What makes you different? What makes your organization different? Is it the location? Prestige? Leadership? Personality? There is an ever increasing demand on differentiation. For a business, the combination of the expertise of the people who work there, the quality of the service and deliverable, and how the deliverable is packaged are 3 differentiating factors you can quickly change. Our job as planners is to help change and manage the same factors for a city. Differentiating factors of a place might be the people that live there, the quality of their life, and the texture of the urban fabric.
Demands on Planners
Demand: Higher levels of expectations from the public driven by the movie and gaming industries lead most people to expect a certain degree of realism from your 3D presentations.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Budgeting is no longer a prohibiting factor to construct 3D models of cities rapidly but do you take it too far? Learn when to go 3D and when 2D will suffice to be effective. Learn when photorealism is necessary and when it is not.
Demand: Co-create the plan with others without wasting time on the process of collaboration.
Document management, project collaboration, co-authoring live text are things you can use to work faster. The demand to do more instantly and stay organized in the process is a daily strain on workflow. Learn how to use web-based applications that actually curb the development time of documents and keep your team organized.
Demand: Clients request documents to be online.
When your clients want their documents online, they don’t mean a list of PDFs. Don’t underestimate the value of live text. HTML is easier to read on the screen and saves trees. If you don’t know how to post live text to the web, then you need a tool to help you. In a matter of seconds your documents can exist on the web, be scanned by Google, and returned as a link from a search query. PDFs take much longer to be noticed by search engines and load on the screen.
Demand: Clients request a community feedback loop to comment on the plan; How do you manage this without allowing all the comments to be viewed live?
You can add value to the community participation component of the plan by allowing residents to make comments online. Just because you provide this feature, doesn’t mean you have to use a discussion forum where everyone’s comments are live on the web. Learn ways to manage community feedback without allowing others to view previous comments. This keeps people from being persuaded by other opinions while providing a platform for feedback. Learn how to use software to create a continuous feedback loop to automatically respond to residents from your plan web site.
