Interview: Consultant Donald MacDonald

My name is Donald Macdonald. Um, I’m a consultant computer programmer, and I work with Greenspace two days a week, and I have been doing so for the past, uh, four or five years. Uh, my main responsibility at the moment is to do with the visualisation wall which, uh, you’ve seen before. Um, this is a device for linking together five different computers and twenty thirty-inch monitors into one gigantic display. And we use that so we can visualise, uh, large scale scientific data in different and interesting ways in a way that lots of people can come round at once and talk about it rather than being gathered around one tiny computer monitor screen.

I’m a programmer, so what we’ve been doing so far is more or less getting the wall to work. Uh, but the ultimate goal is to have a flexible tool that we can take large scale results from scientific data, for instance energy modelling, and think of interesting ways of visualising that, so that either other scientists, or indeed laypeople, can see this in a way that makes sense to them, and then use that and develop it further.

Uh, we’ve been doing some work with, um, various energy companies recently, and one of them wanted to see if the kind of data that we could present for their projects round the, the marine environment of the Hebrides – um, and we were putting together some data, basically sample data showing things like wave height, wave strength, tidal strength, the, the weather at sea, and we wanted to, um, visualise this in a collaborative way, and that’s really what the wall was made for, so we had a slide show which we were able to show for them.

This is a really great campus to be on. I, I’m always thinking, particularly in the summer, but even in the winter, uh, that it’s a great space to work when you come out and you’re surrounded by greenery and trees. Um, it’s an exciting campus to be on. Lots of interesting people are working here doing interesting things. Um, the commute to work is great. Uh, I used to work in Glasgow and, believe me, this is a million times better, so I’m really lucky to be in this kind of environment here. Um, it’s a very relaxed place to work as well.

In the olden days, yes, it would have been impossible to do cutting edge science of this sort in a place like here. You’d just be too far away from other people’s work, but with, with the Internet any research paper published anywhere in the world is available to you as soon as it’s published. Um, you can talk to people on, over the Internet, on skype. Um, e-mail is there. It’s fantastic.

This place has grown from being about two people when I first started working here, with a few consultants, to being about twenty people now. And it would be nice to see that growth both be consolidated and built on, so that, um, we bring people home here who otherwise wouldn’t have this kind of opportunity to work in the islands. And that’s a great thing and I hope it can continue for a long time yet.