Phew! This is now the fourth in this series, where I ask friends to share their social media experiences. Today, Tim Horton, the South Australian Commissioner for Integrated Design.
Check out the IDSC website for what this role means – but be sure to check the FlickR feed too. Tim often shares cityscape images.
- What is your favourite social media platform – and why? Twitter for keeping a watching brief on emerging global trends, programs and projects across the fields of design, planning and development. Facebook as a way of keeping a handle on a large extended family spread across the globe. Why? The ‘friend request’ permissions offered by Facebook supports a more deliberate strategy for crafting friends and setting up secure groups for more discrete sharing.
- What made you begin using social media? Watching an experimental boundary-riding colleague shift from blogging on his site www.supercolossal.ch to an expanded platform, including Twitter and Facebook. While the commitment to a blog site seemed onerous, Twitter seemed to require no long term commitment. 18 months later it’s become second nature.
- What’s the question you’re asked most about Twitter? “How do you get the time?”
- Do you have a “plan” for your personal use of social media? No formal plan, but my ‘Twitter self’ is broadly professional; and rarely share personal/family experience. A general aim to share the breadth of the work the Commission on a day to day basis.
- What do you gain from using social media? A constant stream of local and global emerging initiatives in design, architecture & built environment policy, including experiences from cities, universities and research centres, and design practices. Related interests in science & innovation, information technology, environmental science, social science and social innovation. And intriguing personalities that feed, provoke and sustain an active and restless mind.
