Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

Kamille Parks hails from Los Angeles, California as an urban planner at the architecture firm Gruen Associates. Her work involves ideation and planning for historical and transportation projects all throughout the city. Although Kamille works on various projects at a time, and often those projects take years to complete, this episode we get a great look at what an average day looks like for her, and how Airtable plays a role in making it happen.

Kamille talks about what got her into the work of urban planning, and how she was elated when she discovered that she could major in the subject and do what she had dreamed of doing all growing up. Even though much of her work needs to be kept under wraps for years, she finds great satisfaction knowing she’s doing work to benefit the community.

She teaches a boot camp-style classes at USC to teach tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketchup, and other programs that planners would use on an average day. She works on the weekends to teach these additional skills to students. Airtable plays a role in scheduling what she’s planning to teach, how much each class is worth, and making sure she’s in compliance with the school’s insurance. She also uses the base to set up and keep a record of training sessions with fellow students.

Airtable first entered the scene for Kamille’s work as the firm was looking for a database that could store the whole library of past projects. She transitioned to using databases more than spreadsheets in her life. 

The base Kamille shares is a meal planner she designed to help her be prepared and enter the “working professional” life. In it she showcases how she used formulas to make the recipe’s ingredients to show in a visually appealing way. She shares how the database is structured to allow for easy filtering based on criteria (vegetarian, made in an Instant Pot, breakfast, etc). The base generates a shopping list based on meal planning for the week, and allows excluding the ingredients she already has in the pantry. The shopping list can also be filtered by where ingredients are likely to be found in a grocery store.

Kamille also walks through what her Integromat + Cognito Forms + Airtable does for her database. Because she uses a paid Airtable account she is able to use an Airtable block with a Cognito Form integrated to easily input both the general ingredients and the unique qualifiers for how the ingredient is interacted with (e.g. chopped, minced, sliced). Her Integromat setup is what pulls the Cognito Forms data into her Airtable database, and she walks through how the two are able to communicate pulling the form entries into fields.

As a wrap up, Kamille talks about how her recipe database has made preserving family recipes possible beyond a written record. Airtable has made it possible to help her family preserve her grandmother’s legacy in recipes. She’s potentially going to share the database in Airtable Universe in the future, so keep your eyes open for that when it happens!

See more of Kamille’s design portfolio on her website | 

View the video demo from this episode |

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