(This ongoing blog will assist other blogger’s build quality content for their architectural design & building construction readers.)

Dedication: To designers and makers of our built environment.

By the nature of its output our industry is about bricks and mortar – but it is characterized by the proverbial sketch on the back of a napkin.

All successful business, as Bill Gates wrote, moves at the speed of thought. It is a digital economy of click-based commerce. How do we designers and builders – as shapers of the material stuff of our enduring world – conform to this brave new world? It can be done. While happily ever bound to the earth in our work, our concepts and ideas and aspirations find quick expression in the tools of the digital world. Clients are won and funds are secured with Hollywood-quality computer renderings. Drawing files are produced and shared world-wide via the Internet, unhindered by the normal cycles of sleep. Building systems are collaboratively integrated and tested through BIM technologies. Construction is scheduled, coordinated, observed and recored by remote parties via web-based programs. We have means to survive and thrive in the new economy, when the price is right.

As I’ve seen this digital promise unfold over the past quarter century, the simplest new tool seems to be underused, if not overlooked; the professional blog.

Blogging (the verb form of the contraction of “web” and “log”) is today an established component of the digital economy. Blogging lends itself very well to the information-based aspects of any business, but especially so to the designer and builder. Think of the napkin sketch. A well managed professional blog is greener, can be shared across a global table, can still be read after countless comments and revisions (and drinks), can attract new clients and new ideas from adjacent tables, and can even provide a previously unknown stream of revenue. Yes, revenue. The cash left on the table is for you. A tip of sorts, simply for a napkin sketch you would have produced even if lunching alone.

I intend to expound on this thesis going forward. Please stay in touch. Let’s see how blogging can enhance your napkin sketch and help to transform your digital economy.

Collier Ward, Content Architect.