March 5 2008

M/8 Creative Design’s Lesley Palmer is to set up a seminar group in response RIBA’s requirements for the number of hours chartered members must spend on Continuing Professional Development (CPD).

With chartered members of RIBA now required to complete 35 hours and 100 points of CPD each year, Palmer suggested that smaller practices may find it harder to fulfil some of their obligations. With that in mind, she contacted a number of local practices last week to propose a seminar group starting with a meeting at her offices in Glasgow’s James Morrison Street.

“I think it boils down to being self employed and finding it difficult to either motivate myself or to get people interested to come out to do the CPD for only one person,” said Palmer. “I thought there could be an opportunity there for people to do it collectively… and there are a lot of small practices in the local area so I thought we could all tap into each other, help each other out.”

Palmer hopes the meetings could evolve beyond just architectural lectures, not only because of the varied CPD requirements but also because she believes the potential is there for informative gatherings, for students as well as practitioners.

“I’d just like to see what comes out of it. I’d like to see people willing to talk about their work and have more of an informative discussion and I think it will be nice to have people discuss live projects and get students to talk about concept projects because it’s all relevant to what we do.”

Palmer has had a number of responses to her suggestions and is currently in talks with Skratch Design to give a lecture on the rebranding of Collective Architecture. No date has been set as yet to kick start the meetings, but Palmer has said she hopes the first will be at the beginning of April.

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