Using Multimedia to Introduce Young People to Public Art in Glasgow

This paper is based on a presentation at the NSEAD/AAIAD Millennium Conference in Bristol, April 2000 and takes as its focus a recent multimedia publication, a CD-ROM, commissioned by Glasgow 1999, entitled ‘Scanning the City’. The commission was to find effective ways that students in schools could interrogate the diverse urban fabric of Glasgow. The electronic revolution has shifted the paradigms of teaching and learning by creating the opportunity to engage interactively with visual and textual data in ways that permit investigation of the built environments at a number of levels of intensity. The paper explains the background to the CD-ROM, describes the design, content and theoretical underpinning of ‘Scanning the City’ and discusses ways it might be used in a variety of educational contexts. It concludes by looking forward to the next stages of the research including a study of how young people and teachers are using the CD-ROM and other related multimedia publications.