Keep and Eye on UI

User Interface design is a crucial dimension of development for all things digital, and increasingly, all things are going digital. So how can we overlook the importance of UI design? 

There are two camps that have presented themselves in the graphic approach to user interfaces. The first is very much out of Apple's playbook. It's a style that surrounds the 'skeuomorph' a reference to a historical real world object that used to serve the purpose that the new digital too now does. It's cute, familiar to many of us, and can be graphically rich to the eye, however another, vocal camp in UI design pulls no punches in casting their disdain.

They believe that distracting decorations sever the artery between form and function. In this approach, the pared down, functional and fundamental components are all that find their way onto the screen. If you've seen Windows 8, then you're familiar with this style.

Fred Nerby, aparently a member of the latter school, realized that Facebook is falling behind in the UI game with its full-blown web interface - and it's sort of important to Facebookers out there. So he pulled up his sleaves and reinvented the Facebook environment. Take notice Mr. Zuckerberg...

Take a closer look at Fred Nerby's amazing redesign at his site:

nerby.com

Celebrating IT Stewardship

We all have a certain, natural aptitude with computers. It ranges from self-described hopelessness, through to self-taught IT experts moonlighting as regular folk. Working with computers as part of your job is totally standard, but training to do so isn't always part of the package. Generally, staff do their best to run a stable computer at work as part of easing their day, but some rise to the occasion and act as stewards for their fellow staff, and those folks deserves praise.

 Smaller businesses frequently have a single staff member who takes on responsibility for IT. We see this all the time with Architecture and design firms. They take one for the team, by putting themselves in the path of a freight train of IT frustration. They generally start with a base level of understanding, and then learn everything that have to on the job to keep IT running for their workplace. As much as the arrangement sometimes comes at the expense of properly executed IT strategy, IT stewards deserve to be celebrated for their efforts.

And shouldn't IT stewardship itself be promoted as a good thing in the work place? 

Businesses often allocate a formidable budget to systems expenses. For many creative businesses, the value of their product and its profitability each rely on the effective use of these expensive systems, yet we plant people in front of computers simply expecting that what they do with them is good for business. Unfortunately people and computers often aren't an effective mix without adequate support. So why aren't we placing more emphasis on the final leg of IT infrastructure: computer use itself?

Even computers themselves respond well to proper, caring use. When a person begins to understand the intricacies of their machine, it operates far more stably. When we know that clicking a specific button while the computer is thinking will slow it down, and naturally begin to avoid clicking it, the computer appreciates it. This sort of symbiosis is a massive benefit to productivity. Businesses should be promoting effective use of their machines, because it benefits the machines, the staff, and the bottom lines of business.

Programs involving IT stewardship do not need to be lofty or grandiose. Imagine an IT provider who helps to train staff, trains a couple of stewards to a greater level, then provides strategic, in-depth support when necessary using the stewards as liaison. This sort of organized approach proves to be a cost effective way to exploit the best of all worlds: improvement to the ground level user experience, an organized support structure to minimize reactive and user support costs, training and experience for the IT Steward, and the benefit of overarching, longer-term IT strategy to keep capital and maintenance costs as low as possible.

Look At it This Way

As computers creep ever-closer to the heart of our home and work lives, we should all look to be stewards of our office technology, and to build a respect for the one of the most important tools we use. But businesses, and specifically those relying on power users to be effective stewards, need to consider how well they're encouraging IT stewardship in their team.

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Read our white paper The Power User Experience to learn more about how to build stronger working relationships between your staff and your IT infrastructure.

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Tablets Unify

Good digital technology makes life easier. And as a endless array of services are being brought online in various ways, devices that can effectively deliver online services are taking on an important role.

An Emerging Platform

We began looking at computers as extensions of the limited things that we could do with them: initially they just 'computed', then they replaced the type writer, then allowed us to draw and design, then they delivered us the internet. Now, what they can do is uncanny, with unbelievable connectedness. So much in fact, that they can't be pigeon holed by a particular role. Across the board, computers are all quickly increasing in capability, from smart phone to super-computer, and every machine can be seen as a pretty powerful platform at this stage.

TV, movies, music, social spheres, professional networks, cloud services, shopping, encyclopedia, dictionary, games, etc. All of these activities are easily delivered via basically any type of computer these days. Computers have become portals into the world that we increasingly place on line. This is no small change in role, having come from being glorified calculators running absurdly clunky software. Computers are now central to our lives, both at work and at home, and are used to pipe rich experiences, not bit-level information.

You can send information around in almost endless ways. Everything is being digitized for transmission, and viewing it all is getting awfully easy. Given this flexibility, we should expect to see a great deal of form factor exploration over the coming years, all hingeing on the value of delivery. The iPad has proven (by selling unbelievably) that new form factors can be powerful even when we don't expect it. Among the greatest challenges that people posed on the iPad was that they didn't think it was a necessary device, given that they already had laptops and smartphones. A couple years later, people are shedding computers and magazines in favour of a device they now describe as invaluable. 

Unity is Developmental 

Obvioulsy the journey towards unity is just that – a journey. That is, we shouldn’t expect completion at any point. The role that tablets play however, is as a unifying form factor and fuels the vehicle, but even they have obvious challenges.

One major use for computers poses a major obstacle to changing form factors: data input and creation. As a designer, I personally enter a lot of data into my computer. I write, draw, edit photography, and lay out documents all the time. Most of this work would be handcuffed without a mouse, a good keyboard and a large monitor. Creative work is not feasible on most off the new form factors that are being introduced to the computer and electronics market, and apps that promise to enable creative tasks only deliver a very basic toolset.

A glaring challenge to platform unification comes from the iPad, where Apple has decided against allowing Adobe Flash plugins, negating the viewing of Flash websites. This causes an obstacle to it being an adequate web browser, since there are still a bulk of Flash-only websites out there. Although the flash era is waning, it will take some time before a non-flash browser will be completely effective. Fragmented environments are frustrating and ineffective, but the trend is toward improved unity and converging technologies.

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Look to adopt new form factor devices into your work, but beware of the exceptions to the above rules as decried below. New form factors offer far greater convenience and portability than conventional options. They can provide options for less expensive computing platforms. And certain benefits are significant, like the potential for tablet computers to display construction drawings on site, where both cost and effectiveness are dramatically improved. The iPad and it’s mates are new to the game, but they stand to change a lot about how we use technology.

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Read our white paper, iPads in The Design Build Process to learn a great deal more about how tablets stand to reinvent the on-site work experience.

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The Smart Office Series: Know Your Power Users

We all use computers all the time, but some of us rely on them daily to complete complex work with a high fidelity toolset. I you’ve ever heard of Building Information Modeling, or watched someone build a 3D model of Johnny Depp, then you understand what intensive computer skills are. This direct dependency on the computer as a fundamental tool breeds sympathy, and strengthens the relationship between user and machine. We call someone who’s working in a field like this a Power User, because they click faster, know more, and identify more readily with powerful information technology. 

A power user could be described as anyone who: 

• rails against calling IT for help, even when it’s free

• actually feels embarrassed when they learn that they're the cause of a computer issue

• bypasses application help files and goes straight to Google to troubleshoot an issue

• goes looking for scripts to automate their application workflow

• hates being locked out by permissions policies

• finds themselves one day searching for an online forum regarding their software

• ends up clocking their machines's processing time to calculate its negative impact on their productivity

 Power use is nothing to shake a stick at. Anyone who's livelihood hinges directly against their computer time understands that the relationship is a key one, and downtime sucks. In too many cases, though, power users are overlooked in the workplace. They're commonly left by their employer to toil day in and out with ailing systems, and a lack of empowerment to improve their situation. It’s kind of like putting a putting a killer whale in a backyard swimming pool. 

Specifically creative operations like architectural, modeling, design and engineering firms need to contemplate their staff and identify where power users could pose an opportunity. These team members should be seen as either resources to be drawn upon, or resources to be fueled for greater productivity. Left unattended, there may be a power user in your midst going stir crazy as you’re reading this article.

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Read more about this untold story in IT and consider downloading our white paper that explores power users in greater depth.

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Foreign Beauty: Tablets at Work

Those of us who have dived right in are becoming overly familiar with the ins and outs of running an iPad as a work device. As much as adopting one brings a range of new possibilities, it turns out to present just as many obstacles to your existing workflow.  

Getting to Know You (The Upside)

iPads (and tablet computers in general) are big on connectivity. With cellular data, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, a camera, and a microphone, the devices are more in tune with their environment than you generally realize. All at once, they're checking in on a range of cloud services, maintaining an idea of where they are specially, monitoring which way they're being held, and keeping track of internal statuses to maintain stability and to preserve battery life. For certain an iPad is a powerful computer, but it's main strength is its connectedness, which obviously benefits a mobile experience. iPads are fantastic at bringing information to your fingertips, wherever you are.

They're also highly available. You don't need to turn them off and they have a remarkable battery life. The size of tablets makes them far more convenient than laptops to carry around, and not having to boot up and down for portability makes them a great deal more efficient as a mobile device than a full computer. When you say jump... you get the idea.

iPads are also great at display (ahead of their competition at this stage with the Retina display). Their screen size and its quality are fantastic to look at, offering an industry leading resolution. Their video processing capability is equally solid, enabling them to render 3D graphics with ease. For presentations, they allow for their screen contents to be ‘Air Played’ (wirelessly broadcast) to a larger screen, and for handheld presentations, they shine above any other shape of device.

Mainly via third party apps, iPads are able to display a wide range of file types. Basically any common file can be viewed on an iPad: PDF, MS Office, Apple iWork, various CAD files, and many others are all viewable. But it's not really an iPad’s software that inhibits working with files. It’s syncing. 

Getting to Know All About You (The Downside)

Apple abstracts the file management process and doesn't operate as a hard drive, and we're strongly encouraged to see it as a portal to the cloud instead. What's that mean? A cloud portal allows us to interact with files that are essentially stored external from the device on the internet or a remote server. This scenario creates the problem of keeping the remote file up to date with an intermittent connection to the cloud. 'Syncing' is the sweeping term applied to methods of managing sets of identical data on and off of a device, and it's often a point of complication and error. Syncing not only takes getting used to, it’s also developing as a stable service, and is definitely seeing improvements.

That’s essentially the game, we need to retool our approach to computing to invoke the cloud pervasively, and that‘s going to take some getting used to, for all of us.

iPads also lack effective input capabilities. These are not definitely not production tools, as is easily made apparent by trying to write an email of any length with a touchscreen keyboard. Artists also consistently find that the touchscreen is clunky at best for producing graphics, and this is not expected to change any time soon. Adobe, went as far as making a version of Photoshop for the iPad, but it’s a highly limited experience, due to the lack of a mouse’s precision to outline details, etc. Instead of carrying off production, the iPad has cast new light on the role of the desktop workstation for that specific purpose. It’s apparent that production (other than writing) will continue to require a full computer for the foreseeable future. 

Finally, a decision of Apple's to exclude Adobe Flash from its iOS browsers altogether remains as a point of frustration for iOS users. Although Flash is a dying platform online largely due to Apple's stand, plenty of websites will take years before being rid of Flash components, and many are built ground up in Flash. The minefield of Flash sites will hinder iPad web browsing for some time to come.

Getting to Like You (The Balance)

Don’t be scared by the limitations that an iPad might pose on a current workflow, because that changes that are choking up the pipe right now are here to stay. We all need to learn and work with the cloud and its cultural differences. The benefits heavily outweigh the issues. Literally, lighter weight, more mobile computing is an inevitable part of where we’re all headed.

If you spend any time at all working away from your desk, be a leader and get your feet wet in the mobile space.

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Read our white paper, iPads in The Design Build Process to learn more about how iPads stand to reinvent the job-site work experience for AEC.

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An Architect of Innovation

Vancouver Architect Michael Green spoke a few weeks ago at TED, and was extremely well received with his impetus to draw the field of architecture into a new era. Inspiringly, he cites the kind of shift that was made when the world first saw the incredulously tall Eiffel Tower as the same kind that his field is facing right now. This time it's about wood, not steel. 

Cultivating A New Ecosystem

Information is no longer something that just accumulates on the shelves of libraries and the pages of phone books. These days information is a rich medium, and technology is an implement for shaping, processing, and cultivating it. More than ever the digital fields are filled with energy: entrepreneurial spirit, intellectual drive, philosophical possibility, and creative innovation. 

Now, we're witnessing the fruits of the generation who have grown up entirely within the digital era. The internet is a backyard for these kids, and desktop computers are as old as desks themselves. Generation Y have what seems to be a biological predisposition to understanding and absorbing digital toolsets with ease, and what they can create seems unsurprisingly brilliant. 

Nick D’Aloisio may be the next brilliant mind to arrive on the scene. He's a teenager with the intellect of a tenured professor, and his insight has X-ray power. In his self-taught world of sentiment analysis, information might seem a little more approachable for us all. His creation, an app called Summly, makes use of a technology he developed for automatically building summary pages that allow us to scan web content far faster than we could if we had to view full websites. It's a tool that seems poised to improve our relationship with the hulking mass of information that we're accumulating rapidly. Data mining technologies, as this could be construed, constitute a dynamic area that's seeing massive development in this age of abundant data. 

GigaOM: Meet the Internet's Newest Boy Genius

Finger On The Pulse: Touchscreens

We're all familiar with the immense and immediate success of the iPhone and iPad. Wether it's due to Apple's highly developed ecosystem and sensitively designed user interface, or the massive advantages that a touchscreen presents, it's obvious that the touchscreen will play a big role in our future. They can be single-point responsive, multi touch (handling up to 11 touch points at once on Apple devices), limitless contact points like Microsoft Surface which scans any shape on its surface, or even pressure sensitive touchscreens in the near future.

So where are we in the journey toward the perfect touchscreen?  

Sumsung has just released a touchscreen that senses contact pixel by pixel, and although that might seem trivial, it's actually a great improvement over what's currently on the market. When you can sense pixel by pixel, adjustment to the sensitivity of the touch becomes software based because you can programmatically set the diameter of the minimum input, making it changeable depending on the application. It also up opens up the possibility for far higher fidelity input, making styluses far more like actual pens with fine tips. The desire for virtual paper applications involving realistic pen input is obvious. 

The future addition of pressure sensitive input will further turn the touchscreen into a tactile plane for rich interaction with unlimited digital experiences. 

Developer Creates Proxy Server to Control Any Device Via Siri

The introduction of Apple's Siri has issued in a new mandate for the digital industries. The potential for voice control, and its ability to solve the challenge of data entry on touchscreens, is obvious. The first question that every developer asked themself was, can Siri be used to control other software beyond the suite of Apple's apps? The short answer has proven to be no, and the wait for a development kit could be lengthy. However signs are already apparent that the desire to develop around intelligent voice control, and Siri specifically, may be stronger than we think.

Check out this link to an article by 9to5 Mac demonstrating a proxy server that a developer built to allow Siri to interact with software of his choosing:

9to5 Mac: Developer creates proxy server to control any device via Siri

HBR: The Four Technologies You Need to Be Working With

Harvard Business Review: The Four Technologies You Need to Be Working With

In today's market place, digital technologies play a bigger part than ever before in entrepreneurial development. There are so many new digitally-derived services, experiences, devices and opportunities being born, that it's impossible to keep track. What's important to understand though, are the dynamics of what's unfolding, and how certain technologies are driving innovation. Adam Richardson of global design and innovation firm Frog, points out four such technologies that are key to the growth of the new digital era. This is a great article that summarizes them, and provides examples as to how they're being employed to provide new experiences and benefits.

August 5, 2011

A New Media Network: The Internet

It's plainly obvious that 'all things digital' are coming of age at this point. The New Information Age and Web 2.0 paradigms are garnering constant chatter, but exactly what does this look like on the ground? 

We've historically associated the internet with information or data, like a global IT network. But information is a loaded term, and it encompasses a lot more than figures, text and pretty pictures. In fact, information and data are becoming synonymous with media, since the digital era is all about taking content and experiences in virtually any form, and digitizing them. Essentially anything we can synthesize is representable as ones and zeros.

Hence, the internet is a network for media and media-driven experiences, and it's drawing together the full gamut media platforms before our eyes. Video in particular holds a massive share of the internet's future.

A perfect example is the progression of the video conferencing industry. Historically, companies like Cisco have developed products like Telepresence which is a private, expensive experience that relies on managed connections as a subset of the internet. But as mobile devices and available internet bandwidth proliferate, this approach is being challenged. Companies like Vidyo out of New Jersey and Mirial based out of Milan (and recently acquired by LifeSize), are taking advantage of the internet itself as a platform for an experience that is beginning to unseat market share from the far more expensive telepresence norm. They also bring vital mobile devices like smart phones and tablets into the video conference, which is a growing demand. Today, it's possible to connect more than 100 participants in an HD video conference, using a wide range of devices to connect at the same time. Using the internet itself as the platform also significantly reduces the price of operation for these systems compared to fully dedicated telepresence. Many markets are watching this all develop with hot anticipation of drawing remote participants together and collaborating like never before.

The flexibility, availability and quality of these internet based services also makes them useful to major television news networks. They can feed extremely remote, live interviews from nearly anywhere into a news broadcast with immediacy and affordability, making video correspondence of unfolding events easier than ever before.

When you consider areas like video conferencing, the internet should really now be seen as network for media.

Rob Sunderland

Disruptive Innovation: Zite

Zite could be considered more of a platform than just an app, and a brilliant platform at that. This app, and a few of its cousins (Flud, Flipbook, etc.) have broken out a new market that serves to bring multiple sources of news and magazine content to your fingertips by getting to know your tastes, then automatically feeding content that you like into a digital magazine format. At this stage at least, it's basically devoid of advertising, is free, and is designed to present content from any source in an attractive, uniform layout with beautiful navigation. 

But this post isn't really about Zite. It's about what it represents in the information age. Zite takes old media channels and transforms them (albeit in a guerilla fashion) into a contemporary, on-demand consumer product. Like everything that we're seeing born in the 'New Information Age', Zite does a ton of work for you in the background. It's search engine, developed at the University of British Columbia, takes a set of predefined criteria that it learns from information that you have the choice of giving it, and your behaviour. It then frames content that you would likely not otherwise have seen without navigating to it yourself. By cutting the extra time and clutter out of the article browsing experience, casual news reading becomes new again, and extremely engaging. Zite has a nearly solid 5 star rating as an app.

There's really only one problem: legality. The day after its release, Zite was served a cease and desist letter from a sizeable group of publishing goliaths like the Associated Press, Dow Jones & Company, National Geographic, and Time Warner. Change from the publishing industry will be reluctant at best.

Although Zite and apps like it are a huge help in finding preferable content, although they allow us to effortlessly navigate the endless mass, and although the service helps us to break from repeatedly frequenting the same biased sources, the corporations that employ 90% of the journalists aren't going to change overnight. Indeed they'd be happiest if these new channel-bucking apps were never born, because by frequenting their many sites directly, we drive up their advertising revenues which rely on traffic to sell ads (and pay journalists). 

In the face of this expected publishing backlash, Zite CEO Ali Davar responded with a brilliant, two-fold tactic. He placated the publishing giants by setting Zite's internal web browser to display their articles within their actual websites, reintroducing their advertising to the screen. The reader still feels at home within the Zite framework and knows when they're leaving it if they choose to, and the sources can still sell their advertising space. Secondly, and more importantly, Mr. Davar played the cooperation card by requesting that the publishers work with companies like his to negotiate the publishing industry's route into the New Information Age. This only makes sense given the massively positive response to this new platform, and the new energy it's bringing to content delivery.

Just like any other industry, publishing will have to evolve through the erosive process of rebuilding its rights-based platform as new possibilities are exploited online. Newspapers are already engaged in this clash, and it's now time for the magazines to get involved.

Rob Sunderland

Related Links

Zite in the iTunes app store 

Cooperative Intelligence

It Starts With an Idea

When we think of work, many different forms and tasks come to mind. It can be as complex as theorizing quantum mechanical workings, or as simple as sorting the recycling. However, which of these two jobs is benefitted more by a collaborative approach and why? When we look at varying forms of work, it turns out that we find collaboration is actually best suited to work with one type of outcome.

Many people would assume that collaboration is simply ‘working together’, but conducting work in tandem with team members is not where the real power of collaboration lies. Collaboration is about recursively processing ideas between multiple parties, not so that an idea is democratically arrived at, but so that a multitude of ideas are given consideration and thoroughly investigated. The subsequent use of the idea can be handled with non-collaborative means, but the process of ideation itself, is enhanced by many minds coming together. Creative professionals rely on group ideation heavily.

"Collaboration is about recursively processing ideas
           between multiple parties."

Ideation, or the task of conjuring and collecting ideas, is a complex one. In it’s simplest form, a single mind assembles an idea by combining concepts or extrapolating something entirely new, in mental isolation. In its most complex form, ideation can be a process taking months and involving entire teams of participants before one or more ideas move forward. The common element in each case is that an idea is formed that conforms within known project criteria. The variables involved in the process are usually: the difficulty of the described problem, the context of the problem (which can easily be changed during the process of ideation), the number of minds working on it, and the techniques used to integrate those minds. The latter two variables are all about collaboration.

Work as ‘Problem Solving’

Usually, tasks can be looked at as problems to be solved. If a lightbulb burns out, the problem is simple (replacement bulb needed), and the solution predetermined (install the new bulb). Considering this simple task from a problem/solution standpoint is not useful. However, given a more complicated or open ended task, considering it to be a problem becomes very valuable. Imagine your company’s sales are dropping off, and you need to find new sales somehow. The market is changing, new technologies and platforms are available to reach that market, and you can go in several directions to find new business. What should be done? A conventional approach to this situation might be to have the sales manager investigate and decide on the best new channel to exploit, and the most effective means to implement, then press the button on his plan. No bother wasting time, right?

Wrong. Business is about managing risk to make the most of what you’ve got in your hand. Sometimes we should be meek, and other times aggressive. Simply asking one person to decide on the best single course of action, is a meek request that robs the company of an important possibility. In this case, the business is likely to be well served by taking the investment of spending more time ‘finding’ or even ‘creating’ new means for sales. The only risk is that no good ideas come out of the added hours invested in collaboration. The possibility is introduced, however, for developing a new sales program that drastically boosts the business’s throughput, uncovers a new differentiation, or innovates the sales process for the industry itself. The problem is intentionally left wide open: ‘the company needs new sales’, and the solution can end up taking any form, provided that it meets the outlined logical criteria. 

Human beings are different from the rest of the life on this planet in one major way. Our brains and their associated abilities are gargantuan, and we need to focus on utilizing this advantage wherever we can. Looking at a task in a problem/solution light puts the onus on your brain to do the heavy lifting. When we turn off our brains and go with ‘standard’ solutions, we sell ourselves short. Businesses need to make use of their staff’s brains, and collaborative ideation is a great way of doing so.

Weighing the Risks of Collaboration

Like anything else, investing staff hours in working together can have both positive and negative effects. How can one weigh the pros and cons of a collaborative approach?

Benefits of collaboration:

• enhanced ideation, resulting in more innovative paths
• a staff focussed on ideas rather than labour
• increased engagement of staff in company decisions
• the possibility that a game-changing idea is uncovered
• increased social interaction and company morale
• creativity becomes a part of the wider work experience

Its possible downsides:

• cost of multiple staff members’ time
• inefficiency during the process of ideation
• ridiculously creative ideas are sometimes seen as silly (but generally shouldn’t be)
• no good idea might come out of the process at all
• innovative ideas can be costlier to implement than conventional ones, compounding risk

Given the new and growing attention to design in the schools of business management, the prospect of collaborative approaches has become of massive interest. Design Thinking, as many are calling it is a new frontier in the boardroom, where examples like Apple and Procter & Gamble are making many CEOs think long and hard about how brands, products and consumer experiences are brought to market. Many now argue that creativity is a force that must not be overlooked in the way companies approach operations. Indeed when considering a top down example tree, the best place to find creative methods is at the top. The notion that creative services should be purchased to handle a subcomponent of an otherwise calculated business process is increasingly considered flawed. Creativity is now being sponsored as a part of everyday business, and collaboration is one of the best techniques to get it started.

Rob Sunderland

Related Links

Wikipedia: Problem Solving
Wikipedia: Collaboration Platform Software

Adapting Integrated Practice

Le Corbusier, one of the fathers of Modern Architecture, approached his work with a certain austerity and elitism that focussed decisions squarely onto his shoulders. In his time, a process that channelled almost everything through the architect was appropriate. Today however, as architects are asked to design more complex, more sustainable buildings faster and cheaper than ever before, a conventional approach to the project becomes strained. Traditionally a project would be virtually if not literally led by a the architect, and the subcontracted builder and trades would report to them both for instruction and to shed liability for the management decisions about their part in the project. But the task of developing architecture has now become very intricate. It’s now unrealistic to ask an architect, regardless of their experience, to steer all aspects of a job when any single aspect can bring a level of complexity so great that an entire company is required to handle it. Indeed, with development of technology, the status of the ‘master’ is challenged.

What’s taking place in Architecture is happening in reaction to this trend. In order to reallocate the burden of managing the growing sub-components of a building project, Architects are inviting a collaborative approach that brings all of the subcontractors and the client to the table at the beginning of the design process. These partners then contribute to the design directions and ultimately align themselves with the design intent that the architect establishes with the client. Throughout the process, information is encouraged to flow freely between the stakeholders. The name for this fundamentally different, inclusive design approach is Integrated Project Delivery, or more generally Integrated Practice.

Deconstructing Integrated Practice

Is there a reason that Integrated Practice (IP) couldn't be adopted by wide range of industries to provide the same benefits as it does in rchitecture? I’d argue that though the reasons instigating it might be affecting these industries first, the integrated practice model itself has a lot to offer almost any industry.

IP serves a need that exclusively involves multiple players. A project or field that deals in a one on one capacity with a client can’t make use of ‘collaborative’ means any more than there can be collaboration between a single designer and their client. The prospect of collaboration is relevant, though many clients misunderstand the role of a designer and expect them to work in isolation. Design requires information to succeed, and where that information might only come from an initial written brief, anything that can be done to foster a bidirectional flow between client and designer, will greatly aid the process. Indeed a big part of IP is about collaborative information flow, appropriate in any design process. The complexity of information coming from several parties working in concert, however, tends to beg for more open communication channels, and IP can provide them. 

Another aspect of IP has to do with aligning the efforts of partners in a production process. This is extremely important where there are interrelating systems being installed, since errors caused by missed timing, unexpected delays, and incorrect assumptions abound in these cases. Bringing partners into alignment can be beneficial to any projects that involve tandem components, not only those involving separate companies. A valuable lesson in alignment can be learned from IP, and taken to many sectors.

A third aspect of IP surrounds liability and motivation. Andy Anway of the Boston exhibition design firm Amaze Design, states that, “The senior-level people must be must be committed to achieving a common outcome, with financial or other incentives to keep that singular mindset in place. The success of a team-based process is a function of mutual cooperation and mutual benefit.” 

Truly integrated practice makes the goal of a project singular, so that individual stakeholders don’t get protective of their individual work component. The notion that all members of a team, play as a team, seems simplistic, but in practice it can be quite complex. Particularly when the bottom line of profit is involved, it’s common to see a member become self interested. In order to fight that tendency, a cooperative intent or infrastructure can promote an attitude shift. When all members are at the table up front and agreeing with each other on a common goal, the possibility of one member forming a weak link is met head on.

Without question, the basic concept behind Integrated Practice is sound regardless of an industry or context. The ingredients that serve to bring stakeholders together, help form a shared approach to risk, and focus all players on the end goal of the project over and above their own sub-interests; all aspects key to collaboration. Ultimately understanding the pointed benefits of collaboration, and knowing where and why it’s appropriate become the most poignant considerations.

Rob Sunderland

Related Links

American Institute of Architecture on IP
Wikipedia on Integrated Project Delivery

The Convergent Paradigm

Since the beginning, we’ve been operating under a single paradigm. Our technology has provided us with abilities, setup new platforms like the internet, and bogged us down with new devices to interact with it all, overloading our landfills. So far, in order to perform new technical functions, we’ve needed to either build or augment hardware to serve the new need. New software has often necessitated an increase in processing power, also tied to hardware. The connection between hardware and means has been a common rule along the path that’s brought us to where we now happily sit. But that’s all changing.

Coming of Age

It’s not difficult to understand that an infrastructure seasons with age. A system of roadways, for example, is only really useful once it’s gotten large enough that we can consistently rely on it to offer a route to anywhere we might need to go. Before that, we’d be reluctant want to venture any great distance by car. 

"A system of roadways is only useful once it’s large enough that we can rely on it to offer a route to wherever we need to go."

The same ‘coming of age’ is now being seen with digital infrastructure, and the prospect of venturing out has become welcoming to say the least. Many platforms have been developed in the last two decades including the visual operating system, the internet, wifi networks, 3G cellular networks, various app marketplaces, and many more standardized environments, all available to perform a widening array of functions. Our connectivity at this stage of history is now quite vast. A device’s processing power, though always increasing, has reached a threshold whereby its generally enough to accommodate whatever a user needs of it. Indeed, one could argue that our digital infrastructure has reached a plateau of maturity, introducing a new market that makes use of its new, stable availability.

The point at which the smart phone began to accommodate a fully mobile, connected computer experience started a shift. The onset of the touchscreen interface seems to be solidifying the shift to a new paradigm. Today, we keep computers with unmitigated access to information and totally flexible controls in our pockets. Making use of a platform like this seems to be a rewarding new territory for our industry, and it's really just getting started.

The New Order of Technology

We’re no longer seeing a direct link between new functionality and new hardware needs. Today, new functionality is created by using existing hardware in new ways, making use of its connectivity and control to perform unique new tasks, and this boom in functionality is very significant. All of a sudden, we have social networking changing the face of human interaction and marketing, mobile communications skyrocketing and spawning entirely new cultures, and we’re about to witness a new age of media access cracked wide open. After having said it over and over again, digital technology is changing at a rate faster than we’ve ever seen, however this time it’s fueled by a different trend.

The trend that’s sponsoring so much activity in this particular boom is markedly different from anything yet witnessed. This one is based in the convergence of existing technologies, making the rate of advancement mainly dependent on the speed of new software innovation and the raw creativity of the humans feeding it. 

The ‘app’ market that’s seen overt success since initially being deployed by Apple three years ago, continues to proliferate at a rate that few expected, providing new functionality via computer, internet, and mobile device synergy. This sort of pure software growth is only one dimension, though. A growing overlap between the Smart Home and IT industries is providing massive new opportunity in the areas of cloud-based media, enhanced home and building security, and home-work crossovers. These areas are being catalyzed by greater device and network compatibility, which is in turn motivated by a market pressure to see the technologies converge.

A boom in compatibility that we've not seen before is coming to appliances and electronics. This desired compatibility is putting great emphasis on the ever problematic issue of commercial standardization, and as standards are required, the titans of mobile, media and computer industries are battling to establish them as quickly as they can. Paying attention to these machinations is a big aspect of engaging the new paradigm of convergence.

Recognizing the move that our industry is making towards convergence allows one to exploit its benefits most directly. Today, we’re blessed with many new ways of increasing our access to information, entertainment and functionality, while actually lightening the load on our tool belt. It’s time to take advantage.

Rob Sunderland

Related Links

Wikipedia: Digital Convergence
Wikipedia: Technological Convergence
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2006