Towards a New Architecture
Is Architecture Broken?
I appreciate and celebrate great architecture. Often, these buildings struggle in vein to become great buildings for people. Misalignment of priority on the building itself leaves little time for thought to be placed on the people using it and to work out the technical details ad infinitum. I see several reasons why this has happened:
Focus on issues that are unguided and have misaligned priorities that take the place of missing voids in awareness or understanding of the people that will ultimately serve as the metrics to a project's success.
Decision makers, key influencer and design team leadership have prioritized their scope of responsibilities without considering the project as a whole. If not managed properly the agenda quickly shifts to satisfy individuals and focusing the redesign on accommodation of features that can lose track of the larger purpose of the project.
- Services provided are stuck selling traditional thinking, outdated methods, designing one-off solutions that hand over the design and responsibility instead of sticking with it through realization to realize in a great design's financial success.
- Design is evaluated on originality and initial shock value rather than strength of creating a valuable, engaged experience over time.
- Production and design methods are unengaged, inefficient, expensive, slow and self restrict information to anemic levels of communication in the hope that interpretation is aligned during realization.
Towards a New Architecture
Looking forward, using the experiences I’ve had and the knowledge of how the industry works, I’m interested in refocusing the design of buildings to reflect our understanding of people and how those designs can create rich experiences. I want to be actively involved in how people engage in their world.
The Dematerialization of Architecture into the Democratization of Architecture
Printed Newspapers : Personal Tweets
Following the revolutions of other industries such as seen in media, finance, data, social collaboration and communication, I see a future where design and architecture are practiced by more than licensed professionals to become something everyone can participate in and a platform for innovation.
Whereby the practice of design can become fundamental to a larger group of people looking for methods to solve problems and create the world around them. The profession itself can embrace and become closer to a central purpose for existing towards something more connected and with fuzzy edges for people to pick up on and adept to fit best into helping their circumstances. I see the opportunity in the space occupied by design current to transfer more of the doing in design to the hands of those that will be using the space. Giving individual authorship to make their world and engage themselves in the solution.
The reality we know today: The reality we will know in the Future.
Bell Lab's phone people knew in the past: The iPhone we now know of today.
Leap Forward
This idea is similar to the concept of how the telephone of our past used to be an object that sat on a desk could transform into how it could be integrated into every part of our life, becoming much more than a tool for making voice calls, we understand the same product today.
Its tough to imagine how this world might become everyday/common in our lives before experiencing it ourselves - although I believe it might find similar examples in the past when the stagnation of a product offered little opportunity to imagine its form and function ever being something else. For years, the telephone designed by Bell Labs remained untouched and unquestioned among the general population using them. I'd imagine it would have been difficult for most to imagine these phones ever deviating from the fixed form they knew so well. It would have been a large leap to imagine there would be the day such a ubiquitous product would disappear from their lives and that later on their would be a similar moment of ubiquity among a population of people as seen in the iPhone's widespread acceptance and use today.
I'd like to find myself among others working to create rich experiences that act as catalyst in helping others become actively involved in how people engage with their world.
Opportunities in Digital Product Design Methods
Realizing that buildings are too large, too costly to experiment with, they take years to realize much less gain user metrics and are ultimately focused on production rather than innovation, my focus shifts to where there is open opportunity for thinking and novel innovation.
I believe the future of design will make use of current flexibility and speed currently found in digital product design development. Allowing for a much smaller threshold between finding design solutions that enable testing ideas to be built cheaply and easily and be quickly tested directly from their actual use. Perhaps architecture can be collaborative among anyone who wants to participate, similar to a trending topic on Twitter.