Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -40

Architectural business models + service vs. product

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Caton, an architect that paid his dues in a traditional architecture studio and then WeWork. Now he’s at Juno, a startup working on a “new type of apartment building for the future of the American city.” What does that mean, exactly? 🤔 Let’s think through it…

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Hi there! I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan. This newsletter is about the issues and topics that the degree engages: cities, technology, and design. While we go, we’re detailing the process of starting a new degree program that will welcome its first students in 40 weeks and counting. Thanks for reading.

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🎁 What Happens when Buildings Become a Product?

Juno is not giving away all the details yet, but there are some hints on the site. Where traditional buildings are designed by an architect who is hired by a client (such as a real estate developer), Juno’s buildings are designed and built by Juno... Or so I am inferring from their website. Instead of architecture being a service provided to the owner of the building, for Juno architecture is a product. I’m imagining that they will design, build, and operate their apartment buildings.

That may seem like a small detail but it does something quite important: it means Juno has a direct vantage into the shaping of apartment buildings as well as the use of those buildings. They own the whole feedback loop. Here’s how that compares to business as usual:

🕵️‍♀️ ARCHITECTURE AS CONSULTING

This is the predominant model today. Architects design. Contractors build. People (“users”) inhabit the buildings. And different contractors, decades down the road, demolish or “unbuild” the structure. If you’re lucky, each of these parties learn from their experiences but the learning happens within the phases and there are not many built-in feedback loops between them. Architects are generally not paid to do what is called “post occupancy” analysis, so it’s often at their own cost if they go back to a completed building and interview its inhabitants about how the building works. This means there’s a structural bias against learning, which is a bad thing!

If the architects learn from users, it’s through exceptional effort to do so. Because of this, lots of intelligence falls into the cracks between each phase of the lifecycle. The negative results are myriad: a design and construction process that involves lots of doubled effort (leading to more cost), buildings that are less responsive to actual user needs (leading to more pain), and a built environment that evolves slowly. This last point is problematic in light of the imperative that we dramatically—and rapidly—lower our carbon footprint, a good percentage of which is attributable, in some way, to buildings.

🎈 ARCHITECTURE AS PRODUCT

This model is rare but becoming more common. Rather than provide architecture as a consulting service, companies such as Juno (again, inferring from their site) think of buildings as “products” that a single company designs, builds, and operates. This means they are the ones who learn from every phase of the lifecycle. If rentals are happening quickly, they see all of the data and can make inferences as to why one type of unit is more popular than the others. Likewise, if the building has problems, they are the ones who answer the stressed phone calls at every phase of this lifecycle. That means they get all the feedback about what’s working and not working. This makes it far more likely that intelligence from one lifecycle phase informs the others.

For those coming at this from a digital perspective, the difference between these two models parallels a grand transition in the software world from “waterfall” to “agile.” It used to be that software was developed through a waterfall methodology where one team writes the spec, which describes in writing everything the software should be able to do. Then the designers create user interfaces. Then engineers code it all up. It’s called “waterfall” because work cascades from one level to the next, like water over a cliff. If you think about the architecture as consulting diagram above you’ll notice that intelligence and decisions also cascades in a linear manner. But what if you get to the end and you realize that your fancy new app is hard to use? Then you start all over, or simply move on and try to remember those painful lessons for next time. Both waterfall software development and traditional architecture practice are “leaky” ways of working. Lots of good insight gets left behind.

Michael and I discussed how the missing feedback loop may be one the most detrimental aspects of how the built environment is currently conceptualized and realized under an “architecture as a consulting” model. If that’s the case, let’s think about how architecture might change in the future. After all, these are the futures that our Urban Technology students will build.

🔭Three Futures for Architecture (and Architects)

The most important thing to be built in the next 100 years is not housing or schools or any type of building whatsoever, but feedback loops that make the process of design, construction, inhabitation, and deconstruction of buildings more humane and sustainable. Here are three ways that might happen (there are many others):

1. Space as a Service: this is Juno or WeWork. A company designs, builds, and operates a building that they lease out to customers. This positions them as the recipient of feedback loops about how the building is utilized and allows them to calibrate their offering over time (including details like cost). In this scenario architects find themselves working alongside data scientists, service designers, engineers, coders, marketers, and lots of others. Design becomes far more inclusive of these non-design disciplines and is highly respondent to market forces. Spaces get better but they don’t necessarily get more innovative.

Urban Technology implications: to be successful in this environment you have to be able to bridge between different disciplines that connect design, construction, and business.

2. Space as Competitive Advantage: think Alphabet/Google. Companies that are both large enough to own their own real estate and concerned about productivity will increasingly employ their own architectural teams in house. That’s because calibrating the space to match the business is more efficient when you own the design feedback loops rather than outsourcing to a consultant. Sure enough, Alphabet is underway with significant construction projects in California (and elsewhere) and have an R+D for the Built Environment team in-house that works with and enhances the efforts of architects they hire as consultants. In this scenario architects are tinkerers. They find themselves working with users (aka their peers inside the company) to understand in infinitesimal detail what’s working and what’s not, and then making thousands of adjustments in realtime. Spaces get more innovative, but the result may be so finely tuned to the needs of one specific company that the results are not generalizable.

Urban Technology implications: to be successful you have to be able to understand design in the context of your users’ larger goals. Spaces are just one of many ‘tools’ you employ to make your users more efficient. You may also need to design wayfinding systems, apps and digital services, HR policies, etc.

3. Self-improving Products: things like smart meters or Nest thermostat. The two pathways above describe ways that architects might move into new roles and by doing so transform the way buildings are created. This scenario imagines instead that architects become far less relevant, replaced instead by a broader array of products or components that are individually optimized. Today smart meters send data about electrical usage back to the power company which they can use to fine-tune the grid. If you have a “smart” television (whatever that means) it likely does something similar. As all of the objects in our homes and workplaces become connected to the internet, they send streams of data back to their creators. Architects are used to orchestrating myriad products such as doors, windows, and gypsum wallboard that do not produce data stream that could serve as feedback loops. If this trajectory continues there’s a possibility that architects are “locked out” of the various data streams that these components create, further marginalizing the profession. Spaces get more tuned to their users but data is also more profuse, raising both coordination and privacy issues.

Urban Technology implications: you don’t need to be involved with traditional architecture at all to change the built environment. Longstanding industries and professions regularly find themselves in competition with unexpected forces.

To wrap this up for now, the Urban Technology program is not about architecture and we won’t train architects, so this thought exercise is more about seeing the broader context and understanding how aspects of “citymaking” are and may be changing in the future.

In this program we’re concerned first and foremost with the verbs of cities: living, working, playing, learning, exploring and so forth. It starts from how cities are inhabited and what people do. From there we can think about the best ways to enable, empower, and support those doings.

You may have a different opinion but from my perspective, in the 21st century there’s simply no question that this requires employing a mix of built environment and technological skills and perspectives. That’s why we describe the degree program we’re working on as transdisciplinary. As with the feedback loops described above, the most important work is to be done in the gaps between.

🖼 Postcard from Detroit

It’s not just people that offer feedback to the humans that design and build the built environment; nature has a voice too. This snapshot looks like a staircase in downtown Detroit but I prefer to read it as an infographic telling us about the decline in foot traffic in and out of an office building.

Links

🧱 Brick as batteries? Well, “supercapacitors” not “batteries” but still quite intriguing.

🚁 Walmart is delivering health products by drone in Arkansas.

🌇 281 hand-drawn isometric tiles for a “citygame” released under Creative Commons license. This seems like a cool resource to play with.

😎 Digital design patterns that show you care about data. Great project by the studio IF in London.

📐Speaking of rethinking architecture, Future Cities Catapult, an initiative of the UK government, is launching a program to do so. Here’s a video. Let’s see if they realize any of the scenarios above, hrmmm?

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This week: A good discussion with McLain, chair of Architecture at Taubman; same with Melissa, teacher of drawing as visual inquiry and intentional mark making; and yet another with Jonathan, Jose, Catherine, and Anthony. My eyes may as well be spreadsheets because after a week of flipping between google sheets tabs all I’m seeing are gridlines. 🏃‍♂️