By Simon Mabey, Director
Its often said you never forget your time at school.
My abiding memory of my time is spending my English lesson sitting in a drafty corridor working one to one with a volunteer teacher who would be frustrated at my struggles to read.
I was dyslexic.
Reading and spelling did not come easy to me, and my children also inherited this, and I am pleased to report that teaching strategies are far removed from my school days testified by my children all passed English first time whereas I failed 3 times!
Struggling with reading and writing in your formative years does truly impact and shape your confidence in many ways and for me it was typified by the fact that I would carry lots of cash with me as I dreaded writing cheques and was embarrassed to ask how to spell numbers!
My saviour is that technology has empowered me and driven my career despite the early setbacks as it’s well documented that dyslexics have excellent spatial awareness and in my first job in the late 80’s working in 3D I was able to put this to the test.
In only my first month in the role I was working alongside architects, writing 3D parametrics and modelling proposed tall buildings for central London and plotting all the drawings and producing photomontages.
When I started work, computers cost up to £50k and fondly remember that we had to write much of the tools ourselves to achieve this and quite a lot of time preparing how I would spend my time on the shared computer.
Fast forwarding to the present day and we are still using technology to empower, whether that’s working remotely developing our 3D modelling team or presenting their 3D work to citizens to help them to understand proposed changes.
Its pleasing to see that technology can be used to build confidence and be an empowering experience unlike my indelible memories of the hallways of my primary school.
Within our team we even see the posture change from the early beginning of setting small daily tasks with weekly goals right through to their own learning and sharing knowledge as part of a flourishing team.
Town planning, urban design (architecture and engineering) isn’t always seen as an option, its often a career choice for those who know about the profession because they have a personal experience from a friend or family. But at Digital Urban we are making it our mantra to attract wider interest into the profession, It’s the career of choice if you want to make a major impact on our environment and landscape so it should be diverse and inclusive.
Lifelong learning makes us human and every day we continue to develop our team, we strive to educate our clients (who also educate us) on the ongoing use and application of digital urban models, our client use their digital models to empower the public, helping them to make more informed choices on the future of their towns and the residents of Birkenhead can see the exciting opportunities for their town. (Voiceover by Chloe at the Hive youth club)
I will never forget my time at school nor how far technology has taken me on my lifelong journey.