
NEWS : GARSDALE DESIGN WELCOMES NICHOLAS DUGGAN TO THE TEAM AS OUR PRINCIPAL GEOSPATIAL SPECIALIST
My company Garsdale Design Limited just hired Nicholas Duggan (known as dragons8mycat in the social media world) he starts on Monday the 11th of January as our Principal Geospatial Analyst. I’ve known him for a while and have even bumped into him on occasion at conferences (we are based in Cumbria and I don’t get out much).
Importantly we needed someone who was not afraid to experiment.
His CV is impressive and we know he is technically very competent, it’s in part why we hired him. To be honest though, it was his helpful nature on social media and his interests that are clearly in more than just the job in front of him, that really interested us. What we needed was someone used to working on a variety of differing projects and able to use different software as appropriate. Importantly we needed someone who was not afraid to experiment.
consultancy you see is a wonderfully messy business
Consultancy you see is a wonderfully messy business, today I’m working on a major CityEngine 3D project (yes we do more than just training!), tomorrow I could be helping with some domestic architecture and next week I’m probably helping acquire satellite imagery and GIS data for a potential resort development in the Middle East. We need more than just a focused specialist to help us.

Nick has stated on twitter on a number of occasions that he has ‘room in his heart’ (okay he didn’t say that exactly) for opensource and proprietary software. Yes Garsdale Design is an Esri Silver Partner (and very proud of it too!) but our clients are varied and their requirements and budgets differ wildly so we have to be flexible.
here is a growing sense of urgency to prove that their investment in 3D is more than just a bunch of pretty pictures
Being able to create 3D urban models is one thing, to actual analyse what you’ve created is quite another. Whilst our CityEngine clients love 3D and have focused on visualisation there is a growing sense of urgency to prove that their investment in 3D is more than just a bunch of pretty pictures. 3D isn’t trivial it has real-world uses beyond the gimmicky.
This year my focus, or should I say, our focus is twofold in the 3D space:
- Developing more useful 3D analysis workflows
- Testing out 3D hosting platforms for our CityEngine created models.
As you can see Nick will play an important role for us this year. What next for this blog GeoPlanIT? Well Nick will contribute to it but that doesn’t mean he will abandon xyHt or his own blog ‘The Spatial Blog‘.
Welcome to the team Nick, 2016 is going to be interesting.