architects – futuresrambling

Bullshit Jobs

Post #112 by Laurie Aznavoorian

Yes, I know it’s been ages since I’ve composed a post. Other pursuits such as PHD proposals and novels have occupied my time. If you know any publishers or agents who might be interested in a humorous memoir or a cynical tome titled ‘The Pitch’ – a story of three design firms competing for a prestige project, please let me know. By the way, should either be published, you would not find them in the literary fiction section.

Yesterday I did a presentation to our office on pre and post Covid workplaces and commercial office buildings, I talked about the inevitable imperative for place to now ‘earn the commute’ along with other key themes including employee’s strong desire for their work to align with their individual sense of purpose. Pragmatist may argue there’s no need to pay attention to such silly woke ideologies, which is true if you’re happy to have younger workers, in particular Millennials, leave. This is the cohort that a new report by McKinsey says are three times more likely that others to be re-evaluating work.

The same report found that 70 percent of employees’ sense of purpose is defined by work, so it makes sense for organisations to pay attention because it is becoming clear the work first culture is being replaced by something more personal and altruistic. Also, people who live purpose at work are more productive, they’re healthier and have greater resilience and when an individual’s purpose aligns with the organisation’s, they’re more engaged, loyal, and likely to recommend the company to their mates.

These findings mirror recent research conducted in the US and Australia by Atlassian and PWC. They don’t mince words with their recommendations.

“It’s now clear that employees expect their employers to make a difference. We are seeing an increasingly activist workforce that holds business to account and prioritises wellbeing over career progression.”

Atlassian Co-Founder and CEO Scott Farquhar warns the consequences of inaction will be real in the war for talent, he says there has never been higher expectations of businesses and their leaders.

So how do you know if your job aligns with purpose? It’s a tough question, one test would be to ascertain whether you have a bullshit job. The term comes from the anthropologist David Graeber’s 2018 book. He postulates some jobs are meaningless and cause societal harm, he goes on to suggest that over half of societal work is pointless and psychologically destructive, particularly when comparing what we do to a work ethic that associates work with self-worth.

Mentioning bullshit jobs in the office caused my colleagues to laugh nervously and look at each other, their eyes silently imploring – are our jobs bullshit jobs? The answer is no. For a job to be a bullshit job the person doing it can’t even justify its existence, and if a bullshit job is eliminated society would be no worse off. If architects or interior designers suddenly vanished the world wouldn’t work very well and face it things would be butt ugly. Society might not miss us the way they would teachers, garbage collectors or shelve stockers at Woolworths, but our absence would be felt.

In addition, bullshit jobs are often highly respected, and they pay well; we all know that architecture is all flash, no cash. It might be easier to explain the concept of a bullshit job using Amazon as an example.

If the rocket carrying a ridiculously wealthy boss exploded, would we care? On the other hand, if an underpaid shift worker failed to pack and post the HoMedics Pedi Luxe Foot Spa with heat boost power ordered during lockdown for a pick me up, well that would be a different story.

What does this have to do with workplace and commercial office buildings? Quite a bit, Covid has changed how life and work are conducted, it constitutes a social legacy that will lead to social change and that will manifest itself in both our mindset and how we use physical space. In some instance it may demand we reimagine spaces.

One priority that should drive a potential rethink of environments should be mental health given researchers suggest this is the most important issue of 2021. Hopefully it is now understood that supporting mental health involves more than breakout areas, fruit bowls and temperature checking stations. Workplaces must now demonstrate to employees that the organisation cares about them and the issues they worry about, which is increasingly humanity, community, and the planet, not shareholders and supporting a neoliberal economy.

Looking at the projects that are currently on our digital drawing boards suggest there is a greater likelihood of acceptance and inclusion of places that are designed with mental health and social responsibility in mind.

Ideas such as access to multi – modal areas and blurring of public and private space are the same as those pitched pre pandemic, but now they are seriously being considered indicating this may be the time that organisations not only listen but act.

One concept gaining traction involves reimagining commercial building’s ground planes and podiums as spaces that can support and be shared with the broader community. This includes the spatial arrangement, supporting technology and security to enable activation and extended hours of operation. The concept benefits community in that there is somewhere and something to go to at night and on weekends and combats the expected change in city’s population due to changing patterns and the uptake of hybrid work.

Embedded in this idea is the notion of creating zones for building tenants and invited guests that when creatively conceived offer the opportunity for space to support social causes.

It may not be an idea most developers, landlords or organisations can stomach right now, but including the thought and provisions to execute the concept later is damn smart move, especially if Scott Farquar is right about an activist workforce.

An example of how and why this might work came to me after a Zoom catch up with old friends in Seattle who delivered an earful about how hot it was. The Pacific Northwest had experienced what is referred to as a ‘heat dome’ resulting in several days where temperatures were well above average. Roads cracked and bitumen buckled, overhead cables that supply power to electric busses melted, further North in Canada over a million mussels and clams baked in their shells. Oh, and a bunch of people died too because this is a region where no one has air conditioning.

To save lives cities set up cooling centres, big spaces with cots where people escaped the heat. They looked a lot like commercial office lobbies! More cooling centres are being established in the Pacific Northwest to contend with a second heat dome scheduled to hit this region this week.

Australian climate scientists are paying close attention to this weather phenomenon because it is likely there will be a heat dome coming to your town soon, no doubt squeezed in between the bushfires, floods, and pestilence. I would suggest any Aussie architect who comes up with a clever way to use vacant commercial office space to help us out when that all hits the fan would definitely not be someone with a bullshit job.

Sources:

Atlassian, PWC; Return on Action Report 2021 – The Rising Responsibility of Businesshttps://www.probonocentre.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/atlassian-2021-return-on-action-report-australia.pdf

Dhingra, N., Samo, A., Schaninger, B., Schrimper, M. (2020) “Help your employees find purpose or watch them go”, McKinsey & Company https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/help-your-employees-find-purpose-or-watch-them-leave

Graber, David; Bullshit Jobs, A Theory, Penguin Books, 2019

Milman, Oliver; “Nowhere is safe’: heat shatters vision of Pacific north-west as climate refuge” The Guardian, July 22, 2021

Spocchia, Gino; “Jeff Bezos criticised by Amazon workers and customers after thanking them for funding space launch.” Independent.co.uk July 28, 2021

Social Contagion at Work

By Laurie Aznavoorian

Futures Rambling # 104

Last week I exercised my rights of free agency and personal empowerment by unplugging my desk from the octopus it was tethered to and rolled it across the studio to the spot previously occupied by Peter Titmuss. It took about three minutes to link to a shiny new octopus and voila, I became a member of a new team.

Since the name is less than self-explanatory, an octopus is part of BVN’s boom & octopus combination that allows each of us to re- configure our studio environment at will. All desks are on wheels and both power and data drop from fibre optic cables nestled in overhead circular booms that connect to a host, or octopus, which supports up to eight desks.

Why move desks rather than people you ask, isn’t that somewhat hypocritical coming from people known for flogging alternative working? The answer is poor performance of programs like Revit, V Ray, Rhino or Grasshopper over Wi-Fi. For those who know me and are spitting their coffee on their keyboard, no I’ve not upskilled. But there are others here who are far more talented and unburdened by technical challenges than I who’d be crippled.

For organisations like BVN, extreme flexibility opens many doors, some like enabling teams to reorganise are fantastic, others are a work in progress. For example, we’re currently drafting guidelines that clarify when and how one can roll, otherwise to quote our office manager “it would be a real shit show.” And even though you would think it unnecessary to remind architects not to park in fire exits or blocking loo doors, the guidelines will dictate exactly where you can stop rolling.

In parallel, we’ve embarking on a research project intended to track desk movement. This is critical since a successful rolling studio will inherently rely in part on human nature. We all know that just because an individual has the right to roll, doesn’t mean they will. Humans abandon privileges all the time, just look at American voting records. The psychological aspects of rolling we might explore are plentiful: what inspires one to roll while others are happy to stay still, do some people have roll phobia, is the fear of recrimination due to location real?

We also wonder whether people will learn anything from rolling. Perhaps some will become roving studio journeyman, or roll to locations where they’ll amass skills or positive behaviours via osmosis? The hypothesis could be tested on me, we can take note if I’ve become more hip sitting next to Sebastian and a wiz at photoshop, or if being in the mere vicinity of Selina encourages me to learn Revit.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds, particularly if you know anything about social contagion. I recently learned about this theory listening to an interview with Dr. Gary Slutkin, a physician and infectious disease control specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago. He knows plenty about spreading things.

He also happens to live in a city where the murder rate surpassed 1400 in July; therefore, is well placed to pursue his vocation of studying infectious disease along with his other passion, the spread of crime. Cure Violence is the program he founded that’s being rolled out across cities in the US. It marries both spheres of Slutkin’s expertise and led him to suggest the spread of violence through a community happens in the same manner as a contagious disease.

Take something nasty like Ebola, your chances of contracting the disease increases with exposure and the disease spreads quickly or slowly depending on specific factors: age, overall health and living conditions. With violence the factors are exposure to gang wars, riots or childhood abuse. The evidence that Slutkin has amassed contradicts the common belief that violent acts are random. Instead, he suggests it follows the patterns of contagion and both disease and violence cluster in time and space.

Social science has reached similar conclusions about behaviours. Attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours move through populations like infection, they spread rapidly and are often accepted uncritically. Given the human condition is a combination of both a biological and social process, and each rely on replicated instructions, you can start to see the connection. In biology a gene is reproduced, in social processes it’s a meme, or culture.

It’s called social contagion and applies to both good and bad behaviours and the concept is by no means new. In 1774 Goethe’s publication “The Sorrows of Young Werther” inspired so many people to commit suicide that both book and Werther clothing style were banned. The Werther – effect is now a synonym for media induced imitation.

Social learning theory posits we learn social memes and behaviours by directly experiencing, observing and imitating and make cognitive inferences based on our observations. Back to our studio, based on the theory of social learning and contagion it is entirely plausible that I might develop new skills because of where I sit, or at least adopt an attitude or aptitude to learn.

Of course, we must be mindful not to spread bad behaviours, the research says this can be minimised by limiting exposure or inoculating people against the effects. Currently the only really bad thing that I can think of that could infect the studio would happen at the Christmas party when the New York crowd comes over. As far as I know there is no inoculation against stupid and our colleagues do live in the same city as the Trumps and may be infected. We should be thankful to have no office in Canberra.

Sources:

Bushman, Brad J. PH.D, “How Violence Spreads Like a Contagious Disease” Psychology Today, May 31, 2017

Niederkrotenthaler T, Herbert A, Sonneck G.; The “Werther-effect”: Legend or Reality?” Neuropsychiatry 2007; 21(4)

Jack, B; “Goethe’s Werther and its effects – The Lancet Psychiatry”, The Lancet, April 30, 2014

Marsden, Dr. Paul, “ Memetics & Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?” The Journal of Memetics: Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 1998 Vol 2.

Slutkin, Gary MD, “Violence is a Contagious Disease”, National Academies Press (US); 2013 Feb 6. II.9, Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207245/

“How Treating Violence As A Disease Could Help Prevent It”, Here and Now, PRI WBUR, March 22, 2017

The Role of Digital in Workplace Efficiency

Futures Rambling # 100

By Laurie Aznavoorian

This is the third and final post on the Digital Revolution

Most of us are aware of the wide range of opportunities we have to capture data in the modern workplace using heat maps, sensors and the endless range of analytic tools now available. In addition companies like Johnson Controls, Siemens and Schneider Electric, to name a few, offer smart building technology and monitoring that help tenants get a clearer picture of potential energy savings and efficiency improvements. We’re spoiled with data; consequently, the larger issue today is in ensuring that what we have isn’t just data – but meaningful information that leads to greater knowledge.

The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that smart systems don’t talk to one another. The day when all the smart technologies speak the same language will be the day those interested in real time dynamic measurement and analysis can celebrate. In the meantime, keep the cork in the champagne and relish the advancements we have made. Without meaning to disparage the value these technologies bring in obtaining a snapshot of workplace efficiency, this third and final post on the impact of digital on physical office design will follow the lead of the others and focus on people, their efficiency and experience in the workplace, rather than the physical environment itself.

While smart building systems do smart things around us, most of us carry a secret digital weapon in the palm of our hand, our mobile phone, when properly outfitted it has the potential to radically increase our personal efficiency. The possibilities are even greater with new chips that enable instantaneous artificial intelligence. Combined with a digital personal assistant and an army of ‘bots’ to do our bargaining for us, our mobile can be transformed into a performance tool that has the potential to do more for an organisation than any space analytics tool. This is critical, because at the end of the day, improving personal efficiency and supporting people is why we have a workplace.

Consequently, developers like Apple, Google and Facebook have shifted their focus from personal computers to mobile devices and messaging and they’re hard at work improving the effectiveness of messaging with the goal of making it a portal for all things we do on mobile. The tech giants are no dummies, they recognise messaging is the prime means of business communication in parts of the world like India and Indonesia and in the West, there’s deep market penetration with various messaging apps like: Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, Kik, Line, Viber, Telegram, Slack and Hangout.

Given its breath and the amount of time we spend on our mobile, there’s a priority to humanise messaging, as well as study how digital technology affects the way we experience and convey emotion. Machine learning has the ability to ratchet up messaging with smart replies that are calibrated to the content and context of a conversation, causing them to be more natural over time. As we experience better face to face and voice to voice interactions we’ll see text based communications replaced with multimedia offerings. Emojis, GIFs and short videos have great potential to augment text and assist in expression.

A persistent issue with emails and written communications is misconstrued messages due to the limitations of typing in expressing ourselves. Following the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, recently launched apps like VidiiChat illustrate how AI can be engaged to improve our ability to get our point across. Vidii provides the option of adding high definition, full audio video to ordinary text messages and then uses the phone’s camera to scan facial expressions to analyse the recipient’s emotional response. The app issues the sender an emoji receipt to confirm the recipient enjoyed the message.

Many of these offers are larks at the moment, intended to be used to communicate with friends and family. Never the less, it isn’t hard to imagine how improving written communication and offering immediate feedback could help with common problems many organisations face today with low employee engagement scores and widespread lack of emotional intelligence among people.

Another area with the ability to improve workplace performance comes from the many voice activated personal assistants on the market today: Siri, Cortana, Alexi or Google. Now that they’re using Artificial Intelligence algorithms they’ve moved from being cute developer parlour tricks to useful tools thanks to machine learning and its ability to recognise and process speech and connect to The Internet of Things or an army of bots.

Bots are rapidly taking over for Apps as the go to method for communication on mobile devices, they’re software applications that perform repetitive tasks and their advantage is they perform them faster than you or I and they don’t complain. A common bot task is chat. Some times when you think you’re chatting with a person, you may be actually chatting with a bot, because they mimic human interaction and conversation and have a high level of intelligence with, theoretically, some capacity to learn.

There are E-commerce bots that assist us in buying goods and services. Food bots to order dinner. Content bots, Watcher bots, Workflow bots, Concierge Bots and Banking and Trading bots that provide financial services. These new business bots have crossed the divide to make our worklife more productive, particularly when working in tandem with a personal assistants like Google’s assistant Allo. Imagine messaging a colleague about a meeting and simply typing “@google” to instruct the assistant to organise inviting attendees, reserving the video conference room and ordering lunch for your meeting.

As we begin to experience the workplace differently the Digital Revolution will have an impact on the physical environment no doubt, but right now it’s busy improving the EX – employee experience. As has been mentioned in past posts, this places the onus on designers to broaden their horizons and move beyond form and function toward end to end employee experiences. And in the meantime it would serve us well to not only understand, but make interfaces and software our friends.

Everyone’s an architect

Futures Rambling #78
By Laurie Aznavoorian

At a writing workshop I attended a few weeks ago the facilitator made a surprising statement; ‘Everyone thinks they are a writer’. Her comment was not directed at the ten people in the room who had toiled for years producing manuscripts, some published and others not, but to countless others who make absurd statements over glasses of Zinfandel about how they were thinking about maybe someday writing a book. The point being, there is a difference between intentions and actually doing the hard yards.

Participants of the workshop came from a number of industries: architecture, IT, public service, gambling and the sex trade (no kidding) and could relate to the comment. Because they knew watching episodes of ER or House does not qualify one to diagnoses illness, viewing CSI NY, Miami and Las Vegas provides no real knowledge of how to solve crime, and my personal favourite, selecting a paint colour or living through a kitchen remodel does not make you an architect.

There is a difference between the professional and hobbyist, that difference is that design professionals: architects, interior designers, communications, graphics and experience designers etc. do not just create something that looks good, they create designs that provide value to the end user and that is a very different outcome. Unfortunately, design professionals do a poor job of articulating what that value is in a language that is meaningful to their client and therefore deal with the negative ramifications of this shortcoming on a daily basis.

Add to this the influence of new technologies and procurement models for design services: open source, crowdsourcing, contests and competitions that take the best ideas and only pay the winner or no one at all. For most designers this is far from a sustainable business model because the time spent on the work has nothing to do with compensation. Winning or succeeding is more a factor of luck, whim of judges, or the personal preferences of people who may have questionable qualifications, or lack the experience and know how to identify a superior design solution.

Crowdsourcing is not something we come up against in architecture and interior design; never the less assuming it won’t creep into our lexicon would be at our own peril. Speak to a graphic designer and mention crowdsourced logo competitions and you’ll receive a litany of reasons why this is bad. Crowdsourcing should not be confused with outsourcing, where jobs are moved from higher to lower paying regions; the practice guarantees an equal quality of work for lower cost. Crowdsourcing combines ideas from people all over the world, qualified or not, and follows a pay on satisfaction model. It does not guarantee a similar quality of outcome.

Most industries would consider such a situation ludicrous, whether or not you like what your doctor, lawyer or accountant did, they would still be expected compensation. However, the question of payment is the least of the problems with these models, the real issues arise from the inability for the designer to capture a competent brief, interact and educate the client about the pros and cons of one solution over another. Since the average person does not really understand graphics, digital communications, interior design or the technicalities of architecture, having a professional navigate the decision making process is critical.

All good relationships are built on trust and those between client and designer are no different. Ideally, communication would be constant throughout the project and in the end the outcome would be the result of discourse and collaboration. Forgoing this opportunity for interaction is the main problem with many of the new methods for procuring design services popular today.

When we whine about the insurgence of design competitions being used to award commissions we are singing an old tune. 140 years ago The Royal Institute of British Architects began a debate on the value of design contests, and as far as I am aware, it continues to this day. On one hand it can be argued design competitions devalue the work and create a host of problems for the profession as a whole.

A number of these were identified in a 2013 exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York that addressed the hidden stories and politics behind architectural competitions. Noted were tricky ways architects broke anonymity rules and the unlikely chance of a poorly named entry proposal being a successful winner. They labelled competitions as ‘breeding grounds for clichés in architectural representation, and finally identified the real quandary, hours and hours of unpaid work generally done by interns barely earning the minimum wage if they earn a wage at all. For years the profession turned a blind eye to interns providing services for free for the opportunity to work with an internationally famous architect. Unfortunately, Obama’s executive order on the minimum wage will not change that situation in America if it still exists; it only applies to the public sector.

Considering the other side of the coin, competitions alter the course of design by bringing new movements to the fore. International competitions, in particular have broadened our notions of what is possible by calling on the creativity of architects around the globe. We would not have our own Sydney Opera House if it wasn’t for an international competition won by an outsider, and relatively unknown architect, Jorn Utzon. And moore recently if it hadn’t been for an international competition Thomas Noakes from Australia would have never won the Doritos ad competition and millions of Americans would have been denied a taste of Aussie sophistication. See for yourself it will make you proud, particularly if you’re an Aussie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugo7Y2lRsxc

This highlights another benefit of the competition process, it allows new players to compete regardless of their prior experience in the region or project type. We saw this in the recent Flinders Street Station competition where the people’s choice award went to a team of Melbourne Uni grads: Eduardo Velasquez, Manuel Pineda and Santiago Medina. Although they didn’t win the competition, their entry got us all thinking and talking.

Of course thinking and talking does not pay the mortgage. In researching this piece I read one blog that suggested the last thing you wanted to do was win a competition, because it would signify the end of self-indulgent fantasies and force the architect to listen to clients, local politicians, health & safety certifiers and fire regulators.

The blogger was having a go at Zaha Hadid, who didn’t get a paying commission for 25 years, he claimed her reputation was “based on images, not real-life.” While it may be true that it took a long time for Hadid to warm up, something she could only have done with rich parents or some kind of supporter behind her, it’s hard to see how her work did not become more refined, some might say palatable, from the many international competitions she entered.

Hadid is the recipient of, and only woman to win The Pritzker Prize; her life’s work has been on display in the Guggenheim and she runs a practice of 350 people in London. She is 69th on the Forbes list of “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women” and was named by Time as an influential thinker in the 2010 TIME 100 issue. If that is not enough, she was listed as one of the fifty best-dressed over 50s by the Guardian in 2013! Architectural competitions have been very, very, good for Zaha, and prove that when it comes to architects it’s all about flash, not cash.

Sources:
Doyle, John; “Did We Just Overlook the Next Opera House?”; The Age; January 24, 2014
Dunn, Zach; “The Real Problem With Design Contests”; The Blog of One Mighty Roar; posted January 16, 2009
Kubey, Karen; “The Competitive Hypothesis” Domusweb; posted February 13, 2013
Stevens, Gary; “How to Become a Famous Architect Without Building Anything”; Dr. Garry’s Place http://www.archsoc.com
http://www.ethicsingraphicdesign.org; Contests—who wins?; Posted on Jan 23, 2013
McKiernan, Patricia; Creative Professionals and Ethics; Graphic Artists Guild; August 7, 201