I live in Seattle, I work in LA…virtually.
After a few months of physical travel, which was necessary to become engrossed in the project and become one with the team, it became reasonable to work from a distance. HOK has many tools available to make this possible, including its Advanced Collaboration Rooms (ACR) which allow video converencing and whiteboard communication across offices.
However, we still had a problem. There was no reasonable way to quickly and spontaneously sketch ideas and solutions to each other. You see, this is an important part of the everyday workflow of designing a building. All day long, we architects and designers stroll …
For all you chaps who didnt know. I’m also blogging (1 post so far) over at my friend Martin’s blog called “Off the Green Wall“. Martin is the president of Ecoscorecard along with his two business partners Paul and David. These guys are all around awesome, but I’ll save that for another post.
The important thing is that you watch this TEDx Atlanta talk by Gregory Todd Jones about cooperation and collaboration in networks and how vital it is to understanding this movement we’re all in. It’s less about cars, people, buildings and food and more about ourselves and communication.
After you watch, go on over to Off the Green Wall to read …
In celebration of ‘the Fifth of November’, aka ‘BIM Day’ I thought I’d post some ideas of what BIM (Building Information Modeling/Management) might look like in the future. This could be 20 years or 30 years, or never, but we should never stop thinking ‘what if’. In fact, recently I’ve been thinking about the possibilities so much that I’m getting scared that I don’t really know nearly as much as I should.
At any rate, I’m going to post possible future-casting ideas for the way in which we could be using BIM in the future to harness the power of the ‘building in vitro’. Some of these ideas are simply and process software related, but a majority of the focus is …
Well, here it goes… in just my second blog post I’m potentially ruining all credibility as a designer (or professional in general) as I blog about one of my favorite TV shows, Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance“. (Yep… I’ve already lost some of you.) I will admit to having an obsession with this show, its contestants, and choreographers. Say what you will about dance, but this show can teach huge lessons about what true collaboration looks like.
The show takes dancers of different styles, pairs them together, and then they perform in yet another style. For all intents and purposes the end product could be merely passable or even a train wreck. But the dances that become the showstoppers are the …
I, for one, have some my best ideas late at night, on a fabulous vacation (see attached photo), or sharing a margarita with friends.
Turns out that I’m not alone… Take a look at this study conducted by IDEA CHAMPIONS.
One of the things I found most interesting was that “In the Workplace” and “Sitting at Your Desk” don’t show up on the ”When do I Get my Best Ideas” list until #30 and #37. However, in the top ten were “Brainstorming with Others” and ”Collaborating with a Partner”… all seemingly related to work.
This got the Atlanta office chatting about different ways to work, collectively and individually, so that people can work …
One of the comments we hear a lot is, “HOK’s such a big firm. Don’t you feel lost there?”
Coming from a very small firm (I was one of eight there; here I am one of 2,400 or so), I ’ll admit I was a little intimidated…but I’ve found the size issue is a misconception; HOK truly does provide great opportunities for collaboration that you wouldn’t find in a small firm. In addition to having outstanding resources to help with project work (like the Denver project that used staff from San Francisco, St. Louis, and Washington, DC or the KAUST project that involved up to 400 HOK’ers at one point in time), it …
Tom Polucci, Clay Pendergrast, Rick Focke, Harry Lassiter, Sabine Bartzke, Sharon Paculor and I are hanging out in a conference room in NY with Contract Magazine, specifically, Editor Jennifer Busch and Art Director Steven Betts. HOK is helping to create and coordinate all of the content for Contract’s July issue this year, and our theme is COLLABORATION. We’ve got a mock up of all of the articles up on a wall and are looking at broad themes. Summary of discussion so far…
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Six months has gone since the day I posted this. Today, the project has been issued for construction. Six months of intense learning and contributing experience that makes me a proud HOKer. Working with a total of over 100 people; with HOK San Francisco as the lead office, involving collaboration with HOK New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Toronto and London. I do think only the power of strong corporate standard with great enthusiasm of team players that could lead to the success of project at this scale. And it is pretty incredible how the management could maintain the continuous flow of task assignments in different aspects of the project. In my case, I had the chance to start …
Certain HOK-ers (ahem, John Gilmore ) have been bragging about HOK’s very cool new collaboration technology: the Advanced Collaboration Room, which combines Cisco Telepresence Technology and Polyvision Thunder Express. Well, John, you are no longer the only cool kid in town! The WDC office became the fourth HOK office to open it’s ACR for business. St. Louis, San Francisco, and Toronto already had them…next on the list are Houston, Los Angeles, and London.
After a few solid weeks of construction, the ACR was ready for …
In the spirit of true collaboration, and building on John’s post about Dhaval I thought I’d share what I saw when I looked across the office to tell Dhaval he’d been blogged…
That’s Dhaval, along with Han Hsi Ho, and Colin Greene from the DC office.
The whole crew’s here to work on a large-scale urban design and planning project that’s going on in India, and the worksession has been fast and feverish. Buro Happold and our old friends, the Biomimicry Guild, are here, and you can practically smell the brain juice flowing out of the conference room the team has taken over….
