Social media for architects and interior designers

Posted on April 22, 2014 by ceilidhhiggins

The Art of Social Media by mkhmarketing, on Flickr

Continuing on from my last post on My favourite apps for busy consultants, as promised, today I am going to share with you some of the social media sites and apps I use. I’ve heard its best to focus on a couple of sites, rather than try and maintain a social media presence on every site. As you get comfortable with one, you add another. For me, the main platforms I have used are LinkedIn and my own blog, although I have recently branched out into Twitter and Pinterest (and I exist on Google Plus but don’t really use it). All of these sites I use on my PC as well as on my iphone and ipad.

For me, social media is something I use professionally, and not in my personal life at all, so one big absence you will notice from this list is Facebook. I’ve been considering setting one up recently, as I have heard Facebook is becoming more of a business site rather than just a place to share your personal life with the world. I’d be interested to hear what you think of Facebook and if you use it for any professional purposes.

LinkedIn
I’ve been using LinkedIn actively for quite a few years now. I started out one quiet January in a competition with a colleague to see who could get the most new connections by the end of the month – with the condition that you had to met the person in person. Today I now have some connections I haven’t met in person, but through my online activities, however, I still use LinkedIn primarily for keeping in touch with industry friends and colleagues. The ability to maintain current contact details for people I see infrequently in many different cities has been a fantastic use for LinkedIn over the years.

I’m always looking for more ways to use LinkedIn than as just an address book though. I’ve always been keen to populate my profile with images, slides or other media features (the options for which are frequently changing). When I was job hunting last year I spent a bit if time learning about optimizing my profile for search hits – which does seem to be something you can work with for recruiters but I’m not sure how useful it is for anything else yet. At this point in time, I can’t say I have found LinkedIn to be a particularly useful tool for finding new business as a corporate interior designer – but I think there could be possibilities in future.

I’ve also tried to think of ways to use LinkedIn to get my network working for me. Posting up that I was looking for a designer clock one day met with some success – quite a few options saved me some time trawling the web.

Primarily these days I use LinkedIn to find and share blogs as well as publicizing my own blog. I am a member of quite a few groups and subscribe to daily or weekly digests of group activity. I usually scan these at breakfast and then save to my safari reading list the posts I want to read later – and which if I like, I will then share with my network. I also use the groups to share my new blog posts with readers outside of my own network. Having recently signed up for Twitter, it’s great that I can share something on LinkedIn and have it automatically post also to Twitter.

You can find me on LinkedIn at au.linkedin.com/in/ceilidhhiggins, but if you are going to send me an invitation, include a message with why you want to connect as I don’t accept invitations unless I know why you are interested in connecting.

Twitter
I have only recently signed up for Twitter, and it’s certainly a platform I feel like I’m still getting to know. Like LinkedIn, I use it to find news and blogs and to share what I am reading or writing. Additionally I have been using it to share comments live about events I have been attending. I know some people also use it to have conversations with other Twitter users, but I haven’t really used it that way much so far (though I’m definitely considering the possibilities for making customer complaints – I have heard AutoDesk are most responsive via Twitter). Next weekend you will find me tweeting from TEDx.

The biggest difference I have found between Twitter and LinkedIn, is that mostly on Linkedin you talk to and share with people you know (except in groups) whereas on Twitter you can follow anyone, anyone can see what you tweet and you might have many followers who don’t know you personally. People might retweet and favourite your tweets based upon using either twitter handles – this is basically your user name, mine is @ceilidhhiggins, (themidnightlunch was too many characters) – or by using hashtags (the # symbol in front of a word). I don’t totally get hashtags yet, but don’t let that stop you using Twitter – apparently few people do. But basically the hashtags allow you to categorise a tweet so other people might find it when searching.

Also, don’t let the somewhat strange idea of the 140 character message stop you from signing up for Twitter. You don’t have to Tweet at all you can just read other tweets, and many tweets actually contain links to blogs and websites. You can now also include images in your tweets too. But of course if images are your main thing there are better sites for that such as Instagram, Tumblr (both of which I don’t use) and Pinterest – which I do.

Pinterest
I signed up for a Pinterest account about a year ago, but I’ve only just started to use it. Again for me, it’s a professional tool rather than something centred around my personal interests. A lot of people are using Pinterest as part of hobbies and home renovations as well as professionally. All you will find on my Pinterest right now is one board (find me as Ceilidh Higgins) – which is inspiration images for a current project – I do also have some current projects set up as secret boards too. This way you can chose if you share your boards with everyone or just with people you invite.

I generally find the images in the same way I would have before – via google searches or specific architecture and interior design websites and then use the Pinterest bookmarklet tool to save them to my boards. I share the boards with the project team so everyone can view and add images – wherever they are. It’s a great way to communicate ideas with remote team members.

I have also convinced my office to start setting up an account – we are in the eary days of adding images and haven’t yet made them public boards. It’s certainly a much quicker way to get images of our recent projects out there than a traditional website update. Our practice boards will only be used to display our own work – the Pinterest terms on intellectual property seem to be a potential minefield for companies and we wouldn’t want to be accidentally infringing other practices or their photographers intellectual property or suggesting their works were our own.

If you want more on social media for architects and interior designers, I recently listened to a great podcast from The Business of Architecture, Enoch Sears interviews Aurora Meneghello the Director of Marketing for Novedge (an architecture software company) on social media – and there is also a prior interview on marketing as well as many other resources (including an ebook on social media which I haven’t read yet).

Finally for me the last social media platform is of course this blog, but I’ll save some further chat on that for another day!

What social media tools do you use as an architect, interior designer or consultant? Is social media useful as a means of keeping in touch with your clients – or do you use it more for industry networking? Do you have any ideas on how architects or interior designers can use social media as part of their design process? Or for business development? And finally, should I get a Facebook page?

Image Credits:

by mkhmarketing

Worktech Melbourne: Jellybean Working

Posted on March 5, 2014 by ceilidhhiggins

Last week I headed down to Melbourne for Worktech 2014 . It is the first time I have attended a Worktech event , going based upon a few great recommendations – I had been told it was the best workplace event in Australia. I wasn’t disappointed. As well as getting a peak inside of NAB’s new 700 Bourke St at Docklands (which was the event venue) the presentations were generally of a very high standard – great presenters with relevant and focussed material. I also found it interesting to note that most of the presenters were not designers – but representing the client organsiations such as NAB, Bupa, Google, MLC and RMIT to mention a few – which sets the apart from many other workplace seminars. The day was jam packed – there were approximately 15 sessions, as well as the presentations these included a site tour and an interactive session moderated by Rosemary Kirkby. I thought rather than give you a sentence or 2 about all of them I’m going to share my thoughts on the 2 sessions I found most interesting , over this post and the next. If you see other sessions in the program and wonder what they were about – feel free to comment, tweet or email me and I am happy to share further thoughts.

Philip Ross is a workplace futurologist at Ungroup, and so not surprisingly, he was talking about the future of the work in a presentation which he described as being about Jellybean Working. At first I wondered what the reference to jellybeans might mean, surely not the fad for jellybean shaped desks, but as I got interested in his talk the reference to jellybeans faded into the background. Although he did explain towards the end, and so will I. The main focus of Philip’s presentation was the impact that technology would have on the workplace of the future – and not a far range future, but within the next few years, technology that already exists. Whilst we are all now familiar with the idea that we work using technology tools – and that they change and update all the time, I would say less of the audience were aware of the technologies that makes up what Philip described as the next break through in the workplace – big data and real time activity tracking.

Philip spoke about a range of technologies and methods for tracking activity both in the workplace and elsewhere including sociometric badging, social media and short range wireless as well as other technologies such as driverless cars which would change the way we work.

Sociometric badging is an area I have been interested in since I first came across it about 12 months ago. MIT have invented a device, which they call the sociometric badge which allows you to record data about the movement and behaviour of the person wearing the badge as they move around the workspace during the day. The device is about the size of security swipe card (and can have this function embedded into it I recollect) and it contains a whole bunch of bluetooth and/or wireless sensors, motion detectors and recording devices. So not only will it track where you walk, but if you are standing or sitting and if you are talking to someone and how loudly for how long. Put very simply and crudely, through a whole lot of measures, the data then indicates who you talk to a lot, who you say hello to in passing and where and how you spend your day. The data can then be used to create social maps of an organsiation, which are now being considered important signifiers of innovation and collaboration. I could probably write a whole blog post on this topic…If you are interested in reading more, I highly recommend “People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us about the Future of Work” by Ben Waber.

As Philip pointed out, all of this leads to the question of privacy. However studies are showing that privacy is very much a generational idea, and that generally younger generations have less concerns with sharing information than older generations. Many people seem to no longer care about privacy at all – Philip referred to a website ijustmadelove (which I am not linking to my blog – I don’t want to think about how much spam it might set off!) where people are choosing to share very private information. Whilst some information we are sharing by choice, other information is shared without most of us realising it. We are already sharing significant amounts of information with search engines and retailers, and not just online but a link between instore and online.

Using short range wifi to allow checking into a locations via a social media application means that the next time you enter that space the retailer will know every time you are inside their store. They will also have your purchase history and your browsing history while in store. This will lead to live time direct advertising. Apple are also already using a low energy bluetooth system called iBeacon which doesn’t even require you to check in. I already have something like this happening on my phone which I think is operating via gps tracking – every time I pass the local burrito place after using an evoucher there – at this point it doesn’t offer me any deals but it does pop up to tell me I am near the restaurant.

All of this eventually leads us eventually back to the jellybean. Philip uses the term jellybean to refer to the social media dot or blob that indicates if you are online or offline. He suggests this will become more important in the workplace, signaling to others where you are and what you are working on. I know in an office I worked in with an instant message network people did stop calling the phones if your greet dot wasn’t on. However in the fairly near future, not only will this social media icon just signify that you are online, the technology to concurrently edit documents with other users, will also allow it to signify who is working on a document, whilst tracking technology will identify where in space they are physically located. Philip defines “Jellybean working” as the intersection of technology, people and physical space.

All of this freaks people out a little sometimes, but if you think about it, Apple and Google probably know everything about you already. Which is a nice segway into my next weeks blog post, which will be on Hayden Perkins presentation about NYC Google and Let the User Decide.

Would you sign up for a sociometric badge in your workplace? What new technologies or social media platforms do you think will transform the way we work? Do you use social media in your workplace?

P.S. I’m excited to announce that I’ll be presenting at RTC NA in Chicago in June in a session on a similar topic to this one – entitled BIMx:Big Ideas around Big Data. Registration for the conference hasn’t opened yet, but the RTC AUS conference registration has, it will be on in May in Melbourne and I am also presenting there – a session called Get your Groupon. Check out the RTC Events Site.

Image Credits:

by Ruth L

Social media – design collaboration via digital means?

Posted on February 12, 2013 by ceilidhhiggins

In my last role I used to spend a lot of time working with remote teams – often remote from me and sometimes from each other. Over time I realised that one of the biggest challenges in working this way was the lack of informal “overheard” conversations. For example I might be briefing one person in the team on a task but start talking generally about how the meeting I had that day went, someone else in the team sitting near by might overhear and join the conversation with a new idea. This lack of proximity and informal collaboration is also a traditional problem in the relationship between interior designers or architects and engineers. The question is, is it possible to replicate this casual form of interaction digitally?

Social media is frequently described as the new water cooler, just one recent example can be found here. HP’s internal social media platform was also called WaterCooler. Although I have to say – the image I found looks just the opposite doesn’t it – and I’ve always found coffee to be more popular than water! Regardless of your drink preference, is social media the current or future digital means for casual work interactions and collaboration though?

Personally, I found social media useful on certain occasions – I became the first person in my company to post my redundancy on yammer the internal network – for me this meant a lot of people found out in hours rather than weeks (and I also had posted personal contact details). However on a day to day basis it wasn’t a tool I used extensively. I found instant messaging to be much more useful, but the limitation is that it is generally a one on one conversation. The guy that sits next to me can’t overhear and put his 2 cents in (this privacy is in fact often becomes the reason people chose messaging as the means of communication).

However, I still don’t believe that social media can completely replace the informal, overheard, in person element of communication. Firstly by typing something into a social media site it is much more of a deliberate sharing action. Secondly I find that people are less likely to respond. If I speak to you in person or on the phone you are more likely to say something than in front of a large meeting. If I instant message you rather than email you, you are more likely to respond partially because of that annoying flashing but also just social convention. If I post something on social media (or to this blog!) it has become a combination of email and the large meeting – for most of us it becomes too public, too deliberate and just too much effort to respond with a comment. Perhaps partially because we know that if we start commenting on everything we will be there all day – and maybe no one will notice – unlike if we spend all day at the water cooler or coffee shop!

I think the issue of informal communications and collaborations remains a challenge to be solved in order to fully realize the benefits of working remotely and globally. I started to think about the part that videoconferencing could play in this and then I came across this suggestion:

“One fix, he suggested, could be a screen set up in your office space that shows a colleague who is working somewhere else. It could enable the types of informal conversations that often lead to fruitful ideas, and maybe “frost up and go into privacy mode” when that person takes a meeting or a phone call.”

This came from yet another blog on the workplace of the future, but its certainly the first time I’ve seen this suggestion (and I do have quite a lot of time to read blogs right now…hey its research for you right?) http://www.eweek.com/mobile/intel-offers-an-image-of-the-workplace-of-the-future/

I started thinking about this one, maybe this means the whole office will become like a giant telepresence room where half the office is a mirror image of somewhere else. Or maybe through one window we see one place (say Perth) and through another we see another place (the engineers down the road). For anyone not familiar with telepresence – right now its typically limited to meeting rooms. Traditionally you have 2 identical rooms, each one is only half a table though, the other side is a video screen. Its still pretty expensive so not that commonly installed. The technology has been around since about 2006 but doesn’t seem to have made much impact – probably due to the cost and the need for the 2 identical locations.

Today I found another alternative on – that holograms will be the next big thing. (though I do admit this was posted to you tube in 2010 so obviously I’m behind the times)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAIDXzv_fKA
Maybe we all sit in different places but have our holograms working in a shared project office? This hologram would seem to have more potential as an architectural or engineering collaboration tool. because not only can we share ourselves, we can share our models as holograms too.

All of this moves away from social media as a solution, and back towards physical solutions – even if they are driven by technology, they are still attempting to replicate a physical environment. Do we need a physical environment to collaborate best or is social media already taking over and replacing this? Will this perhaps change as the workplace demographics change?

What is your experience worth social media in the workplace? Do you think social media is the new water cooler? What are your success stories (or horror stories) of using social media for collaboration in interior design or architecture? Do you want your engineers (or interior designers or architects) right there with you? If we were having this conversation in person would you comment?

Image Credits:

by Jason Pratt

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