How to Reconcile Analogue with Digital Tools in the Construction World
- Thursday, 08 September 2016
Lets face it, when moments of inspiration come, or you need to take a quick note, the first thing that comes up to mind is to grab pen and pencil to write or draw something down. The same thing happens when consuming information, some people prefer to have a physical copy of a document or book to read over and analyze, instead of a digital copy. Not everyone's habits are the same, but they need not be mutually exclusive. In the construction world this is a very common occurrence. Contractors or architects may feel like scribbling down notes or designs, and although that helps them better understand or create a solution, it is off the grid and beyond the reach of the rest of the team. There are several ways you can reconcile analogue with digital tools in your construction project, and here are few examples:
Tablets
Tablets have come a long way. They started out being clunky canvases, and today, they are slim, powerful computers that, depending on the manufacturer, may also include stylus pens. For anyone wanting to scribble notes or simply hace a blank canvas upon which they are able to come up with the simplest or greatest designs, tablets are a great solution. You can manually control and manipulate everything to the last detail. When you are done, you can seamlessly share your notes with colleagues or your construction project team. You can also export the file and upload it to your project in BuilBinder so that you can get feedback from other team members.
Integrations
If you are already working with a software solution that you are most comfortable with, but it just so happens that the rest of the team is using something else, find out about the integration capabilities of both solutions. For example, with BuildBinder you can upload any kind of file, be it Excel, Microsoft Project, AutoCAD, JPEGs, PDFs and more. If your team is already using BuildBinder, then you could scribble a note, snap a picture of it and upload it to your project space.
Notebooks + software apps
So some people are more inclined into using notebooks. As mentioned before, you can take a quick snapshot of what you wrote down and upload it to your software solution. If you want to go the extra mile, there are free personal software solutions that help you organize your notes both in digital and analogue formats. Evernote is a great example of this. If you have a napkin drawing, notes taken on your notebook or Moleskine, you can open Evernote on your smartphone and use the "document" feature. Point the camera to your document, and the system will automatically take the picture, and save it on the app. It will then scan the note and, should you ever need to find a note given its content, you can quickly search for it and the app will "read" through your notes. Export these notes and you can easily upload them to BuildBinder whenever you need to.
So you see, if you find that some team members are weary of technology because they prefer to do certain things by hand, there is not problem at all in that. You can easily accommodate their working styles with these solutions.