Design Practice Ripe for Redesign

by Bill Chomik, Chomik Architectural Group

The author is the president of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. This article, based on his presentation before the 1995 Professional Liability Agents Network (PLAN) Annual Meeting in Toronto, outlines the conclusions reached at the RAIC Montreal Roundtable on Innovative Practice, held May, 1995.

Design practice has become a major design problem. The traditional methods and patterns of practice and construction are not working as well as they once did. Many architects, engineers and contractors, even those who are busy, are finding it harder and harder to make a decent profit -- or any profit at all. Meanwhile, the construction process has become rife with conflict and litigation.

It may sound odd to think of “practice” as a design problem. But, design practice is ripe for a redesign.

From the designer’s point of view, what is required is a profitable practice. We need sufficient control over the work we do, adequate time to do our work and supportive clients that pay their fees, on time.

From the client’s point of view, what is required are projects that meet their needs, that come in on time and on budget, and that go smoothly without litigation. And they need a sufficient choice of design services at competitive prices.

The difficulty here is that many of these requirements conflict to varying degrees. Our need to make a profit increasingly conflicts with clients’ need to lower costs. Our desire to control the design process increasingly conflicts with clients who turn to other management types who wrestle control of the process from us. Our need to address an expanding range of regulations, codes, technologies and the like are increasingly in conflict with the client’s demand that projects be done faster and more efficiently. And our desire to explore the discipline of design increasingly conflicts with client desires to simply have no “surprises.”

Such conflict must be recognized as part of the program for redesigning practice. Here are four areas of practice redesign that address those conflicts and that I believe will shape the design profession of the future.

1) The expansion of the geography of practice
Firms across North America and around the globe are expanding the geography of their practice. They are forming strategic alliances or “virtual firms,” loose affiliations of small and medium sized designers and consultants, each with a different focus. Linked together electronically, many of them work out of their homes, yet can provide services internationally. This redesigned practice lets the various partners act essentially as one firm, without the overhead cost associated with the large office.

The implications of this trend are tremendous. They reveal a slow restructuring of design practice along the lines of the medical profession. Instead of the design office modeling itself after a corporation, it is one of a number of independent general practitioners working closely with the client population. These practitioners can come together as a team of specialists to solve virtually any problem, anywhere.

I am convinced, especially with the advent of computer networks, that such alliances will soon become the norm -- so much so that there may come a day when small and medium sized firms will not be able to survive without participating in a network of some sort.

2) The expansion of the type of design services
More and more, design firms are moving aggressively into the pre-schematic phases of the project, with an eye to doing what is most cost-effective for the client. Some firms serve as financial and strategic advisers to help clients determine their facility needs -- or help them decide that they don’t need a new facility at all. A similar tact is for firms to go through an extensive programming stage in every building they design, trying to eliminate unnecessary and money-wasting requirements.

Other firms are moving into construction and facility management, which represents a new form of client relationship. Some maintain a three-dimensional computer file of every building they design or work on, updating the file without charge to the client. This makes them the natural choice when clients want to change or add on to the building. The designer, in a sense, owns the 3-D model, the virtual building, as surely as the client owns the 3-D structure, the actual building.

Design firms, as a billable service, have also begun to support clients’ marketing efforts. Using computer animation and other visualization software, designers can provide effective marketing tools to entice tenants and investors.

3) The expansion of ties to other disciplines
Partnering among disciplines is on the increase. Firms are making connections to disciplines that apparently have little relation to design. It is through these big leaps, though, that the discipline of design can grow most rapidly.

Design firms are partnering with financial institutions, industrial designers, artists and computer scientists. They are partnering with physicians to develop consulting firms on the relationship of architecture, building materials and human health. One firm I know of has partnered with a criminologist to provide expertise in the defense against terrorist acts.

4) The increasing of efficiencies as independent practitioners.
More and more design firms are specializing in single aspects of the practice: schematic design, client services or construction document production. All three of these specialties have their place in the marketplace. Schematic design firms are structured to turn out design most efficiently, service firms can meet the client’s needs most effectively and production firms can turn out construction documents most rapidly.

The problem, however, is that the values of production firms have begun to affect the other two types of firms, putting a premium on design as a commodity rather than as a service or an art. Many firms, in response, have begun to examine their design procedures, finding ways to eliminate inefficiencies and speed up the process. Some designers are institutionalizing the pre-schematic phase in which a strategy for a project is planned. They generate a simple concept that all team members understand, leading to better informed decisions throughout the contract, documentation and construction administration phases of the project.

At the other end of the design spectrum are firms that offer clients all the necessary information for a site design in as little as 24 hours -- and a building design in a week. These specialist and full-service firms couldn’t be more different. Yet they share a similar goal: making the internal operation of the design process more efficient and cost effective.

Conclusion
It should be clear that these four trends represent a number of interesting and important solutions to our problems as a profession. What lies before us is not just the redesign of traditional practice, but the design of new practice which goes beyond our role as building designers to our potential role as activists, visionaries, enablers and coordinators. In other words, once we see our role not so narrowly defined as building form givers, but as designers in the broadest sense of the word, we will, as a profession, find our rightful place in the new world.