This week involved trips to the Royal Festival Hall for Graduation, the Design Museum in Kensington and the Tate Modern on the Southbank. The Design Museum was part of our annual visit with students see notes from last year to get them thinking about how work is presented to the public. It was another fun session taking them around the exhibitions and some really good insights from the students on the narrative tying together objects which they will hopefully take in to their exhibition later this summer.

I also managed to finally visit Electric Dreams at Tate Modern as Leah’s guest before it closes at the end of the month. Some lovely exhibits which were great to see in person. I was particular keen to explore the generative work and pen plotter art.

In other news, whilst looking for 5 example business report covers for my ESB marking feedback, I stumbled across a great book by Andrew “Bunnie” Huang - “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” (2016) which talks about the fuzziness of communicating technical terms in Mandarin for example - xīn piàn hào and xìng piān hào - “No native speaker would ever mispronounce or confuse the two, but a foreigner going up to a local asking “What’s your chip’s part number?” could be heard as “What’s your sexual preference?” if mispronounced and taken out of context.” - also really helpful for us English speaking academics working with lots of Chinese students!

This is also conveyed really nicely in the Up Goer Five XKCD cartoon which only uses the English “ten hundred words people use the most often” - https://xkcd.com/1133/