best practices in risk management
Ch-Ch-Changes . . . Managing Risk in the Change Process
At the core of the creative process is refinement. There comes a point, however, when change brings with it complications such as added expense and delays, explain risk-management authors James Atkins, FAIA, and Grant Simpson, FAIA. They explore the intertwining interests of the owner, architect, and contractor as the design phases flow into construction and the parties variously choose to welcome, reject, or manage proposed changes.

best practices
Measure Your Office Communications for Impact
In his newly released Writing for Design Professionals, 2nd ed., Stephen A. Kliment, FAIA, describes every imaginable type of A/E communications, including a section on creating an effective Web presence. In his concluding chapter, excerpted here, he describes how to measure the impact of that work, including the “fog index” of your writing.

Enjoy These Free Educational Offerings from Your AIA
For one week only, visit AIA e-classroom to take a one-hour online course, “The Ecology of Worship,” and earn one AIA Continuing Education System learning unit (HSW). Also available—now and into the foreseeable future—is a new AIA.org page with more than a dozen 15-minute moderated, taped discussions by some of today’s leading minds in architecture on topics ranging from Feng Shui to building information management.

The Neuroscience and Architecture of Time
This is a good time to talk about time. It is the beginning of a new era in the history of AIArchitect, it’s time to begin another school year, it’s about time for you to come home mentally from your vacation, and it’s time to stop and reflect on what neuroscience can tell us about how and why the brain responds to time. Time, of course, is crucial to planning, designing, and creating the built environment. It is so much a part of our lives from our first memories on that we implicitly think of time as a thing. It is not. It is a concept that we have used our conceptual brains to define and measure. It is also a part of our hard-wired brains, and we find manifestations of that biological clock in organisms as simple as the fruit fly. Join John Eberhard, FAIA, as he explains time as a function of neuroscience.