It's always amazing how persistant DMA Design has been in my life. Immediately after the museum exhibition opened, I was interviewed by James Christie from BBC Radio Scotland as one of the founders of DMA Design. You can read my thoughts on being a 'founder' elsewhere on the blog, though it's certainly true that, in the fashion of Londo from Babylon 5, "I was there at the beginning..."
It was to be a half hour documentary, and it has just aired this morning. I'm always nervous when something is broadcast with a contribution from me in it. And, yes, it's still amazing when I think about it, that I can casually write a sentence like the previous one. This one, however, was especially nerve-wracking for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on. Would I sound OK? Did I make sense? Would my contribution even get used?
Fortunately the answer was yes, and now I'm left with a curious mix of nostalgia and excitement, even as I realise that only a small fraction of my interview was used and only those parts which fitted the 'narrative' that documentaries use. I'm sure it was the same for both Mike and Russel who were also part of it. But it means that there's a huge amount of story that hasn't been told, that doesn't exist on Wikipedia or anywhere else aside from in our heads and the odd fragment on a website here and there. I close my eyes and I can see the old, old, office.
I recorded some important events in a journal I kept at DMA in 1996, but I so wish that I'd done the same for 1995, 1994, 1993... But of course at the time none of us had any idea that DMA would be important and very little was jotted down and nothing at all formally recorded. It makes the piecing together of DMA's history an exercise in deductive work where I still have scraps of paper, or tickets to hint at the exact date something occurred.
And that's what it was like in the days before blogs, twitter and 24/7 recording, when it was still possible for a mythology to arise.
It was to be a half hour documentary, and it has just aired this morning. I'm always nervous when something is broadcast with a contribution from me in it. And, yes, it's still amazing when I think about it, that I can casually write a sentence like the previous one. This one, however, was especially nerve-wracking for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on. Would I sound OK? Did I make sense? Would my contribution even get used?
Fortunately the answer was yes, and now I'm left with a curious mix of nostalgia and excitement, even as I realise that only a small fraction of my interview was used and only those parts which fitted the 'narrative' that documentaries use. I'm sure it was the same for both Mike and Russel who were also part of it. But it means that there's a huge amount of story that hasn't been told, that doesn't exist on Wikipedia or anywhere else aside from in our heads and the odd fragment on a website here and there. I close my eyes and I can see the old, old, office.
I recorded some important events in a journal I kept at DMA in 1996, but I so wish that I'd done the same for 1995, 1994, 1993... But of course at the time none of us had any idea that DMA would be important and very little was jotted down and nothing at all formally recorded. It makes the piecing together of DMA's history an exercise in deductive work where I still have scraps of paper, or tickets to hint at the exact date something occurred.
And that's what it was like in the days before blogs, twitter and 24/7 recording, when it was still possible for a mythology to arise.
