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 Post Favorites for the Week of Aug. 13

Building inspiring cultural centers. Olson Kundig tackles homelessness. Tribute to Elizabeth Scheu Close. Lego's clever social media campaign.  

Building inspiring cultural centers.  While we prize creativity in cities today, the cultural centers that we’ve built to celebrate it rarely hit the mark. Many of our cultural enters turn inward, away from the street and onto an internal space that is only nominally for gathering and mainly used for passing through.

The good news is that shifting attitudes are chipping away at the austere walls of yesterday’s “culture ghettos,” with people demanding more inspiring, interactive gathering places. Creativity is becoming one of the most coveted social assets for post-industrial cities with increasingly knowledge-based economies.

Via Project for Public Spaces Placemaking Blog

Olson Kundig tackles homelessness. The firm has leased former retail space that it calls [storefront] to many cultural statements, but its most recent iteration explores the issue of homelessness.  A+A interviews Alan Maskin, partner in the firm, and associate Marlene Chen about SKID ROAD.

“With the challenge of homelessness, we think there is an inclination for most people to look away. SKID ROAD—like several of the other [storefront] installations we’ve done over the year—asks the public to look closer.” – Alan Maskin

Via Architects and Artisans

Tribute to Elizabeth Scheu Close.  Writer Mason Riddle remembers the first woman architect in Minnesota dedicated to a modernist aesthetic and his first encounter with the 85-year-old in 1997.

Dedicated to a no-frills modernism, Close and her design practice that she shared with her husband included homes, public and private housing projects, medical facilities, and the Gray Freshwater Biological Institute on Lake Minnetonka, in Navarre Minnesota. Their structures are characterized by flat or gently sloping roofs, generous amounts of wood countered by brick or cinder block, an abundance of glazing, open floor plans and an obvious functionality.

Via Metropolis Magazine POV Blog

Innovative Social Media Campaigns

LEGO, the Danish toymaker, is celebrating its 80 years of toy creation with an animated video that traces the company's history. The 17-minute short film, which can be found on LEGO’s newly launched YouTube channel or Facebook page, describes LEGO through the eyes of its founders, who make up three generations Christiansens. The video has received more than 4,000 likes, nearly 350 comments and 2,700 shares on Facebook and 1.4 millions views on YouTube since Aug. 10.

http://www.youtube.com/user/LEGO

http://www.facebook.com/LEGOGROUP

What do you think of this campaign?

Six Ideas for Getting More Eyeballs on Your Blog

There are millions of blogs out there – more than 120 million on just Wordpress and Tumblr platforms – with this much content circulating cyberspace, getting your’s discovered is not a simple feat. A solid content-promotion strategy is just as important as the quality of the blog content itself. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to promote your blog and build your audience. Here are six ideas from me. Leave us a comment with the tips that work for you.

1. Make it easy for readers to come back. This may seem obvious, but if you want people to come back and read your next post, include an easy way for them to be notified when you publish. In blog platforms like Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr you can easily add widgets for Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds or “subscribe to this blog” options. Also, readers who enjoy your content are likely to be connected to others who may like your content, so include social sharing options so that readers can tweet, like, + or even pin your post without having to leave the page.

2. Use keywords in your posts so that people searching for the topic you write about are more likely to find you through search engines. Search engines love blogs for their fresh content and drive the majority of traffic to blogs. In fact, many companies start their blog strictly for the purpose of search engine optimization and traffic that this can drive to the site. Don’t go crazy with keywords though. If it reads like you are writing for a search engine, your reader will probably lose patience and leave.

3. Call attention to like minded bloggers to expand your readership. This can be as simple as creating a blog roll on your site that lists links to similar blogs and influencers in your field. In the AEC world this could be blogs that inspire and inform you as well as those of your clients, your subconsultants, industry allies or even other blogs that support the same causes as you do. If you can help drive traffic to these blogs, they are more likely to promote yours. If these blogs influence you in some way, give them credit by writing about them. A feature story or even a guest post from someone you’ve done business with is likely something that they will want to promote through their own social media channels. This opens your blog up to their network of readers. Don’t know any AEC blogs? Here’s a list of influential blogs from this week’s AEC Social Media Twitter chat (#AECSM Tuesday 1pm PST).

4. Participate in other forums with a similar audience. Look for other blogs, publications, LinkedIn and Facebook groups that target the same demographic as you do. Spend some time reading these and when you have something to add or a question for the author, leave a thoughtful comment. You can also include a link to one of your blog posts when it is relevant to the topic, but be careful not to be overly self-promotional. No one likes to be spammed. Participating in other forums and contributing useful information and knowledge helps to build your reputation around the subject at hand and provides visibility for your firm and brand. If you leave a compelling, interesting comment in one of these forums, other visitors may be curious about you. Remember that the social web is a very connected space, so make sure your profile on each of these networks is up to date and includes a link back to your blog.

5. Approach the blogger, editor or community leader about writing a post for their publication or ask if they would reblog a post you’ve already written. All bloggers are hungry for good content, so if you have an essay or a point of view that is in line with their blog’s purpose they may just take you up on the offer. Not only are these opportunities good content for your social media channels, they help you gain exposure within the industry and a credible introduction to a new community.  Don’t forget to include a link to your blog in your byline.

6. Tap into a blogging community. Many companies develop their own proprietary blog. The “pros” of a customized blog is consistent branding and style with the firm’s website. The “cons” of having a customized blog is that you don’t have access to the sophisticated platform that these companies have created and are continually updating. I’ve watched clients with beautiful custom blogs get frustrated when each little tweak requires a whole new change order and days or even weeks of programmers’ time just to add a simple function. The Wordpresses and Tumblers of the social web give this to you for free. Your proprietary blog won’t be a part of a community of bloggers and you won’t have the advantages that these networks provide. On Wordpress, each time I post I’m informed of a handful of similar new posts that I may be interested in – and I often am interested in these. The community of bloggers can help you activate your blog with dialog. After all, only a very small percentage of internet users are actually content producers and content producers are the ones who are more likely to leave comments or ask questions. These blog networks are serving you up a community of very active and very vocal contributors. Seek out blogs of interest within your platform, follow them and follow back the blogger that follow you. Reciprocity goes a long way.

What do you think? Are there other tactics that work for you?

Could Sweden’s Twitter Strategy Work for Your Firm?

Are you like 88% of the A/E professionals we polled who are using social media to position their firms' experts? Perhaps you should consider Sweden’s approach.

In December Sweden democratized their Twitter account by giving control of @Sweden to a new Swede each week. (You may have seen the headlines about the when Sonja Abrahamsson stirred controversy with her less-than-politically-correct tweets). This approach is now being adopted by other countries with the Netherlands as the latest to try it out.

Granted, Sweden's objective, to entice tourists to visit, doesn’t directly relate to the field of landscape, architecture and engineering professional services. But the concept of associating a personality and their particular point of view with a brand, could be a great way to showcase the many facets of expertise within your organization.

If you have willing and qualified participants (and please be honest with yourself, not everyone is capable of being a thought leader – it takes knowledge, drive and communications skills), ask yourself if you trust your subject-matter experts to operate the account in a responsible way – professional but personal and gaffe free.

In addition to building your firm’s reputation for each of its areas of specialization, this approach could be a fun way to get more employees and leaders involved in your firm’s social media program. Offer your operators solid guidelines and tips so they are communicating effectively. Help them out by scheduling the first few tweets with them, so they can get a chance to learn from you and overcome any fear of tweeting. For those who are already using social media personally, encourage them to amplify what they are doing for the firm’s account by talking about it and retweeting through their personal accounts -- maybe the firm will pick up some new followers as well.

Clearly, this idea is not for every firm, but for the right organization it could be fun. What do you think?

If you decide to try this out, please let us know so we can stay tuned!

Publishing Strategy: Traditional and New Media

The publishing industry is changing. Today every company and individual has free access to the tools they need to be a publisher, but the resulting deluge of content makes the role of "gatekeepers" more essential than ever. I gave this presentation on the merits of traditional publishing, self-publishing and new media at a San Francisco SMPS event to help landscape, architecture, engineering, planning and construction firms create publishing strategies that work for their firms.

Publishing Strategy: Traditional and New Media[slideshare id=13395259&w=425&h=355&sc=no]

What has been your experience with publishing -- old or new?