Single Serves ep. 405 - Seldon on Running a Profitable Design Business

Kimberley Seldon is the founder of Kimberley Seldon Design Group, an interior design firm with offices in Toronto and Los Angeles. 

In addition to her design practice, she runs Business of Design, an online learning platform she started to help other professionals in the design field to become financially successful, with the stated goals that designers running their own practices should aim at making 6-figures salaries.

I wanted to have Kimberley on the podcast to discuss how she and others have accomplished that, as financial viability should be the foundation of any design business.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: ©2023 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd

Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity:

Arnaud Marthouret:

Kimberly Seldon is the founder of Kimberly Seldon Design Group, an interior design firm with offices in Toronto and Los Angeles. In addition to her design practice, she runs Business of Design, an online learning platform. She started to help other professionals in the design field to become financially successful with the stated goals that designers running their own practices should aim at making six figure salaries.

I wanted to have Kimberly on the podcast to discuss how she and others have accomplished that as financial viability should be the foundation of any design business. So thank you very much, Kimberly, for being on the show.

Kim Seldon:

Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. I hadn't anticipated doing it from the car, so thank you for accommodating that, Arnaud, I appreciate it.

Arnaud Marthouret:

That's no problem at all. So let's start with the easy question and can you tell us who you are and what you do in your own words, in three sentences or less?

Kim Seldon:

I am an interior designer, so that's first and foremost.And I run a thriving busy business with offices in Toronto and Santa Monica and Business of Design got started because I wanted to teach other interior design professionals.

Arnaud Marthouret:

That sounds great. So how did you come up with Business of Design? What's the genesis?

Kim Seldon:

Well, the genesis is me failing miserably at running an interior design firm, believe it or not, I had all these clients because I was on television as an interior design expert, so my phone was ringing off the hook. I had an unlimited supply of clients wanting to work with me. And every project started the same way with the client, super excited and enthusiastic about the project. And it ended the same way with the clients, less than enthusiastic about hiring me and not so enthusiastic about the project. And along the way, it never was the case that the clients didn't like me or didn't think I was trying. They all could see that I was really trying, but I did not know how to run a business and I certainly didn't know how to run a profitable business. I didn't even know that I was allowed to want to be a profitable business, if that makes any sense.

Arnaud Marthouret:

It does, absolutely. So was there an aha moment for you where you cracked the code of being financially successful? And if so, what would that be?

Kim Seldon:

That's so good. I'll tell you the no aha moment, which is when I hired my first business coach and she said, "Can I take a look at your P&L," and I didn't know what that was. I was thinking like Proctor and Gamble. So that's where I started from. So nobody started lower down the financial savviness pole than I did. But I believe the aha moment came for me, after working for two years with a business coach and she was trying to get it into my head that if I didn't have systems and process to run my business, I was never going to be successful. And I wasn't buying it because I was creative and don't you understand creative people, every project is different, and every budget is different, and every client is different.

And I just couldn't make her understand that while systems were great for Starbucks, they wouldn't work for me. And we had a fight after a couple of years and she literally threw a book at my head and the book was a tiny little book called The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber. And I read that book and I thought, well, I'm through with her, she's an idiot. But here's this little book, I'm going to read this book, and I read this book and I got it. For me, that was the aha. Okay, I can see now why I'm going to need systems to help me run my business and how I will not be profitable until I have those systems.

Arnaud Marthouret:

And that's a great segue into my next question because financial matters are often, and it's a broad generalization seen as something you shouldn't really talk about that's dirty, or being profitable is bad, or whatever the case may be. But why do you think being financially sound is so important for design businesses?

Kim Seldon:

Well, it's important for any business. How can you be a business if you're not hitting at least some measure of profitability? If you are not doing that, then you don't have a business, you have a jobby. You have a little hobby that's makes you feel good and puffs you up in some way. And I was underperforming on every level, but the financial aspect is the part that's so crippling. At some point, you can't keep doing it if you're not profitable. And in addition to that, I think there was this feeling that it was embarrassing. It's shameful and embarrassing when you're going to your accountant at the end of the year and you've been working full time and your accountant says you made $30,000 this year and you're celebrating because you've had years where you lost money. And then the accountant says, "Do you realize that $30,000 is minimum wage?"

And I'm like, "No, that can't be right because I'm working like a maniac. There's no way I could be making minimum wage." And you do the math and like, that's minimum wage. And in the interior design community, which is my wheelhouse, most interior design professionals are making minimum wage or something just a little bit higher than that.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So you're talking about net income, right?

Kim Seldon:

Net income, yeah.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So which is for listeners, after tax, not the gross income.

Kim Seldon:

Exactly. And I wouldn't even have known to ask that question 20 years ago when I started with my business coach, because the business training I got in interior design school was abysmal. It didn't prepare me at all for running my business, not at all. And in fact, there was even a feeling that as, maybe it was partly because I'm female, it was almost like I had to be apologetic about wanting to make money, that somehow that was greedy. I'll give you a really good example, Arnaud. In our business, we have a model where we charge our clients for the services they want to buy. So some clients want to buy your interior design services and want you to do the design, and the drawings, and all of that.

And some clients want you to do that, plus they want you to procure all the goods, plus they want you to hire all the trades, and do all the trade management. Well, those are three different services. And for the longest time, I felt like you can't charge clients three times. Right? That's not fair. But in fact, yeah, you can because those are three separate services. If they don't want all three services, then charge them for the services they want. But if they want all three, they need to pay for all three. And so I had to overcome a lot of crippling money mindset, if you will.

Arnaud Marthouret:

And I think that's a good segue into the topic of value versus cost because too many, maybe even most designers still charge by the hour instead of charging by the value of their work. Do you have any thoughts on that and what would you advise designers to do?

Kim Seldon:

Well, it's so interesting because I know a lot of people love a value based fee or a flat fee as we call it. But in our business, too often that flat fee is a race to the bottom. It's how low do I have to go to get you to hire me? How low do I have to go to get this job? And so we actually do recommend that interior designers who are just starting out always start with an hourly fee. But the trick is to actually capture all the hours you're spending. And we're just using hours, the increment of time is a stand-in for our expertise. I have to charge for my expertise, so I'm using this increment of time to charge for it. But if I document every single hour it takes and then I'm willing to bill the client for every single hour it took me to accomplish the job, then I will have some understanding of what that flat fee or that value-based fee might be.

But most designers are suffering from the creative entrepreneurship problem, which is that they're afraid to charge too much. They desperately want the job. So often we're thinking about, wow, this is going to look amazing on my website. I can't wait till I see the pictures. And so what am I going to say to this client to convince them to give me the job? And it's okay if I don't make a lot of money on this job because for sure I'll make a lot of money on the next job. But of course, you tell yourself that lie for years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.

Arnaud Marthouret:

That makes a lot of sense. So let's go back to the idea of being financially sound and understanding how money works and the difference say between gross income, net income, and all the rest of it. I think and I'm not mistaken if I sit that most businesses and maybe even more design businesses are reluctant to acknowledge that. Why do you think that is?

Kim Seldon:

Reluctant to acknowledge that-

Arnaud Marthouret:

The importance of being financially sound and live in that kind of bubble that you described you were in before you had that aha moment?

Kim Seldon:

Yeah, that's such a good question. I don't know, I've made up in my head, and this is probably not true, that more women suffer from this feeling that they're not supposed to make money than men. That may not be true, but I certainly got different messages growing up than my brothers did. My brothers were told, "You can be anything. You're a captain of industry, go in there and demand a raise." And I was told, "Be quiet. Don't rock the boat. Nobody likes a mouthy broad." I got very different [inaudible 00:11:00] why I think it is. And then I think another part of it is, that we all need to be taught how to run a business. There are enough entrepreneurs now that that should be something we're taught from a young age.

And financial savviness is something we need to be taught from a young age. There's a huge difference between making a million dollars in income and making a million dollars in profit. Those are different worlds. And too often interior design professionals who say, "Oh yeah, I made a million this year." And I'm like, "Oh, that was your take home pay?" And they're like, "No, that was my revenue." Oh, then you didn't make a million. You didn't come close to making a million.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah. And if the overhead is 950,000, then you make 50,000.

Kim Seldon:

Exactly.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So, in that respect, what do you think is the number one skill, that slacking in the industry, that leads people down that path, skill or knowledge or tidbit of information that people may need to have?

Kim Seldon:

I think we just need to be told from the beginning, if you're going to open a business it must be profitable and it should be profitable in the first year, in most cases, not in every case. I've got a friend who has a huge tech company and he had a five-year plan to be profitable. But for most of us, opening a small professional office, we need to be profitable within the first year. And in order to see if I'm profitable within the first year, one of the things I probably should do is take a salary off the top. I may not be able to take it my first three months in business, but I certainly should be able to take it after six months.

And if I had done that when I first started out, I would've known much sooner that I wasn't making enough money to cover the salary. But not doing that meant that I had to wait until the end of the year when the accountant said, "Oh, by the way, you didn't make any money this year, there's not going to be any salary for you this year." I would've known it much sooner if I'd taken to that earlier. So I think having a plan to pay yourself some amount of money almost from day one is really important.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah, I think so. I'm certainly an advocate of that. I became familiar with the Profit First Method a few years ago, and that was a revelation because that's exactly what they advocate for. It's like put your profit, which is basically a percentage of your revenue aside and your salary first, and then keep the rest for all kinds of expenses. It's very powerful actually.

Kim Seldon:

It really is.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So can you speak a little bit to the disciplines that you teach your students, or however you want to call them, for becoming profitable and running a tight ship?

Kim Seldon:

Well, so the first thing we talk about is to create systems to run your business just like Michael E. Gerber talked about. So you have to have, for every single point on a project, there has to be a system that helps you navigate that point in the project, how you answer the phone, how you sign a client up for the consultation, how you deliver the consultation, what happens after the consultation, what happens when it's time to hire the trades, how do you hire the trades, what you charge for hiring the trades, what's your markup on what you're going to charge for hiring the trades. All of that stuff has to be part of how you show up on day one to every project figured out, so that the clients can then relax and let you run the project. And once I was able to start getting those systems into my bag of tricks, if you will, the clients were responding in a really positive way.

"Oh, we like the way she handled that. She did what she said she was going to do, and she did it on time and she did it on a specific budget. We like that." And then more clients would sign up and want that. And so it took me more than a decade to figure out what all the steps were to running a project from top to bottom. Then Business of Design was born because I just started telling designer friends what I was doing and then little by little, a designer friend would say, "Oh, can you come and talk to my ASID group?" "Can you come and talk to my decorating club?" "Can you come and speak at the school?" And I was spending more and more of my time going to these events for free and teaching people how to do it. And it became untenable at some point. I'm flying to Vancouver. I'm flying to Los Angeles. I'm flying to New York and I'm doing these classes for free. I'm like, wait a minute, this is costing me a lot of money.

I'm teaching people how to be profitable, but here I am spending my own money to fly to all these different locations and teach them how to be profitable. So I started feeling that in my bottom line in my design firm because my design firm was paying for all of these trips to go and help people run their design firms. So finally we said, this isn't tenable, and Business of Design was born. And really it was a way of covering my costs so I could go to New York and teach other designers how to run their business. And it's really pretty much remained that. It's never been my big profit driver, that's my interior design business. I make a lot of money in my interior design business and Business of Design is my passion project, it's my give back.

Arnaud Marthouret:

I see. So you answered the question that came to mind. It's like, which one makes more money for you. But I know it's a very personal question. So how do you teach your clients to break the six figure barrier, because that's the goal you set for them? I know you've talked about the systems and we've touched on that, but is there anything else you want to add to that particular question?

Kim Seldon:

Yeah, first of all, I give them permission to make money. That sounds small, but it's a big thing. In fact, we had a coaching call today, we do it once a month. It's called BOD Live and all these designers show up and somebody said, my client says it's not fair if I charge design fees and procurement fees. So it's like, "No, that's totally fair. You buy a cell phone, you get a phone, you don't get text time and you don't get roaming and if you want those extra services, those are extra services." So first of all, we give them permission to do it, but second of all, I show them how I do it. I open my books to them and I show them this is what I charge my clients. This is what my contract says. This is how I make money.

And so we're unapologetically making money, and we found that as people are willing to share that they're making more money, the bar gets higher and higher. For so many years I dreamed of every interior design professional making six figures, meaning finally at the end of the year, $100,000 of profit. Like, come on, we can do it. Well, we are now at the point where we actually have designers who are making seven figures. So I think it's no small thing to give people a path to follow and to make it happen.

Arnaud Marthouret:

That makes a lot of sense. So in the course of my work, I often bump against, and sometimes internally struggle with the fact that I will relate what you do with a marketing problem that I see all the time, which is the inability to convey the value of the services to the client. And there's many reasons for that, I'm not going to go too much into details. Do you help people overcoming that or how do you think designers should overcome that to become profitable? Because I truly believe that's one of the main impediments to profitability.

Kim Seldon:

I think you're right, actually. I really do. And so what I teach is that I have to portray to my clients this confidence that I have the expertise to run their project from top to bottom. Everybody's familiar with how renovating projects work, and everybody thinks renovating projects go like this. The contractor tells you it's going to be $100,000, but really it's going to cost 200,000 and then it costs 300,000 and it takes twice as long. And everybody accepts that's how it is. Well, we came in and we said, "No, that's not okay. I don't want to be that person. I actually want to tell my client what it's going to cost and how long it's going to take and tell them that I will manage every detail." If you put your trust in me, I can guarantee you it'll start on this day and finish on this day, and this is what it will cost, but that means you leave every detail with me.

And there are clients who are willing to pay for that. There's value in that because the work is complicated. So you just have to have that system that you can rely on and say, this is what I'm bringing to the table. A lot of design professionals think what they bring to the table is, I can make a room look beautiful. That's not a big thing, millions of people can do that. When I say to my clients, "I can guarantee on time, on budget," they say, "Sign me up for that. I'll take that."

Arnaud Marthouret:

What's your success rate on your projects, on being on time and on budget?

Kim Seldon:

Well, 100% actually, because I have a way in which I tell them what it's going to cost once I know what it's going to cost, and I tell them how long it's going to take, once I know how long it's going to take. I went from, in 2000, I would say I had a staff of 15. I had probably a hundred projects that year. I probably made four clients super happy, I made many of them sort of happy and made a whole bunch, not too happy at all. And no client from that year, not a single one ever came back to work with me again. Fast forward to today, I know I make a hundred percent of my clients happy, and almost every single client comes back to me at some point for more work. So that's a big deal, right?

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah, and I love your message because it's a very positive one, because a lot of designers are discouraged by how difficult it is to run a business and how some clients can be difficult to deal with. And so I'm glad to hear that there is a possible path for people to take and become profitable. And I know what you offer is probably challenging, even to the people that sign up for your program. So what kind of attrition rate do you have between the people who actually sign up and people who complete and become successful designers?

Kim Seldon:

It's really interesting you say that. I'm not the best designer in the whole world, and I'm sure as heck not the smartest person in the whole world. So the program that I teach is really easy, if you will. It's simple. Follow the steps, do exactly this, it will work for you too. There is a component of having the confidence to put yourself in front of those clients who can afford your services. That is a component, but the fact of the matter is, once you have these systems behind you, you are more competent, you are a bigger player, and you will get better clients. We have a really, really high rate of designers who have completed the program and make a whole lot of money. And we have something like, I don't even know how many, but at least a hundred testimonials on the website of people who say, I doubled my income, I tripled my income. But I would say over the years we launched in 2004, I would say by now we have a thousand testimonials of people who say things like that.

And given that we don't advertise, we're just a small company still, there's three of us, sometimes four of us. It's great. And our mission statement is to transform the industry one design business at a time. And that's really what we focus on, just that one person who's in front of us. If we can help that one person, they'll probably help someone else. And it's gratifying for me to see the changes that have happened since 2004. And I know we've had at least some small part in some of the positive things that have happened.

Arnaud Marthouret:

And that's great. So I have just a couple more questions for you because I think we covered a lot of interesting ground. And obviously people who want to know more can find you. We'll get to where they can find you at the end. Are there any success stories of some of your clients that really stand out to you that you'd like to share?

Kim Seldon:

Oh gosh. We now have a coach in Sydney, Australia, a wonderful one named Jody Carter, I'm sure she wouldn't mind me sharing this. But when she came to us, she was really on the verge of quitting. She was just broken. She said, she can't do it anymore. Her clients just won't get in line. They won't behave. She can't make money, blah, blah, blah. And now today, and I think this is only like three years later, she is one of the people who's approaching a seven figure profitability, is one of the most sought after designers in all of Sydney, and is now coaching other BOD people.

She's just one of so many like that. Literally today we did this BOD Live event, and somebody posted in the chat, "Oh my God, I can't thank you enough. You've changed my life." And that's how it feels. You're so isolated and alone in this business sometimes, you need somebody to say, it's okay. You're going to be okay and you can do this. It's not that hard. The business is hard, but once you have the systems, if you just stick to the systems, you're going to be okay.

Arnaud Marthouret:

That's a very positive note to end on. So are there any parting words of wisdom you want to share with the audience before we wrap up?

Kim Seldon:

Oh, wow. Don't be afraid of your numbers. Just jump into those numbers. You can do it. I know it can be scary. It can feel like this new technology having to uncover and get familiar with my profit and loss statement. It freaked me out, but now it's such a good tool that I use all the time. I know my numbers. I know my profit margin. Do whatever it takes to get past whatever phobias that you have built up over the years, whatever made up stories you have so you can get really comfortable with the money. No matter what business you're running, you have to talk money and you have to talk it with confidence and ease. And so honestly, if I could do it, anybody could do it.

Arnaud Marthouret:

That sounds great. So where can people find you if they want to get in touch?

Kim Seldon:

Oh, businessofdesign.com. That's easy, right?

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah, that's easy. What was your favorite part of this interview?

Kim Seldon:

Ooh, what a good question. I love that you started off talking about why people may not have the freedom or the know-how or even the understanding that they can be financially savvy.

Arnaud Marthouret:

That sounds great. So I want to thank you very much for your time and your generosity. I really liked talking to you, and maybe we can have another one of those in a while.

Kim Seldon:

That would be great. Thank you, Arnaud. Thank you so much.

A different perspective

I believe aerial photography is still a grossly underused medium. Indeed, it captures attention because it is not a perspective of the built environment that we are accustomed to. We see things from the ground, so anything deviating from that is instantly appealing to the human brain.

As such, I am organizing an aerial photography campaign by helicopter in the very near future. Drones are amazing tools and make aerial photography more cost effective and easier to capture. However, drones have their limitations (such as the regulatory limit on flight height of 120m).

If you’re interested in this campaign, you can register interest here (no firm commitment required for now) and we’ll reach once we have enough sign-ups and are ready to book the chopper.

If you’re on the fence, here are a few reasons that will make it more appealing:

1. A new take on old buildings - Ideal especially if it’s going to be a while before your next building is inaugurated and you’re looking for fresh content.

2. Capture buildings from the air in places where drones cannot fly (anywhere above 120m - downtown where tall buildings make it challenging and dangerous).

3. Get a different perspective on your projects, especially if showing a building in its context is important.

4. Capture “the plan” in photograph, works very well for landscapes and buildings with lots of outdoor spaces.

5. Get sexy images that will make people pause and pay more attention to you (there are few things sexier than a cityscape at dusk).

6. You need to capture things that are only visible from the air.

PS - Don’t forget to register your interest here and if you think of someone who might be interested, just send them this post.

See you from the air!

PPS - See rvltr’s latest portfolio here (contains some aerials).

Single Serves ep. 404 - Derringer on Web3, Crypto and the Metaverse

Jaime Derringer is a serial entrepreneur, artist and Founder of the popular design platform Design Milk and Clever podcast. She is also an artist living in San Diego, CA.

Jaime and I recorded another podcast a few years back that appeared on Truth is Golden in 2018 (ep.106 - "The Milk That Never Spoils"). We talked then about her and life up to that point. Go check it out if you'd like to learn more about Jaime.

Today we're reconvening to talk about all things metaverse, web3 and crypto, as Jaime had now taken the next step in her professional life after selling Design Milk to Ahalife in 2019.

This is our second podcast episode on web3 innovation. Check out Episode 318 with Andrew Lane and Tessa Bain.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd

Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity:

Arnaud Marthouret:

So Jaime, thanks so much for coming back. It feels like an eternity since we last spoke.

Jaime Derringer:

It does. It's so funny thinking back 2018. It really wasn't that long ago, but we were living in a completely different world pre-pandemic. And yeah, that was before I sold Design Milk, so a lot has changed for me, and for the world since then.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Well, so that's going to be my first question. Usually ask people, "Can you tell us who you are and what you do in three sentences or less?" But given our podcasting history, I'll just refer people to the first podcast for that. Instead, can you catch us up to what you've been up to since 2018?

Jaime Derringer:

Of course. So as I mentioned, and as you mentioned, an introduction, I sold Design Milk in 2019, and I stayed on for three years as the Chief creative officer and helped bring the brand into e-commerce. And as everyone knows during those couple of years, through 2020 and 2021, and still right now we're still kind of in a global pandemic, so a lot of things shifted in the world as we know it since then. But yeah, I left Design Milk in March of last year, 2022. And so it's been almost a year since I left. And in the meantime, I took some downtime, and also did some consulting and advising, and also helped bring a new art NFT gallery and platform called Tonic, Tonic.xyz, helped bring that to the world. So yeah, I'm doing lots of things, making lots of art too also.

Arnaud Marthouret:

That's great. You told me offline that you are leaving Tonic. What's next for Jaime then?

Jaime Derringer:

Yes, I don't know what's next for me right now. I'll be honest with you. Before I was helping Tonic full-time, I was considering launching a consulting company, so maybe I will consult. But I'm leaving the possibilities open for me. So I'm actually really excited about that. I think after leaving Design Milk, having the opportunities and possibilities to be open was a lot more terrifying, but now I feel really good about it.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So is that an open call for people to reach out if they have ideas?

Jaime Derringer:

100%. Yeah. I'm all over social media, and it's just my name at Jaime Derringer. You can find me everywhere.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah, you're not hard to find.

Jaime Derringer:

No.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So today, like I mentioned before, we're going to talk about the Metaverse and Web three and crypto. How did you get into that space?

Jaime Derringer:

Well, I started by... I jumped back on Twitter. I've had a Twitter account forever, but I dumped back on there and started seeing some of my friends sharing things about NFT artwork. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Someone had mentioned that technology to me a couple years prior, and I thought it was really interesting, but I never dove into it. So this time I dove pretty deep down the rabbit hole of NFTs and what I could do as an artist. And so after making lots and lots of NFT art, I started thinking a little bit more broadly about blockchain technology and all of the other things that kind of surround that. There's AI and metaverse, and just web3 in general and crypto, and all of these things that are happening in technology that are really fascinating. There's a lot that can be applied to business in general.

So after I kind of came out from making lots and lots of art, I started thinking about it as an entrepreneur, which is the other half of me. I feel like Jekyll and Hyde, but they're both great. I guess it's Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Jekyll, artist and entrepreneur. So I started thinking of it from a business perspective and what impact it might have on our lives. And then I just started sharing those things on LinkedIn and started reaching out to friends and other people who were in those spaces to talk to them about what they were doing. I just was really curious. And that's always what's driven me, is my curiosity to find out what might happen. And someone recently called me, I think called me a futurist. And I didn't ever think of myself as a futurist, more like a trend spotter, but now I guess I'm a futurist, which I accept, and I like it.

Arnaud Marthouret:

It's a cool term, and it's also so broad that you can really pretty much fit anything in it, which can be great. And I remember, when I was in school 15 years ago, back then, futurists were people like this great sci-fi author, I forget his name, Bruce something, quite well known, and they were using their kind of expertise as a sci-fi author to predict or to forecast transfer the future, which was fascinating. So maybe there's something for you there. I recently recorded another episode of this podcast with Andrew Lane and Tessa Bain Digby. The only reason I'm mentioning that is because it's a bit of a primer on all things web3, metaverse and blockchain. So for listeners that are interested in learning more about that world, I strongly suggest you go check out. That episode. It just came out a couple of months ago. I'll put the link in the show notes as well.

I want to dive a little deeper into NFTs because I've only ever been looking at it from the outside, with interests, but never really taking the jump. And there was this huge... I have an interest in blockchain more broadly speaking, and I've gone quite deep the rabbit hole in that, but not so much NFTs. And NFTs to me, when they came out, what was it a couple of years ago or a year ago or something, you had that craze where people were selling them for outrageous amounts of money. And so that's the part that never quite understood because it felt like it was a bit of a bubble. But I also see the potential as a tool to regulate the use of art and make sure that artists are fairly compensated. Since you have experienced doing that and you've actually sold your own NFTs, can you tell us what's your take on this whole thing, and maybe putting a bit aside the bubble aspect of it, which seems to have blown over now and look at what the future holds for this technology and especially our independent artists?

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of hype. And now that the dust has settled, the people who will be staying around are still here making wonderful work. And what I really think happened is that the pandemic probably escalated this, or accelerated it in a way, but the technology innovations are coming head to head with the creator economy, which I think it's really made it incredibly powerful for creators to take the next step in owning their work and being able to be paid for it. We've been very beholden to platforms, social media platforms to help pay creators. But I think that the blockchain enables creators to take ownership of all the work they create. They could mint their pieces on the blockchain and have a perpetual royalty set. So for example, I might sell you a physical painting. And let's say in 20 years, I become like the next Picasso or something, and then you sell that painting for a million dollars.

I don't get any of that money from that painting. But if it were an NFT piece of art, I could put in a royalty amount, and I could continually be paid on that every single time it changes hands. So I think that's a really powerful way that creators can take the power back and hold that power to be financially compensated for their work long-term, no matter what happens to it and whose hands ends up in. And it also, what is really interesting to me too about it is it's like a very public ledger of provenance. So you can trace a piece of work back to its original owner on the blockchain because it's all public ledger, it's publicly available information, so you can actually authenticate a piece of work to its original creator. And I think that's incredibly powerful for designers, artists, any kind of creator, in addition to manufacturers, if you think about the idea of authentic furniture or authentic works that manufacturers or brands can take ownership to as well. And then they could also pay a perpetual royalty to any collaborator that they work with.

So I believe it is a wonderful way for people to be able to not only authenticate ownership, but be paid for their work in perpetuity.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah, and that's very appealing. I'm a creator also in the commercial art world, and enforcing the licensing is always a pain in the ass, to be honest, so it seems to be a great tool for that. And I also like the fact that creators now, or rather, especially in the art world, speculators get less power, and it's more power to the creators. Because like you rightly said, if Picasso sold a painting in 1910 for a thousand bucks, and in 1960, it's worth $2 million, he doesn't get any of it, right? And I think it's, in some sense, more fair that there's a royalty system for artists, because it also incentivizes them to maybe put more art out there or not worry too much about the sale price early on and ensure that they continuously get royalties from the resell of if they ever become popular.

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah.

Arnaud Marthouret:

I think people in the design industry are slowly waking up to the fact that those technologies are coming. But why do you think it's important for them maybe to educate themselves on the matter? And what are the implications for the design industry of all those, let's call it under the umbrella of web three, all those technologies that we mentioned?

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah. All of the things that are happening right now in technology will impact how we interact in the future. I think that I've had conversations very similar to this many, many, many years ago when social media started to emerge, and I would be on panels or calls talking about why it's important for brands to have an Instagram presence or Twitter or Pinterest, whatever. And now this is the same conversation again with a different technology. So I believe there's a place for all of these technologies that will impact design in some way or another. Of course, AI we know will impact everything that we do. We'll be partnering or using it or collaborating it with it in some way or another in most of our jobs in the future. I believe that NFTs will play a bigger role in the design industry for authenticating ownership and paying out royalties.

But also, the Metaverse is another one that I really think is a big, very interesting idea. It's not here yet fully, and we don't really know how it will unfold, but I do think that immersive VR, AR types of technologies will be integrated into really interesting use cases. I think right now, it looks a little far off for a lot of people because a lot of what's being designed right now in the three D space is more for gaming, and it looks very space age, very futuristic, not really applicable to let's say a boardroom or conference room. But I think that eventually, we will be having... We're on Zoom right now. We may be having this in a more immersive 3D environment where we feel like we really are sitting across from one another. And that, I think, enhances our experience of talking and experiencing each other as humans, because a flat screen really doesn't replicate being in person, but at least a 3D immersive environment would do that.

But I also think that there are ways in which that technology will impact design. Right now, we're already seeing AR and VR being used in interior design for walkthroughs, in construction, to see where things should be going. That's already happening. And then I think manufacturers will be creating digital twins of their products to be sold virtually, or just for their sales reps to use as a better tool for customers to experience their products. Instead of seeing it on a flat screen, you can walk around it even if you're not in the same location. So I think there's a lot of benefits that feel much more applicable than, let's say me having some digital land and some gaming metaverse. Yeah, so a lot of people are talking about that, but I think the real use case scenario is what we might need in our everyday lives and doing business and interacting with each other.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Which makes more sense, makes more sense, because someone like me, and I'm sure there are a lot of people that feel the same, spending your day in a purely 3D metaverse is really not all that appealing. I'm much more comfortable with the idea of augmented reality where you still live in a real world, but you might have layers of information appearing here and there when you need them. As generally a tech skeptic, one of my biggest concerns, because we've seen that with the big tech and the social media world, is privacy. I do know that privacy is more baked in web three by virtue of how the blockchain operates, but how do we make sure that the mistakes of web2 and the rampant monetization of private data doesn't happen, if it's at all possible? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah, there are companies out there that are being built as we speak that are trying to give the ownership of data back to the user, so that it is in my hands or your hands who sees and accesses your private data and information. We have basically given these companies away so much information when we register for any website, email address, date of birth, but they're able to know so much more about us than we even offer up. So I think that... I believe that the blockchain can enable this data privacy so that we have more self sovereignty and we can elect to sell our data, or we can revoke access to our data when we connect or disconnect from a website. And you can opt in or opt out as much as you would like.

And then I think it would be great to be able to be paid for that. So we're not getting paid for giving all of these companies our information that they then use to sell to advertisers. And I don't see a dollar or $2 from Facebook every time I log on. So it would be nice to be able to share in those revenue or to be able to opt out of that.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah. I agree. Facebook, even if you don't have a Facebook account, there's evidence that they know a lot about your habits and where you go hang out online. So that's, I think, the big hurdle that we'll have to overcome, and those companies will have to get used to the fact that their business model is, first of all... That's just my opinion. I think it's completely morally corrupt, but also not viable in the long term when people start waking up to the fact. And maybe it won't happen. Maybe people will just be content to get access to free stuff and have their data monetized, but I think it's changing, so hopefully we'll go in the right direction. You mentioned a few minutes ago that the conversations you're having right now about web3, you had them a decade plus ago about social media with web2. Do you see any parallels in the way those two revolutions are happened and are happening? Is there any common themes. Since you've already surfed that wave one time, do you see similar things happening now, or is it completely different?

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah, I do see similar patterns. So the first one is people are just afraid of change. I think that people like to know what's going to happen when and how. Certainly, the pandemic really threw us all off in having to force us to create new ways of living and question everything basically around us. But I think that what we're seeing now is pushback on new tech because it seems scary to people. How are they going to have to change their lives? What will they need to learn? Will their jobs become obsolete? Will they have to hire new people or learn a new skill? So I think there is a lot of fear. And so one of the things that I try to do in a lot of the conversations that I have is demystify it and try to help people adopt it, or even just dip their toe into it.

Because when we talked about social media and the early days, people really didn't just understand why they needed these things to do business. And I was trying to explain that you'll need this because your customers are going to be there and you need to meet them where they are. This is kind of the same situation, in that you will need to adapt to these new technologies because that's where your customers will eventually be. If you think about the Gen Z, that generation has grown up. They don't know a world without an iPad or phones or all of these technologies. And my daughter, who's Gen Alpha, doesn't know a world without Roblox. So these are the future customers, consumers of all of the companies products, and so that's how they will expect business to be done. But it doesn't have to be overnight. Companies don't need to jump right in and adapt all of these things all at once.

I think it's much more of thinking about learning, dipping your toe into things, watching and listening, and thinking about your client or your customer and how those folks will benefit from one of these types of services that you could offer. I think that brands and companies will need to think about their own customers and clients and figure out what makes the most sense. For example, back in the early social media days, sometimes it didn't make sense for a brand to be on Facebook at all, or Pinterest at all. It was just go to Twitter, or just go to Instagram. And I think that that's also going to be relevant here. You don't have to learn all of these things overnight. Dip your toe to a couple and figure out where your customer might end up gravitating toward, and then just go in that direction. But right now, it's really time to learn, and just be open-minded and look at all of the opportunities.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So if I asked you to write the Healthy Skeptics rule to approaching those new technologies, how would you tell people to approach it?

Jaime Derringer:

I approach everything being open-minded and optimistic and with curiosity. And I think that now would be a great time together everybody at your company together, or your friends and colleagues or trusted colleagues and just talk about it, get some new perspectives, find out who's interested in it and who might want to take a class on it, or find out what types of contractors might be able to help you expand your design business into a 3D immersive environment. It may not be a skill that you need to acquire. There are many people out there who already do it. Just like in the beginning of the social media days, people had to find somebody who knew how to do social media and bring them onto their team. This is much more about education opportunities and exploration, I think in these early days. I would also say that... You talk about being a skeptic. I think it is very, very much a watch and/or learn or educate yourself.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah, that makes sense.

Jaime Derringer:

I don't know if that was good at all answer. I'm so sorry.

Arnaud Marthouret:

That's fine. I know what I would do because I actually just wrote a piece on this whole thing as a kind of primer. So my approach was like think about what the technology can do for you. So if you find a technology that's mature enough and has commercial potential for you and your clients, then by all means, jump right into it. If you find yourself looking at a technology that looks promising but requires a lot of upfront investment for it to work, it might be worthwhile, but you should really consider if you want to put all those resources into it. But the third point I made is that there's also a lot of scammy things happening. And so that's why I keep bringing the words skeptic up, because you want to be wary of those snake old oil peddlers we've seen it with FTX. And there's been, frankly, crypto exchanges blowing up since 2013 to 2014 since the first one blew up, Mt. Gox, that nobody remembers today, it was still the early days of crypto.

But it happens every couple of years. There's one that promises the moon, and then it turns out to be a scam, and then they blow up. So it's like everything else. There's Bernie Madoffs in every industry, so you just want to be careful with that. So that's kind of my approach. That's why... I tend to be skeptical, but I'm also not a [inaudible]. I don't want to say don't approach new technology because it can be very beneficial, and we've all benefited from it in some way or another over the years. But I think it's interesting to look at that. I like your approach of watching and learning and being curious, because I think that's the best way to protect yourself from scams while still learning about the important stuff, and then eventually dipping your toes and embracing it.

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah, I don't think it makes sense for anyone to go from zero to a hundred overnight with any of these technologies. I think it's a lot of experimentation right now. There's a lot of tools that are still being built. So I don't think we will see the full spectrum of what we're dealing with for another couple of years. Once new companies start emerging with really good utility and applications for this technology, it still feels very much like we're in the beta version of all of these things.

Arnaud Marthouret:

If not even before the beta version, the alpha release or whatever. So let's talk maybe about some specific applications. What are the most promising ones you've seen so far?

Jaime Derringer:

Oh, great question. One of the things I think is really great... You've already talked to Andrew and Tessa from Digby, so I think their design authenticator is fantastic, and I love the idea of being able to trace originality and lifecycle of a product using this technology. So I think we'll continue to see a lot of growth in that area. I'm very interested to see what kind of hardware comes out in the next couple of years for AR. I think that you mentioned AR as being something you're mostly interested in versus being fully immersed 24/7, which totally makes sense. I think that we will see some interesting hardware coming out for AR. So I don't really see it as being something we're using regularly, unless you're shopping every day and you've got your phone up and you can see a sofa in your room before you buy it, but that's a great application of AR technology that we already have right now.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah, that's been around for a couple of years.

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah. Yeah. But I think it's going to explode if we can have some glasses or something that helps us do that. As we look around a room, we can see different enhancements or instructions. Imagine if we had enhancement on how to operate something, or how to fix a problem with your car on the side of the road. All of these things that you could possibly have instantaneous access to, those, I think, are really exciting. But right now, we're not there yet. So I can't say that's something that exists that I'm really excited about, but we all have experienced the idea of AR with these shopping sites. So I just think it will get more and more interesting as we go. And then I think in the design industry, these applications of metaverse type environments are mostly immersive, so that you can walk through a house before it's been constructed and decide, "Yes, I like the sink here," or "No, I want the sink over there." Those decisions are incredibly costly to do after the fact.

So if you can make them prior to, I think it's fantastic. And it also enables you to do things more quickly. If I'm unable to get to a job site because I'm traveling, I can put on a headset, or even just go into an application on my computer and decide where I want things in a home. That is fantastic, and I think that that will continue to get more widely used.

Arnaud Marthouret:

It just popped in my head as an idea. Have you seen anyone design an application where you could be... And say you're in your house and you're looking to renovate or redecorate it, and then you could look at it through a VR system and then you see the finished product. Does that exist?

Jaime Derringer:

It doesn't exist in that there's no application for a homeowner to do that themselves. There are certainly ways that you can create your own 3D immersive environments, but it's not like your house. I think that comes from a designer. But maybe that's something that will emerge over time, where consumers can go in and scan their room and be able to change things around on their own and drag and drop doorways or furniture or whatever in there. I think that's really exciting. We already have things like the paint apps where you can put different paint colors on your wall and see what it looks like. So it would be cool to have a fully immersive redesigning experience for homeowners, but it is available for designers and architects.

Arnaud Marthouret:

And I've seen architecture firms as early as five or six years ago doing VR tours at their buildings, but it doesn't seem to have become super common yet. Am I wrong?

Jaime Derringer:

No, it's not. I think part of it is the hardware, and the infrastructure that we have for creating these has just been very slow. And at least now, we're seeing a lot more momentum and acceleration in that. So I think we'll probably be seeing more and more of it emerge soon.

Arnaud Marthouret:

And do you see promising applications maybe more in the art world or the creator's world outside of design?

Jaime Derringer:

Huge. Huge applications for creators? Certainly from an artist's perspective, yes. The blockchain enables so much exciting stuff to happen. I could mint an NFT piece of art that evolves over time, that has sound, that has movement, that could be placed in an immersive experience or experienced immersively in a 3D environment. So that's really exciting for artists. But I also think if you think about any creator, any designer, there's tools out there already to be designing in three D using your hands in VR, and I think it's only going to get more and more exciting for the creator.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So in the course of our preparation, you mentioned to me generative art. Can you tell us more about what that is?

Jaime Derringer:

Sure. So generative art is any kind of art that's created using an autonomous or semi-autonomous system, which is basically just a set of instructions. So it could be anything from... It actually started to emerge... It's been around for a really long time. There was a lot of it in the 50s. Sol LeWitt, Damien Hurst, Marcel Duchamp, all of these artists have used instructions in order to carry out artwork. So the blockchain technology is really enabling this boom right now for artists that are creating work using code and AI. So AI is considered a type of generative art, but I also really strongly feel like artists who are writing their own code and using that to generate outputs of art are really making some incredible work that I think will be here for a long time. And that movement, I think, is going to continue to be on the rise. And these artists that are doing that right now will probably be collected by museums.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So you just touched on AI. And it's really topical right now because talking about ChatGPT and other technologies, and you see a lot of those, was it DALL-E and other are generating Ais. And there seems to be a lot of fear about AI. And I frankly had similar fears until I started reading a little more about it, and realized a few things that reassured me somewhat. What do you think about AI? And is that something we should really be afraid of, or be more like you and just optimistic and embrace?

Jaime Derringer:

Well, I like your idea of being a little bit of a skeptic with AI. I certainly think it is a little bit scary, but I also, being the optimist that I am, can see the potential of this as a tool. If we just think of it as another tool that will enable us to do things more quickly, whether it's iterate on an idea more quickly or collaborate with others more quickly, or even just get a rough draft of something done. I'm the kind of person that doesn't work well with a blank canvas or a blank piece of paper, so having a starting point to just get me going is sometimes necessary for me. So I utilize it in that way, to just kind of get my creative juices flowing, and then it's all me from there on. But I can see how scary it can be.

And also, I understand the controversy around it. Certainly, an artist who's spent 20 plus years honing their craft and developing a style, a signature style, and then just to have somebody type that into mid journey and generate an image that looks just like it can be... That would be heartbreaking as an artist. But I also feel like that could be a really great tool for that artist, or maybe it's time to push yourself into a new direction.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So that makes sense. I want to push back a little bit against that idea because.

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah, of course.

Arnaud Marthouret:

... yes, that type of art, and let's say the style can become much more accessible to just about anyone. But when the artist who actually is physically capable, or even mentally capable to generate that art without any crutch, so to speak, wouldn't that art still be more valuable because it would still be more scarce than the AI generated art which anyone can literally generate, and therefore be more valued?

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah. I think we can look at it like anything else that's been copied over time. Chanel handbags have been sold on the street all over the world, fake ones for $15, but the Chanel handbag hasn't gone down in price at all. And in fact, I believe some of the bigger brands said that the knockoffs are good for business because they direct people more to that brand as being something that people see or recognize. So yeah, there's two sides to this conversation. Maybe even multiple sides. It's a multifaceted conversation. I don't think it's a black or white issue. It's just like let's talk about it and see where it goes. I hope, for the artist's sake, that the original art from that artist continues to be valuable, for sure.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah. And I think it's slightly different approach to AI, but I think there's a lot of fears for people who, especially in white collar jobs or knowledge workers that thought their jobs were safe, and now AI is threatening them, at least the lower level ones. I think that higher level knowledge workers will still be in demand because the human mind hasn't been reproduced by AI yet, so we're still good for now. And that's where I'm going to play the optimist on that front. I think what's happening is what we saw with automation a hundred years or 80 years ago when a lot of blue collar jobs disappeared and where they're shipped to China or replaced by robots, but it didn't destroy the economy. People just found other things to do. So it overall made humanity more productive and freed up a bunch of people to do other things that could keep moving the humans forward, so to speak.

And I think that's what's going to happen with AI, at least in its current guise. I don't know what's going to happen when we reach general AI that's as or more intelligent than humans, but we're not there yet. Is that a lot of those jobs are going to be... The same way CAD killed the architecture draftsman. It didn't kill the architecture profession. It just removed a whole bunch of jobs that were made redundant. I think it's similar to what's happening. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that's the case. And then those people will find other things to do. And maybe that's a good way to go back to the trades, because a shortage of trades, and we need trades to make the world work. So maybe we're going to come full circle and change things around a bit.

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah, I love that you brought it back to the trade because this is something that I feel really strongly about, but there is a shortage of tradespeople, and there are jobs available for that. So I think that that's a really, really important point. And I would love to see more people enroll in trade school. I know that going to college has been beaten into all of us for so many years, but I really think that trade is a respectable and amazing profession, and it allows individuals to become pretty independent or create their own businesses. So it's very empowering. But yeah, it's tough work, but I think there's so much great opportunity in that industry.

Arnaud Marthouret:

But if you look at it strictly pragmatically, you can make, I'm sure now it's well over 100 grand because of inflation, but as a welder, maybe you study for a year or two, and you come out of school at 20, whatever, say 21, and you start making 100 grand right away or close to, that's not a bad career. Yeah, you're not going to make as much as a lawyer or a doctor, but you also don't have to spend 10 years plus in school.

Jaime Derringer:

And all the student loans.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah, and pay half a million or a million dollars worth of student loans back. So from a strict financial point of view, it makes a lot of sense. And I also think that a lot of people see the trades as being the plumber that's a little overweight that shows up at your house and shows your shows his crack when he's working under your sink, but you can be a plumber and still be very educated and well-learned person. They're not mutually exclusive either.

Jaime Derringer:

Absolutely.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So I am a huge fan of Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs because he's been advocating for trades for probably about 20 years now. And he says the same thing. Those people who he's met throughout his career, a lot of them have become literal millionaires because they've started businesses and they've grown. And now they have 10, 20, 50 people working under them. Yeah, they work hard, but it's rewarding, and it leads to a great quality of life. So I am a big proponent. And I think the colleges now have become just degree mills. Most degrees don't really lead to anything. There are degrees that are useful if you want to be an engineer or an architect. Those are still valuable because they lead to great careers, but most degrees just are not... The cost is not worth the effort anymore because you can't find jobs with those anymore, which is plain and simple.

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah. And I think it's important to take into consideration is that four years better spent getting experience in a specific profession or specialty versus sitting in a classroom.

Arnaud Marthouret:

[inaudible] of life, baby. That's where it's at.

Jaime Derringer:

Love it. Yeah, I don't use my degree. I have one, but it feels kind of useless.

Arnaud Marthouret:

I have three, and none of what I do directly applies. They've been helpful in learning about things that I work on every day, but I don't need them to do what I do, so I'm with you. I have one more question for you. And switching gears a little bit, but there's been a community aspect to everything you've done, at least since the beginning of Design Milk. And it seems to be even growing as you move further into your career. What do you think community is so important? And what you get out of it?

Jaime Derringer:

Great question. What do I personally get out of it?

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah.

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah. First of all, I think community is incredibly important. I think there's nothing better than bonding over similar experiences or things that you like with your peers that just makes you feel included. I think it's a very human need to be part of a group of people who are like-minded or who will care about you or for you, and you for them. I think that's just a very human thing that we all need. And coming out of the pandemic, even though we're kind of still in it, we are at least moving about the world again and seeing each other in person, and I think that people really are welcoming that much more than they would have if we hadn't been through that experience being stuck at home without human contact for so long.

So I feel like it's definitely another one of those things that's been accelerated because of the pandemic is really big in web3 communities, really big. Part of it is this post pandemic phenomena, but the other part of it, I believe, is because for so long, we've been on these social platforms that are supposed to be social and connecting us and bringing us together, and yet somehow they've been somewhat divisive, also not really friendly for conversation. Hard to really have a conversation on social. You could maybe in the MySpace days. Yeah, it feels very much like you're shouting into a vacuum and you're not really seeing the interactions or meeting people like you would have in the early days. So I think there's this backlash that is more focused on ways that we actually can converse with each other. And there's been a movement back to in-person events and smaller, more intimate communities, like communities on Discord, Discord servers, or small groups of people on WhatsApp where you all have something in common and you're bonding over that.

And I think a big part of web3 is about developing a community around something. Sometimes it turns into a brand, and sometimes it's just people helping other people with resources, or coming together around something that they all love. And I think it's fantastic. I've always been a community person my whole career and my whole life. And so I feel like in the early days of the internet, for me personally, when I started finding other people online who liked the things I liked, that was why I fell in love with the internet in the first place. So it's been the driving force behind my entire career.

Arnaud Marthouret:

And I think you and I are old enough to remember the days of web1 where you go to IRC chats or internet forums. And those were a true community. I remember about, I was around 19, 20, I was part of this computer forum because it was really into computers at the time for some reason. And there was a group of maybe 10 people that were on there all the time, and we'd become friends without even knowing what we looked like. And I thought that was really cool. But I think it got lost with web2. And it would be awesome if Web three could bring that back somehow, in different form, but [inaudible]

Jaime Derringer:

It is coming back though. It really is.

Arnaud Marthouret:

It's coming back in person, but I haven't seen it online that much yet. Maybe I'm not in the right spots

Jaime Derringer:

In the Discord servers that I'm in, it is. I'm having dinner this week with people I met in a community that just so happened to be local. And it's bringing new friends to me, which I just thought wasn't possible with the internet, the way that it was going these days. Because I used to meet all my friends online in the early days and then it kind of lost the excitement and the luster of where we would gravitate toward each other or around something together. But it seems to be moving back toward that, and I really... That's probably why I'm extra excited about it, because it reminds me of those early days where you could very easily and intimately connect with other people. And even if you don't meet them in person, they're still there online and always there to chat or be supportive, and I love that.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Yeah, those were the days. So what is Discord? Is the 21st century version of a forum?

Jaime Derringer:

Kind of. Yeah. Basically. I think it's just like a giant... Let me start that over. Discord is an app that you can use to either create your own server, which is basically just a group of rooms that you can create, chat rooms around a specific issue or a brand or a person or whatnot. So anyone can create a Discord server. And it is typically like an invite only or private servers. And there's a lot of public servers as well that you can join around certain issues or brands that you like. So it's just another way to connect with people online.

Arnaud Marthouret:

So is it similar to Slack, but less business oriented then?

Jaime Derringer:

I would say it's very similar to Slack. Yeah.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Okay. Now it's starting to make sense. That's how out of touch I am. I don't know Discord.

Jaime Derringer:

It's okay. It's very confusing for first timers. I think the reason why I am comfortable with it is because I've been creating forums and internet communities for so long that I'm just kind of used to it. But it's very similar to Slack.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Gotcha. I think that's all the questions I had for you. So do you have any last words of wisdom for our listeners about what we talked about today?

Jaime Derringer:

I've been asked this a lot in most of the talks that I've done, and my takeaway is usually to maintain your optimism and your curiosity in exploring your frontiers of technology and what it can do for you or how you can use it. I advise against being scared and pushing against it because it's going to advance whether or not you embrace it. And I think that embracing it makes it much easier to deal with, even if you don't love it. So I think, yeah [inaudible]

Arnaud Marthouret:

It might be a bit uncomfortable at first, but humans are very resilient and adaptable. So eventually...

Jaime Derringer:

Absolutely.

Arnaud Marthouret:

... I think if you... Because we've all done it before with one thing or another eventually. If you get familiar with something and it's less scary. And then you get used to it, and then it becomes part of life.

Jaime Derringer:

Yeah, exactly.

Arnaud Marthouret:

Great. Well, Jaime, thank you very much. That was great. And hopefully we'll do another interview this time in less than six years.

Jaime Derringer:

Thank you.

Truth Is Golden ep. 301 - In Praise Of Craft w/ Fraser Greenberg

This interview was initially published in February 2019.

Fraser Greenberg and I spoke at length about his Toronto upbringing, how he stumbled into family business and transformed it to thrive an ever-changing market as well as his latest endeavour, the coffee shop Milky’s in Toronto’s West End. What struck me about Fraser is the consistency with which he bring passion, purpose and an amazing sense of craft to everything he touches. A fascinating guest with great ideas, check out Fraser’s interview to learn more about him.

Powered by RedCircle

About the podcast: The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

Credits:

Post-Production: Ryan Aktari

Music: Bounce Trio, Star Animal, 2014.

Organ & Keys : Matthieu Marthouret

Ténor Sax : Toine Thys

Drums : Gautier Garrigue

Composed by Toine Thys (copyrights SABAM).

Buy it on BandCamp :

https://weseemusicstore.bandcamp.com/album/small-streams-big-rivers

More info and music here :

http://www.youtube.com/user/weseemusic

http://www.matthieumarthouret.com

https://www.facebook.com/MatthieuMarthouret.Music/

Single Serves ep. 403 - Rudin on The Careers Outside of Architecture

Jake Rudin is a co-founder of the design career consulting company Out of Architecture, a career consulting firm helping architects exploring the value of their skills both in and out of the architectural profession. He also works as a member of the Adidas Advanced Creation Technologies team - fabricating, designing, digitizing, model making, and exploring all aspects of footwear.  

I invited Jake to have a conversation so he can share his insights on challenges facing practicing and non-practicing architects alike and what once can do about it.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd

Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity:

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Jake Rudin is a co-founder of the design career consulting company out of architecture, a career consulting firm helping architects exploring the value of their skills both in and out of the architectural profession. He also works as a member of the Adidas Advanced Creation Technologies team, fabricating, designing, digitizing, model making, and exploring all aspects of footwear. I invited Jake to have a conversation so he can share his insights on challenges facing, practicing and non-practicing architects alike and what one can do about it. So Jake, it's a real pleasure to have you join me today for this conversation that is near and dear to my heart.

Jake Rudin:

Arnaud, thank you so much for inviting me. I've been really looking forward to this discussion, and I think as you mentioned, my interests are all over the place and even might've had you a little tongue-tied in reading my bio, so I apologize for that. But I think what's really fun about the profession that we work in is that it has so many varied aspects and tentacles that reach into all of these elements of design and so on. So hopefully we'll touch on many of these facets over the conversation, but I'm really excited to be here.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

So am I. So let's start with a really hard question. Can you tell us who you are and what you do in your own words, in three sentences or less?

Jake Rudin:

Yes. I am Jake Rudin. That is the first sentence. The second sentence is that I am a professional problem solver and someone who is interested in simply learning constantly. I'll qualify that later, but that'll be sentence two. And for sentence three, I think I work both at the intersection of technology and design through my work at Adidas where I use digital tools and technologies to design footwear and to support in manufacturing; I also run a consulting firm. I called out of architecture with my co-founder, Aaron Pellegrino, and that recently has become much more than a side project as it has taken on a life of its own. So that'll be my three sentences.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

That's perfect. You're such a good rule follower. Good on you. So you left architecture, can you tell us why?

Jake Rudin:

I have elaborated on that in many, many other podcasts, and so for people who are really interested in that deep story, it exists elsewhere. But I will say that here I left architecture because I found it to be a lot less creative than I really desired. I came out of school, I found that there was a huge disconnect between the kinds of varied problems and challenges that I was solving in the studio setting and the work that I was being not only asked to do, but almost forced to do in the profession. And I certainly found that there were many different ways that those challenges arose. And really at the end of the day, I knew that there was a place for me to practice architecture as I saw it, architecture as I knew it should be, which is just this amazingly fun and wild confluence of the making of things and the experiences that they produce, not to stand up in wave so that the light will come back on in the space, but hopefully that tells you a little bit.

There are some really strong anecdotes. I was told after interviewing for a digital innovation role in an architecture firm, that position that I was looking for didn't exist in the profession, which was I had interest in VR and game design and CNC milling and additive manufacturing. So that was a bit frustrating. I also had some pretty standard experiences, really long, really outrageous hours that I was very comfortable putting in, but wasn't receiving the kind of value back from either my workplace or my peers or my bosses that I felt I should be getting both monetarily and also just in terms of appreciation for the love and the work that I was putting in. So those were some of the reasons I left.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

So what would be some of the things you've learned since you've left and pivoted to other jobs?

Jake Rudin:

Well, my very first role out of architecture was working as a director of business development for a small tech startup. And that title, director of business development, was extremely foreign to me. I learned nothing in school about pipelines or CRM, which is customer resource management, or all of these tools of sales and marketing and advertising. But I found them very intuitive as someone who was interested in always learning what is it that my clients need, what is it that they're really after getting to the root of their problem and then trying to design a solution around it. So I actually found selling to be really easy and was pretty immediately disabused to this idea that architects can only do architecture. That was a huge learning from the pivot. But the second was that as I started to get more and more questions from other individuals about how I had made the switch, I found that it is actually something that can be taught.

But really even less than that, it is just something that we all have the inherent ability to do. We just don't have the exposure to the variety of roles that exist kind of adjacent to architecture out there in the world. Partly because in our architecture education, we are taught that there is a kind of singular goal, which is to become a principal or a firm owner or an starchitect or a star designer. And so I was always sort of blinded by that singular goal of going to work for whatever firm it might be, Herzog & de Meuron or OMA or Bjarke Ingels, or even some of the more niche firms out here on the East Coast or the bigger, more commercial firms. And I say East coast, but I'm in fact on the West coast. I do think it was an amazing learning for me in the pivot that there were probably 150 other titles that I was qualified to have, and that was a big component of making the switch.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

And what you just said triggers a couple comments in my mind. One is that architecture school perpetuates that great lie that you can aspire to be a starchitect and be one of the chosen few in the world that really dominates the press and the conversation. But the truth is that most people will never be that either because they don't have what it takes or they even just not the motivation to put in the work that you need to put to get to that level. That's the thing you've never learned in school.

Jake Rudin:

I'd love to add to that actually, and just say that one of the things that we don't learn that is part of that pathway is marketing yourself and selling yourself and being self-aggrandizing in the way that Bjarke Ingels has done to make himself the most strongly marketed architect in the world. It's not by happenstance that he has entire departments of people dedicated to business development and marketing and social and all of these things. It's not just for the love of his work.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

And the other lie, oh, there's a few more to talk about, but the other big one is that those things happen in a vacuum and it's a single genius accomplishing all of that. Bjarke Ingels, I kind of knew intuitively, but when I went to his website for the first time a number of years ago and looked at the staff and how many partners there were and how big the firm was, I realized he's just a figurehead. It's not to say it does nothing. I'm sure it does a lot and steers the ship in the right direction, but there's an army of partners to draftsmen who do all the work and make it happen. And it's not just, none of that would exist without that collaborative effort, and that's the other lie that's kind of perpetuated. And speaking of sales, that's perfect segue to my other comment as you said, you know, start as a business development manager or whatever the exact title was.

Good salesmanship is the same as being a good designer. You have to go in and find out what your clients are up against and provide the solution, except that in one, you're actually designing the solution, in the other, you're just selling a product or a service that fits what that client is looking for. And so a good salesmanship is not about pushing a product or service onto just about anyone, it's finding the right type of clients that are a good fit for what you're offering, whatever that may be.

And that's often misunderstood about sales. And I think it's also another issue in the industry, and I've been talking about this for years, but it bears repeating and I will repeat it until all architecture firms finally understand that, yeah, it's that selling yourself is not a dirty job. It can be a very fulfilling thing if you do it right. If you learn how to market yourself the right way and convey the right message and find the right clients can actually be very fulfilling. So all of that is very interesting. But next question I have for you is why do you think architects are seemingly so well suited to tackle all kinds of careers?

Jake Rudin:

When we start our education, we start by unlearning everything that we know about design. So when you go into architecture school, they teach you that a line is when you're sketching, not some back and forth jittery sort of approximation of a mark between two points. It's two ends and a beautiful sinewy, delicate, slightly trembling maybe segment in between the two. And you start to break down everything that you know into those elements. And you learn that a box is both a solid and a void. You don't even get to buildings until much farther down the line. We can do-

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yeah, you learn to draw buildings before you design anything.

Jake Rudin:

Of course, of course. And you learn to see the world as these sorts of elements that can be manipulated and played with and turned over and made into experiences. But we sort of learned these scale, this design elements that can be applied to not only a whole range of products, but also a whole range of processes. One of the things that I do on a daily basis here at my work in Adidas is I am constantly on the receiving end of ideas of innovation that have yet to find a sort of mechanism for being realized. And what I mean by that is I get a lot of really wonderful, thoughtful, creative moments, and part of my job is to learn what the intention is behind it and to then find a way of resolving it, whether it's through a piece of machinery or technology or 3D modeling or visualization, whatever that is.

And all of that can be done regardless of whether it's a building or not. And I learned all of these things in relationship to the built environment. But every architect wants to design a chair. Every interior designer goes through and designs a nook or a space or a bench or something related to the human body. And that's a different scale than a building as a whole. And then we've all explored this idea of master planning and you start to branch out into these other sectors.

It might seem obvious as adjacencies, but when people come to me and they ask about transitioning into tech, their greatest fear is just, I don't have the language to speak. I don't really understand what it means to work in the tech industry. And once you make that translation of terminology, it actually opens up that, oh my goodness, there are so many parallels between designing your layout for your crit, designing this sort of wire frame and doing that for a website which you might have done for your portfolio or doing this for an application or an experience which you might have done if you were ever designing a museum or curating art or any of these things.

There are so many unspoken adjacent pathways, but the core skill is that architects can learn faster than anyone else that I know. And you go to school to learn not to really become a professional, which is why we still have to get licensed afterwards, which is why you still have another 3000, 5,000 hours or in the UK you've got part one, two and three. And it's maddening for most people, but I would do the degree again anytime. If I had to go back and go in reverse and start all over, I would get my architecture degree again.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Oh, you would? That's interesting. Because I wouldn't. No.

Jake Rudin:

Why not?

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

I think I would go in the trades. I would find a trade that speaks to me and just learn to work with my hands. And so either fix or make stuff which is related to design in some sense because you're problem solving, but I have this unrealized dream of becoming a motorcycle mechanic.

Jake Rudin:

How very zen of you.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yeah, well said. Even beyond that, that's the first step. Beyond that, I think the ultimate goal would be like to learn how to design motorized objects, like custom make my own motorcycles. That would be really cool.

Jake Rudin:

I would say that your degree would facilitate that better than just going to a school for trade. Because when you have this broad understanding of the world and you can look at the relationship between not just the motorcycle and the human, but the motorcycle and the road and the context of other vehicles and the climate and all of these things, you have a more holistic view on the problem. It took you longer to get there, for sure.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yeah.

Jake Rudin:

And if you do end up going down that route, I will be first in line for a custom bike. But I would say that it's very, very unlikely that you could leave architecture school without some of those skills of making. And I feel that every day. I'm always in the wood shop or tinkering with something or assembling something. And I really would attribute all of that to my studies.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yeah, that's a very good point. I didn't expect you to be so wise.

Jake Rudin:

I look old for a reason. I have a lot of wisdom, but I don't know, it's taken years off my life to get there.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

You can't have everything, but I think it's a good thing to have. So let's talk about Adidas a little bit and how did you end up there?

Jake Rudin:

Well, as I mentioned, I went through the series of interviews where I just realized that architecture was just not going to be for me. And part of it was that I left the two best universities in the United States with very expensive degrees and was getting offers for employment at less than a 10th the cost of my education. So that was really jarring. And with a lot of student debt in tow, I really felt like this is just not going to be a sustainable way for me to build my life. And also not really the kind of work that I was discovering and I was interested in doing. So when I moved out here, I applied to everything. I applied to game design companies, and here being Portland, Oregon, I applied to Nike, which is headquartered here and interviewed with them. And I applied to Adidas.

And the difference and the winning factor for Adidas was that they loved all of the skills that I brought. They weren't just interested in my data visualization or coding, which Nike was. They weren't just interested in my ability to create plans and sections and so on, which architecture firms were, they were curious about my mold making and casting and 3D modeling and rendering and my interest in new materials and my interest in exploring tree houses and climbing and sport and all of these things. And when someone holds out open arms and says, "We want all of you", that's the place where you should go. And I consistently tell that to clients about of architecture is that it is a two-way selection process. And when you are honest about what you bring to the table and someone appreciates it in that way, it's a very magical, very rare thing.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yeah, it is because both on the employer side and on the employee side, because I see it every day, people just, I wouldn't say they hire people or take jobs out of fear, but it's more like, okay, I got to pay the bills and there's a lot of very pedestrian practical considerations that I'm not dismissing, they're there for everyone, but in an ideal world, more people would do what you did, which is go balls out on what you believe in and hope that you get the job you want or you make your own job. Sometimes that's how it works. So was there a special specific title that you were hired, like a job description you were hired for?

Jake Rudin:

Yeah. Much to, what I'm sure my will be my HRs dismay, I will say that the job descriptions here are horrendous and very, very lacking in the truth of the work. So I always encourage people to reach out and make contact, network with the company, try and get in touch with the hiring team and have a conversation. Because very often the bureaucracy behind creating a job description and creating a headcount and a new role in a company really hurts the understanding on the applicant side. So the job description that I applied for was senior manager of the maker lab. And this was something I thought, "Okay, well I've done a lot of fabrication, I worked a lot of tools, I have a great model making experience. This sounds like a good fit." I didn't actually get an interview for that role. What I did get an interview for was a position called Technical Manager of Footwear Technologies or something like that, Product Creation Technologies.

And I went to that call with the recruiter and about 15 minutes in I said, "Look, I'm sorry, but I don't really know what the job is. I'm very flattered to be interviewing, but I don't think I even applied to this job." And the recruiter's name was Brian, a fantastic friend of mine since then over the last six years. And he said, "No, no, don't worry about it." He said, "I think you're a good fit for this role." I said, "Great. Tell me a little bit more about it." And it turns out that the role was basically a blend of what we call horizontal positions.

And so in the company there are verticals, running, basketball, soccer, all of these different things, but then there are horizontals and basically floating resources that can be utilized by any given team for a specific project. And this position was one of those horizontal roles under a technologies team that had both this fabrication side, the maker lab and the sample studio now, and the digital technology side, which I was hired to be on, which really focused on my Rhino 3D modeling skills, my use of Grasshopper and my interest in things like Unity for VR and my creative suite skills.

So all of my Adobe work finally paid off. And so it was an excellent role and I'm still on that team, have since been promoted to lead a team of about six or seven. And I've got computational designers, I have pattern makers, which is the sort of 2D cad of footwear in many ways. And it's just an absolute pleasure and I love what I do.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

And so if LinkedIn is correct, your title is Senior Manager of Digital Technologies.

Jake Rudin:

Yes. And LinkedIn is correct.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

So what does that mean?

Jake Rudin:

So what that means is that as a senior manager, I'm responsible for other members of the deem other experts who are far better at these technical skills than I am. So I have Grasshopper experts and experts in Rhino and plenty of other different kinds of technologies including into Intomoda and Swatch and lots of various things. But my responsibility is to make sure that all of the barriers are removed from the work that they're doing, that all the expectations are set, and also that when necessary we can sit down and I have enough understanding from my technical background to propose elegant solutions to very complex problems. And that's my favorite thing to do is to sit down and say, "If we use this tool or abuse it in this way, and we sort of disregard the traditional notion of how we might use a computerized stitching machine, for example, we could actually trick it into doing this very cool thing for us. Now go figure that out."

And so there's a lot of back and forth, a lot of work with our innovation team. So I spend a lot of time being the bad guy in meetings and saying, "That doesn't really make logical sense." And they say, "No, no, it's going to be really cool, don't worry about it." And of course then I'm the one who's worrying about it and it ends up being a really good fun opportunity. And I think of myself very much like the civil engineer to the architect very often saying, "Hmm, I'm not sure that that's going to stand up." And they're going, "No, no, no, it's definitely going to stand up."

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

The voice of reason, right?

Jake Rudin:

Yes.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

And then you're left to trying to figure out how to make it all work.

Jake Rudin:

Yes.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

So do you approach teams with ideas and solutions or they approach you with problems and then you're left to solve them?

Jake Rudin:

Oh, a little bit of both. What an amazing question though. I love that question. So we work a lot like a small business. We have about 25 people in total in our advanced creation team. A big part of what we do is creating solutions and shopping them around the business for things that we identify as needs. And that I think is what keeps our team growing because the team has gone from about 12 to 15 when I started to 27 or 30. And that has been a big part of my trajectory is, hey, this looks like an issue, why don't we jump in?

But I will say that what keeps the lights on really is the ongoing list of problems, or I guess really just a lack of cohesive understanding of tools like 3D in the rest of the business. So we get to be those specialists that people rely on. And the reason why we're a horizontal team is because very often we can build a system for 80% of the work, but then there's 20% that we are just breaking all the rules, trying out new materials, trying to get something up on the website or in an advertisement or make a shoe that has an exploding axon as part of its delivery. And we're a big part of making those things possible.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

When you say shop those ideas around, that's internally or you also work in external businesses?

Jake Rudin:

Yeah, predominantly internally.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Okay, I thought so, but I wanted to clarify. So let's go back to the idea of architects and their careers and maybe focus a little more on out of architecture. What are the biggest challenges facing the architects practicing and non-practicing that you engage with?

Jake Rudin:

Honestly, that is an incredibly complex question. I think you've outlined a few, and we recently published a book that has a lot of these issues, very eloquently outlined in it. And to name a few, I would say there is an issue with the architecture being, or sorry, I'm going to reframe that as there is an issue that architecture was built by the gentry and the privileged class and people who could afford to really take the time to think eloquently through these problems of design, beauty and aesthetic and functional solution. And we have not designed a business around compensating for that. So it still requires sacrifice. And we tell people that they have to pay their dues. Clients come to us both inside and outside of architecture, having paid plenty of dues and not gotten really much in return. So we've formulated a business that says, look, if you want to be a successful starchitect, you need to have some wealthy friends who can buy a building from you who you can go and design your grandmother's vacation home and all of these things. That that'll get you some projects.

If you want to do it the hard way and you want to go work for a firm, we're going to pay you a lot less because you're still learning. We as very frequently we'll hear people say that they don't feel useful leaving school and going into an architecture firm. And I would simply say that maybe you are not useful to that firm, but that does not mean that you are not useful or valuable. So that's a big, big issue. We also have plenty of issues surrounding equal treatment, equal pay, the way that we distribute work incredibly unevenly between genders and across different races. And our architecture has a huge amount of problems. They're also shared by many other professions. So I won't say that it's the only place those exist, but these are reasons why people come to us. And I think the latter part of it is just creative fulfillment.

I would say that at least half, if not more of the, at this point, something like 800 plus clients or out of architecture and the thousands of conversations that we've had have circled around this idea that we were sold something in school that we're not getting when we go into the working world. And by way of example, my incredible, I'll call her my mentor, but she's also my wife has told me many times that in conversations with her leadership, they've said, "Look, you're a great designer, but you're not going to get to design for another 20 years. And that was before she left to go start a vineyard.

And I think that was a great decision because she gets to make all the creative decisions and drink wine at work, but it's an incredible thing to hear that someone went to school to be a phenomenal designer and then they go into a position in a design profession where they're now learning to be very technical. It's not a bad thing, but it's also not transparent and it's not honest when we tell students that this is what you need to know to be successful.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Is it a challenge for firms to recognize where someone's talent lies?

Jake Rudin:

It is a challenge in that most firms, and I really appreciate you asking this question, most firms do not specialize their architects. They have architects or they have interior designers, but you do not have very specific roles for those people. Now, that's not to say that someone isn't sort of touted as the best visualizer and they might get all the visualization or rendering work or someone is a better BIM modeler or BIM manager and someone is a little bit better at doing the plans and all of these things. But we expect you to do everything, to be able to do everything.

And by not specializing people, you also go into a firm and you are beholden to do the work that they have set aside for you already, which is horrendous. You should be able to go in and say, "This is what I love doing. I love model making, or I love building with my hands, or I love this part of architecture." And yet we require architects to see through the entire building process, which can take five years. That's a long time, especially for a young person. You're asking them to come out of school, spend another five years on a single project before they really know how they feel about any given part of the process. That's a tough ask.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

It's a tough ask, but it's such a complex profession that I'm having a hard time imagining it wouldn't be almost necessary to do, maybe not for five years, but two or three years when you get out of school to understand how, similar to you being, well somewhat versed in all the things your team is specialized in, but without knowing all the details so you can be conversant enough to have intelligent conversations with the experts.

Jake Rudin:

But I will tell you that that role that I have is not every role in the company. I have a role that is paired with another 10 experts who are very specific in the function that they serve and very good at their work. And in our sample studio we have people who do even narrower bands of work who are really good at adhesing and gluing things together or who are really good at stitching. And we don't expect those people to be able to do or understand all those tasks and they don't all want to either.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yeah. So I think the issue of specialization is it relates to specialization at the firm level as well. Because most architecture firms are completely averse to specializing, I would even say terrified of it, because they think that they can be all things to all people. And have realized through the mentorship of some really smart people over the last few years that the more you're specialized, the more you narrow down your potential pool of clients, but also you're going to be sought out way more for your expertise. So it's fine balancing. You can't go overnight, okay, I'm going to be the expert at X. You have to build towards that. And it also, what people often take it to mean is that you don't take on any other kind of work if it comes to you. That's absolutely not true. You should, and if you want take all the work that comes to you, it just means that you're not looking for it and you're trying to specialize.

So I always said, imagine you're, you want to be the best coffee shop designer in the world. If you set out to do that, people would literally fly you all over the world to design their flagship cafes in Buenos Aires, in Mexico City, in Shanghai, wherever, Mumbai, because they recognize the value and they might have seen your first project and then that's where you have to be a little bit of a Bjarke Ingels and you have to learn how to promote yourself as well.

Jake Rudin:

Sure. Or you look around and you find a place that does that work. And I guarantee you, I know people who have worked for the Starbucks retail design team and they have senior directors and VPs who are responsible for exactly what you're talking about. And they get paid incredibly well and they're very highly sought after for the work that they do.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yeah, exactly. Or conversely, you can broaden your expertise, but then you narrow down your market. So you say, I'm going to be an industrial architect, I'm going to do all the industrial building in my own area, like my metropolitan area. And then you try, you don't have to be the best in the world, you just have to be the best in that area. And it's wide enough that there's enough different businesses that need industrial buildings. So it's a little less specialized, but it's specialized in terms of market. And so when you said firms are not specializing their staff, it brings me back to that issue. It's like somehow specialization is seen as an unconscionable risk or a dangerous territory to get in when if you do it the smart way, it might be a bit of a challenge at first, you have to build that image and recognition, but once you do, the work is just going to come your way.

It's like if you're being one of the local motorcycle mechanics, if you're the one that's honest, does the work on time and doesn't overcharge and still does a great job and maybe occasionally throw something in for your clients, people are going to come back to you because we all know how mechanics are. And that's a rare way to be for mechanics. It's not necessarily always that hard to be one of the best. You don't have to be the best. You have to be good enough that people recognize that and come to you. So it's not really a question, it's a bit of a comment, but I think it's important to talk about because that fear of specialization and I think is paralyzing way too many firms and way too many people when it could be a boon to either a firm, for a firm to grow, or for someone to build a great career.

Jake Rudin:

Absolutely.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Kind of like you did.

Jake Rudin:

Thank you. I take that as a huge compliment.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

So you mentioned you have this consultancy called Out of Architecture. What are you looking to accomplish with it?

Jake Rudin:

That's an interesting question. We're about five years into the project that is Out of Architecture, and it did start from pretty much the questions that you're asking, which is many people reached out and said, "Hey, why? Why Adidas? Why would they accept you? What could possibly be the match here?" And after having those conversations, the tone shifted a little bit more to why you and more, how can I do this? And what I began to realize was, to our conversation of specializing, there was a very small niche of people that really needed help. And those people were architects who are looking to leave architecture. Now, I will caveat this by saying many people think that our goal is to get architects out of architecture. And I will say that that is not the stated goal of Out of Architecture. What it is to help people define what they want to get out of architecture.

Maybe that is leaving architecture, but it's also taking something with you no matter what that looks like. Because you are taking skills, you are taking experiences away from the profession, and sometimes you are turning around and supporting the profession from another lens. So we mentioned retail design, which is a different way of practicing architecture, just not at a traditional firm. But then there are all manner of other roles, and we've talked about a few already, but the goal of Out of Architecture is first and foremost to help individuals who are feeling lost in their careers find roles that are both challenging as well as, and yes, the spotlight is very dramatic on me, that are challenging, creatively fulfilling, and that pay well and pay a respectful living wage. And those are really core tenants to Out of Architecture. Whether or not those jobs exist at a firm is completely up to the architecture profession itself.

And we have placed people and helped them find jobs inside of architecture firms, but more often than not, people have been there, done that for anywhere from a couple of months to five years to 15 years to, I kid you not, 50 years is our longest practicing client and they just say, "Look, I'm done. I've gotten everything that I can out of the profession, or it's taken everything from me and I'm ready to change."

But I think you asked what the goal is, what are we looking to accomplish? And it's really just about helping individuals. It is a business, but it is not a money making business. I will say that we do charge for our time, we value the time and the work that we do, and we reinvest it into things like the launch of our podcast recently called Tangents, which talks about stories of people who have left architecture. That is something that we invest in to help and get out to clients. The book that I mentioned is also another project, which is certainly not a moneymaking endeavor for anyone who has published a book with a traditional publisher, you will know that it is a net not positive, let's say. And these are just ways of communicating with a broader and broader community that has really expanded over the years.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Books are expensive, but it's also a great marketing tool.

Jake Rudin:

We're trying to use it as a great marketing tool.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

It's because they're in people's mind and I don't think that will ever change. Books are token of authority if you've written a book, you've literally written a book on.

Jake Rudin:

Sure. And it's not leadership in a way that I think is important to us because we want the messaging for this transition of the architectural profession to be architects are amazing, they're valuable, they're incredible, they're talented, and they can do whatever it is that makes them happy. Even if that thing is not traditional architecture.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

And smart architects will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a beautiful monograph, not because it makes money, but because it gives them a position of authority when they're trying to market themselves.

Jake Rudin:

Sure. That's absolutely true.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

So when someone hires you, what do they get?

Jake Rudin:

Good question. Well, that can be from a few different lenses. The primary is if you are someone who's looking to make a change in their career and you come to us, we mostly provide one-on-one coaching and consulting for your next step. Sometimes that is as simple as I'm going to leave my job, I'm looking for a new role. I want to move into a position in product design or a position in retail design or a position working in space architecture or on yacht design. These are all real examples of people that we've supported. And those are really interesting because a lot of that is people coming to us for our insight, for some discussion about what those roles might look like, for access to our network, which has become very vast and open to the idea that we have a lot of really strong, really amazing candidates who we're looking to help find jobs for.

So you're coming to us for all of those things. But we also now have seen recently this flip side, which is we are not a recruiting or headhunting company, but we do have companies that are coming to us asking for us to share and post roles for them, asking for us to help find individuals who are stately looking to leave one thing and go into something else that might be considered at least more interesting for them.

And so we have companies that are looking for very unique candidates, whether it's somebody with architectural experience, but who wants to practice in a different setting or companies that are just seeing the messaging that we're putting out about how amazing architecture skills are. And rather than having to hire a graphic designer, a 3D modeler, someone who can do their web design, someone who can do their social media, they come to us for one person who fits that bill and that person is the superstar of their company. So we're starting to get clients from that other side who are asking us for support in recruiting and interesting positions and roles to fill. So that's been an exciting two-way street, so to speak.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yeah, it's interesting. So you briefly mentioned the book and what it is, but what is the key lesson you'd want someone to take away from reading the book called Out of Architecture, correct?

Jake Rudin:

Yeah. The full title is Out of Architecture: The Value of Architects Beyond Traditional Practice. And that is the message is that there is value to your degree and your skills beyond traditional practice. That's the core message and I really genuinely believe that so many people are afraid of that, afraid of making that transition or afraid that they're not good enough compared to people who have gone and studied something like industrial design I hear all the time, or, oh, someone who's really studied human computer interaction. And I don't want to devalue those degrees and say that they're not as good as an architecture degree, but they're also not the only way of looking at those problems. And I hope that someone would pick up the book and if nothing else, after the first few chapters feel validated in their experiences and feel excited about design again. I think it's very fair to say that everybody goes through that phase in architecture of what am I doing here? Why am I doing this?

And I think that some people come out the other side just saying, "Well, this is it. This is all I know how to do." But I would hope that even if you're an architect listening to this and you pick up the book, the first few chapters are this narrative of falling in love with architecture and it should reinvigorate you and re-excite you and make you feel like, wow, this was actually a great decision. Maybe I'm not in the perfect job for me right now, but that at some point I can and have the ability to take this elsewhere.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Do you think the, I wouldn't say lack of trust, I don't think that's the issue, but the design being seen by most people who aren't designers as this frivolous thing that can be easily dispensed with the reason why so many people don't find quite the fulfillment they're looking for in their design careers is there so much of an assault on the value of design constantly, whether it's conscious or unconscious, that people just get despaired and say, throw their hands up in the air and say, "I don't want to deal with this shit anymore."

Jake Rudin:

I saw an article posted on the UK Sunday Times website this week, I believe it was Damn The Architect's, the Rich Man's Folly, something to that effect. And the context of the op-ed piece or whatever, I won't call it an article, was all architects are bastards who overcharge and steal your money. Now that's not a great way, not a good look for the profession, let's say. And I do think that opinion is out there, but I genuinely do not think that that is the main sentiment. I think we as an architecture profession, and I'll include myself in that, point to those articles and say, "Look, this is why we're underpaid." I think that is a load of horse shit and a big excuse for firms to say, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. That is why we're underpaying you." Because as soon as you step out and you look around at all the work that other people are doing, let's take a production agency for advertising and film and all of these things, creative agency studio like process long hours, a lot of smack talking, building things that don't work the first time around.

Creative tool set, some technology, some motion graphic design, all of these things, they make out like bandits because they charge for solutions that other people can't come up with. So when you have a company like Coke or Pepsi or Walmart or whatever it is, and they come to you and ask for a creative solution, you get to charge them whatever it is that you want. And the problem is, for architects that number's super low. Oh sure, sure, sure. Because we think that someone else is going to do it for less, and that's right. That's absolutely right.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

And I'm-

Jake Rudin:

Architects undercut each other all the time.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

I'm with you on that one. I think you're right on the money, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg question in the sense that yes, architects are absolutely a hundred percent responsible for how much they get paid because they get to decide how much they charge. And if they decided to charge what their true worth was, they would just go seek the clients that are willing to pay for that.

Jake Rudin:

Absolutely.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

They wouldn't fuck with the small potatoes that nickel and dime them at every turn. So that is very true. But I do think that there's, I'm going to use a very broad analogy and I might piss some people off doing so, but the managers MBA types, I think there's a general sentiment, I could be wrong, and if you can prove me wrong, I'm happy to admit that.

Jake Rudin:

Well, I have an MBA, so I'll be curious to hear how you finish this sentence.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

I think there's a general sentiment that design is nice to have, but it's not necessary. It's a bit of a frivolous expense. And not all MBAs are that way, and there's a lot of MBAs that have design degrees, so they probably understand design better than anyone else and its value, but in a more, I don't know, again, I could be wrong, so if you can prove me wrong, I'm happy to hear your argument, but I think there's a bit of a sentiment that design, less and less so, but still to this day, it's a nice to have that can be dispensed with.

Jake Rudin:

Yeah, Arnaud, I think you're right if it was 15 or 20 years ago, but I think that sentiment has shifted dramatically in other professions, especially in the professions that pull in big chunks of money per person. There's a low labor count for something like a tech company, and they are valuing the experience, the design of their tools and interfaces really dramatically. Those have huge potential. And there's lots of architects that have gone to work for these big tech companies doing design that doesn't take any more or less time or really any more or less skill to put together a really good user interface. It's just a matter of, well, what are we providing to the client with this? And I think that's a big question for architects is how do you explain to the client the value? Because at the end of the day, people are willing to pay for something that's going to bring them value.

If you could spend $500 and for that $500, you get $800 of gold, you're going to do it because you're getting more than you're putting in. But when you design a building and you say this building is going to provide you happiness or a sense of calm", that is a lot harder of a sell than saying the design and the layout of this building is going to increase the flow of business into your practice. And because you've spent this money on good architecture and good design, everyone's going to walk in that front door and you're going to make 60% more money. If you can say that and you can underline that 60% and say, look, this is millions of dollars a year and over five years, you're going to quadruple the money you're spending on this building, someone's going to lay down a handful of cash and tell you that they would love to have you design their building. So framing is a huge part of why architecture does or doesn't sell, I think.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yeah. And so we go back to the idea of business development and sales. If you learn how to do it well, because I tell clients all the time, I'm not going to name names, but there's a client that I used to work with who charged, and it was a few years ago, so it might be different now, but at the time she would charge, I think, let's say 350 bucks for the initial client consultation where she would ask about their projects and get to know them and maybe sketch a couple ideas on paper and look at what's possible to do given the zoning of the area and whatever, do simple stuff. And I kept telling her for years, you need to charge four times as much. You need to charge $1,500 and tell your clients, if you hire me, I will take that off of the fee.

But then at that point you send a signal of, okay, my time is valuable. I'm happy to meet with you for a couple of hours, but you got to pay up. And then if you decide to hire me, then it's going to be worth your while because we already have done a bunch of work and it establishes the architect as the expert who's valuing their own time, and it also commits the client to something instead of saying, oh, I'll do it for cheap or even free and then people don't feel committed to it because they have no skin in the game. And the difference between 350 and 1500 bucks can be quite significant psychologically speaking. It's still not a lot amount, a big amount of money, but in people's minds like, oh, 1500 bucks, it's like half our mortgage or something. So it's not insignificant anymore.

Jake Rudin:

Absolutely not.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

And so I think that that shift, that mental shift needs to happen in more firms and people need to realize that yes, they will lose some work if they ask for what they really want to get paid, but they will also eventually find clients that truly value what they're offering. And I have this thing with my own work where I always try to find ways to at least tie part of my compensation with results. So if I can get the clients for some kind of result that we agree upon together before the work starts, then I get paid more. And if not, I still get paid for my time and thinking, but if I get them the result they need and it helps them make more money or close more work or whatever, then it's only fair that I get paid more because my work's more valuable.

And I think architects need to start thinking that way more on a regular basis because that's how they're going to transition from the scarcity mindset to the abundance mindset where they can go to a client and just slap their hand on the table and say, this is what we charge, take it or leave it and demonstrate their value at the same time. Obviously you can't just do that and walk away, but the learning to demonstrate your value starts where with the fees and how much you want to charge and then you can justify that by saying, well, we're going to put our money where our mouth is and get you the results you're looking for and then some.

Jake Rudin:

Absolutely. My dad says it's the jobs that you take that'll kill you, not the ones you don't. And so I always keep that in mind when we're meeting with clients and I tell them, yeah, it's going to be $750, the base fee for an initial consult. And they go, "Oh man, well what are you going to give me for that?" And I say, "Well, this conversation that we've been having for the last 30 minutes is pretty representative of the work that we do. If you found value in it and you'd like to continue", and you always know when people go, "Absolutely, yes, I completely want to work with you." You know they're going to be great clients. And when they start down the pathway of, "Well, okay, what's your success rate? How quickly will I be able to do this and this?" And the more that you see someone hesitating, I think it's a good indicator that maybe that's not a good fit. Maybe they're really... Yeah, go ahead.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

No, I was being interrupted, but keep going. Sorry. No worries.

Jake Rudin:

That's okay, Arnaud. We're coming to the end and actually I have to excuse myself very briefly here.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Yes.

Jake Rudin:

So we can come to the last part.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

So do you have to go now or you want to wrap up now?

Jake Rudin:

We can do your last couple questions and I'll take the time to show the book for sure.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

That's pretty much all the questions I had, but as we were talking, something came to me. Do you think an architecture degree is the MBA of the future?

Jake Rudin:

That's a very interesting question. I think the architecture degree is a better general education than any liberal arts degree. I would recommend it highly for someone who doesn't necessarily know the pathway that they want to go but is interested in learning a bunch of different things because it has a huge number of valuable skills. But it's not an MBA having gotten an MBA I will tell you that it is maybe more valuable to me and the kinds of work that I want to do than the MBA, but an understanding of the core fundamentals of business is so lacking in architecture that there is no way that an architecture degree as it stands currently could replace an MBA.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

That's a good answer. So how can people connect with you, engage you, or buy your book?

Jake Rudin:

Well, if you want to connect with me, I am obsessed with LinkedIn and I am super happy to connect and meet people and chat. So you're welcome to find me there. For Out of Architecture, we have both the presence on LinkedIn as well as Instagram at Out of Architecture. If you want to come to us for pretty much anything that we do through that, whether it's to engage with our new podcast called Tangents, you can find that out of architecture website. You can also purchase the book or the audiobook for those of you who like listening to longer format audio, we have that available on Audible. You can purchase it through our website or through Amazon directly in print or on Kindle. And I think if you want to engage with us, just please come by, say hello. We are always open to having conversations like this. And Arnaud, it has been a pleasure to sit here and have this one with you.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Pleasure is all mine. Can they reach out to you, get free sneakers?

Jake Rudin:

No, you can get free sneakers, but I would love to have you support Adidas and we always have really cool new products coming out. So for that, the website, and you'll want to write this down, is adidas.com, believe it or not.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Really hard to remember.

Jake Rudin:

Yeah.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Well, I want to thank you very much for your time. It was a really interesting conversation. Hopefully the first of many.

Jake Rudin:

Thank you, Arnaud. I'd love to have a round two and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

Arnaud Marthouret (rvltr):

Thanks, you too.

Truth Is Golden ep. 210 - Stepping On The Soapbox w/ Toon Dreessen

This interview was initially published in January 2019.

In Episode 210, I had a fascinating conversation with Toon Dreessen, principal at Architects DCA in Ottawa and past president of the Ontario Association of Architects. During our conversation, Toon spoke about his upbringing in the Netherlands, his early life and how that influenced his very early decision to become an architect around age 10, a decision he does not regret to this day. Toon spoke about his love of travel, cooking and his unstoppable drive to change architecture's perception in the public's consciousness.

His take on the state of procurement in Canada is more than ever relevant, even all these years later.

Powered by RedCircle

About the podcast: The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

RVLTR x Office D. Sharp - How to Website

It’s time for another installment of my conversations with my pal Dave Sharp. This time, we talk about the dos and donts of websites for architects and then quickly move on to a debate about the state of the industry and an analogy to Toyotas and Ferraris.

Check it out here.

Transcript:

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Hello everyone, my name is Arnaud. I'm from Revelateur Studio and we have Dave Sharp of Office D. SHARP with us today. We occasionally catch up to talk about all things marketing and communications in the realm of architecture. Tonight we're going to talk about websites. Dave, is there anything you want to add to that?

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

No, that's a good intro, Arno. Thank you. Talking about websites, man, you picked websites as the topic for today. What was your thinking? Why websites for architects? Could something we talk about a lot, but why were you curious to discuss this one?

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Because it's been years that I've spent an unhealthy amount of time looking at architect's websites and-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Obsessing over websites.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

... I still go crazy to see how bad some of them are. And I guess the way you could summarize it is that the ratio of bad websites to good websites is grossly lopsided. There's way more bad ones than good ones. So, when I see a good one, I usually use it as a case study of sorts to tell people what they should aspire to do. Not necessarily copy, but just to get the best practices from it. But so many websites are bad, and I don't necessarily mean aesthetically, although that also happens. Sometimes you have very sleek websites, but then the copy and the messaging is just completely off.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yep, yep, totally.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

You and I had a list of subtopics we wanted to cover, so-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Basics, let's start with some basics.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Basics of an architecture website.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Good place to start.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

You were going to start, what do you it should be and how?

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Okay, so this one, I'm going to give a really annoying answer. I used to be so firm about what this should be, the basics of what it should try and accomplish in terms of generating leads, or inquiries, or what have you, what it would need to do that and what it wouldn't need. But as I've grown over time as a marketing person, I think about website basics being, depends on your strategy, because I meet very different types of firms and some firms are really focused on activation and getting inquiries and trying to convert more of their visitors into leads and project opportunities, which is great. That's definitely an important job.

But then there's other firms that I meet and speak to me and they say, "Well, we're all good on that front. That's not really our issue. We are just trying to really change the type of client that we have or the way that we are seen as a brand, as a practice." And for them their website has very, very different basics that it needs to achieve that job. I've muddied the waters a little bit with that spiel.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

I think that's the place to start, because you shouldn't even begin to designed or design for you before exactly what you wanted to accomplish.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

What your objective is. It sounds very marketing person to say that, but it's very true. I think sometimes I see some practices or firms applying, they're applying a strategy or some tactics for the wrong objective. They're not carefully thinking about what they're actually trying to achieve and they see what another firm is doing and they'll do the same thing, but they don't realize that that other firm is trying to achieve something completely different. And it might not have anything to do with getting new business, believe it or not, or whatever. It might be a totally different, coming from a totally different place.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

It's like that conversation that our dear friend Nikita had started on LinkedIn a while back about the controversial big website, because they used to have a very cartoonish, childish, playful website. And that website always annoyed me because it was really a pain in the arse to navigate and find information about projects. But they said, "Oh, that website was" ... Someone said that website was designed to attract employees and intern.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, 100%.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

And so if you look it at from that perspective, yeah, it makes sense. I still think it was a terrible website, but maybe I'm a little more nuanced. I think your point spot on on that, but I think there's something ... If we look at a website in terms of what is the lowest or minimal viable products-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Exactly.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

... kind of goal you should have. I think for architects there are a few things that generally, again, may not apply to a 100% of people, but I think for most it would, you want it to be crystal clear, the website, to make it crystal clear what you do and who you do it for. So, your messaging can be very simple and very brief, but it has to be crystal clear. If you're going to show your work, it should be shown in a way that's elegant, easy to navigate, and easy to comprehend. And anything beyond that I think is gravy. But if at the very minimum you have maybe even very simple looking but elegant and well-designed website, which you can accomplish with services like Squarespace, by the way.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yep, definitely.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

You definitely have a custom website done for you. It's always better, but it's also very expensive. Squarespace is 30 bucks a month or 40 bucks a month.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yep, definitely.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

I think that as far as the basics are concerned, that's how I'd look at it is, if nothing else make it a nice interactive business card or calling card that people will at the very least not be repulsed by.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, definitely.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

And at best attracted to.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

You have an online presence at that point. I definitely do get approached by small practices that have been operating for two or three years and they don't actually have a website yet, and that's not great at all. Because they're stuck trying to make decisions about, "What do I do with the brand name, or the logo? Or should I or shouldn't I engage a graphic designer to do this professionally? Should I do this myself?" I think-

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

They don't have a website, you mean not at all?

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Not at all.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Not even a placeholder?

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Not even a placeholder. No placeholder. They've bought a domain name and that to me is, that doesn't matter what your objective is, that's not going to work. I think if we're talking about practices at a very, very early stage, you wouldn't think that we're speaking to that big of an audience saying, "Get a simple Squarespace website." But there are actually a lot of them out there. I get emails from them all the time. That's definitely the first stage. I think just more broadly a thing that's applicable to a bunch of different practices is that the basics of a website can also mean not very many projects as well. And there are some really, really beautiful websites that are just one project, or three projects, or two projects, and that's fine. And it comes across really beautifully. One of-

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

I have a client who's a more established firm, not huge, but they're up there and they do exquisite work. And I know for a fact that they design dozens, if not hundreds of projects, but their website has, I'm pretty sure it's less than a dozen, maybe even less than 10, but only the best. And the pictures for each one of them are top notch.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, that's the way to do it. That's definitely the way to do it.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

I want to put on my contrarian hat for a second. Do you think it's still possible to be a successful architecture firm without any website at all? And I'm not talking about presence elsewhere online, I'm saying just no website.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

It might be possible, but the funny thing is, there's not a whole bunch of examples I can even think of where there's a successful architecture firm that doesn't have a website. Just the other day I was looking at a successful-ish architecture firm that popped up that didn't have an Instagram. And that caught me as weird because these days that's very rare that you'll find a reasonably established architecture practice that doesn't have an Instagram. And I remember thinking, for how well known this practice is, they're not that well known, which is a weird thing to say. But for how established they are maybe is a better way to put it, they're surprisingly under the radar. And it's funny what an impact I feel like not having that presence is.

Now, I think not having a website is just going to, it's going to be a hundred times worse in terms of lack of visibility, not turning up when people look for, you just can't be having that, right? How do you not turn up on Google when people put your name in by not having a website? It's just so bad for business, I can't see anybody doing it, hey? What do you reckon?

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

I would tend to agree with you, I think. Like I mentioned before, the very least, buy domain name and have a one-page website with your name and your contact info. There's actually, it's not an architecture firm, but I think it's a graphic design and communications firm out of New Zealand called Alt Group. You might know them.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

No, I don't.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

And it's altgroup.net and their homepage, they only have one homepage and it's all white and there's a short sentence in the middle of it that says, "This page intentionally left blank."

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, exactly. That comes back to the initial thing of brand and what you want to do as a brand. When you're at that stage of your marketing journey where your priorities are more around quality of client, brand perception, employee quality, employee, potential employee interest in the practice, whatever trying to brand equity you're trying to build, you could have a very dysfunctional website be part of that story. And firms that aren't at that stage will look at you and think you've lost your mind and that you've lost it. But there's actually a lot of value in occasionally making moves like that if they're from a really good brand perspective. So, a website that is blank like that, and that might be unintentional. Sometimes brands do things that are unintentionally important to their brand, even though it's just sloppiness.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

No, and this is intentional.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Like Berkshire Hathaway.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

This is intentional from other people who know them who say they're the busiest graphic design firm in the world. They don't need a website. So that's kind of important.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Exactly. Which is part of their brand image. It has to be done carefully and done by somebody who's professional at executing that, because if you try to implement that strategy yourself, you definitely are on that fine line between pretentiousness and cool brandness. There's a very, very careful line to tread there and you don't want to necessarily tip too far over the other side. But yeah, that sort of move makes sense. I mean, in the last year I rebranded, I changed my website and I went much more towards trying to define what the brand is about and try and position myself higher in the industry to work with better known or more respected practices was my goal or direction I wanted to go. Bigger practices, more architecturally practices.

And part of that was the trade off that came with that was going, "We're not going to have as much information on the page. We're not going to describe our services in as much detail. We're not going to do this whole variety of different things that were really positive towards getting more business." And I see people all the time criticizing websites for not having enough information or whatever. I used to do that myself, but I've realized that definitely creates a shift in terms of how the brand's seen. Sometimes it can be for a good reason, even though as a byproduct you might not get as many inquiries, or you might not get as many people who understand your service as well as they did before. But those things aren't always universally positive. Sometimes those can be bad things, believe it or not.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

You can get a lot of tire kickers and then waste time vetting them, versus like you said, if you move up market and you get fewer inquiries, but your average sale is like sometimes what you used to do then makes sense.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

It's interesting. I mean, look, I honestly think I probably get more tire kickers because what I'm not putting out as much information about how my services are structured. I'm keeping it way more, part of the brand strategy is keeping it a lot more broad and ambiguous, which is really the opposite of what my approach used to be. It was incredibly structured, productized, detailed, perfectly described. It was really, really broken down. So, nobody that was coming to me was like, "What do you do and how do you do it?" They knew, because it was written in complete detail on my website.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Is a year enough time for you to gauge the effectiveness of your rebrand?

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

The effectiveness happened straight away, really it did. Just straight away, different type of client was coming to me that wouldn't have come to me before. It put me in a little bit of a different league in terms of that perception. I also just feel like, this is a website thing, but having the tools you need to do business and making those yourself or having somebody prepare those for you, things like fee proposal templates and presentation templates and all these capability statement templates. Getting those professionally done is, in terms of sales is a really game changing upgrade in terms of having all of that stuff done at a really high level. It just makes you look, it presents so much better to a sophisticated client, to a high value client that anybody would want to work with them.

But yeah, so I think that's what I think of when it comes to the website stuff in terms of depending on what stage you're at and how those priorities change you might be doing things. Not all marketing is just about trying to get somebody to contact you, so sometimes it's doing things. And when we're talking about project selection, for example, that is also a bit of a mindset shift to narrow down on your project selection, because it does sometimes mean leaving out the possibility that that project number 25, 30, project number 55, that there's something in that is different or unique that would appeal to some project type, that can be quite hard to let that go.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

A very simple tactic to overcome that fear if that's ever ... Because my website is grossly out of date, it's so much out of date that I'm not going to say how long it's been since I updated it. But I've been going through my entire catalog of pictures and reorganizing everything, and I'm posting not every project, but every project that I can like or can stand behind from a professional perspective, I'm posting it on Behance. That will be a lower level, "everything goes" portfolio that's not necessarily geared towards clients, but if clients wants to see a specific project that I can put them there.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

That's fair.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

But when I do get around to revamping my website, then the website will only have the best of the best and that might end up being a couple dozen projects out of 250 or something. I think the curation is really a big part of the process. Let's move to the dos and don'ts of websites and what people should consider doing and absolutely avoid. I think I only have really one piece of advice in that area is, don't do something just because you see one of your competitors do it and you think it looks cool, or you like it. Anything that goes on one's website should really be a reflection of the overall brand strategy as you mentioned before, and it should have a purpose. If your competitor does something that makes sense to them and you find it looks cool but does nothing for you, then that's the reason why you shouldn't do it basically. What's your take on dos and don'ts? What do you have for us?

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

I think what you said earlier about a simple message is a really good one to talk about in terms of a do, because I think it's an area that a lot of architects are really frustrated with is literally it's probably one of the most common briefs I get in terms of people contacting me. They go, "I really need help clarifying my message, simplifying my message." That's always there. Just really just picking a few key things to narrow down on. You don't have to say 15 different reasons that you're a good architect or that your work's good or the 12 ways that your spaces are nice. Just pick two or three things. Keep it really simple in terms of your messaging.

And you just got to prioritize that. I think prioritize a couple things. Be afraid to not say some stuff, sorry, don't be afraid to not say some stuff. You don't have to talk about every other way that your stuff's good. I think it's just certain, just confidence and just narrow down on a couple of things. And usually you'll be able to decide what they are if you just make a list and then start to prioritize what would the two or three most important important things on this list be. So, I think that's a do.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Yeah, and to add to that, I find that a lot of architects really have a hard time putting themselves in their client's shoes and thinking of their work in terms of, "What benefit does it bring to my client? What does the work I do, do for my client?" Because 90% of architecture firms, even the best ones talk about themselves. "We are X, we do this, we won those awards, we are awesome, blah, blah." No one gives a shit about that. What people want to know-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

I do.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

And that's psychology, it's not-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you say. Yep, totally.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

... is, what are you going to do for them? Which of their problems that keep them up at night are you going to help them solve? And once you hit that ... Many architects complain about not being able to charge enough. That's because they don't do what I just said. The ones who do, and I have several clients who actually have gone through that transformation and have started talking to their clients in different ways. They charge whatever fee they want, because they're positioned as the expert and people will pay for their expertise. The problem with most architects is they're seen as a commodity because they all sound the same. So, the messaging should really be about, and that's the hardest part, I'll be honest, that's really hard to do, and that's why it's good to hire people who know how to write those things. Like good copyright-ish-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Definitely. Definitely.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

... to hammer it out for you. You may have a hunch as to what it is, but a good sales, even a sales copywriter, I know it's sacrilege for me to say that, because people hate sales copy, but guess what? Sales copy works. It's unappealing in many ways, but it works. It uses psychology to get people to do what you would like them to do.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, I'd say it depends on whether you're in that stage or not, because I think if you're going like, "I'm trying to get more inquiries, I'm just trying to increase the volume." Which is fine, by the way. Nothing wrong with that. That's like, that's where you're going to be at probably for the first several years. Or it's going to depend on what type of architect you are, what you'd aspire to be, all that sort of stuff. But getting more persuasive copy, more persuasive messaging, getting professional help with that I think is a really, really good idea.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

When I say sales copy, at a entry level it can be just basic sales copy, just to get people to take the action they want. But once you elevate your brand, you still want to think in those terms. And that's where I think some of the most persuasive people I've seen are very experienced advertising copywriters. So, you can do basic sales copy, like white paper type of stuff that's very salesy, effective but not very appealing. Or you can elevate your copy and work with someone who knows how to sell, but also knows how to make it sound interesting.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, exactly. I think so, definitely. It's also, you have to decide whether you want to talk about the architecture service. You're talking about the client shoes and relating to the client, what you're going to do for the client. You have to make a conscious choice about whether your messaging strategy is going to revolve around architect and client, the service side of it, the business, service side of the business, or your messaging should revolve more around the space. What are you actually selling? Because some clients come to certain architects because of the buildings and others come because of the architecture firm. And there's some firms that are both, but typically I find that practices will fall into one category or the other. There are really amazing architects that do incredible buildings that are award-winning that are sick, that photograph well that you see on the cover of Vogue Magazine or Architectural Digest.

They can offer a very, very mediocre service. It doesn't matter, because what they're delivering is pretty amazing and people are coming for that. If their copy was like, "We're going to work with you at every step of the journey and collaborate and listen." Everyone would be like, "Well, I don't really give a shit about that. I just want the thing that's on Architectural Digest cover."

There's a category of that customer and there's the category of that architect. But there's the other category, which is like the architect that doesn't do that work, they just do much more normal work. And the customer that's coming to them is not so much into that. That's not what they're coming for. They're not coming for the thing on the front of the magazine. They're coming for a nice house and a good service. And that architect, that's what their strength is, that's what they're really good at. They have to acknowledge they're probably just okay at the portfolio side, but they're really, really good at running a good business and being a good architect and a good person to work with, and then that's what they copy and stuff should accentuate, so-

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

I think you're right-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

I think there's place for both, I think you need both.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

But I think there's more of the latter than the former, the star-studded level people who can actually run a business purely based on aesthetics. I think-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, yeah. They're a small percentage. No, that's a great, and that's so true and that's important. But I think there's this two sides I've noticed. And they tend to just throw, they take massive shits on each other. They hate each other.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

They do.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

And I think it's cool to just go, there is two sides, and not every architect is a magazine cover architect, but that's okay. But thank God we have magazine cover architects. We love that. That's okay. They can do their thing. And magazine cover architects also shouldn't look down their nose at architects that have more sales or persuasion-driven coffee or are just trying to talk about how they're going to make it a smooth journey to work with a client on their first house and it's accessible. That's great. And I think you need both, but I think it's important for architects to think about which category they should probably position. And this is positioning, like marketing. We talk about positioning, looking at the whole landscape of the market and deciding, "Where should we plunk our business to be in the sweet spot? We're putting it in the right place." And so I think it's just positioning your practice realistically based on where you sit in terms of project versus service. So look, does that make sense?

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Yeah, it does. I personally have a bit of an issue with the whole cover, magazine cover architects thing, because that's what you and I both went to architecture school and that's what we're fed in school. We all think we can become that. And the reality is, most people won't.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Well, it's something we think about. Yeah, no, sorry, go for it.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

But I also think that the sexy architecture takes way too much precedence over competent architecture that does what it's supposed to without necessarily going overboard on the aesthetic or image front. Which I think, as I get older, I find that way more important, because I'd rather see a decent, but average looking school that does what it's supposed to do really well. It functions really well, it helps students perform better, it helps the community life, whatever the case may be, than a very sexy school designed by say Zaha Hadid or her office, since she's no longer around. But that looks super sexy and is on all the magazine covers but starts falling apart five years in.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Maybe, maybe.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

And so there's also that to consider. If you can do both, if you're like a Louis Kahn or Mies van der Rohe and you have the ability to do both, more power to you. Because those guys were really exceptional architects on pretty much any level. But most architects aren't. I think it's a realistic conversation to be had about one's aspirations versus the reality and you're-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Definitely.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

... paid to, because you can be a very competent and highly successful architect and never get published once.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Totally, totally.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

And there's nothing wrong with that. And I mean, most architecture is that way, to be honest. But we just think more about the sexy architecture because it's more in the culture and the psyche.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Definitely, definitely.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

But that's almost a conversation for another time.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Man, but honestly, I think that's the most important conversation. I think that's the conversation the industry needs to have when they talk about marketing. Because I speak at these events or sit on these panels and I just see the two sides talking at each other. And I don't think they realize they're talking about two industries within an industry. The publications, the architect, architect is in a completely different category to the other architect that is providing the architecture service but is not producing that cultural work. I guess, I think there's a hard way to put it.

I remember when I was working at a practice in Japan during my year between before my master's, and they were telling me that in Japan, I might have got this wrong, but they were telling me that there's, in their industry there's two categories of architect. There's a building architect and then an art architect. And there's two, and they're clearly defined. A practice will know whether it's in the art category or the building category, or construction category, or whatever you want to call it. And I think we have something like this in Australia. We have architects and building designers. But there was this idea that within architecture there's these camps that are clearly defined. But I think we get our wires crossed about different strategic things and tactics and what should we do and what shouldn't we do and what's the problem with architects versus, all these things. But I think there's room for both of these groups. But I think you're right, man, it's unrealistic to think that every practice will become or will want to become that practice that's on the magazine cover.

I think the problem that you pointed out is really true though, which is that there are definitely some trade ... There's some challenges if you're not that magazine cover architect. Because the industry, the media, the way that the public consumes architecture, which is primarily through images, that's all very driven towards and benefits that very portfolio-oriented architect. And frankly, that's why there's so many of them and they're so successful. The practices that I tend to interview on my podcast, I'm very biased towards those practices that are winning awards and in magazines. That just tends to be who I gravitate to. And part of the reason for that is that those are the people that the rest of the industry will want to listen to. They're influential, and that's the case. I mean, there are good local architecture practices that are doing good work, but they don't have very much profile. Their work's not published all over the place. Nobody in the industry's heard of them, but that's not a problem. They're running a good business, they're running a thriving little business.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

The same way a regular person wants to know everything about the superstar model and plain looking people are not that interesting. I mean, it's a bit crude to say it that way, but that's the reality of life.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Is it any different in fashion, music, art? Any creative industry is going to have people that are celebrities within that industry. And some clients are going to show a certain amount of, I don't know what the word for this is, but connoisseurship maybe, I think is the technical term. And they are going to be the art collector, or the watch collector, or the music listener who as a consumer knows all the people. And they know who the cool people are and they know who the people are doing the most cutting edge shit. And that's a category of customer that that part of the industry thrives on and speaks to. And when they have their marketing brief, it's like, "I want the client who is design savvy, who knows about architecture, who comes to us because of the quality of the work that we do. They've chosen us out specifically."

If you're saying any of those things in your marketing brief, it's because you are trying to attract that architecture connoisseur client. But the thing is, you have to be on the magazines to attract that client, because that's how they're influenced. If those are your goals, if that's who you want, you're going to have to step it up in that direction. But then again, just the other day I was giving a talk at this event thing in South Australia and somebody was going, "Our clients don't read magazines. They don't care about what other architects are doing. They don't give a shit about architecture awards." And that was a bit of a rebuttal to what I had spoken about, because I spoke about magazines and awards and all that sort of stuff. And you know what? Fair enough, their clients don't care about that. That's not a big deal. That's fine.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

This is my perfect cue to throw in an automotive analogy, because I love those.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, please. It should be a motorbike analogy for you, right, man.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Well, I like both. I like both. But the point is, you can either buy a Toyota or a Ferrari. The Toyota, nobody will notice you, but it will do what it's supposed to do, will work forever. And if you take good care of it'll take good care of you. The Ferrari, everybody will stop you at the gas station. They'll come take selfies with you, but you'll have to pay $15,000 every time you want to do an oil change. And every time you want to-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Totally-

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

... change your brakes it's going to be a $50,000 job. But you'll get the attention you're looking for. I think that's the perfect analogy, because that's really what, let's call it plain architecture versus magazine architecture, the dichotomy is, it's like you have to as a client and as a practice as well, you have to decide whether you want to be Toyota or Ferrari. And once you're clear on which you are, then you can focus on those clients that you-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

A 100%. You've got to be clear on it, man. They've got to be realistic and you've got to even and decide, "Oh, maybe I want to be Ferrari. Who says they want to be Toyota?" That's always used as the analogy to the marketing people to get people thinking about making their brand better seen, right? It's like, "Do you want to be the Toyota or do you want to be the Mercedes, or whatever?" And everyone's meant to go, "Oh, I want to be the Mercedes." But it's a problem if you can't build the Ferrari car. If all you can build is the Toyota, if that's what your business does and produces. You're not going to get very far trying to have a Ferrari mindset when you're got a Toyota chassis. You know what I mean?

I think you have to actually have a realistic view and get some, I think that's where some outside feedback is valuable. That's what I'm, as a marketing consultant, I think also we have to put ourselves into categories. When I talked about my rebrand and business shift, it was about me deciding which category I wanted to move into and be in and be comfortable in. And I wanted to go into more of that, I don't want to say the Ferrari category, but screw it. The Ferrari ca category is where I wanted to be because I saw that's where I wanted to work in that area of the world.

Because at heart, I'm an architecture guy. I went to architecture school, I love fucking great architecture, and that's what I wanted to, I want to gravitate in that world. That's where I want my career to go. But I still love the marketing world for the Toyota, for the 90% of practices that are just doing good work, are working in their area, in their city, word of mouth. They're getting their name out there, they're doing business and they're doing great.

But I think there's a lot of marketing that works for them that you maybe don't even necessarily need a big time architecture marketing specialist to help you with, because really you're just trying to get inquiries. You're trying to keep your digital presence up. I think in some ways it's a little bit more straightforward. But I don't know, there's straightforward things to either side. Also, just putting your stuff, sending your stuff out to magazines is pretty straightforward in its own way. So look, there's like, there's elements to both of it. But man, I think that was a great place to go with this conversation, because I think it's at the core of the problem that perhaps just need to think about.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Like you said before, that's the conversation the architecture industry needs to have. Not base their perception of themselves and others based on false premises, but really look at what the reality of their practice is and have those hard conversations with the people who help that market themselves, because that's really-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And also, just also just stop criticizing each other. The two different sides. I feel like there's that Ferrari architect, there's a lot of people that on LinkedIn and stuff, whenever I post about this stuff or have a podcast about it that are like, "Well, isn't it something wrong with our society, or something wrong with architecture that there is this kind of architecture?" And that is probably a conversation for another day, but also, it's just self-evident that there is a lot of demand for that category of work, who we see that in the prominence of so many great architecture firms. So, it exists. It's a real thing. And I think it's just, deciding where you sit with it, I think is important. But yeah, man-

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

The nature of the business is such that architectural services are expensive, and so that tends to make them only accessible to people with deep pockets, or institutions with deep pockets. And there's that tension between the idealism of architecture when you're in school and you think you can design buildings for everyone. But the reality is, most people can't afford an architect. And that's why we have large-scale developers who built tract housing and replicate the same house a 1,000 times to keep their costs down and be able to pass it on. And yeah, those are not architects' houses. Are they bad? I don't know, I've never lived in one. Maybe not that great, but maybe not that horrible either.

But I think that the problem is, I don't know if there's a way to square the circle, if that's even a thing you can say. That might be a Frenchism. Between the desire of architects to do all kinds of work, including for people that may not have the means for it. And the reality of the business is that you're going to have to work for people with deep pockets one way or another, whether it's large projects for big companies or institutions, or wealthy clients who can afford their dream home. I don't know if that's a problem you can ever solve, but it's an interesting debate, to be sure.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Man, I have seen, okay, so on the one hand, I totally agree. I think that there's a lot of architects, man. We're a very granular industry. Australia, I don't know, I think there's 12,000 architecture firms, or something along that line. It's crazy. We're a small country. We have a lot of architecture firms. There should be enough architects at both the high end, the middle end, the affordable end at any given time to be able to cater to anybody who wants an architect. There is not an architect shortage. There's a shortage of everything else. There is not an architect shortage. So, anybody that wants to should be able to work with one. There is obviously a economy of scale thing with certain budgets and so forth, but there is lots of good studios that are trying to come up with ways to do just things with hourly rates or fixed fees.

There are studios that are structuring ways to make it possible that people with very ... Budgets that would have previously been impossible to work with an architect, they are finding ways to do it. So, that that's a really, really good thing to see. But I think when I say there's no shortage, I also, on the same time I see a lot of architects and ones that I work with that are trying to launch new ways to make architecture more accessible into the public. And those projects are failing. And some succeed, but a lot of them fail, because unfortunately the demand is not there. Not for them in particular, but it just seems like actually there isn't as much demand for architecture as architects think there is. And we just take it for granted that there's all these people that want to work with architects, but there's just too many barriers to entry.

But I actually think it's the opposite problem. There's a lot of actually great architects that would love to offer their services more broadly to the public, and the public don't want it. I'm like, "How do we actually solve that problem, or work on that?" And I think that is a marketing challenge, but something that's come up over time is this idea of, how does architecture, the category market as an industry? We're not like dog food. We don't have two big companies, or we do get together as an industry, but we don't market as an industry or advertise as an industry. We don't do any market research or any really great market research in the industry, at least in Australia. It's been a long time since any of our peak bodies have commissioned any half decent market research or run any good ad campaigns in my opinion.

I think that there's a lot of room for improvement there. I feel like maybe that's the way to get more design out there is to actually try and get the public more into it. And I think anybody that's doing anything that's about trying to get the public educated or excited or involved in architecture is a really good thing. So, I think more of that. It's part of the-

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

And I think the part of the problem is, in my opinion, twofold, is one, there's been a lack of innovation in architecture, because we've been building the same way for let's say a century-

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

What you're saying, yep.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

And I think that lack of innovation is not for lack of architects trying, but I think it's predominantly regulatory in nature. Regulations make it nearly impossible to innovate for a myriad of reasons. And I think that's one of the big problems of architecture. And it also leads to the housing crisis that we're all experiencing. I don't know in Australia, but in Canada it's 90% of it is regulatory.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean-

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

If the government loosened the rules just a bit we would be able to build a lot more and a lot faster.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, there's that side to it, for sure. I mean, look, but you could also say maybe it's good to see some architects are getting out there really in terms of policy and advocacy and dealing with government. I have no idea how you deal with government and get regulation changed and stuff like that. But there's some really smart architects that know how all of that stuff works, and they're out there having meetings with politicians and doing all this important stuff. And I think that that's incredibly impressive. Also, just in terms of innovation, I mean, I open up Twitter or Instagram every day. I see a photo that's absolutely viral of an architectural space generated by AI or something like that. Or these people that are building these AI architecture and interior services just gaining 10,000 followers a day because it's becoming absolutely this phenomenon. And not a single one of them are architects.

There's this also interesting sort of thing of there are these ... Where is the public interested in design? Where is their attention going? And it's like our architects, are they getting involved in that? I don't always feel like you just need to jump on whatever the latest trend is at all. But it's interesting because whenever there's a sign that, "Hey, people are really interested in architecture." That always catches my attention because I never expect it. I'm used to people not being interested in architecture. So, whenever it's going viral on Twitter, I'm like, "Oh, shit, people are, there's lots of people and young people and this is amazing." Or a rapper will start tweeting about how much they want to learn about Frank Lloyd Wright or something, and I'm like, "Oh my God. Actually, architecture and culture, I love to see it." But so whenever we see signs of that, it's really positive. But I feel like that's also important piece of the puzzle.

But I also, maybe talking earlier about people being really divided on things or these two sides in the industry, I think these are areas where both sides can see the benefit of there being improvement, whether it's like regulation, whether it's technology, whether it's like culture promoting the industry. I think that's something that everyone can get around. So, I'm also happy that we talked about that, because I think those are also those conversations that architects need to keep having, because it's not just them taking shots at each other about whether or not people should have $5 million houses or not, and whether architecture should be involved in that, so I really like to see it. It's really good.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Yeah, I think it comes down to what can you learn from the other side? Because there's something to learn. But I think that this architects shitting on each other is also a reflection of the scarcity mindset that you see a lot in the industry. As opposed to a growth mindset where you can easily picture that there's room for everyone, or for most people.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Definitely.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

And I mean, we're getting a bit sidetracked into a whole different debate here, but I think those are all fascinating things to talk about. We only touched about half of the points we wanted to make about website.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

It doesn't matter. We'll do it another time.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Yeah, so I'm thinking we should wrap up, because I believe you have to go and it's almost bedtime for me, and do the other half next conversation.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Let's do it.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Let's post this on YouTube in the meantime.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yep, always a pleasure, Arnaud. Thank you so much, mate. We started about websites. We got derailed about two minutes in and started talking about the industry. Perfect, we should just chop out the bit about websites at the beginning and we'll be good to go. Thanks, Arnaud.

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

I think those are the best conversations. You start somewhere and you end up somewhere unexpected.

Dave Sharp (Office D. Sharp):

Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Thanks, mate.

Truth Is Golden ep. 209 - I Could Have Been Throwing Rocks At Goats w/ Jan Lorenc

This interview was initially published in December 2018.

In Episode 209, I spoke with Polish-born designer and architect Jan Lorenc, principal of Lorenc + Yoo, a leading experiential design firm based out of Atlanta. Jan spoke about his upbringing in communist Poland and his subsequent move to the US at age eight, when the weight of communist policies and constant shortages of basic goods became too much to bear for his family. He also spoke about how this early life experience shaped his drive and work ethic. Listen in to hear Jan's journey through life and how he got to become the respected designer he is today.

Powered by RedCircle

About the podcast: The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

Single Serves ep. 402 - Peterson on Socially Fit housing

In this episode, we're going to dive into the topic of housing, this time of the "socially fit" kind. I know, I know, we've been talking about it a lot on this podcast, but it's a critical issue that still doesn't get the attention it truly deserves, while its root causes - by now broadly acknowledged and agreed upon by most - are still not being addressed aggressively enough to make a dent in the issue.

Joining me for this episode is David Peterson, a Toronto-based architect and educator who's passionate about developing socially fit housing that promotes the flourishing of its inhabitants. David doesn't just talk the talk - he's actually designed and developed multiple housing projects that are both desirable and well-received. One of my personal favourites is The Ritchie, a multi-family building in Toronto's west end that David designed and is beloved by its inhabitants.

David and I discussed socially fit housing. We'll explore potential solutions to the housing shortage and offer insights into how we can create housing that truly benefits its inhabitants.

So, if you're curious about innovative housing solutions and want to hear more, tune in!

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd

Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity:

RVLTR:

So can you tell us who you are and what you do in your own words, in three sentences or less?

David Peterson:

As you said, I'm an architect and educator. I see those two disciplines as really related. For me, one informs the other and the practice has primarily focused on housing, although we've done and are doing many other kinds of building types. But housing for us really is this complex program that has a chance to speak to both our social values but also complex programs and teaches us a lot about other kinds of buildings that we engage in.

RVLTR:

So you gave a talk a while back at IDS Toronto on socially fit housing. Can you tell us what it is exactly?

David Peterson:

The term socially fit housing actually comes first from core housing needs, which is this term that the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, CMHC uses to think about housing. And it has these kind of three aspects, affordability, which we can talk about, and also adequate housing. Adequate housing essentially is maintenance, and then they speak about socially fit. For CMHC, socially fit really means that demographically there is enough bedrooms for children in a particular kind of description that they use. But I've come to think of socially fit housing related to a demographic group and then their needs related to sociability and the relationship to both form and that's... Availability to social spaces essentially.

RVLTR:

So can you tell us why that's important to you?

David Peterson:

I think it's really important because we speak about all the time about sustainability and we know that sustainability, we often speak about it in terms of energy and the environment, but certainly sustainability also has a aspect of affordability. And so certainly something that's exceptionally energy or environmentally sustainable but is unaffordable, that we don't have a situation that's going to be tenable. And the same is true if we said that that same thing that we're calling sustainable isn't including social sustainability, then we have a problem.

So for instance, a good example, it might be that you're thinking about a housing unit that could be very small and its small size speaks to environmental sustainability and affordability, but it may not be socially fit, if we're asking increasingly families to live in smaller and smaller spaces that are increasingly isolated as well.

RVLTR:

And I think that's a very important point you make because I've heard in recent times more and more people speaking to the fact that while sustainability is important and we should be mindful of how much stuff we produce, how much energy we consume, energy in all its forms is also extremely important for human flourishing. So I can see a parallel between what you're saying and the fact that environmental sustainability should probably shouldn't come at the expense of human flourishing and human progress, otherwise we're kind of losing all the benefits of what we've seen since, say, the industrial revolution and how much the world has improved overall. It's not to say it's perfect everywhere, but how much it has improved overall. So I think you've touched a bit on that, but why do you think we should advocate more of that socially fit housing that you've described?

David Peterson:

I think it in large part because there are forms that for housing or other kinds of building programs we might say aren't necessarily any more expensive, but if we change that form, we may find we that we actually gain something socially. So it doesn't come with an additional cost. Really what it's requiring from us is a shift in our minds to say that, "Not this building form but that building form, not this arrangement of units, but that arrangement of units." And we can talk more about that, but essentially it's that as a beginning point. It's almost like at that early stage of conceptualizing the problem that we need to shift what we do.

RVLTR:

And so can you speak a little more to specific examples of work you've done, because I personally know some of your work or most of your work and I can see that in it. But can you give us some examples of how that's been a part of your design ethos and how that has made projects better?

David Peterson:

I think for me it begins by thinking about it as a site plan almost, like when we think about an... As architects, we kind of get taught this, the public space and then the private space. But what seems to get left off is semi-public space. It's that space in between. It's actually that social space if you think about public is the space of the sidewalk where strangers might meet and then the private space of that realm inside the space. And then for low-rise housing, the porch is that kind of semi-public space, that kind of intermediate space between these realms.

But that's, in multi-residential housing, that's entirely removed. So what we try to do in our buildings, like made a courtyard building that you mentioned at Richie, the courtyard is that semi-public space. It's that space that's not entirely public because it's not open to the street, but it's shared. So all the units that face onto it have access to it and then it becomes this kind of intermediate space that people can gather. And because their private spaces are adjacent to it, they're aware of the activities inside that semi-public space, which activates it, which encourages you to go in and out. It's all those sorts of things that create an ease of inside, outside that architects love to talk about but we see less and less because we've continued to remove so many public space from much of our design work.

RVLTR:

And even, I had that conversation with another architect recently. There's not even that many public spaces in this city anyway. He was talking about what's happening at Duffin Mall and the idea that there's this giant parking lot that's completely underutilized. And he suggested, I thought that was crazy, but interesting idea that this could be turned into a public plaza. So I digress a bit, but not only we like public spaces, but I don't think we have a lot of semi public spaces. Speaking to that one specifically at the Richie, what's always been interesting to me is that it's behind a glass door.

So when you walk by... Or maybe it's a grate, some kind of, but semi-transparent, you can see through from the street. And that space has always been very appealing to me. I've been lucky enough to go in at least a couple times just to check it out. But even to passerby, it's a very intriguing space because you can't get in but you can see what's happening. And I find that fascinating. So we've talked a lot on this podcast about the lack of housing and I think that's a drum that's been beaten to death, although the problem's still there. So maybe we can talk about that a bit more, but what do you think other challenges the city's facing when it comes to housing specifically?

David Peterson:

I think the challenge has everything to do with both regulatory challenges, but then challenges that we face from the market and are prescribed almost. We go into housing thinking there's really these two choices, towers and then low rise buildings that are private, and that there's much talk about the missing middle, but really we could still make mid-rise buildings and have them be mini towers. Still not including more semi-public space, still not include that kind of transitional between public and private, so that even our mid-rise buildings could still face challenges to try to accommodate families. Really part of the research that we've been thinking about in practice and as an educator is to think about those with limited mobility. So we speak about children, but it's also true for seniors where you've got limited mobility and the architecture is really starting to dictate then your connections to others.

Because if you can't just pick up and go and meet someone in that public space elsewhere away from where you live, then you're really relying on the architecture to make it easy for you. And if it doesn't, then your socialization suffers. And there's been an abundance of research that demonstrates this. During the pandemic we saw things get worse and there was this researcher from Maximum City that looked at children and asked, "Where do they play?"

And it was pretty clear that if you were a child and you lived in a low-rise setting, you had more places to play. Front yards, if you lived in a cul-de-sac, and those were easy places to get to that were safe where parents could kind of see you playing. But if you lived in a tower, then it was more difficult to get to some of those spaces and there were just fewer of them. And as a consequence, we saw wellbeing suffering in those children that were living in high rises.

RVLTR:

And so I keep going back to the Richie, but I think it's such a fascinating example. Because you've done it, you've built that building, what kind of challenges did you experience? And also I'd like you to speak a little bit to the residents' response to the building, because it's been around for a few years now and I'm sure you've kept somewhat in touch at least with how the building is doing. So let's break it down in two questions. First one is, how challenging was it for you overall to get this built? And then the second question is, how has it been doing since... Now that it's been around for a while?

David Peterson:

Well, the first challenge was around the idea of courtyard buildings because in North America we don't really have too many of them, especially in Toronto. So the idea of a courtyard building is that you're going to push the building's envelope to the perimeter, so it means zero setbacks so that you can maximize the space in the interior part of the lot. And that was a challenge, maybe a little bit easier at the Richie site because three sides of the property were industrial, so there was less resistance to first accept that we would have zero setbacks on those sides.

And that made it a little bit easier. And then it was also the idea that I wanted people to circulate through the courtyard because it was that incidental social contact that I was looking for. So it meant that I was asking people to not move through the building in hallways that were entirely interior. It was really forcing people to move from the streets through an open space like a courtyard and then into their unit.

RVLTR:

It has no interior circulation if I recall correctly, right?

David Peterson:

That's right. All the circulation is in semi-public spaces.

RVLTR:

So all the units are double loaded?

David Peterson:

Yes. So the units have... Are three units. You get light from at least two sides. So that meant that the possibility of cross ventilation was improved. You have multiple sun exposures, but then you also have the increased possibility of also seeing neighbors. So the circulation path was really seen as a place to pause at times. It was intended that there was these kind of view corridors from the corridor into the surrounding neighborhood. And then the courtyard was this place that was apart from the city where it was well treed. We continued the trees from the residential backyards into our area. So we saw it as a kind of continuous space both for people and a bird habitat. And then adding water to that space also just created a place away from the street that would be a place that people wanted to gather.

And I think that's what we've seen. Over the years, I've heard from families that have raised their children there and it really seems like it's worked as we had intended, which was to say that parents gathered and children gathered and fell into a lot of independence by moving in and out of the units into the courtyard. I had it photographed again in the last few years and while we were there photographing things, it was functioning in the same way, children playing, one parent for multiple households while children kind of did their own thing. So it was a success in that regard.

RVLTR:

And so if by any measure the building has been a success, why do you think this hasn't been replicated by you or other people as because now there's a precedent in the city of something like that working? Why don't we see more of that do you think?

David Peterson:

It think it's just because the market is so accustomed to a building type, which is to say towers. And on sites like that, we might have tried to make something increasingly larger. Since looking at Richie and doing that, I started to look at more and more places where we have quasi courtyard buildings, and in practice... We just completed a laneway house. And there was a main building and then a laneway house. And then the space between is functionally a courtyard and I think it's four units in that project. But it still creates a condition where you can imagine that that semi-public space of, that was a backyard functions very much like Richie's courtyard. So there's all those kind of small scale proposals and I've come across other town home complexes that arrange their town homes around a landscape, not architectural marvels in any regard, but socially they're functioning in the same way.

RVLTR:

Yeah, I've seen some of those too. And those spaces are always very interesting because the ones that I'm thinking about, the cars are kept on the outside and then that's right, the courtyard in the middle is strictly pedestrian maybe for bikes too. And it seems to be a very pleasant space to be in even if the buildings themselves are not that exciting.

David Peterson:

That's right. So it begins really with a site organization that suggests, first we're going to start with this shared space without having to eliminate private patios that everybody wants and should have.

RVLTR:

And so it seems like housing for family with children is one of your things. It's important to you, and Toronto continues to add housing in the form of towers. How are these accommodating households who have children?

David Peterson:

Well, the city of Toronto I think acknowledges that there is a need to move what everybody understands is a social isolating tower and try to accommodate families in them, because moving forward... Well, in some neighborhoods already, we have most of the households with children live in towers. And increasingly that's going to be the norm throughout the city of Toronto. So the city of Toronto has a document called Growing Up Vertical where they're studying families in high rises. But unfortunately the document doesn't make a shift in the design of the tower. Really their principle way of accommodating families is to have public spaces that are family oriented or children oriented adjacent to the building so that you could leave your unit and then find a park relatively close. The trouble with that though is that you still have a situation where that independence that a child has of going inside and outside that you have with Richie or other types we've talked about, is not there.

So it's possible that a child living on the fourth floor and there's a child on the third floor and they'll never encounter each other, that kind of incidental contact, because their units are isolated, no sense of what's going on in the corridor to create any kind of connection. And this has been going on for such a long time that parents have found their own retrofits for these things. In my interviews with parents, they were doing things like leaving the door... Their apartment door jar, so that they could, if not see, but they could hear their kids playing in the corridor.

During my talk at the interior design show, I was told by a man that was in the room about what they did in their stacked town homes during covid. They again, no semi-public space. The closest they came to that was the parking garage that all the stacked town homes were sat on top of. And they use that as their place for the kids to play. They all moved the cars out of the parking garage. And because of that reasonable adjacent space to where they were living, the kids could easily gather there and they played soccer and hockey inside the parking garage. So it tells you that parents recognize this need for this and are finding any way to retrofit their existing conditions to make it work.

RVLTR:

And a friend of mine who's also an architect and urban planner was telling me that she wants to live in a condo because she's into that kind of urban living, but she had the hardest time finding a three plus unit condo. That's the biggest ones typically are two bedrooms, most of them are studios and one bedroom plus den perhaps. Why isn't that... I'm guessing that's primarily because it's the performer for the developers, push them to put more of those units out, but if people are willing to buy larger units, why aren't they putting more out?

David Peterson:

I think that's shifting. And the city of Toronto too has, as a part of that Growing Up Vertical document has been pushing developers to making two bedrooms and three bedrooms. And the reason in the past that it was less likely to see it had to do with the parking count. For the same unit you would require a higher parking ratio. And-

RVLTR:

Now that's gone.

David Peterson:

So now that's gone. So that's one problem kind of off the table and with the city pushing for it, we have seen more two and three bedrooms in new developments. But I would say though that the idea of accommodating families is one of space, adequate amount of space inside the unit. But really it is that those units are isolated and we put a lot of pressure on parents to overcome screen time or other kinds of things when the architecture is making it difficult for you to connect. Simple things could be done like putting trans inside of corridors so that you could at least have some visual connection to what was happening in that space, so that if you saw another child there, like the front porch of a house, you have some visual connection and that starts to move us a little bit closer to turning the corridor into something more than just an exit path.

RVLTR:

It just brought the idea to mind, could corridors become social spaces? Would that work from a code and safety perspective or is that something that's always going to be frowned upon?

David Peterson:

Well, I think there was a time where typical housing was very different than say housing for say seniors. But we increasingly, as the building code continues to shift, we come closer and closer all the time. Now residential buildings are sprinkler-ed and that has been the case for some time. When we have AODA standards that want the corridors to be wider, then we're also talking about increasing the width of a corridor as well.

So we are taking baby steps towards moving us towards what looks like more and more like a nursing home. This kind of group B classification for a nursing home that has use inside the corridor is something that we could start to really think about for our residential units. And in some ways I compare these populations of people, the low mobility senior or the child that also has limited mobility because of their age and cognitive ability, they have a lot in common. So it makes sense that in some cases when we make these multi-residential buildings, that we start to take on parts of it that look more like seniors housing. It could be seniors housing, it could be family housing and start to create floors where we do more of that.

RVLTR:

And it would be interesting to see, although in the Canadian context, I'm having a hard time imagining it happening, but it'd be interesting to see corridors being designed as programmed spaces where it's not just a place you go through to go from the elevator to your home, but it becomes a play space, a social space, maybe it's a bit more expensive so you have more room for those things to happen and still you can put your strollers in a corner and they don't... You don't trip on them when you go to the elevator. That would be very interesting

David Peterson:

And you could start to do other things where you'd say, rather than collecting all the amenity space in one spot, distribute it across floors. And parents find it difficult to find enough town homes to buy inside the city. Well you could essentially create floors that were more like town homes, where they have some connection to the outside, larger corridors that could have occupancy on them. And yes, they would cost a bit more but not more than your detached or semi-detached house that's in the low rise neighborhood.

So it would start to create more options of units inside our large multi-residential buildings.

RVLTR:

So Toronto is going to, it's slated to welcome hundreds of thousands of new immigrants in the next couple of decades. I forget what the exact numbers are, but quite big. How do you think we accommodate those people that are going to move in into the city in terms of housing? But also why do you think it should be incumbent on us and important to advocate for them? Because they're not here, no one is here to advocate for them, but eventually they'll be here and they'll be contributing members of society. What's your take on that?

David Peterson:

I think some people would say that we have to make towers in the same form that we do because we just need more housing units and we have to add housing this way, but all we have to do is look around the world to see that there's lots of places that are adding housing units that are green and are these and are facing similar challenges but are finding ways to have more varied versions of their multi-residential buildings. I really think that the next generation of multi-residential building will have more green spaces. We see that showing up in places like Singapore where their green standards for their multi-residential buildings are extensive, and the idea of kind of biophilic housing is what they're doing most often.

So often that the public sector is kind of leading the way for private sector development, because there's this lessons learned that the public sector, as they make more and more public housing, is teaching the private sector for how to be efficient, find, discover new models for making housing. And I think that's what we need. It's really a variety of building types that we can... Some already exist here but we don't have to look very far to find a whole new generation of tower.

RVLTR:

And Singapore is an interesting example. I'm not super familiar with their architecture, but I do know that they have a number of high-rise buildings that have public spaces at different levels throughout the building and they have play spaces, elevated gardens, courtyards that people can use. And so there's precedent out there. Canadian climate might be a bit more of a challenge, but you could also realistically assume that you build a greenhouse type of space that can be enclosed in the winter and open in the summer.

David Peterson:

I think it's part of our mindset that we've thought of the winter as such a challenge that we want to hibernate almost. But really landscapes in the wintertime are possible, next to our buildings, on top of roofs. There's still landscapes that we recreate in the wintertime in Canada and those landscapes can be in part on our buildings. And when we have them around, it's just really deciding that we'll do more of it and that they become, even in wintertime, social spaces that have a connection to our interior spaces.

In my growing up, I grew up in Toronto so there was a building that Arthur Erickson had done that was right off of the Gardener and I can't remember the name of the building, but it had a series of jack pines that were in a landscape that faced the Gardener. And as a teenager I always looked at that and I thought, wow, look at that. Look at how these four or five story pines were growing comfortably there. And it made me think that this was possible, that this is something that we just had to decide to do.

RVLTR:

It's possible. It's probably a bit more challenging in this climate, but it's certainly possible. I've seen precedents for that. So how would you get the private market to make changes that will lead to more socially fit housing for all demographics?

David Peterson:

I think the private market needs to have more demonstration projects and that's to say that something that can kind of say, "Look, here's a model for making changes to the tower you've done and see how well it works." So we just need to do more demonstration projects and because city programs like housing now and are involved in making new multi-residential developments, I think it's incumbent on those agencies to start to say, "We're not just going to take market solutions for building forms, we're going to look at how we can do this."

Because I do this constantly in my projects. The challenge of how do you make a landscape that's above the ground is not nearly as challenging as we might think technically, or from even an expense point of view. And we see it because it's happening throughout the world. We're just so convinced that the norm is what's possible here.

And that's why I say I think that more demonstration projects is what the marketplace needs and then that will kind of move the bar towards, okay, there it is. It's happening not once, twice, three times, four times in our climate. And then that starts to create a precedent for how the market can start to behave. And I think the more that we see that too, the public will start to say, "Okay, I see that happening in these other places, that's what I want. And if I can have that then I'll choose that over what is our current norm."

RVLTR:

So unlike you, I didn't grow up in Canada and I have still to this day, even after 17 years, incredible challenge with how conservative the Canadians can be in general. And I'm broadly generalizing, but what I've noticed also is that politicians are incredibly timid and reluctant even to maybe promote or facilitate those kinds of demonstration projects that you've spoken of. How do we change that or how do you convince people that it's actually a good thing and that there's really no risk in it because the precedents exist even in this city and there's not that many but they exist and it's extremely likely to make things work for the better? So why is there still that much hesitancy and how do you think we overcome that?

David Peterson:

Part of my education was in Holland and I had gone to Holland specifically because they were making exceptional housing. And what I came away from thinking after being in Holland was that it wasn't that their architects were better or more creative than us, it was that they had a variety of financial models. The way construction is designed and financed go hand in hand here. And that there was so few financial models like the idea of co-housing as a way of making housing. We have so few examples here, where in Denmark there's just an abundance of them.

RVLTR:

Co-housing, the model where multiple people share a home and then you have private quarters and common kitchens and things like that? Is that what you're talking about?

David Peterson:

Yeah, well apart from even the form, you start with the financial model for it, which fundamentally says you own a part of a corporation rather than a part of a building. And that already means that you are coming together to make a form of co-owned building, that whatever, its forms inside. Because I think here we get put off by it because the idea of sharing too much maybe is off-putting.

RVLTR:

That's also very common in France where when you buy, say you buy... Let's talk about Paris because it's what everybody knows. You buy an apartment in a building in Paris, you buy with it a portion of the commons, they divide it in thousandths. So you buy 200 thousandths of the building and that makes you a co-owner and then you have a say in how the building is managed and financed.

David Peterson:

So you're renting, but you're also an owner in some ways, right?

RVLTR:

That's for when you own. If you're a renter, the landlord will be the owner, part owner of all the commons that belong to the building. But that also exists in suburban developments where you have single family homes. The property the homes are on, not the homes themselves, but the commons like the roads and whatever public amenities there are also managed that way. So it's a model that works and it seems to be very effective. So I've always been surprised to know that that basically doesn't exist here.

David Peterson:

And I think part of what we look at the financial models that were used to make Regent Park, the redevelopment or other kinds of projects that are going on that housing now is involved with, I think that there is an opportunity there for the public to continue to be involved in ownership and find new forms. And I think, so that's why I come back to the public has to decide that we're going to increase the amount of public ownership of housing, which is incredibly small in Canada compared to France. Your example for France, 35% of the housing in France is in that public realm.

RVLTR:

Public housing?

David Peterson:

Yeah, I want to say. Public housing here has such connotations, but it's publicly owned. In Singapore it's more like 80%, but it still has a market relationship as well.

RVLTR:

So when you say publicly owned, what do you mean exactly?

David Peterson:

It may be a lease hold kind of arrangement where it was built on public lands, but it's a private lease hold onto that public land. It's actually a 99-year lease on those lands. So it has this kind of strange mix of both maybe being constructed by the private sector, but long-term ownership in the public sector so that you get a bit of both happening. But those sorts of mixes still here are very few compared to, I think France is 35 and Holland's around the same. Singapore is outpacing all of them, more like 80%.

RVLTR:

So if change starts with the financing models or the ownership models, why do you think we don't see more alternatives here? Is it that people are resistant to it or are there regulatory barriers to new models?

David Peterson:

I'm not sure exactly. I think our financing regime is very rigid, I think. And when you speak about conservatism, I think it's where it starts. It's really there first, because if you let architects... I get a little frustrated when I see architects from elsewhere coming to Toronto to design buildings. And I think the architects here are capable of all the inventiveness that we see else from elsewhere. It's just that when they are asked to do things in this context, we're constrained by financial models that assume a form because they go hand in hand.

And the idea of inventing a form that is not proven financially is what causes the kind of no-go situation. And I think that's again, coming back to public housing, that's the real opportunity where they could spend a bit more time in schematic design and work through forms and test them against the financial models to come up with things that can be demonstration projects.

RVLTR:

And if the city has land that's available, then they could just make it available for new models and say, "Let's experiment."

David Peterson:

If you've thought about it too, you'd say part of the next generation of housing is going to have environmental sustainability to contend with and I'm suggesting that we also need to contend with social sustainability. And so those, already, those challenges suggest new forms.

RVLTR:

I would put social sustainability ahead of environmental sustainability because if the social fabric breaks apart, environmental sustainability is pointless.

David Peterson:

Yes. So they both necessitate new models. So it makes sense that we're not going to get that from the private industry. They're not going to all of a sudden invent ways of doing either of these things better. So we really need the public sector to step up, demonstrate that, and then the private sector is more likely to follow suit once we've got increasingly more examples for them to look at.

RVLTR:

So how would get involved in the process or the discussion or the public discourse to start changing things? Because there comes a point where talking about those things is fine and I'm glad we're doing that, but I think if things are going to change, how do you see that happening? What would you suggest to say one of your students came to you and say, "I want to make a difference, I want to try new things." Where would you tell them to start?

David Peterson:

I think this is where my life as an educator is important because if we give students problems that say, take those housing now sites... And I think the last time I looked there were 21 sites, give those sites to students and have conversations with the profession. So there's this kind of dialogue between educators and students and the profession and really work through new models and move that discourse away from aesthetic appearance towards understanding things socially and environmentally.

I make this point that when we look at our towers that now we are making these towers that stagger and twist, but they're exactly the same social models, double loaded corridors where the corridors are unconnected, they're not connected socially and a single elevator that gathers hundreds of units. So it makes it really difficult to know your neighbors. And if you have amenity space, then you're also gathering the whole building in that spot. So again, you don't get this smaller grain of social connections. And it doesn't matter that the building is twisty or 1970s boring and flat.

RVLTR:

Yeah. Makes no difference. I lived in one of those buildings a dozen years ago and it had pretty decent amenities for a basic condo, but those amenities were only open in the summer, namely a pool and a deck. And so in the summer it was very social, although overcrowded, but very social because people would meet on the pool deck and hang out, have barbecues, whatever.

But in the winter it was dead because everything was closed. And so basically eight months out of the year you had no social space to speak of. You had the usual party room, whatever. But these are not social space because they're just rented by a group of people to get together, but it doesn't allow residents to connect with each other. So maybe the gym, but the gym was completely underutilized. Every time I went I was the only one there.

David Peterson:

Yeah. Gyms are really, I think they could get rid of gyms inside of buildings and decide to do something different there.

RVLTR:

So I think that's all the questions I had for you. Do you have any last words or any last thoughts you want to share with the audience?

David Peterson:

I think that we're speaking about how to make a shift and I think educating the public, but I think too that for a long time, and it's still the case, that architectural education and interior design education, design education, architecture in particular has been associated with engineering for good reason. There's a strong connection there that we will continue to have, but I think you can equally make the argument that architecture should be connected to social sciences and life sciences, and that an architecture school that's also highly tied to the social sciences makes a lot of sense. That, in fact, architecture with public health is what I'm advocating for. Which is the idea that you would have sociologists in your crit, not an engineer necessarily. Or someone from the building science faculty or-

RVLTR:

Or psychologists.

David Peterson:

So in architecture school, you go through and you have building science courses and engineering courses that are compulsory. You have a litany of engineering courses, mechanical, electrical, structural, but there are no courses... There are no mandates for a social science course or a psychology course or environmental psychology course or biology. That might help you understand that yes, it's possible to grow some of these plants, trees in these environments.

RVLTR:

Or if they are, they're electives and they're not part of the curriculum.

David Peterson:

Exactly.

But I think it's, my point is that it should be a fundamental part of an architectural education and that schools of architecture need to be tied to public health.

RVLTR:

And I remember from my architecture education that there wasn't really any conversation around how will the building affect people's wellbeing? When they do. Good or bad, no matter what you do, the building will affect its inhabitants. So it's critical to know at least on a surface level that what can be done to go one way or another. It's interesting.

Well, I want to thank you very much for your time. It was a very interesting conversation and hopefully we can have more in the future.

David Peterson:

Yeah, great Arnaud, thank you.

Web3: It's like web 2.0, but with more crypto and less cat videos.

How many times have you wondered about what the hell web3, the blockchain and the metaverse are, and what all the hubbub is about?

I have too, and to make your life easier I dove right into the topic for Canadian Interiors with an opinion piece on the topic and what these newfangled technologies hold for the future of design.

Check it out here.

This is intended to kick start a larger conversation about these technologies and what they mean for our industry. Please do reach out with your burning questions or would like to talk to me about it.

Truth Is Golden - 208 | Para-Architecture w/ Nic Granleese

This podcast was initially published in November 2018.

Aussie architect and internet entrepreneur Nic Granleese, did his interview with us during his last visit in Toronto. He talked about his shoeless upbringing in rural Australia and how during a sabbatical early on in his career, he decided to hop on his motorcycle, quit architecture and become a photographer. Subsequently, his path led him to create bowerbird, a growing online platform that links architects with publications. Listen in to hear Nic speak about his path.

Powered by RedCircle

About the podcast: The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

Single Serves ep. 401 - Suomala on Attracting High-Quality Clients

Tyler Suomala is a serial-learner obsessed with helping architects optimize all things business development, sales, marketing, and operations. Before transitioning into Business Development at Monograph, Tyler worked in large and small architecture offices and also ran his own architectural design studio for 2.5 years. He holds a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Michigan and a M. Arch from Princeton University.

Tyler is currently creating a community of architects at TylerTactics.com, where he sends one quick & powerful tactic to help architects attract high-quality clients every Sunday morning.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd

Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity:

Arnaud Marthouret (RVLTR):

Thank you very much, Tyler, for being on the show. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Tyler Suomala (TS):

Yeah, I appreciate the invitation. I'm happy to chat.

RVLTR:

Tell us who you are and what you do in your own words, in three sentences or less.

TS:

Okay. Three sentences are less. Keeping it short. The ultimate business development goal, right? At Monograph, I work with firms to help them improve their business operations and project management processes. At Tyler Tactics, I help bring, let's say, outside tactics and other resources to the surface for architects to use and also improve their business development and sales processes.

RVLTR:

You're trained as an architect, as I just mentioned. What made you go away from their traditional practice of architecture and engage into more business development endeavors?

TS:

I felt a little bit, I don't have a ton of patience to be honest with trying things. I felt like I had tried a lot of different versions of professional practice and hadn't really found fulfillment through it. I had worked at a large firm. I had worked at a small firm. I had ran my own studio for a little bit, and just honestly wasn't, I just wasn't feeling fulfilled in the process. I started looking for other things that would still allow me to utilize my background in architecture, but just in a different way. That's where I was really thankful to come across Monograph.

RVLTR:

That makes sense. As I mentioned earlier, the topic for today is how to attract high quality clients. Why do you think that's important?

TS:

Well, it's already hard enough to be an architect, right? It's hard enough to find clients, but when you do, ideally, you want to work with ones that work well with you and that respect you and want to work with you and have the budget and the vision that you want as well.

You kind of want those shared values because as we've all experienced at some point or another, working with the opposite of that is, I'd say 10 times more exhausting and it can really have a negative impact on morale for you and as well as your team.

RVLTR:

Yeah, I think we've all been there. We know what that's like. You've already hinted at what a high quality client is, but do you want to define it a little more clearly for our audience?

TS:

Sure. Yeah. I think high quality clients are a few different things. They're clients that you just enjoy working with. They're not someone that you feel like you have to take a deep breath with every time you meet with them or before you see them. They're clients that pay on time. They're clients that understand budgets and costs and aren't going to grill you every time you send them an invoice. They're people that trust and respect you, and they're people that return to you for repeat work or at least advocate for you for others to work with you as well.

RVLTR:

All right. That's a very great and six in definition. I like it. Why would you say high quality clients is particularly relevant for people in the architecture and design industry?

TS:

I think I hit this a little bit at the beginning, but I mean, architecture's already hard enough. I think one of the biggest challenges that architects face is doing things that are unrelated to design, 95% of architects care most about design and business, client relations, business development, sales. That's kind of like, that's like the, let's mix that together in the last 5% at most, and maybe 1% for the average architect. You want-

RVLTR:

Yeah, for each bucket, they don't want to want to touch, right?

TS:

Right. It's the icky bucket they don't want to touch again. Again, most of the time architects aren't starting a firm, or leaders aren't in a firm because they love business. They're in it because they love design. They love architecture and things like that. I think it's important to have high quality clients so that you can still maintain as much of your focus on the things that you want as possible and not feel weighed down by the business side of things if you don't want to feel weighed down by those.

RVLTR:

Why do you think so many architecture firms are challenged with their business development efforts? I'm putting my own bias into that question because that's something I've seen over and over and over, and we've kind of touched on the idea that it's kind of too far removed from design if something most architects don't like. There's kind of that unfamiliarity and probably also lack of training, but is there anything else that you've seen specifically in what you do with Monograph and Tyler Tactics that maybe you want to speak to?

TS:

Yeah, I think there's this funny inverse relationship between architects and business, whereby an architect, the normal ladder of working at a firm, for example, you might be intern and then you're designer and then you're architect, then you're associate, then you're maybe partner or principal or something along those lines, owner. As you move up, you're given more and more business responsibilities, but you're not moving up because most of the time, at least, most of the time, you're not moving up because you're good at business. You're moving up because you're good at design or something, or maybe managing a team or something like that.

You're moving up because of something else that's unrelated to the new responsibilities that you're getting in that new position. I think that's one source of the issue. You're beginning to elevate people that are good at one thing and you're giving them responsibilities for something that they have absolutely zero interest or knowledge in or skills in. That's a problem that I think a lot of firms aren't tackling.

I think the other one is just not taking the necessary time to improve skills that are necessary for business. I mean, it takes some time outside. You have to take time outside of design. You have to take time outside of normal architecture. You have to explore other resources and other industries a little bit and allow yourself to learn from them in order to improve your business as well.

RVLTR:

Yeah, and it's interesting what you just said because you're 100% right, as you get promoted and progress in the hierarchy, you do it generally because of your talent in design or talent in managing projects or something related to the architecture itself, but the further up you move, the more removed you are from those responsibilities. I think that's an issue that a lot of people recognize, but as you said, not few people do anything about.

TS:

Mm-hmm.

RVLTR:

Have you seen any examples of firms that have managed their staff transitions into the higher levels of hierarchy well?

TS:

Not specific example. I think it's one of these things that are just, it's like just being realized and recognized. Usually, at least when I'm speaking to firms, they're not coming to me because things are hunky-dory. It's the opposite because they're facing struggles of some kind. I will say that I think there's firms that are taking steps in that direction to maybe make it easier to identify people that would be better in those positions.

For example, increasing transparency across the firm I think is one of those things that can make a big difference in that, because you're giving everyone in the firm the ability to understand how the business works. I think naturally, what's going to happen from that is the people that are interested in the business side of things or whatever those specific parts of the business are going to emerge.

Then, maybe you can also, that's where you can give them the responsibilities that are related to their interests and passions rather than forcing them upon other people.

RVLTR:

I'm going to name names because there's one great example that comes to mind, and I'm not going to say anything bad, but I did an internship at SOM years and years ago, and I was always impressed. To this day, I'm still impressed by how they managed the business aspect of architecture and the design almost separately, like working hand in hand, but they're completely separate people and responsibilities within the firm.

It's interesting that they're the ones doing that soil, because they've been around for almost 90 years now, and I believe that's one of the reasons why they've been so successful for so long throughout so many generations of leaders. I'm wondering what that model looks like in more of the 21st century firm and not so much with firms that have been around for a long time. That's kind of an interesting thought.

TS:

I mean, I think you just have to be, so I'd say that the 21st century architect firm is smaller, there's only a handful of those international firms that can compete with SOM. There's maybe 10 or 15. We ran the numbers early on at Monograph, and it's something like, don't quote me on this for sure, but it's something like 80% of architecture firms are 10 people or less. [inaudible 00:09:53].

RVLTR:

Yeah. I think the majority of that are single person firms.

TS:

Right. The majority of that are single person firms. In that sense, I think you really, if you're going to at least be on the leadership side of one of those smaller firms, you do have to be a generalist. Architects are already generalists in things that are related to architecture. We're good at design. We're good at technical things. We're good at...

RVLTR:

Problem solving. Yeah.

TS:

... problem solving, things like that, that I think also translate into the business side of things, but you do have to be able to manage design at the same time that you're managing your business. That's the same time that you're growing your pipeline and adding backlog to your projects. I think without that, it's not impossible. It's just going to be a lot more painful ride, in my opinion.

RVLTR:

Yeah, that makes sense. One of the things that I've noticed is a struggle for a lot of architecture and design firms is to understand the difference between marketing, sales, communications, and business development. I have my own idea all those are, but can you give us your own understanding and definition of those?

TS:

Yeah, this is one of these, I actually, I feel like I have this conversation once a week with someone about what these things are. I think everyone has a different definition, which is, I don't know if it's a problem or if it's just kind of a funny quirk of the industry. I would define in business development as any, it's any action taken to bring clients into your firm. By that, I would say that business development is the category and that marketing, sales and communication are all subcategories of that. They're all parts that work towards that. That's at least how I group it in my mind.

RVLTR:

Well, that's my understanding as well.

TS:

Yeah.

RVLTR:

I think there's something to it for sure.

TS:

Yeah.

RVLTR:

What about... What is the distinction to you between marketing, sales and comms?

TS:

I think marketing is about nurturing and educating your audience. Sales is about turning that audience into clients and customers. Communications is about how you're doing that. It's kind of the process and the tactics of enacting those transitions.

RVLTR:

Yeah, I've pretty much the same understanding. It looks like we're on the same page. One thing that I see a lot, and I'm sure you have as well, is that a lot of people consider proposal development, proposal management and development and submission as part of marketing. I don't think it is or should be. What's your take on that?

TS:

Yeah, I have seen that. That's such, it's part of a longer discussion about how you should be handling proposals in your firm. What department it's in. Marketing is obviously one thing. I think another thing is how you introduce that proposal, which the vast majority of firms are doing that usually through an email, which I don't think should ever happen. I mean, I think you should send it through an email after you've met with the client, either face to face or on a video call...

RVLTR:

Thank you.

TS:

... and walk them through that proposal.

RVLTR:

Thank you. Yes.

TS:

Don't like, if you're just sending proposals to your clients, I think that's one of the worst, lowest value things you can do, especially if you put a ton of time into that proposal, you should be walking them through that proposal, making, reiterating the fact that you understand their challenges and their pains and that you are the right solution for them before you ever hand that proposal over to them for them to read themselves.

RVLTR:

Yeah. I took on a hard policy of never sending a proposal without first reviewing with the clients. At the very least, what ends up happening is we review it together on Zoom, looking at the screen at the same time, and I send it by email, but you're right, I think just emailing it as one of the lowest value things because you're robbing yourself of the opportunity to handle objections, to answer questions, and frankly, to close the deal because you should be asking the question, are you ready to go ahead and once you're done presenting your proposal, and a lot of the time they'll say, "No, we need to think about it..."

TS:

Yes, we need to think about it.

RVLTR:

... which is a fair answer.

TS:

Yeah.

RVLTR:

At least, every time a client is ready to go, you're seizing that opportunity and if you just send an email, yeah, you're just I think that probability of getting their job just drastically drops down.

TS:

It drops down. I think it's also, there's a fear. There's a fear of not being able to handle objections that people don't want to do. I think there's also a misunderstanding that the clients are going to make whatever decision they're going to make, and we're just throwing your hat in and hoping that they choose us. I think there's this misunderstanding that there's a lack of influence that you can have on that client's decision from engaging with them more intentionally.

RVLTR:

That's why I think I'd love to see more people taking on sales training and becoming good at sales because that's where you're going to shine as an architect, because a lot of them really don't do it very well. It's a broad generalization, obviously, but I think there's a lot to it. You've talked to, from what you told me, more than 1,000 architect over the last years.

TS:

Yeah.

RVLTR:

First of all, I'm just so curious, you have to tell me what made that happen? Second, what are some of the things that you've learned out of that?

TS:

Yeah. Well, if you, I mean, as you know, in any sales or business development role, you're worth as much as the conversations that you're having. When you're in that role, I mean, that's my primary responsibility at Monograph is to have conversations with architects. That might be a cold call, that might be an inbound call based on a question that they had. It might be a discovery call. It could be a demo that I'm doing of the platform. That's usually the nature of those conversations. They're lasting anywhere from five minutes to an hour long about the challenges that they're having in their practice and things that are going on with us. That's the context of those conversations.

What I think I underestimated about that was the pulse and understanding of that would give me on the industry. I don't think I really thought through that when I was taking on this role that Monograph. It's been a really nice kind of cherry on top to this kind of new job and new career that I really love and enjoy, but just having a deeper understanding of the industry itself and the challenges that architects are facing, they're relatively universal. Most of these challenges are the same, but just from talking to a thousand architects, there's definitely a few things that stand out.

I mean, one is just a lack of organization and a lack of tracking or measuring that's happening on the business side. That could mean just challenges with tracking time, tracking budget, and also going back to understanding why someone spent more time on the project or why we ran over on this specific phase of the project so that you can then improve it. A lot of firms are in this reactive state rather than proactive state where things are happening, and then they have to catch up later on and try to do discovery to find out going on rather than being proactive about whatever these challenges are and what might come up.

I think the other challenge that we've already began talking about is that the majority of architects don't really want to focus on business. They don't really want to focus on money. It's like money is important, but it's not, which is, I think something that just hurts in the long run. It's hard to, you don't have to, money profit doesn't have to be your primary driver. I don't think it should be necessarily, but you need to think about it in some context. It needs to be considered in order for you to run a successful business and a sustainable business for yourself and for your employees.

RVLTR:

I mean, there's many ways to set up a business where profit is not the main motivator, as you said. There's legal structures that allow you to do that, but regardless, you do need to be a good manager, money and budgets and costs because you're going to have to deal with those things one way or another. You're going to have staff, or if you don't have staff, you're going to have contractors, you're going to have bills to pay, you're going to have to manage cash flow. It's absolutely and completely inevitable.

TS:

Yeah. The state of the majority of the firms that I talk to, and I don't blame them. I mean, I'm happy to chat with these firms because at least they're recognizing that there's an issue and they're trying to, they recognize that they need to change something, but the state of the majority of the firms that I'm speaking to are that they're generally looking at their bank balance at the end of the month and understanding, okay, good, we have more money than we spent, so that's good.

They're looking at their project budgets at usually once a month to understand how did we go over or did we go under budgets? They're finding that out at the end of the month as well. I think that's a really tough practice meant to maintain over the long run. It's really tough to scale that. It's really tough to grow and iterate and improve upon that.

RVLTR:

I think if you want to do that, you have to have the tools and a spreadsheet is probably no longer sufficient after a while.

TS:

Yeah, for certain size, it's gets harder.

RVLTR:

Speaking of money management, I've discovered this method a couple years ago called Profit First. It's an entrepreneur who created it and developed it. Even if it's not implemented as part of the business, I think it's a great method to understand how money works and how it should be managed. I've implemented it myself in my own business. It is a game changer because you basically put your money, it's the envelope method, you put your money in buckets, and then some of those buckets are reserved for certain things like taxes and payroll and sales tax and whatever else and then you don't touch those.

Then, there's expenses buckets, and there's also, it's called Profit First because one of the first things they have you do is to pay yourself. You're forced to, if you can't pay yourself or you don't make enough money, you pay yourself, then, you're forced to think in ways of, okay, so how do I make enough money so I can pay myself and still meet all my bills and costs? It's a very interesting exercise in general.

TS:

Yeah, that's a great one. I mean, it's also a really good personal finance model. When you get your paycheck, you should pay yourself first, meaning don't go and pay bills right away. Don't go and pay bills. Don't think about what you should buy. Go and put that money into an investment before you have a chance to spend it.

RVLTR:

You've been developing the Tyler Tactics in actively growing that on LinkedIn. What are some of the things that you've learned from that?

TS:

I just started that this past month. That's more of the culmination of being active on LinkedIn this past year, getting an understanding of the challenges that architects are having. I, myself, it didn't take me that long in my business development role at Monograph to realize, "Wow, I didn't really know a whole lot about business development when I was running my own little studio. I wonder if I'm the only one."

Then, having more and more conversations, being more focal about these challenges on LinkedIn, running polls, understanding what challenges my audience is facing. That's really how Tyler tactics came to be. That's just one newsletter that I'm posting each week that's really focused on short, actionable steps you can take towards a specific tactic that will help you improve your business development process, get you more of those high quality clients, help you talk to your clients better and just make actionable changes that will have a marked improvement on your firm.

RVLTR:

Speaking of actionable changes, what are some of those easy changes that firms could make to attract higher quality clients?

TS:

I think there's a few things that they can do. One is just tracking your pipeline. Are you tracking your pipeline in any way? Do you have anything? I think that's where it's okay if you're starting line here is a spreadsheet of some kind, but just understanding the different phases of your pipeline, the qualification process, the proposal process, the closing, the decision making process, understanding how many people or clients you have in each of those. Buckets is really important to understand at any given time. Also, just getting an understanding of what's your win rate for the amount of proposals that you're writing.

I'm a huge proponent of you have to measure something to improve it. If you're not measuring it, it's going to be really difficult to make changes to this. I think most firms are finding their selves in a state where they're not measuring some of these things, where if they did, it would just have a massive impact. It gives this them visibility and it has a massive impact on their firm. One is just measuring and tracking your pipeline.

The second one is diversifying that pipeline. Usually, we're waiting for inbound things to happen, meaning those are clients that are coming to you either based on your website or from a referral. Those are the easiest ones to win, and they're probably the highest amount of clients that you're getting, but they shouldn't be your only ones. You should diversify. You should definitely be doing outbound efforts. You should be reaching out to potential clients, going to events where

I've had potential clients will be cold calling potential clients, just trying to develop those new relationships on a consistent basis, whether that's weekly, spending time doing these things and forming new relationships. That's really important so that new projects can come from that.

The other one is just nurturing and educating those people that you're bringing in, whether that's through a newsletter or something like that, just to keep your firm and yourself top of mind to them. Those are things that can make a big difference.

The last one is just improve your communication skills. Improve your sales skills. There's small things you can do. I mean, read a book. Read a book that's focused on sales, not focused on architecture or something like that, focused on sales, focused on business development or marketing. I can tell you right now, after talking to, and I'm not talking to interns or middle people in firms, I'm talking to firm leaders and principals and owners.

I can tell you that if you are someone that is focusing on marketing, if you are someone that is focusing on sales, and if you are someone that is focusing on business development, in a leadership position in a firm, you are for sure among the top 5% of your firm and you have a huge, huge opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competition.

RVLTR:

What are some of maybe the top two or three sales and business development books that you've read in the last couple of years?

TS:

Oh, another, well, one good one is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. That's just really good for understanding how to negotiate and how to talk about money. I think that's a really important one. Another one that I really-

RVLTR:

That's the hostage negotiator, right?

TS:

Yeah. He's the hostage negotiator. There's really good and everything that you read, you're always kind of reformulating it to relate to how you do it. It's not like every book is going to, everything you read is going to be completely relatable to architecture, but it really does give you, I think, it's just adding tools to your toolkit. It's understanding how you can respond to specific situations and just improve the conversation. That's another one. Another one that I actually really is $100M Offer by Alex Hormozi. I don't know if you've ever read that. It's a really short book.

RVLTR:

No.

TS:

It's not long at all.

RVLTR:

You said $100M Offer?

TS:

$100M Offer, I think, that's what it's called. It's a short read, but it's so powerful and I think it's really relatable. He primarily works with SaaS companies and technology companies and helping them improve the offer that they're making, or even small businesses helping them improve the offer that they're making, using different types of tactics to really hone in on what that ideal client is, different things that you can do, not only to increase your value, increase your fee, but also make it so that you're the only one that's offering something that unique and that's that customized to your ideal client profile.

I think those are the things that you can do to increase your fees. You really have to, rather than racing to the bottom and trying to figure out how you can compete on your fee, you want to be moving in the opposite direction, going upstream and understanding what you need to do in order to just put yourself at a level that's completely different than what anyone else is doing.

RVLTR:

Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned that because most architects think of the business as a race to the bottom. It's like, "Oh, I have to get this job and have to outcompete with lower fees, everybody else." The conversation around value, although, it's becoming a bit more prevalent now, is still to way too rare in my opinion. I'm going to ask you your opinion.

My opinion is that way too many people are focused on internal capabilities and their ability to design great projects, but they're never phrasing what they can do for their clients in terms of the value added to their clients. One example I use all the time, because it's very easy to understand. It's very telling. I have a friend who's a contractor, and he once suggested to a client to shore up the basement. Spend about $100,000 extra to shore up the basement and have, I think it was 12-foot ceilings in the basement and first floor that was at grade, meaning wheelchair accessible instead of the usual first two or three steps to go up to the main floor and then go down to the basement.

TS:

Right.

RVLTR:

The house, I believe, was assessed as being about $350,000 more valuable as a result of that $100,000 investments. To me, that's where the value resides. As a contractor, he understood the value of his work and he was able to make the right recommendation to the client. After that, you have to convince the client to spend more money, but if they can, they'll come out on the other side to benefit from it. I think too few architects understand that that's truly where their value reside.

I'm going to add to that, the fact that almost every one of them wants to be a generalist. They want to be able to do everything. I've been saying for years now, if you decided to be the architect who's the top coffee shop designer in the world, you will get clients paying you handover fist for your designs because you will have that level of expertise and you'll be able to focus on developing that one typology instead of being a generalist in designing house, a cafe, a restaurant, an office, a medical facility, and never be able to really drill down to what makes one typology what it is and be becoming the one expert at it. They're terrified of doing that, every one of them. They won't say it in public, but behind closed doors, they're like, "No. I can't do that."

TS:

They say it in public [inaudible 00:30:29].

RVLTR:

I can't do that because I'm going to lose all my business. They don't understand that's where the true value resides for them. What's your take on that?

TS:

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of, I think fear that just results in a lack of understanding of how markets work around architects. I think I understand the resistance to want to niche down, because you want to be open, you want to take another projects.

In my opinion, I think even if you did niche down, let's say you transition to all of your marketing material, you're changing your website and promo any other promotional material is going to be focused around this specific niche, solving this specific problem, you're still going to get people that are coming to you for other things. You can choose whether or not you want to work on those projects. You're just going to get...

RVLTR:

Exactly.

TS:

... you're just going to get more focused on that specific niche that you wanted to but you're never going, it's just never going to happen where you're only ever going to get queries about that one type of work that you're doing.

RVLTR:

One tactic that I've learned from Blair Enns, who's the founder of Win Without Pitching, it's a great sales training company, is that you can niche down. You don't have to throw the baby with the bathwater. You can easily, and that literally costs you, it will cost you say a couple hundred bucks, you can print bunch of business cards, register a new domain name and start a sister company...

TS:

Landing pitch. Yeah.

RVLTR:

... and just say, "Okay, we're architects X, Y, Z on this side and we're generalist and we do everything we've been doing ever since we existed." Then, the new website is not related in any kind of overt way to the existing business. It's like, "Okay, we're testing the waters of designing the best coffee shops in the world, and our goal is to be hired by people who want the best of the best meaning all over the world," because the thing is, I think one thing that people don't understand is that when you niche down, you don't want to niche down too much in both geography and expertise.

You're either going to pick a very narrow geographical area, and you're going to be a more generalist practitioner in a very small area. In your town, you're going to be the top architect in your town for everything people want or you're going to be the top coffee shop designer in the world worldwide, meaning, that no one can touch you in that particular typology, but you'd never want to do both, because if you say, I'm only going to do coffee shop and you live in a hundred thousand people town, guess what? You're not going to have a lot of projects.

TS:

About three coffee shops. Yeah.

RVLTR:

Yeah. You're going to have a dozen or so. Then, after that, it's over and you're still going to compete with local architects. That's one distinction I think that has to be made, but yeah, it's very interesting to start to get into those details. I think we've talked about a few of those, but maybe if there's more you want to add to it, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see firm make making, in firms making in terms of business development?

TS:

One is, again, not tracking or measuring specific things, not tracking or measuring budget on a consistent basis, not tracking or measuring pipeline on a consistent basis, you need to measure it so that you can improve it. That's thing number one.

Thing number two that I see on the business development side is no defined sales flow, meaning they don't have a process in place when they're meeting with a new potential client. What does that look like? It's kind of flying by the seat of your pants a little bit each time. You don't know exactly how the conversation is going to go that first time. You don't know when or if you're going to write a proposal after that, or if you're going to have another meeting.

I think it's really important to just define, I'm going to have one discovery meeting with a client. It's going to be 30 minutes. I'm going to talk about these things, try to understand what the pains are. I'm going to go back to the office. I'm going to write a proposal. I'm going to set up a second meeting in conversation with them to walk them through that proposal and reiterate the fact that I understand their challenges.

You just need to define something so that you have some kind of repeatable process that you can then improve and iterate upon. That's just, again, just getting something into place so that you have a baseline of understanding. That's another one.

For communication, we've already talked about that enough. You have to improve those communication skills. You have to learn about how to talk about money, how to talk about budget, how to talk about investments. Those uncomfortable conversations that you're having with your client are, I think, usually uncomfortable on both sides. You can make them more comfortable just by understanding better ways of talking about them and discussing them with your client.

The last one, we already talked about too is just diversifying that pipeline, making sure that you, it's just like you do with your own investments. You want to diversify your investments. You don't want to put all of your eggs into one basket. You want to give your firm opportunities to grow in different ways just by opening up and having inbound, having referral business, having outbound business as well.

RVLTR:

I had a question that came to mind or a comment a while back, and you just brought that up again, a lot of small firms that I talk to solely rely on word of mouth to get projects, and by and large it works, but can you tell us why that might not be such a great idea?

TS:

Well, word of mouth is a two-way street. I think that's one of the reasons it's not such a good idea. You could be, we've all had a client that we didn't enjoy working with and that didn't enjoy working with us, and you just hope that that's not a vocal, you kind of just hope that that's not a vocal client.

Of course, you might have more, you might have a lot of, you want to have a good reputation around the town, but one, it's just a two-way street. You want to make sure that you're covering your bases on multiple levels just to make sure that you have, if that word of mouth dries up for whatever reason, you have different ways of bringing in business as well, rather than restarting and having that oh crap moment of, we don't have anything coming up in a few months.

RVLTR:

Awhile back, you mentioned cold calling, and I know that's probably the most terrifying prospect for most architects who have to do their own business development. Why do you think that's still a decent and effective tool in getting projects for work?

TS:

I think, cold calling is like, it has a bad reputation as being the kind of telemarketer spam calls that you get. I'm not talking about doing one of those. I'd actually more so call it kind of like a warm call. You're doing research. You're understanding, so maybe you do residential work in your general regional area. You're doing research to understand, "Hey, what are the builders in this area that are typically doing residential projects?" I might have a list of 10 of them.

Do I see that they've built projects that are similar to ones that I designed and that I would like to get built? I'm going to call up those 10 offices, or maybe those 10 people try to find, either I'm going to try to find that person on LinkedIn or I'm going to call up those 10 offices and just, you don't have to have a pitch ready or anything like that. It's really just introducing yourself. "Hey, this is Tyler Suomala. I saw that you do building in my area. I just started a firm down the road and I'm just curious if I could come in and have a conversation and learn about the type of work that you're doing."

Just something, it's just opening up the conversation and developing new relationships. I did that when I started at my little studio and made three or four relationships with builders in my area. It turns out none of them were happy with the architects that they were using. Depending on the area, that's something that can really help.

RVLTR:

That makes a lot of sense. I think that's the end of the interview. We've covered a lot of ground and I asked most of the questions I wanted to ask. Do you have any last words of wisdom for the audience, which is primarily architects and interior designers of any kind, really. Just something you want to add.

TS:

Yeah, I think my last words of wisdom would be to find and understand the things that the people around you don't enjoy doing or aren't good at and become an expert at those things. You'll immediately increase your own personal value to the firm, and you'll also increase the firm's value as well. [inaudible 00:39:28].

RVLTR:

That's incredible advice. Well, Tyler, I want to thank you very much for your time and your insights, and I think that was a very good conversation. Hopefully, it'll be as valuable to the audience as it is to me.

TS:

Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

{PODCAST} Single Serves ep. 318 - Bain + Lane on the Metaverse and web3.

Do you ever wonder what the hell the metaverse and web3 are? If so, you're not alone. We partnered with Canadian Interiors' Bevel podcast to produce this interview with Tessa Bain and Andrew Lane, co-founders of Digby, a consultancy that helps companies navigate the complexities of these new technologies and why people in the design industry should become early adopters.

Our goal was to decipher these new technologies to help you make sense of it. This is your metaverse and web3 101 crash course.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd

Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity:

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

Hello everyone, I'm Arnaud Marthouret.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

I'm Peter Sobchack.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

You're listening to a podcast collaboration between Canadian Interior's Bevel Podcast and Revelateur Studio's Single Serves. Today, we're talking to Tessa Bain and Andrew Lane, the co-founders of Digby, a tech startup and consultancy for the architecture, design, and luxury industries. The topic of the day is Web3, the Metaverse, and NFTs, and how these affect the architecture and design industry. Thank you very much, Andrew and Tessa, for being on the show.

Tessa Bain:

Thank you for having us.

Andrew Lane:

It's a pleasure to be here.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

Why don't you start by telling us who you are and what you do in your own words, in three sentences or less?

Tessa Bain:

Three sentences or less is difficult.

Andrew Lane:

It's tough.

Tessa Bain:

I've spent about 10 years in the interior design and architecture world always on the supplier side, so working from commercial textiles to furniture, and that naturally helped me gravitate towards how we can apply this to Web3 technologies.

Andrew Lane:

My background is in tech consulting, brand building, and a little bit of talent consulting as well. I did this as an independent consultant at the dawn of Web2 and really brought some top Canadian brands online into the social media space. And so, we saw the opportunity to put those experiences together and really helped to create some education and opportunities for brands in the architecture design and luxury space who were looking to put an early foothold into some of this new territory.

Tessa Bain:

That was more than three sentences.

Andrew Lane:

That was. I got called out. I'm sorry.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

It's okay, nobody's counting. I'd like to start with a few basic definitions of what we're talking about. Can you tell us briefly what is Web3?

Andrew Lane:

I think Web3 is an interesting thing, and we'll find this across a lot of these definitions that the definitions aren't Merriam-Webster's quite yet. They're really being written by the people who are creating. And so, Web3 is fairly broadly agreed to be a combination of leveraging blockchain technology tokenization. A lot of people think Web3 is cryptocurrency, but in fact, cryptocurrency just leverages a lot of those principles and so the two have become more synonymous. You'll also find people who will call artificial intelligence a factor of Web3, and there's others who just say it's a tech emerging at this time. We don't quite know exactly what the definition will land on, but it's really about a lot of emerging technology that people believe will build on top of what we saw created through the Web2 revolution.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

What would be the main differences between Web2 and Web3?

Andrew Lane:

Well, Web2 is really about socialization, whereas Web3, the concept of tokens and the concept of decentralization is really critical when you start thinking about things like identity. Whether that's the identity of an object, oftentimes these uniquely identified objects are thought of as NFTs, but identity can also be about personal identity. So, we think of a decentralized Web3 as a place where you can own your personal identity, whereas in Web2, one of the primary factors was organizations like Facebook owns your identity. And so, that's one of the critical pieces that people see as a differentiator of Web3 and one of the primary ideas behind things like cryptocurrency that we're also starting to see applied in lots of other places.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

That helps clarify a little bit, so I'm glad I asked that question. I have two more definitional questions for you. The second question is what are NFTs? I think that's the most obfuscating of those technologies that people get really confused by. So, can you clarify that for us a bit?

Andrew Lane:

Yeah, I think that there's a belief that an NFT is a monkey or a piece of art that's put on the internet, and some people think it's nothing more than a JPEG, but really an NFT stands for a non-fungible token. It means that it's one of one, original piece that has been authenticated on the blockchain. So, when we think about it in that broader term, there's a lot more interesting implications for what an NFT can be than what we've seen really consume the media over the last 18 months.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

The last definitional question for you is what is the Metaverse?

Tessa Bain:

Ooh, that's a tough one.

Andrew Lane:

Yeah. Similarly, with Web3, the Metaverse is one of those places where the companies that are building are trying to define it in the way that really suits what it is they're trying to build and who they're trying to build for. I think the big tenets of the Metaverse is that it's a three-dimensional immersive space. Some people call the Metaverse the spatial web, that it has some level of persistence. It's an always on space in the same way that a store in the world or any building or location might be, and that it's a place where one or more people... Two or more people I should say are able to interact within that space. You'll get other definitions that say it needs to be tied to NFTs, to blockchain and things, but the broader based definition is really this idea of spatial web, taking what we have already as an internet experience and expanding it into something that's more three-dimensional and interactive.

Tessa Bain:

When I try and put it in simple terms and explain it to friends, I always think about all the different platforms that we use right now. For example, we could be on a Zoom call or we could be looking at a virtual VR experience and we could be on social media. The Metaverse gives you the opportunity to do all of those things at once instead of in individual platforms. And so, we look at it as that evolution.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

I just had my Aha moment. Thank you for that. Now that those definitions are out of the way, why do you think it's important for designers to understand the implications of those technologies?

Tessa Bain:

I think it's incredibly important for designers. These technologies have been underway for quite a while and you have very prominent Metaverses. In the early days of Digby, we saw this as a big opportunity for the A&D community, being mostly that there is a huge opportunity to create a presence and to stake a claim for people that are trained and skilled and have the ability to actually positively influence the space and the design of these spaces. And so without that representation, you've got tech developers that are actually creating the majority of the designs and infrastructure in these spaces right now. The architecture and design community has been a little slower to respond. And so we're seeing a lot more of that now, but in the early days, there was a bit of a gap there.

Andrew Lane:

Yeah. I think it's been exciting to see the early projects and I think that we're really starting to see the snowball roll down the hill right now, where the degree to which designers and architects from the more traditional space are getting involved in these Metaverse and Web3 projects. It's really exciting. Lots of new businesses and projects are launching on an ongoing basis. Scan the papers and you're seeing more and more of them every day, which 12 months ago, it was much fewer and further between. So, we're really starting to see that marriage start to catch on and it's something that's exciting to be a part of.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

Your answer was great, but it's a bit vague in my mind because I can't really picture what those new businesses and opportunities and technologies look like. So maybe, you can give us a few examples of what you've seen that seems promising or you're excited by?

Tessa Bain:

Well, I think we need to break it down and go back to the beginning. When we say there hasn't been strong representation, I mean, Andrew, you can speak about this, about the fourth grade art project. It's one of the best examples.

Andrew Lane:

Yeah, I think that where we're seeing projects come along is in a couple of different ways. There's instances where people are designing Metaverse experiences, homes, worlds for people who are interested in acquiring space within the Metaverse. Metaverse land is seen as a commodity these days, and there are those who want a house in the Metaverse and they want a prominent designer or architect to have created that house because it adds to the cache and to the emotional residence of that place for them.

We're seeing a lot more brands try and move into the Metaverse from a commerce space. When they're moving into that commerce space, someone needs to design what that experience looks like and how that brings their brand to life in a 3D, virtual way. And so, firms are being leaned on for those kinds of experiences in an increasing way. We're even at the NFT level seeing more and more objects and items that are being created from a digital standpoint.

But then, we're also starting to see those objects and items simply leverage that token technology to authenticate physical world items. We're starting to see people bridge between that physical and that digital world as well using this technology, and all of these projects are really coming to bear quickly because the reality is that the industry has had an awful lot of three-dimensional digital design be a part of the projects that they've developed for the real world for a very long time.

Of the early part of 2022, one of the more prominent projects was the Bjarke Ingles Group designed an office for Vice in the Metaverse, which was actually just a project that they had designed digitally previously that when Vice came to them, they brought that to life in the Decentraland metaverse. It was something that they had already designed previously but had never built. So, we're seeing all sorts of different instances of that as well as completely net new designs and net new ideas coming to life at an increasing and accelerating pace as we come through the year 2022.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

You've already hinted at why it would be important for designers and architects to be involved in the development of those new technologies, but maybe you can tell us a little more about why this is particularly important, and why should they strive to be at the forefront of those conversations?

Tessa Bain:

Well, I think return to work is a perfect example of an application. If you're a commercial designer of a corporate commercial, your interest right now is in helping your clients. And so if they are attempting to get people to come back to work in a hybrid fashion, how do we create virtual spaces that could utilize some of this technology and create for better inclusiveness, let's say, when someone is in the office physically and then you have people there virtually, or how do you onboard people virtually? For employee retention, we've seen companies have a hard time keeping their employees engaged.

And so, these virtual technologies have actually been tools that they've been able to use to create and express brand culture across that in corporation. For example, you could see that in onboarding or we think even the opportunity for designers specifically would be to extend out their physical spaces. So, an investment that a client's making, let's say, in their very high-end CEO boardroom or in their lobby and amenity spaces could be somehow conveyed virtually and extended there, so that everyone, whether you're there physically or virtually, could have that same experience.

Andrew Lane:

A company like Microsoft that has a product like Teams that is fairly I think universally known, but also a lot of people would say Teams and Zoom and products like that have an awful lot of opportunity to improve, don't fool yourself to think that Microsoft isn't taking that Teams product and expanding it into this space and trying to turn it into something that's much more 360 and immersive.

I always give the example that a very unheralded application of Teams during the pandemic was when the NBA shut down its League, they actually used the Teams product to bring virtual fans to the game and be able to see the court from their webcam. And then conversely, the people who were playing the game in the stadium could actually see the fans on a digital projection screen as though they were sitting in actual chairs. That's an example of a hybrid immersive experience that's really the tip of the iceberg of where some of this stuff can go when we think about future work and collaboration.

Tessa Bain:

If I'm sitting in the shoes of an A&D firm, I'm thinking about the next stages of where my business is going and how I'm going to innovate. I'm thinking, "Okay, how do I create that value and express that service offering to these clients that are looking for this?" I mean, further in retail, there's been a lot of consulting documents out lately that show that a consumer demands a new experience for retail. And so if I am a retail designer, how do I start to communicate this to my client and networking group and say, "Hey, we offer this service and we can offer you these tools both physically and digitally to enhance your retail experience?"

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

It sounds to me that the most promising applications or ideas reside in the hybrid world, where you're in the physical space but it's enhanced with digital technologies, because I'm still having a really hard time imagining except maybe for a very narrow part of the population to spend their whole time in the Metaverse in purely virtual world. Is that a fair assessment and do you want to speak a little more to that?

Andrew Lane:

I think that's absolutely fair and I think that you're not the only one who has hard time imagining spending their entire time in a virtual world. That's something that is spoken about in any publication that we'd read about, any industry conversations that we have on the technology side as well is this is really about if you think about the end-to-end experience of your personal experience and your life, where are the moments of utility? Where are the points of utility? We learned through the pandemic that being in the office five days a week isn't necessarily the best use of everyone's time. So, how do we rethink the utility of the work experience so that there are physical moments and there are digital moments and we optimize design for both of those?

I think that you will start to see more of those in terms of personal interactions, in terms of retail interactions, in terms of educational experiences. There's really going to be a lot more focus on hybrid where people will be dipping in and out of these tools more seamlessly as the technology becomes better. You'll hear a lot about the Apple AR glasses and the AR glasses that people are developing. AR glasses are another extension of all of this that's really about, how can we more seamlessly blend physical and digital experiences to allow people to optimize their time and optimize their experience? Whether they're trying to shop, learn, play, work, any of these areas will be areas where we'll see disruption.

Tessa Bain:

It's a bit clunky right now. I mean, if you put on Oculus headset, for example, or if you put on any type of wearable right now, there'll be a warning that you shouldn't have it on for longer than a few hours and that's because it's too disorienting. And so, we believe in an evolution. I mean, it'll be interesting to see where it goes, where it'll become much more seamless in a hybrid layering over physical life, and the ability to translate in and out will be much more efficient and less barriers I guess.

Andrew Lane:

You didn't ask the question, but I'll jump in to say that at the top of the house, the amount of venture capital and technology money that's been put into this space, the degree to which everyone from companies like Facebook, which has literally changed the name of their company to reflect their bet here, to companies like Microsoft that I mentioned, but all the processing companies, they're all very all-in on this space because they truly believe that this is where the world is going to go. That clunkiness is going to fade away and the technology is going to improve, and that's why we're real evangelists of the message to the architecture and design community to get in and be a part of the experience now because there is going to be a time when the tools more than meet the needs for anyone who's skeptical right now and that time will come a lot more quickly than any of us will actually be prepared for.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

I'm going to jump in here because I've been listening to all this and as fascinating as it is and relevant as it is, I'm noticing that we're talking a lot about the value of the virtual world as a way to compress the distances between creative entities and collaboration and work together, which is great. But as we've already spoken about and realized, the groundwork for that has been laid already. People are not scared of Zoom or Teams or any of those tools and if the Metaverse just makes that experience more enjoyable, more practical, more productive, great.

I want to change the tune here a bit though and now talk about actual practical, or I should say physical entities, meaning products. We talked a bit at the top of this conversation about NFT. So, I want to bring that up, put it on the table for discussion, because what I've been hearing a lot about and what I'd love to hear from you guys is the value of how NFT can help with issues of ownership. We know that counterfeiting is a big problem in the product design world and this sounds like an interesting tool to combat that. So, maybe we can talk a bit about that. Can you open the door for us and explain how blockchain and NFTs can help good old-fashioned product designers who make a chair and then get tired of seeing it show up at trade shows or completely cannibalized by counterfeit companies?

Tessa Bain:

Yeah, this is a really great question, something that we're super passionate about. My background, I mean, I shared earlier, but it's really been in design furniture. Everything that I've represented in the past and everything in the future has a design story and it's authored and it's authentic. And so, this is something early on that we started paying a lot of attention to and how do we use blockchain and an NFT to show provenance on a physical product design. It's something that we're exploring and there's a variety of different ways that you can look at applying NFT specifically to the entire process, but this is just something that we have started early days investigating.

Andrew Lane:

Yeah, we're working on a couple of pilots with manufacturers right now around this. There's different ways that people think about it. If you're a product designer, you can design from the ground up the ability to uniquely identify your physical product. If a physical product has any kind of a unique identifier on it, it's actually quite easy to be able to translate that into a complimentary identifier on the blockchain. Really where we foresee this going is in a couple of ways, one, that you're going to be able to see manufacturers and designers be able to actually verify the product right out of the gate, so that people know that they're buying the authentic item.

We think that that's going to have an incredible impact in secondary market when organizations like a 1stDibs are going to be able to actually verify that this is an original design by this designer or originally manufactured by this manufacturer and that it's not a knockoff, because I think that obviously when you start to get into eCommerce and things like that, that's where some of that confusion takes on another level altogether because the consumer at a certain point is just looking for a certain look. When you can actually tell them why they're paying a premium and actually show that to be authenticated to the blockchain, we think that that's a really powerful story for the industry to tell around counterfeiting and something that, as I said, we're piloting and we don't think is that far off, because there are so many parties who are really interested in being able to verify that authenticity. We think it's going to be something that we'll start to think about in the industry from the very design production layer in the very near future.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

But where are we right now? Where are we now in this whole stage? Are there actual tools out there that small-scale, one, two-man operations can either buy or engage in or they can get blockchain? See, this is where I lose the ability to even articulate it because I'm not aware on how this whole thing works. Stumbling through the language as best I can, I'm wondering if a small studio, two, three-person operation can buy or have access to a blockchain technology that can do all the stuff you just said. That sounded a bit like the tone was we're getting there, but I'm wondering, are we there yet? Are we there now? Can we...

Andrew Lane:

Turn it on? Yeah.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

Can a Fig40 for instance, who does contract furniture for Nienkamper, can they turn it on sort of thing?

Andrew Lane:

Yeah, that's something we can turn on today with something as simple as an Excel sheet that has your order numbers that are being produced on it and those order numbers can be translated into effectively NFTs that would allow a consumer to log in with that order number and generate a certificate of authenticity that links it back to the blockchain. That can be done in a pretty low-cost way. Those costs drive down with volume, obviously. That's something that's happening, and the end-to-end experience of also integrating with the resellers is really where we're talking when we say we're getting there because what it really needs is the full ecosystem participating.

The way that it's happening right now is in one offs. That's very much where we're focused, because you got to start somewhere, but it's not a cost prohibitive activity at this point. The actual cost to mint an NFT is negligible. It's really just about making sure that you can also layer it in with some technology that'll allow the end consumer to be able to claim their NFT and have something that feels meaningful to them. That's really the experience layer that we're focused on as far as the pilots that we're working on.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

That makes sense to me and I see how NFTs would help with determining the provenance of a product or an object and that's very clear. Are there also opportunities for NFTs to help manufacturers prevent manufacturing of knockoffs, or is that something that's always going to happen and you can't really stop it? Because for people who want the real thing, they'll be able to say, "Okay, this is a real one. This isn't. So, I'm going to buy the real one and pay premium for it." But I believe that there's always going to be people who are going to want the cheap knockoff because like you said earlier, they just want the look or the aesthetic. They don't want the real product.

Tessa Bain:

I think counterfeiting will continue to be an issue until we change our government regulations and what we're willing to accept. I mean, what is it? It's within a 10 degrees variation on a product design in North America, I mean, don't quote me directly, but around that number, that needs to change. But I think that having the NFT as part of your arsenal to combat counterfeiting is going to be something that will be expected in the future.

Andrew Lane:

Yeah. Unfortunately, the technology hasn't gotten its law enforcement badge just yet, but we do think that the ability to truly show provenance is something that doesn't currently exist and it's not a difficult gap to fill with this technology.

Tessa Bain:

Having been in design furniture too for years, you take a chair like a Wishbone for example. Here in North America, you have a friend saying, "Oh, I really want this chair," and they've just put it into Google and the fact that they can keep the name, a counterfeit company that's creating a likeness or a replica can use the same name and design attachment, that's a bit of an issue. So, how do we use these NFTs and how do we communicate that it's attached to an authentic NFT and use that as a tool to educate a consumer? Because to your point, if you are part of the niche group that understands the value of design and authentic furniture and objects, you'll be already looking for that. How do you communicate to someone who just doesn't know and hasn't experienced it what the difference is and the value behind it?

Andrew Lane:

I think resellers will be incentivized by that because if they have that mark and that system is truly end-to-end, that experience layer is further built out, they're going to be able to charge a premium in order to ensure that the person gets the authentic good. I think that that's something that benefits the entire ecosystem.

The other thing that'll be really interesting about that is you'd theoretically be able to see the ownership chain of a product that's gone through a couple of different sales in past hands a few different times. That might become something that's really exciting. When you're talking about a particular piece of design that's been owned by a particular celebrity or whatever the case might be, some of those things could actually really help to spur an authentic resale market.

Tessa Bain:

Yeah, or even sustainability story. I mean, if you can actually show that an office chair has been in four different office locations before taken to its end-of-life post-recycling and you can prove it using blockchain, how cool! That's a great story, not just from the fact that it's really interesting but because we can actually actively show the path and the trail that something has been on.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

You've just alluded to the NFT's ability to demonstrate the chain of ownership and the whole history of an object product or creation. Can you speak a little bit to its ability to generate revenue and perpetuity for the creators? Because I'm a creator and specifically photography and licensing is always a thorny issue, I'm really interested in hearing about its ability to say that you're a creator and you put out some art out there, something that you've created, and people pass it down from hand to hand and that generating ongoing revenue for the creator.

Tessa Bain:

I'm going to let Andrew speak on that specifically, but I think this is a good opportunity to loop back to a loose definition of what Web3 is, and it's power to the creator. And so, it's creating those revenue opportunities for the original creator to see those in perpetuity over the course of that product or service offering changing hands. You can speak specifically about that.

Andrew Lane:

Yeah. The text behind the NFT is often referred to as a smart contract, and really all that's doing is it can be set up at minting, at the creation, to say, "X person was the creator of this and every time that it changes hands, X person is going to get 2% of the resale," or whatever the case might be. That's already happening in a major way in the art NFT space. It's been one of the driving factors behind the growth of things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is probably the most celebrated and reviled NFT projects out there. But the reality is that the people who were the initial creators have continued to sustain a huge revenue influx through the resale at inflated prices of these products. And so, that's really common in the digital art space and it's something that we think has the potential to translate itself across because it is working as a model already.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

I think that's a very interesting thought because it will incentivize the creators to create something that has more lasting value. Not to say that they're not already doing it, but to piggyback on your example of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, I'm not particularly interested in that side of NFTs because the way I've seen it initially, it's like it's just a new technology that people are getting really excited about and it gets a lot of hype but it's going to die down. And so, what I'm more interested in is the long lasting value that creators can create and enhance or support with NFTs and get some of that back in the process. That's a very fascinating thing. Did you want to add anything to that?

Andrew Lane:

I think the only note that I would add is one of the barriers right now is there's friction points within the industry. So, everything from the manufacturer not having a way to individually identify each product or each batch of products that come off the line, depending on what their production process looks like, through to how the authenticity of that production batch is translated through any middlemen that actually bring it to an end consumer. From a B2C standpoint, this is a little bit smoother. When you start to get into B2B processes, where you have different distributors and dealers and different players like that, it can get a little messier to figure these things out.

We mentioned earlier the idea that there will need to be a bit of a conscious thought of production process from the beginning in order to really optimize how this will work in the future. I think that's really where one of the areas that needs to be worked through the most right now is happening is how is it that we are actually able to know that this one of one chair, it's tied to this particular NFT and these are the times that it passes hands. So, the actual development of that process is a data-forward piece that not all small manufacturers and designers have really embraced up to this point and something that they'll need to embrace if they want to be able to take advantage of this technology in a seamless way and create a great experience for those end consumers who are buying and reselling the products.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

I want to zoom back a bit and go back to the idea of Web3 in general and what we've seen with Web2. I'm going to use Twitter as an example because they're so easy to make fun of, but Twitter is generally thought of a platform that very few people engage in, but the ones who do are rabidly doing so and they spend all their day on Twitter and frantically twittering at people, getting angry and getting into arguments. I'm exaggerating a bit, but that's by and large what it is. There's an entire segment of the population that's not even on Twitter, doesn't even think about it. Is that going to be an issue with Web3 and are there ways to make whatever technologies come out of there more accessible, more appealing to the broader population and not just people that are into tech or into very narrow segments of industry that are on those platforms and use them regularly?

Andrew Lane:

It's a great question. I think that the Twitter example, it's a specific platform that you have to go to and that's part of why it's always going to have a level of adoption problems. There can only be one Facebook, and even Facebook isn't Facebook anymore. I guess TikTok is Facebook now. But Web3, when it's going to work really well, it's going to be seamless. And so right now, there are some clunky elements to it. But when it's seamless, you produce a piece of furniture and then consumer purchases that piece of furniture, probably the way they would have a warranty card. Maybe, they scan a QR code and it takes them to an opportunity where they click a really simple button and they're able to register their NFT.

When they go to resell that piece of furniture, the reseller sites are going to seamlessly accept some digital example of that token that's going to allow it to show up on that reseller site in a way that makes it really clear to all the end buyers that, that is authenticated. It's also going to transfer proceeds from that end sale back to the original designer of that piece. There's a little ways to go before that becomes a really seamless process, but that's when Web3 is really going to succeed when that is the case. I mentioned identity at the very beginning. You're going to have the promise at least that people will have the ability to really seamlessly choose which pieces of their identity they pass along in order to transact with a brand.

They're going to be incentivized to provide those pieces of information, rather than in the current state where Facebook knows every movie that you've ever watched and you're really not profiting from that in any way other than the fact that you can log into some websites a little bit more easily, but then they know all your data too. That level of ownership, that test mentioned earlier, will become this seamless background piece. If we go to the Metaverse example, the technology will make it so that you'll be able to much more seamlessly transition in and out of digital and physical interactions and you really won't notice it in the way that you notice, "Hey, I'm going to make a conscious effort to go on Twitter right now," to bring it back to your original example. And so, we really think that's the future state.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

I'm going to take a minute here and circle back to words you used earlier, which caught my ear and I've been noodling since we've been talking. You used the word ecosystem. Whenever I hear ecosystem, I think there's layers of engagement. There's animals that are food for other animals. Everything feeds into itself. It's an awkward metaphor, but I'm just thinking that I want to circle a little farther back into the chain of consumption, start with awareness because we're talking a lot about concepts that members of the industry, that Arnaud and I are involved with. This is beyond foreign. It's hard for them to wrap their head around. You're seeing us struggle even with the language.

But it's probably safe to say that early adopters or kids in their twenties or something who grew up with video games and whatever, this is probably a little more natural for them. I'm wondering how that could play into the next five or seven years as that generation comes out of design school and starts to start their own firms and this is a little more natural to them. I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about what you think how that ripple effect will change the design culture moving forward. It touches a bit on issues of recruitment and in a way, even if you want to expand the discussion to a larger form, is how design itself could be impacted and what industries will be poaching design, or vice versa, who design will be poaching because of an awareness and an understanding about how this universe works.

Andrew Lane:

I love that question. That's a core message that we try to share whenever we can is that to put it bluntly and flatly, there's no guarantee that in the future the architecture and design industry is going to be the preeminent place for the most talented designers in the world to want to go when they graduate school. The tools that people are coming up with, the kids that are right now making worlds in Minecraft and Roblox, the 12 and 14-year-olds, they're going to be professionals in that next seven, eight years before you blink your eye. Universities and colleges are already adapting to this. We're already working with a couple of different schools in our daily work who have professors that are creating incredible opportunities for students to create in these worlds for all sorts of different purposes. While we said off the top that there's the opportunity for the design industry to get engaged and start to build these worlds, that opportunity also translates to talent.

If the design industry doesn't embrace these tools and the most talented design minds of the future are coming up using them, what happens when they do graduate from school? Are they going to want to go to architecture firms, or they're going to want to go to game design companies? Are they going to want to go to the technology design companies, and do those companies start to take over the way that the digital world is designed? I think that's a really interesting consideration, an important consideration, because all signs point to the digital world becoming an increasingly prominent place where people are spending their time, even if it is only transiently. There are going to need to be people who create those designs and there are going to need to be people who think about the way the digital and physical worlds interact with one another. We would hope that this industry would be at the forefront of that, but there is no guarantee.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about whether you see a rift happening between the traditional aspect of design architecture which deals with the physical world, like building buildings and designing interiors and getting them built, versus the digital world where all those kids are getting involved in new technologies and designing offices and buildings in the virtual space. What are the implications for the more traditional practices of architecture and design?

Tessa Bain:

I wouldn't say that one is more important than the other and I think this goes back to our earlier conversation on firms becoming more innovative and how do you take value in both. I see them actually, from my perspective, being very interwoven. And so, using all of these tools would help the processes for physical buildings and physical spaces.

Andrew Lane:

You're seeing Zaha Hadid and Bjarke Ingels Group come out with these headline grabbing experiments even in the space. That's them also planting a flag and saying, "We're going to be a part of defining how this future's going to work and we're going to be a place that talent is going to look to, to come and be a part of that as well." It's interesting when you go on the Discord forums and in places that are talking about Metaverse architecture, there's always an opportunity to put your hand up if you're actually a licensed architect when you're in those forums. There's usually a reasonable 20, 30% of the people that are actually architects who are there, whether being curious or actually having moved and started to really, exclusively design for digital spaces.

There certainly are smaller scale examples, not just those big headline grabbing ones, of where that chasm isn't really a chasm. There are people who are crossing over it. But we do find broadly speaking at firms, whether it's a hesitancy or a lack of belief, that not everyone's diving in head-first. And so, there might be some who are a little bit left behind when it comes to that transition. That's not to say... We're going to keep building buildings. We're going to keep sitting on chairs. These things are going to persist. But there is a big opportunity, and I think a creatively exciting opportunity here right now, that we are starting to see large firms, we are starting to see individuals, and we're certainly starting to see young up-and-coming individuals exploring.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

This might be a question more for you, Tessa. Do you think the way of designing in the physical world is similar to the digital world, or are they completely different? The reason I'm asking is the architects are trained a certain way, designers as well, and they think in terms of, "We have to deal with the laws of physics. There's no escaping that." In the digital world, you don't to. You may want to, but you don't have to. So, how does that impact the way people are going to design?

Tessa Bain:

That's a really good question. I keep giving this answer to everything, and it's both. I think that we don't have to maybe define it one way or the other. And so when you look at, if I am a corporate office and I'm looking to extend my identity into the digital space and offer that service to all of my employees, I'm thinking about something that's not too offensive right out the gate, meaning, we want to come into a meeting room. I mean, Andrew uses this example all the time. In a boardroom, there's a table and there's chairs not because we need to actually physically sit in this boardroom in the digital space, but because we need to understand how to position ourselves in the room. And so, you have the opportunity to, again, extend something that mirrors a physical environment or is a version of a physical environment that you could extend.

I also see the opportunity for certain companies that their identity is a little more progressive or maybe it's edgy or they want to do something wild. I mean, they have the opportunity to then create something completely different and maybe fantasy-based and something that could be unlike anything we've ever seen here. The same goes to product design. You don't need to have a four-legged chair in a digital space. So, how do we start using that to influence our design? There's an unlimited opportunity there when you start to think about digital design. But you could also say... I mean, there's an example, the petal chair by Moooi with Andres Reisinger. He actually created that in a virtual and digital space first, and then Moooi picked it up and created the physical version when they didn't think it was possible. So, it really plays off of one another.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

That opens a lot more questions than it answers, but I don't think it's relevant for this conversation.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

Plus, we don't have time.

Tessa Bain:

Yeah.

Andrew Lane:

Yeah, that's the next podcast.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

That's all the questions I had. Peter, is there anything you want to ask?

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

Well, yeah. I mean, if you don't mind, I want to know a little bit more about Digby. So if you don't mind, I want to put you on the spot. I'm curious, it's a two-pronged question and they're not antagonistic questions, so relax, but operating any company that's in this sphere, you're at the forefront. I hate using fancy words, but in this case, it's actually true. You are at the front of the line and everyone else is behind you, so to speak. So, it's a two-pronged question. My question is, what questions or... Yeah, let's just start with what questions are you fielding from your clients now, and what do you think that the type of questions are going to be five years from now? I know it's a tough thing because no one has a crystal ball, but any good business has to do a little forecasting.

I'm wondering, in any way you want to talk about it, how you're handling clients, fielding their questions now, and do you think the questions are going to be the same five years, seven years from now, or do you think it's going to be a whole new landscape? To add a little spin to this, I know a lot of the way... Arnaud made a good point about architects and designers that work in the practical, physical realm. Their questions are, "Well, how do I get this piece of lumber for cheap?" That's the same question now as it was five years ago, and it will be five years from now. Those questions don't really change. Is there an overlap? Not to just overload you with asking the same question in different words, but what are you getting now? What do you think you'll get in five years from now?

Andrew Lane:

I think that it's interesting you did this yourself earlier, I don't know if we'll edit it out or not, but understanding what the question is that you want to ask is probably the biggest thing that we feel right now, to be perfectly honest. We're helping people to ask the right questions for the most part because they don't know how. They just say, "This is something we want to try," or with an architecture firm, it's, "This company came to us and asked us if we could design this in some sort of a Metaverse. What do we ask them? What should we say to them next? Can you help us figure that out?" That's a huge part of what we do is just help people to understand what are the questions that they should be asking, because it's not about a piece of lumber. Those questions start to become pretty irrelevant pretty fast.

But it's about, what is this you actually want to do with this space? How many people do you want to bring there? How persistent? Is it going to be on 24/7? Is it something that you're doing because you're trying to sell something, or is it something you're doing because you're trying to create community and loyalty? Is it something that you're doing because you're trying to just be a part of this conversation and create some buzz for yourself? So, a lot of the questions that we're getting are just like, "What are the questions I should ask? How should I start?" That's really been the place where we've been able to provide the most value to our clients is to help them take the first couple steps, and then very quickly they start to realize that when you're designing for a different world, a lot of those constraints go away and that's when they can start to have a little bit of fun, because then it's when their imagination and creativity can take over. Would you add anything to that?

Tessa Bain:

Just that it's about utility. I mean, you said it. In other words, it's very important to identify the why and what's the utility that you're looking to gain. Is it exploring, or is there a true business purpose to what you're doing? And so, we start there.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

That answers the first part of the question, what you're encountering in the here and now. I feel like that's not going to change five years from now, even though the technology might. Andrew, to your point, if you're saying that you're trying to educate your clients to ask the right questions, well, that's the phrase that architects have been using for decades, millennia even. I don't know how far back architecture goes, but...

Andrew Lane:

Pyramids, yeah. Millennia.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

Their job is someone comes to me and says, "I want to build something," and an architect says, "Well, let's first start with the why. Are you asking the right questions? Should you build a condo on this piece of property, or should it be something else?" That's a random reference, but I'm wondering, to my second question, is there going to be a whole new set of questions, a whole new set of client issues you think you're going to be, hopefully or unfortunately, having to deal with five, seven years from now? To put it another way, is this going to now be so common that you're not going to have to teach people how to ask the right questions, they'll already know how to ask those questions?

Andrew Lane:

I mean, I think that the way we've set ourselves up will always have an element of that. Education is one of the things that we've really been trying to lead with as an organization. So I think some of that will never go away, to your point. But in five years, I find it really hard to imagine what the questions are we're going to answer and that's part of why we decided to come into the space early, because I've always really enjoyed being in a place where you get to be a part of inventing the future as it happens. I think what we'll see is, as these projects start to roll out, that where people want to go next, the questions will be leading us there and we'll be leading ourselves there with the questions. That was really inelegant. But you know what I mean. It becomes an interesting chicken and egg because we're going to build off of each other.

I talked about this with an editor a little while back. When they first built a shelter, there was someone who came in and said, "Well, this is great. We're not wet anymore. But we could really come in and put a chair here, so someone could have a place to sit and maybe we could do something to make the space more beautiful." That's really where the industry's early stages started to emerge from. We don't have a lot of shelters yet. We don't really know what people are going to do and what problems they're going to try and solve once we start to see people spending more time in these shelters. So, it's hard to imagine where the questions are going to go. I think that it's just going to be a really interesting evolution. So, I don't mean to cop out of your question, but I also-

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

Well, I said it myself that we're not clairvoyant. We don't have crystal balls. If you did know where everything was going, you'd be rich. So...

Tessa Bain:

Well, that's the goal.

Andrew Lane:

Do you have the questions?

Tessa Bain:

No, I just think that right now where we're at in the industry is that the faucet's dripping. People are cautious, which is interesting because we in interior design and architecture follow fashion and we follow art and they're taking some really prominent positions in this. And so naturally, of course, we'll be walking behind it and catching up. I think the faucet is dripping. I think that very quickly, the faucet's probably going to turn on and that's when those questions that we're working with clients now where it's exploratory, it's with caution, is maybe going to be turned into, "Hey, we got to do this and we've got to do it fast." And so, I'm looking forward to that. I think that'll be an exciting time in our industry.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

Well, Andrew, you said it's important to be in a place where you can educate and help people who are listening and engaging to start asking the right questions. If I'm right, you're already moving into that with the projects you have coming up. You're setting yourself up to be an educator in the form of podcast. You want to talk a bit about that?

Andrew Lane:

Yeah. We've, again, thought of education as a real focus. We're starting a podcast of our own. So, it's exciting for you guys to give us a little bit of practice here today. But we're going to be launching that on the Sandow Surround Network with their team and bringing on some people who are doing some of the early projects and doing early work in the space, just to talk to them about how they got started and really to try and do it in plain language and do it in a way that comes from the industry. We don't want to bring on technologists or anything like that, but we want to bring on real people who people in this industry will recognize and respect and they'll be able to hear from them and understand what got them started and what they're seeing and what they're doing.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

That sounds awesome. Before we wrap it up, is there anything that we've missed? A Luddite like me who never played video games as a kid and barely knows how to turn on his computer, is there anything I missed in exploring this?

Andrew Lane:

I think you guys are hitting in all the right notes. To your last question, this is the early stage where we're figuring out what the questions are. We really appreciate you guys just bringing us in to have a conversation about where things are at. But I think Tessa's analogy about the faucet is a good one. We do really see the drips starting to come, and I talked about the snowball rolling down the hill I think earlier, but we really do feel that that momentum is coming on in the things we're seeing in the press and the conversations that we're having, in the people that are coming to us. We really see that there's an excitement that's starting to build, and when some of these things start to hit the real world and the value in the fashion and art industry is already starting to prove itself from a commerce standpoint as well, we just think that the potential is pretty limitless and it's just an exciting moment for everyone to get up to speed and understand how they might be able to get involved.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

I think that's a great place to end. I want to ask you one more question. What would you say to any of our listeners that are interested but scared or hesitant to dip their toe in those waters? Where should they start?

Tessa Bain:

I think the easiest answer would be to just start. Google it. Start reading articles. Start listening to podcasts like this one. Join different Metaverse platforms and just play around and see what it's like. Be open-minded and continue to research.

Andrew Lane:

Yeah, absolutely. You're not going to break anything. Well, we've been playing Roblox lately and just going to collect coins. The things aren't meant to be or built to be scary. Everyone is pushing in the direction of making everything as inclusive as possible. There's nothing that you're going to hurt yourself with by taking a stab and by trying. I think people say there's no silly questions. Definitely feel that way. Ask questions to people in your network who you know. We're always happy to talk to anybody, but there's lots of people out there who are happy to answer a question because it is new and by that token, it's also not defined, which is maybe the coolest part is you may feel like you're behind right now, but 12 months from now, you could be defining the future because you just gave yourself the chance to do that. That's really the stage that we're at. There aren't really rules. There aren't really full definitions. And so, we can just go and play and create. I think that that's the spirit that this industry has built on and that's really exciting.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

Where can people find you?

Andrew Lane:

You can find us at our website, houseofdigby.com. Soon, you'll be able to find us on the Sandow Surround Podcast Network.

Tessa Bain:

Feel free to always reach out to us on LinkedIn as well.

Andrew Lane:

Yeah, absolutely. We try to be pretty accessible and appreciate the opportunity to come and talk about it.

Arnaud Marthouret / Single Serves:

Well, thank you very much for this very interesting conversation and thank you for your time.

Andrew Lane:

Thanks for all your questions, you guys.

Peter Sobchack / Bevel:

It's been great chatting with you. Thanks for coming on.

{PODCAST} Single Serves ep. 317 - Melia on Good Design

Architects are known to have a fondness for industrial design and specifically for items that are streamlined, honest and useful. James Melia, founder of Blond, is in my opinion one of the 21st century heirs to the best modernist designers. Not only his work is beautiful, but it’s also smart and purposeful.

His entire business model follows a strict code of conduct of sorts, where he was able to parlay his skills into a position where he can choose to only work with clients that are philosophically and morally aligned with his firm’s. The result is beautiful, award-winning objects that defy conventions.

In this interview we talk about his work, where he came from and where he’s going.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd

Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity:

RVLTR:

James Melia is a British designer working in the fields of industrial design, branding, packaging, visualization, and UX and UI. A keen observer of human behaviors, he has been interested in unusual solutions to common problems for as long as he can remember. Since founding the studio Blond in 2015, he's worked with a variety of clients looking to disrupt their respective industries. Today we're going to talk design with James, along with some of his work and outlook on to the future. So thank you very much, James, for being on the show.

James Melia:

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

RVLTR:

So can you tell us who you are and what you do in your own words, in three sentences or less?

James Melia:

Three sentences or less, okay. Challenge. We are a industrial design agency based in Central London. We primarily focus on industrial design, or we do have offshoots of that, visualization and UI and branding, which you've already mentioned. And fundamentally, as an agency, we focus on bringing a really deep-rooted narrative to the products that we produce, and focus on a very high level of quality as well.

RVLTR:

So when did you figure out that you wanted to become a designer?

James Melia:

Good question. I think I fell into it. I think I was kind of attracted to being a graphic designer, at school, and not for anything more than just being relatively superficial, and thinking it was quite a cool profession, and seeing that wearing suits and doing something that is maybe not conventional in this sort of academic sense. And then as I went through the school process, I started to realize I enjoyed making things and bringing 3D objects to life, your DT lessons and things like that you have in the UK. I don't know what you call it in the US, or in Canada. And then I went to university with the intention of being a BSC engineer, basically, a product engineer, design and engineering focus. Did a foundation course in engineering path. Surprisingly, maybe not surprisingly, and then realized though, at the end of that, that really wasn't for me. It was too technically focused. As much as I really enjoyed the technical element, I'm much more driven and drawn to the creative side of industrial design. So I mean it was a really lucky and fortunate path that led me to the creative industrial design profession.

RVLTR:

So we ... let's talk a bit about design in more general terms. We hear a lot about the idea of good design, and I personally have an opinion on what that would be. What is good design in your opinion?

James Melia:

Big question. A good design fundamentally has to consider sustainability. When we're talking about designing 3D products, which you're doing all the time, inevitably these things have a lifespan. So as an industrial designer you have to consider sustainability in everything that you do. That's the first thing. I mean it, almost frustratingly, entering design awards recently I've noticed that there's always a category for "sustainable design." It shouldn't be a category. It shouldn't even be a separate topic. It should just be embedded in every single one of the other categories. So that's the first thing.

But to achieve that, maybe it's not always just about the materials you use. Sometimes it comes down to how you actually manage the aesthetics, and assuring there's no aesthetic obsolescence that is designed into something. So not following trends. And that's a big thing for Blond, my agency. We don't necessarily follow trends. I mean, obviously we're aware of them. We don't intentionally disregard them, we just are not drawn to them or follow them from a creative point of view. We design things and embed kind of an aesthetic and a narrative to our products that is really driven by the user's requirements, functionally, aesthetically. And from that you naturally get a product that has inherent longevity to it, because it's useful, and aesthetically it's not going to go out of date. So for me that's a good product. Yeah, I think so.

RVLTR:

Yeah, that makes sense. One of my favorite product brands is OXO. I'm sure you're familiar with them.

James Melia:

Yeah, they do good work.

RVLTR:

And while their products are pretty cheap, both in terms of price and quality, meaning that some of them eventually end up breaking, but I find myself going back to it because they're so well-designed from the perspective of the user experience and how they fit in your hands, because they're kitchen utensils, right. So I think a lot of the qualities you've described are in products like that.

So when you start designing a product, you're given a brief, how do you go about making sure that all the things you've described are part of it, and what are some of the challenges you face when you're coming up with a new product for a client?

James Melia:

It's interesting, to circle back to your first point, that you mentioned OXO. Because we worked with one of their biggest competitors here in the UK, only really slightly larger, called Joseph Joseph. We designed a water bottle for them recently. They have, I would say, a very similar stance and benefits to their consumers. They're always looking for a USP that's actually beneficial. It's not just a gimmick. It really does solve a problem. And so working with them has been really enjoyable, because they have a certain synergy, I think, in the way we approach work. But to answer your second question, it depends upon the client, depends upon the brief. I mean every brief is so different. Sometimes you can get a paragraph from a large corporation and 20 pages from one certain client. And the first thing you need to do is to really, really define what the brief is and sort of collaborate on that.

First of all, there's something that people don't necessarily talk about, they talk about doing their design work, but sometimes just collaborating on the brief to an extent is a really important step. Really understanding what the client wants, whether there's any way to make it better and to increase business strategy, or increase the way that we manage to benefit the user. From there, what we would do is look to conduct, with everything we do, depending on budget, obviously ... it scales up and down, but a holistic bit of product strategy, and obviously research before that. And that allows us to identify market opportunities from a commercial sense, but more importantly functional requirements, and often functional requirements that the user wouldn't know they even had, that help us answer problems and create a really meaningful and useful product.

RVLTR:

And so a big part of design, both industrial and I think in any other area of design, architecture, interior design, graphic, is really to take the brief, kind of study it, do your own research, so to speak, and see if you can come up with maybe a better brief or better solution to the client's problem. So that's pretty well understood by designers. Do you ever walk away from a client because you don't understand the brief, or the brief doesn't mesh with what your firm's about, or you always try to maybe show them a different way or a different path, or maybe an entirely different solution?

James Melia:

All of the above, actually, to an extent. I would never walk away from a brief if I don't understand it. We always make sure that we understood, first of all, before walking away. But we've turned ... we regularly turn down work. Just yesterday we turned down work for a vaping product. I mean, I don't know, for us as an agency, that my staff and me would want to be involved in anything nicotine-related. That's the first thing, has to gel with the studio, and what everyone's happy working on. You got to think about your staff as well as overheads and just your general morals. Obviously, you have to be in quite a fortunate position like we are to be able to turn down work like that, which is generally quite highly paid.

We will turn down work after collaborating on a brief if it looks like ... if we think that it's not going to be successful or actually bring benefit, or have a reason to exist. That's the big one. It doesn't have a reason to exist, essentially it's purely commercial, and just for financial sake. We've turned down a few projects eventually, after sort of fleshing out the brief of the client, because it is clear that it will potentially be landfill waste in a year or so's time, and sold cheaply, and just made to make money primarily. Unless it has some kind of drive behind it to better human existence or make people's lives better or easier, then we wouldn't necessarily take it on.

RVLTR:

Yeah, that makes sense. So can you speak a little bit to maybe your design heroes? Who are the people you respect, both in the industrial design world, maybe outside as well?

James Melia:

I'd been asked this question before, and is it maybe a cliche answer, but I've always enjoyed Dieter Rams' work and still do, particularly from an industrial design point of view, particularly after Jonathan Ive and the Apple team were heavily inspired by his work. He's been popularized and almost a household name, I guess, but he's still an influence to some extent. There are several studios that have been operating for 20-plus years that I respect, and their continual output of good-quality work. And then outside the industrial design world, or maybe crossing between industrial design and architecture, I've always enjoyed the likes of Jan Echolson and Bruno Munari, just from a design thinking point of view, and their ability to be able to create long-lasting objects, really elegant analog objects, that will always be enjoyed for generations.

RVLTR:

Yeah, and it's interesting what you say about long-lasting objects that don't become obsolete. And you've touched on that a couple of times throughout this conversation. It seems like that's a common thread across your work, but are there other kind of design principles or a kind of philosophy or common threads that you can talk about, that are very important to you?

James Melia:

Could you provide an example, potentially, and then I will ...

RVLTR:

Well, similar to what you just said about obsolescence, designing objects that people will enjoy for a long time, and not just discard because two years from now it looks like it's out of date, or it's been replaced by the latest gizmo. So maybe to reframe that question, speak about if you have any kind of principles that you can lay out that you have written down, or your philosophy about design and how you approach each project.

James Melia:

There's three main principles that make up what we call conscious design. These are, first of all, we would say that every product needs to be useful. So it should be ... have a purpose and a positive impact on the user's life. If it's not useful, what's the point of it existing? Second, needs to be deliberate. So no detail is superfluous, nothing. You can see that in our work. Everything's been stripped back. I quite often say to the designers, when I have design reviews, "Why do we have these three separate details in this one product? Can we split it across and make sure that there is a particular meaning for that detail existing?" And I think that bestows all the work that we do with minimalism, which is not intentional from an aesthetic point of view, but actually from a design story narrative point of view. And then thirdly, we like to think of it as aware, so needs to fit within the world we inhabit, and not just designed for today, but designed to be passed down and enjoyed by future generations. So again, touching upon the point that you ... the reoccurring theme of the podcast so far.

RVLTR:

I'm personally fascinated with objects that are designed predominantly because of how they function. I'm thinking about cameras or motorcycles or cars. There's room for a bit of design, but by the way of ... because they function a certain way and ... when you use a camera, the shutter is always more or less in the same place, and you hold it more or less the same way. There's some paradigms that you can't really change or it might be too disruptive to the way people use the object to change. What's your thought on that, and can some of those principles be applied to maybe less functional objects that have a little bit more room for design itself? Because I'm always fascinated ... I'm a photographer, so I ... cameras are, no matter what brand you use, it's always kind of the same way. And I understand why, but I'd love to hear your take on that.

James Melia:

And there's a couple of elements that I guess define that, more than what people are used to. What functionally just absolutely works. There's a thing in industrial design people say, "No one's been able to successfully redesign the umbrella," because it's so perfect and everyone's so used to it. There's an element of that, I guess, to those things. Also, maybe there's a kind of industry standard that people are worried about disrupting, maybe. Most of the controls in the camera to the right. Is that correct? I mean, what percentage of the world are right-handed? There's still a fundamental sort of concern about taking, especially on some of the larger, more analog cameras, the more professional ones, taking analog controls and making them digital. I think to ... it'd be quite a disruptive product to rethink something like that that's been exactly the same for what, a hundred years?

RVLTR:

Yeah, and there are a few examples. I mean the iPhone is the obvious one, where you took something that had a keyboard and a tiny screen, and then you turned the screen into the keyboard, and then kind of completely changed the paradigms. But those are pretty rare it seems. And once something start working, it's more of an evolution then. Because fundamentally, if you take a car, it's working the same way it has for 120 years. It's evolved. Obviously it's more elaborate, more complex, but the basic driving experience is basically the same. So that's always been fascinating to me. And I wonder if someone had to invent the car today with today's technology, if it would be completely different, or if you'd had a blank slate, which is not going to happen, obviously.

James Melia:

I wonder whether it's just the car, though. And if you had a blank slate on the way that the infrastructure worked, as in the roads and the light systems and the roundabouts, then I think it'd be a very different thing. But the fact is that you're ... even these brand new electric cars you're seeing that look very conceptual, but they're actually existing, which is exciting, you're still penned in with the same restrictions. The Tesla's got a floating iPad essentially, and nothing else, which is amazing, interesting, from a design point of view. They're still constrained by exactly the same parameters in terms of safety and road infrastructure.

RVLTR:

Yeah, because you have to contend with the same infrastructure. You have a very good point. So is there a project of yours in particular that you're the most proud of, or that kind of stands out?

James Melia:

There was one recently. It's actually the brand I've already mentioned in the podcast, Joseph Joseph. They're kind of similar to OXO, you've also mentioned.

RVLTR:

The water bottle?

James Melia:

Yeah. That one particularly. I mean it's very, very difficult space to innovate in, if you're not just sticking technology in something. I mean, people have put LEDs and UV cleaning elements in water bottles, which is arguably innovative and useful, but eventually will time out and break. I think we always try to find some analog solution to a problem, or we know that we find. But first of all, I think actually being able to identify a opportunity in a space that's been so heavily occupied was really successful, was very happy with. We actually did a lot of observational research. You ask people about water bottle, not going to say, "Oh, I have deep thoughts," about their water bottle, to an extent. So we went out into London just before the pandemic, and took a couple of days just observing people using water bottles, and what we found was, people on the phone had the water bottle in their hand, newspaper, and they're kind of like struggling with this cap they've taken off.

And so we just found this opportunity to try to somehow make the cap less of a thing that could be lost, or could just be an extra thing you have to hold in your hand. So from that observational research, which I'm the largest advocate of, as opposed to interviewing one on one or even on a bigger scale, we were able to create a method where the cap just slides over the neck of the bottle and it stays there whilst you drink. So also has the benefits in terms of hygiene and storage. So if you take the cap off the neck and store it inside the cupboard, you're not going to get the smell when it's being contained and sealed. That I'm particularly proud of, and even more so proud of it that people don't recognize it. It goes slightly unnoticed, which from a commercial point of view is a bit frustrating. There needs messaging to sort of show that you can use this function, but if you manage to create such a great USP, and it not be screaming at you, then that answers all of the Blond ethos, everything we've been trying to achieve. And even though it's just a simple water bottle it's probably the thing that I'm most proud of, because of that.

RVLTR:

That's interesting. So how do you go about doing those observational studies? Where do you go to observe people using drinking bottles? That's a very interesting question to me.

James Melia:

Yeah, it's a bit of a spying, isn't it? And obviously don't want to take too many pictures because it's not ... It's a bit strange. But we went out to London, the Underground, the Tube, and particularly where it's hot, the central line, and luckily it was summer, so we saw people carrying water bottles constantly, in a typical sort of tourist hotspot in London, like Trafalgar Square and the Tate Museum and various other places in London, and just sat there and observed. Basically took a couple of Tube stops, sat on some benches, watched people going about their lunch break with their reusable or non-reusable water bottle, and just how they were carrying it, how they're using it, how they're drinking from it. Yeah.

RVLTR:

So you basically get paid to people watch.

James Melia:

Basically. This is a great job. Hey.

RVLTR:

That's amazing. So you've alluded to that in the talking about the bottle, the use of technology and industrial design. And I think that's a great segue to talk about more how big tech ... or how tech in general, is getting used in industrial design, and how do you see that looking in the future?

James Melia:

It's a difficult thing to respond to. I think there's some exciting opportunities from industrial design process with technology, and how you present your work to clients, augmented reality and VR. From a product point of view, there are some great opportunities for us to be able to better the world we live in, especially with, for example, EVs and electric transportation mobility in general.

RVLTR:

What would be maybe a dream project? Maybe there's an assignment that you've thought about that you'd like to get, but you haven't gotten a chance to. What would that look like to you?

James Melia:

I'm a furniture designer by trade, so I actually have a degree in furniture design. And I think actually a dream project now would be some expanding of my furniture portfolio. So a desk chair, something really that benefits the ergonomics of ... and benefits just in the way that people sit, and their posture and general ergonomics of working. That would be an absolutely lovely project. That would be a dream project. Also, because we're relatively large, and when you run an agency, small projects, as much as they're really fun, it's nice to have a long, large project that takes a while to develop, and you can really get your teeth sunk into.

And that, and then my answer's always the same. I mean I've been asked it one or two times. As an agency, I always ensure that we have a variety of work coming through the door. I mean, we design within the same month coat hangers and refrigerators and air conditioners and glass Tupperware. So the variety's really important, I think, just to ensure that everyone is on their toes and interested, and every day is different for them, and they enjoy coming into work. And so the dream brief is one that's different to the previous briefs, which is a slightly non-answer I suppose, but it's true. So.

RVLTR:

That's a very designer answer.

James Melia:

Yeah.

RVLTR:

One of the last questions I have for you, it's a bit on the lighter side. Where does the name Blond come from, and what does it mean to you?

James Melia:

On the lighter side, but it has a long answer. Yeah. I had a podcast a couple weeks ago, and apparently the person did lots of question-asking for the audience beforehand to say, "What were your questions for James?" And it was the main asked question, apparently. I understand why. I was looking for names for a long time, and I did lots of workshop sessions with my friends, and I was trying to create this name that had this meaning, and the way that we bring design details together, and there's some process we're looking to adopt as an agency. And the first ... one of the first names that landed, kind of thought, that's it, was a name called Cohesion, right. Cohesion. And I thought ... we both thought, "That's it. That's it. We found the name." And the person I was working with at the time, he's actually recently come back to the business. And we went to bed and woke up, and we'd both forgotten what the name was. So it was quite evident that that wasn't the name, because it wasn't memorable.

So from there I was on a quest to look for something memorable. And in doing so I was thinking about lots of different band names or company names or anything that sticks out in my head. And there's two that always stuck out in my head, which were Acne, which is a clothing brand, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, not a band I like, but I remember their name for some reason. I think about them. And I was trying to analyze-

RVLTR:

Do you know what the Red Hot Chili Peppers' first name was?

James Melia:

No. No, no. Go on.

RVLTR:

So if I remember correctly, because it's a bit long and complicated, it's [Tony Flow and the] Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem.

James Melia:

I did know that. I did know that. I was a big fan of their first couple of albums, particularly Californication. So I had heard that, I think. Yeah. Interesting. It's much better. Red Hot Chili Peppers must have been more memorable.

RVLTR:

Yeah, yeah. It's probably a bit too punk maybe for what they're doing now.

James Melia:

Yeah, maybe. And so basically I was analyzing those, and I thought they were really interesting case studies, because you don't think about the actual chili pepper when you think about Red Hot Chili Peppers. You think about the band. And likewise with Acne, you don't think about spots. Again, I'm not ... still haven't looked it up, probably should, but I think it's a French brand. I think it means something else in French maybe. But anyway, you think about the really beautiful bits of clothing they make, particularly if you know the brand. And therefore I was looking for a name that stuck out in people's minds and they remembered. Equally, it needed to have some kind of meaning. And I came along ... I came up with the name of Blond, basically based upon the color of wood. So being relatively unintrusive, not shouting, some kind of longevity to it aesthetically. As you've noticed, that's a running theme.

And then also the other fact that it has this connotation of hair color, which does make people smile and almost laugh, basically, at you. Because of that, it doesn't get forgotten. I always give this example of when I was completely validated. I went into the room with LG UK one day, was really early days, my first time in the company. And one of the design directors said, as soon as he walked through the door, I think it was even before hello, "I expected you to be wearing blonde wigs." And he was taking the piss completely. Fine though, justified. But at that moment, as much as he was taking the mick, I knew that we'd found a name that people would remember and ask about, as part of enjoying it.

RVLTR:

Do you go to meetings wearing blonde wigs?

James Melia:

No.

RVLTR:

Because that would be a great icebreaker if you wore like a ... what is it called, a bob cut? Or that's kind of really straight chin length hair with bangs. That would be hilarious.

James Melia:

Yeah. You call it bangs, don't you? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that would be funny. No, I don't. And then, other reasons are slightly less interesting.

RVLTR:

And it's funny how a good name keeps on giving you new meanings over time, right?

James Melia:

Yeah.

RVLTR:

That's how you know whether you've picked a good name or not, if you keep coming up with new meanings for it. One of the last questions I have, to get back to a slightly more serious topic, what are some of the lessons you've learned from being a successful industrial designer that you think could apply to architecture and interior design?

James Melia:

The running of a business, probably. I think that crosses everything from all aspects of creativity and beyond. And starting a company. Some of the lessons I learned early on maybe could transfer across for someone looking to start an architecture business, maybe.

I started it with no clients, and no portfolio. I took a £15K loan to basically fund six months-plus of mortgage repayments, and hoped that I would get some work. And my advice to people would be to take more if you're going to take a loan, because that was naive, and that was far too little. But to go for it. And that's the way to do it, is to add that pressure. Obviously there was a big risk there, but I had to make it work. There was a ... And I always had this ... sort of relatively scared of public speaking, even doing this kind of thing. I'd be quite nervous, I mean most throughout my whole life. And then during those first six months, when I had the ticking pressure of the financial side of things, as much as I probably lost a bit of hair in the process, all those barriers, that I want to worry, gone. Suddenly I'd stop being nervous, talk to people, trying to get work, doing these kinds of things. And so some of the biggest learnings I've had is just to, if you want to do it, you want to create your own business, just do it, take the risk, but maybe give yourself a little bit more of a buffer than probably six months worth of overheads.

RVLTR:

And so how long was it until you got your first job?

James Melia:

We were really lucky. I think we got one within the first ... Well, we had a very small one right at the beginning, within the first couple of days. But then I think the big one came within three or four weeks.

RVLTR:

That's pretty fast.

James Melia:

I had been building a website, and I incorporated the company the year before, when I was working full-time. And every single weekend I'd been building a portfolio, albeit conceptual. So it wasn't starting completely from scratch. I had something to hit the floor running with.

RVLTR:

Gotcha. That's all for the questions I had today.

James Melia:

Thank you very much for having me on, and thank you very much everybody for listening.

{PODCAST RERUN} Truth Is Golden - 205 | Loosen Up a Little w/ Paul Petrunia

A brief 2022 take on this podcast: When I started podcasting 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. I had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish, but on the technical side, I sucked and I was also terrified to record myself for the public to hear. “What are they going to think of me?” was a constantly recurring mantra in my head and I would routinely get the jitters in the hour leading up to an interview.

Four years on, I feel much more positively about the whole endeavour, but if I ask one thing of you is this: don’t judge the execution too harshly and instead focus on the content of the conversations. I think after all these years they still hold tremendous value.

In episode 206, the third instalment in our series on LA creatives, Paul Petrunia talked about his upbringing in the Canadian prairies, how Arthur Erickson influenced him to be an architect, his ill-fated career as a teen ballet dancer and his cultural confusion as an expat torn between American and Canadian cultures. Going back to the early Internet days when he started a dot-com business in the middle of the lake late 90's boom to today and his life as the man behind the popular Architecture website archinect.com.

Powered by RedCircle

About the podcast: The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

Credits:
Post-Production: Ryan Aktari
Music credit: Bounce Trio, Star Animal, 2014.
Organ & Keys : Matthieu Marthouret
Ténor Sax : Toine Thys
Drums : Gautier Garrigue
Composed by Toine Thys (copyrights SABAM).

Buy it on BandCamp :
weseemusicstore.bandcamp.com/album/smal…big-rivers

More info and music here :
www.youtube.com/user/weseemusic
www.matthieumarthouret.com
www.facebook.com/MatthieuMarthouret.Music/

{PODCAST} Single Serves ep. 316 - Ling on Modular Supportive Housing

This episode touches on two topics that have been of particular interest to me in recent times: modular housing and accelerated construction schedules.

Daniel Ling of Montgomery Sisam is my guest this week and we talked about his involvement in a supportive modular housing project that was designed and built in about 6 months and what lessons can be learned from this, and applied to the world of architecture more broadly speaking.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd

Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity.

RVLTR:

Daniel Ling is an architect, director, and principal at Montgomery Sisam in Toronto. While involved in a wide range of work from education, to healthcare, to various forms of housing, he more recently designed housing for the homeless through the use of modular construction. This is what we're going to talk about today. So Daniel, thank you very much for being on the show. It's a real pleasure to have you.

Daniel Ling:

Thanks for having me. It's exciting.

RVLTR:

Can you start by telling us who you are and what you do in your own words in three sentences or less?

Daniel Ling:

Sure, absolutely. So to say, I'm an architect and together for my partners, we are really interesting working to build a practice that has a strong culture, and they really do work that combines design quality with strong social value. So in other words, design building that addresses social issues.

RVLTR:

That sounds great. So as I mentioned earlier, you're here to talk about supportive housing projects. Can you tell us what they are more specific in more detail?

Daniel Ling:

Yeah, absolutely. And there's a series of them. In essence, they are permanent housing for those that are experiencing homelessness. This project for us really started in early 2020 with the beginning of the pandemic. The first series of projects are for the city of Toronto. In what we call phase one, there were two projects and the initiative was to provide a hundred homes over two sites. So these two are constructed already, one at 11 Macy Avenue and one at Dovercourt. So these are delivered through modular construction because of the speed of it, because there's a need to provide them through rapid delivery.

Really at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a overcapacity with the shelter system. There's a need to find homes for these individuals very quickly, so the city of Toronto employed this method to deliver these two. So they are a self-sufficient, small compact studio units, about 300 square feet. It has a kitchen, washroom, shower, everything that is in a home, but in a very compact efficient fashion. And so the reason for modular is, as I mentioned, because of the speed of it. So from the beginning when we were hired in May 2020 to when the first unit was moved in, it was eight months. So the first occupants moved in before Christmas.

RVLTR:

That's rather impressive. So is that a new thing that the city is doing, or they have been building housing for the homeless before but the newness of it was building modular?

Daniel Ling:

There has been housing for the homeless. There's also been various shelter facilities, but the modular construction component is relatively new. It was initially used in VC a few years ago and then more recently here in Ontario.

RVLTR:

And so are you able to tell us a little more about where this type of housing fits in? Because I'm assuming the city has many solutions to deal with homelessness and things like that. Can you give us an overview of what the ecosystem is like as far as the city is concerned?

Daniel Ling:

Yeah, I can give a bit of an overview. There's obviously the shelter system, which is temporary. There is something that's more transitional, where it's really a temporary housing. Well, it's permanent housing, but it's intended to transition them out of the system. And then there's these housing, which is permanent housing where they're intended to stay there for as long as they need.

RVLTR:

So in the case of these, do they become basically tenants of the city and they just stay as long as they need and then move on to other things later on?

Daniel Ling:

Yeah. The way these works is that the city would collaborate with a nonprofit. So the nonprofit organization would actually operate and run the facility, and depending on the particular organization, they might have offered different services or they might have different policies.

RVLTR:

Gotcha. So why did you get involved with housing for the homeless?

Daniel Ling:

Well, I guess there's two main reasons I could say. One I touched on earlier is that we are a practice that are interested in design work that has meaning, that has offered social value. And I think the people that tend to work here with us are interested in doing design, but design that can make a difference. And what we realize that as a practice, even though that's the culture and the interest, it also makes sense as a business model when you focus on work that have relevant issues that the community of society is facing at the moment. The government tends to be in the same place, funding tends to be coming at the same time, so we tend to stay nimble to the issues that are at play.

So that's one reason. The second reason is as a design challenge, it's interesting for us. How do you work with projects that has certain constraints and how do you find opportunities out of that? How do we use modular construction that has a certain perception of being perhaps institutional and turn it into something that fits into various contexts, into various neighborhood? How do we do housing in a economic way? Is it the idea of doing more of less? How do we work with such tight schedules? What does that mean from a design perspective? Yeah, so for us, it's interesting to create architecture within such constraints.

RVLTR:

What would be some of the lessons you learned from that? You've talked about some of the challenges you were facing and constraints. What would be the most important lessons you've drawn from it that you might be able to apply to future work?

Daniel Ling:

Yeah, there's a lot of lessons. Modular construction and prefabrication is pretty interesting. There's the whole pros and cons of quality control. What can be done in the shop could be extremely high quality because you're doing it in a controlled environment versus what happens on a site. So we take a lot of time thinking about how to design these. How do we maximize the of type of work that could be done in a shop and minimize the type of work that's done on-site?

There is other technical challenges. We'll get into the details how these things come completely finished and it gets clean into place, so there's the idea of tolerance and how do they actually join together is interesting from a technical perspective. I guess the other aspect is because these are wood modular system, there's a certain limitation. They tend to be three to five-story, so it generates relatively compact buildings. So from a density and built form perspective, it's also interesting for us. The sites are relatively compact, 100 by 200 feet, so that what would fit five to six single family houses, we would fit 50 units.

In terms of how it applies to other projects, I think that the speed of these are good lessons learned. We're involved in other affordable housing projects such as the Housing Now Initiative you might have heard of, where the city wants to deliver over 5,000 affordable units over the next few years, and these tend to be much larger mixed use developments. And as quickly as the city is intending to do them, it still takes a few years. So to be able to deliver is something that could be within 12 months. I think it's something that is relevant to other housing projects and just the speed of providing housing.

RVLTR:

I have a twofold question for you. Maybe you can break it down into separate answers if you want, but the first part of the question is modular construction has been very much liked by architects by and large for the last few decades, maybe the last 60 or 70 years, but it's never really taken hold as a very common way of building. It happens and people build in modular construction, but by and large most construction is still based on the on-site construction model. Why is that not more common, given the fact that it's faster, more precise, better finished?

There's plenty of advantages to modular construction and few constraints. You have size constraints maybe, but architects are also really good at working with constraints. So why isn't that more prevalent as a technique or method of construction? And does the advantages or the lessons you've learned from modular housing for the homeless possibly apply to the broader housing challenges? Because as we both know, currently housing affordability is an issue for everyone, not just for low income people. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Daniel Ling:

Sure. I think to answer the first part of the question, why is it not used more frequently, why hasn't it taken hold as much as one could imagine, there is a cost premium to modular construction, so I think it really comes down to is there a business case for it? So let's say you're applying to market housing, for example, and there is maybe $50 or $75 of square-foot premium on the modular versus conventional. Does the speed of accelerating the construction, the benefit of that is that greater than the cost premium, so it really comes down to the business model.

So that's one. I think the other is that modular construction makes sense when you have a lot of repetition. So does the program benefit from this construction? The projects that I'm talking about, the first one was a hundred homes over two sites. The second phase of the Toronto project is 300 home over five sites. These are all identical units, all 300 square-feet of the same thing, so it makes a lot of practical sense. When you get into other building types, even regular market housing, there's a lot more variety, so at some point you lose the economy of that repetition.

In terms of lessons applied to other housing project, I think that's your second part of your question?

RVLTR:

Yep.

Daniel Ling:

I could see highly sustainable perhaps micro homes that provide compact living. That may work for other housing, like market housing. What's interesting about these, these are wood frame construction, so not using steel or concrete other than a bit of foundation, so they're fairly sustainable projects. And because of the constraint of the module, which has to be about 12 to 14 feet wide by 65 feet long so it fits in a truck, they tend to work for the smaller units. So that's one application that I could see, and because of the size of it, it might pay for the premium. By building less per unit, it might start to make financial sense for the premium of modular.

RVLTR:

Yeah, those are very interesting points. And this is a bit of my personal opinion, but you'd think that now that we've seen how bad the housing affordability has become of an issue, you'd think that all the traditional solutions that we've traditionally relied on should be not discarded, because they probably have some value, but should be considered somewhat obsolete in looking at maybe faster and easier ways to build. So you'd think people would be trying a bunch of new things such as modular housing, and I'm sure there's other technologies out there that could help with the problem. So it's an interesting answer that you've given me.

Would you see, for example, rental housing be reasonably based on the same model or is that just so completely different that it wouldn't work for that?

Daniel Ling:

Yeah, I think it's possible. Again, and I think it comes down to the business case. How much are you able to charge for it relative to the premium? So that's why I think the idea, I think as the trend goes towards most sustainable living with a smaller footprint maybe a day-to-day willingness to live in less space, it might start to swing it so that it makes sense from a business perspective to use this.

The other thing that's interesting is unlike when developer build out of concrete, for example, which is the majority of the housing development, there's a certain economy they're going high with the tower footprint.

RVLTR:

Well, they have to to make their proforma work, right?

Daniel Ling:

Right, exactly.

RVLTR:

Because the zoning and the development charges are so restrictive that they have to go as high as they can to maximize their revenue or profit.

Daniel Ling:

Exactly. So you don't see a lot of three, four, five-story concrete condos around. For this particular type of construction, it's very modular and the limitation is really around five-story. You can maybe stretch it to six at the most. So a lot of the buildings we're doing are the type of infill urban project that is the density that we're missing a lot in Canadian cities. The one that we're doing now for Housing City Hamilton is 24 units on a lot that's only 100 foot wide, three-story, and it would normally fit two or three houses at the most and we are fitting 24 homes in three stories. And so they actually fit well into the residential neighborhood while adding the type of density that we need.

RVLTR:

Yeah. There's a lot of precedent even in Toronto that the units are bigger obviously, but you have a lot of those three, four-story apartment buildings that are not much taller if at all than the surrounding houses but have a slightly bigger footprint and they usually have a flat roof so you can have large units on two or three floors and have six homes on what would be one large home on the same lot, so that makes a lot of sense.

Daniel Ling:

Yeah. These particular models that we're looking at for affordable housing, they don't have parking. So there's no underground parking, there's no basement. Because of the number of units, there isn't a large garbage loading requirement, so it's actually a relatively light footprint on these tight urban lots. That's, I think, something we can learn from [inaudible 00:16:38].

RVLTR:

And could you realistically in modular build larger units, maybe combining several modules together? Could you have a 800 to 1,000-square-foot apartments?

Daniel Ling:

Yep. Sure, you certainly can. You could put two modules side by side and that would create a one or two bedroom units that is probably in the range of 750 to 800 square-foot. Yeah, absolutely.

RVLTR:

So I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit, but I'd love to hear your opinion on that. Just out of curiosity, what do you think are the biggest roadblocks to the current housing affordability issues that we have? And if you had a magic wand, what would be your solution or solutions to that?

Daniel Ling:

Well, I think part of the roadblock is the city of Toronto is very unique where we still have a lot of single family housing in the downtown core and there is quite a bit of resistance in certain areas to densify those areas. You tend to have this all-or-nothing approach where the developer goes in, goes to the OMB, and goes for the full-blown podium for the story tower solution. So if we have the magic wand, it would be to look at innovative way to introduce the smaller scale housing unit into the residential neighborhood and create a wider variety of housing and maybe offer these smaller unit options that are quite sustainable where you don't have to... Let's not build more than we have to, but fit it into the residential neighborhood.

And I think what we've learned also through this process, because some of the municipality we've been working have been quite pushing the sustainability agenda quite a bit, is that these type of buildings can be done with a very low carbon footprint. These are not glass housing, glass condos, glass housing buildings, they're highly insulated envelope. You have triple-glazed window in them. Because they're shop-fabricated, you can take advantage of that quality and have really tight inflow but very low air infiltration. So one of them we're doing is going to be Passive House certified. We are looking at a net zero prototype for this building type now next. This is something that's on the drawing board. So I think we can easily do zero admission buildings housing in an affordable way out of this type of construction.

RVLTR:

Yeah, let's hope the regulatory environment becomes more favorable to that because I personally think the large part of the blame, not all the blame, is on politicians' lack of balls, for lack of a better term, to change the zoning and allow not crazy dense but denser typologies as of right instead of having, what is it, 60% to 70% of the city that's entirely zoned for a single family, which is insane.

I moved to Toronto 17 years ago, and even then we didn't have those problems, but it was insane to me that a city the size of Toronto, as you mentioned earlier, would have entire neighborhoods of single family homes in the downtown core. That just never made sense to me because I grew up in cities where the downtown core was a much denser area. You'd have six to 10-story buildings everywhere and walkable neighborhoods and all the amenities within 15 minutes, which is pretty much the case in most of downtown-ish Toronto neighborhoods, but as soon as you get a little further out, it's a lot less livable if you don't have a car. So those are very interesting legacies we're left to deal with from a much different era.

I think those were all the questions I had for you because this is the only other question I didn't ask you pretty much answered in an indirect way. Are there any last words you want to share with the podcast audience or any ideas you want to put out there?

Daniel Ling:

Yeah, sure, and I've been thinking a lot about this because these rapid delivery housing projects is something that we've only been exposed to in the last 24 months and we've gone through nine. We're on the ninth project now, so it's been very exciting. So thinking about all that, one thing that... I came across a quote recently, I don't know if you heard it by Ray and Charles Eames, and they wanted to do, "The best for the most for the least." So the best design for the most people for the least cost, and I think that's quite inspiring when we are thinking about the housing crisis and affordable housing. How can we apply this set of vision to creating highly sustainable, compact, affordable living?

RVLTR:

Yeah. Well, hopefully your work paves the way for other people to follow suit and maybe use modular housing and prefabricated in a factory and to solve some of those challenges. But regarding that quote from the Eames, I didn't know that quote, but I'm not surprised knowing their work. It's very much in keeping with their lifelong work ethic, so I'm glad you shared that.

I want to thank you very much for your time. I think it was a very interesting conversation and hopefully the first of many.

Daniel Ling:

Thanks, Arnaud.

{PODCAST RERUN} Truth Is Golden - 205 | Less Is More Or Less w/ Dan Brunn

A brief 2022 take on this podcast: When I started podcasting 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. I had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish, but on the technical side, I sucked and I was also terrified to record myself for the public to hear. “What are they going to think of me?” was a constantly recurring mantra in my head and I would routinely get the jitters in the hour leading up to an interview.

Four years on, I feel much more positively about the whole endeavour, but if I ask one thing of you is this: don’t judge the execution too harshly and instead focus on the content of the conversations. I think after all these years they still hold tremendous value.

Dan Brunn’s early life in Tel Aviv, subsequent move with his family to Southern California at age 7 and his later nomadic lifestyle as an adult certainly did not make his life easy, yet set the stage for a highly creative and driven character to develop. Someone as uncompromising as he is a kind soul who wants to do good in the world. Dan is a young(ish) architect based out of LA creating buildings inspired by the Bauhaus aesthetic he grew up around in Tel Aviv, but also influenced by Southern California modernism. We chatted about what moves him, his very early love for architecture, his influences as well as his love of cars, music, food and travel. Listen in to hear Dan speak about his work and life.

Powered by RedCircle

The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

Credits:
Post-Production: Ryan Aktari
Music: Bounce Trio, Star Animal, 2014.
Organ & Keys : Matthieu Marthouret
Ténor Sax : Toine Thys
Drums : Gautier Garrigue
Composed by Toine Thys (copyrights SABAM).

Buy it on BandCamp :
weseemusicstore.bandcamp.com/album/smal…big-rivers

More info and music here :
www.youtube.com/user/weseemusic
www.matthieumarthouret.com
www.facebook.com/MatthieuMarthouret.Music/

{PODCAST} Single Serves ep. 315 - McKinley on the Black Chamber

This week, we’re taking a break from talking about housing affordability and the missing middle. My guest is Walker McKinley, founder of McKinley Studios and we’re talking about his integrated practice model called the “Black Chamber” which is set up to promote collaboration across disciplines and foster innovation.

Listen in to hear him speak about this practice model and learn how it works.

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd

Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity .

RVLTR:

Walker McKinley is the founder of McKinley Studios, a firm operating in the fields of strategy architecture, interiors, branding, art, and furniture based in Western Canada. The firm operates on a unique studio model, the Black Chamber, that aims at giving designers more agency over their work through a collaboration between creative disciplines, which is what we're here to talk about today. So, can you start by telling us who you are and what you do in your own words in three sentences or less?

Walker McKinley (WM):

I'm Walker McKinley, Founder of McKinley Studios. I'm a architect by education, but I'm involved in, I guess, six different creative studios, as well as some manufacturing companies mostly based in Vancouver and Calgary.

RVLTR:

That was short and sweet. So, let's get right into it and what the hell is the Black Chamber?

WM:

So in our architecture and interiors practice, we were increasingly asked questions by clients that we felt weren't really answerable by architecting and required research and collaboration and outside voices. We decided to both monetize that activity, and also by taking on that work for our clients, it was a way to be at the table at the very beginning of projects when we think a lot of really important decisions are made that designers are sort of left out of when they come in in the standard practice of later.

So we're doing research, we're bringing in artists and top chefs and economists and other data professionals and working on ... it changes with every project. Sometimes it's positioning of a real estate project, sometimes it's programming, sometimes it's uncovering assets that a client has that they may not understand. Then often it works for us as a business development tool, because it leads to design.

RVLTR:

So if I understand correctly, design is not always the answer to those challenges.

WM:

Design is ultimately the answer, but we think that designers have often been left out of that critical first step, which in my mind, design thinking is what is needed for so many of these challenges. Yet pro-forma thinking and legal thinking, and political thinking ends up taking over and designers are handed a kind of half-baked agenda.

RVLTR:

So, how long have you been operating on that model then?

WM:

The firm is 20-some years old as a kind of pure architecture and interiors firm. Black Chamber came about I would say five years ago-ish, and has really in the last three years taken on real flash that's got a team and really a process.

RVLTR:

So I think to help me visualize and I think the audience as well, can you maybe speak to a couple of significant or typical projects that have come out of this collaborative process?

WM:

Sure. I'll be speaking today about a couple of them here at IDS. The very first project where we really catalyzed this was Simons department store, which we had done work for them. They have 125,000 square foot department stores. They work for them, unlike most retailers these days, but they could not get that kind of real estate in downtown Toronto or downtown Vancouver, so they came to us and said, "You know our program, what would a 10,000 or a 30,000 square foot Simons look like?"

So we knew that that wasn't just shrinking the store, that it wouldn't be sensical and needed a completely different idea of what shopping is. So the day that I would talk to Peter Simons about that project, I was that evening watching a documentary about a group in World War II that cracked the Japanese code during the war. They were called Black Chamber. I was kind of half deliriously asleep on the couch, and I was like, "Hey, I think that's what we're being asked to do is crack cultural codes and consumer behavior codes, and figure out how the web could replace 120,000 square feet in mixed with a 30,000 square feet, and what that would look like and what it would need to do."

So, then the store became about community and being a sort of ambassador, generating web traffic, shopping takes on a whole other sort of look.

RVLTR:

So, are you directly responsible for bringing Simons to Toronto?

WM:

I am not.

RVLTR:

No?

WM:

We have not done any of that work yet. We've started in on the work and I've done a number of their department stores, none here.

RVLTR:

I see. So, what do you aim to accomplish for this new model? What's your purpose or your long-term vision?

WM:

For us, Black Chamber, I mean, it's a powerful way ... how do I say this? It's at once new for us, but really it's old. It's what architects have always known their job was to think and to be design thinkers. I feel like recently developers and project managers and all kinds of other related professionals have taken away a lot of the sort of agency of the designer. So for us, partly it just gives it back.

It gets us at the table right away, it lets us help make big important programming decisions. It's worked so well for our projects where we've done it separately as a project, that now every project we have starts with a mini Black Chamber. It's sort of our pre-design process and it's opening doors for us. Sometimes people are interested in that thinking more than necessarily they already have a designer or an architect, but we'll still do the thinking and then it leads to more of the more traditional work that we do.

RVLTR:

So are you still taking on the traditional architecture interior's work, or are you solely operating from that Black Chamber model now?

WM:

We definitely still do architecture and interiors, but Black Chamber's now sort of the foundation of how we work.

RVLTR:

That's very interesting. So you have your fingers in many figurative pies, architecture interiors, graphic design, art, products even. I think those glasses you're wearing are your design. How do you keep track of everything and prevent the whole thing from losing steam or get lost?

WM:

Falling apart?

RVLTR:

Yeah.

WM:

Do I? No, I mean, I've got a great team. Each of the studios has a director and associates and a team. My job is to make sure they're collaborating and working as an interdisciplinary whole. I'm sort of a mascot for a fair amount of it and very high-level within it, and then the team really does the work.

RVLTR:

So, it's all about people.

WM:

Absolutely, and collaboration. We're extremely collaborative.

RVLTR:

That's very interesting. So, there's another architect who's been working hard at bringing agency back into the fold of architecture. That's Joshua Prince-Ramus of REX New York. He's really big on doing that by designing in a way that gives him and his firm more agency, and he does so by designing buildings that basically cannot be modified without being completely destroyed.

WM:

Right.

RVLTR:

There's a famous example of one of those ubiquitous high-rise towers in Seoul that he was asked to design, and his solution was to make the elevator core the facade so that it couldn't be changed. It had to be what it was, otherwise the structure would not stand. So that's more, to me, a tactical approach to bringing agency back into the fold of the architect. It seems you have more of a strategic approach to the problem. Can you speak more about that?

WM:

Yeah, I think through Black Chamber, our approach is to, as I say, have a seat at the table right from the beginning and to be really involved in the decisions that would lead to decisions that would lead to value engineering. So, we are helping set the overall values of the project and why the project exists and setting a North Star for all decisions that are made within a project, from how it's communicated to the public, to how it's negotiated with the municipalities, to what it looks like, to how it's sold. So by being a part of that, I feel like we're able to really define where the project goes.

RVLTR:

So when you do that, do you find that it's harder to value engineer, because you have your fingers in all those aspects of the project?

WM:

Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily see value engineering as an evil even. I think if it's value engineering, and truly I think what we are trying to work on in Black Chamber are the values. So I think if the values are strongly set, yes, you can make decisions about do we spend on this or that, but they're made around values. So yeah, I think it is a way to control quality or at least encourage quality, which I think is also what fighting value engineering is also obviously trying to do.

RVLTR:

So, have you noticed any tangible or noticeable differences in quality between maybe your older more traditional architecture and what you do now?

WM:

Yes, for sure. I mean, we're seeing great success in some of the really large projects that we're involved in like multi-building urban fabric kind of projects. We're able to tell a story and bring a narrative based on setting up values all the way through the project, so that different architects can be working on different parts of it, we can be working on parts of it. We can be helping to bring in the right kind of tenants, we can be helping to set how the tenants communicate with each other, how the branding is done.

So, we've gone from maybe we're doing the architecture of a building or the interiors in a building to really helping engineer the entire vision of the place and how all parts of it come together with us and other people.

RVLTR:

So again, just to maybe paint a picture in the listener's mind and in my own mind too, because it helps me, a visual person. Say if you did a condo for a developer, what you can do basically is everything from the pro forma and the initial studies down to the marketing and the selling. Can you do all of that in-house?

WM:

Not all of it. So, a lot of it. So currently, of course Vancouver is like Toronto, a lot of the work is developer condo buildings. So, we would typically get involved with Black Chamber early on in terms of helping envision the sort of positioning of a product and a building, who it's going to sell to. We do consumer behavior research, we do that kind of market analysis, but we do it from a design point of view. We would do the architecture, we would do the interiors, we would do the branding, we would do strategy around marketing, not sales certainly.

RVLTR:

I see. So, what kind of response has that model generated, both from the clients and maybe from the users or consumers or the general public? What kind of response have you seen to it?

WM:

I'd say generally it's been really, really positive. In a way, it empowers clients who don't always have the tools to do design thinking. They come from a real estate background or a financial background, and so you become another part of their organization and help them think in a way that they'd rather do good things, and you help them set values for a project that are more noble perhaps than just the pro forma, and yet you're also responsive to the pro forma. So I think clients have reacted really well, I think the product is generally better that we've been doing.

Some of my favorite work we've done in Black Chamber has been just for ourselves. We've done a big study on housing and construction processes for single family homes, which has led to us being partners in a manufacturing company on a sort of innovative housing platform, prefabricated magnesium panel homes that we're rolling out called Commonplace. So, that started as us asking ourselves is there another way for housing and turned into a company and a platform. We're building our first prototypes now and we're in conversations with people in the US to do 400 homes.

RVLTR:

Oh, that's amazing. So, it sounds like it's almost your own and also your clients' R&D departments basically.

WM:

Yeah. Yeah, really. We started out calling it R&D and it morphs. Sometimes it's visioning, market positioning. The best of it is, I think, R&D.

RVLTR:

That's interesting. So, you mentioned this one personal project that led to a whole other business. Are there any other self-initiated projects or research topics that you're very interested in that have yielded extraordinary results?

WM:

Well, they haven't yielded companies mostly, but we're all over the place. We're doing a study on street fashion and how luxury as an idea has been changed by marginalized groups through street fashion, and what that means for architecture is a study I'm really excited about right now. We've been doing studies for clients on a deep understanding of wellness for architecture, what we're calling wholeness. A really, really holistic idea of wellness and what that literally will mean for buildings and cities.

RVLTR:

That's interesting.

WM:

Yeah, so we're all over the place.

RVLTR:

So, maybe you can help me clarify. I never understood the brand Supreme, and I think it's right up that alley of street fashion as luxury. Is that something you can explain to me? Because this is still a mystery.

WM:

I think Supreme's a mystery to most people. I mean, what excites me about that space is that people like Virgil Abloh literally opened the doors of a very homogenous luxury world and brought in designers of colour. The first students were sitting in the front rows of fashion shows, he was the first black designer to be in the LVMH stable. When he did that, what he did for say Louis Vuitton, I think, changes design.

RVLTR:

So I'm familiar with him, because I actually went to the same school he did.

WM:

Oh yeah?

RVLTR:

Yeah, we both studied at IIT and I know he passed away recently, so rest in peace, but I'm not too familiar with his fashion work. What, in your mind, has he done to open the doors to a whole new market or type of fashion that didn't exist before?

WM:

I mean, he did a lot of things. To me, the exciting stuff was what he was doing at Louis Vuitton, where he was taking this generations-old, very stable, very traditional brand, and really ironically and sometimes sarcastically even warping it, morphing it, changing it, often with a marginalized audience in mind.

So, he sort of inserted this code into the traditional French luxury market that we can never go back on now. Yet, the computer was still running Louis Vuitton and now there was this rogue code in it.

RVLTR:

It's amazing that they let him do it in the first place. What do you think pushed them to do such a 180? Because it doesn't sound like they ran away from their existing brand, but to let it be co-opted by someone who you would never thought as being part of that brand to begin with.

WM:

I mean, I don't know the exact story. I should look into the genesis story of when that happened, but it was phenomenally successful, right? I think Baby Steps saw that this was a world that was going to financially be so successful for these brands, that it was sort of impossible to not allow it. Those brands had a long history of artistic respect and freedom, but within a pretty narrow band until people like him came along.

RVLTR:

Yeah.

WM:

Of course, now it works so well that there's an almost cynical version of it going on where everybody needs a Virgil Abloh, and there's not that many Virgil Ablohs to go around.

RVLTR:

Yeah. Yeah, well, there was probably only one.

WM:

Exactly.

RVLTR:

So, that's interesting. I mean, that's an interesting tangent, but it shows how broadly you're thinking and I think that's much needed in this industry. What has gotten you excited maybe in the last little while of things that you're thinking about working on or you started working on, but ideas you haven't fully formed yet, or things that you think are going to happen in the future that would be worth looking at?

WM:

I mean, off the cuff, our housing project is very exciting to me right now. It feels like it answers so many issues that are in front of us with housing, from affordability to fireproofing, to sustainability and recycling. Whether our product will be one that makes it within the masses of product or not, we'll see, but I'm really excited about where the world's heading in terms of new technologies and ways of thinking about housing.

RVLTR:

So, you said that's a prefab product, right?

WM:

Yeah.

RVLTR:

So, can you maybe give us a little more detail about what that is and how that's going to come to market? Or is it already being sold?

WM:

It's not being sold yet, it's in prototype. We're building our first prototype homes. So we went out to find a better way to construct a home, and at the same time, we're designing what we call the essential home. So on the heels of people like Dieter Rams, less, but better. Not less, not minimal, but essential.

RVLTR:

Yeah.

WM:

So, we were designing what we thought could be a home that answered to that ambition that I think a lot of people have right now. Especially younger generations are not interested in being anchored to their home. They want exceptional lives that include all kinds of other things, but would also love to own a home. So, there was a lot of these things in our minds. Then we went out to try and find the right technology to help us produce something that could answer to some of the technical problems that we saw in wood frame construction, and we ended up partnering with a manufacturer.

So, the product is a magnesium and hemp and recycled plastic panel. It's factory made. We're able to ship these homes with cabling and plumbing within the walls. Because the walls are magnesium, we're working on them being able to be a battery basically. So if you're off the grid, you could store energy in the walls. So, they're not instantaneous, but you would build a home pretty much anywhere that you could ship to within two to three months instead of a year and a half. They would be more affordable, they would be recyclable. These panels, you can mulch them up and make a new panel, unlike wood frame construction, which has nails in it, which makes it very hard to recycle.

RVLTR:

That's interesting. They're also structural panels?

WM:

They are.

RVLTR:

So it's basically a, traditional might not be the right word, but a kind of conventional home, but it's designed and built in a whole new way.

WM:

Yes.

RVLTR:

You have to reinvent the way they're constructed basically.

WM:

Yes, the technology of the construction is what's truly new.

RVLTR:

That's fascinating. I think I ran out of all my questions for you, but is there anything else you want to add or share with the audience that's really exciting to you, or a message you want to pass on or anything else?

WM:

Gosh, I don't know. Thanks for having me. I could talk all day about all this stuff.

RVLTR:

Well, you don't have to have an answer, no sometimes is acceptable. I want to thank you very much for your time. It was great, short and sweet. Hopefully it's first of many conversations.

WM:

Thank you very much, appreciate it.

{PODCAST RERUN} Truth Is Golden - 204 | Multicultural Modernism w/ Steve Ehrlich

Powered by RedCircle

A brief 2022 take on this podcast: When I started podcasting 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. I had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish, but on the technical side, I sucked and I was also terrified to record myself for the public to hear. “What are they going to think of me?” was a constantly recurring mantra in my head and I would routinely get the jitters in the hour leading up to an interview.

Four years on, I feel much more positively about the whole endeavour, but if I ask one thing of you is this: don’t judge the execution too harshly and instead focus on the content of the conversations. I think after all these years they still hold tremendous value.

In episode 204, I interviewed veteran architect and globe-trotter Steven Ehrlich, founder and principal at EYRC, a Los Angeles based architecture studio working under the tenet of "Multicultural Modernism". Steven talked about his formative years on the east coast, his early career in Africa as a member of the peace corps, creativity and the challenges and inspiration that come with running a small, but mighty and well respected practice.

The intent behind our podcast series "Truth Is Golden" is to look at renowned creatives and their work with a critical eye. We aim to ask deep questions in order to peel back the layers of marketing, clever one-liners and sexy branding. We want to show the world what it truly takes for genuinely creative forces to find their own voice build a career on what is very often nothing more than a drive to do things differently. We want to hear about the successes, the failures, the inspirational stories and the lessons gleaned from all of it. We want the truth, so that we can inspire other people to fulfill their own creative aspirations and in the process contribute to making the world a better place.

Credits:
Post-Production: Ryan Aktari
Music: Bounce Trio, Star Animal, 2014.
Organ & Keys : Matthieu Marthouret
Ténor Sax : Toine Thys
Drums : Gautier Garrigue
Composed by Toine Thys (copyrights SABAM).

Buy it on BandCamp :
weseemusicstore.bandcamp.com/album/smal…big-rivers

More info and music here :
www.youtube.com/user/weseemusic
www.matthieumarthouret.com
www.facebook.com/MatthieuMarthouret.Music/