"The Consultants"

Good news time, team! I'm pleased to say that the recent piece I wrote for my good friends at mat.zine - a collaborative architectural zine with lashings of art, poetry and the like - is now available online in their latest edition, Jargon. Best of all, it's completely free!

All contributors were only given the edition's title, Jargon, as a brief and so each response is as markedly different as the backgrounds of the contributors, with poems, essays and short stories clashing together with technical diagrams, photos and artistic works. Despite the differences, the whole thing still fits nicely together and provides a loose narrative on the use of jargon in our lives.

My piece takes the form of a short story about my own experiences with those notorious purveyors of jargon, management consultants. While there's obviously something that sets the consultants in my story apart from those I knew in real life, hopefully there's enough of a twinkle of reality in there to raise a wry smile on the face of anyone who's been in the same boat.

Mat.zine issue #13 'Jargon' is available for free via the following link and my contribution can be found on page 16 of the PDF (or page 30 if you print it out). I highly recommend giving the whole thing a read:

http://matzine.org/matzine-13-jargon/

ps. Along with the Jargon edition, mat.zine also ran a debate discussing the use of jargon, for better and worse, in the communication of architectural design to the public. You can listen to a complete audio recording of the debate here, while feasting your eyes on a selection of photos from the event. While this is obviously a lot more directly architecturally focused, I still found the whole thing pretty interesting, although I'll confess to not knowing what either "praxis" or "liminal" meant beforehand.

pps. It's probably also worth mentioning that I also wrote a piece for mat.zine #11, 'Resilience', which can be found here, if you want to give that a read too.