architecture

from Factory Image Programs: A NADA Research Project

One of the more active and heated debates on the value of design to business is over what are called “factory image programs” for car dealerships.

Most car manufacturers, concerned about the alignment of dealership appearance with their product programs, periodically impose or strongly influence updates to the physical quality and character of dealers’ facilities. Most dealers resist the programs because they are unable to link a measurable business benefit like increased sales to the high cost of these programs.

So the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) commissioned an independent study to uncover and identify the value in the programs and recommend a resolution to the ongoing conflict between them and the manufacturers. The study was just released at the annual NADA convention a couple of days ago.

I expect I’ll return to comment further on the study in the near future. But I did want to offer an initial and very interesting out-take from the study.

After discussing the diverse and complex array of considerations and influences that made solid conclusions almost impossible to derive, and especially after uncovering that the annual costs of billions of dollars spent on dealership facilities meant very little, if anything, to people buying the cars, the study uncovered an unanticipated yet solidly expressed value in the programs.

…dealers expressed pleasant surprise that, after they completed a store upgrade, it became much easier to attract, retain, and motivate good staff. One multi-point dealer even told us that “I modernize as much to attract good staff as to impress the customers.” Another pointed out that with improved employee morale came improved CSI scores, which makes sense. The impact seemed especially powerful in the service area: as one interviewee put it: “A dropped ceiling in the service bays will do wonders in attracting and retaining good technicians, who are pretty used otherwise to being ignored.”

Despite the experiential evidence that there was this direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction (CSI = Customer Satisfaction Index), there apparently has been no survey by the manufactures or the dealer association to uncover and verify these anecdotal, and logical, findings.

And I think that’s where I’ll return in future commentary. I have some significant experience in factory image programs and have consistently been surprised with the fact that they align things (store fixtures) with things (car designs) but not the real experiences with and in these things.

That to me is the most important point of this study, affirming what we know from other places. The real power of workplace design lies not in the “brand image” but in the experiences of work. The quality and character of the workplace directly links to attraction, engagement, morale, motivation and performance of good employees, and that directly links to quality and character of the customer’s experience with the organization.

The NADA has, in other words, discovered what we’ve said in so many other places – the leading organizations of the future will be the ones who “own” the experiences of work.

Where you [don't] sit in the office

February 8, 2012

architecture, Design strategy, innovation, Strategy design, workplace design

Leave a Comment

We reflected recently on the debate taking place about the appropriateness of an open office to meet the needs of a diverse population with diverse needs and characteristics. Our position was and is that this is not an either/or choice of the rightness of open versus closed. We are also concerned that a hybrid may not be the best or more robust response, although we certainly believe this is an acceptable midterm-in-the-transformation-of-the-office solution.

Our emerging position is that work has changed substantially and fundamentally, and we now believe that the either/or/hybrid battle uses an increasingly archaic language. We believe that an entirely new lexicon of form is essential to get on and stay on the curve of the increasing momentum of change.

Beyond the open/closed debate, there is also the one about where we work – home or office – and the relative value of each. A recent example of this debate was published on the Bloomberg Businessweek site, here. As with the open/closed debate, we think that these arguments proposing that one or the other is the more correct place are the delightful indicator of a revolution in the making, yet also reflect a depressing tendency to hang on to an ancient lexicon and miss the currently delicious opportunity to design a new language of work and the places and spaces of work.

What is, however, great to grab from the debate is the data from the emerging science of space and interaction. In the Bloomberg Businessweek debate, Ben Weber cites the growing evidence of the benefits of productivity, engagement and job satisfaction that come from face-to-face interaction. This kind of data is helpful in shaping new solutions for the place we’ve called “the office” and is also helpful in identifying the cultural characteristics and attributes of personal and group behaviors that should be the “program” for designing new types of spaces where the new activities of work can take place.

In yet another example, Bob Frisch asked the question, “Does it matter where your top team sits?” in a recent HBR article (here). He is, essentially, advocating something we’ve done in past work, which is to provide multiple settings for people to do their work. “Two seats for every employee” sounds counter-intuitive in a time of great compression, but the mantra reinforces the recognition that capturing the value of face-to-face interactions means supporting it in lots of different locations.

Our take is that all of this discussion is the illumination of the fact that we work differently now and need a different response to thinking about and designing the workspace(s). Whether we sit at home or in “the office” or with one team or another, or in a place for focus or a place for collaboration, we should begin to recognize that we work in all of these places and in all of these modes. We should no longer demand a place only for one of us and try to make it work for all that we do, and we should no longer accept a place of work provided by the companies we work for that does not provide lots of places for us to work in the modes that best support what we need to do at whatever time of the day we need it.

We desperately need to move on in the world and get new stuff done. We need new places to do that.

Getting out of groupthink and into pursuing opportunities

February 5, 2012

architecture, Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design

1 Comment

Lego Flying Car by katimar via flickr.com

There has been a lot of conversation in recent days about the form of the office and how to design it for those who work in it. This is enormously interesting to me because this conversation, like many others in culture, politics and business, is an exciting signal of the search for real innovation and of a desire for a revolution in the way we provide the places and spaces where we do the things we do.

Argument and revolution

The “conversation” that I reference is the point and counterpoint in recent debates about which way is best – the old comfortable way or a recent newly proposed and tested way. A round of confirming and contradicting commentary was recently evoked by Susan Cain’s article in the New York Times. While trying to make a case for consideration of the closeting needs of introverts, she broadly bashed the new, open workplace as a product of “groupthink” in its pejorative connotation. Using the same term in almost the same week, Jonah Lehrer referenced the incredible volume of creative product emerging from the famous Building 20 at MIT, “one of the most creative environments of all time,” generally credited to the informal interactions happening between people of different backgrounds and interests. And Alison Arlieff weighed in with the groupthink that collaborative spaces aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Closed office vs. open office.

The “revolution” that I reference is my belief that a third form with a new language will emerge. This third form will have immediate credibility in the forehead-slapping “of course” mode and will make both of the currently debated forms artifacts in a rapidly receding history.

Getting out of groupthink – New forms will be generated from a new lexicon

I propose that the current arguments are nostalgic and a bit arrogant. They are arguments of an estate that recognizes it has lost its case but does not yet know where to turn. And they are arguments of a self-appointed enlightened who believe that the right way is the way they proposed to counter the old way but is now being uncovered as having had insufficient rigor, and that now has piles of data bias making a great case against it.

I think that the core issue we are now confronting arises from the loss of meaning of familiar terms like “office” and “workplace” and, even, “work.” “Office” is a term left over in the slow evolution from industrialization and carried the implications of production and supervision in its form. Attendance, for example, was a key characteristic of its managerial mode. “Workplace” implied a single setting, the place where work was done, the place that was separate from the other stuff we did, the place that was defined by time, location and character. “Work” was something separate from “life” and disregarded the reality that, even in the old mold, one defined the quality of the other.

In almost every meaningful, productive, and rewarding context now, these terms are antique.

“Work” certainly has changed dramatically from the dreary and dreaded stuff we did for “the man.” Most of what we call work, the valuable stuff, is creative in some form. Most of what we do is self-defined or collaboratively determined with a team oriented to a goal that is more frequently something defined by them and not by a manager.

There is no single “workplace” any more because we do what we do in multiple physical settings and multiple virtual settings, as well. Time, also, is no longer a limiter in what we do. We carry huge amounts of information on tiny devices everywhere we go, and we connect with our networks anywhere we are. In an odd inversion, we may find solitude and focus sitting with our headphones on in a public cafe and, when we are ready for socializing our ideas and learning from others, we go to the office.

The office best serves as a place for connecting with a network of knowledge and resources to get purposeful stuff done. The productive social buzz and innovative activity that now takes place there is called “distraction” and blamed on an “open” office by those who claim a value of “focus” to name whatever it is that they do behind their six-foot tall cubicle walls. They are missing the reality that entitled square footage for playing computerized solitaire never had, and now certainly no longer has, value. They miss that the work that is valuable is not the consumption of time but the generation of new ideas and approaches with a team of other highly motivated people. Those people, when they need focus, find a place for focus. Otherwise, the buzz of collaborative activity is the visible manifestation of the generation of value for the world.

Pursuing opportunities

Arguing about which of the existing ways of designing a workplace is wasteful. It is a form of the groupthink that the debaters debate. Work is no longer done in one place, and the office is no longer one thing.

Reflecting on what we do, and how we really do it, and then generating, testing and developing new environments for the activities and behaviors of work is productive and valuable.

As Kevin Kelly says, “Don’t solve problems; pursue opportunities.”

The office as an App, redux

February 4, 2012

architecture, Design strategy, Houses, innovation, social design, Strategy design, sustainability, workplace design

Leave a Comment

use case study house via davidgalbraith.org

David Galbraith offers an interesting vision for the transformation of thinking about and designing houses. My interest is less in the specifics of his design, but more in the consideration of this approach to almost any space where we live or work.

We continuously accept a lexicon of form – “living room,” “dining room,” “office” – that no longer appropriately serves the way that we live. We accept these forms and functions because they may be the only choices the market makes available to us, or because of social norms that we feel we cannot challenge or do not know how to challenge, or because they are imposed upon us by another authority.

Considering how what we do would be expressed in a web app offers a context for insights into how work and life could flow better and satisfy more.

The web apps we select to download or use are those that are well designed both in visual and functional character. We appreciate mostly those that are agile in character, that reduce complexity, that are light in system demands, that have a simple logic at points of decision, that flow well. We appreciate those that provide, when we want or need it, a link to augmenting or amplifying information or features. We choose the ones we like because of the quality of the experiences we have with them, which are mostly engaging and efficient.

I don’t recall that we’ve had a client who has approached us with an initial and core request to provide a better experience. Most typically, the language that accompanies the commission is an oblique goal metric like reduced square feet per person that occludes the real goal of the organization to become more engaging for the people who do its work and more effective in achieving its purpose.

Many of the tools and techniques our profession has attempted to use to move our client’s language into experiential considerations work only where experience is the business – in retail and hospitality contexts, for example. Clients in corporate, scientific, or institutional domains typically squirm at the imprecision of an experiential parameter.

Why do people who carefully choose and use web apps use an entirely different language and criteria when commissioning the places and spaces where they live and work? Why is more thinking and emotion invested in an app that costs next to nothing, but nothing of similar critical thinking applied to the experiences in the spaces that cost millions? Could the use of the Web App metaphor be a more effective tool in transforming thinking, perceptions and investments?

Ghost innovation

January 10, 2012

architecture, Design strategy, innovation, social design, Strategy design, workplace design

Leave a Comment

Ghost innovation

This is part of a map plotting various planned but unbuilt subway lines in New York City. Reading it unveils an understanding of past strategies, plans, and objectives that became abandoned due to budget constraints, maintenance priorities and other demands that diverted and then buried the vision. Reading it inspires an imagination of the world that could have been, of a society that might have developed differently, of connections that might have had value but were lost through an inability to efficiently and effectively connect.

Stranded innovation

It reminded me of a recent client, a major consumer products manufacturer and marketer who held what they called a “stranded innovation fair.” It was their belief that, regardless of the circumstances for the loss of attention to or development of these innovations with our application, they might have real value in other contexts, times, combinations or applications. The more that people in the company were aware of these ghost innovations and technologies, the greater would be the potential of their eventual application and productivity.

Hidden talent

In a similar context, some companies are experimenting with rich profiles of the people in their organizations and utilizing certain social media applications to promote those profiles to others in the enterprise. There are people in most organizations with valuable skills and capabilities that are overlooked in the usual day-to-day of operations, or who may have some special skill buried deeper in a resume and unexploited in their current job description or project assignments. By circulating those profiles or using other means to communicate them, these organizations are better able to match the right people with the right projects, achieve goals more efficiently, and gain competitive advantage through otherwise overlooked internal skills and talents.

How can the design of the workspace contribute?

Imagine the potential that lies inside of an organization that is for many reasons consistently overlooked. More interestingly, imagine the power of an organization that has the insight to look back, or look deeper, or promote ghost innovations differently.

Technology may be the more powerful tool for uncovering and developing ghost innovation, but imagine the potential of a more social workplace, as well. How much of knowledge and potential, of skills and innovations, are lost each day due to the inability of people to connect efficiently, to observe others, to understand weak signals, to join a conversation with others.

In their book on the organization and architecture of innovation, Allen and Henn point to the power of work spaces designed in way to support our awareness of others and to increase the potential for our connections with each other.

We think this is the defining challenge for our time.

How can the design of the workspace contribute?

Think big – Grand visions are connected visions. They illustrate for others a path to future development and value, and tend to garner greater support. Even if the final accomplishment falls short, the grand vision leaves “remnants of foresight” that provide others a way to interpret and extend intentions and uncover latent value at the appropriate times.

Redesign the organization before redesigning the workspace – The traditional lexicon of the corporation – organizational charts and individual job descriptions – do not describe the way that work is really done today. If you believe that teamwork and collaboration are the key to higher organizational performance (and they are) then design the organization around those attributes. That redesign will generate a new lexicon of organizational form that the planners and designers of the workspace can leverage for high performance through great work experiences.

Make visible the artifacts and activities of network connections and collaboration – As with the organization, the workspace has to speak to teamwork if collaborative cultures are to flourish. The traditional lexicon of the workspace, like that of org charts and job descriptions, perpetuates forms that are about individuals and managerial controls. The creative workspace is an open and networked space, where team activity and process flows are visible, and adaptable and agile to the dynamics of projects.

If there is any single rule that guides our work for organizations seeking enhanced performance and higher levels of innovation, it is this – Make it visible.

Things we’ve noticed

January 7, 2012

architecture, Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design

Leave a Comment

How. And why. Not what.

This is a very nice piece on enjoying the “how” and “why” in the process of answering a challenging question rather than rushing to the “what,” the answer.

The process of answering a question should be a voyage of discovery, a journey during which you learn something, and one where you enjoy yourself in the process.

The essay made me think about the invisible processes in business, and also how the places of businesses are not designed around the how and why. If the design and planning of workspaces made clearer the purposes of the enterprise, and if the processes people and teams used to get to the what were more transparent and observable, would an organization learn more, create more valuable knowledge, and achieve more?

What innovators share

Somewhat related to the above is this review in the Ottawa Business Journal of a recent book on the “innovator’s DNA.” The review reflects on the power of “the five whys” while also noting the five distinguishing characteristics of successful innovators.

associating, observing, questioning, experimenting and networking

We’d found our way this week, in the midst of our own annual strategic planning, to a discussion about the uniqueness of the places and spaces where innovation seems most successful. As I carry the images of those spaces, I’m making a resolution to shape our design mission – our client’s “program” or “design brief” for their corporate workspace – into a form that links workspace concepts to these 5 attributes.

That is, since most of our clients are engaged in a search for how to generate and support a more entrepreneurial culture, I intend to test a change of the lexicon of workplace design from conventional descriptors of corporate organization and function (“accounting”) and conventional workplace form (“conference room”) to new terms reflecting these innovation behavior attributes.

I expect that radical transformations in design processes and concepts will emerge.

Augmented reality

There are many things to enjoy and reflect on in this proposal of trends for 2012 from the Smithsonian here and here.

I expect I’ll come back to the list for further exploration and comment, since I stopped almost immediately at the first subject, augmented reality.

In a recent project, we found transformative approaches to design through our slogan of “augment, amplify, activate.” A client had a new workspace designed by others, but then found it experientially flat. It satisfied the organizations, functions and facility metrics of the enterprise, but did nothing to change their culture and performance, which was the purpose of the project in the first place. Our slogan was a motivator to the occupiers and the designers to explore conceptual modifications to support behavioral change and development.

This sense of “augmentation” seems like a rich territory for exploration in design. A while back I had speculated on “the autoupdating workspace.” And more recently, a colleague raised a question about augmented reality which made me think in entirely different terms about the “productivity” of both the principal artifact of our service, digital “drawings,” and the activities that take place in the spaces and places we design. I’ve become increasingly interested in how to build layers on top of our digital design information and capture digital information from the physical spaces we design.

The Race Against the Machine

Related to the above, I’ve just finished reading Race Against the Machine, and am now both tremendously excited as well as terribly frightened.

The motivation for me is to begin to imagine the role of the workspace in assuring the race with the machine. Finding a strengthening signal in the requests we are getting from clients, there is an accelerating realization that space supports enterprise sustainability, but this is increasingly tied to the changes in the way we work together because of the extraordinary acceleration of technology.

We are now attracted to, and attractive to, clients whose enterprise is shaped around technologies that, yes, automate creativity. These enterprises are now, or soon will be, seeking spatial solutions well beyond the most advanced corporate real estate solutions.

The Singularity

And, of course, this.

Focus groups

I am not sure about this, but can’t stop thinking about it. That is, is Facebook a relevant a valuable data source for workspace design? It seems so logical to “crowdsource” criteria and concepts for a satisfying and uniquely productive work environment…how do we best do it?

…and, in case you were wondering

Why humans have chins

Design’s future

January 1, 2012

architecture, Design strategy, social design, Strategy design, sustainability, urban, workplace design

1 Comment

We design sustainably.

We are thoughtful about the sources and uses of the materials we select. We design our systems critically to assure that we are not consuming energy unnecessarily and, in some cases, we even design to generate energy to put back into the grid.

We seek to convince our clients to reach for higher LEED certifications, and we are proud as we count the certifications and awards we’ve gained through our work.

When we reach further, we even tend to design in ways that we anticipate will consume less or generate more in the activities of the people who live, work, and play in our buildings.

In most of these cases we work inside of the project and inside of our own profession. Is the future now asking more of us, however?

It seems that a very good New Year resolution would be to engage our clients in a conversation around sustainability in a deeper way. While the catalyst for our initial conversation might be the finite limits of the project they bring to us, should we also talk about the system in which that project exists?

What is it that you, our client, are doing in the world? What can we do together to expand the conversation to more broadly consider your purpose and business and find ways to also design other points in the chain of value creation to be more efficient or more effective in human and environmental terms? How can we, together, develop a long-range vision for how this project may affect the context in which it exists and perform in a way that benefits not only your organization but also the social and economic system it affects, and then revise the program for the project to reflect those long-view goals?

Our conventional performance metrics of “on time, on budget” seem terribly shallow these days. This interview of John Thackara by Rob Huisman of the Association of Dutch Designers provides some interesting context for our conversations going forward.

Are you an architect or designer who has been able to move into a relationship with your client in a more substantial way about society and its future? Is your client engaging you for your creative skills to enrich a larger world-changing agenda? We all would be inspired by the stories and the methods of your success in that experience and approach.

Makers of virtual meeting spaces make them in face-to-face space

November 21, 2011

architecture, Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design

Leave a Comment

Photo by Citrix via Adam Richardson

Perhaps relevant to our last post is this delightful interview by Adam Richardson that I found in a guest blog at the Harvard Business Review. Citrix, the makers of GoToMeeting, have a new collaboration space where the leading work in their innovation process is done. It is fascinating how the makers of virtual work spaces develop their process in carefully considered face-to-face space.

It is not a “crappy” space, and this is how they describe its benefits:

Opening the design collaboration space was a big milestone on our design thinking journey. It’s already played a key role in fostering a more collaborative culture that involves less over-the-wall processes, fewer silos, more and earlier collaboration, and better integration of design into the product development process.

We needed to create a shift in behaviors, and realized this would be best achieved by having people live the change, not just being told about it. The space facilitates this.

Perhaps most significantly, it seems to lie at that upper quadrant of my not-yet-finished diagram in our last post. That upper quadrant is where I speculate that “signature” form but “occupy the workplace” space can generate high performance and engagement.

The interior design is quite minimal. The “beauty” of the space comes from the work that happens inside it: sketches, flow charts, Post-Its full of blue-sky ideas, new product concepts from raw idea to real formation. The space was intentionally left not-too-perfect, so people are encouraged to manipulate it, not be precious about it. It’s intended to serve as a canvas for creative thinking. It’s also very flexible and can quickly change from working studio to lecture room.

It seems also to fit some speculation we were developing about “auto-updating” space.

Like all good design, iteration is part of the process. We have discovered that we do need a better system for engaging remote participants and better ways for capturing brainstorming and meeting notes in real time, so that others can see them later. This is something we are investigating for our next “release” in 2012.

Richardson’s interview is packed with information. I found at least 10 principles for a workplace designed for innovation –

Align the design with your mission – with the “why” and not just the “what” of your business
Relevance to all disciplines supports multidisciplinary work better
Recognize that space shapes the behaviors you want
Your space is an indicator of the authenticity of your purpose
Agile and adaptable space is more valuable than CRE-regulated space
Anytime space supports creativity better than assigned and scheduled space
Casual space supports sharing and trust better
Authentic space recruits
Learn from others and engage users on your design team
Good design strategy reinforces good strategy design

Let me know your thoughts on the article, and your own experience.

Innovation in crappy buildings? Occupy the workplace

November 18, 2011

architecture, Design strategy, Strategy design, workplace design

2 Comments

Innovation arises most effectively in “crappy” buildings.

This was the argument advanced recently by Alexis Madrigal in his blog on technology in The Atlantic. As articles like this will do, responding commentary bounced around the internet, and I thought I’d pick it up and toss my own thoughts into the argument.

I’d offer that there is a great fault in the position put forward by Madrigal. The fact that innovation takes place in buildings, and since most buildings are crappy, means that most innovation will arise from crappy buildings. This, however, is not an argument that crappy buildings are best for innovation. Instead, it is the simple statement of the sad condition that we all share – that the innovation we have is only the innovation that has overcome the significant barriers presented by crappy buildings. The innovators in these contexts might best be celebrated for the cleverness that it took to overcome inadequate resources and barriers to communication. But how much have we lost along the way? How much more innovation could we have if more people worked in good buildings?

Apple, Building 20, and the rest of us

A bit of buzz had built shortly before Steve Jobs death over the design of the new Apple headquarters in Cupertino (which he presented rather masterfully before the Cupertino Plan Commission). The design, by Norman Foster, is a perfect circular doughnut of a building, something like the mouse wheel of an iPod stretched over 800 feet, or as Madrigal says, “Keep scaling that idea up and you get Apple’s ultrahip mega headquarters, which is part spaceship and part Apple Store.” It’s an elegantly simple architectural statement, and certainly will be a highly finished building with some very unique construction methods and materials. Most of the parking will be underground or hidden and the site, formerly an HP campus, will be returned to a park-like state.

Madrigal referenced Stewart Brand’s branding of “Low Road” buildings as the places where most innovation takes place, and put out a call for people in search of innovation to nominate their own Low Road workplaces. Madrigal recalled Building 20 at MIT, which no longer exists, as the great model for these innovation incubators – a big, wooden, nondescript building constructed in the economic spareness of World War II. Madrigal also evokes Jane Jacobs (“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”).

In their own commentary on Madrigal, the writers at m.ammoth.us express a concern about the implications of the argument asking, “if Building 20 is where innovation happens, but Apple’s megaheadquarters are where architects get involved, then is architecture’s relationship to innovation merely that architects get involved with an organization after it has lost the capacity to innovate? Is architecture’s relationship with innovative organizations primarily that it instantiates their ossification?”

In our practice, we are in the midst of a (frequently typical) commission for a place that will act as an innovation incubator. We have just gone through a very quick design exercise to get our foot in a funding stream, and are assessing and reassessing what we’ve done as we now are about to start the “real” design process. Our project will be both about old building as well as new, partially in a “crappy” building and partially in a new design by us.

As we began our initial efforts, examples and arguments like Madrigal’s were in the back of our minds. In front of us was a client with two, or maybe three heads.

We are working for a university and one of its schools, greatly interested in making a major architectural statement for at least three very good reasons – to enhance the perception of the institution, to attract top research talent from around the world, and to act as an innovation incubator for improving the health and wellness of our region. We are also working for its facilities department, greatly interested in making only the sparest and most necessary of moves.

These conflicting perspectives, these competing values, have us moving up and down the scale trying to understand just where is the best place for institutional aspiration and architectural authorship to surrender to innovation legend and occupier/user customization.

A concern

I have a great concern about the kind of logic and argument that Madrigal is trying to advance and that may be embedded in Brand’s work, as well.
The fact that most of the world’s buildings are not “designed” in a conventional sense, but are built naively, designed speculatively, designed without full understanding of user characteristics, or designed for purposes other than they are now being used, naturally means that most innovation arises from those “Low Road” buildings. This does not, however, mean that it is Low Road buildings that are the key factor in innovation success. The innovations that we celebrate may be only a small fraction of the innovation intended and pursued, and which successfully overcame the barriers of an insufficient supply of buildings that ate truly supportive of innovation.

I’d speculate that a significant amount of the failure of buildings to support innovation is a failure to design to support the awareness, communication and combination that we now recognize as central to innovation pursuits.

As a simple example, clients compel architects to design for function, and architects respond with functional designs. That is, clients ask for “conference rooms” and architects design formal spaces for scheduled meetings with chairs around big tables and with pictures on the walls. In these most typical of the contexts that generate anonymous buildings, neither client nor architect has asked about, explored or discussed the value and purposes of the organization and how to design to facilitate the interactions in these and other spaces that best support the development of a shared culture of communication and sharing of knowledge and experience. In fact, most clients directly reject the making of a social workspace, and most of those who reach further naively believe that image-making will be the generator of innovation.

In other words, consider the sad potential that a significant amount of creative output and important innovation is lost because of the inherent barriers in Low Road buildings, and the failure to think critically about how to support the cultures and communications of innovation in High Road buildings.

Architecture is vertical. Workspace is horizontal.

Paraphrasing a frequently reformulated axiom of comparative architectural styles, I’ve offered that “architecture is vertical, workplace is horizontal.” That is, it seems that architecture, carrying the responsibility of big budgets, regulated by codes and ordinances, and contracted (mostly) to large, management-driven organizations, is inherently hierarchical and ordered. The stuff that goes inside of the architecture is lighter, of shorter life span, beneficially adaptable to changing circumstances and occupancies, and is (potentially) less ordered, and (potentially) more democratic.

I’ve used that observation to generate this diagram, and to explore this matter of places and spaces for innovation again.

Architecture is vertical (a placeholder image)

I’ve represented architecture along the vertical axis, naturally. I’ve given it a range from a Low Road of anonymous and apparently non-designed buildings to a High Road of “signature” buildings. Along this range can be the core and shell of otherwise speculative developments to more highly programmed buildings for known organizations and occupants.

Along the horizontal axis is a range of approaches to planning the interiors of these buildings. I’ve used a context of control for the scale here, setting the highly regulated world of corporate real estate at one end, and more ad hoc occupancies at the other. Along this scale can be relatively intelligent but still centrally provided “settings” for specific kinds of work and activities, and less proscriptive and more helpful planning “guidelines.”

It seems that the domains of successful innovation might most typically take place in the upper left quadrant. In this space we would find buildings that are programmed and designed with an understanding of the interactions and communications that are essential for innovation, that build the “awareness” that Allen and Henn have identified as a key underlying value for innovative organizations. The spaces in these buildings might be very unstructured, but might have the resources – infrastructure, technologies, agile assets, operating manuals – that would enable the occupants to take charge of their own working environments and adapt them to the dynamic and changing demands of creative pursuits.

It seems to me that this approach could provide both for highly iconic (organizational signature) buildings as well as rich interior working environments. These conditions would not cause a reduction in creative zeal nor a suppression of innovative activity. They might, in fact, be the contexts that enable the potential for a significantly higher level of creative commitment and productive invention and application.

An autoupdating workspace?

October 18, 2011

architecture, Design strategy, workplace design

4 Comments

A couple of influences this week evoked once again my great interest in how to conceive of a workplace that is continuously updated and enriched by the actions and adaptations of its users.

There were, of course, the many reflections on the culture that Steve Jobs developed at Apple. I found interest in a video we’ve referenced before with this specific observation about the Apple design culture – Every time you present the user with a non-essential decision to make, you have failed as a designer.

It is easy to appreciate the meaning of this in the experience of Apple’s products, and in its retail environments. In architecture in other places, it conjures up Mies van der Rohe, Tadao Ando, Louis Kahn, and others. The work of each is beautiful in its sparseness, in its precision, in its critical attributes, in its reduction. It is also easy to imagine how these environments would be seen as disappointments to those who were not their direct commissioners.

The notion that google’s Chrome was developed as a blank platform with an “autoupdater” that progressively enriched the platform is a great inspirational concept, too. An app gets progressively more valuable as the experience of thousands or millions informs its designers, providing the insights for its progressive development and enrichment.

Buildings learn, it seems, but rarely cumulatively. And in between the experience of the users of a building and its learning potential is an authoritarian structure charged with control and armed with the limiting tools of standards. Its role is unidirectional by intention, but even when embracing an interest in more progressive approaches it is under-resourced to effectively and accurately receive and respond to information coming from the direction of the occupier/user. The user is, of course, also under-resourced, without tools or opportunities to experiment or implement what they perceive to be better approaches to environments that might help them do their jobs better.

Designers are unintentional disappointments, as well. That is, the desire for recognition from peers, and for appreciation from users, frequently generates fully-loaded designs perceived as rich environments for their purpose but stripping the user of opportunity for authorship.

Is it possible, in then, to develop a workplace infrastructure in which the initial commission can be the minimally awesome product, and in which the users have resources and authority to make progressive adaptations based on a commitment to purpose and a goal of performance and the insights from ongoing experience?

What do you think?

Jim Meredith

—archizoo

The blog of MEREDITH Strategy & Design

Archive

architecture

How car dealers uncovered a surprising key to greater customer satisfaction

Where you [don't] sit in the office