Engaging and retaining Superusers really has to do with the proper care and feeding of Superusers: how do you keep them, and keep them from leaving for richer pastures?
Technology specialists in AEC are a special breed, and engagement is about retaining these valued employees. The usual go-to tactics – an attaboy/attagirl, or gift card – just won’t cut it. Engaging and retaining Superusers involves nurturing the 10 Cs, the soft skills, mindsets, attitudes, and hard skills possessed by every Superuser.
The chapter opens with the ways firms keep things moving, interesting, and relevant for design technology specialists. Next, we look at when Superusers leave AEC for startups and other industries, why they leave startups for AEC, and how firms compete with these startups for Superusers, and concludes with a look at the training and upskilling of Superusers.
Where is the world going, and how can we avoid being eaten alive by software and robots?
A group of LMN Architects employees were recently reading and discussing R. Susskind and D. Susskind’s book, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts. LMN Architects Principal Stephen Van Dyck was reading the book, and was convinced that everybody in his company needed to read it. Van Dyck says:
At a cursory glance, as a leader in this business it may seem really problematic to have your staff grapple with this future – that perhaps professional services might be automated in the near future. But I see it the other way around, which is: how can you not have your staff think about this problem? These are ideas that everyone in our company should be thinking about every day. I want people to constantly question, ask how can we make everything we do more efficient and better, to free up our time to do the most critical activities that only architects can?
With all the work and deadlines firms have to contend with, how do important group discussions such as this come about? Van Dyck explains:
In one of our early planning sessions, I mentioned somewhat glibly, “Oh, I’m reading this book about the future of work which has blown my mind into smithereens. This is really incredible stuff, and I think it’s really important for us to think about together.” The group seemed really intrigued by the topic, so I asked, “What do you guys think about just doing a book club? Anybody who is interested can come.” I thought it was important to have this be disconnected from official office business. Other than the office providing office space, where we just meet in our flex area after hours. I personally go buy chips and wine. Others bring snacks and stuff too. We do it on weekday evenings between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. The intent is not to make it an office-sanctioned event, but to make it more a conversation among friends about a really important topic, which is: where is the world going, and how can we not be eaten alive by robots?
Or software? “Or software,” agrees Van Dyck. He continues:
So I put a post on our Intranet and said, “Hey, we’re going to start a book club offline. Anybody who wants to join, let me know, and we’ll figure out how to do it.” And 37 people responded! I was blown away by the interest. So we split up into two groups to make the conversations more manageable. We discussed the first half of the book in two sessions, last week and the week before, and we’re going to do the second half when I get back from my travels in a week or two. We call ourselves the LMN Existentialists. Of course that started the wheels turning in my mind, and we’ve got a whole bunch of other books and articles on tap. To some degree we function like a support group, because this is a really existentialist crisis that we’re in. We as a profession, as members of society, we have to grapple with this topic. What is the world like when machines can do a lot of our work better than we can?
The group is also an informal brainstorming session. The conversations are a way for us to think proactively. All of this is to some degree, formally or informally, makes its way into how we structure the future of our firm. It’s just a slightly unexpected way to do it. It’s a new way of cultivating strategy with our staff to help make sure that we’re positioned well.
This is just one of many ways firms are going out of their way to engage – and retain – the very people who help them succeed. It leverages one of the greatest advantages that a firm has – that it is not just a confluence of individuals, but a collaborative group with shared interests and outcomes. Van Dyck says:
I believe that we’re all better off talking about the existential crisis together. It just goes back to some basic human stuff. Sometimes, it’s hard to talk about difficult things. And this is a difficult subject. It’s a hard conversation to have, but there’s really good stuff that can come out of it. That’s my hope, to be proactive about things that people are really scared about. The more we can be smart about it and think about the bad and the good, the better chance we stand to fare well in the future. It’s an experiment. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. You can ask me this question in five years. How did it go?
Engaging Superusers
Today, it is important to keep our best people engaged in the work they are performing. And from a management standpoint, it is equally important, where possible, to align an individual’s professional development with the business goals of the firm. “I try to equally get them to understand the pros and cons of being in a role like this,” says CannonDesign CTO Hilda Espinal. She continues:
I try to give him or her every sensible chance to be exposed to as much of a variety of opportunities as are available. I love to give them the spotlight and step aside and see what they can do and perform and deliver and contributing to their professional development. It’s like, OK, is this where you wanted to go? Here is your chance. I always tell everybody, “listen, if we’re doing our job right, two or three years down the road we will render ourselves obsolete, you have to be OK with that and enjoy change, evolving is the recipe to success.”
Those conversations are happening a lot, because not only am I evolving myself, but I’m evolving with my crew and they are evolving themselves.
A lot of the answer has to do with my leadership style. Without, hopefully, sounding arrogant, I’ve developed an eye for identifying what folks love to do and what they can do, which often go hand in hand. So as long as it is in line with our vision, I try to align their development with business goals. It is also important to have regular communications and do path-correction, whenever possible. Frank feedback and check-in points, I find, always help.
Figure 6.1
Shane Burger in the Woods Bagot VR lounge. Woods Bagot developed an app for iOS and Android devices that allow clients, using a compatible lens, to walk through their designs on their own phones. (2018) Credit: James and Karla Murray.
Keeping things moving for design technologists
Today’s professionals need to always be learning and growing professionally. But sometimes there’s the perception that the firm itself is what stands in the way of design technologists feeling like they can continually learn and grow. From an employee retention standpoint, this can cause firm leaders trouble, in terms of always having to keep things interesting. Shane Burger, Principal and Global Leader of Technical Innovation at Woods Bagot says:
It is definitely an issue. I give people a lot of room to learn, because, for me, I’m not counting hours. Everybody fills out timesheets, but I kind of don’t care. If you get the work done, and it’s good, and you want to spend part of a Wednesday afternoon learning something new, great. If you want to go off and teach at Columbia, Pratt, or somewhere else, great. Doing so keeps people creatively and intellectually stimulated in their work, beyond just the project work that they are doing.
These things do pose a problem, because firms have to maintain a relatively fast pace. Burger continues:
The thing that we’ve run into at Woods Bagot, and part of what caused Brian Ringley and Andrew Heumann to leave, the speed of the gears of the design technology team were going at a much higher pace. Yet, when it hit the mechanizations of an 850-person global company, that size of a ship is hard to turn. It’s harder to pivot. We’re doing really well, and compared to our peers are doing really well. But sometimes it isn’t quite up to speed with keeping things moving for people. Because of that, ultimately, if you have a pretty big critique of the profession in general, or at least the business of architecture, then that’s not going to keep you as interested.
It’s been less about interesting projects. I’m a believer that a group of amazing people can take a mediocre project and turn it into an amazing one. It doesn’t have to, by default, be a tower with a huge budget, an amazing client, with an art museum at the base. That’s not where you’re going to get an amazing project from. The biggest issue we run into, coming from retention of really good staff, has more to do with boring things like management, project pipeline, and diversity of project types. Keeping that stuff going. Keeping a diverse set of interesting things going on in the studio. It’s been less about I got to work on an amazing tower for three years. And it’s been more about career advancement and promotion.
When Superusers leave AEC for startups, and when they leave startups for AEC
Inspired by – and having to compete with – startup culture, firms are offering design technologists opportunities to conduct research and innovate – a win-win for both employees and for firms. TT CORE has an R&D program open to all staff, which allows anyone to submit a proposal. According to Hiram Rodriguez, Computational Design Group Leader at Thornton Tomasetti:
If they get it they will be funded for that project, which is great because we are not the only group trying to come up with content but you have others outside of the group create some of that content.
It is crucial to have an R&D program if you want the company to explore new technologies or workflows. Not only are you allowing your staff to further their knowledge, you are creating new value for the company as a whole. In terms of TT CORE, we have been doing more development in the last year, but we maintain a healthy ecosystem of project support, training, internal research, and outreach. For example, having focus group discussions about tool development is something that we’re starting to do more of, and remains key to building tools that can reach a broad range of people.
The AEC industry is increasingly losing computational designers, design technologists, and similar specialists to other industries. Another trend is that there are people in other industries, e.g. in startups, that end up taking a significant cut in salary to work for an AEC firm. They’re willing to take the cut to work less with spreadsheets and more with their hands, e.g. coming up with digital prototypes for projects and find that to be very fulfilling.
Why do design technologists choose to stay in the AEC industry? What career opportunities are there for computational designers who remain? Why don’t they leave AEC firms for an allegedly more lucrative career at WeWork, Katerra, Autodesk, or Disney? What are the opportunities and liabilities of staying, in terms of design technologists’ career development? “For my twelve people, I always think there’s tons of opportunity for them,” says Dan Anthony, Design Computation Leader at NBBJ. He continues:
Concerning the liabilities, “A lot of times they are not being utilized to their fullest potential, and they go somewhere else to explore that potential,” says Anthony. He continues:
That’s OK. I would love to keep people in that spot, designers who are computationally savvy. But it’s a hard space to be in. Because you either don’t want to become too specialized, or don’t feel like you get to express it enough in the work that you do. That’s the hardest part about that role. For them, as long as they try to maintain that balance, they are actually very, very valuable.
Just months after stating these words, Anthony himself moved on from NBBJ, joining a software startup building design tools to power the Superusers at construction and architecture firms – like the one he left.
Superusers are understandably hard to come by. “Made even more difficult by the fact that we have now totally different kinds of companies snatching up our great talent, verticals like Katerra and WeWork,” says Van Dyck. Architecture and engineering firms, as well as construction companies, have seen good people leave for a startup. LMN Architects is no exception. “Oh, yeah,” says Van Dyck:
If you spend any time at the WeWork headquarters, what you see is a very large operation with a lot of people in the C Suite, and a glitzy start-up atmosphere. In their current state, they are certainly optimized to lure some of the best design technologists over there. But there is a lot unknown about where they’re able to take their model. I think the jury’s out on that.
I’m really curious to see what happens with them, if this allure stays for the technologically inclined architects. I think the big scale of what they’re doing with this typology of building and the way that they approach design as an integrated part of their business model is awesome. I’m really fascinated to see where it goes and the things they learn. I’m just not sure it’s going to remain as alluring to those talents as it is now.
But are these startups in the same industry as AEC? “No,” says Van Dyck. He continues:
They’re in the same industry as many of our clients. They’re operating in the world of academic campuses and large real-estate firms. Now, they’re beginning to offer models of facilities and operations to all kinds of companies, which is really fascinating. It doesn’t preclude us. It’s totally possible that there will be a project where WeWork would really benefit from hiring us. I think of them as a future client.
When people decide not to leave or disband, or not go to another company or industry, what is it about what we do that keeps them from jumping ship? According to Van Dyck:
It’s the idea of being immersed in a breadth of design work that elevates the social experience. That’s our focus. That’s the outcome we help create. It’s the experience we help shape across a wide range of project types. At LMN we don’t have any studios, which means we all work on all sorts of project typologies. You might be working on a convention center today, and you might be working on a performing arts center or a pedestrian bridge in a month’s time. That diversity of design expertise means diversity of perspective. It’s critical to our outcomes and our ability to solve problems in new ways. Another important element for us is the fact that as a young designer you can have a lot of impact on projects and working process. Our teams are generally small. Our projects range in size from small to large. And they’re all quite different in function. You’re not going to be stuck designing housing within a specific supply chain all the time. You’re not going to be spending the rest of your career maximizing the efficiency of office space. So in a nutshell, we offer a broader experience for an architect while simultaneously maintaining a constant curiosity about how we can reinvent our services and process. I think that’s what attracts people to LMN.
The other side of this is, what attracts people to those places? “It’s their explicit objective to disrupt a market,” says Van Dyck. “That concept of disruption is important to people. People want to feel like they’re contributing to something meaningful and new.” As they do currently at WeWork and Katerra. “Exactly,” says Van Dyck:
People really want to know that they’re part of something that is growing. The perception is that there’s growth in disruption, which is often true. It certainly is true now with those two companies. I would argue that LMN also offers that sense of growth and disruption. We don’t have a pro-forma that creates a potential stock valuation of whatever billion dollars, but we are reimagining our role and approach at different scales constantly. Whether it’s our design process or how we collaborate with our partners or how we engage in post-occupancy work. All of that is disrupting the status quo of traditional architectural service, we’re just not explicitly branding it as disruption.
That’s really the difference between those choices, working for a firm like LMN or a vertical like WeWork. Do you want to work for an industry disrupter with a very narrow focus? A vertical has to remain very tightly focused on what that thing does. Their business model right now, it is dependent on filling office space. Their revenue and their funding is based upon how much office space and members they have. It’s the T-shaped question, do you want to be really good at one thing, dial that in and do a ton of research about it? Or do you want to remain somebody with a broad reach that is able to affect a more diverse set of problems? The answer for me is being broad and horizontal. I really embrace the breadth of the architect’s role to be a great generalist and orchestrator to solve complicated social needs.
As a transdisciplinary practice, KieranTimberlake has a number of people who could be working outside of architecture and perhaps making more money. Partner Matthew Krissel says:
But they are passionate about the built environment. And rightfully so, many people still believe that architects have a meaningful impact on society, that the built environment is not neutral, it can have a profound impact and it can enrich or diminish the human experience. Increasingly people are much more conscious about what they do and the impact they can have as criteria for their careers.
Figure 6.2
Our industry’s approach to the digital and delivery of data in the built environment needs to stop looking like a spreadsheet and more like prototyping with sensors. (2011) Credit: Smartgeometry.
Shane Burger got into a conversation with Federico Negro, Head of Design at WeWork about this. “He commented that he was doing critiques at one of the universities and had people coming up to him and talking about potential positions at WeWork,” says Burger. He continues:
The point these people were making was, all of their friends were going into software development companies. It’s arguably sexier and more lucrative. It’s a quicker pace. You produce things that get out there a little faster. That said, this only appeals to certain people. Maybe it’s something they do for a while, but there’s still something really impressive about buildings and creating spaces, especially ones that have a very personal impact on people within an urban environment, such as New York. Not all architecture is timeless, but it’s a lot closer than creating an app. There’s still a strong interest, and we are finding some people who, yes, they can go out there and work for a Google. One of the software developers I am interviewing right now could go out and work for Autodesk, Google, or similar company. But he actually doesn’t want to. He wants to stay a little more close to the problems. And see something actually come from his work beyond the software that he created. He wants to see it used for something. That’s what’s of interest to him.
Woods Bagot is finding a lot more back-and-forth with this. Burger continues:
What we’ve had in the past are architects who are interested in developing programs to do their work, to make plug-ins or Grasshopper definitions. Some of them have gotten so good that they meet the caliber of what you’d find out there in the industry to work for a software company. So they decided I might as well cross over there and try that for a while. I’m not sure that that shift is going to increase in velocity. We’re always going to have some of that. We’re competing with other architecture firms, and we’re competing with software developers. We’re also finding an increasing amount of people in the AEC lifecycle of projects, or the whole ecosystem, that are seeing increasing importance of these skills. That’s of course who WeWork’s hiring. Airbnb are hiring people who do this kind of stuff. Lots of different software companies and contractors. There’s a significant amount of the real estate market in New York that are building up their own tools similar to (3D web app) Envelope City and such. What we’re seeing is a lot more people interested in the skills of a programmer, but also someone who thinks critically like an architect. There’s a great combination in those skills and we’re finding a lot of other businesses in the larger built environment ecosystem that want to bring a lot more of that stuff in-house.
Prior to coming to Woods Bagot, Burger worked at Grimshaw. He stayed in architecture, in AE, and continues to work in this space and make inroads, leveraging the tools for the greater good. What is in Burger’s DNA that enables him to persevere in, and not abandon, the AEC industry, while others leave it for greener pastures? Burger says:
I am still really fascinated with buildings and spaces. I’m still fascinated with the creative act of collaboration. The reference for me still comes back to the years I spent, when I was much younger, playing in bands. And what it meant to collaboratively create something. That process gets my blood going – I am so excited by it – and it keeps me going.
Figure 6.3
T-shaped Superusers have both deep and wide skills in balance. (2018) Credit: Deutsch Insights.
Dan Anthony worked in tech before coming to design and architecture. He admits:
At the time, I wasn’t the most technical of people. I wasn’t writing the code day to day for our product. I was managing products and designing what the feature sets should be for certain things. The reason I got into design was exactly that: the outcome. I wanted to understand how to lead a more creative practice that wasn’t simply the fulfillment of some other things. It occurred to me if I didn’t have those design skills I would never have them. I wanted to acquire design skills, then went out and got them. I, too, took the pay hit.
Could another reason people stick with the AEC industry be financial – the perception of sunk costs? “The cynical answer is ‘Well, you already paid for your degree and you started a family, and you just don’t feel it’s worth the risk of trying something new,’ but I don’t think that’s it actually,” says Brian Ringley, Senior Researcher at WeWork. He continues:
I’m not actually a cynic. I think it’s funny to open with that and it’s probably a little bit like it’s not easy to switch once you’re inside. Now, I’m in too deep. What is that called? The sunk cost fallacy. People have a genuine passion for architecture. People who are in architecture really, really love architecture. That’s not necessarily true of say the tax industry. Well, maybe it is.
I will say I’m tired of the people who are in architecture proper bitching about it. It’s a little tiresome, but I also understand those frustrations and I feel lucky to have all these opportunities to continually try new things. I myself, I’m still doing architecture, it’s just at scale and it’s vertically integrated in a way that is not commonly found in practice, because I am fascinated by cities and by buildings. I remember it happened to me at a pretty young age. It’s really comical to think about, I used to be obsessed with ranch homes when I was in high school. I loved these old 1960s drawings of these cheesy ranch houses. I feel like it’s ultimately just a passion for the built environment, and no matter how [expletive] things seem to them, I think that’s still where they want to be, and they still want to work to improve it.
Competing with startups for Superusers
Is one solution to try to compete with the startups – including vertically integrated companies interested in owning the entire project pipeline – for the best people? Increasingly, one doesn’t need to leave architecture and engineering firms to experience the advantages of startups. “There’s no doubt that a lot of wonderful things can happen when you control and define the whole design to construction lifecycle,” admits Matthew Krissel. He elaborates:
I like how these firms can define the whole design and construction lifecycle, and I hope this kind of focused pressure can become real agents of change. No doubt, when you try and solve all the challenges across everything that architecture and construction may touch, it’s too much and too interconnected to take it all on at once. I believe these types of practices can make real change by taking on smaller pieces and stair step the progress and examples for everyone’s benefit.
At the same time, it’s great that a single designer, with a job in hand, can open a design practice and complete a project. They don’t need lots of capital or a network of relationships to get started. This keeps an entrepreneurial version of a design practice viable and relevant. I also like how a practice like ours, a design and research practice, can take on so many different things all at the same time. We are not held back by any one element of the vertical chain or an area of focus critical to the operation. Whether it’s making software, designing a house, mapping the behavior and environmental factors, a large office building or an esoteric academic building, when we see projects we want to take on we can do it. We can scale and adapt our business model, contacts, design process, deliverables, our partnerships, and our interest to almost anything. I believe there is still lots of space and many forms for a design practice to take and thrive within. Some we have seen before and others [are] yet [to be] invented. I wouldn’t want to see a contraction of this dynamism where everyone looks to become vertically oriented. I would, however, like to see a more coordinated effort across these scales to shape mutually beneficial areas of how we teach design and architecture, advance fabrication, construction, delivery, and operations of buildings and how we shape clients to be more aspirational and motivated to deliver meaningful projects. Architecture, construction, and operations all bear great responsibility but also opportunity. Performance and poetics are not mutually exclusive, rather their fusion is imperative at a time when the built environment must give more than it takes.
Are there similarities in what an AE firm like NBBJ does with the work that WeWork, or anyone in the co-working real estate space, does? “Yes and no,” says Dan Anthony:
You can imagine some of the techniques they use being very interesting. WeWork is expanding from a core area of putting butts in seats in standardized yet attractive spaces. Filling the seats. Their goal is to fill those seats at the highest price most often in as many spaces in as many buildings as possible. That is real estate. What’s curious is that they have started to develop techniques to capture the corporate market. Creating more specialized spaces. Which is about putting a company in a WeWork building. So they’re offering them their design services. It has to start from a very numbers-driven, top-down approach. How do we get as many companies in these standardized spaces? What does the space need to be to suit their needs but also be really easy to roll out? In my role I’m interested in the techniques they use. If the scope and scale of their work allows them to create something powerful and useful, but they hold on to them and they’re proprietary, that is a market edge that could eventually bleed into the design space. The risk for us, whether AE or AEC, is we’ll probably have the edge in terms of design and specialization. Making spaces that are unique for our clients.
For our client, we have a different attitude. Our goal isn’t to fill seats as often as possible, but maybe to design the building that works best for their business. We’re interested in human performance in that way. We want to think about spaces that don’t just meet the bottom line but also to help them to do their best work. Sometimes that means having some waste. We have more space than we need because we want to accommodate flexibility and choice. The question I have is: How does a company like WeWork understand the general human conception of what a workplace should be like? Do they own that IP? Do they make a tool that we can all use? These are big questions. These are all things that we can imitate in a way, but also have a different tactic. On companies such as WeWork or Autodesk: We’re just going to keep on collecting data until it tells us something.
Figure 6.4
Technical façade drawings. (2018) Credit: Nathan Bataille, Pratt GAUD.
Brian Ringley concurs that WeWork, for all its ambition, currently has a more narrow focus. “At WeWork, we have huge ambitions,” says Ringley. He continues:
But part of what allows for scaling and vertical integration is that relatively constrained design space, it’s that specialization in workplace and the ability to systematize that, and also an often under-looked fact is just redeveloping existing properties and how sustainable and quick that can be. There are so many underutilized spaces in the world, and yet the default real estate mode is buy a piece of land, have an architect create a core and shell building as tall as possible, and then sell that. They just keep doing that and you’re never actually looking at the demand. It’s all just pure speculation.
Training and upskilling Superusers
How do Superusers learn and stay relevant? Lunch & Learns, and earning continuing education learning units, don’t always cut it. Are firms responsible for preparing employees for the future? If so, how would they go about it. DLR Group’s Ryan Cameron strongly recommends a skill rebuild approach:
You should rebuild yourself every three, four, five, six, or seven years. I believe Frank Lloyd Wright had that advice. A few years ago I discovered that Gensler has their own in-house lab, and Gensler University, where employees can put in time to learn software or something else and the firm says, “OK, let’s go do that.” What if we applied something similar to that but also meshed it with something similar to a one- or two-year development league for NBA between high school and professional basketball league, that gets you substantially more prepared for all the actual stuff you’re going to run into? Professional basketball’s not just a physical game; it’s a mental game. There’s all kinds of trash-talking, things you have to be ready for. Otherwise you’re just going to get mentally broken down.
The exact same thing is true with architecture. If you’re not going to be mentally ready, career-ready, hands-ready, skill-ready, you’re really going to flop your first year, because it is such a hard thing to prepare for and overcome. If there was something like an Architect Development League (ADL) where you took a year between college and practice, the firm you’re going to work for, that would be interesting. You could have all the big firms say, “This is our definition of what that is. We’ll pay for it. We’ll buy a building somewhere and that’s where people go.” As we start to discover who’s the most talented, we start to fight over them. Because that’s how it happens now. Your smaller firms, they’d have their own cultured development league that’s fit for their style of play. So for the people who want to go to a big firm, there’s the development league avenue. People who want to join, work, or stay at a boutique-type firm, there’s a development league for that.
One way to further develop design technology specialists is to equate firm engagement with opportunities to learn and grow professionally. “There are only a few colleges that have a computational design program,” says Jordan Billingsley. “I believe Columbia had the first that began in the 1970’s.” Others include Harvard GSD, Stevens Institute, and Georgia Tech, among others. Billingsley continues:
If you don’t have a graduate from one of these programs, the best way to develop aspiring employees is to give them an unlimited conference budget and an unlimited expense account for learning resources. If there is pushback to unlimited budgets, I give the example of Virgin and Netflix, where they have given their employees unlimited vacation yet there has not been any paid time off abuse because employees are invested in their work projects and feel fulfilled and supported. With regards to unlimited conference and professional development budgets, I don’t even think it is possible to be abused, because the more conferences you go to, the more networks you create, the better informed you are about everything that’s going on in that space. Personally, whenever I go to a conference, I come away so stimulated that I have enough work for at least three months. As I become more of an expert in my field, lectures may become less valuable but the network I have built will continue to drive me.
It’s all about finding ways to keep employees engaged. Billingsley encourages firms to open source their technology developments under a creative commons license. He’s observed that most design technology specialists are self-taught, learning from free online communities, and sees a strong desire to give back to these communities. Firms that limit employee communication with online peers out of concern of protecting intellectual property, he believes, are stifling their own potential. Billingsley says:
I want to emphasize conferences, being able to work from home like I’m doing right now. Also, open source and firms creating their own tools. Almost everybody who is a computational designer, or works in computational BIM, design technology specialists, is getting their education for free via these blogs and forums and other sources. So, when they start to develop tools, or even if they’re building off other tools, a firm shouldn’t feel protective about that, because by releasing it or making it open source, as long as it doesn’t have company information in it, that tool is going to naturally evolve into something so much better. As someone who wants to automate things, I don’t want to worry about how do we protect this? That’s one thing that I really don’t want to care about. I know that might not be popular, but in terms of letting a design technology person be creative, you don’t want to add more constraints.
Figure 6.5
UISOM rehearsal room swarms are a sculptural acoustic reflector system that doesn’t obstruct the experience of the room’s tall ceiling height. (2018) Credit: LMN Architects.
Billingsley is the chair of his firm’s design technology committee. When he first joined the Design Technology Committee (DTC) the monthly meetings addressed a single issue. “I found that technology sectors were outpacing our decision-making process,” says Billingsley. Instead of increasing the frequency of meetings he decided to define seven technology sectors, or disciplines, and create specialist roles responsible for presenting succinct reports at each meeting. The seven technology disciplines are ABCDEFG; Automation, BIM, Content, Digital visualization, Early energy analysis, Fabrication, and General information technology. Billingsley explains:
The way the committee was structured before was that it attacked a single issue at each monthly meeting. They’d ask, what did we do well this month, what did we not do well this month? What technology should we be looking at? Should we buy a new 3D printer? Should we get VR goggles? And each one of those were a separate meeting. For the first year, I continued running things that way, but I found that I was basically leading every meeting and doing all this research and we weren’t moving fast enough for how big of a firm that we were. So what I’ve done is I’ve restructured our committee to be in seven disciplines. The seven groups are easy to remember because it’s ABCDEFG. At every meeting, we meet once a month, we have seven reports that are five minutes long each. It works well.
One reason Billingsley diversified is he felt if he was ever hit by a bus everything would stop. “We needed to diversify and get more people involved, and also I needed to stop being the one who runs all of these meetings.” He continues:
Right now we’re in a transition period where I still have to set up all the slides, I have to set all of the goals, and sometimes I even rehearse the talking points for everybody. I might prepare entire slides for a certain section and give it to somebody else and say, “Okay, I want you to do this just for presentation purposes. I want a different face to be up there other than mine.” I’m getting better at not micromanaging and just handing projects off. But also, other people need a framework for them to plug themselves into. Right now it’s just about to take off.
Meeting is one thing, but getting the word out and making sure people are learning is another. Billingsley recognizes that dissemination of information is a problem that everyone grapples with. His firm records their DTC meetings and has placed members on active and non-active statuses, where active members are involved with development efforts whereas non-active member contributions are more advisory. Both groups, he assures, have access to recordings and help with awareness campaigns when developments are unveiled to the entire firm.