Commercial, Custom Residential
How to Use Social Media When Designing a House or Retail Space
There are so many social media platforms out there these days. Which are the most helpful when you are planning an architecture, interior design, or landscape project?
September 13, 2012
I was going to start this post with something about how “social media is here to stay” or that it has “changed the way we do business” but, quite frankly, none of you are idiots and you already know that. As a culture, we’ve trended towards being more and more “social” online and that has not only crept into our work environments but truly re-shaped them.
As an architect, I rely a lot upon different social media outlets to not only promote my business (cough... this blog ...cough) but also to help pull together imagery for clients and to more easily communicate with clients. You may think architecture is about design, detailing, and really awesome spaces, but truly it is about communication. You either communicate well and succeed... or you don’t. Latching on to social media to help the way you communicate is critical.
Now, a lot of architects really LOVE their industry. I dropped the all-caps in there because, really, they take their relationship with their industry to a whole new level. I often feel for their significant others who probably can’t compete with the field of architecture in their spouses’ lives. Consequently, there are a lot of blogs and social media elements out there that are written by architects and clearly meant ONLY to be read by architects with their heads so far into the field that they actually can appreciate a three-page article consisting of erratic diagrams and words clearly not found in the dictionary. We learned these words in architecture school for reasons that escape me. I think that using some of these words (which I can’t bring myself to type here) do a huge disservice and separate us from the people we are paid to work with! I have no clue what the authors of these types of writing and media hope to get out of such writings except their own self-gratification. To quote a phrase I heard back in school (and I apologize for this), it seems a bit much like a “self-masturbatory edifice of juxtaposed irregularity”.
Yeah, exactly.
That just isn’t me and part of my approach to social media and my writing is just to write like I talk. If a client wants to point at a detail on a balustrade and call it the “thingy”, then guess what? We’ll call it the “thingy”. The world still rotates and I’m able to communicate with my client. If I rely upon the sixteen bazillion acronyms that we use in our industry I do nothing but separate myself from the people who need to understand what I’m saying. Dropping terms like “SSA, RFI, OFCI, STFI, or TYP” seem ridiculous to me. It doesn’t take me that much more time to just say what the damn letters mean. Easy enough.
And that has been my intent with my writing. Simple, straightforward, accessible, and written in a way that hopefully makes you think and laugh a little bit.
So all that said, how do we here at Board and Vellum actually go about using social media within the field of architecture? Well, aside from the company promotion, the biggest two sites at the moment that we use as tools to communicate with our clients are Houzz and Pinterest. If you have any interest in design or are thinking of a project get on both of these right now and start using them.
Houzz is focused on single-family residential architecture and is a warehouse of beautiful images all easily searchable. Wonder what some images are of library ladders or Tuscan styled powder rooms? BAM! You can then save the images to "Ideabooks" and start pulling together very helpful collections of images that you can then use to communicate with your Architect about the things you like or dislike. Houzz also has numerous links to products as well within the photographs. In short, it is awesome and helps augment the clipping of magazine pages I still recommend.
Pinterest is enormous and a lot of people use it for recipes, fashion, pretty much anything. My fantastic niece (who is an aspiring architect herself... I like to think that I at least didn’t dissuade her from joining the profession) clued me on to this site a while back and I’m a full-on addict. It allows you as you browse the web to grab an image and pin it to a board. I have boards for lighting, furniture, cabinet details, you name it. It is great for assembling lighting or furniture packages in particular as you can grab the image and then it links to the store you saw it on. You can also upload your own images as well.
So, there you have it. I wish you luck sifting through the pages upon pages of horribly over-designed and confusing architecture mumbo-jumbo out there of interest to people often stuck in the confines of academia. There are better ways to communicate with each other out there and I know that social media is helping us speak to each other better.
And if along the way someone drops a phrase about “juxtaposing the tangential faces of the theoretical construct” then just click back to boardandvellum.com and we’ll take care of you. Promise.
