Thanks for presenting last week and scaring the pants off of everybody.
Scott Lelieur, Director of Operations at Lake|Flato Architects, had participated in the Design Colloquium at the Presidio Officers’ Club in Presidio Park in San Francisco, CA, where I spoke in 2018. First established in 1776, for 200+ years the Presidio served as an army post for three nations, world and local events, from military campaigns to World Fairs and earthquakes, and California has long set the national agenda on culture and technology.1 It was about to, relatively speaking, experience its latest cataclysm: a talk on AI and its impact on the future of the design professions and building industry.
It really shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as the Colloquium theme, after all, was Disruption: Game-Changing Design. Attended by leaders of “Design-First” firms in architecture, engineering, and related design disciplines, the attendees were decidedly not all technology-first professionals. The Colloquium coined the term Design-First to refer to “practices that have maintained a consistently high level of design quality, while not dependent on a black-cape superstar.”2 The list of firms that have attended and participated in the Colloquium since the late 2000s reads like a veritable who’s-who of celebrated architectural and engineering design firms not led by a starchitect: Behnisch Architects, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Ennead Architects, FXCollaborative, Herbert Lewis Kruse Blunck, Olson Kundig Architects, Miller Hull Partnership, Pugh + Scarpa, Studios Architecture, Snøhetta, William McDonough + Partners, ZGF Architects, and Lake|Flato Architects, among others.
On the first day, the session immediately following lunch was entitled, Exploring the Future for Architects, Engineers and Designers. The session’s speakers and panelists included Craig Curtis, President of Katerra, and Luis Jaggy, Design Researcher, Woods Bagot SuperSpace, and myself. As the first speaker, I spoke about the growing technology haves-have nots situation among firms; about AI and automation in architecture; about the unavoidable changes we’re about to experience as a profession and industry, and made recommendations for how we can arrive there empowered, unscathed, and still playing at the top of our game.
Speaking in Northern California where wildfires have been increasingly prevalent, I showed a slide of a recent wildfire and asked the crowd:
See that fire on the horizon? That’s AI. And it’s fast approaching. Too fast to fight or respond to, it’s coming for your office. Why wait for a fire we cannot put out, when there are things we can be doing today to prepare us for the inevitable conflagration of AI?
It was this that earned me Scott Lelieur’s thanks for presenting … and scaring the pants off of everybody.
It was never really my intention to scare the pants or any other clothing article off anybody – but to provoke, incite conversation, and ideally action.
My other main purpose was to introduce those present to the concept of Superusers: the folks who’ll help us get to where we need to go.
Design professionals are experiencing a shift right now, and some are more comfortable with it than others. In order to increase productivity, profits, and frankly our chances of survival, we all need to get comfortable with it. We are about to see incredible changes in our profession and industry, and Superusers – as you’re about to read – are the ones who will get us there: mostly unscathed, and for the lucky few, triumphant. Who they are, how they do this, what value they provide, and how you can attract and retain them, is the subject of this book.
Firms have witnessed the transition to, and integration of, design technology since the late 1980s, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This is not new. But how this transition will be impacted by the cutthroat economic scenarios of the near future, including increased competition, rising automation, lowering wages despite increasing productivity, commoditized services, and thinning margins, represents clear and present threats – and opportunities.
After CAD and BIM, the developed design world is entering the third generation of digital technology. Still very much a work-in-progress (take a breath), the age of automation, built on advances in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, and going by various names – the age of technology; the information age; the computer age; the age of computation; the 4th industrial revolution; the second machine age; the robotic age – relies on the architect’s gold, data, and also tools: software, algorithms, and soon, working alongside robots and architect-machine collaboration. We are entering a world where the architects’ relationship to computers and other machines, and to software and other digital tools, is leading to one of two outcomes: in the near future, the design professional will be an Augmented and Informed (AI) architect – call it, as Douglas Engelbart has, the augmented architect – collaborating with machines. Or, they’ll be competing with AI and robots: call it toast.
We may not know how this will play out through the 2020s, but we do know who will shepherd the rest of us to a successful resolution: Superusers.
This book will help you to identify Superusers; what differentiates them, what their superpowers are, what roles they play within organizations, and the value they provide; where to find them, how to hire them, or grow them internally, engage and retain them; what career opportunities they have, and what obstacles they’ll face, and how to lead them, and answer what technology has to do with designing exceptional buildings.
Despite the users in Superusers, this book is not a technology book: it is not about design technology. It is about the people who are able to achieve magic with the technology we have – by working with, through, and among others – and create the tools we need, in order to achieve the results firms are striving for – no matter what their goals or ambitions may be. LMN Architects partner, Stephen Van Dyck, himself a widely recognized industry authority in the adoption of emerging technologies, sums up the aim of design technologists and the focus of the book pointedly when he says of Superusers, “It’s all, ultimately, about filling performance goals from both an aesthetic and a functional perspective, but also from a financial perspective. And I would argue that the widespread proliferation of this approach across the industry is fueled by necessity.” He assures us, “It is impossible in this day and age to be a successful firm operating at scale without technology being part of the equation.” As I made clear in my Colloquium talk, this goes for Design-First firms as well.
What will help us get from where we are today to where we need to be, to survive and thrive in the new world of design and construction, is the subject of this book. What will help us get there are Superusers, the individuals that provide 20% of the effort and achieve 80% of the results; who take an assignment that normally takes a week and complete it in just hours.
Superusers provide a great deal of value to teams and firms – financial, performative, liability-reducing, architectural design excellence, value. They’re firefighters and fixers, whose work is – as many mention – noble. They’re the ones who connect the dots; get obstinate, uncooperative, and non-communicative tools and platforms to talk to each other; often winning jobs for the firm with their tech wizardry, demonstrating to owners how computation will make their buildings better.
Whether rationalizing column placement or facades, or calculating body carbon; whether maximizing views, or fresh air, or proximity, Superusers are design professionals with the wherewithal to recognize a tool, curiosity to inquire into a tool, confidence to mess with a tool, capacity to learn a tool, creativity to combine tools, and the interpersonal intelligence to connect with others to achieve actionable results.
These are the individuals who are misunderstood, undervalued, hard to find, and once found, hard to keep – and keep happy – hard to promote, and hard to fit into the organization, with its traditional titles, roles, and paths to promotion. This book addresses how successful firms today are addressing these concerns to remarkable results.
One of the key values offered by this book is the easy to apply Superuser concepts – the ten C-factors; ten Superuser superpowers; Superusers as this generation’s generalist architect; as force multipliers; as the “Other,” and as 5-tool players; storytelling through technology; the design technology specialist career path as risk journey; benefitting from working in the grey space; eyes-on/hands-off; eyes-on/hands-on; and minds-on/everything else is off hybrid roles; the Architect Development League (ADL); the third space, among many others – dispersed throughout the book you’re about to read.
The premise of this book is simple: design technology specialists are not the “Other,” and design technology will not – if you just wait it out – become permanently obsolete. It’s like the carnival game of whack-a-mole: try as one might to absorb technology into firm workflows and work processes, a new one pops up ad finitum. Design technology – and design technologists, the individuals who leverage, master and create these technologies – aren’t going away any time soon and remain an integral part of projects, teams, and firm success. If you’re lucky.
This book will show you how, more often, to be lucky.
Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two-horned topics?3
I wrote this book because, since the late 2000s, I have been immersed in the world of design technology, consulting, recruiting, meeting, speaking, and sparring with, observing, and hearing from firm leaders – and leaders-in-the-making – about their concerns related to technology in the workplace, and over time have built an ever-widening network of committed, engaged, and enterprising design technologists. In that time, I have researched practice and recognize, as you do, that something must change. I also recognize that what we don’t need is another book on the technology itself (or for that matter on computationally generated pavilions!) but instead one on the individuals who are getting results for their organizations and helping an industry to get from point A to point B (and B-yond).
As an author, architect, professor, and head of a graduate school in a major architecture program with global ties; as someone who led a tech-forward Harvard GSD Exec Ed program, and as an international keynote speaker, my experience remains: firms want both power-user (billable) skills as well as blue sky strategy (overhead) skills – in the same person. This almost impossible to come by person and personality, a veritable unicorn, is the Superuser, and this book will tell you how to find them, if necessary, how to make them – and if you are one – how to make the most of your career prospects, without having to leave the profession or industry.
Like my three previous books – all published in the same disruptive decade – this fourth utilizes practice-based research, featuring worldwide doers and leaders working in design technology. And yet, this book is something of a departure in that it doesn’t so much address the process and the tools as the people who make them and make them possible. In this book I allow the multifarious voices of the Superusers come through, providing interpretation and analysis as needed.
I came to write the book because I believe, along with others, that the architecture profession and design industry will look radically different by 2030; and design technology specialists – a particular high-performing, high-functioning, highly connected, and highly motivated vocal minority here called Superusers – represent the near future of our industry. They’re the Sherpa who will get us to where it is we’re trying – as teams, firms, profession, and industry – to go.
And while no one can say exactly what that place will look like, I believe that the one thing that will get us there are design technologists and design technology leadership: you. That is the subject of this book: the caring and feeding of Superusers so they can help us to get to where we need to go, and fast. This urgency – to address an intractable, seemingly unsolvable, non-obvious problem all firms are facing – is why there is a need for this book now. Since the late 2000s we have seen the use of technology migrate into all aspects not only of life but also of the building lifecycle, from design and documentation to fabrication and construction, to communication and facilities management, operations, and maintenance. Buildings are increasingly complex and expensive, and design teams are under greater pressure to improve costs, timelines, and efficiency while remaining innovative, achieving higher quality, and importantly, meaning in their work. For the first time, owners can have it all, so they want it all. Superusers deliver on their demands.
Since the latest downturn of the economy, employees have been expected to do the work of two or three. Fees are down, processes need to be more efficient, with each employee required to be increasingly more productive. But how?
How, in other words, will we get from here to there – where we need to be – and pronto?
In a word, Superusers.
Notes
1 www.nytimes.com/2018/06/02/opinion/sunday/california-progressive-politics.html.
2 http://designcolloquium.com.
3 José Ortega y Gasset, On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme, Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 1957.