Admittedly I’ve been redlining lately. And I don’t mean that good kind where you provide project direction, insights & quality controls to a project.
It’s the other kind. Multiple searches open and frantically diving into anything that pops in my head. I don’t quite know where the urgency comes from – but it’s a bundle of unfocused energy that just follows the stream of consciousness, where I talk too much. Eventually I need to reign that in to be able to participate and engage in polite society without that look of “What the hell are you talking about?” from across the table.
I can see how something like this can be useful as a creative way for idea farming and doing the second brain collection – but it’s a swarm of counterproduction at the moment.
As I stated in my last post I’ve been looking into Notion as a way to bring back the focus, and that’s lead to more rabbit-holing about how it functions, and phase/task boards vs. a central task repository. I think I’ve got a solve for that, but that’s the 20th time that I’ve thought that. Tasks are assignable once. So a linked database of typicals isn’t going to work across 3-4 projects that all have different schedules. (See, already starting the spin-off).
One of the career path suggestions that came out of the brainstorming session was UX Design. My misconception was that it dealt with coding. It’s in my toolbox, but it’s that rusty specialty tool at the bottom that needs a shine and pulled into the daily use stack.
From a general understanding, paired with a misconception – I’d dismissed it. I was wrong to do so.
I went on Udemy, looked for a course, and picked one up for a little walk-thru of project development & a lesson plan.
I’m late with all of this and feel a little dumb about my initial position. Tunnel vision has set in on the original definition of architecture as a profession. That’s the target, that’s the goal, so things that aren’t architecture get passed over.
What I quickly discovered was that I’d already been doing a form of this for YEARS across multiple platforms. All the articles that I’d skimmed are right.
It’s an iterative design process with a built-in feedback loop that ends with a graphic ideation of the finished product. I’ve done that.
I’ve done video productions for capital campaigns, video production as part of art installations – all wireframed & storyboarded.
I’ve done interactive presentation production with hosted videos, either PDF, Keynote or shudder, PowerPoint.
If you boil it all down to the essentials, the creative process is messy iterations toward a refined and agreed-upon end result.
I’m still in process with the course, but the ideas are already popping up, especially when it’s tied to recent experiences. Templating is even identical to how I use Revit – creating repeatable content for recycle and editing across multiple projects.
The part of the puzzle that I want to explore further is a ‘usable’ end result. Exporting an interactive media you can flip thru like your own personal book. There is a myriad of packages that provide this type of end result, but it would be helpful to create an “offline website” as a PDF that mimics a web experience for firm-related items. Either internal or marketing and product development, or a published pamphlet.
I’m still playing. I’m still learning – but if I could figure out how to pull out an interactive presentation (beyond a preview) – I think that would be ideal.
All of these tangents of exploration connect and spin-off to other possibilities, as the Second Brain is wants to do.
What I’m bumping into a LOT lately is that a layer of experience is missing from existing project teams. The more people that I interview with, the more light is shined on the missing institutional knowledge in the process.
When these down-turns happen – the middle gets stripped out of firms. Partners, Market & Bus Dev all stay – we need to get the work. Those with lower billing rates remain – someone still has to explore design and produce things. “The What” & “the How” have a hole in them. The middle is removed. For me, it’s happened twice now.
There’s a layer of institutional knowledge that needs to be re-injected into the process somehow. Mentoring can be sporadic in this career. I’ve experienced that as a beginner – being handed a set of drawings with the instruction to ‘make it look like this.’ And while you can grow and learn things under that – it’s limited.
If you take 10 minutes and add ‘this is why.’ to that exchange, everyone grows.
Most of the positions I’m coming across in their various descriptions and abstract conceptual titles – all boil down to a similar problem – we need a person with a broader experience who can lead to better outcomes.
So it’s as though Architecture (as a profession) is in dire need of its own UX.
There are several spin-offs from this idea. MANY articles, podcasts, and products that I can think of just by saying that. There is an equal number of resources out there exploring these topics, but they have to be sought out, and it’s becoming clearer that wisdom is not always imparted during the process.
Just off the cuff, I can think of a few things that could use a UX overlay in the discussion of practice.
Some of the coolest discussions that I’ve had with people who are starting the profession have dealt with the Why. There are days when all I do is ask that question like I’m 2 years old and exploring new concepts.
Staff shuffling & the fire sale that the middle experiences – leaves holes in the process. The layer of staff who’ve fallen into those holes are participating in the Great Resignation.
I was “resigned” prior to this as part of stripping out the middle and corporate office politics. Understandably so. The backlog pauses, the current load slows, and the billings cease because the developer/client’s revenue vanishes. If you can’t afford the current payroll, let alone future payroll – things have to change and it’s going to suck. Coming back is bumpy. It’s happening in fits and starts because of the disruptions to the supply chain, knowledge base and availability of materials.
These Here Are Crazy Times
(This one is a REALLY deep pull that I don’t expect anyone to get – album title by an Aussie band called Boom, Crash Opera)
HLADE’S LAW:
If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy man — he will find an easier way to do it.
I’ve got parts of this buried in my personality and deliverable approach – if you add an over-caffeinated Type A layer on top of it. If I get stuck in a silo, doing similar work in a single building type on repeat – I’m going to come up with a system & method to repeat the tasks with limited effort.
I don’t know if it’s a rare trait to have 2 layers of project zoom in mind – but I can flip back and forth pretty easily.
After about the 2nd or 3rd iteration of a project type – I’m figuring out how and where to break things, so I can design around how they break.
As an example (in Revit): Hosted elements in a group great really upset when you break that relationship and copy that group to a new location.
Solution: Develop a module that can exist without hosted elements. (Rebuild all the upper cabinets in a kitchen so they don’t grab the wall).
Use case: I know have a collection of families that can be used in any project type, but in Hospitality & Multi-family can be copied around and edited to populate entire floor plates. Cool – I don’t have to rebuild things.
(This also happens with details created in live views)
If you follow this to the next level – develop a series of editable detail families for casework so you never have to start that from scratch again. (Build a repository).
Eventually, this type of thinking leads to a collection of tools that can get grabbed and edited across several project types. So yeah, I may be stuck in a silo doing production work on the 40th hotel that year, but I’ve now got a library of applicable and tested details to build efficiency, and an established method to reduce friction in the process.
So even though there’s limited input in a creative realm while in the vertical silo – I’d invented a way to make it less boring. I’m a mid-career architect. I’ve spent 20 years grinding out production w/ tech because I like the tools. Most of my contemporaries don’t have this affinity for the tools – so they’ve got teams under them that produce these things. Some of that leads to the problem.
Disassociation between “the What” and “the How”
My desire to have a team is overridden by the efficiencies that I’ve gathered. In a corporate culture, it translates to ‘he’s good at this, and gaining speed – let’s take advantage of this. Give him more stuff to do – but no promotions.’
This has lead to something that I’ve repeated here:
“I’d be further ahead in my career if I wasn’t so good at my job.”
I’d much prefer to teach everyone else how to do this and scale the entire department/practice.
This applies to all portions of the tools in the toolbox: Families, Elements, Detail items – and zooming out – templates, view templates, project organization, add-ins, etc.
My motivation is entirely selfish. I want to stop drawing everything. In defense of this position – I’ve developed a method to not have to draw as much while working toward the goal of handing all that off to someone else.
My next level in this is to gather these components and automate their use & input them for redline and editing.
This is not at all a new concept by the way. The automation part might be, but firms have been using detail manuals for projects for decades. Gather, edit for the use case – publish. Leave the pure creative energy for the bespoke areas.
The firms that I’m meeting with, all want a layer of this knowledge within their firm to mentor junior staff. Either to solve deliverable issues, mentor process, manage content, etc.
I’ve always called this type of job description ‘The Fixer’. The person on the team that rebuilds half the broken tools while establishing means & methods and modeling practices. You know, that guy that you ask how to do something or talk thru an idea. Or the one sitting there after everyone leaves to police and clean up the things that got broke in the model today.
If you take a look at all of this from a broader scale, that’s essentially UX. Building a design tool within the framework of a firm to develop tools to enhance the end result. Culture remains in place and feeds the tools, as would an identity that you design a UX project toward.
Most of the development can be folded into the project process, as long as you create all the elements in a way that they can be farmed from projects. Do that with consistency and some of the tools build themselves.
This all can be gathered, wrapped in a UX narrative about the Why, and distributed at scale.
The largest hurdle is perhaps:
Q: How many Therapists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.
The race seems to be on to the best way to impart this institutional knowledge base, disrupt practice, serve a larger client base and the greater good.
If recent discussions are any indicator, the industry is starting to see the need (outside the podcast & tech sphere pushing the discussion).
That said – there are still others that think less of this type of patterned approach, because each project is beautiful/unique and therefore shouldn’t be produced with a repeatable system.
Although gravity is still a thing, code still defines the playbook, and efficiencies exist repeated elements. So the solutions may be unique, the base process has been the same for 100 years.
I know – that sucks some of the romance out of the creative process – but to steal from Bob Borson – “Unless you build it – its not architecture…”, and this is how we build.
Copyright © 2023