Ever wonder where we’re headed? What I mean is: on a warm, breezy Sunday afternoon, with barbecue smells and children’s laughter filling the neighborhood, between mowing the yard and watering the plants, do you ever take stock of where we are and try to imagine where we’re all headed? When you’re inching along in rush hour traffic, or clutching that slippery post as your train speeds away from the station, do you ever wonder how we’ll get to where we’re destined to go?

I do. I think about these things all the time. Some say too much although I’m not sure I’d agree. For me, tiny moments of everyday life are perfect respites that invite contemplation. And after all this time, after years of pondering the future of my chosen profession architecture, considering context, reading signposts, and wargaming scenarios, what I’m absolutely certain of is this: while our path to the future is more stepping stone than superhighway, the direction is unmistakeable. And it troubles me.

What I’ve Learned

Architectural practice has evolved slowly over a long period of time, so it’s easy to observe that our business models are indelibly influenced by tradition. Comparitively, other businesses are much younger and less established. They’re hungry, willing to experiment, and have little downside to investing in new opportunities. Ratcheting up the stakes in business today is the fact that technology-enabled companies are lighter and faster than ever before, meaning the competitive race is accelerating at an ever faster pace at the same time the nature of the race is changing. In our complex, globalized world, striving to simply maintain position is a recipe for stagnation. Those businesses that choose to stick to their knitting quickly find themselves surrounded by agile game-changing competitors.

With much of the business world already beta-testing Innovation Version 4.0, I’ve found my profession incorrigibly mired in a previous and outmoded version, with the gulf growing ever larger. I have my own thoughts about where we’re stuck, but you can decide for yourself:

In today’s world innovation pays; in tomorrow’s world wealth will be generated by new ideas. Without a doubt, innovation is the engine of progress, and most often real innovation comes from insurgent viewpoints rather than incumbent ones. Real innovation is as much about new ways of seeing and doing things as about breakthrough ideas. Real innovation flows from shifts in mind-set that enable company visionaries to generate new business models and recognize new opportunities, and company doers to weave ideas through the fabric of its culture. Myself, I define innovation as the ability of individuals, companies and entire professions to continuously create their desired future.

What I See

Accumualated evidence has made me increasingly concerned about, and disturbed by, the health of architectural practice as a whole. I see a crisis brewing and it makes me angry. Collectively, we should be doing much better than we are. We have the talent and infrastructure necessary for increasing success, yet remain complacent incumbents at a time when what’s needed is a fresh approach. 

We’re presently living through a period of radical change, not one of incremental change. Other businesses recognize this and are moving forward at a rapid pace, racing one after another toward a new high ground where the capacity for innovation is viewed as a hallmark of success, and from which new streams of opportunity will undoubtedly emerge. In our profession, what’s currently on the table seems to be a strategy of “more” and not one of “different”. Although we talk about BIM, cloak ourselves in concepts like sustainability or integrated project delivery, and invest in technologies like Revit, such things are at best incremental and don’t fundamentally change the nature of the conversation.

What I Intend to Do About It

Our profession’s biggest challenge lies in siezing a day that’s well past noon, and for this there’s no simple solution. However this blog is intended as a start. It’s the backbone of a social media strategy conceived to help shape our profession’s future, brought to you by a company committed to increasing the success and value of design professionals. AWCWEST operates under a simple insurgent idea: with respect to both design and project delivery, the nature of specifications and position of the specifier together offer a largely untapped resource for innovation. By developing this resource and offering our clients the dividends, we hope to contribute to the growth of their businesses and the future of our profession. Sound strange? Just wait. In the months and years to come we intend to supplement our blog with real time, on-the-fly, media-rich platforms that host content demonstrating exactly what we’re talking about.

For those who either support or are satisfied with the status quo, we wish you well, hope you enjoy the content we put forth, and look forward to you visiting us often. But for those who support meeting our profession’s challenges head-on, diagnosing our current situation, exploring innovation, and putting forth proposals to revitalize our position in the decades to come, we invite you to invest with us in finding new sources of demand, new client needs, and new social trends on which to place bets for the future. We invite you to explore the fringe and develop your insurgent thinking so that new ideas may be brought forth that will help shape our tomorrow. And we hope a little fun can be had collaborating and getting to know one another along the way.

Welcome to our blog and the community that sustains it. Welcome to what’s next.