Make Your Vote Count: Be2Awards

I first learned about the Be2Awards awards last year while researching our book, so of course we are really excited to have “Social Media in Action” shortlisted for the 2012 Be2 Media Award. I’ll say it up front … the awards are crowdsourced, so please vote for our book! Plus, if you journey to their website and start clicking you’ll discover some fantastic examples of built environment (that’s the B.e.) professionals, companies and organizations who are using new media in innovative ways.

The quality of competition here is no joke.  Mark Johnson’s social media PR campaign (which we recognized as one of our blog post favorites) and his competitor, #droptheban, make for a tough choice in the Best PR/Social Media Campaign category, as does ArchitectMap and Green Vision in the Best Community Category. The categories for the best social media and sustainability blog are ripe with great examples – and blogs to start reading religiously. I was thrilled to see Cesar Abeid’s Construction Industry Podcast, a series that I recently discovered and really enjoy.  The list gets me thinking of other sites, campaigns and communities to nominate next year.

“Social Media in Action” is in the Best Old Media/New Media category and I am honored to be among these prestigious candidates which include the UK’s construction search engine, a UK construction publication that makes all its content free online, the UK’s construction trade association live database of contract awards and The Guardian’s own built environment “hub” for sustainable development.

The Be2Awards are in their third year and aligned with the London strand of the global Social Media Week event series that takes place in a handful of cities worldwide. Be2 is also hosting Be2Talk, a speaker series on the built environment and social media as a part of the London Social Media Week. I sincerely hope these talks will be posted after the event. I’m interested to see Carlton Reid’s ''Cycling, the built environment and social media'' presentation. This is hardly their first event – Be2 has hosted a slew of conferences, Twitter chats and more since the organization was established in 2008 by built-environment professionals Martin Brown  and Paul Wilkinson, Jodie Miners  and Pam Broviak.   I just joined the Be2Camp community to stay better connected to all their happenings and hope you will consider joining too.

Blog Post Favorites for Week of September 10

10,000 unwanted books on the streets - Urban living fuels design of cities - A school’s greenovation - Cutting the mustard

10,000 unwanted books on the streets. The Spanish art collective Luzinterruptus has embarked on in a traffic-stopping installation in Melbourne, Australia, commissioned as part of the Light in Winter Festival to encourage reading.

Similar to the installation in New York City and Switzerland, the streets contained 10,000 books that had been collected by the Salvation Army after being discarded from public libraries. Artists have been allowed to expand upon the project, growing it for a month and making it their largest installation to date.

Via Architizer Blog

Urban living fuels design of cities. Dan Winey of Gensler blogs about his observations from abroad as he is seeing a highly accelerated demand for urban living that has fueled the design and creation of new cities.

Winey says what’s troubling is that too many emerging cities in China and other parts of the world are adhering to an outdated urban planning model that will ultimately prove to be unsustainable. However, super tall buildings like Gensler's Shanghai Tower, which is currently under construction, can help urban planners think in vertical terms instead of horizontal ones.

Via Gensler on Cities

Architect enters the chicken coop fray. Peter Strzebniok,  a pioneer of prefab for people with Nottoscale, is bringing the best of green modern prefabricated modular flat pack construction to the burgeoning chicken coop market.

Strzebniok has created the Moop (modular coop), which is the "architect designed prefabricated modular chicken coop for the design minded urban chicken." The Moop is compact enough to fit in most backyards while being modern enough to make any chicken happy and every owner proud.

By Lloyd Atler, Via Tree Hugger

A school’s greenovation. Lindsey Engels, Executive Director of the U.S. Green Building Council in Orange County and project coordinator at LPA, guest blogs about partnering with Davis Magnet School to make the school more green.

LPA monitored temperature, light levels, energy usage per circuit and CO2 monitors for air quality to find solutions to make the school energy efficient. With the completed retrofitted classroom, LPA and the school will be able to see a real-time comparison between the “greenovated” classroom and the control classroom.

Via LPA Blog

Innovative Social Media

Society of good taste. Grey Poupon launched an online marketing campaign on Facebook this week in which the mustard company will screen fans who attempt to like the page to see if they have good enough taste to become one of the company’s Facebook fans.

Fans of the brand will have to apply for membership to the "Society of Good Taste" on the Grey Poupon Facebook page, where an algorithm will determine whether or not they "cut the mustard". The algorithm searches and judges users' profiles based on their proper use of grammar, art taste, check ins, book and movie selections, and so forth, and gives them a percentile score based on their refinement. However, if the algorithm detects poor taste in music or text-speak, for example, they could be rejected. Those who do not qualify will have their "like" deleted, and be asked to refine their profile before trying again.

Via Ad Age

Blog Post Favorites for Week of September 4

Makeover for highway signage. Icon Magazine has offered up a new take on the ubiquitous green signs that line our interstates. Not only does the proposed refresh include a new color scheme and information layout, but it also makes the smartphone connection and may provide information about the current exit and the surrounding area to your handheld device as you approach. While this refresh is exciting to see, do drivers need another distraction on the road? Will the new hierarchy and information structure be confusing to drivers used to the old standard? Does the removal of recognizable symbols (those Interstate shields and icons) make the signs less graphically legible.

Via Cannon Design Blog

related: http://www.iconeye.com/

Gen Y transforming the workplace.  Leigh Stringer, a hardcore Gen-Xer who works at HOK, blogs about how Generation Y is changing the workplace.

After reading an article on Gen Y and office culture that pointed out generational differences such as how Gen Y rates the importance of having an "engaging workplace" highest and the "quality of meeting rooms" lowest, Stringer was inspired to learn what Gen Yers at the office had to say. She interviews six HOK employees who share their thoughts on what’s important for them in the workplace.

Via HOK Life

related: CNN article, "Generation Y Set to Transform Office Life"

Architectural toy collection. Stashed away in a room in the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., is the United States' largest public-trust collection of architectural toys containing household names that will be part of the museum's big toy exhibit in November.

Stephanie Hess, who is curating the November exhibition "PLAY WORK BUILD," is in the process of selecting and sometimes assembling these toys for the public that includes Erector Sets, Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs.

Via The Atlantic Cities

Waterfront for Corpus Christi. Schematic Design is nearly complete on a new 34-acre downtown waterfront redevelopment for Corpus Christi, Texas.  The city’s goal is to create a world-class urban park that will further ignite and enhance development in Corpus Christi’s downtown core.

Hargreaves Associates is leading the site master planning and landscape design effort, while Lake Flato is designing a fleet of park buildings and shade structures to be deployed along the waterfront’s new boardwalk promenade.  Buildings planned for the park will include a multilevel beach cafe, park arrival facilities, staff offices, a wine bar, event facilities, an outdoor concert stage, restrooms and changing areas, as well as a series of flexible vendor kiosks for food service, recreation equipment rental and retail.

Via The Dogrun

Innovative Social Media Campaign

Social Media Marketing for the AEC Industry from Mark Johnson

Mark Johnson of Markitect.me Consulting shares a presentation about a pioneering social media marketing initiative for Formica Group, a global brand  from the AEC industry. The case study will be featured in "Business to Business Marketing Management: A Global Perspective", a college textbook  by Jim Blythe and Alan Zimmerman,

to be released in early 2013.

The social media marketing initiative explores how social media networks, including Pinterest, Flickr, Paper.li, Twitter chat, Facebook, Google +, as well as live events and designer tools, were integrated to the web site and blog to create a content marketing message about their sustainable products.

http://www.slideshare.net/MarkJohnsonFAIA/social-media-marketing-for-the-aec-industry

Blog Favorites for the Week of August 27

 The five Cs of neighborhood planning. Howard Blackson blogs about the challenges of updating community-scaled plans, especially with the personal sentiment people feel for their homes and the difficulty people have in expressing such emotion within conventional 2D planning documents. Blackson writes about the five Cs of a neighborhood -- complete, compact, connected, complex, convivial – which define the neighborhood.

Via Placeshakers and Newsmakers

Integrated Sustainable Design. Albert Lam of Southern California blogs about his experience during the three-day outdoor festival Outside Lands in San Francisco and notices that among the trash receptacles and recyclables is another bin: compost.

"I've always said that the best sustainable practices don't necessarily require profound leaps of technology or drastic changes of policy, but should incorporate subtle but distinct changes in habit that target a more efficient way of living. Compost collection is a great example of such practice." – Albert Lam

Via LPA Inc. Blog

Venice Biennale 2012. The jury of the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale has awarded the United States pavilion a “Special Mention” for it’s innovative installation, Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good.

Brooklyn-based practice Freecell collaborated closely with the Sausalito-based design studio M-A-D to design a kinetic system of color-coded banners, weights and pulleys, that showcase each urban intervention.

Via Arch Daily

ASLA 2012 Professional Awards. The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has announced the winners of the 2012 Professional Awards, which honor the top public places, residential designs, campuses, parks and urban planning projects from across the U.S. and around the world.

ASLA will present 37 awards to professional landscape architects and their firms, selected from more than 620 entries in the categories of General Design, Residential Design, Analysis and Planning, Communications, and Research. You can view the winning projects in the September issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

(LAM link )

Via The Dirt

(This post isn’t from a blog, but is a very interesting point of view.)

Lean design. Gary Vance and Keith Smith of BSA Life Structures talk about engraining Lean, a certification designed for organizations and individuals who work in healthcare settings to enhance their ability to provide robust reliable care and treatment to each patient, in the design aspect for clients.

Implementing Lean techniques reduces waste and improves quality, efficiency, and safety in the healing environment—all outcomes that can be measured for success. Healthcare organizations are looking for a facility and an operational plan that guides the patient through the healing process and provides accountable care at all levels. Using Lean helps identify how successful a design is at providing that type of care.

Via Health Care Design Magazine

Innovative Social Media

From news aggregator to newsmaker. Reddit’s role as a media influencer and informer has risen steadily and stealthily and the site has increasingly become a place that news, stories and issues are discovered before bubbled up to the mainstream, writes Christina Warren.

On Wednesday, President Obama embarked on a real-time Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, which allows Reddit users to pose queries of all kinds of people. Instead of using any of the other media sources to deliver his message, the President and his campaign advisors chose to target Reddit and Reddit users. Just as Oprah joining Twitter was seen as a turning point for that service, the President participating on Reddit is a breakthrough moment for the service.

Via Mashable

Reddit AMA

Blog Favorites for Week of Aug. 20

Is working from home effective? | Architecture is woven, not built | London Olympics landscape | Spreading Cokes – and Happiness – Via Mobile.

Is working from home effective? HOK’s Leigh Stringer blogs about the benefits and drawbacks of working from home.

With more and more people working outside the office, large portions of office buildings can sit empty for long periods and there can be less of a reason to be there. Stringer talks to two HOK workplace experts who work at home full-time and two employees who work in the office.

Via Life at HOK Blog

Architecture is woven, not built. Robert Goodwin of Perkins + Will blogs on how his first-year architecture professor presented him with a powerful sense of what architecture was all about.

“He had what many architects lack today: heart.  While he fully understood the intellectual premises behind the great movements we students revered, he had a way of also making us understand the human impact of architecture: how people use space; how they would feel in it; how the light might come in to a place where children could play.” –Robert Goodwin

Via Perkins + Will Blog

London Olympics landscape. While the architecture of the London Olympic games won the U.K. a lot of press, the coverage on the Games’ highly successful landscape architecture was also in the spotlight as nearly 250 acres were turned into a spectacular setting.

According to John King, architecture critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, that success was due to a team of landscape architecture firms , including U.K.-based LDA Design and U.S.-based landscape architecture firm, Hargreaves Associates, who came in at the proverbial last minute to update the master plan in key spots.

Via The Dirt

Innovative Social Media Campaign [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8PEZz-IOtI?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

Spreading Cokes – and Happiness – Via Mobile. Coca-Cola and Google joined forces in Coca-Cola’s mobile ad campaign that used a digital interpretation of the classic 1971 “Hilltop” ad with today’s technology. The ad says consumers will be able to buy the world a Coke, and using the mobile app, a consumer in New York could buy a Coke for a stranger in Buenos Aires. That consumer could watch a video using Google Maps and Street View to see the Coke can traveling across the globe. After the recipient gets the Coke from one of the custom vending machines, the sender can watch a video of the person’s surprised reaction and perhaps get a thank-you note, if the recipient chooses to do so. Later, the sender can pass on the video to friends on Facebook, Twitter or Google+. The goal: Prompt real-life moments that underpin Coke’s current “Open Happiness” positioning.

Via Mashable