It used to be that the only time you saw the interior of someone’s home was when you got invited over. But living online has brought a proliferation of snapshots of spaces once kept intimate. As we tweet and upload images of our new headboard, reclaimed wood coffee table, or redesigned kitchen, our design choices become public domain. And because we are sharing the “after” shots of these design choices, it makes sense that if we crave the most “likes” for them, we crowdsource them.

Given the Millennials’ tendency to strive to be part of a group and our technical agility, it makes sense that we’re the generation most likely to crowdsource our design choices. We’re doing this by starting Facebook conversations around paint color, or pinning design ideas on Pinterest and then only using the ones that get the most comments or “repins” from friends.  (In fact Pinterest is bringing in so much traffic and sales to other sites that it recently launched an open source analytics to show just how much shopping is happening in the space.)  As consumers look for more design savvy groups to crowdsource inspiration from, they’ll start conversations on design blogs, seeking advice in the comment thread. Sites such as Apartment Therapy allow us to comment on design choices we’re struggling with, so that others can help us make the right one. But don’t be fooled into thinking only Millennials are participating in this trend.  Like many other trends, our generation is passing our habits on to Boomer parents and Xer older siblings.

My own Pinterest page where I collect communal ideas and inspiration for design

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In 1975, musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt created a deck of cards called “Oblique Strategies” to break through writer’s block in the studio. Their idea was to collect phrases that would return them to an artistic state of mind when they found themselves struggling under pressure. The cards provided inspirational words of wisdom such as, “Honour thy error as a hidden intention,” or “Work at a different speed,” or “Gardening, not architecture.” The latter is a personal favorite, and here’s why.

Architecture is envisioned, planned, and executed. It is a singular expression or provision, closely conforming to a plan, always requiring control. Ideally the architect achieves success when all the elements are arranged as presented. The architect makes the physical world obey.

Gardening is attentive, responsive, and warm-hearted. It’s about helping living things grow to their potential—living things that are under your influence, but not within your control. The elements provide or destroy, and the gardener is in dialogue with the plants to encourage and heal.

“Gardening, not architecture,” has become my guiding statement for leading a studio of wildly talented, creative, and sensitive people.

While there is certainly a place for highly structured approaches in the design world, I think the gardening metaphor is best suited for studio culture. If creativity is gardening, creative leadership is about selecting and nurturing its gardeners. Let me illustrate.

On the fourth floor of our IDEO Boston studio is a large common area. Three years ago it was essentially a peninsula of empty desks surrounded by project spaces. Sometimes they were occupied, but most of the time they were vacant because people were on projects. After some time it just seemed counterproductive to have this space outfitted as such. We asked everyone with a desk on the fourth floor to move their belongings upstairs with the rest of the gang. We intuited that this newly made blank canvas could serve as a flex space.

It must have been winter because the new space sat neglected for some time until one day a project team decided to make something of it. Frustrated with being confined to their corner project room, they took an afternoon to build a new lounge in the flex space. Sofas, lamps, and chairs (including airline seats from a former project) were relocated from different parts of the studio. The team built a standing height table in the shop and painted it turquoise with an intricate gold interior pattern. The space quickly went from “abandoned” to “owned” and found new uses—from gaming, to coding, to reconciling credit card statements. New life had sprung.

Soon after things were organized and rearranged, an exhibition of non-billable work brought the space to life in a new way. A documentary film series, “The Sundown Film Festival,” sprouted during the darkness of our short winter days. Spring and summer passed and it appeared that interest in the space was waning. Read more…

We had modest goals when we first took on the “ideas competition” to design the office building of the future. All we wanted was to use the tight deadline—the discipline and structure that comes with a competition—to organize our ideas about the future of office buildings. In the beginning we saw this as a way to engage in an internal debate about a myriad of related topics. We began as we always do, asking many questions. This time, though, we went beyond our usual inquiry:  Will there even be office buildings in the future?  How will people want and need to work in an office 15 or 20 years from now?  What impact will technology have on design and engineering?  But we never once asked, “What will it look like?”

As principals, we calculate the risk against the rewards for our architecture practice. Naively, we guessed that this project would involve a few weeks of work for those staff members who weren’t fully employed on other projects. Our economic risk would be minimal. Our reward would be a 10-minute presentation to show our developer clients, inspiring their thinking about office buildings. With no clear vision of what could happen, we nevertheless pushed our team to reach for something beyond what they already knew.  If we were going to enter this competition, then we were in it to win. Go big or go home.

The effect on the office was profound. We took the opportunity to look over the horizon, unfettered by the normal project restrictions and, in the process, energized everyone. Suddenly they all wanted to get involved. We engaged the best engineers to contribute their ideas. We decided to do a video (which we’d never done before).  Most importantly, we would allow ourselves to dream. Suddenly the risk expanded far beyond a monetary risk. Now we were taking an emotional risk as well, pouring our hearts and minds into a collaborative effort and then, perhaps, ending up being disappointed with the outcome. When we announced to the office, over champagne, that we had been named one of four winners nationally, everyone cheered!

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As we wound down our a charrette, an exercise somewhere between a Top Chef “quick fire” and a game of “exquisite corpse,” we remembered seeing flickering pixels, oversized movable louvers, folding organ-like planes, and stretching ribbons. Our research yielded a number of innovative precedents —both theoretical and built— from architects and engineers experimenting with movable facades around the world. We had examined automated fins and shading umbrellas, tessellated screens and adaptive fritting from ABI, the homeostatic façades from Decker Yeadon, and the Aegis Hyposurface from Goulthorpe, among others.

But it was not enough that these façade components moved, either by means of carefully controlled computerized programming or by more rudimentary manual, hydraulic, or mechanical means. The movement that we were trying to describe was different. It had to be tied to performance. It had to respond to the sun. As Mike Hickok often said, it had to behave “more like a plant, less like a machine.” With our newly acquired understanding, how could we propose a future in which shading devices would deploy and contract biomimetically, like the artificial muscles we studied, in response to the sun?

Then we had a rude awakening. How could we even begin to tinker with these shapes with our limited experience, with the kind of software that had the capabilities to produce what we needed?  Clearly we had found ourselves at the convergence of technology, media, and representation. We needed to make leaps in all three. As Lisa Iwamoto describes on her book Digital Fabrications[i], our design had to inform and be informed by its modes of representation and production. We had to go beyond, way beyond, the limitations of what we traditionally produced in-house and do it at the fast pace of a design competition. At once we were dealing with modeling software shortcomings, researching smart materials, studying artificial muscles, defining performance, contracting out the scripting of algorithms, buying software, and storyboarding the presentation to determine deliverables and staff allocation.

Rhino image of ribbon

Mike Fischer[ii], a fifth young designer was brought on board, contracted to work side by side with our team to help with computational modeling and scripting. We shifted to Rhino, a NURBS-based modeling software that would allow us to conceptualize, tinker, and control our shading strands. While developing the component, we needed to test it across the façade. Mapping it and remapping it to control its size, density, and openness required formulas—a lot of formulas—which we crunched in Grasshopper.

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“Good ideas can come from anywhere,” Mike Hickok, one of our principals at Hickok Cole is fond of saying.  His vision and the idea of new collaborations were tested when we were tasked to design the office building of the future.

It took weeks of long meetings and passionate discussions before we finalized our plan concepts. Through it all, we realized that we wanted to work differently than we were used to working, to design the building envelope. We had just seen the Metropolis film, Brilliant Simplicity, which inspired us to look for opportunities of cross pollination or cross disciplinary thinking that we could build upon, tinker with, and synthesize into a simple concept.

A substantial portion of our legwork was done in the form of traditional research. From the books and writings of Branko Kolarevic and Ali Rahim (UPENN); Lisa Iwamoto, Bill Mitchell (MIT); Chris Luebkeman (Arup): and Jim Glymph (Gehry), we learned about digital fabrication techniques like sectioning, tessellating, folding, contouring, and forming.  We learned about rapid prototyping and rapid tooling, parametric design and “file to factory,” innovative materials, and new modes of fabrication. And we were inspired by Kolarevic’s phrase, “form follows performance,” and by Iwamoto’s ideas about the correlation between architecture and its modes of representation and construction.

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Most design competitions are won by entries with a narrow focus, as architects know only too well. There is simply no time to work through all the issues and tell a comprehensive story. The goal is to unearth a single idea and then work to present it in the most compelling fashion. Those who try to design too much fail. Those who concentrate on a succinct scheme, succeed.

When we began working on the Office Building of the Future Competition we realized that this was one of those game changing assignments, and it needed a completely new approach. Only by integrating a variety of issues such as engineering systems, site constraints, market forces, and architectural design could we hope to understand the challenge facing us.  How then, could we achieve this integrated concept with limited time and resources?

We called our friends and some of our most trusted consultants: Mark Tamaro at Thornton Tomassetti for structural engineering; Christian Agulles at WSP Flack+ Kurtz for MEP Engineering; and Paul Totten at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger for building enclosure consulting. We fully expected to have to “sell” them on this project.  After all, we wanted them to donate their most valuable commodity, their time. Their response was quick and definitive. Not only would they work with us, but they were excited by the prospect.

MEP Diagrams

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This is the first in a series of posts that chronicles our evolving design process at Hickok Cole Architects in Georgetown, Washington, DC as we took on the challenge of proposing a vision for the Office Building of the Future. Like all stories, our narrative will be full of plots and twists, success and conflict, all of which culminated in a novel design vision. Our posts will focus on: concept process, design features, and impact.

In today’s fast paced world of “just in time design,” the three-headed dragon of short deadlines, demanding clients, and tight budgets has a way of trampling innovation. As I look back at the YouTube video of our design proposal, I still wonder what compelled a midsize firm of 80 people, struggling to recover from the recession, to dedicate a considerable investment in time, energy, and resources to develop such a comprehensive vision of the future.

The short answer: “to scratch an itch.”  We know that the most complex ideas often result from the simplest conversations. In our case, they were the result of dozens of informal discussions on emerging trends and patterns in the marketplace.  Some of our ideas were technical and focused on new envelope systems, anticipated code changes, or advancements in sustainable technologies. Others had sociologic undertones that focused on human interaction, demographic shifts, and changing attitudes about the office environment. They remained fragmentary until the beginning of the year, when a national ideas competition for a vision of the Office Building of the Future was announced by NAIOP, a real estate association.

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