Bing Thom: Crowd-Sourced Community Input

Among the presenters at last week's AIA Colorado Design Conference, Michael Heeney, principal at Bing Thom Architects had one of the most interesting presentations - at least judging from the amount of notes I took.

One of many innovative practice and design approaches discussed was the implementation of social networking to generate community input for a public library in Surrey, British Columbia (a suburb of Vancouver).  Given the project's truncated schedule, Bing Thom established a public Flickr account and asked for photographic submissions from the community for ideas and inspiration for the library design. 

image: Bing Thom Architects

The result of the process was a network of crowd-sourced ideas, representative of more of the population than simply those who are motivated enough to attend community meetings...and it probably saved a little time for the city and the design team as well.