Ryan’s the technology design guy. Kristen and I headed up the office design. But technology, and Pinterest specifically, has played a big roll in our office design process.
Candidly, before we started designing our firm, I just really didn’t know what to do with Pinterest. I had occasionally used Pinterest to flag interesting recipes, but it was a site that really didn’t fit in my internet/social media world in a sort of Goggle+ish way. I mean, an online scrapbooking site? I don’t scrapbook. I don’t even “get” scrapbooking.
But lo and behold, Pinterest was an incredibly useful tool for us to organize our thoughts visually. It also serves as a memory stand-in — things that would have been forgotten in a pre-Pinterest world were right there waiting for us on our Pinterest page. Pinterest’s obvious strength lies in its visual nature, but we found another real asset is its ability to serve as a repository not only for what you find on the internet — convenient because the “pins” are typically hyperlinked to a place where you can purchase the item — but also for what you stumble upon in the real world.
By way of example, on St. Patrick’s Day we were at a vineyard with friends and liked the corner shower they had in their restroom. Because I took a photo of the shower and pinned it, we actually looked at it, remembered it, and now that corner shower is an inspiration for the shower in our office.
Later, Kristen and I found our chairs for the reception area at a local store without an internet presence. I snapped a picture and pinned it to my design board, and later as we shopped we were able to check Pinterest on our iPhones to see whether the purchased chairs’ color and style worked with other potential items we found for the office.
As recently as last week I was standing in our large conference room with our electrician discussing the wiring for the fixture that will hang over the conference room table. He needed to know where the table would be placed in the room so that he could center the light over it. The table was not yet delivered but, thanks to Pinterest, I easily grabbed its dimensions and we measured it out.
FreedMcKeen’s Pinterest page is here, if you’d like to take a peek. Even though most of the design, if not the construction, of our office is complete, Pinterest remains useful. We pin pictures of our during construction “satellite office” — aka our living room — to one board. Construction snapshots hang out on another. It is nice to have a spot to watch the firm unfold.
