Superusers
Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice
Randy Deutsch
- 200 pagine
- English
- ePUB (disponibile sull'app)
- Disponibile su iOS e Android
Superusers
Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice
Randy Deutsch
Informazioni sul libro
Design technology is changing both architectural practice and the role of the architect and related design professionals. With new technologies and work processes appearing every week, how can practitioners be expected to stay on top and thrive? In a word, Superusers.
Superusers: Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice will help you identify who they are, the value they provide, and how you can attract and retain them, and become one; what career opportunities they have, what obstacles they face, and how to lead them. Written by Randy Deutsch, a well-known expert in the field, this is the first-ever guide to help current and future design professionals to succeed in the accelerating new world of work and technology.
Providing proven, practical advice, the book features:
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- Unique, actionable insights from design technology leaders in practice worldwide
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- The impacts of emerging technology trends such as generative design, automation, AI, and machine learning on practice
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- Profiles of those who provide 20% of the effort but achieve 80% of the results, and how they do it
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- What will help firms get from where they are today to where they need to be, to survive and thrive in the new world of design and construction.
Revealing the dramatic impact of technology on current and future practice, Superusers shows what it means to be an architect in the 21st century. Essential reading for students and professionals, the book helps you plan for and navigate a fast-moving, uncertain future with confidence.
Domande frequenti
Informazioni
Part one
Why Superusers?
Chapter 1
Superusersâ C-factors
Curiosity
One of the things that came out of my experience at Stanford is an interest in graphic design â something Iâve always been interested in. One of the things that got me to the University of Oregon is that I continued to explore that space after I graduated from Stanford. I found that the thing that I wanted to learn more about was architecture and design. I went to California College of the Arts (CCA) for classes. I travel and go to museums, draw and photograph buildings. I realized I was gravitating toward the urban space and wanted to learn how to design it. I was driven by curiosity.
Youâre not looking for somebody who needs to be told what to do. Youâre looking for somebody who has an extremely large appetite for knowledge. Itâs not even problem solving so much. Itâs just gaining knowledge, and the way you gain knowledge is to locate problems and wonder why itâs a problem, and decide if itâs a problem worth solving or if the problem is the problem. Youâre just hungry for knowledge, you have that appetite and youâre a naturally curious person; if you have that attitude, that you should be able to pick things up. Thatâs how I felt about myself and thatâs what Iâve noticed over the years, the students who are the highest performers are those who donât wait for me to demo a tool. They have a problem that they want to solve and they go about solving it.
I teach a lot of Grasshopper as part of various courses and itâs a good proxy for design computation and smart models and process in general, as well as also just being a useful skill to know Grasshopper. I know I should be more practical about it, but Iâm just always heartbroken that people arenât trying to figure things out and asking questions. It just seems like they, by and large, come in and itâs like they did what they needed to do to get to that point.Iâve had a lot of advantages in my life so I donât want to hold myself up, like everybody should be the same type of person Iâve been. I remember one advantage being that I learned Rhino in high school, which is a freak accident mostly. I remember just being bored with the assignment and being like, âIâm going to type in every command. Iâm going to run every Rhino command and Iâm just going to see what it does.â I tell my students that and theyâre like, âOh, Grasshopperâs so hard,â whereas I said, âJust put a random component down and see what it does, and then put another one, and just do that once a day, and just see what that leads to.â As an educator, thatâs always been that really, really difficult thing to attain, which is âHow do I nurture curiosity?â rather than âHow do I deliver content?â
Itâs like coming to WeWork. It was hard not to notice them, and it was hard not to notice they were doing the types of things I wanted to do and they were really, really good at it. Thatâs exciting and that curiosity takes over and youâre like, âWell, I have to go do that now because that seems like where all the smart people went, and where all the big things are happening within this industry, so Iâll pop in over there and see what happens.â
Contextualizers
They ideally know what this means for their individual project. Hopefully they do, beyond themselves. What does this mean for the work Iâm doing now? What does this mean for the larger project team? Beyond that, what does this mean for this typology or this sector? Is there something here I can learn from? Beyond that, what does this mean for the practice, or even beyond that?
Connectors
That is a big part of what I do. I constantly look for connections and problems to solve. Sometimes applying something that happens over in the Perth office to something that happens in London. I absolutely encourage the team to do that. I donât want them to become overwhelmed. You donât want to over-weight the individual task that they are doing at that time that then might be used to solve 10,000 other problems. Thatâs where there are two mindsets between the 50/50 of the work. The one 50% thatâs focusing on the individual project, and the other 50% thatâs to say, alright, letâs back up. Letâs look at this from a 10,000 foot view. What am I doing now that can go bigger?
Because we were using Flux at that time, we added on top of that some concerns about where Flux was going from a big picture point of view. That then turned into Brian Ringley and Andrew Heumann building some aspects of the Wombat toolkit that we then released publicly. These were some utilities that we were using again and again and again in the practice. We didnât see anyone else with them out there. They are not really that complicated in terms of IP, but they are really handy utilities. Where this went after this was saying OK, now wait a minute. Weâve fixed some of that for us. But is that really a long-term solution? Additionally, we have this design research group based in our Sydney studio called SuperSpace that is running into similar paradigms, but not quite the same solution space. There are some similar conversations happening. That then sparked a conversation around, letâs start thinking about a future system that might be similar to Flux. We started having very serious conversations with the team from Speckle, in particular Dimitrie Stefanescu. We started talking with Jonatan Schumacher with where Konstru was going in its next steps. That went from single project tools, to multi-project tools, to enterprise tools that we pulled out, developed, and then released, to then start thinking about platforms. So it went at that point from plug-ins to platforms. Thatâs a good conversation to have. I donât want to saddle a particular project with a platform-level conversation, but there does need to be that moment where you can back-up and think at platform and infrastructure level, asking: how does this actually impact how we do our work on a regular basis? And is there some amazing opportunity that we could have by thinking about it at platform level?
Communicators
We have an Intranet that all the big firms have. I will post occasionally, âFor the next episode of Dynamo Next we have this going on. Here are some cool things we can do with data, some basic steps you can learn.â
We would only need to bring in the computational designer when theyâve settled on rough rules for what the design of the façade should be, and then trying to get a transparency versus opacity percentage, and thatâs when...