BS What were you doing before you joined Techniquest?
DB Child of Techniquest which was really quite scary because, I haven't had another job. It's been fun all the way. You know. From university, I started work in Techniquest when I was, actually at college in Cardiff. And - I'd entered a schools competition. I didn't win the schools competition because I was too young, because the category I'd been entered in to was the wrong category because my teacher messed it up, but then, in actual fact that teacher did me great service in messing it up because it meant that I was, I was, I was awarded a highly commended for this interactive exhibit that I had created. And one of the judges was - knew Heath White, who was the exhibits director, at the time, and Techniquest was - in the shop in town, and just thinking about moving sort of into phase 2. So, I got involved then at Techniquest. Really at, sort of weekends and things like that mainly involved in the exhibit building side.
Eventually went to university. And, really it was to do with me being paid while I was, on holiday they, they gave me a bursary, so I was actually a sponsored student by Techniquest at university. It kind of made up the difference really, in sort of, it didn't put me on comparable pay to the guys who were working there full time but it was a way of covering the cost.
So, it was great because through university I had, paid employment during the summer and Christmas and Easter and, just involved building exhibits, which was fab. Other sort of skills I had, I was very interested in things like - theatre, I had been stage manager for productions in the Sherman, never in the acting more in the sort of technical, stuff. I'd always been interested in making things. My dad's a watchmaker. And apparently I used to sort of sit in the workshop at age 2 or something and he used to baby-sit and I just used to watch him working. So whether or not I sort of got through osmosis I don't know. But certainly the practical end of actually building things and making things, that's what he does.
So, using that, starting Techniquest after finishing university, I was then responsible for, after building a few exhibits after a couple of years became responsible for putting all the exhibits into the exhibition here and coordinating the movement of the installation. Which was all a bit tricky because this building was very late. Finally got the exhibits in and then ever since we've really been - we went through a very, very long period, just after opening, not really having a budget for exhibit development at all. We had a huge amount of money initially when we were looking at creating Techniquest, but once it was here it was, you know, a lot of the money had to go into, running, running the organisation and we had a whole load of 160 brand spanking new exhibits. What do you want to do with the new exhibits? So the workshop itself, went down from a period of 3 years of 28 people working in it to create the exhibits we had here, down to, about 15 people. So a number of people left, presumably on fixed-term contract. I stayed and then was put in charge of managing the workshop.
And during that period in, to, to find work we did external work for people. So we, went out and we were building exhibits to their design. We did a very, very big project with the science museum, which was something that really taught us a great deal about working with external contractors, in that they, they had designs and they wanted us to follow those designs to the letter, but involved a lot of development. And actually working to develop projects for other people, is very, very hard when you can't make compromises and you can't - kind of change your perspective as you, as you go, depending on actually how the, the design and how well the exhibit's working out even and you've prototyped it. So, it can be very difficult when a design company will say "that's what we want. We don't want it - it's got to work that way" When you can say well "actually it's going to be really hard because from experience we know that's not going to work."
So, working for the science museum it was - pretty difficult job - very horrible. Finally got all the exhibits in. We went through a long period of having to go up and working over night in the science museum in London to fix things because obviously you can't work while the exhibition's open. Because a number of things had gone wrong and, for us it was a very, difficult learning experience but we learnt a great deal.
Shall I keep on wibbling like this or are you quite happy or you know, I could talk for