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For what it’s worth, I have been listening to the audio version of ‘Creativity Inc.’ about the founding and management of Pixar studios. I am finding it to be entertaining and focused mainly on the interplay between creativity and process management.

Wow, thank you for all the good leads. I appreciate the help.

I work for a medium size firm and some of the ways we encourage wellness and innovation are:
-Company walks at 3pm, we all get up and go work a walk around the building each day. 
-Every employee is allowed to spend time out of their week to research anything they want. It is only an hour a week but it has become a good time for employees to look…[Read more]

Well, that helped make my point that if you are too narrowly idealistic it is a path to hell in this profession. You don’t get the opportunity to work on projects if you are against the project OR you do the project and are miserable because it goes against your ideals.

First, I design mostly recreation facilities, and often I am modifying or improving existing sites.  For example, I designed a new low impact campground that allowed us to close the existing camp sites and restore the flood plain they were previously occupying.  I don’t see low impact recreation development as encroaching on forest lands- in f…[Read more]

Thank you for your reply, very interesting. Don’t you feel bad about encroaching on forest lands with human development? (Not to make you feel bad, just curious..) You are not frustrated with the foregone conclusions of a VIA (visual impact statements), that continuously allow development, that have no way to say  no to human encroachment? I find…[Read more]

Hi Trace,
I am with the U.S. Forest Service, so my design work is generally on National Forest System lands.  I am often on teams ensuring that our work (whether design work or restoration work within an ecosystem) aligns with NEPA while meeting high design and aesthetic standards.  Most of my design projects have been on fairly undeveloped s…[Read more]

What do you mean, Krystal?  I am curious to know if anyone has experience using the Keysoft Landscape software.  Can you shed some light?

We’ve got the best clients already!

@LLauren, my experience is all in public, also. I am interested – do you not deal with CEQR or NPDES, or vast irrigation plans? How is your experience different? I am prob ably asking for trouble, but I am too old to really care. So what do you mean, Lauren – if you care to elucidate..

Oh, and PS, I should also add that as you assemble the vast…[Read more]

They offer a free download. I’d be curious to know how you think it measures up 😉

Haha! There you go!  Put the pressure on my guys at Land FX!

Just came across another solution: http://keysoftsolutions.com/landscape/products/keyscape-design-studio

Well stated, Andrew! As a someone in public practice, I can tell you that my experience this far has been quite different than what Trace describes above.

It is a diverse profession. You can choose to pursue a path that takes you to number crunching, it could take you National Parks, it could take you to urban areas, it could take you to working in and on beautiful properties in beautiful places almost every day that few people have access to.
It depends on you to recognize what opportunities are…[Read more]

Nice sales pitch… Low pay, lots of overtime, and cranky clients should sweeten the deal.

As someone who got an MLA from UPenn when McHarg was there, (read, major idealist!)  I can tell you to please measure your ideals against reality. Number one, try specification writing and road alignment, for the discliplines of crunching endless numbers and balancing them with massive spec packages – do you enjoy massive quantification of…[Read more]

Ready, Set, Practice.  Also Hinze’s Construction Contracts (chapter 9 or 10, no need to go over the whole book), you can buy an older edition as the new ones are rather pricey.  They’re about the only things I looked at.

Parading? not really , just make sure there’s enough grade for it to drain (you don’t want a muddy ground).  2% is really noticeable when running extended periods of time, but while walking/marching.  you will see the grade though, so you don’t want kinks in the pitch.

I wouldn’t fret. Soccer fields, where you want as little grade interference as possible, are set at 1% – 1.75% and they still drain readily enough. On your grassy areas you could get away with it due to infiltration. On the hardscaped areas stick to 2%. But it’s so slight , no one will notice.