Today I had the privilege of being able to sit down with a student who requested one-on-one Adobe Flash tutoring to discuss plans of her portfolio website. I was able to show her the basic programming of buttons as well as how Flash and Dreamweaver go hand-in-hand when it comes to website development. She already knew the fundamentals of the software and really just needed me to show her how to utilize the skills she already possessed  and refine them into a real-world scenario. I feel that with a couple more meetings, she will have a fantastic portfolio page to showcase her work.

When asked to create some workshops with a design theme in mind, my first response was “No problem!  There is loads of design to be found in food!”  Little did I know how right I was.  I mean, I had a pretty good idea about the way a plate is designed, how a banquet should be presented, how garnishes work with a dish, how a buffet should be laid out for the best results.   But I had just scratched the surface.

I’ve found design based around food in architecture, and not just in kitchen design!  The flow of the cooking space, the Feng Shui of the kitchen, makes a huge difference in the functionality and comfort of the space.  The way a dining room table is seen by a systems analyst, through the set-up, the meal itself, and the aftermath – designed for maximum efficiency.  A good garden design makes both the work and enjoyment of the space better.   The way a distribution network is designed makes all the difference in how foods find their way to our table, and it is an amazing dance that foods do on that journey.

All of these elements and more have been popping up as I dig a little deeper into the various concepts of food in design.  And don’t get me started about all of the buildings out there in the world that are made to look like some sort of food item.  Our own beloved Big Chicken in Marietta is a sterling example of that sort of “food architecture”! LOL

I’m going to be carrying my camera around with me to see where I can find food elements in design around the city.   Stone pineapple sconces at the entry points for elegant driveways, rippling water and scale themes carried out on wall designs, even the occasional pig-butt sculpted BBQ joint.  Let me know what your favorites are, send a picture if you have one, or give me an idea of how to find it and I’ll see if I can go get a good picture of it.

In the mean time, take a look around you the next time you fix a plate of food for yourself, pack a lunchbox, or order a nice meal at a restaurant.   Consider the care (or lack thereof) that was put into the design of the food presentation.  Look at your kitchen and consider your work flow – is the design well-thought out and favorable to your needs? And by all means, look around as you are on your daily travels, and see where you can find some interesting food elements in the designs around you.

Bon Appetit!

Getting in the middle of a conversation that’s already going on, versus creating a conversation and asking consumers to come in is the key to effective advertising.

Doing the former is as silly as the following conversation:

Person 1: Hey, did you hear about Michael Jackson?

Person 2: Yeah, I loved him. I already miss him!

Brand: Hey, you over there! Did you know most of insecticides have nerve poison that causes a cockroach to have muscular spasms that make it flip on its back? Without muscular coordination the cockroach cannot right itself and eventually dies in its upside down-position. Wanna buy some bug spray?

Irrelevant.

Click to check them out!

But take interactive shop Deca (Digital Entertainment Corp. of America) for example, which inked a sponsorship deal with Target for its Momversation show (above). This content is uniquely relevant to the target audience that the brand fits comfortably into. Plus, it utilizes bloggers that already have influence within market.

Now that’s relevant!

What conversation can your brand butt into today?

Our little 3D model is really starting to take shape now. If you missed last Saturday’s workshop, you missed the addding of the second floor. We brought in many of RevitCity’s families to help us complete some furnishing. We are just about ready to add a roof and the small pool to the courtyard. Next week should be very interesting after putting the roof and and making some changesto the exterior part of the building. It will be interesting to see how Matt is doing with his Sketch-up building and how the two will compare.  Revit is such a woderful tool, giving us the ability to actually layout quick designs in a matter of a few hours.  I think the only thing that comes close to this is sketch-up.  I can see now, how sketch-up and Revit can really compliment each other.  It’s really exciting especially as we work on the same project.  Come check us out fro yourself.

Saturday we had a great session covering the first portion of the Structural presentation.  On August 29 we will recap some, and cover the remainder of the Structural presentation.  Viewed as one of the most difficult divisions of the ARE, interns usually find the review to be extremely helpful, and as usual there were many tips shared during the discussion on how to take the exam successfully, Tips and Tricks behind passing the exam, and Several Sample problems to be worked out.  The culmination of 9 years of presentations by several of Atlanta’s top Structural Engineers has evolved into the presentation that has nearly a 95% pass rate.  The ARE SHOP in conjunction with the materials presented are a huge asset to any Achitect looking to add to their knowledge bank, and hae more tools in their mental tool box.  I look forward to seeing you at the next ARE SHOP.

Last week we actually did something a little different then what I had originally planned. We are working on a little project that might lead to the actual design being built. We started with a pdf file that I had to convert to a jpeg so Revit can import the file so we can use it to trace over and build our model from. After bringing the file in and getting it close to the true dimensions we were on our way. This past Saturday we pretty much completed the first floor. This coming Saturday the 15th, we will be working on completing the first floor and moving up to the second floor. This is the perfect opportunity for you to join us and watch a project go from start to finish.

The Top Ten Myths of Divorce
Discussion of the most common misinformation about divorce
David Popenoe

1 Because people learn from their bad experiences, second marriages tend to be more successful than first marriages.

Although many people who divorce have successful subsequent marriages, the divorce rate of remarriages is in fact higher than that of first marriages.1 [Sources]

2 Living together before marriage is a good way to reduce the chances of eventually divorcing.

Many studies have found that those who live together before marriage have a considerably higher chance of eventually divorcing. The reasons for this are not well understood. In part, the type of people who are willing to cohabit may also be those who are more willing to divorce. There is some evidence that the act of cohabitation itself generates attitudes in people that are more conducive to divorce, for example the attitude that relationships are temporary and easily can be ended.2 [Sources]

3 Divorce may cause problems for many of the children who are affected by it, but by and large these problems are not long lasting and the children recover relatively quickly.

Divorce increases the risk of interpersonal problems in children. There is evidence, both from small qualitative studies and from large-scale, long-term empirical studies, that many of these problems are long lasting. In fact, they may even become worse in adulthood.3 [Sources]

4 Having a child together will help a couple to improve their marital satisfaction and prevent a divorce.

Many studies have shown that the most stressful time in a marriage is after the first child is born. Couples who have a child together have a slightly decreased risk of divorce compared to couples without children, but the decreased risk is far less than it used to be when parents with marital problems were more likely to stay together “for the sake of the children.”4[Sources]

5 Following divorce, the woman’s standard of living plummets by seventy three percent while that of the man’s improves by forty two percent.

This dramatic inequity, one of the most widely publicized statistics from the social sciences, was later found to be based on a faulty calculation. A reanalysis of the data determined that the woman’s loss was twenty seven percent while the man’s gain was ten percent. Irrespective of the magnitude of the differences, the gender gap is real and seems not to have narrowed much in recent decades.5 [Sources]

6 When parents don’t get along, children are better off if their parents divorce than if they stay together.

A recent large-scale, long-term study suggests otherwise. While it found that parents’ marital unhappiness and discord have a broad negative impact on virtually every dimension of their children’s well-being, so does the fact of going through a divorce. In examining the negative impacts on children more closely, the study discovered that it was only the children in very high conflict homes who benefited from the conflict removal that divorce may bring. In lower-conflict marriages that end in divorce—and the study found that perhaps as many as two thirds of the divorces were of this type—the situation of the children was made much worse following a divorce. Based on the findings of this study, therefore, except in the minority of high-conflict marriages it is better for the children if their parents stay together and work out their problems than if they divorce.6 [Sources]

7 Because they are more cautious in entering marital relationships and also have a strong determination to avoid the possibility of divorce, children who grow up in a home broken by divorce tend to have as much success in their own marriages as those from intact homes.

Marriages of the children of divorce actually have a much higher rate of divorce than the marriages of children from intact families. A major reason for this, according to a recent study, is that children learn about marital commitment or permanence by observing their parents. In the children of divorce, the sense of commitment to a lifelong marriage has been undermined.7 [Sources]

8 Following divorce, the children involved are better off in stepfamilies than in single-parent families.

The evidence suggests that stepfamilies are no improvement over single-parent families, even though typically income levels are higher and there is a father figure in the home. Stepfamilies tend to have their own set of problems, including interpersonal conflicts with new parent figures and a very high risk of family breakup.8 [Sources]

9 Being very unhappy at certain points in a marriage is a good sign that the marriage will eventually end in divorce.

All marriages have their ups and downs. Recent research using a large national sample found that eighty six percent of people who were unhappily married in the late 1980s, and stayed with the marriage, indicated when interviewed five years later that they were happier. Indeed, three fifths of the formerly unhappily married couples rated their marriages as either “very happy” or “quite happy.”9 [Sources]

10 It is usually men who initiate divorce proceedings

Two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. One recent study found that many of the reasons for this have to do with the nature of our divorce laws. For example, in most states women have a good chance of receiving custody of their children. Because women more strongly want to keep their children with them, in states where there is a presumption of shared custody with the husband the percentage of women who initiate divorces is much lower.10 [Sources] Also, the higher rate of women initiators is probably due to the fact that men are more likely to be “badly behaved.” Husbands, for example, are more likely than wives to have problems with drinking, drug abuse, and infidelity.

Sources

1 Joshua R. Goldstein, “The Leveling of Divorce in the United States” Demography 36 (1999): 409-414; Andrew Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) [back to text]
2 Alfred DeMaris and K. Vaninadha Rao, “Premartial Cohabitation and Marital Instability in the United States: A Reassessment” Journal of Marriage and the Family 54 (1992): 178-190; Pamela J. Smock, “Cohabitation in the United States” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000) [back to text]
3 Judith Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (New York: Hyperion, 2000); Andrew J. Cherlin, P. Lindsay Chase-Landsdale, and Christine McRae, “Effects of Parental Divorce on Mental Health Throughout the Life Course” American Sociological Review 63 (1998): 239-249; Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) [back to text]
4 Tim B. Heaton, “Marital Stability Throughout the Child-rearing Years” Demography 27 (1990): 55-63; Linda Waite and Lee A. Lillard, “Children and Marital Disruption” American Journal of Sociology 96 (1991): 930-953; Carolyn Pape Cowan and Philip A. Cowan, When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples (New York: Basic Books, 1992) [back to text]
5 Leonore J. Weitzman, “The Economics of Divorce: Social and Economic Consequences of Property, Alimony, and Child Support Awards” UCLA Law Review 28 (August, 1981): 1251; Richard R. Peterson, “A Re-Evaluation of the Economic Consequences of Divorce” American Sociological Review 61 (June, 1996): 528-536; Pamela J. Smock, “The Economic Costs of Marital Disruption for Young Women over the Past Two Decades” Demography 30 (August, 1993): 353-371 [back to text]
6 Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) [back to text]
7 Paul R. Amato, “What Children Learn From Divorce” Population Today, (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, January 2001); Nicholas H. Wolfinger, “Beyond the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce” Journal of Family Issues 21-8 (2000): 1061-1086 [back to text]
8 Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Alan Booth and Judy Dunn (eds.), Stepfamilies: Who Benefits? Who Does Not? (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994) [back to text]
9 Unpublished research by Linda J. Waite, cited in Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage (New York: Doubleday, 2000): 148 [back to text]
10 Margaret F. Brinig and Douglas A. Allen, “’These Boots Are Made For Walking”: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women” American Law and Economics Review 2-1 (2000): 126-169 [back to text]

Thank you to all that attended our last Sketch-upSHOP.  Many of the sessions build on each other, but I try to refresh the memory of those who missed previous sessions, and try to cater to the audiences needs.  The Design for ALYS Beach Condo is going to be a fun and exciting project to run through the Pre-Design and Schematic Design phase.  For those of you that missed the presentation, this week we did the following:

1. Inserted a site plan from JPG format, Inserted the “old” floor plans also in JPG format.

2. We rotated and scaled the images to get them in “real world” dimensions.

3. We constructed the first floor walls, inserted some doors and windows.

4. We applied some materials, and discussed the future components of the project.

Tune in in two weeks when we address the second floor, Roof, and courtyard.

PREVIOUSLY:

Thank you to all that attended our first Sketch-upSHOP.  It was quite a success.  We got to cover all the basic information and even went deeper into the program for a little more advanced users.  We discussed Groups and Components and edited a few of both.  I look forward to the next Sketch-upSHOP, and hope to see you there.

We have just started our new series of RevitShop workshops and started off with a wonderful afternoon this past Saturday. We followed the sketchup workshop which was a great transition right into some 3D modeling.
We are starting with the basics and working our way through all the functions of Revit. There is still time to join us for the basics before we get into the real meat and potatoes of all the possibilities of what Revit can really do.  This Saturday, August 8, we will be taking our little cottage and dissecting it.  We will cover sections and elevations and how to put them on sheets with notations.  We will also be enlarging some plans and showing details.  You don’t want to miss it, so sign up now.  See you Saturday.