LinkedIn – Dos and Donts

04/02/2010 by esieditor
nanpalmero on Flickr

nanpalmero on Flickr

Happening right now (4/2/2010) is EMAP’s Construction Marketing training day, which will be considering the role of social media in the construction industry, and then digging into LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Here’s a decent introduction from Jake Swearingen to getting started with LinkedIn:

  • Create a compelling profile
  • Building your network
  • Get the most from your connections
  • Manage your social network

plus sensible advice on what not to do.

And Su Butcher’s take on LinkedIn and company confidentiality. Embrace openness!

Landscape design | Older people

03/02/2010 by esieditor
Care home garden - Tim Lynch Associates

Care home garden - Tim Lynch Associates

The Sensory Trust has a short piece, titled Landscape design for older people, which covers some of the key points to consider when designing inclusive spaces, be they public parks or private gardens.

  • Reduction in mobility
  • Reduction in reach
  • Visual impairment
  • Sensitivity to weather extremes
  • Impairment of mental faculties
  • Erosion of confidence

There’s a useful table of design solutions reproduced from ‘Landscape Design for Elderly and Disabled People’ by Peter Thoday and Jane Stoneham (1994).

The OPENspace research centre is in the middle of I’DGO TOO, a four-year research project on outdoor access for older people.

‘The I’DGO (Inclusive Design for Getting Outdoors) … overall aim to identify the most effective ways of ensuring that the outdoor environment is designed inclusively and with sensitivity to the needs and desires of older people, to improve their quality of life.’

‘The implications of the findings will be important for policy-makers, planners, designers and other professionals working in the urban environment, as well as users of that environment.’

And background information on a 2009 participation project run by Northern Architecture. Tyneside residents were invited to attend a series of workshops ‘to explore how the design of the built environment impacts on the quality of life of older people’, with the intention that designers, planners and local authorities are aware of the needs and concerns of older residents.

And finally a couple of case studies from Tim Lynch Associates. The practice has over 25 years of experience in sensory garden design for retirement developments, nursing homes and alzheimer gardens.

1. Royal Star & Garter – dementia and special needs sensory garden
Different coloured paving to provide a feeling of walking between places
Low gates to break up a walk and provide a sense of purpose
Sensory garden
Seating, sculpture and sun shade

2. Fleet – care home
Wrought iron arches, fencing panels and mature evergreen hedging give a sense of distance and interest on a smallish site
Pergola seating, garden club area, patio, shade garden

Tim Lynch Associates also produces and sells a series of special needs garden design packs.

ESI references:

Social media: benefits for architects/designers

26/01/2010 by esieditor

Wheel of Friendship by jurvetson on Flickr

Summary: architects, landscape designers and construction engineers are finding new ways to herd on the internet. Social media are maturing and their users are self-policing. They’re making professional use of online information more relevant, reliable and time-efficient.

An interesting post doing the rounds: KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog: Social Media is Making Measurement More Vertical. In short, it discusses the importance of sector-specific information on the internet.

The notion of online communities was always held up as a virtuous principle in website design. The reality for online publishers has often been more prosaic, especially as dotcom-bubble idealism gave way to the urgent need for sustainable business models.

More recently, though, the basic commercial building blocks have bedded in. Robust business-to-consumer and business-to-business websites have found their feet, search technologies have become more sophisticated, and user interfaces have become more intuitive.

So, the possibility of web-based networks has returned to the foreground, albeit in different forms to those anticipated a few years ago. Now they’re usually characterised by behaviour that people have developed in their leisure time migrating to their professional practices.

In the architecture, landscape design and construction professions, social media models are starting to provide effective lines of communication. Linkedin professional groups, Twitter lists, the nascent Construction Network (tCn), Google Wave, YouTube product demonstrations and other facilities have a self-organising quality that means the useful flourish while the useless flounder.

Professional Twitter users, for example, are impatient and vocal when it comes to heavy-handed co-opting by marketeers. Interaction, conversation and informed personal opinion are seen as valuable. Overuse of shortened links and piggy-backing press releases on tweets and blog posts are taking on the same kind of stigma as spam emails. But here they are punishable by ‘unfollowing’.

More generally, the emerging use of social media for work is a tonic against some of the internet’s less practical traits. When an architect, designer or engineer needs relevant and reliable information quickly, general web searches can throw up information overload. Fragmented, anonymous and unaccountable data are not a basis for professional decisions or commercial transactions.

And while indexing by search engines and web crawlers might continue to improve exponentially, an online equivalent to word-of-mouth recommendations will provide an interesting human-scale check.

Shaping creative cities in the UK and East Asia

20/01/2010 by esieditor
Rental bikes in Hangzhou - rlerdorf on Flickr

Rental bikes in Hangzhou - rlerdorf on Flickr

The British Council’s Creative Cities project aims to enable ‘city-shapers of East Asia develop relationships with people in the UK that help to make their cities open to new ways of thinking, well networked, well designed and prosperous.’

I might suggest that there’s probably a lot that the UK could learn from the ideas and experiences of Australian, Japanese, Chinese, Malaysian and Korean cities.

There’s a good blog, with a range of contributors, covering themes such as Social spaces, Sustainable cities and Future visions.

Worth a dip:
Jared Braiterman on biodiversity in Tokyo where ‘residents are experts in blurring public and private spaces, and growing vertical gardens in even the narrowest openings.’

Amber Parkin on Hangzhou’s bike-sharing scheme. 10,000 bikes, located at 350 stations. London hopes to get its chargeable bike-hire scheme off the ground in 2010.

Jess Scully on Seoul’s smart city shelter which reports changes in the city’s air quality, as well as providing shelter from the elements.

And Jess Scully again on public art in Thailand, with an introduction to Apostrophy’S reinterpretation of Bangkok’s Victory Monument (think the Arc de Triomphe) through a lens of ’sustainable community regeneration, architecture and media technologies.’

17 words of architectural inspiration (or not)

20/01/2010 by esieditor

Daniel Libeskind in front of the Denver Art Museum

Daniel Libeskind riffing on his “17 words of architectural inspiration“, from the TED archive.

Everyone loves a list, but Libeskind’s does not seem to go down well, if the posted comments are anything to go by. Ouch.

  • Optimism vs pessimism
  • Expressive vs neutral
  • Radical vs conservative
  • Emotional vs cool
  • Inexplicable vs understood
  • Hand vs computer
  • Real vs simulated
  • Complex vs simple
  • Political vs evasive
  • Unexpected vs habitual
  • Raw vs refined
  • Pointed vs blunt
  • Memorable vs forgettable
  • Communicative vs mute
  • Risky vs safe
  • Space vs fashion
  • Democratic vs authoritarian

Rising sea levels and the future of British coastal cities

15/01/2010 by esieditor
The Attack scenario in Hull - a new relationship with water

The Attack scenario in Hull - developing a new relationship with the sea

A new report from Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) looks at the effect of a 1.9m sea level rise – a worst case scenario predicted by scientists if nothing is done to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and global ice sheets begin to break up – on Hull and Portsmouth.

The report entitled Facing up to Rising Sea Levels: Retreat, Defend, Attack? outlines three scenarios:

- Retreat
Accept that parts of the cities will be under water and moving critical infrastructure and housing.
Are we prepared to do this? Large tracts of the south and east coasts of Britain are threatened. Where will everyone go? What will the loss of arable land do to our food security?

- Defend
Build extensive flood defences to protect the city.
Are we prepared to spend the money? Our current annual flood defence spending is £500m. It is estimated that it needs to increase to £750m just to maintain design-specification levels of protection.

- Attack
Living on the water by building stilted and floating structure.
Waterworld. The report envisions a new relationship with water with infrastructure being moved onto decommissioned oil platforms and retro-fitted naval vessels. This scenario is similar to another visualisation noted on our sister blog – Water, water, everywhere – the impact of rising sea levels on coastal cities.

Download the report here.

Maybe it’s time to become serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions. How about a global summit?

Other resources:
- Useful explanation of the different types of flooding

- The Environment Agency is responsible for England and Wales’ flood defences. Here is a brief outline of what they choose to defence and why, whilst here is more detail from DEFRA, including an assessment of funding requirements for the next 25 years.

- A piece on the Netherlands’ experience, which suggests interestingly that the Dutch are psychologically more open to an Attack response.

Elevating public transport

13/01/2010 by esieditor
Tokyo Monorail - OiMax on Flickr

Tokyo Monorail - OiMax on Flickr

If streets are too crowded then maybe the log-jams can be avoided with alternative forms of public transport.

Steven Dale writes on the history of cable-propelled transit in New York and suggests it is a cost-effective method of crossing rivers and reaching airports.

The Gondola Project, with which Dale is also involved, describes itself as ‘a cable-propelled transit primer.’

In the UK urban cable transit or monorails haven’t got off the ground, so to speak.

There was the caterpillar monorail at the Gateshead Garden Festival. And Robert Kirkman’s plan to link the Millennium Dome and West Greenwich from the end of the 1990s. Whilst more recently there was a proposal to build a cable car link over the Thames between Thamesmead and Beckton.

However, urban monorails and gondola systems have been successfully implemented as part of public transport strategies in several cities around the world.

The Tokyo Monorail was opened in 1964 and currently handles 127,000 passengers per day.

And there’s these as well:
Skyrail Midorizaka Line, Japan
Chongqing Metro, China
Metro Monorail, Sydney
Las Vegas Monorail, USA

Urban technology forecast

12/01/2010 by esieditor

Five predictions about urban technology changes in the next five years, from IBM’s Next 5 in 5 review.

  1. Cities will have healthier immune systems
  2. City buildings will sense and respond like living organisms
  3. Cars and city buses will run on empty
  4. Smarter systems will quench cities’ thirst for water and save energy
  5. Cities will respond to a crisis—even before receiving an emergency phone call

ESI references:

Solar power and street furniture

12/01/2010 by esieditor
Zava solar-powered street lighting

Zava solar-powered street lighting

As we’re getting used to solar-powered bus stops in the UK, the next generation of solar-powered public furniture is being designed.

Vekso’s Nanok is a litter bin with a solar powered compactor which compresses rubbish, minimising its volume by around 80%. This, in turn, reduces the costs and carbon dioxide associated with emptying the bin.

Zava’s PV.LED solar-powered lighting street lighting really combines external illumination with creative design and a pleasing aesthetic.

Solion’s Solard is a solar bollard that ‘gives off enough light from LED’s to enable drivers to see the bollards and act as a pathway marker for pedestrians.’ No wiring is required from grid sources, eliminating the need to dig up roads.

Clever Bins’ litter bins use a solar-powered daylight-charging system to illuminate static and dynamic on-bin advertising panels.

Greenbarnes’ solar-powered noticeboards use motion sensors and a timing mechanism to ensure that lighting is active on only when people are in close proximity, hence maximising battery life.

And Nikola Knezevic has designed a suite of futuristic solar-powered street furniture – news stands / street lamps / ATMs – which shares its energy between linked modules to maximise efficiency and ensure the lights don’t go out anywhere.

ESI references:

Outdoor play / education in America

11/01/2010 by esieditor
Joy Kuebler Landscape Architect - Buffalo Public School 90

Joy Kuebler Landscape Architect - Buffalo Public School 90

The American Society of Landscape Architects has established a new professional practice network based on children’s outdoor environments – Children’s Outdoor Environments Professional Practice Network. Its focus is on ‘designing areas for children to play, learn, and develop a relationship with nature’.

One of the case studies from their first newsletter is Buffalo Public School 90, ‘a shining example of how landscape architecture makes a true and lasting difference in people’s lives’. There’s a good explanation of how each element of the redesigned outdoor space integrates with the school curriculum. Maths, science, languages, geography, art and physical education are all catered for.

Elsewhere, the Children, Youth and Environments Center for Research and Design at the University of Colorado at Denver works with ‘the design professions and allied disciplines to promote the health, safety and welfare of children and youth.’

Current projects include:

If They Build It, Will They Come?
An evaluation of the effects of the redevelopment of inner-city school grounds on the physical activity of children.

Intergenerational Mural
Elder artists are working with school children to create a multi-dimensional representation of a child-friendly community.

Urban Hens
Aims to develop a sustainable model for re-introducing chickens in Boulder backyards, providing children with an opportunity to learn more about a local food source.

For great examples of natural playgrounds browse Playscapes – a blog about playground design.

ESI references: