The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

I need to get a bit more imaginative about the title of my DAI-related posts – it ends up being “DAI October”, “DAI November”, etc…

The problem is that recent DAI weeks have not really been very noteworthy, if the truth be told. This week in particular was extremely passive, with rather a lot of listening, sitting, listening, a wee bit of thinking, doodling in my sketchpad, and more listening. Next time will be at least a bit more engaged, since I have an assessment!

We began rather unusually this week in Utrecht, where myself and the other 2nd year students had a meeting with Emily Pethick of Casco, who is moderating the production of our graduation publications; these small book(lets) along with a website form our graduation portfolio, in contrast to a final show, which is seen as rather old-fashioned.

This turned out not to be the most productive of meetings, since we were all supposed to have prepared some content to discuss, while in fact nobody really had. We had only met with Emily for the first time in Enschede last month, have been mostly quite busy in between, and in any case it still feels quite early to be getting into discussions about the details of the publication. Hopefully the next meeting will produce some more concrete progress.

That done, it was back onto the train and out east to Enschede. Tuesday turned out to be quite a strange day, since we were all supposed to have prepared a Pecha Kucha presentation on our future selves in 2014 (seven years time), but almost half of the students, mostly second years, had not done so. Pecha Kucha is a presentation format using 20 slides (either images or videos) of 20 seconds duration each, thus giving a total duration of 6min 40sec. The idea is that information can be presented quickly and consisely without the presenter or audience losing focus. This is much easier said than done.

I did have something prepared, but I can quite understand why others did not; it is a very distant and frankly quite frightening topic, and the amount of time needing to be invested for such a short presentation didn’t really seem like a top priority.

I was also not at all satisfied with what I had prepared, but here is at least one piece from it; a 20sec message from me in the future. In case it is not obvious, I am speaking very bad Spanish; many many thanks to my wee sister Catriona for helping me with this!

Finally, we had a little Christmas party on Thursday night, with lots of nice things to eat and plenty wine laid on by the DAI, followed by a few beers in the centre of Enschede. Despite this, I needed to be up earlyish on Friday, and this combined with a general lack of sleep meant that upon returning to Amsterdam that evening I slept almost right through until Saturday afternoon.