Social Media in the Built Environment Awards - BE2

This Wednesday at the Building Centre in London was the big BE2 show up with awards of course. In sixteen categories 64 projects, teams and individuals were nominated. Awards are numerous and everywhere they are won or lost, but BE2 promisses to be more than that. The BE2Awards grew out of the BE2Camp a plat form to promote web 2.0 applications in the context of the built environment, eg for planners and developers. A number of camps too place since 2008. Now the Awards area logical next step. "It's now time to start shouting about some of the best practice that has emerged. It's time for the world's first awards for social media in the built environment."


Image taken from ecologiqyest blog / In order to store and track the stories behind the objects, as well as connect people with similar experiences, Tales of Things launched a website that assists those trying to sell their second-hands on ebay or other e-commerce sites by allowing the media-link through QR from their beta site.

The structure for the awards was: "the Be2 award nominations were sourced from you, our "crowd", and voted upon by the same "crowd": you. This helped ensure we got a wide spread of nominations, and also encouraged shortlisted candidates to mobilise their supporters once online voting began." In this sense it was also a test for BE2 on how good they are able to mobilise the crowd to actually make this work. And it worked out for both the nominations and the voting.

The categories are roughly in two groups, one is writing about and the other is applications. There are awards in best blogger and best blog, or best twitter as well as best location based app and best 'internet of things' application, but also best charity use of social media or best education and learning project.


Image taken from Marko Manriquez / This is my first attempt to visualize a data feed from Pachube (energy consumption in this case) using an augmented reality app. The app in question is Porthole, powered by Pachube, a cool and easy to use augmented reality (AR) application that provides a view into the data environments hosted by Pachube. Pachube itself is a vast data brokerage platform for the internet of things, managing millions of datapoints per day from thousands of individuals. Its created by Usman Haque who designs interactive architecture systems and researches how people relate to each other and their spaces.

The winner were announce on the 9th of February and were voted for on the website. In total some 40'000 vote came in to support the contestants. The full list of winners:

Built environment blogger of the Year - Joe Peach for "This Big City"

Best sustainability blog - Joe Peach for "This Big City"

Best AEC social media blog - Su Butcher for "Just Practising"

Best use of Twitter - Paul Wilkinson (@EEPaul)

Best AEC collaboration platform - BIW Technologies

Best AEC community, network or community application - tCn - The Construction Network

Best use of Web 2.0 for construction products - Reed Harris Tiles

Best location-based AEC application - NearMap

Best 'internet of things' application - Tales of Thingss

Best mobile application - Woobius Eye

Best virtual or hybrid event - Sustainability Now

'Old media/new media' award - TCI - The Construction Index

Best AEC PR/marketing campaign - SMPR for Camfil Farr campaign

Best education and learning award - Virtual Maths

Best charity, third sector use of social media - EACH Treehouse Appeal

Best AEC use of photo / video - Andy Marshall (@fotofacade)

Joe Peach won two awards for him self as a blogger in the category best blogger and another one for best blog for This Big City. A blog on everything urban and sustainable covering stories around the planet.

In the category Best 'Internet of Things' application the Tales of Things project developed at CASA was the winner. The team with Andrew Hudson-Smith from digitalUrban, Ralph Bartel and Martin de Jode developed it here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis together with Brunel University, Edinburgh College of Art, University College London, University of Dundee, University of Salford for the past two years. Its great to see this now winning the first award. This category is definitely going to see many more applications to come in the near future. ALready there was stiff competition in this category with patchub, bubblino and sen.se.


Image taken from fazeleyevents / He watches twitter for a chosen keyword and every time he finds a new mention then he blows bubbles.