When design technology specialists become design technology leaders, there’s an understandable shift in priorities and responsibilities. This chapter looks at what design technology leaders do, what it takes to lead and support Superusers, and the need to identify what is advancing in our space that we’re not seeing, staying relevant, and the regular need for skill rebuild. Next it looks at what it takes to create an environment that fosters a computational mindset from one’s team. The chapter closes with marketing a firm’s use of technology, and winning projects by emphasizing technology and the Superusers who create and use it.
Figure 9.1
The award winning Passerelle, both a key bridge and piece of art for the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) in Montreal. (2018) Credit: CannonDesign + NEUF Architect(e)s.
CannonDesign’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Hilda Espinal trusts her teams to take care of familiar headaches and pain points, such as connecting digital tools, and bridging workflow gaps. As a firm leader, she no longer has to do these things herself. The emphasis changes when you rise within an organization, where you find yourself less hands-on, less tactical, and sometimes more strategic – and frequently less billable. Espinal used to think about more tactical things a lot, now less so, in part due to trust, but also due to technology itself, to having access to resources, and in part due to firm culture. As Espinal explains:
I do, but also part of the reason for this concern decreasing significantly has to do with where I am at now. At CannonDesign we have an environment that’s fully virtualized. In all other previous firms, I had to worry about which office is going to collaborate with which one, and what we need to do behind the scenes, IT, a private tunnel or site-to-site connection. Here, I don’t. Geographically distributed teams are not an issue. There is no additional preparation or work required to work with someone across my office or overseas. So, I’ll just park my laptop where I’m at, including home or a coffee shop, and I’ll join the team. Those headaches have gone away for me.
One of the challenges I’ve always had is funding ideas, things we want to pursue and are non-existent. Especially when these things one envisions do not have hard ROI because it hasn’t been done before. And it’s more about, not how much time am I going to save or how much more efficient I’m going to be, it’s more about what am I going to do that my competitor cannot do? Or I may be able to leverage other benefits that we just don’t have metrics for, per se. It’s about innovation and creating opportunities.
Figure 9.2
The award winning Passerelle, both a key bridge and piece of art CHUM – Largest Healthcare Project in North America. (2018) Credit: CannonDesign + NEUF Architect(e)s.
What design technology leaders do
While weighing the value in improving his own coding abilities, as a Design Computation Leader, NBBJ’s Dan Anthony has his team’s – and firm’s – best interests in mind by looking out for and identifying better ways to get work done. Anthony realizes that he may not get any better or faster at coding. And in the last chapter we saw how he would like to do more strategic thinking on how to make techniques useful for everyone. He recognizes that part of that requires staying cognizant of what the design problems are, but also producing or making more, in a digital sense. Anthony might tell a team member:
Hey, I know you used to do this with SketchUp. But try it now with this because now we can easily bring it into our BIM platform. Let’s try this out because now when you sketch we can pass it on more quickly to our client and get feedback.
Anthony explains:
There are always different methods that will require a computational specialist to stand between, and understand how, we can disseminate knowledge. Part of that requires our being on top of the latest technology and processes, and actually using them. This ferrets out three options: we can buy the tool, once somebody makes it; we can hire somebody else who can do this better, which architects do all the time for a lot of different reasons; or we can do it – create the tool – ourselves. My thinking is: I’m really glad to buy that tool. My job, most of the time, is to tell somebody to buy that tool.
Challenges of leading design technologists
The architect’s problem is a leadership problem: one that has to do with leading individuals and teams into the emerging future. The questions are still there. Do technology leaders need to learn and use the technology? What do technology leaders need to understand, and why? What are some of the special challenges of leading design technologists? Are design technologists more/less easily bored than other employees? Are design technologists more/less utilized than other employees? “Distractions will consume your time that could be better spent on other things,” says Ryan Cameron, Project Architect at DLR Group. He continues:
When you do find something, pursue it with everything you have. You have 1,140 minutes in a day; use them wisely. Anyone can be under-utilized or bored by what they do if they do it too long. They are utilized when leadership fully embraces and understands the capacity that Superusers bring to the business.
If we had a phenomenal hand drafter from 1982 and a phenomenal person in 2012 using a BIM authoring tool and asked them to produce the same building, who would produce more work? Who would grow bored? Who would be faster or better? I don’t know what the ratio would be, but I do know it wouldn’t be 1:1. It might be something like 1:16. So that person might get done in a day what the other might take two weeks to accomplish. What does that person do with their time? Now we ask, take that same 2012 person and pit them against someone from 2042. It’s not even close. So instead of being bored, take that extra time you have and use it to get closer to that future design technologist.
What keeps design technology leaders up at night?
Design technology leaders may not concern themselves with the day-to-day tasks of specialists, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have concerns of their own. What keeps firm leaders up at night? Among their frequent concerns are messaging and finding the right words to communicate, solving the right problems, the next thing, and even the fear of success.
Messaging
It might come as a surprise to design technologists that their leaders sweat over wordsmithing – how things are communicated – to their troops and fellow leadership. “The biggest one that’s kept me up at night has been, how do I phrase these changes?” says Shane Burger, Principal and Global Leader of Technical Innovation at Woods Bagot. He continues:
How do I talk about these changes in the industry, whether it’s a process change, or a product change with digital culture? How do I talk about that with our lead designers, who don’t necessarily work with all of the latest digital tools? How do I keep them engaged in the conversation? That’s the thing that keeps me up the most. Sure, there are emails and other important things that come through. But for me, it’s very specific ways things get phrased. On more than one occasion, I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with a turn of a phrase. I’ve gotten up to write it down. Speaking to designers, who often work conceptually, I need to speak conceptually. But I also need to tie it down to their projects. It does keep me up at night thinking specifically about how to do those things. And even more so, what are the things I need to start advocating for change in our business model in the practice to make sure we stay relevant?
Design technology leaders have to choose their words carefully, in part because they’re privy to things in the pipeline, or coming up in the near future. Software manufacturers have hyped technology to the point where one becomes immune to the hype, in terms of thinking about the effect it can have for one’s organization. Language and choosing one’s words wisely plays a significant role when leading teams. “What has worked for me is just being very honest, transparent and the exercise of common sense,” says Hilda Espinal. She continues:
One must choose one’s words carefully, especially to not over-promise and under-deliver, not offend anyone, and all of that I do in the day-to-day conversations. But, in terms of being honest and being able to manage expectations, that’s where someone like myself becomes key in the role that I’m in. Because some vendors and other people misrepresent themselves. It’s super important to carry conversations intelligently and informedly, talk about the potential realistically, challenge them if something seems suspect.
It’s important to point out that messaging works both ways. Specialists also need to be careful not to overhype technology to their leaders. “I am very blessed to have very open and supportive leadership, but I am careful to not over-sell my proposals,” says HCM’s Jordan Billingsley. “This comes from a sensitivity of BIM being oversold as THE solution without properly addressing the necessary business changes that accompanied the technology shift from CAD to BIM.”
Solving the right problems
Firm leaders often ask what is advancing in our space that we are not seeing? Dan Anthony says:
What keeps me up – the fear – is, what am I not seeing? I want the things we do to be effective. The techniques we develop to be effective. My worry is, are we solving trivial problems? Or are we part of something that’s going to make the design space better? Ultimately, a lot of us are interested in improving the way the whole process happens. The process of building things in the world, and the way we do them specifically in our culture or in AEC, are a mess. And could be a lot better, and better for the planet. And be a lot more responsive to actual outcomes. My worry is that we’re not actually getting there. We’re getting further down a path. That keeps me up.
I’m concerned that we might be rolling out more bad buildings and not buildings that are going to help solve the climate crisis. One of our important activities is analytics. Being clear-minded, and not lying to ourselves about outcomes. We’ll go through the process of making something and at the end of the day ask, does this have a positive influence? We have to spend the time to do analytics and ask, did this really have the effect we expected it to have? Yes? No? Should we do more of this? Should we do less of this? Sometimes, you’ll work on something for a long time and find out it’s not actually solving the problem that you started out to solve. The only way you are going to understand what to do next time, or what to do better, is to do a post-mortem of the project. In the end, hopefully creating a better skillset or organizational structure. So that the next time you take on a project, you inform your decisions based on something that didn’t work last time.
One thing I hope for is that so much lives within that kind of singularity of project findings. We often only look at our own past experiences. I would love to find a way to learn more from what other people and firms do as well. One of the things that is going to move our industry further is if we look at a way to understand the outcomes of not just our work, but of other people’s work as well. There’s going to be a better way to share that knowledge in the future – I just don’t know what it is.
The next thing
“I’m almost always thinking about the next thing,” says Hilda Espinal. “I am relatively new to the firm. It’s just, how am I going to design this? What is my next move, what is my next thing to stay ahead of the competition? Always thinking about that.” She continues:
What’s that next thing that others maybe thought of but haven’t pursued, or maybe have not even thought about? How do I lead? There is also the less strategic but time-consuming day-to-day stuff, like what’s due tomorrow also next week, type thing. I have staff I work with closely. They are very talented and sometimes I think about what can I do to retain them while continuing to develop them and hence, [be] more attractive to others. What can we do to better the work that we do, the stuff that we went to school for, for our careers in architecture, so there’s not an exodus?
For other firm leaders, the concern centers around, how will a new initiative scale? Cory Brugger, CTO of HKS says:
For us, if we put a new initiative in place, say we’re going to do x, y, and z for our design process. Here’s our pilot, we define the complete workflow, we run the project through the paces, we verify results, and document the process. How do we implement across 24 offices? Who is responsible for it? So, there have been plenty of initiatives started, but for an initiative to be a success or have a firm-wide impact, on a market or on the effectiveness of our delivery process, we need to create resonance and get buy-in from our staff. How can we disseminate and ensure that an initiative takes hold without personal investment? I’m not there yet.
That’s one of the most important things for us to address. If you want to have process change, organizational change, or application of new tools and processes, you need champions on every project. You cannot rely on having a single person in an office to help nudge, or you’ll end up doing trophy one-off projects. That’s good for those projects, but I’m focused on how you implement change across an organization.
Fear of success
Some design technology leaders are so fearless in their approach to practice, one can’t imagine anything that keeps them up at night. Still, in a position of leadership, one can feel an inordinate amount of responsibility for those they work with, within their organizations, and even beyond. “I’m not afraid to fail,” admits Ryan Cameron, in reference to a new automation tool he was working on at the time. “I’m afraid to succeed. So the truth would be, what if the thing that I’m making ends up collapsing the whole professional process? That’s my concern. That’s all on me.”
Figure 9.3
The Eleventh: live spatial analysis. (2018) Credit: Woods Bagot.
Design technology leader provenance
Leader provenance, like art provenance, traces leadership roles back to their origin point, usually in IT or design. The air is thin for design technology leaders – there are so few people in these roles, and for those who have made it to the top, they more often than not arrive there by way of IT (CTO, CIO) or traditional roles (project designer, project architect, project manager) and not via design technology itself. “It’s crucial to have people at the director level that can drive and speak to the need of having a computational designer in the industry, because they’re solving problems,” says Thornton Tomasetti’s Hiram Rodriguez. “They are solving hardcore problems in the industry and it is crucial to have them.”
As Dan Anthony said earlier:
My role is both defined and amorphous. The official title on paper is that I am a Design Computation Leader at the firm level. Which puts me under our Chief Information Officer, Paul Audsley, who leads NBBJ’s technology strategy and operations in the areas of design, building information modeling, design computation, infrastructure, security and project collaboration. Myself and two other people, currently Marc Syp and Nate Holland, are Design Computation Leaders. We sit in different studios. Our goal is to organize all of the different efforts in every studio across the firm. There are currently about 12 people in our group that do this kind of work, with the three of us leading the way.
Anthony sees being a Design Computation Leader similar to being an enlightened BIM manager. “Yes, right now we treat computational method as a compliment to BIM,” continues Anthony:
In some ways, it’s an artificial distinction, and becoming more and more so every day. But at the same time, we have a BIM manager on a project. They end up being a little more tactical due to their role. BIM managers are often also more useful day-to-day, since computation isn’t always in play in a project.
It helps if your boss is a former design technologist. Having been in your shoes, they’re more likely to equip design technologists for success. Call this design technology leadership advocacy. Anthony continues:
I work closely with NBBJ Design partner and co-lead of the firm’s corporate practice, Ryan Mullenix, the partner in my studio. Part of the reason my role exists is because of Ryan’s advocacy. His interest in computation being part of our practice. I owe a lot to both Ryan and those who came before me in this role in that it creates a space for this in our design practice. While Ryan is our design director and leader across all of the projects that happen in our studio, he’s not necessarily involved in the day-to-day of all of them. In his role he looks for opportunities to apply our computational process and kind of thinking to more workplace projects.
Mullenix’s background in computation makes him sensitive to, and have an appreciation for, the needs for the technology in NBBJ’s practice. Anthony says:
The key about Ryan is that he understands that there is a value to letting the exploration take place. We have other studios in our company that now have design computation leaders that don’t come from a similar computation background. The difference between the studios is that Ryan will look for the value in it and apply the value in the process. In other firms where that isn’t the case, it’s harder to change the fundamental construction of how they execute their design process to allow room for any kind of visual or performance exploration of analysis. Let’s trust our intuition but inform our intuition with more information if we can. It impacts how things are communicated, in a wider stance, the things we already know about design. Expressing and proving to our clients that there’s a value to not just doing things the cheap way but doing things in a way that is going to maximize the views, or fresh air, or the proximity. A lot of our clients think in a way that is not artistic. They’re essentially saying: demonstrate that this will make things better in our building or we’re not going to do it. And so we demonstrate it.
Figure 9.4
The Eleventh: panels automatically generated in Revit. (2018) Credit: Woods Bagot.
Staying ahead of the learning curve
Each firm leader has a different process for how they keep up with technology. Some design technology leaders proactively seek out new technologies to understand – some reactively, by waiting for others to bring them to their attention. “There is definitely a proactive element,” says Anthony. He continues:
One thing that I personally feel deficient in is that I don’t always stay socially active, for example, on Twitter. Part of it is that I sometimes have a hard time getting through the chaff of it – there is a lot of noise in that space. But I do think following asocial media is important – I do track it. Research is another very important part of this. And I do a lot of research. It’s about leaving space to explore what’s available. It’s part of my job to do this. It’s not time that I have on the books. But something I think is critical to succeed at my job. A lot of times we have these clear goals where we really want to figure out a way for doing something. The risk for us is that we start down a path where we’re trying to reinvent the wheel. I grew up with the Internet as a way of solving that problem by searching for that information. Reaching out to people, asking them questions, is a great way to solve that problem. The key is that you do a really thorough job of exploring what the state of affairs is, by digging through GitHub, by reading journals to see if anyone has tried to solve this before.
The third space: leading not just the firm but the transformation
Some – the first users – will want to lead the technology transformation, while others – the survivors – will be happy coping with it. The rest – call them victims – will be the casualties of it when it’s forced on them. “I want to be a first user,” says Anthony:
I want to use it when it doesn’t work. When you imagine what it could be. And you have to scrape and scrap to find the right button that does the thing that you actually want it to do. Just the other day I was loading up the new Dynamo in Formit, and finding that it wasn’t working. There was some server bug in there. I was thinking, well, someday this is going to be exactly what I want it to be. I like that feeling. But that is definitely true about the three types of people. What we’re going to see fairly soon, is people who want to keep designing the way design happens now. When you think about us and the vendors, there’s this third space that’s there. Which is where design is actually the design of the process and the tools. There’s this whole space in the middle where more and more the techniques you use are becoming the outcome of the design. It is a third space and it is for everybody to capture. I am really interested in filling in that space.
One of the risks people keep talking about is that designers are going to lose agency, that design is going to go to processes that you can implement, that do some of the design for you. The development of that kind of technology is fascinating because it doesn’t fit into our neat model where these people make the software and we’re the people who design things and who use that software. There’s a space where there’s a chance to be a designer, decide what you want to automate, decide what you want to control, and what your goal is. The real truth is that the goal of architecture will continue to be to make things work the best for the lowest price.
We manage these transformations and what the outcome looks like because new techniques will make buildings look different and function different than they do now. While still upholding the goals of what you design for. There is some kind of person in the middle that is a designer and knows what the intentions are of making human space that isn’t purely one or the other of the two things.
Figure 9.5
The Eleventh rendering. (2018) Credit: Design Architect – Bjarke Ingels Group.
Marketing technology capabilities
Having mentioned TT CORE, HKS LINE and LMNts, tech-forward firms have, since the late 2000s, for a number of reasons, introduced tech labs. One has been to promote the firm as innovative. Brian Ringley says:
From what I’ve seen, those groups are legitimate efforts to help improve the way teams work. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a team at a firm and thought, “That’s completely fake.” I don’t actually think that leadership would tolerate that at architecture firms. They would see that fluff and they’d want to slice it off, but I do think that they take some of the more superficial things that those teams do and trumpet those. Woods Bagot Design Technology did this, too. We released a tool and that was nice marketing for us. It’s a contribution to the culture that we’ve taken so much from, but if “what Brian and Andrew did with Wombat was their primary contribution to architecture while they were at Woods Bagot,” I would be bothered. I feel like it was the workflows, the frameworks with which we engaged the project teams to solve complex problems.
Some firms need to bring in someone into the sales meeting who knows technology and they’ll do their five-minute tech commercial. But the minute you get the job you never hear from them again. “Right, or, just in case someone asks questions they are not comfortable answering,” says Hilda Espinal. She continues:
But no, that is not the kind of pursuits I’ve been a part of. Recently at CannonDesign, my and my Digital Practice Director’s engagement and contribution have been pivotal. But, it’s so interesting because it’s the mixture that I have with architecture and technology that is of interest. It’s not the same if we’re just going to talk about integrating networks and security and all that stuff which I’ve done in “previous lives.” I can speak to that regard as well, it hardly ever comes up. The flavor of technology that is front and center of these recent conversations is what I call Technology in Practice, in capitals as that is what I am naming my CannonDesign Technology Innovation Group.
At times, design technologist specialists are brought into a client meeting unannounced, and often unprepared. They’re told they’re going to perform – say, as a computational designer – for them or they’re going to run something that someone in the room can’t do. “It depends on whom we’re meeting with and show the different things that we have done in the past,” says Hiram Rodriguez. He continues:
We have a good work sample folder with where we store images, videos, and presentations of various projects. So if it’s a developer, we’ll probably show VR and some automation processes of generating different schemes so we can calculate body carbon or rationalize column placement. Maybe an architect is more interested in rationalizing façades. We have workflows that show that. Moreover, the way you show it is different, because you want to be visual with the architect in terms of the variation you’re going to have on the form, whereas with the developer you want to show metrics, tonnages, and pricing and all those components, whereas with the contractor and on site you want to show something about drones and site surveying.
Leading by empowering
How can firm leaders make the work exciting so that people want to come in to work, not only for their firm but in the industry? One way is by empowering employees. Leading design technologists requires a spirit of empowerment, engagement, and entrepreneurship. “A concept I am borrowing from successful contractors, speaking at a conference is that of rotation,” explains Hilda Espinal, where employees rotate within the organization. “It would be amazing to grow as the-full-encompassing-whole-architect, by getting to some of this and some of that. Keeping it varied and hence, more interesting.” Espinal continues:
You get to shadow or have exposure to different areas of the office and process. Maybe you get to work on something new for a little bit. And maybe you’ll like it, maybe you’ll hate it. Some people hate writing Specifications, some enjoy it. Maybe you work on the schematic portion of a project, because a lot of times you’re getting pigeonholed as being a technical architect, so flex that conceptual muscle. But as architects it can also materialize by rotating between different market sectors or project delivery phases.
“Luckily at my firm there’s this spirit of entrepreneurship, which is probably why I fit in so well,” says Jordan Billingsley. He continues:
Whether you are a principal or a senior associate, you have probably retained a client or two, and the firm does not try to take that client away from you, they don’t get involved with anything that you’re doing, they just say, “Okay, here you go, we’re basically just your legal support, and you just focus on customer service.” Entrepreneurship has descended down to other aspects of the office, so they’ve been more open to people who present goals that they want to pursue personally. I feel very well supported at my firm, and I do know that that’s a unique case, and they don’t see it as risk whereas other people at other firms might see it as a risk.
What Billingsley does in this office today benefits from his having been an entrepreneur with Blackline. “I know how to make proposals, I know what it’s like to present yourself in a way that is convincing to other people,” says Billingsley. “And I’m self-motivated. Not that other people aren’t, but I don’t need direction to get something started.” As with other Superusers, one can’t necessarily just plug into a role and rise in an organization. Like an entrepreneur, it’s still a blue ocean they’re creating, one that remains a risk journey.