Architectural Word of the Day

It is useful to understand the specialized jargon of your clients. Not only can it help you speak with them, it can help you understand their view of the world. For example:

"parti: Choice, means, or method. In architectural criticism the parti is the assumption made that informs a design as well as the choice of approach when realizing the scheme. It is the BIG idea. To complete an architectural project, there must be a beginning. This can be the most difficult task in designing a building. Architects sometimes invent a strategy before beginning a project. This is called a parti. This word is from the French language and is a derivative of the verb for departure. In other words, a parti is a beginning. Once a parti is established, it serves as the organizing idea behind the rest of the project. This can include everything from the organization of the spaces to the elements used as decoration."

The word is mostly used by what I call "capital A" Architects (and "capital A" Academics), not necessarily by the individuals who are doing the construction documents or selecting products.

Now you know, and can do your part for the parti.

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New EPA Reporting Rules Announced

Starting Jan. 1, 2010 the EPA will be tracking greenhouse gas emissions:

"The new rule will require about 10,000 facilities that emit about 85 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases to begin to collect emissions data under a new reporting system, EPA said. Suppliers of fossil fuels and industrial greenhouse gases, motor vehicle and engine manufacturers and other facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more of carbon dioxide equivalent will be subject to the new requirements."

This may not impact the construction industry directly, at least at first, but it will have a major indirect impact via suppliers, transportation, machinery, etc. More importantly, it is the next major step towards complete transparency in environmental impact disclosure.

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"Farchitecture" and Promotion

Here's a great promotional idea you can use to attract the attention of architects:

As we are in the business of architectural consulting and marketing innovative building products, I could not help but mention the company CoolHaus and their coined term: "farchitecture".

CoolHaus is a Los Angeles-based company that has combined food + architecture to create a concept they call "farchitecture."
They have used their architectural design skills to turn an old postal van into a food truck where they sell their building-shaped ice cream sandwiches that are named after famous architects. They are representing their green efforts through the use of edible wrappers (anyone who's ever eaten an ice cream sandwich will appreciate this idea) and are looking into creating other edible utensils to reduce waste. To find out more about "farchitecture" click here.

Sponsor them in your booth at the next architectural tradeshow, and see all the attention you get.

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Maintaining Situational Awareness with RSS

RSS feeds are the unappreciated heroes of the internet. They are awesome time saving and information gathering tools, properly used. RSS feeds can consolidate all the information from your social networks, important blogs, newspapers, and trade magazines in a single place: your own custom internet portal.

bongoboy at the CSI blog has a great post about the importance of RSS feeds in maintaining situation awareness.

"Situational Awareness means, in it’s simplest form, that you know which way is up… and up is very, very important in the aviation world, as the opposite of up is down and down has the potential to end badly. Very badly.

In the construction world, the absence of current situational awareness can simply mean that one doesn’t take the time to keep up with the constant change that is taking place in our industry, but in this litigious age simply claiming ignorance of modern materials and techniques is not a defense, especially considering how simple it is to have that information delivered to your computer each and every morning for you to peruse and enjoy with your morning coffee."

He points out the value of RSS from both sides: they are a great way to distribute information and to keep you informed. Both are valuable to a manufacturer. Encourage current clients and new prospects to subscribe and you get free, instantaneous, opt-in distribution at the click of a button. Find and subscribe to useful and interesting blogs, including your clients', and you get a one-stop information center. (It takes me a bit more than the 15 minutes bongoboy claims to read my blogs each morning, but then I probably subscribe to more comics than he does.)

The hardest part, as it is everywhere on the net, is weeding out the garbage from the gems. As bongoboy points out:

"Does it have potential to push a load of useless information across your desktop? Of course it does, but if you’re smart enough to be reading up on technology like this and you’ve come across this article, then you have the required gray matter to glance over a feed article for a second or two, make a snap judgement and toss it out if it doesn’t make the cut. If the feed continually sends you content that you feel is garbage, unsubscribe...this is a free country."

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Need an Architectural Photographer?

It takes time and money to fly around the world with your camera or to transport your own photographer to a project site to take photographs (especially if you want before, during, and after shots). Architectural photography is also more unique than other types of photography because the photographers use special techniques to capture the height, width, and depth of building spaces or landscapes.

Photographs of all stages of construction projects are extremely beneficial to so many different branches of a project. The photographs can be used by the architects, contractors, building product manufacturers, the building itself, and the list continues.

At http://www.aiap.net/find.html, you can search through lists of AIAP certified architectural photographers worldwide. If my firm is based in Los Angeles and I have a project in New York, I can scroll down the list of New York photographers, look at their websites and previous work, and choose the photographer I think is best fit for my project. Then VOILA!- I have beautiful photographs!

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Twitter's TOS: Who Owns Your Tweets?

Twitter announced updates to its Terms of Service last week, throwing additional fuel on an already heated debate: who owns the content you post online? The seemingly obvious answer, the user-creator is owner, may not be the case. For example, your tweets can be used for:

• Data for an API
• Retweets
• Display on someone else's website
• Quotation, with or without attribution

All of these are ways for someone else to profit from your writing, without the benefit ever reaching you. To further obscure the issue, the new TOS includes this:

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

Within a single paragraph, ownership is granted to the user-creator while usage is granted to Twitter. WebProNews quotes one user as saying, "If Twitter can do what they want with ‘our’ tweets, including reproduction for their own (financial) gain, what do we actually 'own'?"

The issue has come up from the other side as well, notably the recent "Facebook Murder" case and various cyber-bullying trials. Here the question is what responsibility does Facebook bear for the content posted by users? Combined, these questions of ownership and responsibility mean that most social networks and other online services gain the benefit but not the liability for all user-generated content.

This mirrors the debate about liability in BIM (read the comments from this BD+C post about mandatory BIM in Texas); everyone wants credit for their work on the project, but no one wants liability for bad information, faulty design, or whatever other problems might occur. Furthermore, once a model is designed, who owns the information?

In light of these issues, how can building product manufacturers protect themselves and their information?

The first key step is to be sure that any information posted online is technically accurate: guide specs, BIM models, CAD details, technical literature, MSDS, etc. should be reviewed carefully, preferably by a third-party architect, engineer, or other technical specialist. This may require a material testing program to get independent confirmation of the qualities claimed, especially for life-safety issues such as surface burning characteristics.

Secondly, refer people to the company website wherever possible. Twitter makes this easy; it's hard to fit extensive product detail into 140 characters or less, so tweets usually redirect users to the full article elsewhere. On blogs and networks like LinkedIn, however, there can be a temptation to post full-text of data sheets. Avoid this impulse; link to the appropriate page on the website instead. That way users will always find the most current information, and the issue of content-ownership is diminished. If Twitter or another network claims usage rights, all they have to use is a tweet saying "For more information, visit....".

The issue of content ownership is going to evolve rapidly over the next few years. Lawsuits are already testing the issue. Until a clear path emerges, the best way for manufacturers to protect themselves is focusing on these fundamentals.

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