By Mika Klein, Senior Educational Facilities Planner
Some of you are aware that I have been waxing poetic about Pinterest since I started using it this year. I honestly think this is one of the greatest tools out there and every architect and designer could put it to good use.
I don’t know about you, but the deluge of emails, magazines, brochures, and other media that comes across my desk on a daily basis is overwhelming. Since I am a research and information junkie who is passionate about higher education thinking and how that translates into architecture and learning environments that really work, I find this visual information overload extremely frustrating. I try to read everything (I do not succeed), and I often find things that I want to remember, save, and pass on. For me, this translates into random sticky notes, forwarded emails, printed hard copies buried somewhere on my desk, or files saved who knows where on my laptop. Forget about my memory, I’m in my 40s—enough said. In short, it was really difficult to find the info/visual nugget when I needed it. And then along came Pinterest…
Pinterest is simple. It’s fast, it’s visual (which is the way I think), my goodies are in one virtual place, and I can access it anywhere. I started creating “pinboards” for various topics and now every time I come across something interesting, useful, or inspiring, I pin it. When I need to refer back to something, I just login and there it is. I keep adding pinboards and I can see how I could make one specific board for every project I am working on. It could be a great collaborative tool for teams to share images. I have to admit that it has not solved my problem with saving/filing whitepapers, but who knows what the next big thing will be!
Here are some of my pinboards that you might find interesting. Enjoy!
