The economic shift that is disrupting the practice of architects and venue designers.
Neil Bachelor from our UK office, wanted to attend TEDx Plano. The challenge is that Neil lives in England and his schedule didn’t allow him to be there physically.
So, Neil attended via a telepresence robot.
If you haven’t seen them before, a telepresence robot is basically an iPad on a motorized set of wheels. The genius of the telepresence robot is that the person who is “virtually present” has full control of the robot. They can walk where they want to walk. (Technically, roll.) They can sit or stand. They can network with people.
Neil reported that the experience was much like being there in person. He chatted people up in the lobby. He had to stand in line to get his badge. At one point, when Neil turned away from his co-worker, a woman came up and asked that colleague quite seriously if Neil was seeing anyone. (As real-life a social experience as it gets.)
Of course, you don’t have to have a telepresence robot to go beyond the walls of your home or the venue of an event. People are regularly tweeting, instagramming and facebooking.
Interaction that was once confined to a geographic space now goes beyond it.
Effortlessly.
This is changing our buildings.
Going beyond the walls of a building isn’t new. We’ve been broadcasting from venues for a very long time.
What is new, is the direction of the flow of communication. Neil wasn’t passively observing on a television screen. He was able to participate. He interacted with people. He even said “hello” to the audience for my TEDx talk.
Most venues are designed for communication from a platform outward — think the microphone on a podium, camera feed from a television studio, or presentations from the head of the boardroom table outwards. All of that is last century’s methodology.
The new methodology is bidirectional.
Miami’s Frank Gehry designed, New World Center, bent the rules on this 10 years ago when we worked with their team. Michael Tilson Thomas leverages I2 to connect the New World Symphony with conductors, master musicians and composers all over the world. The thinking in the design of the venue was all about how to go beyond the walls. (The exterior of the building projects performances to the park outside of it.) Because of the high bandwidth, an orchestra in Spain can play with the orchestra in Miami. A master-teacher in Australia can coach a student in the US.
The move from connection to contribution.
As cool as that is, it might surprise you to learn that, connection isn’t the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is developing a context for contribution.
We see this online all the time. Groups of people gather to support a cause (GoFundMe), launch a product (Kickstarter), write open source code (Apache), or edit an encyclopedia (Wikipedia). There is an online structure designed by programmers that facilitates connection and contribution. Here’s the thing:
Architects are the programmers of the built environment.
A new venue that embraces moving from connection to contribution is Harvard Business School’s Klarman Hall — designed by William Rawn Associates and scheduled to open in 2018. The Harvard Case Study method requires contribution from students during the class. (There is no passive observation by the students involved. Contribution is required.) My team is working to design the technology to support this collaborative group contribution at 1,000-seats, it is something previously not conceived of.
This is only the beginning.
When a shift changes the economy, everything changes.
For a century, coming out of the industrial revolution, profit was based on efficiency and hours worked. The Frederick Taylor approach. What we now know is that has a finite output. (You can only work so many hours. We’ve pushed that as far as we can.)
The new economy is based on the force multiplier of collective contribution. Much has been written about the disruptions caused by UBER, Airbnb, Etsy, Amazon, Lyft and others.
But, here’s the thing:
Uber, Airbnb and the others work because they facilitate contribution by people from wherever they are, at whatever level they want and whenever they want — and do so in a way that rates the value. It couldn’t work before, because there was no mechanism for collective, incremental contribution. Not because there was no desire for people to contribute value.
If our buildings and assembly venues are to thrive in this new economy, then there has to be a method of contribution built into the facilities. Our culture is shifting away from passive consumption of information, art and entertainment. It is moving toward creation and contribution of value.
Can we design buildings that allow people to contribute from wherever they are, at whatever level they want, whenever they want?
If this sounds like chaos to you, keep in mind that the rating systems have been proven to be highly effective in moderating what has value. Everyone can contribute, but only the good stuff makes it to the top.
Our job as designers is to figure out how buildings and technologies will support this.
Designers will have to restructure to get this right.
Our management systems are addicted to individual output, utilization rates, and tracking hours. Rethinking the way we do things will be a major blow to our well-oiled machine of a system.
If we want to be the ones who design this new wave of architecture and multidirectional technology, we will be required to maximize engagement of the people on our own teams. We can’t design the physical structure for groups of people to contribute together unless we first live this out in our own companies.
Litmus test: Have we figured out how to facilitate the mass contribution of the people on our teams in a useful way? Or are we too busy locked up in meetings where the communication is based on one-way downloads of information and rigid hierarchy?
The good news is that we as humans are innately wired to get this right. We are wired for connection, we are wired for relationship, and we are wired for community.
In short, we achieve more together than we do apart. Intrinsically so.
Technology is removing the barriers to productive contribution and connection.
Once we solve this problem for ourselves and our own teams, designing the solutions for the rest of the world will be much simpler.
// To see Neil live as a telepresence robot, watch the TEDx talk. Or connect with me at idibri.com.
