are using Flickr to cut down on necessary site visits by consultants as their new project in Washington DC goes up. Sweet.
Howeler + Yoon are using Flickr to cut down on necessary site visits by consultants as their new project in Washington DC goes up. Sweet.
21 Comments
having your consultants comprehensively review your multi-million dollar project isn't worth a few hundred bucks in plane tickets?
keep it classy, folks.
Read a one sentence news post, look at some pictures, and make a snarky comment... who's classy now?
please don't let archinect devolve into Dezeen-level commentary.
your news post merely contains an out-of-context flickr set. is it really worth a lengthy discussion?
the title implies a bad idea, and i try to point it out. and snarkiness is the essence of the internet, sorry.
There's no obligation to post a comment. if you don't anything nice to say, etc, etc.
And clearly not everyone agrees that it's inherently a bad idea to use photos in lieu of *some* site visits. I'm interested, for one. And it seems to be working out for H+Y.
Innovation in practice is exactly what architecture needs more of! some innovations will be successful and some wont, but let's save judgment for the appropriate forum where's there's some ability to make a useful analysis.
Of particular interest here is the use of notes and a public photo sharing site to coordinate between various members of a building team. nothing huge, but it's cheap (free!) and clever.
I've been posting site-visit photos to flickr since 2006 - I would never make them public though
and it isn't free if you want to post a bunch of pictures at once.
not even one just to show others how you're using and benefiting from it, toasteroven?
I've got to disagree, bryan, about not saying anything bad. Criticism involves both positive and negative feedback to improve something. Pointing out, even snarkily, the drawbacks of an e-site visit is part of that, just as is noting the benefits of posting the images.
That having been said, and on a less objective note, I think the idea of using flickr in this method is, like a lot of H+Y stuff, more trendy than it is innovative. That's just me, though.
Criticism is most certainly important. and yes, criticism means being OK with negative commentary as well as positive.
But to be critical in any meaningful way you have to be able to analyze the situation... and sectionalhealing's commentary was not an analysis so much as a comparison to the status quo and his/her own a priori assumptions about what the flickr photos are being used for.
The title of this news post is not "THE MOST INNOVATIVE BEST THING EVER." It's just about calling attention to something that others may find useful (or not).
But look, all I mean to say is that we shouldn't let snarkiness be the tone of archinect out of laziness. Architecture has enough snark built in. Do we need to bring it here too?
Here's one:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/40/99271520_20ac3b463f.jpg
I've deleted most of the ones from this project since I don't work for this office anymore - I didn't save any ones with notes... unfortunately.
the consultants didn't really use it as much - but it was similarly useful for quick clarifications of something mentioned in an e-mail. I ended up doing something else because my then-boss felt there wouldn't be a "paper trail" if something went wrong.
I liked the ease of the comments, but it raises some liability issues.
OK, so now we're getting to a level of useful discussion. Liability and documentation concerns are a good point.
Thanks for sharing, toasteroven!
good points, bryan. I forgot to mention that my feelings are that the photos might be a good way to augment site visits and other means of communication, but not to replace them. I think there's something invaluable and otherwise unattainable that you get from visiting the site, seeing it in person and in context, and being able to focus on what you find most important. That having been said, having a set of documents, images, records, etc that are shared and able to be easily and universally referenced might be a great way to supplement those site visits.
okay, i'll clarify my point: if you value buildings and their construction, you should also highly value site visits (consultants or otherwise).
it's like having sex with your girlfriend versus checking out her facebook page. there are things you'll notice in real life that are impossible to perceive in a mere 20 photos.
there are exceptions (if it's really hard to travel to the site, etc.), and this technique could perhaps supplement site visits, but shouldn't replace them.
also, as was pointed out above, there are huge liability concerns. do i really want to show the world how poorly i design things?
I think it's incredible how little architects make use of technology like this. Here would be a good setup:
1. Password protected access. Not sure if flickr allows this -- if not, yet another example of how flickr has slipped up completely (they could have totally controlled photo sharing for the next decade, but they've made so few innovations since the original push, it blows the mind...). But there are other ways to host photos.
OBVIOUSLY you should pay for the premium flickr. One area in which architects are total morons -- using free web tools, beta versions of software (and of course pirated everything) for real work. In this case, it's $25 a year to establish a relationship and support rights... what's not to like?
2. TIME, version control: One of the complex things about site visit photos is that they build up over time, and sometimes old photos become irrelevant based on new photos (keying to new developments in the field, of course). On the other hand sometimes the old photo becomes terribly important. When I email a photo to the engineer to get his thoughts, then the contractor changes something in the field, and the engineer refers to my old photo in a discussion, this is a bad situation. So with good photo sharing for construction, we would want to be able to update, or at least tag/sequence images. Flickr would let you do that, if you worked out a clever set of tags for dates, etc.
3. Sharing of construction knowledge within the profession: Despite what I said in #1, I think having public photos on flickr is also great for the profession. How many students get to see that kind of thing? The liability concerns are heavy, I'm sure, but there might be unexpected benefits from the added scrutiny. This starts to open up the same kind of discussion as "should I open-source my software project?"... only they don't have as many liability issues, I suppose.
There's more to discuss, I'm sure. At our very small firm (RSVP) we are still emailing photos around, alas. Engineers rarely make site visits on the kinds of job we're doing, so photos ARE important. Also, while there are a lot of dangers in my providing photos to the engineer (since I'll only shoot what *I* am worried about on the site), it does let me control the discussion. When the engineer goes out there himself, I don't have that control. Just one thing to consider.
PS. I suppose it's obvious that this should only apply to a small firm. In a firm with more than thirty people or so, I would hope that an IT person would set up a real client sharing site and make this kind of thing in-house. But flickr still might be a useful tool within that system, if it could be hosted locally.
PPS. Thinking more about liability: just posting the images on flickr exposes them to potential subpoena, I suppose. The internet makes us so naive... but the myth has enough momentum that you might get through several projects before this would become an issue.
You could certainly do this with a self supported website as George points out. However, you can also non-publicly publish photos via Flickr ( double checked to make sure), but it could get unwieldy marking clients as "contacts"
I think the biggest reason for wanting to do so is that so there wouldn't be a liability issue. They wouldn't be "public record"/
They could still get subpoena if they simply exist, digitally or otherwise.
The firm I (used to) work at used a secure .ftp site to do exactly the same thing, settling potential liability issues. Isn't this really just a glorified field report? Hell, I've been on less complicated jobs with a dedicated log in remote control video camera.
I use flickr to organize imagery produced by my students (as in, they upload images each week as they work on them). I find it just barely adequate -- again, I think flickr just stopped trying after their initial success. Being bought by Yahoo couldn't have helped.
The problem with just sharing images with "friends and family" is that it forces anybody who you want to see the image to create a Yahoo and flickr account. Similar problem with Facebook, of course. Simple password protection, or a situation where you can make the user account for the client or consultant, seems like a much better option.
I'm most interested in how tagging and public scrutiny could combine to actually contribute knowledge to a project that was brave enough to post construction shots online. Perhaps if it was in the contract from the get go that the construction site would be considered "virtually public" -- anybody would be welcome to take photos and post them online at any time. You could post a sign outside the site to that effect. A similar (but much more useful and risky) idea to the "report unsafe construction practices" signs one sees on all NYC job sites.
Developing on that last thought... (sorry, working late, with lags for rendering...): you could have a sign outside the construction site with the address of a public flickr group to which to post any photos of the site. So strangers would do your photo documentation for you (from a non-privileged, outside-in view, of course).
Flickr has it's uses, but I would say posting a series of photo on a Basecamp.com collaboration site that is set up for the project team would be a lot more appropriate. It's password protected, possible to make comments, and if you are already using basecamp for communication and collaboration with your consultants then it would be a natural part of the process...
I'm currently using flickr for private, password-protected communication between myself, the rest of the project team, and the clients. All you have to do is set up a private group.
Basecamp is a good idea too, but it's missing the note feature of flickr, which has been key for us. It's such a simple, small thing, but it makes a big difference when the primary context of your work is visual. Way easier and cleaner than having to manually annotate files and output new jpgs too.
We've been using project collaboration software on very large projects to replace paper submittal review. mark it up in PDF, post it, someone else marks it up, each A/E consultant does the lather rinse repeat. Return to the contractor means they download the final PDFs. the platforms we ve used are eBuilder and Skire.
e Builder has redline functions similar to Flickr that let users add overlays with notes or graphics to posted files, but we have chosen not to use the transparency markups because there's limited facility to download the resultant compilation of markups into a good archival format. It's always downloadable, but you have to rely on the website hosting vendor to maintain the info for the 12 years or whatever your state deems is the statute of limitations for A/E liability blablahblah.
Having the comments visible to the public is less of a concern since privacy settings on Flickr solve that pretty easily. The archival access and audit trail is the dealbreaker for my company at the moment. But i guess all the cloud computing Software-as-a-Service stuff presents similar dilemmas.
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