Confidence in our Hands

What can one person do, and how can it be measured, so they have confidence to go forward?

I’m a local landscape architect and founder of a design office. We work in landscape architecture and public arts.

When I drove to this venue here, through this beautiful landscape, I was thinking about a lot of you who would be travelling on the airplane to get here and looking down to this patchwork of essentially a man-made landscape. We forget that a lot of it is man made. And form’s full of function, maybe it’s not designed to look pretty, but we all accept it is a stunning landscape.

And I was just thinking, a lot of that is done by our hands, actually. It’s done – the landscape that we see around us – was done by man power, before the power of diesel and steam. And we tend to forget that that. So we are capable of making a very, very big change.

As a designer, I thought it would be interesting to see how can we bring back that confidence of making things ourselves, of doing things by our hands. And at the moment, we’re all very much aware of the success of do it yourself gardening, in particular do-it-yourself production gardening that has overtaken the normal pretty flowers at the moment, which is encouraging, to say the least.

So it's interesting to know that for people to get confidence that they don’t have to rely just on local authorities, just on the government and just on the steam engine or the diesel nowadays. What can they do themselves? It’s about giving them confidence.

But it needs to be measured, it needs to be visualised, to show what a person can do.

So my thought is, what can one person do in a lifetime in the context of public space improvement in the physical world, in the external world? What can one person do, and how can it be measured, so they have confidence to go forward? And how can these individuals be grouped so that the effect of their synergy is much greater than the effect made by one?

Landscape Architect and artist of vast and varied experience. David worked in Sydney, Australia where he was involved with a garden design and construction company for 10 years. He completed a post-graduate study; Master of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, Harvard University, which included many subjects of urban design and architecture. He worked at the prestigious West 8 landscape architecture studio in Holland before settling in Cornwall 9 years ago to found Mor Design Ltd.