Being Human: Serena Welton

We speak to five landscape professionals, asking them what ‘human’ skill they best add to projects, where they see skills gaps and what they didn’t learn in their training – but now recognise as vital…

Serena Welton is a Senior lLandscape Architect at RSK. She has worked in the landscape architecture field for nearly six years and in that time has gained a wealth of experience working in both England and Scotland. As a result, she has experienced the diversity of the landscape profession from large-scale infrastructure and renewable energy projects, to the various landscape design sectors including public realm regeneration, education, residential development and masterplanning.

In any profession, human skills provide a level of diligence that a computer software can’t. It might create something ‘adequate’ but lacking that level of consistency or care, which only comes from humans.

At the moment a colleague is working on a play space; I am sure if play design software existed she could input the requirements in order to create a scheme. But whether that ‘design’ would give the children what they need in terms of play, learning and social space is another question.

We’re a design profession and that’s what we give to clients and collaborators – what we do is not a mathematical process. Technology alone just doesn’t have those nuances.

In saying that, I went to a conference about pushing the boundaries of BIM. The prevailing view was that landscape was way behind, and isn’t necessarily worth investing in. However, in my opinion, once you start designing and looking at things in 3D – as we do as humans, not just the bird’s eye view of a plan on paper, it becomes very different. Technology can also be so interlinked with the human side.

Moving forward we can do more to help people’s understanding of who we are and what we do; how we can interlink and help other professions.

One of our company directors is encouraging people to join him in going into schools, colleges and universities to talk about the wider profession; not just about landscape design but environmental consultancy including landscape planning and management; highlighting that there’s a whole raft of skills and jobs that they aren’t aware of.

One of my colleagues studied chemistry, which included a module on air quality, which lead her to an atmospheric chemistry Masters and who now works our Air Quality team.

Why can’t we have more links, modules or seminars on related courses such as architecture, geography and planning, giving students an introduction into the landscape profession?

When we talk about training the next generation of professionals, we need skills to be in context. University isn’t about trying to stifle creativity – you’re there to explore ideas – but often you’re working with no constraints.

Our work is about creating something feasible, on time and on budget: A client could say to you ‘this is the site: we want X but not Y; there are series of constraints, such as a group of TPO’d trees, level differences and a number of underground services.’ Those are the realities and you have to cut your cloth accordingly. That said, it’s good to push the boundaries and think of innovative ideas for the betterment of the scheme.

I’m a big believer in encouraging junior team members to get stuck into projects; if you’re just doing what you’re told, you don’t learn anything and if you make a mistake, so what. Yes, you might have to stay behind and do some extra hours, but you’ve learned something, thus becoming a better practitioner.