Garrett Reynolds joins the podcast to talk about to give an update on the company's decade-long fight to keep building codes free and public. We explore the string of lawsuits UpCodes has faced from the International Code Council, ASTM, and other code publishers since 2017, the Supreme Court and circuit court rulings that established no one can own the law, and the Pro Codes Act, the industry-backed legislation now trying to accomplish in Congress what the publishers couldn't win in court.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and practitioners who rely on adopted codes every day and have never thought much about who controls access to them. Garrett lays out what's actually at stake for firms and their tech stacks if the publishers win, and what a small amount of constituent pressure can do against a well-funded lobbying effort.

To learn more about Garrett Reynolds, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/236

To get more great conversations with AEC technology leaders on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Marlene Chen and Blair Payson join the podcast to talk about how a firm known for design, not technology, actually puts new tools to work. We explore the office-wide crit they ran to surface friction points across every role and experience level, the shift that took their visualization team from three people to effectively 150, and the messy reality of adoption: rogue folders on personal desktops, a surprise surge in software licenses, and the slow work of change management inside a 300-person practice.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, design technologists, and anyone responsible for getting a growing practice to adopt new tools without flattening its culture. If you've ever wondered how a studio this size balances experimentation against deadlines, and why the people always matter more than the technology, this one will give you plenty to sit with.

To learn more about Marlene Chen and Blair Payson, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/235

To get more great conversations with AEC technology leaders on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Håvard Vasshaug joins the podcast to talk about what happens to building data after the architect hits save, and why so much of it dies inside the authoring tool. We explore why it makes no sense to force construction, cost, and scheduling data into Revit, how live model changes can flow straight to contractors and owners without a BIM license, and why six-week-old information is the reason projects run over time and over budget. Håvard also gets into architects' instinct to guard their files, the industry's decades-long habit of shedding risk instead of getting paid to carry it, and why the firms that self-disrupt end up looking light years ahead.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, BIM managers, and design technologists who are tired of being the bottleneck stuffing metadata into models on someone else's behalf, and who suspect that structured, liberated data is the real groundwork for everything AI is about to ask of the profession.

To learn more about Håvard Vasshaug, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/234

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Mariusz Hermansdorfer joins the podcast to talk about turning an internal tool into a product for the whole profession. We explore how he spun Jifto out of Henning Larsen as the firm's first ever tech spin-off, why letting go of corporate control was the thing that made it possible, and how a Rhino plugin can put wind, stormwater, and microclimate analysis in the hands of architects who never had a specialist team to call.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and computational designers who are sitting on tools they've built in-house and wondering whether they could, or should, take them to market. If you've ever felt the gap between how designers think and how engineers deliver, or wondered what it really takes to spin a product out of a practice, this one's for you.

To learn more about Mariusz Hermansdorfer, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/233

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Tatjana Dzambazova joins the podcast to talk about why the AEC industry deserves a brand new tool, one built for AI from the ground up instead of bolted onto software designed 25 years ago. We explore the end of what she calls the terror of technological expertise, the difference between hoarding artifacts and capturing the process behind a building, and why she believes AI could bring joy back to architecture rather than grinding it down to cost and speed.

This episode is especially relevant for architects and firm leaders who feel the pull between efficiency and meaning, and who are wrestling with what their value will be in a world where anyone can generate a rendering. Tanja makes the case that if architects don't define what they'll be paid for in the future, owners will define it for them, and she offers a far more hopeful read of this moment than most.

To learn more about Tatjana Dzambazova, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/232

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In this special partner episode, Jack Sadler joins the podcast to talk about the phase of a project where architects quietly lose control: construction administration. We explore why CA became a cost center instead of a profit center, what happens when architects run their work out of someone else's software, and how AI can automate the routing, logging, and paperwork without ever touching the professional judgment that actually matters. Jack makes the case that CA is where design intent gets realized or negotiated away, and that owning the flow of information is how you make sure it's the former.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, project architects, and anyone who's been handed the CA phase and felt it turn into email triage, spreadsheet chasing, and cover-your-ass paperwork. If you've ever suspected there's a better way to run construction administration, one that makes your firm smarter, more defensible, and maybe even profitable, this conversation will give you a concrete place to start: take back control of what you're already accountable for.

To learn more about Jack Sadler, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/231

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Keith Gerchak joins the podcast to talk about the double life he's been living for thirty years: designing spaces for storytelling as the Design Principal at TheatreDNA, and inhabiting those spaces as an actor and filmmaker. We explore what makes performing arts buildings unlike any other building type, the surprising parallels between directing a feature film and managing an architecture project, and how technology — from Revit to AI — can either serve a story or quietly strip it of meaning.

This episode is especially relevant for architects and design technologists who feel the tension between the tools they use every day and the purpose those tools are meant to serve. Keith makes the case quietly and specifically — drawing from three decades of bespoke theater design and a twelve-year independent film that made it into 500 theaters nationwide — that knowing why a building exists, and for whom, is the one thing no technology gets to replace.

To learn more about Keith Gerchak, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/230

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In this special Campfire Series episode, Jeff Mottle joins the podcast to tell us the full story of CGarchitect — from a side project launched in 2001 to a 21-year platform, a sale to Chaos Group, and everything in between: the 3D Awards, CGschool, the evolution of archviz from expert-only technical gatekeeping to storytelling, and what COVID revealed when it stripped away all the travel and in-person events that had been keeping him going. We also get into his four years at NVIDIA, the AI wave he'd been predicting for nearly a decade before it hit, and why the AEC industry's instinct to wait for a clear winner may be the costliest mistake it makes.

This episode is especially relevant for visualization professionals, design technologists, and firm leaders watching AI reshape the tools they've built careers around. Jeff makes a direct case that the democratization of archviz didn't start with AI — the last 5% just got sped up — and he's specific about why billing by the hour is the industry's biggest liability going forward and what a shift to outcome-based pricing actually looks like.

To learn more about Jeff Mottle, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/229

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Steve Burrows CBE joins the podcast to talk about why the construction industry keeps rewarding dysfunction instead of fixing it. We explore the gap between selling time and creating value, why startups keep failing to change construction by trying to change all of it at once, and what the collapse of Katerra actually taught the people who were in the room when it happened.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and engineers who feel trapped in the cycle of meetings, emails, and change orders, and who suspect the system they're operating in was never designed to produce great work. Steve makes a blunt, practical case for starting with what you can control, and his perspective is shaped by decades of working on some of the most complex structures in the world before walking away from the corporate path to figure out what comes next.

To learn more about Steve Burrows CBE, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/228

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Rachel Riopel joins the podcast to talk about why enterprise transformation keeps failing in AEC and what it actually takes to make it stick. We explore the gap between running pilots and operationalizing technology across an organization, why the industry's obsession with productivity as the primary metric is a race to the bottom, and how cybersecurity is quietly becoming one of the biggest friction points in AEC collaboration.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, digital practice directors, and technology strategists who are tired of watching transformation initiatives stall out after the initial push. If you're wrestling with how to move technology from a siloed initiative to something embedded in your firm's business strategy, or if you're trying to figure out what to actually measure beyond speed, Rachel's framework for organizational readiness will give you a sharper lens for the work ahead.

To learn more about Rachel Riopel, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/227

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Charles Portelli joins the podcast to talk about what you learn when you leave architecture to build software, and what you bring back when you return. We explore the gap between how buildings are designed and how they're actually fabricated, why the most valuable work inside a large firm is often the least glamorous, and what it would take to build an AI-powered project assistant that actually knows everything about a job.

This episode is especially relevant for design technology leaders, firm principals, and anyone working on the internal tooling side of architecture. If you've felt the tension between chasing the next new capability and keeping everyone from drowning in an ever-growing tool stack, Charlie names that problem clearly and talks about what a more patient, intentional path forward looks like.

To learn more about Charles Portelli, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/226

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Antonio González Viegas joins the podcast to talk about the open source infrastructure layer he's building for BIM software and why the barriers that have protected legacy vendors for decades are collapsing faster than most people realize. We explore why every BIM company has been forced to reinvent the same foundational technology from scratch, how That Open Company is giving those pieces away under an MIT license, and what happens when AI compresses years of development into weeks. Antonio coined the phrase "nuclear bomb moment" to describe where BIM software development stands right now, and the conversation pushes hard on whether that framing holds up.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, BIM managers, and design technologists watching the AEC software market shift beneath them. If you're weighing vendor lock-in against emerging alternatives, or wondering whether small teams with AI can actually compete with established platforms, this conversation will sharpen your thinking.

To learn more about Antonio González Viegas, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/225

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Martyn Day joins the podcast to talk about the forces quietly dismantling how architecture and engineering work gets done, and how it gets charged for. We explore how AI-driven solvers are compressing months of project coordination into hours, why BIM 1.0 is becoming a drawing conduit as open SDKs erode software moats, and what layered cloud and AI token costs mean for firms reconsidering where their project data lives.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and technology directors who are watching these tools arrive without a clear view of what they mean for staffing, billing, and competitive position. Martyn moves past tool-by-tool analysis to the structural question underneath: if the business model depends on billable hours, what happens when the hours disappear?

To learn more about Martyn Day, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/224

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Pablo Zamorano Mosniam joins the podcast to talk about what it looks like to build a technology practice around design values rather than the other way around. We explore the “door scale,” the intimate layer of texture and touchable detail that most firms skip and Heatherwick obsesses over, why tools leave recognizable fingerprints on the buildings they produce, and how the studio's most-used internal AI tool turned out to be the one that required the least training to adopt.

This episode is especially relevant for computational designers, design technologists, and firm leaders watching the industry accelerate toward faster, cheaper, and blander — and wondering whether the right response is better tools, clearer values, or both. Pablo doesn't soften his view: the people waiting on the sidelines won't find a comfortable place to land.

To learn more about Pablo Zamorano Mosniam, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/223

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Mirco Bianchini joins the podcast to talk about where AI automation is actually headed in AEC and why the industry is likely focused on the wrong problems. We explore the gap between Grasshopper prototyping and real product deployment, why LLMs are about to democratize computation far beyond the specialist niche, and how MCPs could finally connect a construction industry that has always been fragmented by tool silos.

This episode is especially relevant for BIM managers, computational designers, and design technologists who are experimenting with AI tools but unsure how to move from individual automation to something the whole firm can use. Mirco argues the real opportunity isn't in generating models but actually in the unglamorous operational work: capturing knowledge across projects, reducing email overhead, and building the organizational second brain that firms have always needed.

To learn more about Mirco Bianchini, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/222

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Joachim Viktil joins the podcast to talk about the growing gap between how architects are trained to think and how architectural firms are structured to operate. We explore the hidden cost of staying busy, the limits of billable-hour business models, and why architects, despite being trained as systems thinkers, are often confined to producing deliverables instead of improving the systems behind the work.

This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and tech-curious architects who feel the tension between utilization and leverage, and are questioning whether the current structure of practice is setting their best people up to thrive.

To learn more about Joachim Viktil, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/221

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Joshua Schultz joins the podcast to talk about lightweight structures, including cable nets and glass design, as well as insights from his upcoming book, “Structural Design of Lightweight Structures,” co-authored with Christian Stutzki, highlighting the future of architectural design.

To learn more about Joshua Schultz, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/220

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Ready to gain your leadership edge? Join TRXL+ today and never miss an insight that could transform your practice.

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George Guida joins the podcast to talk about how AI is reshaping architectural practice. As founder of xFigura, George shares insights on building tools that keep architects in control while leveraging AI for ideation and collaboration. We explore the challenges of AI adoption, the future of design interfaces, and how the profession can thoughtfully integrate these technologies without losing the essential judgment and creativity that defines architecture.

To learn more about George Guida, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/219

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Zach Kron joins the podcast to talk about what it really means to apply architectural thinking to products for AEC from inside a technology company. We explore designing systems, learning by shipping imperfect work, the real tradeoffs that come with pursuing leverage beyond traditional practice, and more.

This is an honest conversation for architects considering a move into tech, or looking to evolve their careers without leaving the discipline behind. It’s about agency, constraints, and redefining what impact and success can look like in architecture today.

To learn more about Zach Kron, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/218

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In this special Campfire Series episode, Neil Katz joins the podcast to tell us about the evolution of architectural technology from first principles. Long before CAD, BIM, parametrics, or AI became industry buzzwords, Neil was there. From technics and morphology, to early programming in BASIC and geometry-driven thinking, to custom software at SOM, to landmark projects that pushed behavior-based design into real buildings, his career offers a rare, continuous view of how design computation entered architectural practice.

If you’re interested in where computational design really came from and what still matters as the industry looks ahead, this episode provides essential context.

To learn more about Neil Katz, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/217

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Randy Deutsch joins the podcast to talk about what real adaptation looks like inside architectural practice. Not trend-chasing. Not tool collecting. But a fundamental shift in how architects think, learn, and operate in an AI-accelerated world.

Randy draws on decades of experience as an educator, practitioner, and author to explore why resilience, convergence, and continuous learning are now core competencies, not optional extras. The conversation spans design technology, professional identity, authorship, and the uncomfortable truth that the firms who survive the next decade will be the ones who change before they’re forced to.

This is a clear-eyed look at where architecture is headed and what it takes to stay relevant when the ground keeps moving.

To learn more about Randy Deutsch, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/216

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Wes Reynolds and Hugh Soward join the podcast to talk about how OPN Architects is intentionally shaping its future through digital practice, experimentation, and culture-building. They discuss the evolution of OPN’s digital practice group, how they evaluate and adopt emerging technology, and why their long-running annual retreat has become essential infrastructure for aligning design, tech, and people across the firm.

For anyone navigating innovation, change management, or digital strategy inside an AEC organization, OPN’s approach offers a clear example of what proactive firm development really looks like.

To learn more about Wes Reynolds and Hugh Soward, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/215

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In this special partner episode, Todd Henderson and Christopher Parsons join the podcast to talk about what it really takes to build a learning culture inside an architecture firm—one that actually sticks, scales, and improves project delivery over time in this final installment of the KM 3.0 series.

Drawing from Todd’s background in Lean, Scrum, and healthcare design—as well as Chris’s leadership in knowledge management, intranets, and now AI-enabled search—the conversation goes straight to the operational reality: how people learn, how they share what they know, how they improve, and why many firms fall short. The episode explores the evolving role of AI-augmented KM, the importance of making institutional knowledge searchable, the value of intranets that don’t die on the vine, and how learning management systems give firms a real advantage in consistency and quality.

Todd also breaks down practical strategies for coaching teams, supporting project managers, and turning continuous improvement into a repeatable habit rather than a once-a-year aspiration.

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About the KM 3.0 Series

This episode concludes a seven-part, in-depth series created in partnership with Knowledge Architecture, designed to give the AEC industry a comprehensive, modern framework for knowledge management. Across these seven conversations, leaders from operations, digital practice, learning & development, and technology share what’s actually working inside their firms—and how they’re using KM, AI, intranets, and training systems to move from isolated expertise to firm-wide capability.

The result is a robust, openly accessible resource for anyone in AEC looking to build or modernize a KM program. Whether you’re starting from scratch or leveling up an existing initiative, the KM 3.0 series delivers a rare combination of strategic clarity, practical examples, and hard-won lessons from people doing the work every day.

If you’re responsible for digital practice, firm operations, KM, or elevating your team’s skills, this finale ties the whole series together and points toward what’s possible. It’s an in depth look at how firms can work smarter today than they did yesterday using the right systems, culture, and leadership making that future achievable.

To learn more about Todd Henderson and Christopher Parsons, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/214

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Jonathan Nelson, Nirva Fereshetian, Heath May, and Shane Burger join the podcast to talk about one of the biggest questions facing our industry: How do design technologists grow into firmwide leaders?

What was originally planned as a one-way presentation quickly became a true two-way conversation. Instead of a traditional panel format, we created a space where the audience guided the discussion with thoughtful and challenging questions. The energy in the room elevated the entire session and resulted in one of the most engaging and candid moments of the conference.

Joining me on stage are four leaders who all began in design technology roles and now hold significant positions inside their firms:

Jonathan Nelson, Global Head of Digital, Populous
Heath May, Partner and CEO Elect, HKS
Nirva Fereshetian, Principal and CIO, CBT Architects
Shane Burger, Chief Design Technology Officer, SOM

Together, we explore real pathways into leadership, pivotal career decisions, and how to build credibility inside complex organizations. We discuss what technology adoption conversations look like, how to develop the next generation of talent, how to approach the build versus buy dilemma, and what it takes to secure buy-in for major technology investments. We also talk openly about the cultural friction that continues to challenge firmwide transformation.

By capturing and sharing this session on TRXL, we help extend the value and reach of AECtech far beyond the room. These ideas and insights can now be part of a global conversation among AEC professionals and leaders.

If you want to understand how design technologists make the jump into senior leadership, what skills matter most, and how the future of practice is being shaped right now, this episode delivers clarity, candor, and inspiration from leaders who have lived it.

To learn more about Jonathan Nelson, Nirva Fereshetian, Heath May, and Shane Burger, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/213

To get more great conversations with AEC technology leaders on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Ashley Hastings joins the podcast to talk about what it really means to make curiosity a key performance indicator (KPI).

📐 A note from Evan: The phrase “curiosity as a KPI” contains its own contradiction, and hopefully the irony landed with you, dear listener. Obviously, KPIs are about measurement, control, and predictability—the very things that can kill curiosity when applied too rigidly. True curiosity thrives in open-ended exploration, not quarterly targets. The challenge isn't to meter curiosity like a production metric, but to design systems that protect space for it, reward it when it leads somewhere useful, and to not punish the curious if/when it doesn't. The goal is to make curiosity visible and valued. Not to turn wonder into a dashboard.

We discuss how curiosity can and should be operationalized as a measurable part of firm culture—not so much as something tracked, but rewarded and tied to real outcomes instead of being left to chance. Ashley shares her perspective on aligning incentives for innovation, treating training like a product, and creating feedback loops that actually capture and scale knowledge across teams.

We also talk about the post-GPT reality of context over keywords, and how design technology leadership is increasingly about change management and culture design.

If you’re a digital practice leader, BIM manager, or anyone trying to build a more innovative, adaptive practice, this conversation offers a clear path toward turning curiosity into a strategic advantage.

To learn more about Ashley Hastings, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/212

To get more great conversations with AEC technology leaders on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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In this special partner episode, Evan Troxel is joined by James Martin and Jess Purcell of Shepley Bulfinch, along with Christopher Parsons of Knowledge Architecture, to explore how AI experimentation in architecture is revealing tangible value inside real firms.

The conversation dives deep into how disciplined experimentation—running small, intentional AI pilots with measurable goals—helps firms uncover where AI adds value and where it doesn’t. From documenting workflows and prompt libraries to developing lightweight governance and “trust-but-verify” approaches, the guests share how architecture practices can build safe environments for innovation without sacrificing rigor or control.

James and Jess share what’s happening inside Finch, Shepley Bulfinch’s internal knowledge platform, and how a culture of thoughtful documentation and shared learning has accelerated their adoption of new technologies. Chris ties these insights to KM 3.0, emphasizing knowledge in the flow of work and demonstrating how Synthesis AI Search helps architects find and reuse firm knowledge more effectively.

Together, they highlight what’s working, what’s still experimental, and how the next generation of digital practice leaders can use process, governance, and culture to make AI truly useful in AEC.

Key Topics:

How to design and run small AI experiments that deliver measurable value
Translating workflows and prompts into reusable firm knowledge
Lightweight governance for AI: policies, pilots, and playbooks
Building a trust-but-verify framework for quality assurance
Applying KM 3.0 to real practice: knowledge in the flow of work
How Shepley Bulfinch’s Finch intranet supports experimentation and sharing
The role of Synthesis AI Search in improving findability and reuse
Scaling successful AI pilots across the firm

To learn more about James Martin and Jess Purcell, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/211

To get more great conversations with AEC technology leaders on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Matt Goldsberry joins the podcast to talk about how data is reshaping architecture practice. From computational design roots to leading digital strategy, Matt shares how Power BI and analytics can uncover insights that drive better business and design outcomes. The conversation covers building dashboards that matter, translating BIM data into meaningful decisions, and helping architects evolve from tool users to data-informed leaders. It’s a grounded look at how to start small, build momentum, and create measurable impact through data in AEC.

To learn more about Matt Goldsberry, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/210

To get more great conversations with AEC technology leaders on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Cesar Escalante joins the podcast to talk about his journey from practicing architect and early CAD adopter to firm technologist and now national AIA leader shaped the way he’s guiding the AIA Technology in Architectural Practice (TAP) Knowledge Community today. The conversation centers on how TAP is creating new connections across the AIA, especially with the Committee on the Environment (COTE), to align technology, sustainability, and more. Evan and Cesar discuss the outcomes from TAP’s recent sold-out symposium, what these collaborations mean for the profession, and where the group is headed next year as they focus on turning those ideas into practical tools and frameworks that firms (especially small and medium-sized) can actually use.

To learn more about Cesar Escalante, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/209

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Kate Grimes and Christopher Parsons join the podcast to talk about how firms can align AI with their values, evolve knowledge platforms responsibly, and balance technology with culture. We cover the realities of building value-based tech stacks, structuring data for reliability, measuring ROI, and protecting collaboration as AI adoption accelerates.

To learn more about Kate Grimes and Christopher Parsons, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/208

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Craig Barbieri joins the podcast to talk about his experience of hard-won lessons from the trenches. We get practical about what actually moves the needle in firms: training culture vs. one-off sessions, reality capture as “cheap insurance,” ACC-era coordination, and taming tool sprawl with strategy. We also dig into framing ROI so leaders and teams align, where AI is quietly helping today (think specs and submittals), and how to bring VDC thinking upstream.

To learn more about Craig Barbieri, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/207

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Rachelle Ray joins the podcast to talk about how AEC marketing and BD teams are really using AI today: what’s working, what’s not, and where things are headed. While proposals are a recurring thread, the broader focus is on how AI can clear space for strategy and creativity by reducing manual, repetitive work.

Rachelle brings insights from OpenAsset’s customer feedback from both survey data and real conversations to highlight common challenges, misconceptions, and the growing demand for AI tools that actually understand AEC workflows.

To learn more about Rachelle Ray, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/206

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Robert Otani and Alexandra Pollock join the podcast to talk about how they’re rethinking Thornton Tomasetti’s engineering practice by making technology the foundation rather than an add-on. They share practical lessons on bringing computation into practice at scale, adopting product thinking inside a services business, measuring the ROI of innovation, and eliminating redundancy so teams can focus on the work that actually moves projects forward.

Rob traces CORE Studio’s origins and early bets on parametric tools like Grasshopper, then walks through some other tools they’ve developed that sparked healthy debates about accuracy, transparency, and trust and informed how newer AI tools are designed. Alex highlights how open, community-driven learning at their AECtech conferences and hackathons accelerates capability building and open-source collaboration. The trio also dig into how AI can compress the path to professional proficiency and why leaders must proactively redesign their business model to stay ahead as “conventional consulting” shrinks.

To learn more about Robert Otani and Alexandra Pollock, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/205

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Dave Gilmore joins the podcast to talk about the urgent need for firms to proactively disrupt themselves before they’re disrupted by external forces, and why transformation is first and foremost a leadership challenge, not a technology one. Dave shares insights on the limits of the production mindset, the dangers of outsourcing strategic thinking, and the critical role that psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and entrepreneurial curiosity play in shaping sustainable, future-ready practices. This is a no-holds-barred candid conversation that calls firm leaders to think differently, act decisively, and embrace a culture of continuous change.

To learn more about Dave Gilmore, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/204

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Peter Markos joins the podcast to talk about rethinking the traditional business model of architecture by developing products instead of relying solely on client-based services. The conversation covers Peter’s journey from winning Airbnb’s OMG! Fund to creating a prefabricated, scalable cabin business, the role of investors and partnerships, the realities of risk and operations, and how timeless design, branding, and physical models play a critical role in building trust and long-term value. This episode offers a candid look at how architects can apply entrepreneurial thinking, prefabrication strategies, and product design principles to create new opportunities for practice, scale, and impact in the AEC industry.

To learn more about Peter Markos, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/203

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Katie Robinson and Christopher Parsons join the podcast to talk about how LS3P’s knowledge management program evolved from a marketing necessity into a strategic advantage. We discuss the origins of their Data Manager program, how they’ve integrated firm-wide data into their intranet platform “Frank,” and why they’ve embraced AI-powered search to democratize access to knowledge. A highlight of the conversation is LS3P’s “Expert Hours” initiative—casual, recorded conversations with subject matter experts that capture invaluable, often untapped knowledge. Katie explains how these recordings are now being repurposed for marketing, onboarding, and learning, creating a flywheel of knowledge-sharing across the firm.

To learn more about Katie Robinson and Christopher Parsons, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/202

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Phil Putnam joins the podcast to talk about what it really takes to lead in today’s workplace. We explore his “Give to Get” leadership framework, the staggering cost of employee turnover, and why loyalty no longer means what it used to. From generational shifts in motivation to the myth of paycheck-based performance, Phil shares practical strategies for building teams that thrive—starting with understanding what people actually want from their work. Whether you’re in firm leadership or just stepping into management, this conversation will change how you think about leadership, retention, and the future of work in AEC.

To learn more about Phil Putnam, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/201

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Nathan Miller joins the podcast to talk about why most digital transformations in AEC fail, and what to do about it. In this milestone 200th episode, we discuss the high cost of misalignment between strategy, culture, and operations, the dangers of tool chasing without purpose, and the critical role of authenticity in building sustainable, tech-enabled practices. Nate also shares his “smarts, health, and fitness” framework for assessing digital readiness, and we explore how firms can create lasting change by starting with who they really are. And of course we talk a lot about AI too.

To learn more about Nathan Miller, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/200

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Amy Bunszel joins the podcast to talk about the future of Autodesk’s architectural tools. From AI-driven productivity features to contextual design with Forma, Amy shares how Autodesk is reimagining workflows, connecting data across the cloud, and helping architects spend less time “doing the dishes” and more time designing.

To learn more about Amy Bunszel, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/199

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Corey Squire and Christopher Parsons join the podcast to talk about how knowledge platforms, culture shifts, and intentional frameworks can turn individual expertise into firm-wide intelligence. We explore the role of intranets, AI, onboarding, and the AIA’s Framework for Design Excellence—all aimed at embedding sustainability into everyday practice.

To learn more about Corey Squire and Christopher Parsons, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/198

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Phil Read and Harlan Brumm join the podcast to talk about the often-overlooked transition from technical expert to team leader, and how the AEC Acoustics Leadership Retreat was designed to support this journey. We explore the power of shared experience, vulnerability, and creating space for meaningful personal and professional growth in an industry that rarely provides resources for this critical career shift.

To learn more about Phil Read and Harlan Brumm, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/197

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Joseph Lucido joins the podcast to talk about the evolving role of community colleges in architectural education, emphasizing the need for equitable pathways, integration of technology, and preparing students for diverse career opportunities in architecture while addressing industry challenges and cultural shifts.

To learn more about Joseph Lucido, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/196

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Jesper Wallgren joins the podcast to talk about his journey from running a design studio in Sweden to building a focused software platform for multifamily residential planning called Finch. We explore the lessons learned from trying to do too much, the power of narrowing scope, how Finch integrates with tools like Rhino and Revit, and why letting architects break the rules is a feature—not a bug.

To learn more about Jesper Wallgren, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/195

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Ellen Bensky and Christopher Parsons join the podcast to talk about how Turner Fleischer built a digital twin of their practice. We get into what it means to intentionally work on the firm—not just in it—and how Turner Fleischer has operationalized innovation inside a service-based business.

Ellen shares how the firm protects time for internal research, why curiosity and empowerment are foundational to lasting change, and how knowledge management evolved into a strategic priority as the firm scaled from 60 to 250 people.

We dive into the tools, teams, and processes behind their KM system, how learning and teaching became part of the firm’s DNA, and how AI is being used not to replace people but to simplify and amplify expert knowledge.

Along the way, we unpack some of their most creative internal programs and reflect on the powerful role knowledge management plays not just inside the firm, but across the entire AEC community.

To learn more about Ellen Bensky and Christopher Parsons, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/194

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Darren Brooker joins the podcast to talk about how storytelling and visual communication, when used together, can transform the way ideas are received and acted upon. We discuss how architectural concepts are often misunderstood not because they’re bad ideas, but because they’re not communicated in a way that sticks. Darren explains why the key to influence lies in empathy, emotional engagement, and a deep understanding of how humans process information. Whether it’s helping decision-makers “see” the future, winning buy-in for a concept, or navigating the messy early stages of design, he shares lessons drawn from architecture, advertising, Pixar, and more.

To learn more about Darren Brooker, see the full show notes with links at https://trxl.co/193

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Patrick Chopson and Eric Cesal join the podcast to talk about what an architecture practice could look like if it were designed around AI from day one. We discuss the limits of traditional workflows, how education is falling behind the pace of innovation, and why small, agile teams may be better positioned to lead the industry forward. This conversation goes beyond theory into the real-world application of AI in architectural practice, and what it will take for the profession to adapt.

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Connect with the Guests Patrick Chopson + LinkedIn + Cove Website + Cove on LinkedIn * Eric Cesal* + LinkedIn + Website + Eric’s Substack – Life As a Disaster + What Would It Mean to Be An “AI First” Architecture Firm?

Books and Philosophies Eric Cesal’s Down Detour Road + Amazon Link + A poignant narrative exploring architecture’s response to crisis and uncertainty, relevant in today’s AI transformation era. * Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism + Amazon Link + A critical look at data, power, and the future, resonating with AI’s increasing influence in AEC. * Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital + Amazon Link + Examines the digital transition era, offering foundational thinking for AI-first mindsets. * Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language* + Amazon Link + A timeless design thinking toolset useful when encoding architectural intent into AI tools.

AI Tools and Emerging Technologies Claude by Anthropic + Anthropic Official Website + One of the large language models Patrick mentioned using to maintain traceability in design decisions. * OpenAI (ChatGPT, GPT-4o) + OpenAI + Foundation of many architecture-related AI explorations discussed in the episode. * Cove + Cove + AI-powered platform and architecture practice focused on carbon reduction and developer-friendly project delivery. * GitHub Copilot for AI-Powered Coding* + GitHub Copilot + Mentioned as transforming coding productivity and workflows, with analogies to architectural production.

Further Reading & Listening AIA AI Survey + Architects are excited about the potential of AI, but concerns abound + Referenced in the episode as a touchpoint on firm adoption of AI tools and the perception gap. * Archispeak Podcast* + Archispeak 365 - “Why Architects MUST Reimagine the Profession”, with William Dodge + Podcast episode about the integration of AI in architecture, its impact on creativity, the evolving role of architects, and the shift towards innovative practices and micro studios, highlighting the future of the profession.

About Patrick Chopson:Patrick Chopson, AIA, is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Cove Architecture, an AI-powered full-service architecture practice revolutionizing how buildings are imagined, designed, and delivered. By integrating artificial intelligence and simulation into the design process, Patrick leads a bold shift away from conventional design services toward scalable, outcomes-based design excellence.

A licensed architect with over 20 years of experience, Patrick holds a Master’s in High Performance Buildings from Georgia Tech and has deep roots in sustainability, building science, and product innovation. He is the co-author of "Build Like It's the End of the World: A Practical Guide to Decarbonize Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (Wiley, 2025)" — a manifesto for retooling the AEC industry for climate resilience.

Through Cove, Patrick is helping redefine architectural value delivery by fusing data-driven design with AI-powered automation—turning design intent into measurable impact at scale. His work has been featured in Architect Magazine, TechCrunch, Site Selection, ArchDaily, and more. He collaborates closely with real estate developers, policymakers, and technologists to tackle the built environment’s toughest challenges—from embodied carbon to permitting bottlenecks.

Passionate about the intersection of architecture, AI, and planetary limits, Patrick is building not just buildings—but the tools and systems to redesign the future.

About Eric Cesal:Eric J. Cesal is a designer, educator, writer, and noted post-disaster expert, having led on-the-ground reconstruction programs after the Haiti earthquake, the Great East Japan Tsunami, and Superstorm Sandy. Cesal’s formal training is as an architect, with international development, economics and design futurism among his areas of expertise.

Cesal has been called “Architecture’s First Responder” by The Daily Beast for his work leading Architecture for Humanity’s post-disaster programs from 2010 to 2014. He has been interviewed widely on the subjects of disaster and resilience by publications such as The New Yorker, Architectural Record, Design Intelligence Quarterly, Architect Magazine, Foreign Policy Magazine and Monocle. He has served as a juror for various design awards and frequently lectures globally on disaster reconstruction, climate adaptation, and the future of design.

He has taught and guest-taught on issues of disaster reconstruction, resilience, and sustainable design at several of the world’s leading design schools, including the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Universite Grenoble Aples, and Washington University in St. Louis, and UC Berkeley where he served as the Director of the Sustainable Environmental Design program. Currently, he teaches in the Harvard Global Development Practice program on community-based responses to disaster.

Cesal is also widely known for his first book, “Down Detour Road, An Architect in Search of Practice” (MIT Press, 2010) which sought to connect architecture’s chronic economic misfortunes with its failure to prioritize urgent social issues.

Cesal also served as the longtime Special Projects Director for the Curry Stone Foundation, a U.S. non-profit which seeks to support and empower forward-thinking social impact design. There, he hosted Social Design Insights, a pioneering weekly podcast with the leading voices of the public interest design movement.

Cesal is currently working on several new writing projects at the intersection of design, climate change and artificial intelligence, and serves as a founding member of the Built Environment Futures Council.

Cesal holds a B.A. in Architectural Studies from Brown University, as well as advanced degrees in Architecture, Construction Management, and an M.B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. There, he was both a Howard and Joyce Wood Fellow as well as the recipient of the Jerome Sincoff Scholarship.

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Episode Transcript: 192: ‘Building an AI-First Practice’, with Patrick Chopson and Eric Cesal

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Patrick Chopson and Eric Cesal. Patrick is the co-founder of Cove, AKA Cove Tool, and one of the drivers behind their newly formed AI powered architecture practice.

Eric is an architect, post-disaster expert, former executive director at Architecture for Humanity and special program instructor at Harvard. He's also a sharp observer of the evolving relationship between technology and architectural practice. His Substack called "Life as a Disaster" is worth subscribing to, and I've included a link to it in the show notes for this episode.

This episode explores what it means to build an AI first architecture firm, not by layering AI on top of outdated processes, but by starting from scratch.

Eric introduces the AI first mindset, borrowing a page from the journalism industry's shift to digital first thinking and challenges us to stop asking how AI can fit into traditional workflows. Instead, what happens when we reimagine the entire system from first principles? Patrick meanwhile has already made the leap. He shares how Cove is now delivering design services with a hybrid team of architects and software engineers building bespoke AI tools, sometimes just for a single project. What they've created goes beyond their sustainability consulting service.

It's a new kind of architecture firm, one that is operationally different, legally responsible, of course, And focused on giving experienced architects more time to design while maintaining higher coordination and quality standards. We also dig into the critical mismatch between architectural education and real world demands in an AI driven practice why large multi-office firms may be structurally at a disadvantage during this technological shift. How AI might elevate senior architects while challenging the traditional learning curve of junior staff and why building trust in the output, not just the speed of these tools is essential to firm adoption.

A key theme from this conversation, which connects to many of the other episodes, is the power of rethinking practice models from the ground up. An AI first approach forces us to confront everything we've inherited from phase structures to compensation models, and ask if we started today with today's tools and knowledge, how would we design a practice that serves both clients and architects better?

There's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes as usual, so be sure to check those out. You can find them directly in your podcast app if you're a paid supporter of TRXL+. And if you're a free member, you can find them at the website, which is TRXL.co. Please consider becoming a paid supporter if you aren't one already. If you are, thank you so much.

It makes a tangible difference for the sustainability of this podcast. So now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Patrick Chopson and Eric Cesal.

Welcome back to the podcast. This episode is gonna feature two brand new guests. And Eric, we just actually got to meet in person at a, at a recent event in San Francisco, which was fantastic. I. And I think I told you when I met you originally just on the phone, that I had been gifted one of your books in the past, which was Down Detour Road, which is a, a, I mean, searching for meaning I think is kind of one of the things that I, I talked about with you, uh, regarding, I like this.

Maybe, maybe architects are always kind of dealing with an existential crisis on some level, right? I mean, and we will be talking about that today actually. But, that was kind of my intro to you a few years ago that a friend gifted me that book. So, Eric, welcome to the show, and Patrick, welcome to the show.

Eric, if you want to just kind of kick us off and kind of give us an idea of, of where you've been before we get into the actual topic today.

Eric J Cesal: first of all, my, my main focus is not, and has never been on technology per se. Um, my background is in the humanitarian sector. I train as an architect, and as a construction manager, uh, I have degrees in both as well as an MBA. Um, so after five years of commercial practice, I was back in school and started volunteering on the Katrina reconstruction. Um, and that kicked off a career in post-disaster recovery that. went global, um, leading the Global Disaster Studio for Architecture of Humanity. And in 2015, I pivoted to more of a teaching and advocacy role, which included having my own podcast for a while, social Design Insights and, um, teaching at first at WashU, then at Berkeley, and now currently at Harvard.

And I think the roots of this discussion started a couple of years ago when I started writing and lecturing on AI through the lens of You know, not AI doism, but you know, this is a large impact events and you know, is architecture as a profession going to be resilient towards it? Um, and are we having the right preparations and reactions for what's coming?

Evan Troxel: I want to talk about a, a recent, fairly recent article that you wrote before we jump into that. Patrick, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you. I know we've talked before just on a, on a regular call and, and talked about kind of what you guys were up to with Cove, and since then made another a pivot speaking of Pivots that Eric just mentioned, which we'll talk about today.

But Patrick, welcome to the podcast and maybe you can kind of give us a little bit of background on your circuitous route through this industry.

Patrick Chopson: super happy to be here. Um, one of the things that is interesting is we've raised three, six and a half million dollars to date in venture funding. Tr against trying to find ways to bring carbon lower.

That's kind of like the

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: Um, how we do that. We've tried many different things.

We've tried, uh, working with manufacturers, we've tried working with architects to varying degrees of success with our analysis tool that we've had for many years. Um, but then over time we found out that most architects want to answer. Some of them will learn, uh, but many want to just have someone tell them what their carbon is in their billion or the energy use or daylight or

so on and so forth.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Patrick Chopson: started a consulting practice, which then, recently, uh, we've actually also expanded that to include architectural services as well. So we're one of the first ai, uh, powered architecture firms, and we've had a lot of success thus far with a lot of developers. So excited to keep that rolling.

Evan Troxel: Nice. All right. Well, Eric, let's, let's jump into kind of where the idea for this conversation started, which was with an article that you wrote and you said you don't, you didn't, don't really focus on the AI kind of doism, but you do include images of. The Terminator in your graphics.

Eric J Cesal: Yeah, do.

Evan Troxel: So maybe you can kind of kick us off about being what it means to kind of rethink practice when we talk about new tools, kind of, I don't wanna say taking over, but infiltrating, but also kind of change.

There's a new mindset that is potentially required here. And I'm, I'm curious kind of your thoughts when you're about the, the article that you wrote about being an AI first practice.

Eric J Cesal: Yeah. Uh, well, first of all, the Terminator thing is meant to be diffusing humor. Um, so I,

Evan Troxel: yeah. It's not a, it's not a menacing graphic. I, I didn't mean to paint that picture. It's like, it's like it's very cartoonish. Here's the Terminator. The Terminator is, has a a, a speech bubble and it, yeah. So anyway, we'll, we'll put a, we'll put a link to it in the show notes so people can, can read it.

Eric J Cesal: no, the, the AI first article was, was the culmination of several years of thinking and, and arose out of a metaphor. Um, the metaphor of, um, digital first, which journalism went through in the nineties. And, you know, with the emergence of the internet, there was this tension, you know, are we going to be print first or digital

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Eric J Cesal: So if you're print first, you already know what you're doing, and then you just have to stand up a website and put the articles on there. But being digital first offers some advantages, and if we're gonna be digital first, then a lot of those that had been in place that had been sacred for the last 100 years probably didn't make a lot of sense, as well as a lot of the physical infrastructure.

So, you know, I started thinking through that a couple of years ago, you know, an AI first architecture firm. If we started off with a blank slate and said, you know, the one objective is to deliver. Designs for buildings that, that want to get made. Um, how would you do it? You know, not how would you take AI and apply it to the processes that we know, the phases that we know, the, you know, customs and habits.

Nobody knows like, why the hell we do this the way that we do. But that's the way I was taught and that's the way my mentor was taught by his mentor and, and this sort of thing. Um, knowing all the technology that we have today, um, and the technology that we could be fairly confident is coming in the next few years, how would you organize a practice?

And, you know, it's, some of it probably seems a little farfetched, but that's the point, um, is that, you know, we're, we're buried in, in a lot of practices that, you know, got their start in an era of paper. Um, and then we kind of layered digital technology and computers onto those practices and now we're gonna layer ai. top of that. And I think things emerge when you really ask that question. Like, okay, scrap everything except the starting point, end point. And let's see how we get there. And I'll offer one example and then I'll give up a mic. I mean, one of it is, is phasing, right? Um, you know, we have these very strict phases of schematic design, design development, construction documents, et cetera. and my hypothesis was that, you know, you could easily embody the interests, um, and maybe even the personality of a client in some sort of language models. There's researchers doing that at Stanford now, and I'm sure the C-E-A-C-I-A did it, you know, five years ago. Um, and then, you know, have the client as, as a copilot on the design process where you could access. That person for questions when they were actually necessary as opposed to, you know, at some pre-scheduled interval or something like that. And you could also block them out, right when you just need to work. You can say, all right, you know, you go off to the side, I'm pressing mute. Um, this is my design time.

I'm going to figure it out. So, I mean, I think we all should be engaged in those sort of speculations at the moment 'cause they're gonna be here before we know what I think.

Evan Troxel: I think there's a lot of speculating and a lot of pontificating. I mean, you're talking about kind of a thought experiment, right? And, and there's value in that, but I think a lot of people get stuck at that part too. And so I think this is where it, it gets interesting because Patrick's here and talking about what you're up to with Cove.

It's like you went beyond the pontification and you're, you're out there and you're talking about what you're doing. You're not doing it even in secret. You're kind of. Semi, I assume kind of doing it in public, not a hundred percent, but maybe this podcast gets this, this more behind the scenes about what you're actually up to, but to actually like pull the trigger and say, we are going to move forward with a different model.

And I don't know what that means. I, I, I just assume it's different. Right. So I mean, Patrick, give us an idea of, I mean, because Eric, you talked about like, we can see we're fairly certain about what's coming. I don't know if that's actually the case. I think a lot of times this is also what's holding architects back, which is like, what do you mean it's fairly certain?

Like this stuff is still changing so rapidly. What if we tie ourselves to this thing and then it, the, the rug gets pulled out from underneath us, right? And, and, and maybe the nimbleness of a startup has a little bit more ability to kind of navigate that. Anyway, I want to throw this to you, Patrick, and, and kind of get your thoughts on, based on what Eric is talking about, how you decided to actually move forward in this space.

Patrick Chopson: Yeah. Yeah. So I think like a lot of, as you mentioned, a lot of folks were saying over the last couple years, oh, this is coming someday it'll be here.

Many firms

Evan Troxel: It's here.

Patrick Chopson: But you have to think about why did large firms and many other firms banned the use of ai? It's because they couldn't validate the, um, the chain of command of thought that runs through

an idea.

So like, you couldn't actually maintain what they call responsible control. So without responsible control, you can't use AI because you can't, you're legally have to understand as an architect, like, where'd you, where did I get the answer

from?

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: like made sure that I've exercised the standard of care. So for the most part, up until maybe about six or seven months ago, it was very hard to kind of like figure that out. And so once we had solved that internally here at Cove with some of the new tech that had come out with from different people like Claude, you know, open the eye, different ones, uh, then we were able to actually start building tools around that where you can maintain and understand how you get from one answer to like another answer and map that out.

And so that's like really important. So that was the first thing that was enabling that allowed us to move forward. And the second thing we saw that really was a big game changer was understanding, uh, inter interpretation of intent by AI systems has dramatically improved over the last like six to eight months. And so once that also, those two things, interpretation of intent. Is being able to re maintain responsible control. Now you can actually build an AI powered architecture firm. And then of course we have years and years of building for the a a C industry at our back. So we actually understand how to build applications and we have a full software team of 10 people. But now those 10 software engineers collaborate with the architects. And as we're doing specific projects, we not just build an application that is general purpose. We can build applications that are for single use, like for a specific project, we can actually build an AI application that solves a very specific problem, piece of software out maybe never used again.

'cause there's not, um, as much of a, a problem with that. And we're also building like some really cool internal tools that allow us to produce drawings and things like that. And those ones are how we kind of gather a lot of information out front and be able to actually. Do the, the work of architecture a lot more smoothly with less revisions, um, and get things done on time, which turns out to be the thing that most developers right now are really for is a on-time delivery.

Evan Troxel: Does that and is that really like, because there's just less and less time available to do these kinds of things, is because it's like the, the, the tool stack that people have and their understanding of their current capabilities. Like we know pretty much how long it takes to do a thing, but that that timeframe is getting squeezed and like new tools do allow.

Efficiencies to happen, maybe less steps. Um, it's, it's not all about efficiency. I, I would assume like there's gotta be design differentiation to make projects also successful. And so I'm just curious from your point of view, like, are, have you just just accepted that as like, yeah, we're, we're gonna have less time to do it.

The quality still needs to, the bar needs to be way up here. How are we going to get from here to there? And it's by employing thinking and tools like this.

Patrick Chopson: the most important thing though is when a developer is hiring an architect, if you really break down the business problem that they're trying to solve is they need someone to assume

risk. And so

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: doing it faster, which every architect architect's afraid of when it comes to AI, is not really what they want. wanna pay for someone to review project, to come up with the best and highest use of their design. And you know, as architects, we sometimes, because of all the things we have to do, we don't have time to make sure that we explore multiple alternatives. We want the design cycle

time is just

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: You know, you saw people like big architects, they use grasshopper and things like that to improve their cycle times. And that's kind of like how they achieve some success with more resolved. know, looking designs, you know, back over the last few years, but that's like still only a two x or three x improvement and speed of iteration.

So I think like

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: as architects we need to focus on. The developer does not want us to do it too fast. What they want is they just want to get it done and they want to have it be coordinated because we're seeing many principals are retiring now, the knowledge they have around coordination not necessarily getting passed on quite as well.

And so we see more and more uncoordinated drawings delivered late where, that's the big pain point for most developers. So that's why

Evan Troxel: There's more and more drawings too. Like there,

there's a lot more drawings. I, I, I'm curious, just if you, if you guys have seen this newest graph, I've seen it circulating around a little bit, which is, you know, like the old version was, you know, here, here's design is kind of like this slow. Curve and the gently curving upward of it is like what, what you're doing over time.

And AI kind of jumps up real quick in the beginning, but then there's a bunch of iteration. 'cause it gives you something pretty close. And then it's like, okay, now tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak. And it's like, okay, we end up at the same place at the same time as we used to.

It's a different process to get there. But it sounds, Patrick, like what you're talking about is you've actually been able to kind of make the tools do what you want faster. Like you trust them sooner because of the kind of the work that you're doing Is, does that sound about right or I, you tell me.

Patrick Chopson: I mean if you build it yourself, you can definitely how you got the answer.

Evan Troxel: Interesting.

Patrick Chopson: that's the most important thing. But giving us more time for design excellence, that's

like what we're

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: for in the processes that we have in house is like, how do we get experienced really good architects with really good design sense? How do we give them more time to do the thing that.

They do best, which

Evan Troxel: Where the value is.

Patrick Chopson: the

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Right. Eric, what do you think about what Patrick's kind of describing as as a place to kind of kick this conversation off with as far as like implementing into practice?

Eric J Cesal: I mean, I think the, the implementation is great and it's a terribly important discussion, right? You know, where is the and what are people actually, I. Seeking when they hire the services of an architect. I think Patrick is spot on. Um, you know, the, the, the highest motivation of most of the developers that I know is, is risk.

You know, they want somebody to assume the risk of errors because those errors stack up. Um, you know, I would challenge a little bit the idea that, you know, if, if, if time is second, it's a very, very close second. You know, when you, you take out a $50 million commercial loan, um, you know, you're, you're paying a of a million dollars a month in interest, um, you know, on this project.

So, um, if we have the ability to collapse the design process from 14 months to 14 weeks, I assume every developer would jump at that because it means the building gets done sooner and you know, the returns start coming in sooner, as long as it's at. The specific level of quality. Um, I think that brings with it problems in an industry that charges by the hour.

Um, and I think that's the fundamental problem that I've always been reacting to, is that architects have an idea about where their own value comes from. And I'm not convinced that that's synchronous with other people's ideas of where our value actually lies. Um, and I think it's, uh, also not synchronous with the, the mechanisms that we have.

You know, we, we claim that design is where our value lies, but the methods that we use to charge for our services are principally mighty hour and as a percentage of construction costs, both of which are designed, So, you know, I think AI and the sort of advances that, that Patrick and his team are achieving really brings into relief the, the historical problems that we all kind of knew about with architectural practice.

And I. I hope that our methods of practice can evolve as quickly as Patrick is evolving the technology crossing my fingers.

Evan Troxel: I, I have an like another wrinkle maybe to throw in here. And Patrick, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, which is like, if it, okay, just using Eric's example of 14 months to 14 weeks. That to me sounds more valuable than, right. Like it sounds like that should actually cost more for an architect's fees.

And so I'm curious like, like how is this kind of, how are you seeing this work out in when, when it comes to practice, billing, all of those, you know, timelines, milestones, those kinds of things?

Patrick Chopson: be, I would've thought that too when we first started, so we even did this with architects when we did consulting before, where we would,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: in a day and we thought that people would want to get that detailed analysis in a day, it turned out that it was too fast, and that if you did it so fast, people thought it wasn't valuable. So there is an element in the construction industry that people know how long things should

take or

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: to take. And then if you fall too far outside of that then it calls into question the validity of your process and your accuracy of what you're doing and how high the quality is. So there is some, like, you know, people just wanna make sure that proper time is being taken. So, yeah, I can see it like. For us, you know, we've been able to do things about 40% faster, 60% faster in terms of making drawings. But when I, if I go to sell a, an owner on that, they're like, Hmm, biggest risk is that my money that I've sunk into this project and to acquire the land or to like secure this loan. If I lose that, my architect's fees are nothing in comparison to that. So it's like sure that it's right, that it's been vetted, that's been figured out. But also like in the beginning when you're just doing side evaluations, um, if those things are incorrect and we can't actually build for the price that we think we are, and we're 20%, 40% off in the construction costs, then that's a bigger risk oftentimes to the developer.

So like, that they really wanna know is like, is this accurate? And so if we're like, yeah, it's more accurate what we're doing, or it's higher quality that I. probably what most people are paying for. Now. Obviously there'll always be someone who wants to do it quick, like a web services building 20,000, know, data centers or like some kind of, know, people building warehouses.

That could be a thing. But, you know, so speed is of the essence for some building types. But for many projects, like what we're finding is that it's the 50 to a hundred million dollar projects where our, our, uh, services are most receptive. Um, so that's gonna be things like multifamily garden style or like midrise or we had a couple highrise projects we're working on.

So it's like those, those types of projects we're coordination can make or break the project are like really, really ones that we seem, seem to be winning on a lot lately. Uh, which I think is not what I expected. I thought we'd do small projects first that had quick turnarounds. the bigger ones that have more coordination where we're really kind of like winning the trust of those developers.

Evan Troxel: Interesting. And, and if you can do drawings 40 to 60% faster, does that just mean then that you're spending more time on the quality level and the. Yeah, upfront. So, so you're, you're, yeah. So you're just like changing the, the, the way that the hours are kind of stacked, right? So, so you actually are getting to put more time into design, like you talked about, and ensuring that the quality's there, where a lot of people are just underwater trying to keep up and there's delivering an uncoordinated quote unquote set of drawings at the end.

Obviously architects, reputations, they're license, all kinds of things rely on this kind of thing. So I, I'm not just trying to say that architects are doing that, but I mean, it, things fall through the cracks, like they definitely slip through the cracks. You, you, a lot of times, you know, especially, you know, in the last, let's just say 10 years ago, right?

You would, in public work for schools, you could submit a set of drawings and then, because you knew it sat in the bin for six to nine months before it was gonna get reviewed. Knowing it's half baked and then go slip in sheets before you know that things have been catching up to that. Like that isn't really a thing anymore, I don't think.

But the, like these are examples of how this has worked in the past, and now you're saying like you're actually getting to spend more time on the stuff that matters in the process because of those efficiencies that you've figured out.

Patrick Chopson: know, think about too, like there's a lot of studies I'm sure that you guys have probably seen as well and other viewers, but like, I don't know if you guys realize this, but like they're saying like when study after study people with lots of experience can achieve up to 10 x improvement in using AI of some type that's well fitted to their industry, but someone with no experience achieves a negative increase in productivity. Uh, so I can see that on as I train people on our team that we have to invest a lot in training people who are junior

on how to

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Patrick Chopson: I. Someone who's older, uh, and more experienced. Like for example, ed Aikens, a IAS on our team. He, um, you know, he picked up driven workflows in a few days as soon as we started using it, producing gorgeous drawings, beautiful images, but everything was like, looked a lot like what I would expect to see from him if he'd spent several weeks. But he was like doing it in just a couple days. And so like, then he spent his time designing he understands what he is looking for. And so like, that is like to get the beauty. And also the, the, the hard part is like you have to invest much more in people. If you want AI to be successful in your

business.

Evan Troxel: I, I knew there was gonna be a people aspect here because this is the, the thing, the, the, the fear. There's obviously a lot of fear in, in these tools, but also just in the unknown, right? So I'm curious, Eric, what you think about this people side of, of the conversation now.

Eric J Cesal: Um, uh, yeah. Where to start? Um, no, I mean, it's got me concerned. Um, you know, Patrick, I hear a lot of the same things and, you know, I experience them in my own work with ai. You know, when I ask. Clawed a question, and you know, it's a complicated question. The answer comes back in less than a second. I'm like, nah, that can't be right.

You know, like, do something else. Um, I

Evan Troxel: Fake it. Just fake it for me. That's what you just, just take.

Eric J Cesal: just,

Evan Troxel: If it did take a little longer, would I trust it more? That's a, that's an interesting aspect to this.

Eric J Cesal: Well, yeah, I mean, when they released the microwave, there was a lot of suspicion around it because, you

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Eric J Cesal: people could not get their heads around the idea that food was being cooked in so short amount of time. And for all of human history, you know, eating uncooked food was, you know, occasionally fatal.

Um, so people have a lot of concerns about it. And, you know, gradually people acclimated to the idea that like, yeah, I can, I can cook my dinner in, in two minutes or three minutes in the microwave or, or something like that.

Evan Troxel: Now we rely on it. We,

Eric J Cesal: Yeah. Now it's like absolutely necessary. But that's a good point too, because, you know, the sort of hesitancy Patrick that you were describing, I wonder how long that sticks around and how long it takes for the entire a EC value chain to acclimate. Um, deeply respect the fact that, you know, you, you soak up that extra time with more design to, you know, bring the work to a higher level of quality. Um, I also know that their architects weren't gonna do that once they get, you know, hands on the tools and they're gonna,

Evan Troxel: hmm.

Eric J Cesal: outbid everybody in the room and say, look, I can get it done in 47 minutes, just like, give me the job and like,

Evan Troxel: Race to the bottom. Yeah.

Eric J Cesal: I mean, I think that's where, you know, I get concerned about the people aspect is that arctics have this notorious history of devaluing their own services and their own worth. And I think it's a profession wide project to figure out. How as these technological changes are taking place, we manage to preserve or enhance the value as as perceived on the client side.

Patrick Chopson: And that's, and that's where like in our opinion, you know, obviously 'cause this is a protected profession 'cause we've got the stamp, it really lends itself, unlike many other industries, the AI innovation will have to be done by architects themselves because of like the legal liability of the stamp itself.

So like for myself as the licensed that, uh, stamps a lot of the drawings here, I have to be, and also the person producing the software, like I've coded my own a DA bathroom generator. That's a part of the whole process, right? Like, I wanna know exactly what assumptions we made, how do we make them? Go through the, with the team that's making it, check it line by line, make sure that makes things that are plausible and that meet code. But like, you're right, like there'll be a time when that won't be the case, that there'll be less careful people building things. But I think it's really incumbent upon those who are building the tools like us and others to like how a broader conversation with the ac, especially the, a part of the community, start educating people, start collaborating, um, sharing things like what we're doing here, you know, the ideas back and forth such that we can make sure that the systems we are designed are biased towards Like, for example, we're analyzing everything from a carbon perspective in the backend, or not it tells that to the owner, or we actually highlight that. Maybe not a good idea these days, but, like we're actually checking it, you know, so that we can ensure that our billings are

by default the

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Patrick Chopson: we can achieve. But that's like kind of my, my dream has always been how do I create that maximum impact. come to see that it's maybe affecting the architecture as maybe a faster way to do that. So I don't know. There's like, but there's a lot of like, we have to be, uh, engaging with the a i a, um, different folks. I know has kind of been on a rocky period recently in terms of, you know, how to get the profession to work better together. I think like if we do all work better together, we can come through this whole AI transition a philosophy and rules and things that make sense. I think I would advocate for an ai, an AI of conduct from the ai.

So everyone

Evan Troxel: Okay. Are.

Eric J Cesal: absolutely. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I wanna, I wanna throw this out now because, and it hasn't come up on this show yet, but it's, did you guys see the survey that a i a published regarding, uh, adoption of AI tools just amongst existing firms? And it, and it was put out there as kind of like a report, but it was, it was just based on survey results.

And that's the survey, I mean. I just maybe, maybe Patrick, from, from your point of view, what did you think about that survey? Because, because it was really a mix, right? It was like, uh, okay, of course this is gonna be what an a i a survey results look like. It's like some architects are just saying, we're just watching from the sidelines, and other ones are like, yeah, we're, we're, we're going, okay, you just painted a picture of nothingness to me, I mean, it, it is just like that, that is such an obvious outcome of a quote unquote survey.

But the way that they presented it was like, here, here are the facts of the industry. And I felt like it was actually, like I asked, who's the audience of this survey? Is it architects? Because, I mean, it's a public facing. Article that they put out there. And I'm thinking, well, if, if future clients read this, it's kind of damning of the industry.

Like our architects aren't adopting the latest, greatest tools. Everybody's adopting these tools, why wouldn't architects? And, I mean, there's a lot of nuance in there, right? When it comes to risk and standard of care and control of the documents and all those things that a lot the public doesn't know about.

But I, I kind of, they don't, they don't care about that stuff either. Right? So I'm just curious from, from your point of view, what, what you thought of that survey and, because I think it is kind of a state of the industry, but at the same time there's gonna be a lot of AI first firms like you who would never, not, not necessarily you, but they wouldn't even talk about their use of AI because it's, they, they want to keep it a secret.

Like a lot of firms have always wanted to keep their technologies and their special sauce and, and special podcast air quotes a secret.

Patrick Chopson: Yeah, I don't know. I, I don't, I, I just have seen have, having tried to sell technology to architects for years and years that architects don't adopt new technology easily.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: know this. Uh,

Eric J Cesal: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: so,

Evan Troxel: Live, lived it.

Patrick Chopson: I don't think that it'll be very quick that most firms adopt, uh, ai, to be honest. Like it'll, they'll need to see some other people do it.

It's kinda like

the whole

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: When you see the penguins, they get close to the edge and the south pole, and then there's like the sea lions and the orcas down there swimming around. They, they get closer and closer until one penguin falls off and then they all look down. They say like, well, did he die?

And

if he doesn't, then, then they

Evan Troxel: I think if you look closely, there was, there was one right behind it that just kind of gave a quick push.

Patrick Chopson: So that's, that's I think how we'll see it. We see, we've seen that like from cad, uh, to bim, there was like a 20 year adoption cycle and I think like Bim, if I'm not mistaken, it was 10 or 15 years and then like probably we'll see a having again of that to maybe

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Patrick Chopson: seven years. You'll see, I think most firms using ai, but like initially the first movers will have like, us and others will have like time to actually. Understand what it's we're working with and really perfect that process, uh, potentially ahead of other things. And then of course, once we perfect it, I'm sure we'll end up sharing that with others. But our thesis is that most people don't wanna try something new

when

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Right,

right. Eric, did you see that survey that I'm talking about? I'll put a link to it in the show notes, uh, for the listeners, but, but I thought it, you know, again, like it, it, it's just to me it wasn't, it was a nothing burger of a report. Oh,

Eric J Cesal: Um, I didn't actually see it, but you told me about it at the conference, uh, when we saw each other. Um, and I assume it's like every other. AI survey and architecture that I've seen from Reva or architecture or whatever.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Eric J Cesal: and yeah, you have those striations of, you know, the people who don't wanna deal with it at all, which I agree with you, Evan, is, is hazard in terms of like how we face the public. And then at the opposite end, there's the ones who are quote air podcast, air quotes, is that what we call it?

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Eric J Cesal: using ai. But what they mean by that is, you know, chat GBT to make an occasional query and midjourney to make thousands of, you know, renderings that nobody leads or, or wants. Um, so yeah, I mean I, I think that, um, we, we need that statement of AI governance that Patrick was talking about, and we need to be conscientious about how architects are perceived as using AI in front of the client facing public.

Evan Troxel: I wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about students in kind of the next generation. Eric, I'm curious, does this come up in your, what you're teaching at Harvard?

Eric J Cesal: Um, no. Um, but

Evan Troxel: This is a separate thing,

Eric J Cesal: yeah, no, I mean, I teach in the global development program and I

Evan Troxel: okay?

Eric J Cesal: post-professional students, so I'm not, um, not presently teaching design studio or, or anything like that, although I have, um, I see it coming up in my classroom regardless, and

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Eric J Cesal: tell you the way that it comes up in my classroom, and I think that, know, the analog's perfectly there. Um, I always tell my students that they should use ai, um, and that, you know, AI catches are not sophisticated enough to catch 'em. Um, and I can't always tell either, but they probably shouldn't use AI because it's normative. So in my class, you know, I teach on community-based approaches to disaster and resilience.

And we're seeking innovation. We're acknowledging that our existing methods for keeping our community safe aren't adequate. So we're looking for better, newer, improved methods for doing that. And AI doesn't capture that very well, right? If you ask, you know, Chad, GPT or Claude out of the box, you know, how do I keep my community safe for disaster?

It's gonna give you a pretty generic set of things to do. And I tell my students, that's not adequate here. I think that applies to all learning and all students across the board. Um, you know, AI makes it easy to give the easy response. And what we want for the future is, you know, critical thinkers, innovators, entrepreneurs, people who are really gonna push things forward.

So I think in that sense, there's, there should be serious alarm around how this is going to be used in the classroom and how we keep. Teaching innovation and design,

Evan Troxel: Kind of setting a baseline and then going beyond using it as that, and then going beyond that with your critical thinking skills, your design thinking skills.

Eric J Cesal: if you understand it as a

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Eric J Cesal: And I think, you know, I've heard about models, um, Randy Deutsch at, uh, Champaign Urbana, Phil Bernstein at Yale, are really like teaching to it in that way and saying, look, here's ai, and then here's all the thinking that we're gonna do on top of the ai, and I think that's the right way to teach it.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Patrick, from your point of view, when it comes to tools, I mean there, working in architectural practice, I would argue that there is a, an analogy here, which is like, uh, a lot of times the buildings end up looking like the, basically how the tool works is how you get to Yep. I can tell that's a Revit building or that's a SketchUp building.

Right. I'm again, with, with the air quotes, but it's, it is kind of, that's a thing, right? For sure. In practice and. Because we are often limited by the tools and, and what you can make in the tools. So it obviously has, has to do with the skills of the operators and what they're capable of doing, what the tool's capable of doing, understanding how much time it actually takes to do work arounds in these tools to get them to do what you want.

Right. Um, often to, to terrible results. Right. And wasting a lot of time from your standpoint, like has this really unlocked some additional freedoms? Because, and again, like I have to, I have to put it out there, like, the caveat here is your software developers coming into this and so not every architecture firm has that, I'm gonna call it a luxury, right?

May, but, but maybe you don't see it that way, but like you're coming at this from a different perspective, I think than, than traditional practices where they're buying something off the shelf like you're building versus buying in a lot of cases.

Patrick Chopson: Yeah, no, that's, that's interesting. I, I think like, man, there's a lot to unpack there.

Uh, I guess

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Sorry.

Patrick Chopson: when I think about like, uh, just kind of like what I'm, what's on my mind is when I think about like the junior folks that work in a firm and how they're, they're the ones who are going to get most impacted by the bias of the tool that you created because they won't know how to overcome it,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Patrick Chopson: make something that seems technically. Uh, complete, but it does, but it's not beautiful.

Evan Troxel: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: create a piece of writing where they won't be able to, they won't be as good at writing or as good at like saying, here's what I'm trying to get. And then the AI as it interprets the intent like create something very interesting or compelling. Whereas like if I have a tool that generates images and it's trained on my hand drawing style and then I have a junior person use that, then it makes things that are like what I would do. we've actually have like created different profiles for of trained image regeneration models for different principles so that the work like their, their work if they're having a junior person work with it.

But I think like that is an interesting point though. It's like the bias of the tool. I've always been a tool bias person in studying that. And, uh, I think I. What I look at when I'm thinking about building an AI system is not it necessarily like an image generator where it's trained on things from the past, but train it on how to think about a design problem. And so I tend to look back to like somebody like Nicholas, uh, Nicholas Negroponte or uh, maybe Christopher Alexander with pattern language. And I'm like, what is the design thinking methodology? And then how do we organize the information that we can use that design, think thinking, and keep everything in mind as we're like making And then hopefully we create a, a model and a way of working that's biased towards an actual of making things beautiful and interesting and compelling, rather than trying to teach against a certain previous existing dataset so we can generate new things based on our human So it's like how do we achieve a, a tighter fit between a human intent and the machine's resolution of that intent?

what I'm.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: Always thinking about as we're building stuff.

dunno.

Evan Troxel: I'm curious how, how do you actually extract that from people? Because I, I had a guest on recently and they talked about expertise and how experts don't even know what they know. Right. They just know it, and it comes out in different ways throughout. The different parts of a project or in conversations or, and, and, and so I'm curious because you, you talked about that, that idea of like, keeping it all in mind, right?

And, and that's hard for humans to do, to keep it all in mind. Like, like you may hear about a particular design constraint and then it's like a, you immediately forget about it and you design something and it's like, oh, it doesn't work because I forgot about that one rule. But the computer doesn't forget and you can just continually add additional constraints so that they're always in mind, you know?

So, I, I'm curious just how, first of all, how do you extract from, from individuals? And then do you put that into your models so that it is always in mind?

Patrick Chopson: Yeah. So the closest analogy I guess, of where this has already been com figured out is in the software industry where now you can code very large applications, uh, from scratch

with,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: to have like the standards that you're referencing. You have like the structure of the project that you're looking at.

You have to have all these documents that help you vibe, code is what people call it nowadays

instead of,

Evan Troxel: You're the first, first person to bring up Vibe coding on the podcast. I've been waiting for this to come up.

Patrick Chopson: So like we actually went through this first with our software engineers. So of the things that was super valuable about this whole process is that. actually have an industry where they have been totally, in the game has changed. You can code now using ai, a hundred percent the whole project. when we took our software team, we were like, guys, you're trying to use copilot. You're still writing things line by line. Let's all work on learning how to code using a different way of

coding.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: of the most valuable things that we have in our business is that our, um, head of software engineering is a older guy who's been through four different ways of coding through his career.

So starting from like, you know, I think the eighties, two 20, 2000, 2010s, you know, he's been able to like see these different ways of doing what he's doing. then when we showed, when he and I sat down, like how are we gonna design an AI coding best practice, we actually had templates to pull on from the past of like how to this.

And so like. Changing how people thought about coding was very, very challenging.

And so

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: once they got over that hump, now they're all, know, building stuff at lightning speed and they're building more things than they could ever build as a team of 10, before. So that's kind of like, I don't know, it's like we've already been through the process now with the software engineers, so I kind of have a template for how to like, architects get over the same hump.

That's a very long answer. So

I apologize, but.

Evan Troxel: it was great. That was, and there's so much stuff in there that, that I want to, I want to explore and I don't, I don't know if I can even recall it all talking about keeping things in mind, but that my, my first one that I want to talk about here is just this idea of you driving this process because I, and that sounds very top down.

Versus a grassroots kind of a thing, which I think is what most people are experiencing in firms today. It's like the technologists are the grassroots, they're the ones who are the doers. They're writing the scripts, they're checking out the new tools, they're experimenting, they're doing these things, but there's somebody at the top saying, no, we have to do it the way we've always done it.

Right. And so, I mean, I know this is kind of a common trope, but at the same time it, it's not untrue. I mean, a lot of people experience this and so from you driving this process, change this, right? Like, like that to me is a, is a big difference.

Patrick Chopson: I mean, that is the difference. Uh, right

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: of have the, the foxes are in the henhouse to a certain extent when it comes to like, innovation the a, EC. Like, you have folks that don't, that aren't on the edge, but you do have a few firms where people are. do think that a lot of your Gen X, um, kind of principles who are now assuming control of a lot

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: uh, or millennials in some. You know, limited cases, I guess, uh, those folks do have, uh, sometimes more of a technology bent to them. so it's possible, it's only possible to create an AI powered architecture firm if the leadership is aligned around like, we're doing this different

and we're gonna

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: And then everyone's gonna feel uncomfortable for a while.

But if you kind of like live in that state of discomfort, it's, that's where you're gonna find the innovation to actually do it. And then some things you just can't do with new tech. You know, like hand drawing is still the fastest way to communicate with ai, I think. Uh, your design tint. So we

have

Evan Troxel: Interesting.

Patrick Chopson: on every desk.

Evan Troxel: Nice. What can I ask you? What generation you are actually.

Patrick Chopson: I am a geriatric millennial, I guess is what they call me.

Evan Troxel: I, I was the Gen Xers out there. We, I, I heard this recently and it really put, threw me into like a, a perspective, oh, okay. We are the last analog generation as Gen Xers, and obviously we are not digital native. And so it was just kind of a new way to say that, right? It was like, oh, we're the last ones who grew up with analog as like the, the way it all started.

And then many of us transitioned, but we weren't, we're not digital natives. Eric, what do you think about this? I think it applies to education too, the thing that we're talking about here, but, but when it applies to education and the architecture profession, what do you think about this? Like, top down and versus grassroots and like the, the position that many firms are stuck in, like literally stuck in, um, because of the, the leadership.

Eric J Cesal: Well, a few thoughts. First of all, shout out to Gen X, Evan. We gotta stick together. So, um, uh, I appreciate that. Um, I always tell people, like I, I was probably like the last class at school that was taught how to do hand lettering. Um, and I

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Eric J Cesal: do it. I still write like that. But, um, a few thoughts, uh, you know, about the, tool thing.

You know, a metaphor that I used in, in that article that you referenced in the beginning. is that, you know, when, when 19th century traders crossed the mountains crossed a mountain range, they followed the path that was most hospitable to the horse, right? And so, lowest elevation, fewest rock slides, things like that, 20th century engineers went through the mountain to take a tunnel, they followed the path that was most favorable to geology. nowadays, when we fly over the mountains, we ignore both, and we just follow the path that is appropriate to jet stream. So I think we need to be open to the idea that technology is speaking to us about the way in which it wants to be used. And

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Eric J Cesal: AI evolves, it won't always be the case of, you know, us trying to make AI do this, but us listening and saying, you know, look, by the nature of this technology, it suggests that we do something different.

And maybe by coding is an example. Love that. Um, you know, just kind of changing the paradigm about coding. Um, the other thing is predictably a concern, right? Because, you know, I'm the disaster guy. Um, you know, I wonder how these tools progress, um, and at what point they diffuse into the wider population.

You know, it was one of my first concerns about Midjourney, you know, two years ago, two and a half years ago, uh, you know, Arctics were having a field day. And, and my thought was, Hey, you know what? Everybody else can use Midjourney too. and you know, I wonder as these tools evolve and they make the process of design more intuitive, more accessible, you don't have to spend years learning, you know, Adobe Creative Suite or Revit, you know, it's more of a conversational platform that you're working with. Does that, does that open the door to additional predation and additional devaluation of, of architectural. Services. I agree with the prior comments that you really need to know what you're doing, you know, at least at this point, um, to know when the AI is wrong and to apply that human judgment to the equation. Um, but yeah, uh, experts don't know what they don't know and, you know, neither do regular people. So I think as a regular person, you know, meaning like a client, it comes very, very hard to delineate between something that is professional level quality and something that is 95% of professional level quality.

So, you know, I think the tool conversation is, is interesting, but I have, I, I feel like we have to keep it in frame.

Patrick Chopson: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I'm curious, Patrick, from your point of view when it comes to that, like what he's talking about. It used to be that people would come with their own SketchUp model or their own, you know, they would be drawing, I. Floor plans in Excel, for example. Right. Um, but, but it's happened, right? Uh, and so is this the, the new version of that?

I think it is, right? But the other, the other thing that we have to keep in mind is that the ai, and maybe maybe this isn't the case, but it has been the case, is AI doesn't understand space. And that's where architects, the value comes in when it comes to these things and actually figuring that stuff out.

And, and I'll layer on top of that, that I think a lot of times being a quote unquote architect, you know, a graduate of an architectural program, you still have many, many years until you understand those kinds of things in actually producing architecture and experiencing it and understanding. Quality of those different things and how they affect the people that inhabit these spaces, right?

Because it's not a 2D image on a screen, right? It's a spatial experience and it a progression of spaces. It's function and adjacency and response to the environment and lighting and all of these layers of, of nuance that a lot of people just, you know, here's, here's, here's what I want it to look like.

It's like, well, there's a lot more to it than that, but give us kind of your perspective on that.

Patrick Chopson: I, I guess like as the AI becomes more aligned around your design intent like, what is you're trying to do, I think that if you don't have good taste, it's gonna align more closely to your poor taste. Um, then not, you know, so it's like, if anything, as the tools become more sophisticated, they'll interpret what you're trying to do and, and like. still, there's been a whole long thread on Twitter, uh, or XI guess now, um, where all these property developers, that's where they have their conversations. They're not on LinkedIn. They have a rip roaring time on X

and they always are chatting

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: and this and that. But one of the things you see a lot of is people like, Hey, I threw this image of this strip mall into, into my thing and I got back a beautiful rendering and, and it doesn't look beautiful, uh, what they made, but they,

But but from their perspective,

Eric J Cesal: it is. Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: think it looks pretty good, you know, like, but what they were saying, which I think is the part that a lot of architects who might see that and freak out is they were like, I just need to show the person who's gonna give me money that this could look better. And I think like our architect as architects, we should think about, like, that's kind of like why they were hiring us to begin

with or doing

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: study is they just needed to have to secure that money. And then they spend the time to like getting the construction documents done and know. No reasonable developer wants to do that work themselves.

They're just, it's just not what they're looking to spend their time on. They wanna find the next deal and they wanna analyze deals and for them, everything's a spreadsheet anyway. The whole creative side is not something that they really are wanting to do. So I think like you'll probably just see, like, maybe you'll see people use it to like up with a concept similar to like the Excel analogy of someone drawing a plan in Excel and you'll, it'll still be not that great compared to what an architect will have access to in the future the AI will have progressed on our side much far in advance of what a consumer will have access to because we'll either be billing ourselves or know, maybe someday a big company will figure something out, but I doubt.

Evan Troxel: An unnamed large company. Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: That makes a billion dollars a year. They'll, they'll buy some, some something, you know,

that will do something. But

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: have access to tools and AI agents that will be far superior than what a regular person will have. us with all of our training will be able to operate them more effectively, even if they are more sophisticated. I don't know. I, I remain optimistic that the profession will be, anything reinforced by good applications, but I fully acknowledge there'll be bad applications too.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. The, the idea that, um, there's, I mean, equal access for all right, it's the same, it, it, it's just like a cell phone, right? Like the mo the richest people in the world have the same cell phone that you do, right? Uh, they don't have a better phone. Um, and, and I think the tools in this, for the most part, are like that.

But to your point, Patrick, obviously there are specialty tools and, and if you can build tools yourself, I'm, I'm just curious, and I think this applies again, you guys are both in kind of different aspects of. A EC, probably a better way to say that, but I'm just, I'm curious, like what do you see as kind of from, from a standpoint of experimentation, how is and, and making tools?

I don't know, Eric, if you're making any tools or if you're just really using the tools, but, but is this a, a thing of like, you have to get in there and experiment and learn what these tools are capable of or, or are, and, and, and how much time can you actually spend doing that? Or should you be doing that so that you are at least understanding what the landscape is out there?

Eric, why don't you take that?

Eric J Cesal: was that

Evan Troxel: Let's let, it was at both. It'll be eventually at both of you. So yeah, I mean, from, from your standpoint and especially when it comes to teaching and writing, like how, how are you, what, what's your stance on that and how, how are you approaching this?

Eric J Cesal: Um, how am I approaching?

Evan Troxel: like tool usage, experimentation. How are, how are you taking that and, and, and even tool building, like, are you doing anything on your end to enhance your capabilities so that like, again, like as these more specialized tools do emerge, that you're ready to actually put them to use.

Eric J Cesal: Yeah, no, I mean, I build tools all the time. I mean, I don't design buildings anymore, and that's not a part of my professional life. So,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Eric J Cesal: not in that space. Um, but, you know, I develop specific single use software for all sorts of things that, that I need to be doing. And, um, I think, you know, I always begin with the question of, okay, you know, what is the start and what is the finish?

You know, what am I actually trying to accomplish? And then what is the best approach to doing this? You know, is it some off the shelf application? Is it, you know, some app done by some startup that I sign up for free and then, you know, two weeks later it's charging my credit card every month and I forgot about it and, and that sort of thing? Or is it actually a bespoke solution? I mean, is it. Straightforward enough that I can, you know, just jump in the Chad GBT or Claude and, you know, code it outright. So I, I mean, I think that, yeah, I just circle back to this idea that this needs to be a period of time where we're very open-minded about what it is that we're trying to do and what is the ultimate start and the ultimate end. Um, you know, Evan, the last time we, we talked, we talked about Uber, uh, as, as a case study. And I think that, taxi cabs were very, very protected market. They were very well entrenched, um, legally, uh, illegally, uh, culturally, you know, I mean, this is like a very kind of fixed part of civic life, um, especially in some cities. And, you know, it was disrupted because they failed to realize that nobody gave a shit about taxis. People just wanted to. Get from one place to another without using public transportation or their own vehicle. And technologists were able to step in there and say, you know, if we take a point A and point B, like how does technology solve that problem?

De novo. So, you know, if I was at, at an architecture firm, like I would be asking that about every process. Um, you know, the smaller ones and the larger ones.

Evan Troxel: Mm. Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: No, for certain, and like, I think when I look at, look at it like this, if, if you're a leader of a firm you're not willing to like. Try out these tools and find the boundaries yourself. You're never gonna know what you can and can't ask someone to do. think that's

like the way I

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: with ai, you just have to try because the boundary between what the human can do, what the AI can do is not a hard line. It's a very squiggly line. If we kinda look at like some things you'll be like, oh my God, I can't believe I can just press a button and get x and other things. You'll be like, I should be able to do that. But it's far outside the capabilities. Um, and so you have to constantly test that boundary, but then the boundary is always changing.

So as you can add more new models, you to understand what you're doing, you have to kind keep picking away at like, here's a problem I've been trying to solve for the last iterations of the AI model. Can it do it now? And you try and you're like, oh, oh my God can do it

now. Then that's like,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Patrick Chopson: you gotta keep experimenting.

'cause then I can't go to my software team and say like, I. Do it this way. 'cause I read this on a, a blog somewhere like that, that's not the right way to lead. Uh, as a leader, you have to, if you wanna lead on technology, you have to it yourself and you have to learn how to do it yourself. And then if you're the per, it's like, there's this guy that, he was my best boss I've ever had. I was unloading trucks one summer in college and he didn't come back there and say, you guys are going too slow. He would say like, you guys are going too slow. Let me show you the speed that I want you all to work at. And he would go in there and he'd start throwing stuff off that truck. He was a reasonably. older guy and he was out doing us young kids like just moving these boxes, you know? And I remember like thinking like that he'd work that way for like 15, 20 minutes. He'd be like, no, keep doing that for the next four hours I'm gonna come back here. I wanna see this truck unload. And I think like that's the kind of like person that you really wanna work for them.

'cause you're like, I don't wanna let somebody like that down

'cause they're doing the

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Patrick Chopson: well. And I think

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: leaders that are more your servant leader type, I

guess is what they say

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: like that. You gotta like show, show it first and then other people will believe you.

Especially when it comes to AI

Eric J Cesal: Were you

Evan Troxel: So when,

Eric J Cesal: or by the

Evan Troxel: yeah.

Patrick Chopson: by the hour, you know?

So.

Evan Troxel: More boxes in less time. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is architecture too, right? It's like, do do it in less time. It's like, uh, well better design in less time. It's a tall order. And so I, I'm curious from like a tool stack standpoint, Patrick, can you, can you give us some ideas about

Patrick Chopson: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: what, what you guys have taken on versus what build versus buy?

Is there any buying? Are you doing it all? Like, like give us just kind of a, a glimpse into what, what's going on at Cove?

Patrick Chopson: I mean we, we've taken a philosophy that you probably can't find something that does what you need. And really, nowadays with ai, you can copy any software. There's no barrier now to making software for real. You can literally just take a screenshot of something and you can make it in a few days.

Uh, so

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Patrick Chopson: in that world then, it's kind of more incumbent upon the company, I think, to look at what is it that we should make? Start from there, against that. So we use, uh, we use a lot of React tailwind. Uh, that's kinda like one of our, kinda like front end. And then on the back end we use a lot of Python. Uh, we use a lot of things like that. And we use AWS obviously for like servers or you know, some people use Azure and, you know, whatever your tech stack happens to be.

But I think like a lot of, uh, architects are obviously not gonna be like, okay, well how does web development work? But we feel like web tools are like the best because they allow us to connect more things together

than building like

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: app or something like

that.

Evan Troxel: Sure. Yeah. I, I'm, I'm curious from your point of view then, when it comes to the words that you just said, react, tailwind, a WSI mean, those are foreign. Words and acronyms to a lot of architects. Right. Especially, you know, traditionally trained architects. So like, what do a architects need to be doing about that?

Are they hiring a staff? Are they outsourcing this to a consultant or outsourcing it to, you know, anywhere? I mean, I, my, that's a question I think a lot of people would have. Well, where do I start?

Patrick Chopson: Yeah, I mean I think like if you look at some of the tools that are out there, if you kind of start following the AI hashtag on like honestly on x, I know

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: platform that for political reasons some people like to be on, but like it is where the discussions happening around ai, if you wanna see what's going on real time as a new model comes out, people start testing that thing.

They use different tools. They'll say, I tried this tool and it's totally awesome, or This one sucks, and you can see that and then you can go try it yourself. that's where you want to be on LinkedIn. You're gonna see stuff that's maybe three, four weeks behind and in some cases even months old.

And so it can be a little stale.

Evan Troxel: eternity.

Patrick Chopson: And like, and you can also just see that like people who don't know what they're talking about. a lot of those people on LinkedIn. Uh, whereas on X, like you get exposed pretty quick if you don't know what you're talking about. So you kind of start to, you see a real learning culture of sharing

stuff on, on X.

Evan Troxel: Interesting.

Patrick Chopson: like, if you wanna see what's, what's happening and what tools are the right ones for you're watching this podcast, like make sure you know it's the latest, uh, at that time. 'cause then there's something, there's some things I've tried last year that I was like, this is game changing now.

I look at it, I'm like, Hmm,

not really a thing now.

Evan Troxel: Interesting. Yeah. It's moving so quickly. So yeah, the, the, the way that I would explain it is like x it's, it's unfolding in real time. It, it, it kind of, it's always been that real time

Eric J Cesal: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: timeline, the feed of what's happening now. And LinkedIn is like the polished version. Like, I would like to now present to you the final results of the thing.

Right. Um, and, and it's way more like, I mean, obviously they're bigger posts. They can, they, they're, it's a different audience. I mean, it's like, show, I'm gonna show you my accomplishments and now you will applaud for those accomplishments, right. Versus this kind of just exposing the work in real time version.

So I think that's a really insightful thing to say, even if it isn't the place that people want to be hanging out, there is some incredible information. Shared and, and like, you get to actually look under the hood and see what's going on behind the scenes from Yeah. Eric, Eric, any, any ideas or like thoughts that that brings up for you?

Eric J Cesal: uh, I would agree a hundred percent. Um, I mean, I think Twitter is where those conversations happen. It's where I get a lot of my news.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Eric J Cesal: and I think you both characterize it correctly. You know, like some model comes out and three hours later, you know, I. Some guy is like, Hey, here's what I did with the model.

Like, here's like the use case and you can explore through that. I mean, personally, in terms of my explorations and keeping up the news and stuff, I would, I would also throw YouTube in there. Um, I think you need to filter it a little bit, but, you know, there's, there's a lot of the same effect. Only slower than Twitter, faster than LinkedIn.

Evan Troxel: Because it takes more, more, more, more to actually create of a YouTube video versus just Yeah. Throw something on x. Right.

Eric J Cesal: phenomena. You know, you get somebody that, you know, takes something new and make some incredible experiment with it. And then, you know, 12 hours later is giving away the, the step-by-step how to, for free. 'cause they wanna click views or, or whatever. just because of, you know, my situation, I, I favor a lot of academic papers as well. Um, and I know a lot of people don't have access to those kinds of journals if you're not affiliated with an institution, but I really like to be aware of what's going on in the lab, um, and what researchers are doing because they know that no one is ever gonna read their paper. You know, so they just kind of put it out there and they're like, eh, you know, here's what I did.

Give me

Evan Troxel: Here's a thread. Yep. Here's a thread.

Eric J Cesal: Um, but no, you find a lot of interesting stuff that slips under the radar there because

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Eric J Cesal: of times, you know, academics are so, so down in the weeds, um, you know, with their work that they don't particularly understand the professional applications of it.

They're not, they're not looking towards that necessarily. So if you know a little bit of something about practice and you know how buildings get made and you can suffer through an academic paper, you can often draw a lot of connections about what's coming.

Evan Troxel: Patrick, um, I have a question about kind of hosting your own models versus just using publicly available models. There's a lot of models out there. Are you guys doing any privately host, like you're taking their model, putting it in onto your hardware and running it locally? I'm, I'm curious because a lot of firms have constraints around that with the types of projects that they're doing.

Um, not only with. What information can go outside of the network. Right. But also just like, I think this is also part of that trust thing too, and and control thing. So where do you guys stand on that? Or is it a, a little bit of everything.

Patrick Chopson: So like we, we do have to abide by FedRAMP style stuff, you know, in terms of like what, what hosting it yourself is probably the one of the least secure things you could do. Uh,

to be

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Patrick Chopson: uh, AWS if, if you're in their, one of their super locked down data centers, your data is a lot more in terms of if you're making, making tools.

So, like, in some cases, like, uh, web-based tools can be more secure than a local application. But, um, when it comes to like, sharing your model something with a model, like it's, I don't know. You there's Open AI is probably the one that's taken the, or Claude, to be honest, or the with from Anthropic. Those two are focused on winning government contracts and so they

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: created versions that are more secure than others. Uh, I think the biggest risk you could do is like, try to use like deep seek or one of those open source models that you don't know who created it and try to run it locally. That would be like, to me, the most risky thing you could do.

Uh, 'cause you

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: know what biases went into it. I think you, I'll oftentimes think it too, it's like this is a continuum and if you design your code where you can swap out the engine, which is how we design everything, we'll swap, we'll swap out our model every time there's a new model we could switch from, know, one model to another without any. Problem. You know? So I think like you just have to design your system such that the brain can be popped out. Anyone can be put in, uh, fairly easily.

And because, you know, things are,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: you start building something to the time you finish building something, even if it's a few weeks, it'll already be out of date.

So as well just kind of like, focus so much on like the, I don't know, I, I just focus on making sure that it's something that's backed by a entity that's trying to win contracts with the federal government.

That'd be

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: that would be my, uh, advice, uh, if I, from a security standpoint.

Evan Troxel: Okay, well, final question, I'm gonna turn the tables to for you both and you're putting you on the spot, and so do you guys have any questions for each other? I, I know that that to me, like may, maybe this, maybe this podcast sparks something there, but I, you know, Eric, do you want to, do you want to jump, I mean, I would love to pass it over to you and just say like, what, what have we, what do we need to get into the end of this episode before we sign off?

Eric J Cesal: Um, I, I really do have a million questions, Patrick. I hope we, we talk again soon. But, um, I guess if I had to pick one, um, you mentioned something earlier about, you know, larger firms disseminating technology or, or maybe even your yourselves passing that along. How do you see that landscape unfolding?

Because, you know, there is, really kind of an unfair. Situation. Uh, I don't know if it's unfair in some sort of moral philosophical sense, but you know what I mean. You have large firms with staff that can dive into this AI stuff, and then you have a whole bunch of very, very small or one person firms, um, that maybe don't have the resources or the expertise.

And I've just been struggling to understand how that plays out. You know, do we end up with like 10 architecture firms in the future because they kind of captured everything during this AI wave, or is there some technology transmission whereby, you know, large firm pioneers, something and to the way the chat, uh, open AI and, and some of these other companies have been working like, we'll give you the model that's like three months old for free and like you pay for the new one.

How do you, how do you see all that playing out?

Patrick Chopson: so I guess I look at it this way, like in private equity where you roll up firms and combine them together, they kind of are shooting for a 10% of the market to create a major player. So like when you think about I think will happen. Like there'll be, someone will come along and start rolling up small firms to create a new large mega firm. think that'll happen. I don't, when I look at, I've in large firms, there's so many. The multi-office firms that are out there will struggle because they'll be hard to enforce a top down. Like AI adoption strategy individually within those firms will be brilliant people. There'll be certain offices that may be more or less using ai, but like, I don't think that, I think being a large firm right now is a disadvantage.

Uh, it's kind of the dinosaurs versus the mammals situation here. Um, I think if you're a smaller firm, you can enforce a, a more aggressive technology approach. And if you're a principal, you can, like, if you're the one who learns it first and then enforces it, you can kind of like say like, look, you either can work here and do this, or you can go work somewhere else, but I know I can, you know, build a firm that's gonna do this thing. I think that's what you'll see first is that the smaller firms may actually it on faster and. Maybe not like five person firms, but like a 30 person firm is a good example. that size is probably more nimble and more than likely the principles can get aligned around a particular spend or investment approach. So I do see that probably happening and then I think you'll start to see that as the smaller firms that have adopted AI grow a little bit larger. We'll see a, right now there's a hollowing out. We have the small to big, it's too big on the top, too small on the bottom. So I think we'll see more of a graduated.

I. Range. There'll be the boutique firms who are never gonna use ai. And you come to me 'cause you want your building hand drawn.

I think that will still

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Patrick Chopson: But then there'll be the

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Patrick Chopson: are like ai. You don't wanna use AI for your project, where the old, old school people come to us because we're, the expensive Louis Vuitton handbag kind of thing.

Like, that'll still happen too. So, but I think there'll be a continuum of people in the middle though, who are all using technology to deliver a unique level of design service that far exceeds either the large boutique firm the outside or the tiny, tiny, you know, firm that works for the homeowner. You know, there'll be like those guys in the middle that, that group will become probably 50% of the market is my guess. Um, in the next five to six years, you'll probably maybe 10, you know, if we wanna be conservative, but know, at least by 2030 you'll start to see some. Some firms that are like in that middle ground, probably occupying more and

Eric J Cesal: Hmm.

Patrick Chopson: of the, buildings that affect the maximum number of people.

Eric J Cesal: Interesting.

Evan Troxel: Patrick, your turn. What do you got? You got a question?

Patrick Chopson: I guess. Like man, I'm, I'm just thinking like, I need to hire a lot of people. So as I, so as I'm thinking about like, you know, new folks coming out, I've been engaging a lot with, uh, Casey Castor, you know, over there at S Arc and some of his students, I've hired them they're really kind of well fitted to this problem.

You know, they're kind of, they

Evan Troxel: Mm

Patrick Chopson: use ai, they have experience like doing some random project where they may or may not have had success in creating a building. But certainly something really interesting is the idea that's being explored. just wonder, like, as you look across the educational landscape of like what we need to do to kind of help folks get ready. What are you seeing that's been the most successful at teaching? 'cause I'm actually teaching a lot of people who are, are hiring in-house, uh, to do these

things. And it's like,

Evan Troxel: sure.

Patrick Chopson: what are you finding is a more successful way to help kids overcome, like, know, the whole like, oh, AI can just make anything.

But does that mean, like the meaning of it, the, like the, the true soul of what you're making? Like, I don't know how, is there anything that you found that's

successful with them?

Eric J Cesal: No, you gotta give me the hardest question. Um, no, I mean, it's, it's super challenging, right? Because I mean, I, I am old fashioned enough to believe that you really can't be a good architect unless you build, you know, like unless you've like, been on the job site and swung hammers and like that, that touch and feel of materials, that that execution of the process gives you the intelligence to, um, intelligence broadly speaking, um, to actually like design things in, in the right way. Um, and I think not to cast dispersions on, on architects who don't um, you know, they, they have a role as well, but I think that, um. You know, we need to stay connected to that in some way. And I worry a lot for education and we've already seen this effect show up in other professions like medicine where, you know, the AI is not good enough to do what the senior person does, but they're good enough to do what the junior person does so that junior person can't get into the job market and start making those, you know, early mistakes and, and gaining that experience.

Um, so I think that's a broad systemic problem. And I would address it by zooming even farther out and perhaps being more useless. Um, I think AI is going to fundamentally change what we hire for. you know, working in disaster zones, you know, is funny. You know, I would hire a lot of architects and I was always prioritizing certain things. Adaptability, resilience. Uh, humility, um, you know, people who could be humble in front of a problem that they didn't necessarily understand. And, you know, when I survey the architecture, job boards we're still hiring in the same old way. You know, we're like, I want somebody who knows this software and has worked

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Eric J Cesal: kind of project and, and this sort of

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Eric J Cesal: think those considerations are just getting less and less meaningful by the day. in terms of training people, I always found that if you hire that person based on, I hate to say it, but the non architectural qualities, you know, the things you can't teach, um, you know, courage, resilience, uh, adaptability, um, personability, that sort of thing. Um, then they can teach themselves at some level, right? And they can adapt to whatever's coming and they can learn from the twists and turns that, you know, the world is bringing. Towards them. So, I mean, I think that as educators we have to be cognizant of that shift as well and, you know, talk to ourselves about, you know, the skills in the future.

Like they're not gonna be like this software or how to do like this calculation or, or something like that. I think there are certain things that are going to be demand as we fully realize an AI future, and we have to teach to those and you have to hire to those. So,

Patrick Chopson: yeah.

Eric J Cesal: Yeah,

Patrick Chopson: I, I just seem like when I'm looking at folks that are successful, it's the problem solvers who are really abil the ability to think your way out of a paper bag sometimes is like what I've seen as the quality that I'm always looking for. Uh, but I've really seen that like, an uneven. Ability of people to reason their way out of a problem, uh, when, you know,

uh,

Eric J Cesal: No, and I think it's challenging in architecture because I think design training has a way of marrying you to process. You know, we, we kind of go through school in those early parts of our career and we develop methods that work. You know, I, I design with a micron pen on yellow bum wad, and that's just like how I things.

And architecture rewards that kind of monogamy because like, you can produce great results consistently. Um, but, you know, bag or no, like being able to say, you know, this is what the problem is, so this is what my reaction should be, and if that doesn't fit with the method or skills that I have, gotta get new skills, develop new methods.

I think that's, that's what we're looking for.

Patrick Chopson: yeah.

Evan Troxel: Change management. I mean, it's so difficult. I mean, you talk about just kind of like this. Re you, you're, you get used to the way that, that these tools work. They, that you get rewarded for that. And that just re this reinforcement learning. I mean, it's, it's hard to escape those loops and especially, I mean, it takes 30 years to get into a position of, you know, stability in, in this industry

Eric J Cesal: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and then what, right?

And then, and then it's like cruise control turns on and like, don't mess with, with this system. Right. Um, and, and I we're, there's a ton of that going on too. And I, I think that the, one of the biggest things that I keep seeing is. There's kind of this cheerleading by certain individuals in this industry that are like, use ai, and it's just so generic, right?

It's like architecture has to transition to, it's like super generic. It's like, well, what is that? And, and I think it's just that on some level, it's like the message has to be that simple. And at the same time it's so overwhelming because tool fatigue and headlines constantly changing. And even we're saying it today, it's like, well, it didn't do it three weeks ago, but now it does.

Right? And it's like, how do you keep up with that? And so a lot of that is just, all of these things are putting pressure on people. And, and at the same time it's like, well, like the project deadlines are, are, are looming, right? We gotta, and, and so we're gonna do it the way that we've done it because we know what it works.

So, uh, ugh. Tough situation. It's a tough, it's a tough situation to be in. For sure. Well, thank you guys for taking the time to have this conversation. Thank you both for asking the best questions at the end. That was, that was amazing. Uh, and we'll have links to both of, uh, Eric and Patrick in the show notes for this episode, so that you can connect with them and read Eric's writing and see the latest on the AI first firm that Patrick is championing at Cove.

And this is, this has been fantastic. Thank you both so much for, for your time today.

Eric J Cesal: Thanks you both.

Patrick Chopson: Yeah. Thank you.

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SummaryIn this episode of TRXL, I spoke with Christopher Parsons of Knowledge Architecture about the evolution of knowledge management in AEC—from KM 1.0’s basic capture and storage, to KM 2.0’s community-driven sharing, to today’s emerging KM 3.0: knowledge embedded directly into the flow of work. At the center of KM 3.0 is a new set of cultural and technological shifts, powered in large part by artificial intelligence.

We explored how AI has become the same kind of inflection point for KM as the web and social media were in previous eras. It’s not just about better tools. It’s about building a smarter, more responsive firm that knows what it knows and can act on that knowledge when and where it’s needed. Language, clarity, and culture are now just as important as software and systems. This episode is a roadmap for firms looking to evolve how they work, learn, and lead.

“Language is the most powerful knowledge management system we have.” – Christopher Parsons

Key TakeawaysHere are my top takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

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When I hit “record” on the first episode of TRXL back in 2020, I honestly thought I might make it to ten episodes—maybe. It started as a COVID project. I had podcasting experience over at Archispeak (now in our 13th year!). I had the gear. I had some ideas. And I was pretty sure there were a handful of people worth talking to about how technology influences the evolution of the AEC industry.

So I got through the first 10 episodes and thought I was done. It turns out… there are plenty of people worth listening to. And even more who want to be part of the conversation.

Fast forward five years, and somehow… we’re approaching 200 episodes.

That’s over 200 hours of conversations with the people shaping the future of AEC. Technologists, architects, engineers, software developers, firm leaders, industry disruptors, and enthusiastic tinkerers. Each one has shown up ready to go deep—to share insights, lessons, frustrations, and hope.

The result? A living, breathing archive of where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how we might get there together.

Looking BackTRXL has become a unique space for deep, long-form conversations about the future of AEC told through the voices of technologists, firm leaders, software creators, researchers, and the passionate folks working behind the scenes.

These are real conversations. Unscripted. Honest. And hopefully, helpful.

And while most podcasts fade before they hit 10 episodes (seriously—about 75% don’t make it that far), TRXL is still going strong five years in.

That’s thanks to you.

To the incredible guests who have generously shared their time, experience, and unfiltered thoughts—thank you. You’ve made this a platform worth listening to.

To the listeners and supporters—whether you’ve tuned in since episode 1 or just found your way here—you are the reason this continues to exist. Your messages, reposts, notes of encouragement, and even your challenges have made TRXL stronger.

I'm also deeply grateful to our sponsors. Few companies in AEC tech are willing to support independent media, and I truly appreciate those who have.

Why It Still MattersIn an industry that often struggles to talk openly and candidly about change, TRXL has become a space for honest, necessary conversation. We talk about what’s working, what’s broken, and what we’re building next. These aren’t marketing pitches—they’re explorations. And clearly, there’s a hunger for that.

What started as an experiment during lockdown has evolved into a meaningful, ongoing dialogue for AEC professionals at every level. It’s proof that this community wants to connect, learn, and challenge the status quo.

Looking ForwardIf you’ve found value in TRXL—if an episode helped you see your work differently, inspired you to try something new, or just made you feel more connected to the people pushing this industry forward—now’s the time to help TRXL keep going.

Here’s how you can support the show:

Become a TRXL+ member
Paid membership directly funds this work and makes it possible to keep publishing meaningful conversations. If just a small percentage of listeners joined, it would change everything.
→ Become a paid member here
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My goal is to hit 1,000 YouTube subscribers this year, and we're getting close. If everyone reading this subscribed today, we'd easily surpass that goal. While many YouTubers have millions of subscribers, reaching 1,000 is an achievable milestone for our community.
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If you represent a company that wants to get in the ears of tens of thousands of AEC technologists, leaders, and decision makers, I'd love to talk to you about sharing your message.
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Your support isn’t just appreciated—it’s essential. And it’s energizing. When I hear from you, see the numbers go up, the feedback come in, and the community grow, it fuels the work ahead.

Let’s keep pushing the conversation forward in AEC.

Thanks for five incredible years.

— Evan

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SummaryIn this episode, I spoke with Milos Temerinski, widely known as The Balkan Architect, about his incredible rise as one of the most influential Revit educators on YouTube. We unpacked the journey from hobbyist creator to full-fledged business owner, the power of media as a platform in architecture, and how embracing imperfection can drive professional growth. Whether you’re a BIM manager, technologist, or firm leader, Milos’ story underscores the value of consistent, human-centered content and how technical mastery unlocks new levels of creativity and opportunity.

“Architecture school trains you to be a misunderstood artist. But I realized what we really need are buildings that get built, and that requires mastering the technical side.”– Milos Temerinski

Key TakeawaysHere are my top takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

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Kyle Morck joins the podcast to talk about about the widespread misuse of marketing in the AEC industry. We unpack why firms rely on vanity metrics that don’t move the needle, how real marketing success comes from long-term relationship building, and why personal branding inside firms is just as critical as the firm’s brand itself. Whether you’re in a marketing role, a firm leader, or an individual looking to build visibility, this conversation offers practical insights for communicating with purpose and standing out in a noisy industry.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Watch this Episode on YouTube:Subscribe to the podcast on YouTube

Episode links:Some links on this page help fund our work, and we may earn a commission from purchases at no extra cost to you.

Connect with the Guest* Kyle Morck on LinkedIn * Reynolds+Myers Website

Books and Philosophies Seth Godin’s We Are All Weird + Amazon Link + Explores how brands thrive by embracing niche audiences, a core concept in AEC firm differentiation. * Seth Godin’s This is Marketing + Amazon Link + A roadmap for permission-based, audience-first marketing — deeply relevant for the architecture profession. * Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand + Amazon Link + A powerful framework for simplifying your message and making your firm’s positioning resonate. * David C. Baker’s The Business of Expertise* + Amazon Link + Guides creative professionals in positioning themselves as trusted experts — ideal for AEC leaders.

AI Tools and Emerging Technologies LinkedIn Ads for Employee-Generated Content + LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads + A new way for firms to promote employee posts for better reach and personal connection. * SparkToro: Audience Research Made Simple* + SparkToro Website + Useful for identifying where niche AEC audiences spend time online and what they engage with.

Visualization & Design Tools Canva for Social and Proposal Graphics + Canva Website + Quick and easy graphics generation for AEC marketing teams with limited design resources. * Notion for Content Planning* + Notion Website + A flexible workspace ideal for organizing marketing strategies, social calendars, and brand content libraries.

Networks SMPS: Society for Marketing Professional Services* + SMPS Website + A key network and training hub for AEC marketers and business development professionals.

Psychology and Personal Development Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You + Amazon Link + Offers advice on building career capital and the long game of standing out in your field. * Adam Grant’s Give and Take* + Amazon Link + Explores how building meaningful relationships and giving value often leads to success, resonating with Kyle’s relationship-first marketing approach.

About Kyle Morck:Kyle Morck is the VP, Strategy at Reynolds+Myers, where he leads marketing strategy development for organizations in complex industries. From Fortune 500s to multinational conglomerates, his clients include Boise Cascade, Simplot, BASF, Idaho National Laboratory, and the American Wood Council.

Kyle specializes in helping small marketing teams clarify their role, focus their efforts, and communicate impact in environments where traditional marketing playbooks often fall short. Before joining Reynolds+Myers, he worked extensively in the nonprofit arts sector — co-founding LED, a nationally recognized performing arts company named one of Dance Magazine’s "25 to Watch". That dual background — creative leadership and structured execution — shapes his approach to strategy and education today.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Episode Transcript: 191: ‘The Bastardization of Marketing in AEC’, with Kyle Morck

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Kyle Morck. Kyle is the VP of strategy at Reynolds+Myers, which is a marketing agency that works with small teams in complex industries. AEC among them. His background as both a programmer and a strategist gives him a unique lens into how firms can better connect with their audiences, grow their reputation, and ultimately win better work.

In this episode, we challenge the prevailing norms of marketing in the If you've ever felt like your firm's social media presence is just an internal echo chamber, or that your website traffic stats don't reflect real business impact, you're not alone. And Kyle explains why. We dissect the overreliance on vanity metrics like impressions and likes, the false confidence that those create and why they often distract from what actually moves the needle in a relationship based business.

But this isn't just about company branding, it's about personal branding too.

We explore how the same principles of communication, storytelling, and value creation apply to individuals within firms. Kyle and I unpack how to show up authentically, how to be known for something and how to remain top of mind, whether you're an emerging professional, a leader in waiting, or someone looking to attract the right clients or team members.

A key theme from this conversation is the danger of misaligned marketing, both at the firm and personal levels. if we're measuring the wrong things, we're likely telling the wrong story to the wrong people in the wrong way. And whether you're in a marketing role, leadership, or just looking to grow your own visibility and career trajectory inside of a firm, this conversation offers a wake up call and a way forward.

As always, there's a lot more in the show notes at TRXL.co or in your podcast app if you are a paid supporter. So check those out to go deeper, and you can also help support the podcast by sharing this episode with your network and joining the discussion on my LinkedIn posts or on YouTube, this one lit a fire under me for sure. I love talking to Kyle and I hope it does the same for you. So now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Kyle Morck.

Kyle Morck, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you. Great to see you again. It's been a little while since we've seen each other in person,

Kyle: Yeah,

it's,

uh, been really great to see you reconnect and Thanks are having

me on the show.

Evan Troxel: you're welcome. I, I am happy to host somebody to talk about. Bastardization of marketing in AEC. Is that the right, is that the right title? I think, I think we're going for clickbait here, but, uh, it's not untrue, right?

Kyle: Yeah, like, 'cause it's the bastardization of marketing kind of across all levels, but it definitely hits AEC hard.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. So let's talk about that. But, uh, before we do, let's get an idea of who you are and what, what you've been up to.

Kyle: yeah. So I'm the VP of strategy for a marketing agency called Reynolds+Myers. And we work with generally smaller marketing teams and what we call complex industries. So any type of industry where you've got long sales cycles, where you're uh, you know, based on relationships, selling through distribution, anything like that.

But we do a lot of work in the construction space, building products, AEC firms, uh, all of those, uh, kind of, you know, just industries where you can't really just make an ad and expect people to

show up.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, and we, we had a conversation on another podcast previously when I was working at Tech, the Startup, uh, and. That's kind of where our conversations about this entire topic started. And then as we recently reconnected, I think this is something that's really interesting to me. 'cause I think a lot of times in AEC marketing really just means responding to RFPs and it's a really reactive

situation instead of a proactive situation.

You know, there's, there's obviously social media component to marketing for firms, but I feel like a lot of times it's just kind of like patting ourselves on the backs kind of thing. So here's, here's the awards we won, here's the promotions that have happened inside the business, but it's not really positioning themselves.

I mean, I take that back on some level it is, it's like, here's our people and, and here are the, we, we, we are celebrating their, you know, ascendants inside the firm. And, and on one level, because this is a relationship business, it's great to know who the people are. And at the same time, it. Quote unquote thought leadership.

Kind of that toxic term that I hate so much is it's like a thing that people participate in to generate SEO to have. And I think this kind of underlies our conversation today, which is like the me, how do you say that? It's like the metric of

Kyle: Right.

Evan Troxel: right? It's like, how can we measure how many people are coming to our websites?

How many post impressions are we getting on these social media posts? And I'm, I'm sure you have a lot of thoughts around that whole topic.

Kyle: Yeah, because what I would say part of the problem is, is that you've got kind of that RFP side of the business, which takes up a lot of time. And you know, there's plenty of people that might, uh, be a marketing role within an AEC firm, that

that's all they do

Evan Troxel: Sure.

Kyle: the proposal

Evan Troxel: Right.

Kyle: But what you find is that, you know, when you wanna start growing, when you're trying to kind of go out and actively find some business and get a little bit proactive about it, uh, what you turn to is a lot, you know, social media or content or ads or anything like that. And. That's the place that I think most AEC firms are really looking at the

wrong

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: that they're focused on the metrics and a lot of those vanity metrics and, uh, not really a full understanding of like the way in which marketing could really move the needle for their

firm.

Evan Troxel: Well, let's talk about that. I mean, that, that seems like an interesting position to, like a statement to make kind of the, the initial part of the argument here. And so I'm curious why that's wrong to do in, in this kind. Like, because the context matters, right? I mean, you said it earlier, it's like in a relationship type of a business.

So can you go deeper into that?

Kyle: Yeah, so a big part of what it comes down to is that, okay, so if you're within a firm, and you know this applies to even if you're a sole practitioner on where you focus your time, but where you see this the most is you've got a firm that hires one or two marketing folk, that they have kind of a small marketing department. And what you get into a situation of is that you wanna start measuring ROI of, it's okay, we're making this

investment. And

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Kyle: the people side of it and perhaps on a budget side of it. So then you want to start saying, okay, how do we measure. The success of this. But then you start looking at metrics like, how much traffic are we driving to our website?

How much, you know, how many likes are we getting on these social media posts? Are we getting people to our, uh, social media page? And you'll see a ton. Like one of the most common things you see when you start kind of investing in like LinkedIn posting or something like that, is that if you see the people that are liking the post, it's almost entirely like

people from the firm

Evan Troxel: like an echo chamber for sure.

Right, because you kind, there's like this internal pressure. I, I think maybe it's just,

it's just like, oh, I have to do this because I have to basically show my loyalty for the,

Kyle: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: for the firm.

Oh, yeah.

Kyle: don't even think the people that are liking about it are really thinking about it. You know, it's

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: they see it show

up in their feed, they like

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: if you're the person doing the social media posting and you're like, oh, we got 20 likes on this,

or whatever,

Evan Troxel: Who is it?

Kyle: of 'em

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: the firm.

Evan Troxel: Right,

Kyle: and what it really comes down to is that the metrics that you start to use to kind of try to prove your worth are actually very misaligned from the things that can actually like drive business for a firm. 'cause that's like the, the chances of somebody like seeing a LinkedIn post about flag day or

whatever on your

Evan Troxel: right.

Kyle: page, and then that somehow driving them to, you know, choose to work with you is very

slim.

Evan Troxel: Well, maybe let's take a step back and just define marketing. I mean, because the, my understanding is, and, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw this out there and you can slap it down or, or you can say yes, but the, the idea of marketing to me is. Awareness and marketing. There's a lot of different ways to accomplish brand awareness in the marketplace so that when it's time to make a decision, you are in the short list, right?

Like, to me, that's kind of the, the overall goal because, and, and so measuring ROI, I mean, what I think we'll get there, so eventually, but measuring ROI on exposure is a really difficult thing to do, right? So take, take it from there.

Kyle: Yes. So, and I, I think that brings up an interesting place, like particularly in AEC firms, because, uh. The difference between like marketing and sales is becoming really

muddied

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: the idea has been that, uh, marketing is like a one to many expression where

sales is one-to-one.

So marketing is, uh, going out wide and sales is reaching out to individuals, but especially for like a services firm, you know, like, uh, in my work for new business development for the agency, would consider almost everything I do marketing, but I'm almost always reaching out individually to people to kind of do that work. I'm not trying to make the sale. I'm trying to build relationships and get people to know about us and understand what we are, who we are, all of that. Uh, so I think that that's really muddied. But then in a lot of AEC firms, you know, your marketing folk might be, uh, business development people that really are on

both sides of

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: Uh, so that's the first thing is that I think in terms of like, I, I wouldn't say that that one to many definition is really even right these days. But what I would say in terms of marketing that it is about, uh, getting into that consideration set and then staying top of mind that, uh, when you are, you know, have a project where you're looking for an AEC firm. It obviously depends on who your kind of audience is for your firm, but a lot of times it might be that they need a project done, you know, once every five years or something like that. So, uh, when that trigger comes, what you're really trying to do is that when they start making that short list of who might they be reaching out to for this project, it's that you are at the top of that list and that, know, first you need to know about them, but then you also need to think of them as, you know, the type of firm that, uh, manages these types of projects that align with the type of people that you wanna work with and that you remember them, uh, when the time comes.

'cause it's not really something that, like a c firm has no real. Ability to like produce demand.

Like they can't

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Kyle: somebody that they suddenly should be

doing a project

Evan Troxel: need to spend $50 million right now. Yeah.

Kyle: Yeah. Uh, so you need to make sure that you are still top of mind when that time comes, that they do need

somebody.

Evan Troxel: I think there's an interesting parallel here and, and maybe this is. Rabbit hole. But I think there may be people listening who are like, oh, this doesn't apply to me. I'm not on the, I'm not on the overhead side of the business. I'm in the doer side of the business. And I wanna draw a parallel that I think these principles apply to people too inside of corporate environments because there's this evolution on a career trajectory that people go through.

And I think marketing, per personal marketing has a lot to do with that. And I think you could, you could swap out the word communication, storytelling, maybe not swap out the word, but like, those are the, the, the analogies that I think of when I think of marketing. Um, personal marketing. How do you be the top of mind person when it's time for promotions?

How, how do you become the top of mind person when it becomes. Who do we select to be on the A team for this project? Things like that. And so I think these principles still apply on the personal level as they, you know, to the, to the 1, 2, 10, 50, a hundred, whatever person firm as well. Because like, this is a, a long game and just like a projects are are long, right?

Projects take years and so does your career development. And it's not always the most transparent process either, right? It's, and so there's a lot of positioning that happens naturally in capitalism, right? And in corporate America. So

I just wanted to throw that out there now because I think it's important to kind of think about this from your own level as well.

Like it applies to me as a podcast host too. Like how do I. Get on someone's short list of podcasts that people listen to, for example. Right? So how, how do you, Kyle, get Reynolds and Meyers on the short list of people who are looking for marketing consultants or for, you know, the services that you offer?

It's, it's very similar in concept, the, the

Kyle: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: things that you're talking about.

Kyle: Yeah, and I think that's a great point that, uh, so much of the work that we do, it's not just about kind of the quality of the work, it's also about like the context in which you do that work and making sure that that work is, you know, remembered in the right ways when that

time comes up.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Kyle: it definitely applies to, you know, the firm side and the personnel side. And I'd also say like, uh, from the firm side, even when it comes to things like recruitment, that these are all really important pieces that if you're having trouble finding folks for your construction firm, that this type of work is the same thing

Evan Troxel: Oh,

Kyle: brings people in.

Evan Troxel: I have my hand on my forehead because you just reminded me of like one of my pet peeves that I see, I see this on LinkedIn all the time when people are quote unquote recruiting or, you know, they have openings. And seriously, the, the only text is, and, and I get it, AEC professionals are short on time, right?

Let's be blunt about that. But it just says, know anyone interested. And then there's a link to their, their job opening.

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: like, to me, again, this goes back into positioning and marketing and

recruiting and how do you evolve as a business? How do you attract the, the kind of people that, that you need to take your company to the next level?

And this was a, a project. I mean, that pet peeve drove me to really. Go inside and really think about how to deal with that and, and be an example of, it's so easy too, to stand out. How, how can you stand out in a sea of know anybody interested or it's like, are you interested? It is like, who's interested in what, what do you stand for?

I don't, I don't get any information from that kind of a post. And then what? I have to click on a link, go look at a copy of a copy of a copy of a, of a job that, you know, a job posting. Right? Which is they, they're all, they all are very similar. Let's just say it that way. Right? So it's like, okay, I'm not really gonna get a sense of the company in here.

Okay. Yep. We want someone who works hard and thinks big and goes fast and knows the tool. It's like you Yeah, I've read this job posting a million times. Right? So, and, and then on top of that, know anybody interested, interested in what? Like, again, like I'll just come back to who are you and. When I was running digital practice at our firm, I took recruitment personally.

I wasn't gonna leave it up to the HR department who doesn't know anything about the roles that I need to fill and went deep into, you know, becoming a YouTuber. Like, that's where this started for me, was I'm going to promote what we're doing and who we are and who we wanna be like. Like not even saying this is who we are today.

No, this is who we want to be in the future. And painting that picture and telling that story so that people could then opt in to wanting to be a part of it. And I think that, again, kind of applying this to different levels like this can apply to you on a personal level. It could apply to a team, it could apply to, it can apply to a corporation, it could apply to a marketing department who.

Is trying to attract future customers, right? It's like you, you need to get good at communication and storytelling, but also be authentic about it and say like, here's, here's who we want to be. Do you wanna opt in on this ride with us and help us build that future? And that's kind of, it's interesting that you, like all of that just kind of flashed back at me as you were talking about, about what you were just talking about.

It's like, oh, I just went down this my, my rabbit hole. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw it out there and leave it there and see, see what? You've got to come back.

Kyle: Yeah, that's like, that's, you hit on something, which I think is really key, is that you talked a little bit about kind of the point of view, and I think that that is one of the most important parts

about positioning

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: anything is being able to have a unique point of view and express that in a way that

gets people excited about, uh, joining you on whatever that might be. And I think the reason that so many firms struggle with this side of things that is, you know, harder to measure and all of that is that it's something that takes time and kind of

a commitment

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: and a commitment to

building and testing and talking to people to see what, uh, really connects on that side of things.

So when you add that in with it being hard to measure, then you find yourself kind of. Looking for the easy button or the silver bullet in a lot of ways that it's, you know, we need business now, not six months from now, but all you're really doing when you're putting that work off is delaying, you know, that

six months that

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: takes to get everything working well. And the other thing that I would add to that side when it comes to the, uh, point of view is that not only can that like. Help you in attracting like outsiders to you, but it also helps you in kind of everything that you're creating, uh, that you're putting outside, that having that kind of clarity of focus in something that you internally can really get behind. It just makes like your day-to-day life so much easier in terms of like prioritization and picking what you're trying to do.

Evan Troxel: You, you're now kind of stirring up these thoughts of, of mine around marketing and wordsmithing and you know, the mic things going under the microscope before they go out. And so I'm curious from your point of view. What about that polishing aspect of marketing materials before they go out versus working in public as kind of another end of that spectrum?

Where do you fall in there?

Kyle: Yeah, I think in general that we're way too precious about our marketing material. Like I, I think we get in our head this idea that we've got like one chance that, uh, we're gonna put

something out in the world

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: going to see it right away, and then they're gonna make their judgment on that in that second.

But the reality is, is that most people are paying no attention to anything

you're doing

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: point in time.

Evan Troxel: you for saying that.

Totally.

Kyle: and even if they are paying attention, like most people are usually pretty, uh, like. Open-minded about things

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: see one piece from you that doesn't connect and then six months later you produce something that does connect, they're gonna be paying a lot more attention to that thing that connected than the thing that didn't connect in the past. So yeah, I think that that's a big issue within, uh, marketing in general is that we, uh, do a lot of kind of perfectionism that like, you know, it's very common to have clients that wanna spend like months, you know, going back and forth in internally making adjustments to things before they, uh, ever have a customer actually looking at the piece where the more you can get it in front of customers, get feedback, iterate, the better off you're going to

be.

Evan Troxel: There's an architect that I talked to who I used to have a prolific social media posting, and it was all done by by him and, and maybe his partner, but you know, they had a growing staff. I was, I saw him in person once. Anthony Laney is his name, and Laney la is, is the name of their, their firm. And so people might recognize that, but he super nice, super down to earth guy.

Very, very polished looking social media presence. But I talked to him once about it and he said, one of my rules is that it has to be fast, and if it's not going to be fast, I will not do it right. And he, he recognized kind of the value of his time, number one, but also that it didn't have to be absolutely pixel perfect before he put it out because, and this kind of ties into one of my kind of guiding principles, which is, it's about the, the big picture.

It's about the whole story. It's not about the little pieces along the way. They, they may tie together in weird ways or whatever over time, but. It's, it's like the body of work. It's not the specific piece of work. It's like this podcast is not necessarily about a particular guest or a particular episode.

It's about the entire body of work and the connections that we can draw between those episodes and, and what we, that's to me an interesting, like that's what design is, right? It's like connecting dots that were not previously connected, but also just kind of weaving a story, a new way of understanding because of a different perspective.

And to me that's, that's something to go back to. And I thought that was so insightful of Anthony to say like, it has to be fast. And because this idea of Polish. You can polish forever, right? Before you decide to put something out. And by the time you put it out, it's like, okay, well, number one, the investment's huge into, into getting this done.

It feels like a slog, right? To get these pieces put out because they have to be run through four different committees and this much red tape, and this person who does copy and their, their desk is stacked with papers to do copy on, and so they might get to yours someday. Versus kind of this speedy mentality of just get it out, tell the story.

It's like you said, it's not precious, it's just a little piece of the whole puzzle. Um, and, and I, I think that there's some value in that mindset, and I think that also applies kind of, again, going back to kind of personal trajectories inside of firms, if you have to be vocal, you have to be putting stuff out.

You have to be constantly communicating what you do, what you're working on, what you did, what you're going to do. Does it have to be polished? No. It, it could be in an email. It could literally be three bullet points in an email every week to somebody.

But it's like this constant trickle of information and that stream builds into a river.

Right. Like that overall, it's like you making an impact. It's like over time. Right. And so that to me is, is a very important aspect to communication.

Kyle: Yeah. Like that. That's exactly right. And the, the thing that I would want to add is that it's not about quantity of it. And I know

that's not the point you

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kyle: not about like just posting something

for posting's

Evan Troxel: does. It doesn't need to be on a schedule. Right.

Kyle: Yeah, it's all about having something to say and just

saying it, it doesn't need to

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: doesn't need to be polished, but just having, uh, something to talk about and making sure that people are saying, seeing it is what really matters there. And you definitely, uh, hit on it with, uh, like it's just one piece of a puzzle. Uh, and that's the biggest thing when it comes to talking about the metrics and all of those that so many people are missing is that, uh, anything that you can measure is going to most be such a small part of the overall picture of what actually like led to that business for you. And what you're in danger of is really over-indexing on those measurable parts that, uh, like that. The practice I love to run clients through is just like thinking of yourself in terms of like how you actually buy something. So if you sit down and think about like, uh, you know, a semi major few hundred dollars purchase that you make, that you spend some time thinking about and really try to sit down and understand like, when did I first hear about that brand the

very first

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: What got me thinking about purchasing this in the first place? How long did I spend thinking about that? What type of research did I do while I was thinking about that? And then, you know, what was that trigger that finally made that happen?

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: what do you see? So if you think about that from like the e-commerce side, which is the easiest. way to look at it is that you have a lot of people in e-commerce looking at their metrics and being like, oh, that person clicked on an ad and then bought our shoes, or whatever. So this ad is working really well, but they're missing out on, you know, the brand's 30 years old and they've done all of that work to get 'em so that they know about it in the first place.

That they were already on their phone researching shoes and decided to buy three weeks ago. They researched your shoes because they heard about it from word of mouth, from one

of their friends. And then, you know, that ad might have just been the thing that was the trigger when they were at their computer at the right time to make that purchase.

But then if you say, oh, look at how well these ads are doing, then you stop doing all of the other things that actually led up

to that sale and

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: over-indexing on

that one piece.

Evan Troxel: Interesting. Yeah, that totally makes sense. I'm curious from your point of view, like what is an effective way of getting your story out? Do you feel like the most effective way right now? What do you feel like that is? So like, and I'll, and I'll just throw this out there and, and maybe this resonates with you and maybe not, but for a long time in AEC when I was running digital practice, the term that was being thrown about quite frivolously was like, you're a technology company.

You just happened to do architecture. And it was kind of like this,

this framing of. Where we're headed and, and how you should think about the approach and, and especially as it comes to like delivering projects digitally. Right. Um, and, and one thing that I used to say was we, we, we call this digital practice and some days it's just gonna be called practice.

It was already just the way we did things, but we had to call it something for people to pay attention. And then, and then once we got through whatever we were going through, eventually we could say, yeah, just this is now the way it is. But, but when it comes to that analogy and media, I actually kind of feel like now it is like everybody's a media company.

Every company's a media company. You happen to provide whatever service or products as well. I'm curious if that resonates with you. Like, do you have to be doing this kind of a thing to, to get noticed, to get that exposure? Like, like just kind of give us an idea of the current situation that's going on out there.

Kyle: So the, what I would say is the most important thing is. very first thing you have to do is have a really clear understanding of who your

audience actually is.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: actually particularly hard, like, uh, in the architecture side of AEC firms, that there's so many different job descriptions that might be, you know, the ones looking for an architect.

There's so many different kind of places that, uh, like, uh, kind of stages that someone can be

in when they're doing that.

Evan Troxel: Sure.

Kyle: search. So I'd usually like start, if you were trying to really like, think of this from scratch is trying to understand like who have been your best clients in the past. Like what type of people are they from both a, you know, uh, job title perspective or whatever that might be.

But also from like a psychographic perspective of like, what type of people are they that, what was it about you that attracted them, uh, to

you? Uh,

Evan Troxel: How do you find that out? Like do you just go back and ask them like what, or is it like you're, I mean, obviously you're doing some kind of an analysis here.

Kyle: Yeah, like customer interviews is so powerful and it's not just about like your, like, you know, I'm talking from the perspective of past clients you've had, but it's also just anybody that might be a potential, uh, client in some way, shape, or form. And that's part of what I talk about with, uh, marketing and sales side becoming really blurred, is that some of the best marketing you can do is reaching out to potential

customers to interview

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: to ask them, uh, what draws you to a firm?

What's your thought process when you're doing that? And that gives you a good opportunity to kind of start building out that relationship with potential customers. But a lot of marketing folk are really hesitant to kind of have that one-on-one contact with, uh. Clients, whether it's like current former

potential clients.

Evan Troxel: of the, like the vulnerability aspect of it, or what do you think that is?

Kyle: Yeah, I think that it's the vulnerability. I think that, uh, depending on your culture, like if you have any real type of like sales culture, you can feel like you're like

stepping on feet

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: marketer

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: you know, somebody else owns that relationship and you can't get in the between that. Uh, but I also just think that it's something that, uh, is time consuming and scary

in a lot of ways that it's, you know, it takes time to set up those interviews and there's, you know, the vulnerability of reaching out and potentially people

are gonna say no

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: you,

Evan Troxel: want to hear No. Yeah,

Kyle: I think that's a

hard part of it.

Evan Troxel: sure.

Kyle: but it's very worth

the time.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: And yeah, so, so going back to your original question around the, uh, what's working or like, what I would recommend these days, so like once you understand who your audience really is, and, uh, you know, the, there's a huge importance to niching as well, and this is part of like the marketing side of things doesn't work independently from like the business strategy side of things of understanding, you know, where your market is, where you're making the best profit opportunity, what have you.

So working side by side with your leadership to make sure that you've got kind of a. Perspective on who you should be going after. But that niching side is really important. Even if you're like a super large firm that can take on, uh, a bunch of different types of projects and a bunch of different verticals, you still, for your marketing, it's really useful to like, at least pick a focus for the next

quarter or

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: it's, uh, the biggest opportunity part for you or what have you. And then it's really about just understanding. Where are the people in that audience spending their time and what's a message value? Anything that I could provide to them

in that space.

So a lot of times, you know, that can look like just interesting content on LinkedIn. If your audience spends a lot of their time on LinkedIn, then you know, you could get interesting content with an interesting point of view in

front of them. But if

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: don't, then you need to be thinking in other ways.

And that's where it comes back to, you know, those customer interviews to really understand where they spend their time, where they're finding, uh, new ideas, all of

that.

Evan Troxel: How, how do you define where your audience is? Like what, how do you go about figuring that out? Is it, is it where you're getting engagement because you're putting stuff out there? Or if you're not putting stuff out there, then, then where is it? Where's it coming from? Mm-hmm.

Kyle: so that's a, another side of that like to measure, uh, piece is that, you know, the, if you really think about, so like I, I've hired architects in the past, uh, my past life. I was a, uh, I led some nonprofits. So we did, you know, built buildings that hired architects for, and if you think about like, the way that that actually comes about, like the way you find them, you know, there's the mixture of those little banners that you put up on construction

sites.

Evan Troxel: Just driving by.

Kyle: really meaningful in terms of just that very first,

like, what is

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: if you see those driving

by enough times,

Evan Troxel: I tell you how many times I've seen those signs and the font is so small I can't even read it. Right? And, and so it's like

the, the 55 mile an hour test too, right? It's like driving by, not standing there, not right up against the fence reading it, but driving by at 55 miles an hour. Can I make it out?

Can I remember the three letter name of that firm? What Whatever it happens to be?

Kyle: Yeah. And that's, you know, so the visual design of that, like if it's just intriguing enough that somebody that might be hiring a firm one day

remembers

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: that,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: can be, uh, enough in that sense. But then once you're doing that, okay, so maybe you go to their website and then when you're on their website, is there something there that is intriguing enough that it's like, I'm gonna keep these people in

mind, you know,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: I'll follow

Evan Troxel: Make an impression. Yeah.

Kyle: of social, you know, and that's that where it comes back to that point of view.

All of those things that it's like. Is there something that stands out enough to kind

of remember you?

Evan Troxel: Right.

Kyle: then, you know, so maybe you've got an, uh, like email is super powerful, but a lot of people do email really wrong because they focus their email entirely on like, how can I tell everybody about us?

Instead of being like, how could I provide value to

potential clients?

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: maybe you do that Google, but then there's like, Hey, we do a monthly newsletter that's focused very much on this specific, you know, niche idea. Like, I don't know, I don't, it doesn't matter what it is. If you're got a big focus on refrigeration, there's people that are gonna go crazy about your refrigeration news.

You

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: there's something for everybody in that space, but they're much less likely to kind of engage if it's just, here's. You know, some awards we got or something like

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: to find a way to provide them Value is

the biggest piece

Evan Troxel: So, so you have to do that homework part of it, right? Which is kind of have the content there waiting for, and I, and I've even heard, depending on who that audience is, hopefully you have like different landing pages that really hone in on who that is. If, if you can get that specific about it may, maybe your business doesn't allow for that.

But that to me is, is one of the things that the affordances are there to be able to do that it's up to you to execute on that. It's like, like starting a new podcast. You don't start it. You don't publish it out there with one episode because it's like, well what else is there? I'm ready to binge this po.

You have to have stuff there waiting for people before you even promote it in the very beginning or else like you, it is like, what are the chances? Like most podcasts don't go beyond 10 episodes anyway, right? So what are the chances that. That they're gonna stick around if you've only got that one thing to listen to.

And a lot of people will go to a, a podcast listing and see how many episodes there are to see if it even has staying power to see if it's worth their time. Because subscribing to something is an investment, right? It's, it's the same as following somebody on social media. If, if, if people you're hoping people will follow you or your brand on, on social media, it's like you've gotta have stuff there or else like the chances are they're just gonna walk away before, before clicking that button to to follow you.

Right?

Kyle: Yeah. And, and so many people focus like if they, so, uh, you know, content is obviously something that's been around for a long time that I'm sure most AEC firms have a blog or something that they're putting together or toyed around with like an ebook or something like that. The problem most people make is that it's so generic that they're focused on like SEO or something with their blog content, or it's just, you know, cool ideas for buildings or whatever that, uh, their ebook is that there's not really anything that like connects with.

Like, uh, I'm the type of person that would work with

your firm

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Kyle: like, you know, you're speaking to me. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong around this is that, you know, having a. Ebook that brought in five new clients would be an amazing, like return on investment for the vast majority of firms. And most people are looking at kind of how many downloads is

that getting or whatever. But it would be way better, you know, if you had 10 downloads and five of them converted because it was made so specifically for them versus 10,000 downloads and

nobody cares about it

Evan Troxel: And, and can I, can I like lower the stakes a little bit? I, I feel like obviously that would be amazing, right? If you got commissions based on eBooks, but I think it's like, okay, well what next to me? It's like there's a progression and it's so, it's like the if for for me to sign up for your mailing list and then those people.

Click onto the next thing to download the ebook, and then they click on the next thing to I, you know, book a call. I don't know, maybe that's too much, but you have to kind of think multiple steps down the sales funnel as it were. Right. To, because that's what actually qualifies that ROI, right? It's like you get from, because going from ebook to commission is a huge step.

So what are the, how can we reduce that friction? I mean, I know you were using that as an example, right? But it's like, how, what are, and I'm just saying like, these are the things that people need to be thinking about. How can we reduce the friction to actually see what's working? Because downloads of eBooks, who know, who knows who cares?

Like what did you do with it? Like if it

Kyle: And that, that's exactly the point is 'cause yeah, like none of this is direct

response marketing.

Evan Troxel: Right,

Kyle: nobody's ever going to download something and then, you know, call you, 'cause they have a project that next day,

Evan Troxel: right.

Kyle: well maybe they would, but then they're already so far like. Close to the project that they were probably just, you know, looking at it already after making the choice to reach out to you. And that's another side of, you know, where people start to get misled by the metrics on those sorts of things. But it is, uh, like, I personally don't believe in the idea of the marketing funnel because that makes it seem like it's like a

linear process.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Kyle: the first thing you do is this, then you do

this, then you do this.

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Kyle: But the like kind of funnel I like is, it's something called the awareness funnel that, uh, kind of every customer or client or potential client is in a place, uh, where they're like, have some type of relationship with you at that moment in time. And the goal is to kind of move them to the next stage of that.

So in the awareness funnel, it's like from, uh. to problem aware to solution, aware to product, aware to

customer essentially. But what's important there is about just kind of understanding that almost nobody that your marketing is going to reach is in kind of the buyer

ready stage. So everything that you're doing is just trying to build up that trust, build up that relationship with you, uh, keep them interested in what you're doing.

So when you're looking at something like an ebook, you know, that can be very powerful tool for getting across your. point of view, and if they then went on to join your newsletter or whatever, that's great. But in reality, it's just like that engagement with that ebook is the thing at that moment. And that's all that really matters is that, uh, category that they're building in their mind around you.

And then the hope is, is that they'll see something else from you at some other point in time because you are staying in kind of the world that they live in online or in the real world or whatever. It reminds them of kind of. That point of view that they have around your firm, and then maybe there's another piece that they engage with there, an event, any, uh, YouTube video, any of those things that it's not about trying to like move them into this funnel and move them down.

It is very much just about like having as many touches as you can that keeps them building up that trust and relationship with you and just kind of affinity towards you so that when they eventually do need your services, you're the one that they think of.

Evan Troxel: You remind me of two things. I'm gonna try really hard to remember the two things when I finally get to the second one. Uh, so hopefully that happens. But the first one is, there's a book I read, marketing Genius, Seth Godin. Right? You, I'm sure you're aware of Seth Godin, but he wrote a book

called, I mean, he's written a lot of books, right?

But the one I'm thinking of right now is called We Are All Weird. And I mean, it's really just kind of about the magic of the internet and people being able to find their tribe out there.

Kyle: Right.

Evan Troxel: And like to your, to your point of niching down, right? It's like people are very, like firms wanna offer lots of.

Project types, lots of verticals. Like we do all these, we can do any building, we could do anything for anybody. And then they water themselves down so much by being everything to everybody that they don't know who they are. Right? It's like, well, we, we do it all and we do, we will take whatever. And so then you have to start, take, taking all these low morale projects, I call them.

Right. Just to feed the beast. And, and so then you get unhappy, uh, staff and they end up leaving. And a lot of turnover because the, you've gotta do the crappy projects. And, and then there's, there's the other types of firms out there who like get weird, right? And by I don't mean that in a derogatory term at all.

I mean, it's just like, well, we do this really specific thing, or we do these kinds of projects for these kinds of people and they're really specific about those kinds of things. And that, that to me is what I'm talking about here. It's like. So, because you're creating an alignment between your Audi, you're, you're being really specific about who your audience is and, and who you are, because these are the kinds of projects you want to do.

And this is something that I forgot to bring up earlier, but I wanted to, which is like when you're looking at who your audience is, knowing your audience, you said, right, like, you wanna know who the best part of your audience is. You wanna know exact, you wanna identify exactly who it is you wanna work with and who the, what the kind of projects are that you want to do.

Because if you need to focus on that so that those become the reality. Because if you don't, you're just gonna get distracted with all the other crap that comes across because you have to do it right now because you've gotta feed them, feed the Beast, right?

Kyle: Exactly. Yeah. There there's two. There's two ideas that I recommend that everybody has and. Definitely marketers, but I think this is something that applies to business as a whole, and that the first one is your ambition. And what's important about this, so like lots of companies will have like their mission or vision or values or whatever, but your ambition is really about like, what type of company do you actually

wanna build?

Evan Troxel: Hmm

Kyle: like the one place that I say this is

about looking internal and not about looking at your customers. It's like, you Know your firm,

Evan Troxel: yourself first.

Kyle: wanna have?

Evan Troxel: Right?

Kyle: are

you trying to make?

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: do you wanna do? And like the, the example I use is if you're building like, you know, like a consumer package good of some sort.

Like let's say you're making purses, there's a big difference between I want this purse to be available at every Walmart in the country. Versus I want to have a boutique, uh, store in, you know, the four major cities that sell the purse. And like both of those can be very successful, but the type of work that you're doing to get to that point looks very different.

And it's very much about like the lifestyle you wanna live, the, uh, type of work you want to do, the type of, creative,

all of those

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: But it should be a pretty like pass fail thing of like, we either have accomplished this

or we haven't

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: it's. Uh, you should be able to just know in five years time if you were successful doing that without it being kind of

up for chance.

Evan Troxel: And what

Kyle: know

that, oh, go

Evan Troxel: I was just gonna ask, like, well, how do you, how do you recommend people position themselves? Is it, is it really clearly, like I. We do this for, in this way, for these kinds of people. Is it like super specific, like a one sentence? I mean, it's not even an elevator pitch, right? Like to me that's, that's kind of what you're talking about.

It's like when somebody goes to your site, you know, we build websites for architects, it's like something like that's plain speak and that simple, but it's also like, here's who we serve. And, and it, and you could, you could obviously add a little bit to that, but not, you can't go too much because then you'll lose people.

If, if it's goes beyond six seconds of, of reading.

Kyle: There's, there's a framework that I believe this is somebody named Steven Wesner talks about that I would also recommend anyone that's running firms, there's so much good content on the like, marketing and digital agency side of

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: completely relevant to running an AEC firm too.

So there's lots of good information there. Steven Wener is somebody that's a big person on kind of the biz dev

side of agencies.

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Kyle: but he calls it the x, y, Z framework, which is exactly what you said. Plus one, it's, we do this for this audience to

help them

Evan Troxel: Accomplish whatever. Yeah. Okay.

Kyle: so that, and that's a key part there is that it's not just about the work you do, it's the kind of outcome that you help them get. And having those three pieces together, uh. Really helps people just kind of see, is this for

me or not?

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: that's actually in a really useful thing to have people kind of self-selecting in

that way.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. You're reminding me of like visual, I mean, probably as it counts for many senses, right? But most of the work that's going on is you're filtering out stuff,

Kyle: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: right? And so for you to be able to be that precise with your messaging. Then allows people who are not the right fit to filter it out, right?

But for those who it is the right fit to hone in and say, oh, like, it's so specific. It really helps say, because you can't be everything to everybody. Like let's just say that really plainly, right? You can't be everything for everybody. And so if you're really specific about who your audience is, and, and this again, I think still applies to the, the personal focus working inside of a company or the, the single person, firm owner even, right?

It's like,

Kyle: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I think it applies, right? Who, who are you, what do you stand for? And like what are the outcomes that you care about? And then crafting that really simple pitch so that people know whether they align with that or not.

Kyle: Yeah, and if you have strong positioning, your close rate should be. 80, 90% because you're never going to be in a position where you're doing proposals,

uh, that

Evan Troxel: no reason.

Kyle: of a good fit, that they aren't already. Uh, like the, the concept is like they're agreed on principle before you actually get to like, pricing and all of those pieces of it, because they are actively wanting to work with you or your firm. that's the other part of niching is that it makes it from a marketing perspective, that you've gotta really focus like, okay, here's the 500 clients that we wanna work with. It's completely possible to, you know, just boots on the ground. Make sure that all 500 of them know who you are. And if you can know that, like, uh. Mix that with your point of view that you know, clearly speaks to that audience, then that's what can really get you into that expert position. It's not about being, you know, LinkedIn influencer famous or whatever, but if you can get all 500 of those businesses to think of you as an expert in that space, then you're going to be winning.

And that's the other side that that niching and positioning helps you with is your focus on that side of things.

Evan Troxel: Do you have like a framework of how to do that? Like what I've used in the past is this idea of like a persona or multiple personas like you who like be, you're not just really identifying who your target audience is, but you give them a name and they have a job. Here's what they do when they wake up in the morning.

Here's what they do throughout the day. Here's what they do before they go to bed. And the reason you go through that exercise is so that you then look at everything you produce or want to produce, think you want to produce, let's put it that way. And then say like, does, does Jennifer actually care about that?

Right? From a, from a personal, like, who is this person? Can we be in her shoes to figure out if she would be interested in this? Do you guys use a framework like that or is that, is that old? Is that an old way to do it? What do you think? I.

Kyle: Like it's, it's definitely, uh, conceptually like the right thing. I personally don't do like full fledged personas because I feel like we get too focused on the. Demographic side of that. So that's like age and things like that. Uh. Where I focus much more is the psychographic side in terms of like, what's their values, what do they care about,

what's the problem

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Kyle: are being kept awake at night about? And that's what I want to have a really clear sense of for my customers. So, uh, when I say like, we focus on small teams and complex industries, there's two sides. To that, the small team side of it, that there's a lot that comes with being a small marketing team and all of the different hats

that you're wearing.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: we have a really strong understanding of what it means to be a solo or three person marketing team. The complex industry side of it is we know the struggles that, uh, marketing teams have in trying to like, defend their budgets to leadership. We know how hard it can be to, uh, explain just what your product

is and

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: those things, or to track, you know, money's actually moving and what actually moves the needle.

So that's where I focus a lot more. Um, but you know. Starting as simple as like a job title or a vertical can be really useful. So, uh, a AEC firm that I worked with in the past, they just happened to have some engineers on staff that were like experts in refrigeration for

grocery stores.

Evan Troxel: that earlier example, it was a real example. Yeah,

Kyle: exactly. Um, so like that's something that, you know, there's only so many people in the world

that care about

Evan Troxel: I was gonna say,

Kyle: for

Evan Troxel: I was gonna say they care. Yes.

Kyle: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: And we're glad they do.

Kyle: yeah, but that's still. Can be pretty good business if you can make sure that everyone that does care about refrigeration in, uh, grocery stores, knows who you are, that can be a pretty good part of your practice.

So it's those types of things. And then once you get into that, you know, they're gonna have specific pans, they're gonna have specific, uh, things that they run into that most firms that they talk to

don't understand. So your ability to talk their language to address those pains, that's gonna be your strongest selling point in a

lot of ways.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. The, the words come up several times. Now it's sales. Right? And I think for a lot of architects, that feels like a dirty word. And, and I'm just curious your perspective on that because I, I don't, I don't see it that way. I see it as like, yeah, this is what designers do. This is what architects have to do.

Kyle: Yep.

Evan Troxel: You need to sell. And again, it, it maybe people feel. Like use car, car salesman, kind of around that. But, but I don't feel like that at all. Like the, the, this, the world is sales, communication is sales and, and positioning is sales. So I'm, I'm curious from you, you're nodding already, but just go ahead and tell me what, what you think about that word and or, or if there are alternative words that people may accept more.

Kyle: So there's, there's two sides to it. I think there's one is kind of the outbound side of things, and I think on that side, you just have to get comfortable with the idea that you're going out to sell something. But part of your goal should be that like the people you're reaching out to aren't feeling it as you're

trying to sell to them.

Evan Troxel: Mm,

Kyle: about

building relationships that it's about getting to, know them, provide value to them, all of that, just so that they come to you when the time is right. Once you're in kind of the process. Uh, I think that there's nothing dirty about sales because what you need to just keep in mind is that, uh, are providing them That like, if you believe that you can actually help them, then you're doing them a favor by. Leading them through the process in the way that you, uh, believe works best that. You know, if you're like, I guess, you know, obviously some people in AEC sell to homeowners or whatever, but generally it's two businesses that are

working with each other and businesses know they need to spend money.

So there's nothing like kind of, uh, taboo about that conversation that a lot of people are scared to talk about the money or anything like that. But it's just, if you come at it from a place of, you know, uh, you have a problem, I think I'm well. A position to help you with that problem. And through this process, I just wanna make sure that you get what you need out of this.

And that's like a ton of, when I'm doing like, kind of, uh, qualifying conversations with potential clients, like, uh, and it comes back to the positioning, all of that. A good handful of them, I tell 'em like, we're probably not the right fit for you. 'cause either the budget's not right or what you're looking for isn't right. And my goal is really just to help 'em. But if the thing that's gonna help 'em is yeah, working with us is your best fit, then I'm not, you know, take

no shame in

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: that of I want to

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Kyle: for

Evan Troxel: like you said, you're, you're delivering value. And to me like that, what that ultimately means is what you are giving to them is at least equal to what you're charging, if not worth more, right. Than them going somewhere else to get it or doing it themselves or whatever. Right. And, and so I think a lot of times I think professionals really know this.

I, I, I don't know if architects really know this, even though they're technically professionals, but it's like the value of hiring because architects like to do a lot of stuff ourselves, right? Like, we'll, or we, we can do that. We don't need to hire somebody to build that website or build this intranet or do the marketing or whatever the thing may be.

Right? Um, I, I feel like because we're up for a lot of challenges and we know how to work hard, but. But it's like when you're hiring somebody to, to do something, it's because it's worth it. Right? And, and, and that to me is what we need to understand about ourselves is not that just they have to hire an architect because we can stamp the drawings because it's required by law, but it's way better than that.

Right. And so this ties back into that idea of like, understanding your audience too, right. And niching down because then you're having a value conversation with those individuals about whether they're going to hire you to provide these services and, and products. Right? So

Kyle: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: to me, like it, it all plays into you doing the work that you want to be doing and getting paid handsomely for it so that there is a vitality to this profession, to your business.

That is a success overall. Like I, I feel like there's not enough talk about that in this kind of race to the bottom with fees and undercharging and doing things more efficiently so that we can do more projects. Like, all that to me sounds like, or spending more time doing stuff we don't like that. We, like number one isn't the highest value, but we don't like doing it.

Like, and, and doing stuff that you hate is like literally killing you, right? It's literally destructive to your life force when you're doing those things.

And so when it comes to like understanding that people can actually value what you provide and you can charge more for it because you're giving them a higher value than what it takes to actually do it and, and like it, that relationship gets better throughout that process.

There's a lot going on here that, that's way more than just like what the price tag is.

Kyle: Yeah. And, and all of that goes back to the marketing and positioning and all of those pieces as well. Because what you're when you do that well is you're making it so that people are coming into that sales conversation already, understanding the value that you specifically bring that other firms don't.

So they're already kind of ready for, uh, you know, this is gonna cost more than other people, but I am having this conversation with you because you do this thing that I really value, so it's

worth it to me.

Evan Troxel: And I, and it's not even like an A thing. It's, it's like it's you, it it's personal and, and to me, like the getting back to like building relationships, it's anything that you can do to show people who you are, how you think, why you care about these things. Is that positioning part. It's also, it's like, like this podcast, like people tune into my cus Speak podcast for 13 years because I'm a character in their life.

Right. Because they've tuned in to listen to Cormick and I talk about things over, over a decade. Right. As crazy as that sounds to me. But, but it's, but it's, it's a relationship and it may not be like a personal relationship, but it is a relationship and, and I think that that's such a powerful thing to understand that you could do that and people can pick you out of a lineup because they have heard your voice.

Kyle: Yep.

Evan Troxel: And they, they already know that they want to do work with you. They already know because they've heard you say something else because they, they aligned with something that you said before or they were challenged by something that you said before. It doesn't have to perfectly align. Right. It could just be like, okay, there's this open-mindedness to it.

And the challenge was like, oh, that challenged me to think differently about something or to have a different purpose or whatever it would be. I think that all of that is, is incredible and it leads to you doing the kind of work that you want to be doing because people know who you are. There was a firm that I, I interviewed with back in the day, long time ago, and it was like, okay, well I'm an, I'm a technologist, right?

I'm an internet user, which is, it's like, it sounds so silly to say, right? But it was like, this was back in the nineties, right? And it was like, well, okay, I'm gonna search for who these people are at this firm. And like literally nothing came up. Nothing at all. And it's like, so if you, if nobody can. Find you, how are they gonna have any sense of who you are?

And, and listen to what you have to say and believe it, right? Because there's no, there's not, there's no consensus out there, there's nothing to even go off of. And like you said earlier, people have already done you, you have no idea what they've already done before they come to you. Research wise, search wise, like how, how many times have you gone and you know more about the product than the sales person does, right?

It's like all the time, right? This is how people operate. And so it's, it's

Kyle: also

Evan Troxel: different in this context.

Kyle: that's important there too, is understanding. A lot of times they're doing that research on other sites, on YouTube, on things

you have no control over. So, uh, like the pieces that people are actually looking at before they're making those decisions, you rarely actually have any control over them anyway.

So all you can try to control is the things people are saying about you

elsewhere.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I'm curious if you have good examples of, I don't know, like if we, if we can keep it in the domain of, of architecture, but maybe, maybe we, we can go outside of it. It doesn't matter to me actually of, of people who are doing this well. Um, brands that are doing this well, what you're talking about

Kyle: I don't, I can't think off the top of my head of any, uh, firms that I would

like point

Evan Troxel: a damning statement, Kyle.

Kyle: yeah, and, and I, I will be fair that I don't pay a ton of attention to, but that kind of goes back to, you know, if we're talking about LinkedIn, for instance, like. I wouldn't really recommend to any firm to regularly post to their LinkedIn page.

Like, you know, maybe post once a month, just so that if somebody's looking, they know that you still exist. Like the importance of LinkedIn is going to be much more like your subject matter experts

and things like

Evan Troxel: People,

Kyle: there.

Evan Troxel: yeah.

Kyle: Exactly.

Evan Troxel: accounts. Yeah.

Kyle: yeah, so there's a lot of people out in the world that are doing this well, that are there making a for themselves and, you know, that comes across to their business that they're attached to. Um, but like, I'll, I'll give you one example that from, so like I, my background is actually as a programmer, I've been building websites since I was like eight. So that's where I kind of started

all of this,

Evan Troxel: There were no websites when I was eight. Kyle.

Kyle: Well, and then I, it was like Angel Fire in Geo Cities when

I was eight. So,

Evan Troxel: All right.

Kyle: I'm not, not that young. Uh, but the, a really great example of this in the kind of d web development space that there's a company, uh, I won't even say the name of the company because they don't deserve it at this point, but, uh, there as a company, they build like a database as a service, right?

So it's like one of the most boring kind of concepts, like even people that are super nerds aren't going to care about their database as a service. But they hired, uh, a great guy called Aaron Francis to run their YouTube channel, and he was able to build this into this like, really successful channel that was all about databases.

So like, one of his most popular videos was, uh. somebody was tweeting about the company and how they were having like a problem with a slow query. So he reached out to him on Twitter and made a whole video about like helping him, uh, troubleshoot this problem and then like, kind of showing that actually it was user error and not a problem with the pro product and all these things, and just doing it in this really personable way. eventually this company that's like, you know, VC backed everything decided. actually we aren't getting any ROI from this YouTube channel, even though you're getting millions of views, we don't believe that CTOs that are who we sell to are watching YouTube. So they, uh, fired Aaron and, uh, his kind of team there and shut down the YouTube channel. Uh, that company's not doing great these days. Uh, but Aaron's doing amazing 'cause he's been able to kind of sell, hey, uh, actually people do buy based on YouTube in this space because the people that are watching are the developers and everything making the decisions and telling their CTOs, this is what you should be looking at, that it's an understanding of how that sale is actually made, that the VC backed company kind of wasn't willing to understand that. That's the type of thing that, uh. AEC firms could really learn from is just like most people would never think that having a successful YouTube channel is going to help your AEC firm. That if you're not like just talking about yourself for

something like that,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Kyle: know, having, you could create a channel, like, you know, I watch a ton of YouTube channels just around like, you know, history of architecture, interesting concepts within it.

Like you could easily create a channel on that that would have, you know, massive ROI for a, uh, AEC firm. If you're able to kind of take the jumps that it takes to understand how that would actually drive business, that it's not about somebody watching a video and then reaching out to you. It's about that long-term

play on it.

So.

Evan Troxel: Man, like I, I talked to earlier about how I started going off onto YouTube and uh, I just, I didn't even ask for permission to do that, but it was obvious to me that my future staff members were going to see what we did there and want to be a part of it. So if you go back on my YouTube channel, you'll see my digital practice videos that I made.

And they were very vlog style, and they were very, like me talking to you, it was like, it was like, you know, I had defined who my audience was and I was speaking to a, a person that represented that audience. And the things that I was talking to them about were where we were headed as a digital practice.

And to me, um, maybe you can't do that anymore, especially in a larger firm, right? There's so much red tape around this kind of stuff. Um, smaller firms can definitely leverage this. And, and so I'm just curious, maybe start to wrap up here, but the, the, the idea of firms not leveraging individuals who are willing to put themselves out there.

I mean, it's, there is a vulnerability aspect to it. It's like not easy for people to sit in front of a camera and talk to it like the, like we're doing here and, and. Get ideas across and, but, but the only way you get better at it is by doing it. Right. And so you, again, it goes back to that preciousness aspect of it as well.

Like they're, they don't need to be perfect. You, you just need to be, make it a practice. 'cause practice even maybe it won't make it perfect, but it, but it makes it something that you can do. And it starts to weave, you know, this rug that we all use that ties all the rooms together, right. But it's like one of these things where you, you don't, I didn't ask for permission to do it.

And like I said, maybe in a big firm you can't do that. But it's one of those things where, where it makes, it can make a huge difference. And a lot of firms, because they have so many committees and red tape and all these things, and they can't. Like, let some person be a quote unquote star or misrepresent them by saying the wrong word at some point or whatever.

Um, like they're leaving a lot on the table. And, and like, it always kind of blows my mind that there's serious rock stars working at and at these, these firms. And you wouldn't know it because,

Kyle: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and, and so like going back to this idea of personal LinkedIn pages versus brand LinkedIn pages and which ones approach like personalities and people are, a lot of the reason why people get hired to do things is because they wanna work with you, right?

They wanna work with that person on a project. And I think a lot of brands are, are, you know, companies are leaving, leaving that leverage where it is like they, they, they won't even use it.

Kyle: Yeah. And I, I, I think there's an understandable level of risk

that firms

Evan Troxel: Sure.

Kyle: of because if you're, uh, really investing in, uh, a employee of yours on them kind of building their own personal brand, the fear is if they leave, they take that with them, right? And that's like, you know, the database company I was talking about.

That was exactly what happened is that they, uh, invested in somebody that built up a great, uh, kind of. Following and then when he was gone,

that went with him.

Evan Troxel: But they didn't, but they fired him.

Kyle: yeah, it was

their choice.

Evan Troxel: Right. Right.

Kyle: I think that that's what it comes down to is that the pros way

outweigh the cons. And the things that kind of mitigate against it is being a good

place to work

Evan Troxel: Right,

Kyle: taking care of your employees in that way. 'cause even if they le leave, if they're leaving on good terms, that's not going to damage your

brand at all.

Evan Troxel: right. Right.

Kyle: firing them, if they were really, uh, somebody that was, uh, drawing an audience is obviously gonna impact you

negatively.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: of like there's only upsides if you treat them well, essentially, that it might be a short term investment or what have you, but it's still gonna be worth it while it's

happening.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. You think about how there's a lot of times where firms will invest a lot of training into people, whether it's an app like Revit or whatever, and, and those people leave. Like, was that a bad thing to invest so much into them so that they learned the right way to do the things? Like not really. They went somewhere else and they're gonna take a good habits to another place, and that's gonna actually help the profession.

It's, it's not so much about us, us, us. It's about we, right? Like the, the bigger picture, again, that benefited from your investment into that person. And if you can't figure out how to keep them there like that, that's something you should also be looking at, right? It's like figuring out ways to keep those people happy who are truly like a magnifying glass for business development or marketing or promotion or, or storytelling, whatever those things may be.

There's a lot of analogies that you could use there that I think like a lot of times people will look at it this one particular way, which is like, oh, that it's, it's so risky to give that person a voice. And again, kind of going back to this idea that everybody's a media company. Like if, if you don't have, if you have people who are willing to do it and you're not allowing them to do it, of course, like work with them, of course, like set out guidelines and set out like goals and all of those things.

But don't like completely smash it because they'll just go somewhere else where they can do it. Right. Like that. Would people who wanna do this stuff are gonna do it?

Kyle: And what I would recommend too, 'cause I, I feel like people come into this in kind of two states of mind. One is either they're just against it entirely, or the other one is like, we need to be on all of

these different channels, or we need to have

a blog, a YouTube, a TikTok, all of

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: But what I would do is just look inside your firm, see where your talent is, and if you see somebody that seems like they could really excel in an area, if you gave them the chance, whether that, you know, like I wouldn't put much. Uh, stock in an AEC firm's TikTok channel. But if you've got somebody that can TikTok content that gets millions of views around your AEC firm, I would let 'em do it all day. You know, like that's a, gonna be a unique spin that you can really take

advantage of.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Kyle: if they're a great writer or just great at building relationships on LinkedIn or whatever, uh, looking to kind of that talent first is where I would focus on.

Evan Troxel: it, it, you, you're bringing to mind like this idea of again, like where your future clients are and future clients could be in two years, it could be in 20 years. Like the speed at which firms move through projects is not fast, right? So you kind of do have to do a lot of different things because your future, your 20 years from now, customers are, some are in a different place than your tomorrow customers, right?

So if you think about who's buying buildings or these services that, you know, design. Like sometimes the right answer. Well, it's like, yeah, there's, there's multiple categories. The right answer is email, and it is Facebook, and it is Instagram, and it is TikTok because those are different audiences and you actually need to, but you don't put the same content on all those things.

Right. You,

you, you are specifically kind of identifying who those, who those audience members are, and you're talking to them in those channels. If you could do all those things

Kyle: Yeah. And, and the key is that you're not doing all of those things just because you're supposed to be on those places that, so the, i I talked earlier about how there's two things that I recommend everyone have. The first being ambition. The second is what I call like a theory of your marketing, which is having a really clear, like, kind of just path of like, if we do this with these types of people, we think eventually this will happen.

So an example of that. Is. Um, so we work with a firm that is essentially tourism, right? And we, there's like two campaigns on the digital side that work together. One is a YouTube campaign, which is just video ads at the front that are, so this is an Idaho focused, where we live a campaign and it's highlighting like there's great skiing, great mountain biking, great rafting, all of these things in Idaho. And the only metric that we're doing for that is can we see an increase in the amount of Google searches for mountain biking in

Idaho? Things like that over time. Then when you search for mountain biking in Idaho, we have an ad there that brings them to. Our client's site related to that content. So those two things work

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: it's with the understanding that, you know, travel is a, a decision that's made over years.

You know, that people hear about a potential place that they want to travel to and then that goes in kind of their bucket list, but they might not actually plan to. Visit there for five years or whatever. So the first step is getting 'em into that consideration step. And then as they're doing that research phase, then we want 'em to come to our client site, which brings them to a specific part of Idaho.

That's the

goal, right?

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: there's two sides to that, but then it's understanding, you know, the YouTube videos that we target, it's a very specific like type of person that's kind of like an adventure seeking 30 something year old with disposable income. So they're watching videos about mountain biking and you know, knowing how expensive those are and all of that.

We kind of have an idea of the type of person

that is

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: big picture. It's about kind of that overarching like piece that it's not about just being on every channel, it's about understanding like with our overall theory of what we're trying to make happen, what are the channels that really

matter in that?

Evan Troxel: And how long of a time span is that arc that you see doing that, running that experiment for, to start getting some data in that you could actually analyze?

Kyle: Yeah, so we're really looking at like on the like YouTube side, so we're not measuring like the YouTube ads at all because there's not really anything

to measure on that,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: Like they are 15 seconds ads, you watch 'em, there's like, we don't expect anyone to click through or anything like that. We just wanna lay that groundwork and then it's more over like, know, six months to a year we're measuring, can we see a lift?

Like is this something that is getting people to search for these terms? And we're not even going to try to say that there's like a one-to-one that our ads are definitely what's causing that. But it's just like, what we know is that when we spend money on YouTube around these topics, we see an increase in the amount of people searching. These terms on Google. And that's kind of where it comes back to that theory, right? Like we can never prove that really,

there's not really other metrics that matter to it. It's more of like, that makes like a kitchen table logic. So then we're gonna see what we can measure within that space. So we call 'em like

indicator metrics

Evan Troxel: Mm,

Kyle: not the thing, the thing we're trying to make happen is actually people considering and researching traveling to Idaho, but this is an indicator of how well we're able to kind of

influence that.

Evan Troxel: interesting. And, and can you put a ballpark number on what it takes to do something like that?

Kyle: It's like what you. Get there. When it comes to like something like ad spend is that first you just want to have, like you, what you have a ballpark number of is much does it cost to get in front of, you know, a thousand people in this space, right? So then that's where you can start to kind of measure, like when we get in front of, you know, a hundred thousand people, this is the lift we see. If we doubled that, you would expect to see kind of a round double that lift. If you don't, then you're reaching probably like diminishing

returns on that, that

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Kyle: more expensive to show those ads to people than the kind of result you get from it. So that's the type of measurement you can do, but it's also just when you know kind of, uh. How much it costs to run YouTube ads. You get kind of a good

sense for it

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Yeah,

Kyle: that's where it comes back to kind of having experts in those spaces can really help on some of these, uh, types of things.

Evan Troxel: social media. It, it, it's interesting because I think there's a kind of an allergy maybe, I don't know if this is just personally, you know, like my age demographic or my profession demographic or if it's an industry demographic, but there's this allergy to, you know, like I said earlier, like this allergy to the words sales, but also advertising, right?

And, and like, uh, AEC like we talked about marketing being kind of just re reactive to RFPs and not like proactive marketing and positioning and. Direct mailers or I don't know what, there, there's a lot of ways you could, you could start to shift, you know, where your, your eyeballs are coming from, um, if you're a small firm, right?

Like when's the last time a small firm sent out mailers to an age and a and a, an income demographic in some targeted area that says, Hey, I do high-end bathroom remodels. Like I specialize in them.

Specifically niche down. Right? How many people are considering doing that? Well, probably quite a few, right?

It's a big value raise for the home. You know, especially if people have lived there for a long time, you know, they're gonna need to, like, it's, it's repeat work. Uh, it's a cool design problem every time you do it potentially. Um, when, how often are people doing that? Probably not very much. Right? They're just waiting for someone to call them based on some, you know, low ranking Google search.

'cause they're not doing Google ads or anything. Um, I think there's a lot of easy low hanging fruit when it comes to this kind of thing.

Kyle: yeah, and that's the thing when it comes to advertising that again, it comes back to that kind of positioning and value, that if you have nailed that positioning, you're going to be getting in front of people that have, that actively have the problem that you're trying to solve. And they're going to actually value seeing a potential

solution for it.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: you're, uh, in that bathroom remodel pace, like if you're finding the right targeting of the type of people that actually want to remodel their bathroom, and you know, it's also fine. Like, uh, when you're. Are kind of looking at ad spends or things like that. You actually don't want to get hyper targeted.

You just wanna make sure that everyone that you wanna reach is

kind of within that.

Evan Troxel: In the pool.

Kyle: if you know, if you're sending out 10,000 mailers or whatever, if only 500 of 'em are the people you're trying to reach, it's fine that the other 9,500 see that or whatever. It's not a waste of

money, it's just

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: it takes to get in front of

those 500. But those 500, they're the ones you care about and they're going to be like, yes, this is exactly what I

was looking for.

Evan Troxel: Right. I'm curious what you think about, okay, so going back to this idea of, of brand versus, or company versus personal LinkedIn pages, uh, boosting posts. Uh, what if, what if per, you know, somebody works for a company, they're putting up something that could potentially start to tell the story about attracting, you know, future team members.

Um, what about boosting those kinds of posts for, you know, $10 a day for seven days and seeing what those numbers bring back?

Kyle: Uh, so are you talking about Facebook specifically

Evan Troxel: LinkedIn,

LinkedIn,

Kyle: Yeah, so a few things to it, uh, that depend on the platform, but in general, like I think that paid social media is going to always perform better than organic social media,

and

Evan Troxel: I,

Kyle: there's a

Evan Troxel: I

Kyle: reasons

Evan Troxel: tell you, like, I totally agree. I, I read something recently, like somewhere between one and 3% of people who quote unquote follow you or are your connections on LinkedIn, uh, you know, a professional social media, the quote, air quotes, you know, there. But, but this idea that that between one and 3% of your following is actually gonna see your posts.

I mean, it's, it's built around what we're talking about right now, right? Which is boosting posts.

Kyle: what it comes down to, and this is like something that's really important for any marketer that's getting any into any sort of like digital ads, anything to understand is that the way that the giant media conglomerates make their money something you need to be fully aware of. Anytime you are, uh, doing

something on their platforms, that Facebook makes their money through the ad.

So they're very incentivized to not show your posts. Uh, LinkedIn kind of similarly is really focused on trying to, uh, kind of build up. The platform is this

relationship

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: there's been studies that show that like, I think personal pages or something like four or five times more likely to have their posts shown than

like business pages.

Like I follow very few businesses on LinkedIn for that reason. But, uh, you almost never see them in your feed and that's just what the incentives are for both of those. So it is kind of pay to play really if you're a business. Um, so I would say, you know, that you don't. I wouldn't spend a lot of time or effort on organic for the business page on either side of that on Facebook.

If you think your audience is on Facebook than it can be worth looking at paying some money to get in front of that audience on LinkedIn. I think that it's way more about like you're way more likely to get a showing of a good personal post on one of your

employees that

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Kyle: have something

interesting to say

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Kyle: anything you pay

for.

Evan Troxel: And that's the reason I bring it up is I think companies could be bo boosting people who, who work for them, who are posting things that could. Add to their brand, but, but then they're, they're footing the bill. But, but because that's a really effective strategy to get things out in front of people.

Kyle: And there's actually a new ad placement from LinkedIn to get very, you know, on the executional side that allows for businesses to boost

personal posts. So it shows up as like, you know, uh, the name of the person, but then it says like, architect or whatever at blank firm

sponsored by

Evan Troxel: Oh, nice. Yeah.

Kyle: So that's a great way to kind of, uh, if you wanna start, kind of boosting a, the profile to kind of kickstart the organic side of it that might get them some followers that can then lead to more organic

growth for them.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people are probably thinking, uh, this feels gross. Uh, but I'll just say like, this is a game and you play the game or you don't play the game. And, and so what, what the angle I'm coming at this from is like playing this game. So to work to your advantage. And there is something to be said for social media platforms, knowing their audience, like they know more about you than you probably know about you than, than your close relationships know about you and.

They are very, very effective for targeted advertising. And like, don't dis like, so like the reason I prefaced this whole section of the show around an allergy to this kind of thing, like we kind of have to get over that. I think if you really want to be known, and that's all I'm just saying is like, like there is value in being known, right?

Going back to the whole premise of this episode with marketing is just being known for whatever it is. And so these are really, really, really, I think, effective ways to do that and using these tools for what they are absolutely built for. You think Facebook is meant to get you to connect with your family?

It is absolutely not. Like that's where it started, but that was in service to building what it has become. Right? And so, I mean, Kyle, you're the expert here, but what, what do you think about what I just said?

Kyle: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And if you feel gross about it, it comes back down to like, if you are the business you're doing, if you think that it matters, if you think that you are, you know, bettering the world through the work that your firm is doing, and you're not being, you know, unethical or lying or whatever in your advertising, then. know, that's what it takes for your firm to win and do more of the work that you want to do, that you think is

bettering the world.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kyle: you can't be kind of afraid to get in and play the game, as you said, if the, uh, even if it feels, you know, 'cause like it's not, I don't think anybody has a problem with it from like an ethical sense.

It's almost more from like a brand sense or something that it's like if I'm out in the world actively looking for business or something, that, that reflects poorly on us. But that's why it really comes down to like that value side of it that, uh. know, clients can smell a desperation if you're coming in into something like desperate to get them to come to you.

But if you're going out and providing value and just knowing like, Hey, eventually this will come back for us, then that's just a win-win

for everybody on it.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, Kyle Morck, thank you for sharing your expertise with us today. The company is Reynolds+Myers. Is that right? Did I say it in the right order?

Kyle: Yes,

Evan Troxel: I, I think about it in the opposite order. Reynolds+Myers, and, and I mean I'm just gonna pitch TRXL podcast right now, is a great place for AEC and technology companies to get in front of an audience of people who care.

And I think Reynolds+Myers is also in the same boat. Like, if you like what you're hearing from Kyle and you like what you're hearing here on the podcast, reach out to us. I mean, and, and should we be ashamed to say this? I don't think so. Like this is exactly what we're talking about and we've worked hard to get to this point, and I really appreciate you coming on the show to talk about this subject.

Um, I, I know more about it than I probably should know, but at the same time, like, I don't know. There's so much that I don't know. So I'm really happy to have you come on the show and, and share.

Kyle: Yeah. I really appreciate you having me. And I think to the point you just made, that that's part of it is that, uh, the world makes marketing seem way more complex than it actually is or should be. So a lot of people like feel like you, that there's a lot you don't know. And, uh, I think that's a big part of what I try to do in the world to just help, you know, guide 'em in the right direction and let 'em know actually it can be simpler than, uh, it's been made out to be.

So with that said, you know, I'm happy anyone who wants to reach out and chat, I'm always happy to help 'em through their marketing and just help set 'em in that right direction. So please

feel free.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, there's a lot of architects who are gonna take this on themselves because that's what we do. Right.

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: but to the point that we talked about earlier in the podcast, like reach out to an expert who knows what they're it, it saves so much time. It saves so much pain of learning. That whole craft from scratch and not having the time to do it and all that stuff that comes along with any of these really specialized roles.

Like you bring a lot to the table, right? Like, and that to me is, is really where the value is. And I'm willing, I'm willing to pay for that kind of a value if I can to, to get somebody to is a literal shortcut to,

Kyle: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: to something else.

Kyle: And, even for me, you know, even if there's no potential work from it, if a 30 minute call can help somebody from, you know, wasting a bunch of money going in the wrong direction or chasing after shiny objects, then you know, that's a value I want to provide to the

world regardless.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kyle: always happy to do

it.

Evan Troxel: Cool. Alright, well I'll have links to Kyle and Res Myers in the show notes for this podcast among many other links and, and things based on what we talked about today. And, uh, until next time, Kyle. Thank you. All

Kyle: Thank you so much

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SummaryIn this episode of TRXL, Evan Troxel interviews Gavin Crump: architect, BIM consultant, educator, and content creator behind the Aussie BIM Guru YouTube channel. Gavin shares his journey from stumbling through a firm’s Revit test to becoming a globally recognized voice in AEC technology. He discusses why he chose to stay in AEC rather than move into tech/startup land, how programming unlocked creative freedom, and how introverts can find a voice and build influence through authenticity and generosity.

“There’s gotta be a better way to do this.” – Gavin Crump

Key TakeawaysHere are my top 5 takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

View Details

Christopher Parsons joins the podcast to talk about about the evolution of knowledge management (KM) in the AEC industry—from KM 1.0 (knowledge capture) to KM 2.0 (knowledge sharing), to KM 3.0 (knowledge in the flow of work). We explore how AI is catalyzing a shift toward real-time, firm-wide knowledge operations, and why success in this new era isn’t just about better tools—it’s about cultural, process, and operational change. Christopher shares the origin story of Knowledge Architecture, real examples of KM 3.0 in action, and why knowledge is now a team sport that requires clarity, community, and intentional communication to unlock its full value.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Watch this Episode on YouTube:Subscribe to the podcast on YouTube

Episode Links:Some links on this page help fund our work, and we may earn a commission from purchases at no extra cost to you.

Connect with the Guest* Christopher Parsons on LinkedIn * Knowledge Architecture Website * Synthesis – KA’s intranet platform * Knowledge Architecture on LinkedIn * KA Connect Conference – Community-driven event for knowledge management in AEC

Books and Philosophies Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice + Amazon Link + Introduces the concept of learning through community interaction—key to understanding Knowledge Management 2.0. * Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive + Amazon Link + Highlights timeless principles of organizational leadership and productivity—critical as firms rethink roles and workflows. * Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism*** + Wikipedia Overview + Amazon Link + Relevant to conversations around AI and ethical data use in KM 3.0.

About Christopher Parsons:As Founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture, Christopher is responsible for product development, marketing, and organizational health. He is also the executive producer of KA Connect, our annual knowledge management conference for the AEC Industry. Christopher has been a technology leader in the AEC industry since 2002, including serving as the Chief Information Officer for Steinberg Architects and the Information Technology Director for SMWM (now Perkins+Will).

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Episode Transcript: 190: ‘ An Acronym and Jargon Fiesta ’, with Christopher Parsons

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Christopher Parsons. Chris is the founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture, a software company that's been working at the intersection of knowledge management. Community and technology in the AEC industry for over 15 years.

He's also the creator of KA Connect, a long running knowledge management conference and community for AEC professionals. In this conversation, we demystify what knowledge management KM for short actually means in our industry.

Chris walks us through the evolution of KM through the early days of knowledge capture, which is KM 1.0 to knowledge sharing KM 2.0, and into today's emerging era of knowledge in the flow of work, otherwise known as KM 3.0. We talk about why this shift is happening now, largely thanks to the rise of AI and its ability to deliver relevant information when and where it's needed and why tools alone aren't enough. Cultural process and operational transformation are the real unlocks here. As Christopher says, knowledge is infrastructure and firms that want to evolve must treat it that

As a bonus, you'll hear real examples of how firms are already creating value by operationalizing knowledge. And just as importantly, we dive into the human side of all this, how language metaphors and cross-disciplinary communication play an essential role in making knowledge work for everyone, not just a select few.

A key theme from this conversation, which connects to many other episodes here on the podcast, is that operationalizing knowledge is a team sport It's no longer enough to expect a single person or department to steward institutional memory. In the KM 3.0 era, everyone in the firm, designers, technologists, operations leaders, and executives have a role to play in capturing, structuring and sharing knowledge. And when it works, it unlocks not just better decisions, but better culture, better retention, and better outcomes for everyone.

As always, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes, so be sure to check that out, and you can find that directly in your podcast app if you're a paid supporter of TRXL. And if you're a free member, you can find them at the website, which is again, trxl.co. Lastly, you can really help the podcast by sharing these episodes with your colleagues and by commenting and sharing on my LinkedIn posts. You can also leave a comment over on YouTube to engage with me and other listeners. and now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Christopher Parsons. I.

So, Chris Parsons, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you on this one for the first time. We've, we've talked many times over the years, you've been on other podcasts and episodes, and you've also suggested guests for this podcast. So that's been fantastic.

So welcome.

Officially,

Christopher Parsons: made it,

uh,

Evan Troxel: You've, you've finally gotten there, Chris, I, you know, I, I've just been waiting for, for this one box to get checked and you finally

did it. I can't tell you what

Christopher Parsons: I guess you made it now. I, that's what we should be saying.

Evan Troxel: There we go. Well, I appreciate you coming on and talking about knowledge management today because this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart.

But before we jump into what that even means, uh, tell us like what's your story with within AEC?

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, I was a history major in college, um, and graduated in the middle of the dotcom boom, which for, I don't know if all your viewers know what the dotcom boom was, but our listeners, um, it was a, just an explosion when the internet, you know, took off and everyone was digitizing their businesses and building dotcoms.

And if you were, I mean, I graduated a history major, not a CS major, but if you had a heartbeat and could do anything with technology, you had a job in, in tech back then. And so I was a technology consultant, went around the country working on these projects where we were laying, you know, networks and infrastructure and like accounting systems in for the first time.

Like it was kind of a wild thing to imagine, like putting those first systems in. But that's what my job was, and moved to San Francisco in 2001. Then later that year, or sorry, 2000 do, uh, the dotcom crash happened and nine 11 happened. And I was eventually after four rounds, you know, laid off and started looking for work, um, in the city.

And my kind of constraint that I said is, I'm like, I wanna, I moved to San Francisco, so like, I sold my car and I wanted to be able to walk to work. And I'm like, okay. So my constraint is I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna find a job within the city of San Francisco that I can walk to. And in that time, tech was like dead.

And you could only get a job in tech if you had like 10 or 12 years of experience. Took a massive pay cut. Like it was terrible. So like for someone two years outta college, like that wasn't happening. So I found a job in this architecture firm, SM wm, to write out the recession and then go right back into tech.

That was my plan.

Um, I didn't know that architecture firms existed in the form of more than five people. You know, I didn't know that there were like 50, a hundred. Thousand person architecture firms like that had just never been part of my life. And I just really love this company. Like I love the intersection of art and architecture and science, and we did a lot of public work.

So there's like politics and kind of public policy involved, and the engineers, the collaboration that would happen. I just, I'd go to all of our crits, I'd go to all of our kind of, we call 'em forums for the lunch and learns. I was just soaking it up,

Evan Troxel: architecture. Nice.

Christopher Parsons: myself a lot. I went to a lot of, uh, classes.

'cause I wanted to, Revit came out during that run. And so I, like, I wanted to help the firm with a transition to bim. Actually we tried Acad first, which is a whole nother story. Um,

Evan Troxel: I

Christopher Parsons: and then of it

Evan Troxel: before I taught

Revit too, so I, I'm,

Christopher Parsons: Oh good,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: been there. Yeah, it was fun actually. Um, so I, I did that for five years. So my kind of plan was do this for a minute and then get out.

But like, I actually loved it and then went to another architecture firm, a larger Steinberg Architects became their chief information officer. And for about eight years, I worked those two jobs. And in each of those companies I, number one built intranets and it was a lot harder than it should have been.

Um, and number two, um, worked on knowledge management. And so I kind of discovered that in my first firm. Uh, I kind of built the kind of core IT stuff, servers and printers and email, like the stuff you could do in any company. We had design technology going, we didn't call it that at the time, but like it was becoming digital design, like we didn't know what the terms were gonna be.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: But then this knowledge management thing, so intranet, but A CRM and image management and like all this kind of information system stuff, but as well as learning and development, like that's where my heart was. Like I thought that was the most interesting part of my job. And so after having done that at two companies, I started looking, well, I can either go to a large company like the Genslers and soms and HOKs of the world and like run knowledge management there and just only do KM or I can start a business and work with kind of more small and mid-size firms that I'd grown up in.

And help them with knowledge management. And so did that in 2009. Um, and I didn't know honestly what that was gonna mean. You know, like it's, it's so clear now, like that synthesis, our internet platform was gonna be the thing. But I, you know, there was that, there was some other integration software. I thought I could maybe be a virtual knowledge officer, like one day a week for these firms and get four clients and take Fridays off and send bills, whatever it is.

Um, but it became quick, within the first six to 10 months, it was like, okay, we're gonna do intranet. It's like, that's what people really want. Some people outside of our company had seen what we built, but I built before and said like, if you could build something like that as a product, like we would love, like we've tried to make SharePoint work and it was hard and we'd love to hire you to come in and help us do intranet.

So yeah, that was 2009 and now we work with over 150 firms, um, across the country. We're on version six of the platform. But I think more critically, you know, we kind of realized early on that knowledge management was more than software. It's people, it's process, it's culture. And so we believe that in order to have the kind of impact on the industry we wanted to, in terms of bringing knowledge management to AEC and having people see success, we had to focus on that other stuff, people, process and culture.

And so started our conference, K Connect in 2010 to bring together, you know, we had 30 something people speak at the first one, but they were short talks because that's kind of like when there's a new thing happening and changing, um, everybody's got like a, their little tiny piece of it figured out. And so the best thing we know how to do is create community to help bring those people together and share.

And so that community and the sharing ethos of our, of KA has been there since day one because we really wanted to do more than just be a software company. We really wanted to help lead this movement in the industry. So that's the kind of high level from 99 to two to 2025 that I, that I can kind of tell you about.

Evan Troxel: many things went through my mind. Like when you're, when you're talking about spinning up networks, and I'm thinking Nove networks back in the day and I'm, there's just so many things that we've been through and, and then, know, maybe you can define knowledge management. So, so a

couple things. Knowledge

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: but then you are also saying ka, which is not, I just wanna put it out there. Knowledge architecture,

right? That's the name of your

Christopher Parsons: Thank You

Evan Troxel: it KA

for short. And then the product that you're talking about, the thing that you do is you make an intranet

called Synthesis.

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: I, I'm just thinking of kind of how this has evolved because firms, I just had a, a guest on the show recently. Talk about how like everything would hit for a very long time has just been locked into fold, not locked, but in folders somewhere on the p drive of the network, right? It's sort just like, where's that thing? And it's like, oh, it's on the P drive in 38, 62, 44. And it's like, it's like, really? And, and so this has, we, we've also seen social media come along where there has become, and even before that, right?

We've, we've had live journal and MySpace and Facebook and like this growth of what a social media platform is and that like this idea of an online community, is kind of a mirror or I dunno how you might have describe it better than I can, but like this, it's this other version of your institution, your organization, right?

A a lot of times and, and sometimes there's similarities, but then oftentimes it's like where people go to look

for stuff.

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: And that, like I said, stuff used to be in folders and that was really opaque, right? It's hard to find stuff and, and we're talking about, when you talk about knowledge management, I wanna hear your definition, but these are all the things that I'm kind of thinking of when it comes to, like, there's stuff locked in people's head. There's stuff locked in email, there's stuff locked in folders. And again, it's not locked, like, it's not behind that door that you can't get into, but you have to go looking for it and it's difficult. And so give us a definition of what knowledge management means. Maybe, and maybe it's evolved too. Maybe you can talk about different versions of what knowledge management

has been.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. Um, I'll start with a short definition and then maybe I'll kind of walk back and talk about the evolution.

Um, I think about knowledge management, about connecting people to the right knowledge and the right people in the flow of work. And, um, so when we first, so knowledge management really became like a thing, like a term that got, you'd find it in.

Harvard Business Review or mentioned at conferences kind of in the nineties, but I mean, obviously we've been doing, we've been managing knowledge as species for a lot longer than that. So, you know, going back to cave paintings and oral traditions and books and libraries and universities, like, we've been trying to figure out how to write down what we know and capture it and share it and get it to the right people.

That's a human, very human thing to do, and to build technology and build tools that help us do that faster. I mean, tool building, we share architects and software people share that, right? We like to build things. Um, and so, but in the nineties there, there was something that happened was the beginning of that, of the internet, and you saw a lot of that knowledge that had previously been very analog.

Like I, I don't know if you were in practice when there were still binders of like,

Evan Troxel: yeah.

Christopher Parsons: know, the Yeah, so the HR handbook was pr,

Evan Troxel: in a

binder,

Christopher Parsons: everything was filed in a binder and file cabinets, and it was all paper and hard to retrieve and. If you're working in multi-office, oh my gosh. So what you saw with the internet is you saw this digitization of all of that stuff.

Um, and so you saw the rise of intranets file, servers, databases, all that kind of technology that basically took that knowledge that was captured and made it more available digitally, easier to, you know, kind of search, easier to access. Um, but it was very focused on knowledge capture and it was very kind of top down in a way most of the time, right?

It's like somebody at the senior level of the organization saying, this is how we do things here. And then the digitization became like an efficient way to like push that down.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: Um, in 2007, this is when, you know, I kind of marked social media taking off. So Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, the like, um, this is when I was at that second firm and I started looking at that being like, you know, we could use that technology inside the company, right?

For knowledge sharing, people asking questions across offices, across disciplines. Sharing new things that they've learned or lessons learned or new technology, whatever it is. Like we have a lot to share and, and putting it into place beyond email that could be searched later, or if you join the company after those discussions that happened.

It's not like they were invisible to you, like you could capture them, um, but allow them to be more social in nature and richer with media and that kind of thing. So we started doing that when I was at that second firm, and then that became the Synthesis when we launched. It was a social intranet. So that was like, that was a very big idea at the time because intranets had always been very static and very, yeah.

And so we were having these dy, dynamic intranets and not only was it dynamic, but the, it was democratic and this was, every time these technology shifts happen, there's a culture shift that has to come along with it. Right. And so I remember there was so much resistance to synthesis in, in some firms in the beginning because they're like, well, what do you mean anybody in the company can share?

Evan Troxel: Right.

Christopher Parsons: Like, this is terrifying, right?

Evan Troxel: Permissions.

Permissions.

Christopher Parsons: but then I wanna approve every comment before it goes up. And like, what if they say something wrong? What if they say something inappropriate? And um, what if they tell somebody about this product that we don't want them to use? Like, it was a lot of fear. And like, that seems kind of funny in 2025.

Like we figured it all out, but there was a lot of concern about that. And so I think that's, so we rode that wave into business and like, and this is right when K Connect started, so a lot of what we were talking about at our conference was about how leadership is modeling good sharing behavior or how to get people answers or like tru like trust being so central to knowledge sharing.

There was this, I don't hear this as much as I used to when we started, but people talked about knowledge as power and people hoarding knowledge to retain their power within the organization. Like, I don't know, I hadn't really thought about it until I just brought it up that like, I don't hear that like I used to when we first got started.

I think companies have maybe become more trusting in general or people have understood that sharing and building others is a, is a way to advance. I don't know. I, I'm pausing on that one for a second, but, um, that's a good pro. It's progress. I mean, I think I'm happy about that outcome. And so, like here we are now in 2025 with AI arriving and that's the next big disruptor.

And every time there's been a tech disruptor, it has changed the way we manage knowledge. And so, you know, there's a lot of different ways that people are looking, and we can dive into this if we like, but looking to use AI around knowledge management. But the big way that ca knowledge architecture has been thinking about it has been from AI search and retrieval.

So we've captured all this good knowledge, people have been sharing knowledge, but now I want to find the thing. I've got a question about a pipe or I've got a question about a grab bar or a, a standard, or who's the person I go to. Being able to search across all that knowledge and either find the answer or find the person who can help me mentor me, like whatever it is worked on a certain project like that is now what we think is.

Really, really possible. We're seeing that in our, in our technology and it's really exciting because it's always been, the hard part is like the ca,

you know, to get at the answers. So that's kind of how we're thinking about knowledge management. Now, I named the company knowledge architecture because the firm I worked at, the first one, well both firms, but really the first one did a lot of urban planning and master planning.

And I always liked their presentations and I loved the kind of long view that they took around. You know, we have to think about the whole campus strategy and then it's gonna be this building, then we're gonna renovate that thing and then this group can move over to that building. Like the logistics of it were super interesting

Evan Troxel: yeah.

Christopher Parsons: I saw in a massive parallel to how I thought about knowledge management, you know, like

you can't, there's so much knowledge in your organization, you can't manage it all at once.

And so you have to think and se, you have to prioritize and think in terms of like moves that you need to make. Um, and that could be in terms of systems too. So like when we, you know, talk to prospective client. A lot of times we find ourselves saying we might be the right fit for you in three years.

'cause it sounds like you need to do X, Y, and Z to get things in place before it makes sense to bring us in. Yeah. So that, that longer term knowledge architecture, like thinking about literally the architecture of systems and how knowledge flows within your organization. Like it's three dimensional chess, like I think in a lot of ways.

So that, that's kind of how we got the name. But that, and that's how we think about it too. It's not like there's one monolithic system that's gonna have everything. It's really a dance between systems.

Evan Troxel: One of the things that I, I keep thinking about having gone through an intranet implementation previously too, is like I keep thinking of the word

participation,

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: because you talk about kind of the difficulty that it's. to this point where now it's, it's what's incredible with, with tools like AI is like practically everything is searchable at this point, which has been difficult, right, to

say the least previously when, when you've got a, a giant BIM model, when you've got a long video, when you've got a long audio recording, you've got threads upon threads upon threads of email tossed in there along with all the other spam and all the other stuff.

It's like, how do you find the needle in the haystack, right? Because to, to find the right thing in the flow of work, like you said, it's like, okay, well with, with the least pain possible, right? With the

least friction

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: of this magical thing. It's like, to me is what is so interesting, like, like just the parallel of, oh, if I go to Google and I search for something and I see. A ton of ads or a ton of placed links, right? I have now I have to, like, Google used to be so

dang good

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: of thing, and now it's subpar, right? It's, it's not a good experience. Right? And, and now I go to chat, GPT and I type in a thing and it just tells me, like, it doesn't try to sell me something along the way.

It's not putting, you know, something type adjacent to a product in the way of me finding the information I need. Maybe that'll change in the future, I don't know. But, but just as a, as a analog to what you're talking about, it's like, well, the least friction possible is often what I need to stay in the flow of work because the detours cost a lot.

Right.

Um,

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Evan Troxel: of the things where it's, when we used to talk about it, when we were putting in the internet, it's like, well, do you want to go to the one place? The single source of truth, or, or, you know, because when, when we go out looking for something on the internet, it's like all of a sudden I'm buying shoes that I didn't know I needed.

Right. Because I got distracted along the way. and that, that's, that's a real thing. Right? But I do come back to this idea of participation and, and a behavioral shift to get people to, because you're talking about like, what do I need to do to find the thing

about the pipe or whatever, and it's like, well, somebody needs to put that

information in there

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: to explicitly put that information in there.

Right. I think one of the cool shifts in, in the latest version that what you're talking about of knowledge management is like being able to find the needle in the haystack. That could be a two hour long interview with a principal about everything that they know about antsy thing or some code requirement or, and, and to me, like that's super amazing that that can happen now, the friction to participate is lower because we don't have to. Whittle these pieces out manually and file them in the right place and do all those kinds of things. I mean, what do you think? Just generally about like the way things have kind of evolved in the how we store information, but also how we can access that information to make it less friction. To find the things that that people need when

they need it.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot I like in there. Um.

I mean, there's so many things that we've been doing in knowledge management. I don't just mean at KA and, and even within AECI just mean knowledge management in general. You know, like some of the greatest hits, lessons learned

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: years. You know, there's this notion of critical knowledge transfer, which you were hinting at, or expert interviews that were really, really good ideas.

You know, they recognized, you know, let's take lessons learned. They recognized that like, it'd be good if our firm didn't have to keep learning the same lesson over and over again, and the next time we, you know, encounter this condition or this challenge on our project. We can learn from our past projects that we don't have to just learn the same thing over and over again.

The problem was operationalizing those insights. So somebody writes it down and what puts it in a lessons learned database and now what's the, what's the next person supposed to do? Like, think of all the potential things that could go wrong. Search this lessons learned database on, I. Like, it's just, it's just kind of wild.

Um, like, so what, what you had to do back then is like the only way to get lessons learned useful is to operationalize them and like change policies, change standards, change training, you know, whatever it is, you had to really put them. And that's still a good idea, don't get me wrong. But I mean, even the lessons learned database now has gotten some new life breathed into it because now somebody doesn't have to think, like, the way that we're approaching it at, at knowledge architecture is like, I don't have to think whether it's in a lessons learned database or if it was in a video, or maybe it's in the standard section of our intranet.

I just ask my question and, you know, AI will be smart enough to retrieve, you know, the right answer whether it comes from lessons learned or not.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: so, like, I think it's allowed like, to, to your point, like it's removed a lot of friction from the content creation process. Um, same thing with interviewing folks and to transfer knowledge.

Like it's really hard for experts to write down what they know. For two reasons. One, they're super busy and they're expensive and billable. And finding time

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: hard.

Writing is hard for them. But also, most experts don't know what they know anyway. They don't know what it is that makes them special. Like it's what we call tacit knowledge in knowledge management.

It's silent knowledge, right? So the two types of knowledge are explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Generally, it's how people talk about it. Explicit is stuff that you can write down. It's standards, procedures. This is, these are our rules, like this is how we do things. But tacit knowledge is like, I don't know, you imagine if you ever worked with a CFO that can look at a gnarly spreadsheet and like point to the one cell, they're like, it's because that's off.

You know? Or like you imagine a pilot who can fly a 7 47, and if you've ever seen the cockpit of one of those things, there's like thousands of switches and they know exactly what to do. It's all like compressed intuition. Like they don't, they don't think like, oh, I should go find this button and do the thing.

It's like they just get a, a feeling that something's off or like this is what needs to happen. So. It's hard if you ask then a, an expert to write down what they know, it's very hard for them. So interviewing them is a really good technique. But then the problem was always on retrieval. So it's like how do you then take those insights?

So you imagine somebody searching those past videos using keyword searches or lessons learned using keyword searches, and they get seven videos, 10 videos that are an hour long each. What are they supposed to do? Watch all seven or 10 of 'em. And to, to, it's not, it's not realistic.

Evan Troxel: right.

Christopher Parsons: it's, it's like a break.

It's like we kind of have stacked that capture the sharing and now we're getting this like, flow of work thing. Like that's the big breakthrough of the unlock. That's, that's pretty exciting. Um, I think I answered your question. Oh, I'll say this. The participation part. So now here's what we're seeing is that experts kind of, they knew the, the trick, they kind of know that it was hard for people to retrieve.

So they're kind of a little bit dragged their feet to participate in that kind of stuff. They're like, I know it's good for the company, it's definitely good for the person interviewing me. They're gonna learn something. But like. How does this actually, like three years from now, like, is this getting used?

I don't know. Um, now they know it can be used, and so now they're like, okay, I see this as leverage. So if I'm a subject matter expert and I wanna make, I want to, I don't wanna be the subject matter the only one, I don't wanna be the bottleneck. I don't wanna have to answer the same question over and over and over again.

I wanna empower people if I'm at a job site, if I'm with a client, if I'm on vacation, if I'm at a conference. Like I want people to be able to work and tap into the things I've learned and I wanna like, almost like, I wanna like free up that space in my brain

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: holding that knowledge to make room for new things so I can, you know, kind of continue to lead and evolve and grow and strategize.

So I feel like for subject matter, for both people looking for information like seekers and subject matter experts, this is a really interesting time because I think both of their quality of life, quality of lives, quality of lives are, are about to get better.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

No, that's a really good point. And, and, and so, and this brings up something I've thought about a lot, which is people need to kind of see it to say, oh, okay, it's possible, right? Like, they actually need to see the case study to give themselves permission to do the

thing.

Christopher Parsons: Mm

Evan Troxel: think a lot, I see that a lot in, in architecture.

It's like, oh, I mean, there's always talk about, oh, the hourly business models working for time. Is, is we, we can't do, it's like, well show some other successful examples and then people will give themselves permission

to pursue it or incubate a startup technology startup inside your firm. Well, show me another firm that's. Successfully done that. Right. And, and also talk about the failures along the way so that people know what they're getting into. I mean, there's a lot of different types of examples, but specifically with knowledge capture, it's like, I do feel like a lot of people think, oh, what? You're just like, what is this?

This document's gonna get captured and then no one's ever gonna use it. But I, that really is now very possible to show like, no, actually look like we can act, let's just do a quick 10 minute one, or let's just show you that one that we did with somebody else. And the tools are

there, I mean, to

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: accomplish what you're talking about.

And you've shown some great

examples recently that

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: So

Christopher Parsons: What's interesting about what you're saying is it goes a step further than that because if you now, now the kind of, the new rules of the game are if you capture really good insights, they're gonna get used in ways you couldn't imagine when you captured them or when you shared them as an example.

Um, you know, a lot of people record their town halls or learning and development sessions or lunch and learns or whatever it is in our community, and they upload those into their intranet, meaning, meaning for them to be continuing education. But the marketing and communications teams will wanna ask questions like, what's our approach to mass timber?

And they may be getting results from a lunch and learn a technical debrief that wasn't there. They weren't the audience. Right, but they're trying to describe to the marketplace how the company thinks about a topic or an issue, and it's drawing on all that knowledge that was transferred more for professional development and continuing education.

And it's helping them craft a narrative on how the company thinks about something. So this idea that it can then synthesize knowledge from like multiple different places to help you get kind of a unique answer to your question,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: that's also brand new. Like there's just, we're in the first inning of this thing, Evan.

Like we're just really trying to figure out like all the ways it's gonna help people just build smarter firms.

Evan Troxel: Is that 3D chess, four D chess, what it is, like, it's connecting things on different dimensions and in different vectors. I, that's really interesting and, and I, I love that point because I, I think about like how AI is unlocking this, and maybe even more specifically towards AEC firms in this regard.

Because one of the things that you've talked about in the past is, I don't know if you're the first person to bring this to my attention, but you've definitely like made it more of a, a point that I need to pay attention to, which is this idea of rag, it was retrieval, augmented.

Generation, is that the right?

Christopher Parsons: You got it?

Evan Troxel: good job. I get a gold star. Um, but, but the, the thing is, can you talk about what that is and why it's important here, especially around like vocabulary and jargon within the industry? Because I think a lot of times people are using AI tools you might search for something and it finds something, but it's not the thing you were looking for because it's not specific to architecture.

But I think we've also seen it with like, um, transcription services, right? Where it, it thinks, you said something else than you actually said because it's not trained for your

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: Is that, am I

in the right ballpark?

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, I think there's a few things that are interrelated there. Um, so retrieval log, augmented generation, when, um. When we first decided to build an AI search product, um, we were looking at, so the way that Open AI kind of pre trains their models, I think most people know this by now, so I won't go into depth, but basically it's a pre-trained model on content that was that content at the snapshot of time in which that model was trained.

So when the first, I mean you might remember when 3.5 or whatever came out, like the data was eight months old.

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Christopher Parsons: So that was a problem

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: if you were gonna try and use that for the use case that we're talking about. Um, in addition, if you were trying to train a model, there's all these permissions issues. So principles should be able to see some things that maybe interns shouldn't.

So training a model wasn't good for that. Um, and it was a hallucination issue, like basically, you know, too.

Um, so RAG came out as kind of an architecture. Which basically said, look inside the company, we're gonna do this another way. We're gonna do a search first. So that's the retrieval in retrieval, augmented generation.

And we're gonna pull snippets of like the best content that matches the query intent behind that query, whether it comes from a document, a page, a video, and employee profile, doesn't matter. And then we'll set, this is when we'll use AI, is to kind of summarize, alright, which of, now here's the query, here was the intent.

Here is the relevant content that we have in our company that could answer that ai, please stitch this together into a summary. And then include citations to let people have referenceability back to where that information came from. So that was like a really transformative, you know, for knowledge management.

Like that was really kind of the only way to do this. Um,

trying to train a model, like for an internal use case just is problematic on a hundred levels, not to mention cost and effort and all those things.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Christopher Parsons: Um, so that's, that's rag in a nutshell and it's been really, really powerful. It turns out. That the hard part about RAG is really not the AI part.

It's the r it, it's the retrieval. Like it, it's the retrieval. It's the retrieval. It's the retrieval. It's, it's like, it's so the challenge because it's also the data. Like it's, that's, that's where the hard, you know, the hard, hard thing is. So, um, we've, so when we've released 1.0 of AI search, it was meant to be just like a very general knowledge base, um, search.

So what's the best way to do this flashing thing, or what's a Revit container file and how do I use one? Or, you know, all these kind of general, what's our 401k policy like from benefits to design tech to all of it. What it wasn't good at was answering employee questions. So like, how many licensed architects do we have in California?

Who's the go-to person on this subject? Because that kind of data was stored in a structured database. You know, those were like more structured database questions. So we had to keep working with the retrieval part of RAG to understand the query intent and say like, you know, if it's just questions about licenses, that should be looking at a database.

If it's a question more about, like a more general knowledge base question, it should look to the general intranet. Or in some cases if it's a employee like skills, it might be both, right? Some of that might be in a structured database, but it might be that Evan is listed as the contact on the Revit container file page and maybe he's the go-to person.

So the hard part that we've been working on is not the summarization that is a cool inherent property of these large language models. It's been getting the context and the content to that ai, the right stuff, understanding the context of the question, understanding the resources that people have available within their kind of systems, um, in order to find the right content to answer the question.

So that's been the magical part. So now we're getting into Agentic Rag, where we're using, we're, we're describing all the tools, right? All the content that it has. Here are some tools you have for retrieval. You AI make smart decisions based on this query to use the right tool to look in the right place, to bring the right answer back.

So it's this kind of multi-step looping process now versus a one shot, here's, here's the, here's the content, summarize it so it's getting more sophisticated very quickly, but it's pretty interesting. Did I go too far? Is that, is that a good?

Evan Troxel: think it's, it sounds not for this audience. It sounds super valuable to me too though that, that like you're connecting, let's just call it all the

departments in

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: because firms have lots of, I, you know, I maybe silos, maybe that's not the right word, but Right.

There's these departments for sure. There, there's like, there's marketing,

there's hr,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: risk management, there's QAQC, there, there's all these things. And, and rarely have they talked to each other unless you go directly to a person and then it's like the, the gatekeeper, right? And then you, you schedule the meetings and you talk to the right person and. That what you talked about a minute ago, kind of this, this unforeseen unlock of like tying these various things together with one query and AI can go out into this lunch and learn, it can go over here into this town hall and it can go over into this, you know, somebody's state of the union kind of a thing or whatever, and pull something together.

Out of all that, it's, it's really cutting a cross section through all these different places and, and I think what you're saying now is like with Rag it's like it's actually determining the appropriate place to go

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: based on this kind of training data that it has that, but, but again, like super valuable to like shortcut the line to, to get to where

you're trying to go.

Christopher Parsons: Right. And because we're domain specific, specific with AEC, we can give it a lot of shortcuts. Like if you had to try and try and get SharePoint to do, you know what we're doing, like it doesn't know the details about projects and roles. And I'll give you a really silly example. Um. Out of the box. The AI couldn't figure out that registered architect and licensed architect are the same thing, just like they get,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Christopher Parsons: and, and so people would search for, for license and they couldn't find it.

And so like we're, you know, you build this little context in, we, we have to sometimes provide these contextual clues to help AI find its way to, because like we're coming from a very industry specific problem. Um, you got this interesting thing about silos. 'cause I think silos are an interesting, are an interesting thing.

'cause usually it's used pejoratively when people talk about silos, but they're also quite helpful

Evan Troxel: sure.

Christopher Parsons: many ways. Um,

but where they become, one place that they've always become really tricky and contentious is in information architecture. Meaning how do you organize the navigation of a website or an intranet?

What are the broad buckets across the top? What goes at level one, level two, level three? Like how do you organize information to make it easy for somebody to navigate and find it? And you would get into political wars within companies.

Again, website and intern. It doesn't really matter. Like, it's just like, 'cause you're basically asking very, like there's questions about power and hierarchy and like, there's a lot of stuff baked into that.

Evan Troxel: Who gets the private

office? Who gets the corner

Christopher Parsons: It's the same. It's the same. And like, by putting me in this office space or by putting that this level of our navigation, you were basically saying things about me,

Evan Troxel: something, right?

Christopher Parsons: it says something. And what's interesting, like, I don't remember who our first client was, I think it was Hillary, um, said like, are we still gonna need to care about information architecture in the AI age?

Is this important? Because a lot of the distinctions that get made are artificial. Like there are a lot of things, even though like, I'm trying to think like, I mean, I don't know, like proposals even, like that's kind of lumped in as a marketing thing. But is it like principles are responsible for bringing work into the company?

Proposals is one of the ways that they do it. You know, project, you know, like project managers need to know about proposals. Like it touches finance, it touches like. A lot of the things that we do touch a lot of parts of the business, if not all parts of the business. Like, I mean, design technology is a great example.

Is that it? Is that design technology, is it risk management? Is it practice? You know,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Christopher Parsons: a sustainable analysis tool, like is that, where does that go? Like is it under sustainability? There's all these like false choices we've had to make. And I think what is nice in the future is I think we don't need to care as much about all that and we can really be more focused on what are the biggest knowledge gaps in our company and how do we fill them,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: what knowledge does our company not currently have in our heads or written down that we need to acquire to meet our goals?

Like we can focus more on that part of it and worry less about the structure and the retrieval if that, there's a part of my brain that's screaming out, that's saying, this is a terrible thing to say out loud. You know, because I do think there's still people that browse. I, it's still helpful, like. I'm not saying information architecture is dead and nobody should care, but it's, it's, it's a spectrum, right?

And it's shifting a little bit. Um,

Evan Troxel: ways to do it

Christopher Parsons: yeah.

Evan Troxel: those aren't necessarily, like picking one is not necessarily the right or the wrong answer. That's just a

different way to do it. Like

Christopher Parsons: Yep,

Evan Troxel: to the Google example versus

Yahoo in the

Christopher Parsons: yep.

Evan Troxel: right. Yahoo is a directory. Google just gave you a search

box,

Christopher Parsons: I wish that people that haven't been on the web could go, go Google that and try and look at Prego, yahoo directories and like, this is how people browse the internet. It was, yes. Wild.

Evan Troxel: Double clicking into folders, right into

categories, and then,

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: the

right one. Go Back

Christopher Parsons: Back up.

Evan Troxel: or two, go into a different

rabbit hole. Right?

Christopher Parsons: And then GeoCities came out and it's like, okay, so San Francisco, now I need to go to this specific GeoCities page for the city that I wanna learn about. And now I have to browse that whole direct, whole different way.

Evan Troxel: me of just like working in an office and they, and the, somebody takes it upon themselves, it or some committee to redefine the folder structure for jobs, right? And, and what are the appropriate folders

and, and

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: like, what's the template for that? Where do you put stuff so that people can find it?

And, and so I, I agree like, um. It's better just to not have to worry about all that stuff. And at the same, because it's interesting 'cause I think about my

kids, right? And I

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: they don't even know what files are

necessarily, right.

It it's

Christopher Parsons: right.

Evan Troxel: their phone and the stuff that I need is in the app that I

made it in or

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: it in.

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Evan Troxel: this, it's interesting like the, the way that, the way that it now works is obscuring that kind of stuff because like, it doesn't, doesn't really matter for, for a lot of people. It matters

for some people, right. But

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. It's, it's an interesting evolution in the way that information is stored in, in

surface.

Christopher Parsons: You bring up a really interesting. Point there. There's also this kind of like, um, one of the things that's, that's enabled rag or retrieval augmented generation is what's called semantic search. It's oftentimes called vector search. And so what, when most people think of search, they think of keyword search and you, the precision required, um, in order to find exactly what you're looking for, especially with, I mean, Google's a little bit of an extra case 'cause they've been using semantic search all along.

We just didn't know it. But if you think about anything you've used inside your business, you have to search on the right term, no typos, you know, in order to find what you're looking for. And if you search on

standards and it's actually a guideline, good luck. Right. Um, so like all that naming or what we call it,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: good luck, it's called, it's taxonomy, right?

That's what we call it in, in knowledge management.

So what Semantic search does is it's, it understands actually my kind of more shades of meaning and words that are clustered together. And so when we do that process, we have to kind of prepare all the content for retrieval augmented generation.

Essentially what we're doing is we're putting it into a semantic search database so that it's easy to retrieve. Um, and that's been, that's made a huge difference. It's way more forgiving in terms of getting precision, in terms of exactly what word you search on. Um, and it's allowed people, 'cause if you watch people search, they say all kinds of things.

There's all kinds of typos. And so there's this kind of flexibility, like how they really want to search is just like, type really fast. And then

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: they don't find what they look type really fast again and, you know, just kind of, kind of, it's kind of staccato type kind of rhythm.

Evan Troxel: you

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: It's like,

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: tell you how many times I'm using a tool, like an AI tool, and I, I don't, I, I misspell something and it actually

doesn't matter.

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Evan Troxel: then you go back to a tool where it's like one letter is off and it's like, I can't find what you're looking for. Like,

what do you mean?

Right.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: in such a short

period of time

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: with that kind of thing. And that that's pretty, it's

different for

Christopher Parsons: It's different. It's different. And understanding acronyms is different. It like, there's so many like things that it's unlocking, like especially, I mean, one of the audience, one of the kind of core people I think about all the time are like emerging professionals and they walk in the door on day one and it is just like an acronym and jargon fiesta for them.

Right? It is just,

Evan Troxel: That's the name of this episode right there.

Christopher Parsons: it is, it's wild. I mean, we like to do it as people, but I don't know. AEC just takes it to, I mean, even our industry is an acronym, right? I mean, that's where we are.

So.

Evan Troxel: It's pretty meta. Yeah,

Christopher Parsons: I'm trying to imagine what it's like to be like 22 years old and like, so you're in an a, e, C firm and now you're gonna work in a healthcare project.

Oh my God. The like jargon soup that's coming at you. So like being able to like quietly under your desk Google, like, look up what's a nicu? What's a BXP? What's lead like without the kind of shame, like, and be able to get a good answer. Like, I don't know, I'd feel like that's a really nice thing.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned a little bit about, uh, clients and, and the, the work that you're doing. You have some case studies that you could share about the kinds of work that you're doing and who, who's doing it with you.

I mean, obviously this takes kind of an, the, the whole AI and the search takes kind of an early adopter mindset, and I, I'm curious to hear how willing firms were to get

into that, but then

Christopher Parsons: Sure.

Evan Troxel: you know, who, who, who are your champions in this arena?

Christopher Parsons: You know what's interesting? Um, some of the case studies I've been sharing about what I'm calling KM 3.0, right. The, the knowledge and the flow of work, AI search stuff

have been doing knowledge management for a long time and they were in a really good position to take advantage of this technology when it came out.

So one of the case studies I've been sharing is BWVR. It's an architecture firm in St. Paul, Minnesota. A couple hundred people, multiple, multiple offices. They do a lot of healthcare work and they have built, um, really good communities of practice on synthesis. They call all of our clients renamed their intranet and brand it, they call theirs beehive.

So they have built a really strong community of practice. So for, this is another KM term knowledge management term. So communities of practice are getting groups of people together who share a domain. So it could be healthcare architecture, it could be project management, it could be grasshopper to share knowledge of what they're learning on their projects or their initiatives to learn faster together.

Um, so that's a long worn kind of thing that we've done in knowledge management. They do it, they kind of host theirs on their internet. And one of the things that they do, because they do, they onboarded 70 people in the last year into the firm. They're emerging professionals and they just need those people to be able to contribute as quickly as possible.

And so they created training courses, you know, for those people to learn healthcare. So there's like 18 modules of like the basics of healthcare architecture. It's a, it's a lot. Um, they've got best practices. They've got the kind of things you would imagine they share. They have these lunch and learns, et cetera.

Um, so they had been doing all that already when AI search came along. And so it was really easy to go to a firm like BWBR and say. Let's, let's, let's take a look at what this is gonna do. You know, like we think it's gonna make that retrieval part that we've been talking about, it's gonna completely change the game.

And so I think as far as like how we got people into beta, we started the first private beta in October of last year. And we started with three firms and it was like, you know, there's an old saying, I think it was Reid Hoffman, he's the founder of LinkedIn, said, if you're not embarrassed of your version one, you didn't launch it soon enough.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: And I think I'm like halfway on that boat. You know, like, I'm like, there's a level of polish that I'm just not gonna like put something out the door. But there's another thing, it's like, it is, it is wildly done from per like, you can see the beginning of it. You see how it's gonna be valuable. We're not like irresponsible and not caring, but like it's not done.

And like what is important and I think especially I've learned from working in AI is, um, I. We have a really hard time predicting what's gonna be important and how long things are gonna take. Like, you know, I've been working in software for a couple decades now and I have a pretty good intuition. Like we say, Hey, we're gonna build this thing.

I can sit with the engineering team and we can basically say, nah, plus or minus this many months like, or this many weeks. Like we have a sense of how to build that stuff With ai, it's wild. Like you just don't know. And in both directions, like we've had stuff, like we're doing stuff in the product today with AI search that we thought was gonna be a couple years out with us having to build a lot more infrastructure.

On the other hand, there's other stuff that's been a lot slower to get right. So it's just really hard to to predict. But the other part of that has been, we had a lot of hypotheses, like we got a 1.0 out and we had a lot of guesses on what, like 1.1 and 1.2 would be, but we didn't commit to any of it because we wanted to get feedback from real users and understand.

A, what was the most broken, but like what was the most compelling opportunity for us to work on? And nowhere really on the Bingo card, I think did we think that employee search was gonna be the next thing we built. We thought there was a lot of other stuff we're gonna have to build first, but because people can rate their searches in the platform and put feedback, we see all the feedback when people like rate how good their AI searches are.

And it just became, it was like 45, 50% of our feedback was about, look, people looking for people, which I think is also really interesting. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: based, on

Christopher Parsons: yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: what are they, what,

are they searching for?

Christopher Parsons: licenses. Who do I go to? A lot of it was like, I have a question, especially if you're in a multi-office firm, who's the expert or who's the person who signs off?

Like if I have to get a certificate of insurance, like pedestrian, stuff like that. Like there are hundreds of these questions that come up every day that people need to find out who in the company knows the thing or who's worked on this kind of project before. You know, like all this kind of stuff like.

And what I think like is really like kind of warming or comforting about that is this idea that like, AI is gonna reduce kind of the need for people. Like if you think about it, like we took a swing at what we thought the most important thing to do was this general knowledge based search. And the community told us, actually, we want it to be able to connect with each other.

Like that's the, that's the next most valuable thing that this product can do for us is help us connect with our peers. And then the thing after that is about projects. You know, uh, obviously I want to know how many projects we've done, the square footage over the last five years, that kind of thing, but also who worked on that project or who are the people that have worked on projects in the city.

it's, that's what people really want to use. We're seeing emerge organically what people really want to use this technology for. So like I feel like our role is kind of to facilitate the conversation, build the tools, and just be really good listeners. Follow that puck wherever it's, you know, I know you're supposed to skate to where the puck is going, so we're trying to imagine, you know, that whole thing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I, I'm, I'm curious from your point of view, a slight tangent here is like, uh, it seems to me then that like plugging

that data in

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: updating it is super important. Otherwise, like how, how are people finding the right, I mean, there's turnover. Sure there's retirement, sure. But there's also title changes. There's also different roles, like a principal could be the project manager

on a project

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: and, and they have eight other projects that they do a completely different role on. I'm just curious, like, how, how does that information work? Its way in there? Um, because I think traditionally that kind of stuff is just like, it is just word of

mouth.

Like, oh Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: yeah,

Evan Troxel: this thing on this project now, and it's not actually codified anywhere. Or maybe it is, I mean, maybe I just don't know where it, who's doing that and when they're doing it, but maybe it is

in there

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, that's a really, really good meaty subject. Um,

Evan Troxel: too

much, maybe.

Christopher Parsons: I mean, it, it's up to you. This is your show. Um, so you tell me in 30 minutes when I'm done answering the question.

Evan Troxel: I mean,

Christopher Parsons: Um,

Evan Troxel: think this is one of the, the objections.

maybe people,

Christopher Parsons: sure,

Evan Troxel: mind, but it's like, well, when I talk about knowledge management, like how on it

do I have to

Christopher Parsons: yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: it's

effective?

Christopher Parsons: I think like from first principles perspective, like you can't manage all the knowledge in your organization. Like, you just need to know that that's not a, that's not a reasonable objective. And so a lot of it has to be prioritizing what knowledge you choose to manage based on what's important to your company.

So I gave the BWBR example about upskilling folks, but in other cases we see, you know, it might be that they've got some, um, experts that are retiring and like, they feel like we need to transition what these folks know about what they work on. Like, and we need to start early, not like with three weeks left before the

Yeah.

As they're blowing out the candles. We're trying to like transfer knowledge. Um,

Evan Troxel: suckers

Christopher Parsons: c suckers are getting better at onboarding or improving quality. Like there's all these different things that like, could be the most important thing for an AEC firm. And the goal is to tie knowledge management to whatever that most important strategic thing is and see how knowledge management can help you move further, faster towards it.

Um, some of it is, you know, this is why integrations are important. You know, a lot of the data that we would wanna pull into synthesis already lives in another system, so, great. Um, but I think that the, the, the, the trick of it beyond prioritizing what, and like doing integrations is raising the value, we call it return on knowledge, you know, a lot.

Um, and so when people see that, okay, so if we do capture this, we're gonna be able to access it and other people are gonna be able to access it, we're gonna be able to use it in all these other ways. Like they, they, they can do the, they can do the math in terms of the ROI and realize it's worth a little bit more effort to get more return.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: whereas before it was a little bit more suspicious. So I think that's some of it. I think that I mentioned the feedback, what's been good about the feedback. I mentioned the feedback in this AI search, the ratings in terms of how it comes back to us. But the other part of that's important is it goes back to the knowledge managers at our clients.

And so they're able to understand like instead of constantly being in this state of paranoia, that things are out of date. You know, and there are, we do recommend kind of proactive, like it's almost like a crop rotation scene where you're kind of like rotating through your intranet on a period, three months, six months, whatever it is.

And just making sure stuff is still current. Like there are ways to do that, but the search exposes stuff faster than that. But also it exposes gaps. And so somebody's looking for this thing and nobody, no one know what. We have a client who their values are. I guess every client thinks their values are important, but for them, like they talk about 'em all the, it's like one of those companies, they talk about 'em all the meetings, they open it with a slide.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: Nobody had written the values down on the intranet. It is so like part of the way that they talk about the company that nobody actually wrote it down. So then one of the first searches was, what are our values? Sorry, we can't return. There's no information found. And at first they thought it, the product was broken, but then we kind of like realized, it's like, oh my gosh, nobody wrote it down.

So like that kind of exposing gaps,

Evan Troxel: holes.

Christopher Parsons: it exposes the holes and then the knowledge management team can go plug in holes and they can pull and they can go to a subject matter expert with evidence saying like, look, there's six queries in the last two weeks asking for this thing that, you know, they probably, when they couldn't find it, came to you anyway.

So like what do you think about helping out?

Evan Troxel: It is like people who create content on the internet, like the comment sections are goldmines sometimes. Right? It's like, like tho those are suggestions or,

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: things that you're, you're not addressing because, but, but when somebody brings it up, it's like, oh yeah. So it's constantly kind of giving you indicators of

could be next

Christopher Parsons: Exactly. We, you know, we think it's a, you know, it's a virtuous cycle or like a flywheel, right? If you improve the content, then you build trust. People will search more, they'll give you more feedback so you can improve your content and they search more. Like it's this really beautiful cycle. And so when, when it's working well, that's what it looks like.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. It's inter, it, it, it reminds me the, the parallel now that I'm thinking of is like culture,

right? It's like,

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: it's the glue. I. Of the community. Right. It's, and, and what you're talking about, like through this participation of constantly kind of filling these holes, updating, getting rid of the old stuff, you know, a lot of information should have an expiration date on it.

So like the cyclical crop rotation thing that you're talking about, I think is super, super valuable. Um, as far as just like a strategy of, of how to go through this and actually dedicating people or a team or, or a person to do that, is, is also like, like a key thing that people shouldn't not tune into. This is, it's a big job, right?

Um,

Christopher Parsons: Can I, can I say something about that? Actually, uh, uh, it is a big job and, and I think though though it should be a team sport, not a person's responsibility. Like I can, I've seen a lot of intranets in my day and, um, I've seen a, I've seen several not successful ones where it's one person's job to upload all the content for the entire company.

And if you've got something new, email it to Evan and he'll put it up for you. And if it's not up there, it's like, well, Evan, welcome this. It is just, it's not, it's not great.

Evan Troxel: the byline on

everything is this one

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. It's all this one person's byline. You got it. Um, so what, what we advise is definitely getting kind of like, this isn't gonna sound like rocket science until the very end.

So for example, if you've got seven different market sectors or different departments, you wanna find a champion with each one of those market sectors of departments. What's important is. Not the, it's not the department head usually, or it's not the practice leader. It's what we call an expert, right?

That's the next, it's the person who's gonna be the practice leader. You've got new jargon. I'm hopefully getting you a bunch. Um,

and so think about this for a second. So you've got somebody who's maybe 10 years in. So they're not like an emerging professional, but they're not senior either. They're right in the middle midcareer.

And so if they're gonna help build out the content for, and we'll just stick with, with sustainability, they're probably gonna interview the subject matter expert to pull information outta their head. They're gonna conne and then for this for a minute, just one. So they'll spend time with other experts.

They'll kind of own and kind of maintain that material. They'll get to know other knowledge managers or people doing that role within the company. They'll get to know their peers. So they're kind of networking and so they're both kind of developing their knowledge base, they're building a personal brand for themselves as kind of a go-to person there.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: And it's also good for the expert 'cause they're offloading that responsibility and it's good for the business because they've kept that person engaged. They're developing 'em, they've done some risk management for when the expert retires or leaves or whatever it is. And it's a sustainable process because when that expert becomes the expert, then you backfill them with an, you know, next man up kind of thing, or next woman up kind of thing.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Christopher Parsons: that's the kind of, I learned that from a mentor of mine named Carla Odell from A PQC acronym. Um, she's like one of the main thought leaders in the space of, of knowledge management. And that expert thing is just transformative, I think, in the way to think about, about doing this. They also have more time, like there's all these things.

Um,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, that makes sense.

You mentioned one example, at least maybe do you have any other examples of kind of unlocks that people have seen with these new tools?

Christopher Parsons: Um, sure. Uh, several. Um, I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll use Bora as an example with Corey Squire, who's the director of sustainability. I mean, Corey, for many people in this podcast probably know of Corey, he was the ran sustainability at Lake Plato.

Before that he's been very involved in the a i a and defining a bunch of guidelines. He wrote a book in 2023 called People Planet Design, which is awesome. So knows his stuff. Um, he saw an opportunity to really make that knowledge accessible inside his company, um, and to kind of like accelerate people's growth and development to not answer the same question over and over again, but also to free up time for him to do, like, you know, work on more advanced projects, push the edge on sustainability.

And so one of the things he did that was just awesome besides building out best practices and sharing knowledge and videos is he uploaded his book to their intranet, which was pretty awesome, just chapter by chapter as a, you know, in a document library. And now that's all searchable to the company. So now if Corey's at a conference, if he's traveling, he's outta the office, people have access to what we affectionately call Robo Corey, or kind of like his digital twin

that he's built and other experts at at Bora as well.

And so this idea that, um, you know, I've been, I've noticed since we put AI search on our version of synthesis, I've written probably more in the last year on our intranet than I have in the previous five combined because it's that same thing. It's like I'm getting confidence that I know that this is gonna make its way into people's hands.

Um,

Evan Troxel: some incentive?

Christopher Parsons: I have some incentive, but also, and this is the part that I think is really important, is I. It's so much easier. Like I use AI a lot to help me transfer knowledge, my own knowledge, right? So I use it in design all the time to help solve design problems. Like for example, we're working on a learning management system, um, to add into synthesis.

And there's a lot of thorny design problems in a learning management system. Like just even get into assignments and how they work and what happens if somebody drops the course. Like there's all these things. And so I end up workshopping a lot of that in voice mode with chat GPT, back and forth, you know, back and forth, back and forth.

And what I always do at the end of one of those, like once I've kind of gotten to a defined design direction, is I have it summarize the different avenues we explored, like why we made the decisions we did. If we decide not to enable something in version one, what are some known workarounds? Like I basically do a debrief of the design session with chat GPT,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: right?

And then I add that to our intranet. So like that context, it's not just what the decision was and how it works, it's why. Who ha like all that stuff. And like

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: people want context, robots want context. Like more context is good. Um, and so I think that

Evan Troxel: the,

AEC

Christopher Parsons: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: to me as a designer is like, these are all the layers of trace that led to us actually drawing it in

bim.

Christopher Parsons: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: a lot

Christopher Parsons: yeah.

Evan Troxel: doesn't get scanned or it just gets tossed away, and then you don't know why,

uh, you know,

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Evan Troxel: in the meeting minutes because it wasn't an official meeting.

Right. And it's like all of these reasons why, and this is a, a really cool example of how that can actually become a superpower later. It's like, oh, okay, so this is the way it is, but this is

why it's like that.

Christopher Parsons: This is why it's like that.

Yeah.

Evan Troxel: amazing. Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: Think about like I mentioned Corey, like I might not get this right, but like, let's just imagine like they, they de de defined a window wall ratio at optimal of being 30 to 50% or something like that. The comments can let me know how off I am.

Evan Troxel: 80% Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. 80%, right?

Um, but if that's, if it's just that fact, and I'm not saying this is what happened on board's internet.

I'm just using it as an example. Like, I don't know why it's 30 to 50%,

Evan Troxel: Mm

Christopher Parsons: 30 to 50% is a 20% range. When should it be more like 30? When should it be more like 50? Like what do I, does it different in different conditions and different, like, there's just so much more context versus like, this is just the rule, apply it.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Christopher Parsons: I think the more we can capture that, um, that helps get better answers in AI search, but it also helps our employees actually learn and understand instead of just kind of memorizing some facts or just blindly following a, a rule. So yeah, I think it's gonna, I think K km 3.0 or AI is gonna pull better knowledge sharing out of us.

Like it's gonna re, it's gonna ask that of us to be better. Sharing context and better at staying on top of our knowledge in order to take advantage of, it's a, it's a trade, right? In order to get the advantage of these new tools, we're gonna have to do some of these things. And I think they're all generally net positives.

Evan Troxel: I mean that the thing that you just did seems like kind of a gold nugget. That, that the example that you just shared about your process. What other kinds of things are firms gonna have to do to actually this be, have

the most

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: most useful in, in their firm's culture,

their strategy?

Christopher Parsons: Um, I think, well, I mean, to state the obvious, I think ai, actually, this is an interesting, I might take you down a little. Might, we might meander a little bit on this answer. Um, what I was gonna say, and I will still say is that high quality, firm-wide data is like really important. And, um, and I say high quality and firm wide because at least in our case.

We'll go back to silos. Um, we've kind of, since we've been in business and honestly since before I was even in knowledge architecture, I've kind of really oversimplified the world into kind of project data and like kind of enterprise or firm-wide level data.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: meaning the standard versus what you're doing on this project at SFO.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: On, you know, specific. And so, and generally the way that we've architected systems has kept those worlds relatively separate from each other. Um, and so if I'm searching on a tiling standard, if I do it on synthesis, I, the goal would be, I want to find like what we think about the best way to do tiles is, or do indoor air quality or window wall ratio or whatever it is.

If I'm searching project content, like it would be probably something more like, where are all the projects where we've used this particular tile? Right? Or what are all the project and, and it feels like there's a lot of, we've gotten some, like a little bit of pressure from our community to bring those two worlds together and have one search bar to rule them all.

Um, I don't know that that's right. Um, personally, I think, um, and so there is, but, but it does require somebody somewhere to decide this is what good looks like for our company. Like this is, you know, in good into learning and development, this is the way we do project management, or these are the three ways we do, you know, like there's some variance.

Maybe it doesn't have to sound so total totalitarian as I made it sound, but to really kind of say like, this is how we do things here. That's a lot about culture and that's a lot about knowledge management. So I think taking the time to communicate and capture how your firm works and why it does the things that it does, like that doesn't.

That's effort. So I think it's gonna ask us to do that. Um, I think it's going to, I mentioned the feedback cycle before, like where, you know, you get new feedback, you fix the knowledge, people get better search. That only works if you actually make changes on two levels. One, the content doesn't get it better if you don't update it.

But also I think the feedback slows down too. Like, I've always thought this with like surveys and feedback or asking for input from anybody. Like if you don't show somebody that you've taken action based on the feedback that they took time out of their day to give you, like, guess what I mean? That feedback's gonna start drying up.

Like, you know, and so I think there's, there's that kind of responsibility to follow through and like keep that continuous improvement machine going.

Evan Troxel: So what do you think that actually takes for

firm then? I mean, if you were to

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: lay out, I mean obviously it depends, is like the answer, right? But, but if you were just to kind of, let's just pick a scenario. Like for, for example, uh, friend of the show, Adam

Recht was the first

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: officer that I had ever heard of, right?

And, and I'm sure he wasn't the literal first, but in AEC he was the first to me. when he was at a previous firm, and it was like, what does that mean? And so I, I think part of it that you're talking about is like. who do a thing. There's like a team kind of, but there's also kind of a structure and a representatives within different departments in a firm and all these things.

But I mean, if you could legitimately just kind of lay out a basic

strategy

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: set an expectation, because this doesn't happen by itself, right? And, and garbage in,

garbage out. You

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: you don't, IM, you don't improve based on feedback. Like, these are all indicators, but I think it still takes like people to actually, you know, you gotta say, this person does this.

How much of their time do they spend to it?

Like, what have you

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: kind of like minimum viable product

from a staffing standpoint to make this work in, in your

favor?

Christopher Parsons: I mean, I think, uh, I like that you ended on minimal vibe. So we have a, an asset we developed several years ago called the Essential Content Checklist. And that's kind of what it sounds like. Like I think we developed it when we had like a hundred clients and we basically looked across those firms that were successful and we tried to just kind of just generally get like, what are the kind of key pieces that every AEC firm should have on their intranet?

Evan Troxel: huh.

Christopher Parsons: And it, I mean, it gets done into very basic stuff, like, when do I get paid? What are our holidays? You know, what's our technology? How do, like, all that stuff, that's just like, that's just kind of like a floor. Like we're like, just do that because the second you turn one of these systems on, like that's the stuff.

People are gonna reliably always search for, um, and find and need, need to get access to. Otherwise, your HR department and your marketing people and your IT people and operations, like, they're just gonna get inundated with the same, same kind of questions. So like, that's really low hanging fruit at most firms.

They have it somewhere. Um, you know, and so this, this checklist ends up becoming kind of a treasure hunt. You know, like maybe some of it lives off in this other old internet. Maybe some of it's on the network share. You know, maybe some of it's all just sent via email. And so a lot of it is kind of consolidating that, updating what's missing and kind of bringing it up to like a good level of quality and then continuing to maintain it going forward once you get that.

And then we generally recommend that firms just get really good basic employee data together. So you know who does what, who you know, uh, who works in what office. Like, like really sim like again, simple stuff. Um. The reason that's important is it's not that hard to do, but it builds trust in your community that your data is good.

Um, and that's what you wanna start doing pretty quickly is establishing trust. Um, then it starts getting into some pretty interesting territory. So I had talked about knowledge sharing before, maybe, and this is where it depends happens. Um, maybe what the most important thing to do at your company is, is have, like, you have a new strategic plan.

Your leadership is trying to steer the culture in a new direction. There's just something kind of big happening at the company, and you want to use knowledge management as a way to drive that message through the organization so everyone's aligned. They know what the important things are. Um, maybe it's like you have a really robust design culture, or you want to have more of a robust design culture and you really want these like, people sharing stuff from the model shop.

People sharing stuff from project tours or site visits or talking about crits. Like, so then you start kind of like picking on like, who do you want your company to be? A year from now, or two years, or three years from now, and you work backwards. So like what are the knowledge management interventions to make that happen?

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: I mentioned the upskilling thing from bw, so like, we need to get these health, prepare people up to speed. So it does vary very quickly. And, and because the, the goals vary then the resourcing and the, and the staffing vary quite a bit too. So if what you're trying to do is get a design conversation going, you can imagine that's a very different set of resources than trying to, you know, improve quality or trying to upskill, you know, employees.

So it, you usually have like a, a, an executive sponsor. So they kind of sit at the board or management team level. They're the connection to the knowledge management team of like what matters and what doesn't. So they can keep the knowledge management team from cha chasing like science projects or things that sound interesting.

They can say like, this is the important thing. I would spend time here. You usually have a champion or two who kind of like. Orchestrate the work of a bunch of other people and then depending on what the initiative is, you could have five to, we're talking part, now this isn't like generally full-time roles, like this is like part of somebody's job.

I think the more I think you would need a good, clear structure, but I think the more people you have involved in general is better than having, like if you could have just like a couple FTEs doing this all the time, like I actually don't think that's great. Um, I think it's better to have this be part, you know, piece and parts of people's role with a good sponsor and a good champion or two, kind of just overseeing the machinery to make sure that it stays on strategy and that it's like operating efficiently, if that makes sense.

Evan Troxel: And, in your pers like your position, I mean, as

built this platform

Christopher Parsons: Right.

Evan Troxel: have lots and lots and lots of firms using it, fantastic to have you as a resource to say, I. Here's some best practices for implementing this so that it gives you the return faster than you trying to figure it out on your own kind of a thing.

So that's, that's a, that's a

big plus.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, and I think, I mean, I can't overstate the, you know, one of the things I love about our industry that confounds my friends and even my wife who's outside of it, is how open we are to sharing with each other, even with competitors. Like it's always like, I'll go to some a non AEC thing and talk about what we're doing and like how in the world are you getting these companies to share this kind of stuff on your webinars and your conferences?

Like they figured something really cool out and the first thing they do is they turn around and tell the rest of their community, like what are they doing? And I, I get it though actually. I think like, you know, we're not competing on the way that we do the knowledge sharing piece or this piece of this grasshopper script that we've written.

Like we're competing on something else. And I think we're moving further faster as an industry together by sharing. But what that's allowed knowledge architecture to do is like, again, like I feel like we're still kind of just hosting. This conversation with people who have pieces of the answer figured out.

And our job is to keep that knowledge flowing and to synthesize it and be able to turn it around. But like, we don't, you know, like we can't give those recommendations if it weren't for how generous and transparent our community is. So it's, it's an amazing, amazing thing. We don't take it for granted.

Evan Troxel: Can you talk about just kind of the, uh, is this a heavy lift for people? I think when people think about, okay, now I've gotta put the data in the right buckets, I think of like severance, right? You click on the number and it goes into the, and nobody knows what it means, but it's like there's this, this fear of like, data entry, like menial work kind of.

Okay, I gotta make sure, but I think it's probably not necessarily like that. At least I, I'm, I'm curious of, of your perspective from like a structured versus

unstructured.

Christopher Parsons: Mm.

Evan Troxel: Like, like do we just throw the PDFs of the manuals in there and, and AI can just pull out the relevant information? Or do we need to be more structured about it?

What if we haven't been keeping records very structured versus, you know, like some, I'm sure some firms do it very well and there's a whole spectrum

there, right? So

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: somebody's looking at implementing something like this, like what kind of a lift is it for them to start having something usable to pull from?

Christopher Parsons: Do, do I have to say it depends for you or like,

Evan Troxel: man,

Christopher Parsons: it is, it's the answer to almost every question that comes up like this. Um, but like to put, to put some more thought behind that. I mean, one of the, one of the FA variables I look at for it depends is your kind of existing state. So we've had clients come on board who had a very, like maybe in a more analog way or a less efficient way, organized really good resources and they just needed a really good bucket that was searchable.

Easy to use to put them in. And that's been a really easy transition. And they came in and their Deltech data was great, and their open asset data was great, and we just basically plugged it all together and off they go.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: Not quite that simple, but that's one end of the spectrum. We've had other clients who have come on board who, like, I'm thinking of one, I'm not gonna name them.

I'll let them tell, maybe they'll tell their story on this, but like, I'll use them as an example. They came on board at like 60 people and had nothing like in terms of systems and they had just, they had, they had severe growing pains and wanted to become like they were getting all this work, they were growing.

They're like, we cannot keep operating like this without really clear procedures and standards and a way to connect the people. Like it's just not working anymore. And so they basically, they took a year to implement because they had to write everything like the, these are things that they had never, ever written down.

It was all just kind of social or tribal knowledge. And so that was actually the lift. We've had clients use synthesis as kind of like a Trojan horse for the culture change they were wanting to affect.

So I can think of one CEO who took over one of our clients and it's an engineering firm, and they had kind of a, you know, I say this, I'm gonna put a disclaimer out here.

Some of the most, uh, collaborative sharing knowledge, best clients we have are engineers. Um, like they, they do really, really well. Like with our product, this culture was kind of more of the caricature that like, I don't know, some architects may say about engineers, right? They just were very close to the vest.

They weren't sharing like it was a tough environment. And she came in and basically like collaboration is the key to our thriving and actually maybe even survival as a company. And so she used this kind of social intranet at the time as a way, like, she kind of like. Used sharing on the platform and asking all of the kind of leaders and held them accountable to sharing X amount of time as a way to kind of make that culture change of making the company more collaborative and open and transparent.

So I'm kind of a little all over the map there, but that's honestly what our journey's been like. It's like we just find people in various states of existing content and also what their ambitions are

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: then how much they can resource the thing. So sometimes people try and take this on with like three other things going and some people wait until they can really get a strong runway at it.

Um,

Evan Troxel: And so when it, when it comes to like

implementation,

Christopher Parsons: yep.

Evan Troxel: much of a resource are you available to them to help figure that out? So it's not like buying a

piece of box software

Christopher Parsons: Alright.

Evan Troxel: then,

oh, you're on your own.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah, it, it, it matter. It depends how much they want us to be. So like, we can run the gamut from, like, we do strategy, we help you figure all this out, we help you with best practices. We like help you with the information architecture, like we can drive really, really far for somebody. We've had clients come on as like, Nope, you guys have lots of good online content.

You've got lots of good training videos. Like it'd be good to ask you questions when they come up. But they prefer to be self-directed. And so we can support people at that kind of high touch level or kind of a more self-directed level. Um, and it's just interesting and like some people, I mentioned our community beyond the conference, we have like quarterly round tables.

We get people together to share and we have monthly webinars. There's like, we have an online community where people can ask questions and there are clients that don't take advantage of it at all, but the intranets are really healthy. And so, okay. You know, like we're just gonna keep building great resources.

And it's really a matter of like where, and maybe they were really into it at one point and they drift out or maybe they didn't start into it and then later they're like, we need to do this thing and I can't do this alone. So yeah, it's varies for sure.

Evan Troxel: Well, I'm curious about, I guess we could

start to wrap up here,

Christopher Parsons: Okay.

Evan Troxel: where's this going? Like, what do you, things have changed

so quickly

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: of time. I, I remember you showing like the periodic table of all of the, these different pieces of

knowledge management

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: of firms and something that you've, you brought it up in this tangentially, right?

You don't, or weren't directly relating it back to that diagram, but it's like you can't do

all of these things.

Christopher Parsons: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: what's interesting is we're starting to see, like for the people who do a lot of them, maybe they're not doing a lot of them really well. Like this is starting to connect the dots between a lot of those because of the evolution in a short period of time that we've seen with ai. But where do you see this going? I mean, crystal ball

time, maybe a little bit

Christopher Parsons: Mm.

Evan Troxel: there's some stuff that's more rooted in reality that you're seeing, that you're really

excited about.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah. I mean, I, in the very short term, um, we, I mentioned we, the feedback we got about employees, so we built that kind of advanced employee search. We're now building the advanced project search, um, as well, so. That's exciting. Um, we're building a learning management system into synthesis. As I kind of touched on before, that's gonna obviously have a big interplay with search.

Um, and I mentioned I'd said high quality, firm wide content. Well, there's a lot, um, potentially in a learning management system. So to have the intranet, the LMS and the AI search all under one roof, like, we're pretty excited, you know, about where that goes. Um, I, I can, so I'll answer your question maybe in two ways.

On one level, we don't plan out any further than that anymore. I used to do that more like when I first got started, I used to look out kind of like three, four releases and it was fun to kind of roadmap all that out. I have learned over my career that like, that's just not great. Um, product management because, well, two things can happen.

One is let, let's say you make a mistake. Let's say that you think you're clever and you know what you're doing and you tell people about it, and then you get to the moment and it's no longer the most important thing to do. So you either break your promise to your community. Or you go ahead and build the wrong thing.

'cause you don't wanna break your promise. So I don't know, like, other than kind of bringing the LMS into our search platform, like I've got a long list from client feedback and I could guess, but like, we don't commit to it and I don't, I don't know. I do think it's gonna get to be, um, I think we've gotten to this level of quality pretty quickly, but I feel like the expectations of users of what AI is making possible is just gonna keep ratcheting up.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Christopher Parsons: what I, what I know is, is like we're onto something with search and discovery. Um, I think that, um, we're gonna be working on it for years and it's just gonna keep getting more and more interesting based on our ability to kind of scaffold out new technology, but also the underlying technology just keeps unlocking these new things.

Like, for example, two weeks ago, chat, GPT-4 0.1 came out. It didn't sound that exciting. 4.1. How revolutionary could that be? It is way faster and it's really, really good at following instructions. And when I had mentioned that ag agentic rag stuff before, like our engineering team, especially our director of engineering, like a lot of the way that these systems get built is like you're giving context to the model to tell it how to work with the data that you're giving it.

And like sometimes it's like talking to like a five-year-old, you're like, no, seriously, please do not do this. You know, like when this thing, like he's shown me some of these prompts. Yes. Like it's literally like your interface to the model is just context like that. And so you have to get really clever.

And so this 4.1 model is just like much better at following instructions so we can dial back some of the all caps, you know, and the unnecessary

Evan Troxel: Brackets and,

Christopher Parsons: the, brackets. Right. Exactly. The exclamation points. And so it's, it's like that's a little thing, but like these models, like one of the things that we're very excited to do.

Is built an A AEC spec. I've mentioned semantic search before,

Evan Troxel: mm-hmm.

Christopher Parsons: so without going too far into a tangent, that's built on a technology called embeddings, um, which basically take every piece of content and they kind of like, if you imagine like DNA, they kind of embed it with a unique code that basically means like sustainability ish or contracts ish kind of thing.

Well, we think there's a huge opportunity to build an AEC specific embeddings model

Evan Troxel: mm.

Christopher Parsons: understand our domain and our acronym and our jargons and have a much better semantic understanding. Like, and, and it's AC specific, but also kind of professional services specific, like the generic models that do semantic search, like they don't really understand that utilization and chargeability and these kind of words.

They don't really know what those mean. They were kind of trained on more consumer data, and so, but right now, like. It seems like that's not really commercially viable. Like there are tools out there to do that, like in the lab, but it doesn't feel like it's primetime stuff yet. So we're kind of monitoring that as an opportunity for when those tools become like repeatable and actually something we'd wanna bring into our product.

Like we would jump on it. So some of it's just like waiting, you know, like carefully monitoring the evolving tech landscape and looking for matches between the things that are most important to our clients and the emerging technology and be able to like, kind of do that matchmaking. Um, so the thing I know we'll be doing is staying very close to the feedback into our community.

'cause they generally lead us, you know, in the right direction or at least we, we walk in the, in the right direction together.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Exciting. what I'm also excited about, Chris, is just gonna, this, we're gonna do a multi-part series with this that we're, we're sharing. So this is the first piece, and this kind of kicks us off and sets the

foundation for,

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: we're gonna be sharing some, some stories with the firms that you've been working with and, and talking about implementation, return on investment, uh, things that have been exciting to them.

What are they getting out of it? Was it worth it? Like, there's so many questions I think that are gonna come up from different perspectives, and, and I think that's gonna be really, I mean, I, I appreciate you guys investing into telling this story over

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: different episodes because there's a lot of nuance and, but what, what I'm most excited about is that we're not stopping with just kind of this. What feels like of, you know, we, we haven't gotten to the really deep implementation parts and the, the boots on the

ground kind of side of it.

Christopher Parsons: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: um, for the listeners out there who are wanting to hear more about making this a reality, you're gonna hear some real stories about that of people who have been through it and done it.

And do you want to kind of talk about the kinds of firms that we're gonna be

talking with?

Christopher Parsons: I mean, I think, I think as a broad level, I wanna also make clear that I think our intention is to explore knowledge management in general, not just kind of their implementation of synthesis. So I think it's important that we kind of fit into an overall ecosystem or a knowledge architecture, if you will, of like how they think about knowledge management.

Um, I can speak to, um, three of the guests that we're gonna bring on, um, that we know of. And there's a couple more that I think we're gonna look at, um, down the road. Um, we're getting Ellen Bensky from Turner Fleischer to talk about it. And she's their CEO and will kind of give the CEO perspective on knowledge management and why they've invested, not just in synthesis, but in a, they built a knowledge management department and a team and as well as a learning and development team.

And kind of like why they did that at a 250 person firm. Um, we're gonna have Katie Robinson from LS three P, who's their chief marketing officer and leads their knowledge management program. Katie has a ton of great, really kind of like detailed, like a lot of the stuff you were asking is like. How are we actually going to get good project data on a sustainable, in a sustainable way?

Like Katie's done some smart stuff there, she's done smart stuff with, you know, kind of critical knowledge transfer and experts sharing and a bunch of other things. So that'll be fun to talk to Katie, kind of from that marketing lens on knowledge management. And then Corey, who I'd mentioned from Bora, is gonna talk about that sustainability slash subject matter expert slash um, practitioner, you know, kind of impact on knowledge management, different firm sizes, different scales, different positions.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christopher Parsons: you can see each of them though, has led knowledge management in their organization. So it can happen from all different parts of the company, um, depending on your unique business. So I'm excited. These are good friends of mine and good friends of our companies. They've all spoken at our conference K Connect over the years, so I, I'm excited to bring this to your audience.

I think it'll be, they'll learn a lot.

Evan Troxel: Ellen's been on the

podcast before, if

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: is tingling. Anybody's ears out there. She's was talking about knowledge architecture, and that's when I think I became actually. Acutely aware of that. This was a thing

in architecture firms

Christopher Parsons: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: to a class that she co-taught with one of her principals from Turner Fleischer at Autodesk University many years ago. And so impressive to, to like the, the level of thinking that I am assuming all of these guests are kind of bringing to the table here is it's just gonna be worth the

listen. So

Christopher Parsons: Yep.

Evan Troxel: looking forward to this series. And, and Chris, we'll put links to where people can find out more and connect with you online in the show notes for this episode.

And, uh,

thanks for coming on. It's

Christopher Parsons: Oh, my pleasure.

I was glad to be here. Thanks, Evan.

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A conversation with Rob Asher and James Blackwood about exploring the integration of design and data, the challenges of traditional architectural tools, and how Giraffe empowers architects to leverage technology for better decision-making and streamlined workflows in urban planning.

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Episode Links:Some links on this page help fund our work, and we may earn a commission from purchases at no extra cost to you.

Connect with the Guest* Balkan Architect YouTube Channel * Balkan Architect Website * Milos Temerinski on LinkedIn * Balkan Architect on Patreon

Books and Philosophies Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work + Amazon Link + Explores how creatives can effectively share their process to build audience and trust—very relevant to Milos’ YouTube strategy. * Cal Newport’s Deep Work + Amazon Link + A framework for mastering focus and producing high-value work, aligning with Milos’ journey of content mastery and specialization. * Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being*** + Amazon Link + Referenced in the episode; a reflective guide on creativity that influenced how design thinking and personality can intersect.

AI Tools and Emerging Technologies ChatGPT for Software Training and Development + OpenAI’s ChatGPT + Milos discusses experimenting with AI explanations of Revit—helpful for anyone considering AI as a learning partner or content generator. * AI-Powered Video Summarization + Eightify (YouTube summarizer) + Mentioned in the episode as a tool for quickly distilling lengthy educational videos. * Control-F for Video Tools (search inside video)* + TLDV (Too Long Didn’t View) + Enhances accessibility of video content—useful for architectural education.

Visualization & Design Tools Autodesk Revit + Official Revit Page + Core tool used by Milos in his tutorials; critical to modern BIM workflows in AEC. * SketchUp + SketchUp Official Website + Milos compares early experimentation with SketchUp before switching to Revit. * 3ds Max for Visualization + Autodesk 3ds Max + Used for modeling exploration before committing to BIM workflows. * Photoshop for Architectural Presentations* + Adobe Photoshop + A fundamental tool in visual post-production for student and professional work.

Content Creation & Media Production Adam Savage’s Tested + YouTube Channel + Referenced in the episode as a model of authentic, curiosity-driven video education. * Paul F. Aubin’s Training for Revit + Paul F. Aubin’s Website + One of Milos’ early influences; highly respected Revit educator and author. * Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning)* + LinkedIn Learning - Revit Courses + Milos referenced learning from this platform early in his career.

Events and Networks Autodesk University + Autodesk University + Annual event where advanced Revit users and content creators share innovations. * AU Certified Training Centers* + Autodesk ATC Program + Milos’ training platform recently became an official Autodesk Training Center.

Psychology and Personal Development Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success + Amazon Link + Essential reading for creators and educators aiming to grow and evolve with their work. * James Clear’s Atomic Habits* + Amazon Link + Offers a roadmap for building consistent habits, which Milos exemplifies through daily uploads and content development.

About Milos Temerinski:Milos Temerinski is the Founder and CEO of Balkan Architect, a leading online platform dedicated to architectural education and professional development, with a particular focus on Revit and Building Information Modeling (BIM). Based in Belgrade, Serbia, Milos has spent over seven years empowering architects, engineers, and designers worldwide to master essential digital tools for the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Episode Transcript: Member 189: ‘The Rise of the Balkan Architect’, with Milos Temerinski

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Milos Temerinski. You might know him better as the Balkan Architect whose YouTube channel has become a staple resource for Revit tutorials and architectural software knowhow with nearly 700,000 subscribers. Milos is not just a content creator.

He's also a trained architect who started uploading videos while still in school, driven by the simple urge to share what he was learning. That decision turned into a full-time endeavor that has now evolved into a company, a training platform, and a thriving community.

In this episode, we talk about that journey from uploading his first tutorials to becoming a certified Autodesk Training Center. Along the way, Milos shares his thoughts on architecture education, why video is the best medium for learning software, and how creators can teach more effectively by being vulnerable, iterative and consistent. We also get into the world of technical creativity. Yes, creativity even inside Revit, as well as a hacker mentality that many of us have embraced to get things done in software workarounds. Am I right? Today, Melos shares practical insights around how architects can use content to accelerate their careers, grow their influence, and ultimately build sustainable businesses,

something that connects to many other episodes of the podcast is the rising role of YouTube as a vehicle for knowledge transfer in architecture. just like podcasts, video-based learning is dismantling traditional educational gatekeeping and empowering a new generation to learn in the ways that actually work for them. The implications for firm leaders and educators are huge. As usual, there's an extensive amount of additional information on the show notes, so be sure to check them out.

You can find them directly in your podcast app if you're a paid member and if you're a free member, you can find them at the website. Which is tr xl.co. Lastly, you can really help me and the podcast by sharing the episodes with your colleagues and by commenting and sharing my LinkedIn posts.

You can also leave a comment over on YouTube and engage with me and the other listeners and subscribe if you're not already. And of course, subscribe to Milos' Balkan Architect Channel.

I came away from this conversation, inspired to keep showing up and sharing. So without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Milos Temerinski.

Milos, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. Hello, Evan. I, I am very happy to be here, so thank you.

for having me on.

Evan Troxel: This is gonna be great. I would love it if you would start with kind of your story. where did the Balkan architect, where does this come from? And, and so you, I know you have a history in architecture, right? You're coming at to this as an architect and, and if, for those listeners who don't know, Milos has an amazing YouTube channel.

I wouldn't imagine that people don't know about it. I'm sure, especially during the

pandemic. This is, I,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: is when I became very aware of what you were doing on YouTube, but I'm sure there's a story to this. So tell me where you're coming from.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I have a ma master's degree in architecture. And, uh, Balkan architect is pretty much what they've been doing full-time. Uh. Since even school or my masters and ever, ever since. Uh, so I've always had a passion for YouTube. I was always interested in YouTube.

I think, uh, I'm the kinda the generation that grew up, uh, with YouTube, the, the, the first one. Uh, and uh, yeah, it was always gonna, my natural way of, uh, accessing any type of knowledge is just. Go on YouTube and see if somebody has a, a video to do that. So, uh, I kind of merged my passion for architecture, uh, and my passion for YouTube, and that's how Balkan architect was, was born.

Uh, so yeah. Uh, at, uh, while I was at the university, I, uh, I started learning software. I, uh, I figured that would be the best kinda path forward and, uh, or I started sharing that online first. Uh, I created a, a local, let's say, YouTube channel that was in Serbian, and I was doing tutorials. And then later on I tried out Revit and that kind of exploded.

And here, here we are.

Evan Troxel: Nice. Can you explain what you mean when you say you have a passion for YouTube?

Because I

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: I think I know what you mean,

but I think there's probably an, an older generation who's like, that sounds like

nonsense to me.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and, and so explain what, what you

mean by that.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so it was kind of my form of entertainment when I was growing up, uh, during the, the formative years. And, uh, really the, the YouTube format, uh, I guess, resonates with me. I think it resonates with, with many people. And, uh, there is kind of a, um, let's say a YouTuber approach to doing things or to explaining things.

It's not, uh, I wouldn't call it only a video format. Uh, you have, uh, you have a, a, let's say, podcast approach, something like this. You have a TikTok approach, which is very different. And then you have the, the YouTube approach, which is kind of a thing of its own. Uh, so Yeah.

I, I think it's, uh. Can, what, what really drew me in is, uh, because, uh, YouTube is kind of a merger between, at least when it comes to educational content, uh, it, it merges education with entertainment in a way, because when you are posting on YouTube, you are competing with entertainment and you have to be entertaining in order to get those views and in order to, uh, get your videos out there.

So, uh, I I, and that's kind of the, the magic, like, I, I trick people into learning something while they feel like they're entertained.

Evan Troxel: Well, and this is what, to me, what the, the magic of YouTube is that you can learn what you wanna

learn from,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: to learn it

from. And, and

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: the techniques that you're talking about are the what, that magical

piece, right?

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: really defines who the audience is that you attract. They're, they're coming to you because of the way that you teach and the way that you just

described it, I think it

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: Part of that, it's the way that you teach. It's you're tricking them, like

you said, and,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: they don't feel

tricked, right? They don't

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm. Yeah, of course.

Evan Troxel: they're showing up because they want to show

up and they're choosing to watch you. And it's not just like, it may be a little bit of a routine, but I don't even see it kind of as a routine.

It's like, like this, something YouTube figured out really well was, was like, like you said, you're competing against entertainment. And

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: why would somebody sit and watch an hour long tutorial

on a really

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Unless there's a reason, like, and it's the

person teaching it

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: cracked that code?

I mean, this, this is to me, like some of my favorite YouTube channels, like Adam Savage is tested,

right? For example,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: but, it's, it's very authentic to who he is. It's the sense that I get, it's not like he's showing up and, and playing a character.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: a, YouTube persona per se. Maybe it

is a little bit, there

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: examples

of that, right? Where people

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: they're a completely different person on YouTube than they are in real life. But it's those people where you get to a, you get a glimpse, and I think it's not too d different from a podcast like my other

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: been going on for 13 years, right?

And like people show up because we're characters in

their lives.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: there's all that, that Venn diagram of architecture and personality and, and subjects and all those things that people resonate with. It's really an interesting concept. And, and I think the other thing I want to point out here is that YouTube hasn't been around forever,

right?

I think, what,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: ish?

I don't know. It

Milos Temerinski: Something like that.

Evan Troxel: something,

like that, right? And so it's like when you say you grew up with YouTube, like before that there was no

YouTube and, and, and then 2007 the iPhone hits and then Android hits and all, and then now you have YouTube in your pocket. There's actually an app on the phone called YouTube back in the day on, on it, it was called video.

I don't know. So it was something like that on the, on the iPhone. And they wrote their own app as a YouTube

v viewer.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: just put it in your pocket, like it, that

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: available and that, and then this explosion has happened, right? I mean,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: do you now have on, on your

YouTube channel?

Milos Temerinski: I think it's 680,000 or something like that. Yeah. It's, it's crazy.

Evan Troxel: I, I've got like 700, right? So you're,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: I'm not a YouTuber,

like I'm a podcaster.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: think, I still think that there's like a thing where it's like people don't, there

because of the people who

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: to

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: a place for them to see this show. But it, it's, I'm coming

from a different spot,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: Like you have

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: over half a million subscribers to your, and, and so as a way to get a message out, but also you just talking about the way that this resonance with an audience, it's absolutely incredible. What, what creators who start off on their own

right. Making

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: videos, but that are also entertaining.

There's this huge potential that I,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: interesting looking at it through an architecture lens,

right?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. I, I think it's the, Yeah. it is the, the personality to kind of. Carries the, the content, uh, in a way, and that, that's why always say that there is a lot more room on, on YouTube. Uh, when people are consistent, they form that audience that relates to them. And, uh. Uh, there's a thing where people feel like they, they know, uh, YouTubers just because you, you spend hours on an, and, uh, it's the same thing with podcasters.

Uh, you feel like they're in the room with you. And then, uh, it, it, I, I know people have told me, like when they meet me in real life, like, I, I already know you, and it's like, you know, my tutorials, you, you don't really know me. But it feels that way just because it's all of that time that you, that you spend and it's, you're interacting with this person.

It's the format, it's the video, and yeah, I, I think it's, it's really powerful. And also as an educational tool, I think not everybody resonates well, uh, with different methods of teaching. So it's nice that you have this diversity on YouTube where you can have all of these different instructors teaching you in different ways, and then you kind of figure out what resonates with you and you go with that.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it, it, I think it is slowly becoming the primary way in which people consume information, right? Like it's, and, I don't, it doesn't obviously apply to everybody, but for your generation

it's like.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Whoa. It's, it's a incredibly powerful force. And, it's also as a, on the creator side of things, I think, like it's constantly changing how

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: the system.

And I, and I wanna point out that like, the number of subscribers, I don't think it actually matters. Like,

and the reason I say that

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: there's people who are like, I wish I started a YouTube channel 10 years ago. Now it's too late.

I don't, it's

Milos Temerinski: No, that's, that's definite. E especially, it's, it's quite different. Uh, be before it was easier in terms of there wasn't, uh, that man that much competition. Uh, but also the YouTube algorithm has changed quite a bit. So, for example, when I got started, yeah, it was the, uh, the subscriber account really mattered.

So how many subscribers you got, YouTube would send notifications whenever new videos come up, they would, uh, give you recommendations. Now it's, uh, working more like the TikTok algorithm in terms of, uh, what's popular and what's good. It's going to be pushed out there. It doesn't matter if it's a channel with a million subscribers or with zero subscribers.

If it's something that people are watching, it's going to push it very hard. So, uh, in a way it's easier from that standpoint, but of course it's harder, uh, in terms of, there's already, I A lot of creators out there. And it's, it's, yeah, it's different. And I, I mean, I look at it, I was lucky in, uh, in, in terms of starting while I was still at school.

And, uh, it, it wasn't like, um, I guess it wasn't, I. Taking away time from, let's say an actual job, uh, or something like that, where when I see somebody that's, let's say 35 years old, they have a child, uh, or something like that, they have to take care of their family. They have to go to work, and then to start a YouTube channel and earn nothing for a year or two or even more, uh, financially, it just doesn't make sense.

So, uh, I I, I was lucky in terms of just starting when I, I can had nothing to lose and nothing competing with that. Uh, especially because I was also, um, it was, uh, I, I'm from Serbia, so here it's uh, the economic situation isn't ideal, especially when I was in school. It was quite terrible after the, the recession and everything in 2008 and it.

Really didn't it, it looked like an obvious thing to invest your time in because the alternative, the getting a a, a kind of a first job was just ridiculously low paid. That YouTube kind of made sense.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. That's interesting. And I, I, I feel like, uh. Man, there's just so many things that I'm but I don't think I should assume for the audience, because a lot of reasons, additional reasons, additional value that having content on YouTube will bring to you. And I think it is kind of

a long game

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: It it, you have to, you can't just like throw something up and say, well, nobody,

nobody watched it, so I'm

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Right? It's, it's one of those things where you need a long-term strategy that plays back into kind of these additional values that come out over time. And, and again, like I wanna reinforce, it doesn't really matter how many subscribers you have.

I, I mean, I don't know what your numbers look like, but, but it's something like 50 probably to 80% of people who watch your channel are not

subscribers at all. Like

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: seeing, people are seeing your video, but they're not subscribing. And so the actual subscriber number isn't an indicator of the impact that you can have on YouTube and.

By having this stuff being, first of all, you're getting better at media production. Just by

doing it right, you're

Milos Temerinski: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: you, you have to force yourself to get into a routine of making stuff. It doesn't have to be

perfect,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: be polished. It needs to be, to have the right content at least to start with, and then you can slowly evolve that over time.

But the additional, what are the additional values that you see come out of having a presence on YouTube and, and other social media?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, I, I think it's, it's really powerful just to put yourself out there. Um. I think in today's kind of economy and just the, the way or the place where internet is right now, uh, I I think it makes absolutely a hundred percent, it makes sense to have some sort of an online presence in terms of your career just because it's, it's going to open up so many doors.

Uh, I see people they can get perhaps discouraged if they upload the video and it. only gets 50 views, but it's like 50 people actually clicked and watched. If you saw 50 people in a room, you wouldn't feel like, oh no, nobody came to my video. Yeah, Yeah. yeah. It's, it's, it's incredibly powerful and Yeah.

you, you learn so much.

Um, just. I think it's, it's also a thing where you, when you learn a new skill, it helps you with pretty much everything in your life. Uh, it makes every other new skill easier to learn. So I think, uh, just figuring out, okay, how do I do this, this YouTube thing? Okay, so I have to record the video. So I need recording software.

I need a camera. Okay, I need to edit that somehow. So how do I do that? How do I upload it? What, what should I take care of? What's the thumbnail? How does this even work? And, and all of that. I think it's a very powerful kind of learning experience, uh, on one hand, and as you, as you've mentioned, you get better over time.

Uh, I, I was lucky in a way where. Uh, when I got started, uh, YouTube was very, pretty much prioritizing channels that upload every day. So It the idea was, uh, you had these kind of daily vloggers and people would tune in to YouTube every day just to see their latest video.

Evan Troxel: prime

Milos Temerinski: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: right? It every

Milos Temerinski: yeah, exactly.

Evan Troxel: like 800 and something days. It, it was a huge

number of, of

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, that's that's great.

Evan Troxel: Absolutely

insane.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. Yeah. And, and I was getting started during that time, so I thought, okay, I guess we're doing daily rabbit tutorials, and those didn't really look good. Uh, some, some of them were like two minute tutorials, some of them were 20 minute tutorials. But just from having That routine, you wake up, okay, I have to figure out an idea.

I have to record it by 10 o'clock, and then I have to go to school and just doing this day after day after day if I want to go on a trip. Okay. You have. to prepare 10 videos in advance before you go on a trip or. Yeah. I don't know. I, uh, I, I know that there, there are aren't really any penalties apart from the view count going down a little bit, but I took that seriously and I did it and, uh, uh, I grew so much as a creator, as my, my English got so much better just during that time, and Yeah.

I I became a lot more natural in front of the camera.

It's, it's really hard starting out. Talking to a camera can be very uncomfortable for most people, but it gets. So much, uh, so much easier over time. And then on the other hand, you have the, the online presence and people start reaching out to you. And people, uh, as I said, they, they feel like they know you and they're, they say, okay, we need an architect who knows Revit Well, I feel like I know that guy.

And it's, it's, it's just like saying, okay, do you have a recommendation to your, let's say to your employee, we need another. Rev guy, do you know somebody? And you're way more likely to trust, uh, that connection, uh,

Evan Troxel: That

Milos Temerinski: of your employee recommending some, somebody then that you're going to just put on, put an ad out and somebody calls in and you're like, okay, I, I don't know anything about you.

So when people feel like they know you, they're more likely to give you opportunities. And I got so many job offers, freelance work offers, uh, stuff like that, which, uh, I had to, most of them I had to decline just because I was still studying. And then later on, I, I, I wanted to do this YouTube thing full time.

But yeah, it was, uh, so, so many opportunities opened up really quickly as my channel grew.

Evan Troxel: I think of the title YouTuber, right? I'm

using air quotes.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Um, and, and I'm sure you, you, you've probably said that to people like you're a YouTuber,

you're an educator, you

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, it,

it, it's getting weird now that Balkan architect is kind of a, a company, so it's, uh, it's hard to just say YouTuber, but it's so many, yeah. Different things, But yeah. Mainly YouTuber. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and, and

Milos Temerinski: I'm mainly known as a YouTuber

Evan Troxel: and it's like, what does that, what imagery does that bring up in, in, if you had 10 people in a room and you said, okay, if, when I say I'm a YouTuber, what does that mean to you? What does that mean to you? And it would be something

different. Like they would probably have

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: And I'm

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: if anybody would say like, um, Revit teacher, I.

Um,

Milos Temerinski: I, I don't think that many.

Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: it, right? And it's like you teach people, architects how to use the, the main software that they're going to use to deliver projects.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: YouTube is your platform and your delivery mechanism.

Right.

And,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: on the internet and that means that anybody can get to this for the most

part. And so

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I'm curious from your point of view, like what have, what, what have people, uh, what, when you say you're a YouTuber, what. Did they make a funny face? I mean, because again, like in the profession of architecture, you're a YouTuber.

I mean,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and

like that well,

Milos Temerinski: It's weird.

Evan Troxel: until some point, like that was never

a thing. And, And, it's

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: like I'm a podcaster. Uh, again, it's like, well, yeah. So is everybody else? Well, no, not,

not. Okay. I, I think I have a, I think I do it a little differently. Um, but yeah, a lot of people during the pandemic especially became YouTubers and podcasters, and then it just, it it died.

Right? Like they, they couldn't hang onto

it. They didn't want, maybe they didn't want to. Maybe it wasn't right for them. I'm not saying it's right for

everybody,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: like, what is the feedback that you get when you tell people you're a YouTuber?

Milos Temerinski: Uh, so I think most people are just interested in like, how does that work? Yeah. Uh. Honestly, most people ask like, how do you actually make money from it? Like, is that your job? Or like, do you have a job? And then

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Milos Temerinski: as a hobby?

So that's kind of what I mostly get and Yeah.

But when it comes to people from the architectural world, they're like, oh, that's, that's so cool.

It's like very interesting to, to see somebody taking this path and something that they've noticed. I don't know if this is something that kind of started with soon or was this always a thing, but so many people that uh, that that finish architecture, they get their master's degree or bachelor's degree, they do something that's kind of tangent to architecture, but not necessarily.

Working on, on projects and designing things. Uh, it's some, something else in the, in the field, uh, and something different. So I, I see a lot of people doing different things. So perhaps now It's not so controversial or not so weird that you're a podcast or a YouTube or, uh, in, in this field. Uh, and there's of course, uh, uh, uh, always somebody that says, so what you do, like, pranks and annoying stuff.

You harass people on the street

Evan Troxel: It's like,

Milos Temerinski: views.

Evan Troxel: YouTube? Do you have any cha? Like, like, yeah. That, that to me means that you, that's not your, that's not your

platform that you

Milos Temerinski: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: things on. Yeah. When people say something like that. Yeah, because it's like cat

videos, right? That's what YouTube

Milos Temerinski: yeah.

Evan Troxel: people.

Yeah.

That's what it is

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Right? Uh, that's the interesting thing about YouTube is there's absolutely everything on there and algorithmically and as far as like exposure goes, you are competing with literally everything out there. And then in your niche, like if people actually started searching for something, right?

There's a difference between searching for something and, and YouTube. I mean, this is something that Google and YouTube have absolutely cracked, right? Which is. Search.

I mean, if,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: how many times nowadays do you go to YouTube first to search for how to do something? Or it, it could be, it could be any number of, of May.

Maybe it's not how to, I, I guess my

point here, but I think a

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: it, it actually

is,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: easily falls into that category or architectural software. Let's just put it in, in a broader category, right? It's like,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: like YouTube's the way to go because architects are

visual

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: we want to see how it's done addition to maybe being entertained along the way,

right?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. I, I, I feel it's kind of like if you're sitting in a room with somebody and you ask them like. Ask them something, if they answer verbally just to tell you the answer, then it's something that you can Google or ask chat GPT or whatever. If it's something that they show you, it probably belongs on YouTube as a, as a video.

Just because it has that, yeah, that visual side. And I think a lot of people, uh, learn a lot better when they, they're shown things as opposed to reading or, yeah. Learning that way.

Evan Troxel: One of my favorite new YouTube hacks, I don't think it's available on every video, but I see it like in the YouTube app on my phone, is you can ask AI just to summarize the

video for you because

Milos Temerinski: Oh, yeah.

Evan Troxel: there's a 40 minute video that literally could be explained in five minutes, right? Instead, and, and it's, uh, that's pretty.

Pretty important I think. And with, because of ai now, some of the developments in the video space, I found one today where it's like this really in depth way that AI approaches video to, they, they call it like control F for video. Right. And this is, this is a, a great thing, right? Especially in the tutorial world where videos do tend to be

longer.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: the part I I, I know I saw it. I know I

heard it? Where was

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: finding that in the video, more than just based on a

transcript with timestamps. Um, this,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: actually taking it to new levels. I think this is gonna be an incredibly powerful platform to be on. And, and I'm curious your take when it comes to, uh, like this whole idea of, I'm, I'm, I'm.

Formulating this idea where, and and you've probably heard this too, uh, which is like, well, architecture firms are actually technology companies. They just happen to do

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: I think you've probably heard that, right? And, and now I, I kind of actually think it's, it's more on the media side of things, and this is, maybe I, I'm biased because I make a lot of media, but a media company, right?

Like the Balkan

Milos Temerinski: All right. I guess.

Evan Troxel: right? And you, you, you, you have a, a way that you do this, you, you, you have platforms that you focus on, and you have a delivery mechanism that is YouTube, but like you're, you're creating your main deliverable in, in addition to information is media. Like, and it's how

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: consume.

I'm, I'm just curious, like, what, what do you think of in today's day and age about like media being, media first?

Obviously it opens

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: for people that they never, you, you didn't come outta grad school. Maybe you did because you were doing it in grad school, but you're like, I'm, I'm gonna be a YouTuber.

No, you never, you probably never said that. Right. And so, but nowadays it's like, this is just

what you do, this is how you do

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: And, and I'm curious when it comes to, like thinking media first, what does that bring up for you?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I think it's definitely a powerful way to think, um, when I see, especially in architecture world, uh, when I see local companies and what's considered, let's say, a good company or a not so good company, it's mostly kinda that media presence and just marketing in a, in a, in a way. And, um, you have a, you have these new companies pop up and they do, let's say interior design, and they have videos showing their work.

They have kind of interactive ways of explaining things. They, they, they teach you what they're doing. It's not like, oh, this is what we've done. It's like, okay, let me explain why what we have done here is actually really good.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: that's so

powerful, right? Because like you said, when you, you might meet somebody in real life and they're like, I feel like I know you. I. They, they know how

you, how you, teach and things that you think that specifically relate to the subjects you're talking about.

But if there's, if you're explaining on video, how you think as a designer or as a firm or why your approach, why you approach this project this way. Like I recently listened to a podcast, Rick Rubin's podcast, he's

famous music

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: um, wrote a great book, I think he's called The Creative Act. And now he has a podcast called Tetragrammaton.

don't know what that means, but

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: really cool.

And he

Milos Temerinski: Sounds cool.

Evan Troxel: part interview with Bjork

Les of

Milos Temerinski: Oh.

Evan Troxel: Engles Group. And it was such a powerful, because it's long

form right? Podcast, I think this podcast, many podcasts by nature are long form and long form like us having this conversation Way more layers to the onion than you would get in a polished media piece, right? Where it's gone through all the wordsmithing and the color grading and the sound mastering and all of those things to produce unquote perfect media. This is not that. This allows us to go in depth, and I felt like it was su, it was such an incredible way to get to know Bianca Ingles better because he, he's not preparing an agenda, a talking

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: It's literally like this, a conversation. We prepared no talking

points before this, and

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: us to go wherever we want to go. And, that to me is like, oh, I feel like I know Bjork Ingles better. He, he doesn't know me, right, but I know him better. And that to me builds like I, I am going to think of him before I think of another architect when it comes at least to like, I like the way he thinks, for example.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. Yeah. I I, I mean, it's, it's really powerful to, to see that, like how, how somebody gets to a certain idea and kind of thinking out loud. I, I think that's, that's, that's very powerful and especially in the, the podcasting world. That's, that's what it's all about. It's seeing how impressive people actually think

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Milos Temerinski: and, um, you can see, see them and, and it's kind of something that they've noticed.

At least that's, that's something that I always feel like when I'm watching a podcast. You can see when the guest is, they have kind of their talking points, and then when somebody asks them a question, they, you can see them kind of immediately jump into this, mode. Like, okay, I have this, this is the question, I have this answer.

And it's, yeah, it's completely algorithmic. And then you see people that can. Take a moment to think about it, like, oh, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I, I, I guess I would approach it this way and it's so much more powerful and, uh, and interesting. And, and, and you feel like that person is way more genuine, uh, in the, in the way that they're talking or presenting themselves, uh, as opposed to just having those prepared talking points and just going like, ba, ba, ba, just one after the other.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And, and then again, bringing it back to YouTube, this kind of visual portion, this other layer of information as an architect, being able to show

imagery, being able to

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: capturing that, and, and as a, as a superpower that a lot of architects have right to sketch ideas in real time as they're thinking out loud and like talking through it a really powerful form of communication and this is a great way to deliver that information.

Again, it's, it's a form of marketing, but I wouldn't call it marketing. Right? It's, and I, I wouldn't call it thought leadership, it's just like. You put it out there so that people could, like, there's an opportunity for them to see behind the scenes, the process, the way you think, like you put it, that's so powerful.

And when the opportunity arises, this is the marketing part where when somebody actually needs something and they've seen that because it exists, it's out there on the internet and they could be looking for it and they could have seen your video. the one that they

think of. And that

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: is, just kind of a new of the puzzle to today's media marketing, advertising game and, and YouTube totally is a

game, right?

It, it's

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

yeah.

Evan Troxel: constantly trying to figure it

out.

Milos Temerinski: It's like, uh, I, I think the word sharing is, uh, fits very well. It's if you try not to make it too, uh, try not to, uh, that that's something that I'm working on. I, uh, just from my experience, uh, in school and everything, I always thought if you're teaching something, you have to be very composed.

You have to be very structured, you know, like, oh, and this, and this and that. And it's very kind of in, in a very strict manner. Uh, and that's, I guess good in a way, but also, uh, it can takes away a whole bit of that, uh, sharing side where it's like, okay, I found out.

about this. What do you think about it? Uh, and, and, and it's like, uh, this process where the audience is, you're breaking that through.

Uh. Fourth wall. Yeah. fourth wall.

Uh, and your, the audience is engaging in, in the comments section and telling you, oh, you've, this is okay, but you can perhaps do something as a, a little bit different. I found this solution. Well that doesn't work in my area because we have this code and we have to do it different and so on.

So I feel like that's, that's very powerful and I always find it hard. I, I feel like I am kinda letting down my guard whenever I talk that way, but also I understand that it's the, uh, I guess it's the, even though it feels a bit w vulnerable, uh, uh, it also, uh, is the most genuine way to, to share knowledge and to interact with your audience.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, there's definitely a trend. I've noticed this with my own work that. You mentioned it a minute ago, which was like that, uh, contemplative pause when somebody asks you something that you're not prepared to

answer for, for example. I mean, it's not like it's out of bounds, right? It's like, oh yeah. Um, and I think there used to be kind of a, in my mind at least, uh, like I need to edit that down.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: And, I think now speaking to what you're talking about here too, what comes to mind is like, okay, a bug pops up you have to deal with it before you can move on when you're doing a software demo. Like,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: actually that's real

life like that,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: to everybody all the time. How do you deal with that?

And then you're showing that like, that's authentic the experience of using these con complicated

pieces of software that we have to

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: deliver our, our projects. so. Now, I don't edit those pauses down. And I, if I'm doing a training, you don't have to cut those pieces out because you don't have to describe a perfect experience because nobody has a perfect experience and you, it's a teaching opportunity.

And it is just like, when I used to teach in the university, I would, I would teach Revit, I would teach technology tools. can't edit that out. It's

live. It's right

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Everybody's watching. And they want to see what do you do in those situations, because everybody has these situations all the time, it's a great opportunity.

And I actually think that's a great training ground for right? Which is just do it in front of people. Do the thing that you want to do and capture it right there. And I, I think this also gets back to another point that I wanna make, I'm sorry,

I'm going on for a second

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: like this idea that, that, um, you can capture this stuff for, for those who aren't on YouTube or aren't doing this, you can capture this stuff.

You don't have to

post it.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: we did many podcasts on cus speak before we posted the first one as practice podcasts. And it just starts to get you in the rhythm of it and then you know what you need to do to get a little bit better. And then you try that and then you, you keep this cycle going so that you get better and better and better.

And then you get to a point where you're like, okay, now I can put, start putting 'em out there. They don't, again, they don't have to be perfect. They have to be good enough will naturally get better at these things over time. But I, I'm curious your experience like with editing and polishing and doing all that stuff, where, how has that evolved for you over time?

Milos Temerinski: Uh, so when it comes to, um, just if, if I can just go, uh, one step back. You, you mentioned something and it kind of triggered a, a, a thought, uh, something that I found when I was, uh, at university or even at high school, I would learn, uh, best when I, uh, pretended like I'm the teacher explaining this to somebody.

That was my kind of thing. I would do this kind of role play in my head and I'm teaching the biology lesson today, and that's how, how I would prepare for the test. And, uh, I think that's very powerful, uh, when it comes to learning software. Like you might, uh, learn something once, uh, but uh, it's, as you said, software today is so complicated.

You'll. Forget about it in six months, and you will not, again, you'll have to search for that solution. So just going through that and just recording it, at least for yourself, it can be really, really powerful. Uh, so Yeah.

Now getting back to your actual question, You said about the editing process and how, how, how did that evolve and what did I learn?

Right?

Yeah. So at first my editing process was very poor, just because I didn't know how to use the tools very well. So, uh, it was just kind of record and if I make a mistake, I stop and then I start over until I have like a five minute video with no mistakes or slight mistakes. And then kind of slowly as I learned the basics, I, I started editing out the mistakes or I could.

Make a pause for myself, or if I, if I am, if I perhaps wrote down how I want to explain a specific thing, I can then stop, look at that, then re record, continue recording and, and so on. So it did kind of evolve from this very kinda rigid, scared, position it first to becoming a bit more comfortable. And then I would, uh, I I could edit out any mistakes or pauses.

Evan Troxel: you know, you know, there's a, there's a, a net that you can

yeah. Use when

Milos Temerinski: yeah. You're, you're,

Evan Troxel: a

Milos Temerinski: you're, you're safe.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Uh, I do, uh, however, can feel, uh, like I'm constantly thinking about, okay, do I want to. Explain this a bit further, or do we want to keep it very simple and straightforward? This is something that,

uh, is, is I, I guess, controversial on my channel where people are some, uh, sometimes get angry about, uh, let's say show a workflow and then they say, okay, but that doesn't work.

My bi manager would fire me if I did something like that, or, and so on. And then other people are commenting, oh, oh my God, this saved my life. I, I had this project due and I finished it and it was perfect, and so on. So it, it kind of feels a bit weird because different people have different expectations. you, have so many different workflows, and do I explain all of that in the video, but then the video is way too long and nobody would watch it? Or do I explain it very short? So now I'm. Trying to kinda keep the long form stuff and kind showing everything slowly, step by step for the, to pay the audience on the website.

Now we're even doing live sessions and uh, and so on. So that's very powerful and I, I was very scared of that at first, but now I am, it, it feels so good to share something, something with the community, and then people, they, they ask questions and, and, and all of that, and it's, it's really fun. But then YouTube is more for things like, I.

Um, as you said, with that AI that can kinda search through your video, I try to make my videos like very, um, search engine optimized and very, like, not search engine optimized, more just search optimized. Okay, I have this problem, I need a solution. I go to YouTube, Balkan architect as the solution. So I try to make it, in a way where it's very simple and straightforward, and then if you want this more kind of chill approach where you're not, uh, strictly learn, uh, searching for a quick answer to a, a question, you're, you're ready to kind of learn and relax while we have a different kind of avenue for that.

And I, I'm thinking about doing some live sessions on YouTube as well. I think that would be really powerful.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Milos Temerinski: I just haven't gotten to it yet, I guess.

Evan Troxel: How do you do that search optimization that you're talking about? Do you break things into chapters? Do you break out

separate videos? Is it really in the description? Like how, how are you actually going about accomplishing that?

Milos Temerinski: Uh, yeah. Uh, I definitely try to, um, do the, the timestamps and I try to make each part of the video kind of make sense within that timestamp. So if you look at the video, that's a 10 minute video and we have a two minute timestamp. I try to have that timestamp kind of work on its own. If somebody comes, let's say I'm doing a.

Roof, and it's like a complex roof, and then I have a timestamp like dormer. If you're just searching for a dormer tutorial, those two minutes would kinda give you the answer. So I try to kinda structure it in that way. And also it's a lot of trial and error. Uh, I, I have over a thousand videos so far and it starts to feel at some point, like I really have nothing new to say apart from the kind of the new features that come out.

But then I realized at one point like, okay, I have all of these old videos that I'm not happy with. I. The way that they, they, they turned out. I'm a lot more confident now. I know a lot of new things. Revit has changed a little bit since then. The ICON's are different. Maybe something is in a different place.

Why not try to improve that video and upload it again in a kinda shorter, uh, much more, uh, higher quality content type of way. So, uh, I try that and in, in a lot of cases, it turns out very well, and then I can, I, I forget about it because it feels very uncomfortable to upload something for the second time, uh, or the same topic.

Obviously it's a new video, but it, it kind of feels weird. I dunno. Maybe It's just, a, a meeting, but, yeah.

Evan Troxel: is be, and I'll tell you

why it's it, uh,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: man, the same topics have come up on ar, my Arch Speak podcast over and over again. And it's like, you don't even remem I don't remember if we've talked about it or not. I'm sure we have. but there's a new

audience a lot

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: too, right?

And they've never heard it before. And so there might be the people who have been the loyal listeners or watchers for years and years and years and they're like, again, and, and it's like. so sorry, not sorry. Because there's a new, there's new people that show up and they don't know, and maybe you've changed your

approach a little

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and that, I think is, is an interesting piece of the evolution of a channel as well.

Like, I definitely think differently about certain things than I used to. And that starts to work its way into the content that you present on the channel. And that becomes part of the

journey of the

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: as a, total body of work. Not independent episodes. Like I don't think, I think one of the, the, the real interesting points about doing these kinds of things that you and I are doing it really is about the big picture

of creating all of the content over a longer period of time.

That's a journey that we're going on and our audience is going on with us. People are picking it up at different points along the timeline. It's not about the specific episode and whether it was perfect, and it's not about whether you, your opinion on something at that moment. Like, like those things happen, but that this is like, just like

life, right? Things

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: but it's really about the whole life. It's not just the right

now or the, the,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: the one that was three episodes ago anymore. Um,

I don't know,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: kind of bigger existential, uh, concepts that we're thinking of

here.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, Uh, it's, uh, one thing that kind of proves me wrong every time I think, like perhaps people are going to get angry if I upload a siMilosr topic twice, is that, um, a lot of people that can get our courses or get consultations, they say, oh, I've been watching your channel for years, and they didn't know you have the website.

And it's like, I say that in every single video in the beginning of the video, in the end of the video, and people just kind of miss that. They're just looking for one specific thing. And it's okay. I mean, we all consume media that way because there's so much of it

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Milos Temerinski: there. There's not enough lifetimes to To watch it all.

Evan Troxel: the

Milos Temerinski: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: have time to read the article. How many

times you, yeah. All the

Milos Temerinski: exactly. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Well, one of the other things that, okay, so we can stop talking about YouTube here in a minute, but one of the things that, that is really incredible is the comments in YouTube, and you brought it up, right?

It's, it's like this, I I, there used to be, I mean, YouTube used to be. fire when it came to con comments.

Right. But

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: like, I don't know, in the last few years at least, like they've gotten incredibly good at weeding out the junk and just, and I think for the most part you said you do get some comments that are like really

critical or,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: negative or whatever, of course, right?

Because you're putting things on the internet

and people are gonna do

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: on the internet and, and these are examples of the, the downside of putting things on the internet. But um, the same time, like when it comes to content, like you could go to your comments and get

ideas for content,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm. Yeah, all the time.

Evan Troxel: incredible the feedback mechanism that is generally in the positive category through the YouTube comment system.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. Yeah. De definitely. I think it's, it's really powerful. The problem is sometimes just filtering through all of the comments.

Evan Troxel: Well, with,

Milos Temerinski: Something Yeah,

Evan Troxel: you're just throwing shade now, like you've, because 'cause you have so many, so many subscribers.

have a lot

Milos Temerinski: yeah,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. It, it, it can get, especially now we're across multiple platforms, so just even just going through direct messages is next to impossible and, uh, uh. It, it's kind of hard sometimes just because you, you know, that there are some genuine, interesting conversations, uh, that that can start, but you just don't have the time to,

uh, to, to, to just read through them all and filter it down to see like what makes sense to answer and what doesn't.

Uh, at least that's, I, guess, that's the, uh, that's a problem and uh, the platform reaches a certain size. Uh, but yeah, I think it's, it's very powerful. Like people who. Leave comments. And I, I, for example, with, uh, Gavin, the Ozzy BIM guru, he, I did a tutorial on, on something, and then he create, he, he, he left a comment.

He was like, oh, uh, I wouldn't recommend doing this this way. And just because of this and that. And then he created his own video, uh, on that topic. And then, uh, let's say a year or two later, I created a new video, kind of, uh, fixing the, the old one, uh, according to his tips. And, uh, I think I mentioned that.

And it's, I think it's this nice kind of back and forth where, uh, you can really, um, you can really learn a lot through the, through the comments. And also people give, give, give good ideas in terms of the, the content they can, that they can make. For example, my favorite is the, the, the comment that they always get is like, can you show how to model.

X, y, z building in Revit, and I always select it, I Google it, and if it's something that's interesting, uh, uh, I can use it for a tutorial. So it's, it's really helpful. And of course, people kind of correct your mistakes or point out different workflows and, uh, I think that's really good.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. You can't cover all the bases and I, it, what's interesting to me is that. You can get better together on a platform like

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: mean, you don't have to be near each other. You don't have to be in the same office. You don't have to be on the same team, can still get better together. And, and so yeah, maybe it wasn't perfect.

Maybe you learn something

through the comment.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: them to make a video. And let's just, let's just throw out, shout out to Gavin

because he leaves genuinely

great

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: YouTube content that he watches.

Right. And, and I

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. Yeah, he's

Evan Troxel: that

Milos Temerinski: good.

Evan Troxel: like more of that. Please, I, that is it.

It's absolutely wonderful.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, it's, it's really good to have people out there that are willing to take the time and, uh, and can help out and or join the conversation and, and add something insightful.

Evan Troxel: Formulate a

thought and Yeah.

Milos Temerinski: yeah.

Evan Troxel: and then, oh, that's amazing. Right, because most people don't take the

time to do that. I mean,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: are, I'm busy. I don't, I don't leave many thoughtful comments, but I think it's better than just throwing, throwing poop at somebody's video,

right. Because like, who

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: It's, it's not that, that is a waste of

time. I think it's

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: can't believe you took the time to leave that comment.

Right. And just

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: again, internet, doing internet

things. Right. That,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: So, okay. So let's move on from, from YouTube and let's just talk about kind of

teaching approach and technology, teaching technology and the importance of that.

What, why did you end up focusing on this content?

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Uh, so I, per personally, I found, uh, video the, the best way to, to share knowledge, especially when it comes to software and also like just DIY things ar around the house or something like that. So, and also, as I mentioned, I had this passion for YouTube, so I, I always felt like video is a very good, um, approach or method to, to share knowledge.

Uh, I was very frustrated at school. Uh, I, I don't know how other universities are, but my university, for example, uh. I think I've spent more time just in hallways waiting for the professor or teaching assistant who's late and then waiting in line in front of or behind 40 other students to get like a five minute comment.

And then you get to class and It's like, I didn't tell you to do this, or something like that. And just a lot of waste, uh, in terms of the time. And I just felt like my time wasn't respected at all, uh, at the university and so many things. Like I even remember like professors, you can see that they don't really care.

They're, they, they're there to just do their job. We're there just to do our job and it's like we're just pretending to do.

Evan Troxel: It's really

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, very transactional. like teaching is like the last thing that anybody's interested, uh, in there. Of course there are wonderful examples at my university where I learned so many good things and was inspired, but also there were a lot of these examples where it's just, just horrible time management and, uh, just horrible way to learn.

So I always thought that on demand video is the best way to learn because it's, it's video, so it explain things. It's also video, so it allows you to edit things in a way that's, uh, a bit more efficient than a, a person just speaking off the top of their mind. And, uh. Yeah.

So I, I, I always thought that was, that was really powerful and, uh, uh, I, I was watching some courses, I think it was back then was like linda.com or something like that, uh, uh, uh, Paul F Hop and, uh, was there, and I, I can't remember the other name, uh, of the other instructor, but I, I, I learned Revit partially through those courses, and I thought, okay, I, I love their job.

I wanna try to do this. And yeah. And I was doing tutoring at school, uh, just to make some extra income. And Yeah.

I, I, I really fell in love with that teaching people and then seeing them have that aha moment, like, oh, you can do That

Evan Troxel: Yes.

Milos Temerinski: so incredible. And when, yeah.

Uh, very much. It's addictive when you feel it.

And it's also addictive when You sh sh show somebody and then they feel it and, and you're like the, the gatekeeper of this incredible knowledge. And it, or perhaps gatekeeper is wrong word, but Yeah. You're the,

uh, the, the sharer,

Evan Troxel: that? Yeah.

Milos Temerinski: the source, I guess. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: That's cool. I, and, and so when you did, did you distinctly pick Revit

when you began

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: thing as like, I'm, I'm going to focus on this. Were you searching for something that you felt like, or like, like where did that

actually, that

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: that specificity of that subject come

in?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, of course. So, uh, when I was at, at school, uh, the, the economy was terrible and I was very.

I think it was 2014 when I joined and

there was this thing where professors and teaching assistants were telling us like, there's absolutely no work. Like, don't even bother. Uh, I dunno What you're doing here. So that was kind of the attitude.

Uh, and that got me really scared and I thought like, how do I differentiate myself in the, in the, in the workplace? How do I make myself a better employee, potential employee, uh, better candidate? So I thought like, well, uh, there is this, I. Software thing. And people at the university who are better at specific software are get better grades.

They finish their projects easier, uh, just it's a lot smoother for them compared to people that don't know how to use software very well. So for me, like learning software was the way to go to just get a decent first job out of school. So I, I already, in high school, I learned AutoCAD because I was in this kind of like technical high school, uh, for construction.

So I learned AutoCAD, uh, I knew the basics. So then, uh, when I got to university, I learned Photoshop and Illustrator. And then, uh, I was like, okay, I need a 3D software. So I learned a little bit of SketchUp, a little bit of three DS max, but it was nothing that I was very happy with. And then, uh, when I figured out that there's this?

rabbit thing that's supposedly the future and how it works.

Uh, it immediately like clicked for me. It was like, Okay.

that's what they need to learn. That's the future. And, uh, at that time, a lot of professors at the university were very, um, judgmental of, of me for using Revit just because it does constrain you when you don't know how to use it at first, and I didn't.

So it does constrain you quite a bit when it comes to the shapes that you can create compared to, let's say, a SketchUp, uh, or just CAD that other students were using. So, uh, my, uh. My projects looked, uh, I guess a bit too rty for them. Uh, but I kind of felt like there is a way to kinda push through this and, and learn it.

And I did over the years, or it took me like two, three years to get really good at it. And then I was constantly, because I got so good at these different software, I was constantly, uh, answering questions for other people in school. Like, Oh, I have this thing. How do I make these lines thicker? How do I change this?

How do I make that roof and so on? How do I export out of the software? And, uh, that's how I kind of started doing tutoring for the younger students. And then, uh, I wanted to do some sort of marketing campaign for myself. And also, uh, as I said, I, I loved these tutorials and courses and I thought like, I, I wanna do that for.

On my own. And I made this AutoCAT course, uh, that was very successful. Uh, so it's in Serbian language. It's, I think it's Belgrade or something like that. The, the YouTube channel. It's still out there. And, uh, Yeah.

so that was successful. However, I, I didn't really get any new clients, but I did start, uh, earning a bit of revenue from YouTube and that kinda motivated me to, to, to, to start doing something.

It was only like a couple of dollars per month, but it was like, wow, it's magic internet money. Uh,

so, so that, that kind of motivated me. And then I tried English and I tried Revit and uh, it just exploded from there. I just did one video and it got I think, like 8,000 views in, in four or five months. And for me, that was, I.

Crazy. And then I did a few more and a few more, and a few more, and it got to a point where the channel was getting about 10 to 20,000 views per month. And, uh, I was very excited and I was doing this part-time job and, uh, for free. And I, I decided to quit that and do, try to do that, uh, daily upload. And that's what really kind of grew the channel and, uh, established Balkan architect as a, as a, let's say, as a recognizable name.

Evan Troxel: So I am curious what. then, you said you

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: as

the future.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: didn't agree with that because of the

constraints that you

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: but I think also through learning how to master a tool, it does kind of open up opportunities and, and, and as a teacher of that software, you're, you're maybe even showing like future, you will be able to do these kinds of things if you put in the work to get

there. And so

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: curious if, if that was really the driver for really focusing on that content. Obviously you were getting

feedback from the audience as well, like, oh, I'm getting a lot of views on this software, and it's helping you make decisions around the type of content to deliver.

give us some insight into that side

of it?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. I, I felt like Revit had this, I, I felt like Revit was only limited in terms of the modeling. it?

perhaps sounds weird, but, uh, '

Evan Troxel: because that's,

what it's

Milos Temerinski: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: right? Is the

Milos Temerinski: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: so

Milos Temerinski: modeling,

software, but yeah. But, uh, I, I, it's also something to do with university where projects look very wild and it's not straight walls and, uh, flat roofs.

It's mostly like crazy things. And, uh, yeah. So, uh, I felt like, okay, so if I learn how to use this software, uh, later on when I get a job, I'm going to be so powerful. I can make these schedules and I can do all of the sanitation very quickly. I can make changes easily and all of that. So I, I saw the potential and, and then that's kind of what pushed me into exploring it even further.

And also there's that aha moment that we've mentioned. And, uh, I can live for that. And, uh, at some point I start, I stopped learning Rabbit because I needed it for, school and I started learning it just because I wanted to teach it. And. I kind of, I, I really enjoyed that, especially when I started making my first courses when I was like, okay, roofs in Rev, let's make a course on that.

And then I go through the all of the, the, the Autodesk manuals, and then I go through the forums and everything and I see like what everybody's doing and all of the different things that people are doing. Then I do my own testing. Okay, how can I do something different? Can I use this, this tool to get something interesting out of that somehow, or this or the other? So, yeah. it was, uh, a lot of that where, uh, I, I really enjoy kind of going really deep into a specific topic and then figuring out the best way to present that to a larger audience.

Evan Troxel: And that self-direction, I mean, is what leads you to content, uh, versus working in a

firm.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: If it's, like, oh, okay, well we have all these jobs we have to do, and so there's not that time for exploration and experimentation. And then,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: but, sometimes it's like, well, we really need to create this form.

really difficult to like nights and weekends then for

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: looking for that

stuff, which just starts

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: the batteries and the morale around

because you're not getting paid

Milos Temerinski: yeah,

Evan Troxel: Right? And, and, but

Milos Temerinski: yeah,

Evan Troxel: expectation. And so it's, it's pretty interesting. Like you actually had the insight there to say, okay, I need to step away from this so that I can do this.

And then that self-direction, that curiosity that you have just around a generic topic like roofs, right? Because, okay, well man, there's a lot of different roofs

out there that we, you can

Milos Temerinski: yeah.

Evan Troxel: around in the, in the downtown and be like, okay, well how can I make that one, how can I make that one?

how can I

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: And then you can start looking at top tier design firm. Forms and say, okay, well how can I do that one? How can I do that one in the software? And then it just leads you down this path of exploration that you then get to share with an audience. I, it's a, it's pretty, it's pretty cool how that works.

Milos Temerinski: yeah.

Yeah. And, and it's also, uh, I think it's you, when you spend that extra time, uh, researching a topic, uh, it feels very good when you can, uh, gather this collection of solutions and just go, bam, bam, bam, bam. Like, okay, so there's a solution for this and a solution for that. And, uh, because it's, it's very hard, uh, as, as you mentioned, like when you're working on a job and you, you have to finish something, you have, uh, deadlines, uh.

Uh, the difference between, let's say AutoCAD and Revit is you go from this where you can, you kind of just do lines a little bit different and you get to that shape. Whereas in Revit, you really have to find a completely different approach that's completely, that's not really intuitive compared to anything else that you've done so far.

So sometimes it feels like, yeah, like what are you working on? Like this roof. Didn't you do that yesterday? Yeah. So what did you do since then? Nothing. I, I found like six wrong solutions to this and yeah. I'm, I'm working on it. So it feels really good when you can, can help people avoid that and people really appreciate that.

Uh,

Evan Troxel: to the

right work around.

Milos Temerinski: yeah, exactly.

Evan Troxel: like, like modern software is just a lot of work rounding,

right? Like that,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: new verb, but it's, that's what it is. And, and so because the capability's not there yet, but we still need to

deliver, we still need to

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: Uh, and, and so I mean, that, that does become like these tougher problems that you're trying to solve in the typical software becomes an art form in itself

of, of finding

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and then implementing these workarounds.

Uh,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: it's also the bane of the people who come behind you, right?

When they have to

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: fix that thing or modify it or something. And it's like, well, how did, and then they have to reverse engineer it somehow or, or start over.

Yeah. It's a, it's

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. I, I

Evan Troxel: in the industry.

Milos Temerinski: definitely, I, I feel like a lot of people see this as, I guess creativity, being drained out of architecture, but I think It's just a, different kind of. Creativity. it's more technical in a way, but also kind of my view towards architecture has changed a lot since, uh, school.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Milos Temerinski: Uh, I, I feel like at school they're, they're really forcing this idea of, uh, architecture being art and, uh, architects being these mostly misunderstood artists, uh, who can't get their work published or built.

Uh, and, um, I, I think through, I, I think there's a huge place for art in architecture and I think it's, it's wonderful. But they also think there is this kind of technical side where there are actually problems with housing and it's, it's not so much yet there can be art in terms of the facade and in terms of, let's say the, uh, the aesthetic of it.

But the technical side, we just need. Buildings being built, and we need to find the, the most, um, affordable technical solution to that. And, uh, I feel like that's an art of its own just to, through software to find those solutions and, and, and deliver.

Evan Troxel: I think an another dimension to that too is that in order to get those projects built, mastery of the technical side of, you know, the technology is super important,

right? Because that

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: how the projects are drawn and

delivered,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: figured out like how, how do you make those constructible.

Through

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: And, and so I'm, I'm curious, your position on enhancing your skills, building on your technical software skills, unlocking levels of creativity. I

mean, is that something

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: do you think about that?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, definitely. I, I mean. I, I feel like I'm doing very creative things when I'm in Revit. And,

uh, it might not feel that way. Like you're just going through parameters and, okay, should we use a formula here? Or how do we filter down the schedule? Do we create a shared parameter for this or whatever?

How do we create this interesting material? But yeah, I, I, I find tremendous kinda creativity, uh, in all of that, especially now I'm working with a, uh, with a small team. And then when you can go kind of back and forth. Okay, so what's your idea on this? While I, I tested out something a bit different and it's, it's, it's really fun and, uh, Yeah.

I, I, I, I, I don't think like my creativity or my creative outlet suffered because I'm more on the software side of things and not on the designing, uh, part of things.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I, the, what came to my mind, so bear with me here for a second. This may be super weird. I mean, there's this attitude and I, this, we've seen this in software and architecture forever, which is. You know, the going into technical debt, like fi, like the bandaid today helps us solve the problem today. Um, we're just going into debt for, you know, three weeks from now when we actually have to do it for real, or we have to undo it or we have to deal with the way we did it today then.

Um, and because the, the analogy that comes to mind is like the movie industry, right? Um, I'm a huge fan of like the behind the scenes, you know, how did they do that? Um, special effects or filmmaking in general? back, back when I was learning, like right outta college, late nineties, a lot of software stuff I was doing a lot of 3D modeling and visual, you know, movie making, fly-throughs, but also I started to get into visual effects and I would go, I lived in LA and I would go downtown to.

Kodak Theater where they would have masters of CGI come in and show like, how did they do this, you know, thing in Phantom Menace, how did like teach me about rotoscoping, teach me about camera mapping and all of, you know, matte paintings and all these kinds of things. But there they were, transitioning to digital right from, from film was just, I loved it.

I ate up everything that I could about it and, and, and even today, you can go on like Disney Plus's streaming Channel Station and, and you can look at like I the ILM documentary and it's a multi-part documentary of how Industrial Light Magic made the Star Wars movies

and, and other things.

Milos Temerinski: wow.

Evan Troxel: Go

ahead.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, I just say, wow, like I, I didn't know about that. I'll have to check it out.

Evan Troxel: cool.

Um, because, and, and my, my roundabout way of getting to the point is, is just like, um, everything is a

hack, right? Everything

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: magic. This is what we called movie magic, right? You, they would use miniatures to shoot this scene and they would use blue screen or green screen or camera, you know, motion tracking or whatever it was.

do whatever they needed to do. And this kind of works its way back into YouTube with like Adam Savage's tested channel. He worked at ILM back in the day, right? And so he was a model maker. And, and so it's all about like doing whatever it takes to

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: shot. And architecture is much like

that.

It, it has

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: right? It's like, well hack it, like, okay, fake it. Everything is like, just, just, you'll know, draw a field region

over that, right? Like mask it

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: right? And, and, and it's like that, that there's a certain elegance to that. Problem solving, uh, way. And then there's other people who are like BIM managers and Revit, you know, they, they, they pros and they know how to do everything and they're rolling their eyes and they're like, I can't believe you did it like that.

And, and it's like, well, we went through architecture school, right? And where you would rip the wall out of the

model and it was better.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Or you, you know, it was, who cares? Like cut it off with a pair of scissors. It's not even a clean cut, but it's like, okay, now I, now that model really sings or

whatever.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: there's, there's kind of this parallel to this film

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and, and so I'm curious like from a. A hacky point of view when it comes to software and just making it look right, just because like ultimately we deliver

drawings that just have to look

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: that really that, and until later, like I'm sure we're accruing some technical debt for when it actually needs to be built, or we didn't realize we were covering up that stuff that Oh, it, it all moved.

And the, the, the mask is still

there. Right. The field region

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: still in the same spot as where we drew it and now it's

not. Right. Right.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and so there's this, now there's this tension, this fight of like, there was like the promise of bim and this is something I'm sure you're aware of, like BIM is dead.

Like we're seeing this

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Right. Um, it's because there was this promise and then like there was this lack of ability to actually get, because of

the technical prowess that it actually takes to get to the point where it can deliver on all of these different dimensions. And so like we're hackers by nature.

Architects are kind of hackers by nature, like, right. And then there's this kind of really technical side of things and doing things quote unquote right. And best practices and all of these things, like, I just went off down this huge tangent, but, but I'm, I'm curious from your point of view, you're teaching people and you're evolving things

over time too,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: kind of teaching a, a future version.

You're, you're saying this is who you could become by learning this software with these technical abilities that you can literally like get through watching you on YouTube. Um, and there's just kind of like these fights and these disconnects happening along the way and there's all these different levels on the spectrum of, of technical ability in this very complex software.

Like,

like I'm just curious

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: all

that. Uh, let me just dump

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: do you

think about it?

Milos Temerinski: No, no. I, I think it's, it's, It's a great analogy with the film industry and also I, I think the yeah, as you mentioned, the, the Vim is dead. Uh, people like this, this whole idea. I think it's just people were really optimistic because architecture, construction, it's always such a mess.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Milos Temerinski: Always has been, and

could possibly always be.

Uh uh, and people kind of felt like, okay, so we have this. New technology, it's coming in and it's going to streamline everything. It's going to make everything kind work like on a, in a factory conveyor belt, and it's all, all, all going to be perfect, no errors, no issues. And it just didn't turn out that way at all,

Evan Troxel: really the

Milos Temerinski: eh?

Evan Troxel: Lucy version of the conveyor belt where she just starts eating

the food as it's

Milos Temerinski: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: down because she can't process it fast enough.

Yeah, exactly.

Milos Temerinski: yeah, yeah, definitely. So, I, I think it's just because the construction industry is so diverse and the, the building industry and every building is different. Every building requires, uh, something different. So you can't really have a kind of streamlined approach. Like you can do it for, um, some sort of like prebuilt.

Stuff that's gonna, just gets assembled and then you can avoid a lot of issues. But that, that's only part of construction. Like, uh, everything else is, is a thing of its own, a life of its own. Each project, especially larger projects. And you may build like a small factory just to do certain something, some construction element for a specific project.

So, uh, I just think the, the fact that each project is different, we cannot have this streamlined, uh, approach. Uh, and perhaps we're going into that direction, but we're definitely still, uh, far away from that. And of course, the, the fact that you can, uh, and in the end you still need to give somebody a drawing, uh, so that, uh, the, the output kind of.

Um, pushes you in the direction of using these little hacks and as you said, filled regions just to hide things. Obviously, when we go to, to, to a point where the deliverable is actually a BIM model, you can't do some things, but also you can do a lot of other things that are not, uh, kind of according to the agreement or what somebody would, uh, consider a, uh, a kind of a complete project.

I mean, it's, it's one of the reasons I I I, I try to avoid, uh, most freelance work, uh, when. Somebody reaches out, okay, we have this project, it needs to be LOD 200. And yeah, you just do it. Uh, I, I always feel like the, the possibility for, uh, for miscommunication is so large. Uh, uh, I am, I'm always very, uh, kind of fearful of taking on that project and just defining everything.

Okay. So we have to go through everything. How do, how do we model this? How do we model that? What is the deliverable? How should that look like? Uh, what should be included? What kind of parameters we use? Um, just kind preparing. That almost takes as much time as executing the actual project in, in Revit.

And, uh, it's just not fun.

So I, luckily I don't have to do it, so, so I don't, but Yeah.

it's, uh, it, it's just part of the industry where we're at Right.

now. And, uh, I think we're far away from. That dream that we were promised.

Evan Troxel: I think that is a, that's a great Yeah. That it, that, that I think is a, one of the biggest reasons why the quote unquote BIM is dead. Right. Is, is you're talking about right there. Just the amount of. Positions time, you know, and by positions I mean like

staff to do

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: of things. It's like there, we never used to try to have to figure out how we were going to represent this thing in

3D the

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: when the deliverable was a set of drawings, right?

And, and what's what's interesting is like we're still delivering the same thing right now. Like, we're not delivering models for the most part, right? Like, of course, models get thrown over the fence with all kinds of disclaimers, uh, uh, attached to

them, right?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: the liability and all of those things.

Um, but, but we're still delivering the same thing as we were when we were drawing it on paper the agency for review, for approval. For the contractor, for the most part to build from, which is actually not even true. It's like actually the shop drawings, which is the whole set of drawings that comes after our set of

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Right. Um, and so I think what's, what's so curious about this is like, uh, this is, this is why there's an uproar about this, right? It's, it's like, well there's, we're, we're just spending more time doing the same thing, right? And we have to hire new

people that are all these

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: to do these things, to push the buttons in the right order and to fill out the parameters correctly and to know, understand formulas and all of this kinds of stuff for the same

thing, right?

So we're

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: more time and resources to do the same thing, and the fees are

lower.

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: like,

Milos Temerinski: yeah,

Evan Troxel: it's, uh, we never lived up to, or we never met. The expectation of the promises that were originally handed out and have evolved to become even more complicated over

time is

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: quotes of the right way to do it, because it's just gotten way, way more complicated.

And, and so now people are spending time in software. They don't even like spending, don't even like

using it. Right? And,

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I'm sure you hear otherwise from you're teaching people and they're like, oh my gosh, this just unlocked something for me. And I now I actually enjoy it again. Um, there there's gotta be there.

There's again, like there huge tension. And so I'm just curious, like you've, you've now you've kind of defined yourself, your business.

Your

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: around this piece of software, that's really complicated. I mean, how, do you go from

here? I mean, do

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: what you're doing? Like, or, or how, I mean, obviously you don't have to, like, nobody has to stay in the same business that they're in.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: else. I'm just curious from, have you started to think about that? Or, or, you know, you hear things like, BIM is dead and that's what your, your livelihood is based on, is teaching people how to use these tools. So like, I'm just curious from kind of a, a

bigger

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: point of view.

Like where, where do you see things going and, and how are you responding to it?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. Uh, I did get a little bit afraid when the AI hype.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Milos Temerinski: at its peak, like, okay, is this, am I being outsourced to, to ai? Yeah.

Uh, but I did, uh, I did try to ask JGPT to, to, to explain something in, in Revit and, uh, to just something very simple to, to teach me how to do, and it failed miserably. So that kind of,

uh, made me feel a bit better.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, but yeah, in terms of the, in terms of the business, so we've, uh, recently, so this year we're just doing the, the first group right now, we became an Autodesk authorized training center. And, uh, that means we can provide an Autodesk certificate, uh, once the students finish the course, and also we can provide private software for the duration of the course so they don't have to buy the software if they're just learning.

Uh, so that's, that's something new. And this allows us to, um. On one hand, it allows us to, uh, do these groups. Uh, and it also pushes us in that direction just because that's part of the roles that Autodesk gives us. We need to do, have, we need to have some one-on-ones or some live sessions with the, uh, with the participants of the course.

And, uh, this is something that I've enjoyed very much, and, uh, just doing these, uh, both doing the live sessions, but also preparing the course and just doing it, uh, uh, at a higher quality that they've done, uh, previously just because, uh, we can charge more of it because of the certification. And that means that, uh, I can spend a lot more time and try to make it the best possible learning, uh, solution for somebody.

So, uh. For a while I was thinking, okay, so next I need to do Dynamo and I need to do some advanced BIM stuff, and I, I need to get into coding. Uh, like for example, what Gavin is doing right now and, uh, that, that just, uh, I, I kind of felt I need to go into that direction, but he realized there's so much more room to grow just for the beginners in terms of providing the best, um, the best, uh, learning experience for them.

So, uh, I, I realized that yeah, let's, let's just focus and do this one thing perfectly and then we can expand from there. Uh, and, uh, yeah, I, I. I think it's also, it has to do a little bit with how I started on YouTube with those daily uploads. I, I felt like I always needed to do more and more and more and more and different in order to stay relevant.

But now when I see, like, when I focus just on the very simple beginner things, people and I, if we do them better than ever before, people resonate really well with that. So currently the, the, the goal is just to, uh. Create the best possible learning experience for beginners and then kind of grow with them and then do some more advanced things

and just do more of that personal touch and that, uh, one-on-one.

Uh, we do consulting, for example, I don't do it. Uh, a colleague of mine does, uh, she's an, uh, authorized or she's a certified instructor and people are really happy to have that ability to call somebody up, jump on a zoom call, let me access your computer, let me show you on your computer how to solve the particular issue that's giving you kinda headaches for, for days.

And that has been really powerful. So, uh, uh, also I feel like that's something that AI will not be able to replace. Soon. So, uh, yeah, that's, that's something that I, I, I like to, I, I, I would like to explore and also just going from a solo creator, a i, I always felt like I was going to be like a solo freelancer.

I have all of this freedom and, and all of that. And that sounded, sounded really fun. But after four years of that, it kinda felt a little bit empty. And also I saw many limitations, and that's, that's when I decided to actually start hiring people and form a company. And just now, like my fun thing is just running this company and, uh,

putting out fires.

And sometimes it's frustrating, but it's also really fun. And I, I guess it's some sort of growth. So, uh, that's what I enjoy.

Evan Troxel: Well, you've, you've transitioned from working in the company, being, being the, the creator to working on the

company. Right? And

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: this responsibility with these staff members

that you've hired

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: company and offer these different training solutions and consulting and all these things.

And strategically, like you have to make

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: And that's so hard to

do when

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: in architecture, right? It's like, well, I, the, the project is like this, this one way street, and it's this narrow, and these are the blinders, and I have to get to the next deadline so that I can get to the next deadline, so that I can get to the next deadline.

What do you mean work on the practice? Like who has

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: that? Right. I mean, it's a, and, and so to, to your credit, like you saw that with the future of architect, the channel, the platform,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: all those kinds of things to be able to more

people. I think that,

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: Scale with doing what you're doing at some point becomes part of the

conversation. And, and

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: obviously scale and like on the YouTube side is one thing, but now getting people started on the right

foot, getting the right

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: under them to, to really leverage the tools so that they can take their skills, their practice to the next

level

Milos Temerinski: Hmm

Evan Troxel: a, is a big deal.

How do you do that? Well, you have to, you have to actually step away from creating the stuff to having a team

that can do that so that it

Milos Temerinski: mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: in the way that you're talking

about.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, it's, it's completely different when, and I, I, I constantly find myself, uh, arguing with myself like the, the, the creative me is arguing with the, uh, boss me, who is also arguing with the company owner, me. And it's, it's all, all of these kind of personas that each one of them has their own interests.

And, uh, I have to kind of find a way to, to, to, to, to make peace between all of them.

Evan Troxel: they each have their own

office in, in

Milos Temerinski: I know.

Evan Troxel: just

inside your head? Everyone

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. That's just,

Evan Troxel: room

Milos Temerinski: yeah.

Evan Troxel: head. Fun. Well, where can people find out more about what you're offering, what your

platform is all

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and how they can connect with you to, to where they can go to learn more?

Milos Temerinski: Yeah. So balkan architect.com, uh, definitely the best place to go. Uh, we're now doing a big redesign, so the website is going to look a lot nicer and be a lot more?

functional, uh, and the, and the following month or two. Uh, so yeah, that's, I think that's where people can learn pretty much everything, what we offer, uh, what we're all about.

And yeah, if they want to get started on their Revit journey with us, that's, that's where they should go.

Evan Troxel: And there's lots and lots and lots of previous

content to

Milos Temerinski: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: on the Balkan Architect YouTube

channel. And, uh, I'll put links to those in the show notes. Nilo, it's been a fun conversation. Thank you for

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: to share the journey that you've been on. I mean, when did the Balkan Architect actually get started?

Was it, it was like 2018 as far as

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: but even getting to that point, like it took years, right? You, I think you said you started YouTube in 2014 ish. Is

that what you said? So.

Milos Temerinski: So. I started learning Rev in 2014. Uh, but yeah, it, it took I think over two years until the channel like really became

something.

Evan Troxel: And, and now

Milos Temerinski: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: resource for everybody. I mean, it's just, thank you for doing that. I mean, it's, it's very, it's very cool that, that our profession has people like you doing the things that you're doing and bringing this content to, to others. So appreciate it. This has been a fun

conversation.

Milos Temerinski: Yeah, it, it, it has been really fun Uh, it was really nice talking to you. Uh, I love talking to, to people in the, in the industry, especially like this, doing different things. So I, I love the fact that you're doing a, a podcast on this. I think it's, it's very powerful and yeah. Uh, it, it was really interesting.

Evan Troxel: All right. next time.

View Details

In episode 186 of the podcast, I sat down with Clifton Harness, CEO and co-founder of TestFit, to have what turned into a wide-ranging and cathartic conversation about the state of architectural practice, technology adoption, and the limits of automation. Clifton didn’t hold back as we unpacked the cultural inertia in architecture, the outdated contracts that hobble innovation, and why TestFit was never meant to be “another BIM tool”, but something radically more focused.

We talked about the difference between working harder vs. working smarter, why architects must decouple their identity from drawing production, and how developers seem to be playing an entirely different (and more scalable) game.

“Architecture is dying a death by ten thousand paper cuts.” — Clifton Harness

The conversation offers a rare glimpse into Clifton's unfiltered perspective and serves as a rallying cry. His message is unmistakable: architecture must evolve beyond its rigid contracts, entrenched culture, and universal tooling approach, or risk losing ground to developers, software, and AI. Yet there's hope: by owning our value, choosing the right tools for specific tasks, and properly encoding our design intent, we can create a future where architecture isn't just relevant, it's essential.

Key TakeawaysHere are my top 5 takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

View Details

Gavin Crump joins the podcast to talk about his personal and professional evolution from an introverted graduate architect who stumbled through his first Revit test to becoming one of the most visible and trusted voices in AEC technology. We talk about programming as a creative outlet, the surprisingly emotional experience of automating his first workflow, and what it takes to build a public brand rooted in generosity and curiosity. Gavin also shares candid thoughts about building for delivery instead of design, the often-overlooked value of middle-tier roles in architecture firms, and why he believes architects still deserve the best tooling to do their best work.

Watch this Episode on YouTube:Subscribe to the podcast on YouTube

Episode links:Some links on this page help fund our work, and we may earn a commission from purchases at no extra cost to you.

Connect with the Guest* Gavin Crump on LinkedIn * Architectus website * Aussie BIM Guru on YouTube * Aussie BIM Guru on GitHub

Books and Philosophies Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World + Amazon Affiliate Link + Explores the benefits of focused, distraction-free work, which aligns with Gavin’s approach to mastering programming and BIM tools. * David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World + Amazon Affiliate Link + Encourages embracing breadth in skill development—resonates with Gavin’s diverse journey from architecture to BIM consulting and content creation. * Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work*** + Official Website + Amazon Affiliate Link + A guide to sharing your creative process and building a personal brand, relevant to Gavin’s journey with the Aussie BIM Guru YouTube channel.

Tools and Emerging Technologies ChatGPT for Coding Support + Official Website + Gavin discusses using GPT models to learn C#, demonstrating the evolving role of AI in helping technologists break into new languages and workflows. * Anthropic Claude + Official website + A highly regarded option for AI assisted code generation. * pyRevit* + Official Website + A powerful IronPython scripting library for Autodesk Revit, frequently used by Gavin to create custom tools for project teams.

Visualization & Design Tools Dynamo for Revit + Dynamo BIM + Visual programming for Revit—Gavin’s early gateway into programming and automation in architecture. * Grasshopper + Grasshopper Official Site + Visual programming environment integrated with Rhino; helped Gavin reconnect with architectural design logic. * Rhino 3D* + Rhino Website + Used to expand digital practice into mesh-based workflows and broader file compatibility.

Psychology and Personal Development Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts + Official Site + Amazon Affiliate Link + Offers insight into introverted leadership—Gavin’s story exemplifies the impact of introverts in technical and public-facing roles. * Angela Duckworth’s Grit* + Amazon Affiliate Link + Examines how passion and perseverance drive success—relevant to Gavin’s self-taught journey through Revit, Dynamo, Python, and C#.

About Gavin Crump:During his career, Gavin has worked at a variety of firms in various levels of BIM coordination/management and as a BIM Consultant at his own company, BIM Guru. He became well known for his work over at his YouTube channel, ‘Aussie BIM Guru’ – where Gavin shares practical tutorials and discussions focused on BIM and computation.

Currently Gavin works at Architectus as a BIM/Computation lead amongst a team of like minded professionals, and his interest remains with the forefront of technology and workflows related to data management.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Episode Transcript: Member 188: ‘Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable’, with Gavin Crump

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Gavin Crump. Gavin is an architect, BIM consultant, educator, and content creator based in Sydney, Australia. After working on some of the largest healthcare projects in the Southern hemisphere, Gavin transitioned from production to coordination to BIM management, and eventually into consulting.

Along the way, he built an engaged global audience through his Aussie BIM Guru YouTube channel, which you've probably heard of, sharing technical tutorials and insights on Revit, Dynamo, Python, C#, and more. Today, Gavin continues to work inside the AEC industry as a digital practice lead at Architectus helping to shape the digital workflows and strategic tooling that support project delivery at scale. In this episode, we explore his personal and professional evolution from an introverted graduate architect who stumbled through his first Revit test to become one of the most visible and trusted voices in the AEC technology space. We talk about programming as a creative outlet, the surprisingly emotional experience of automating his first workflow and what it takes to build a public brand rooted in generosity and curiosity. Gavin also shares candid thoughts about building for delivery instead of design the often overlooked value of middle tier roles in architecture firms and why he believes architects still deserve the best tooling to do their best work. A key theme from this conversation, which connects to many other episodes, although with an opposite outcome from many previous guests on the podcast, including myself as one example, is Gavin's intentional decision to stay in the AEC industry rather than jumping to tech. While many with his skillset have left for startups or consultancies, Gavin chose to remain and make his impact from within.

It's a choice that reflects a deep sense of alignment with architecture's mission and a challenge to firm leadership. If we want to keep top talent, we have to create the conditions for them to thrive. Right here. As usual, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes, so be sure to check those out.

You can find them directly in your podcast app if you're a paid member of TRXL+, and if you're a free member, you can find them at the website, Lastly, you can really help the podcast by sharing the episodes with your colleagues and by commenting on and sharing my LinkedIn posts. You can also leave a comment over on YouTube and engage with me and the other listeners.

I actually wonder if Gavin will leave a comment on this episode like he has been doing so well on many of the other ones. Anyways, head over to YouTube and see if he did. Also a hint that many of you don't know about hang out until the end of the episode for my wrap up, where I'll share my key takeaways.

All right, so now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with the Aussie BIM guru, AKA Gavin Crump.

I had this idea to start off this episode. I mean, you are the Aussie BIM guru, right? And, um, one of the things we keep seeing on LinkedIn is that BIM is dead, dead nails in the coffin.

Gavin Crump: Done.

Evan Troxel: Ai. We, we've moved on and, and, and I just think it's kind of like, are you serious?

architects don't move on from anything quickly. Right. And, and let alone adopt it. But, but then move on from it after they have adopted it. And I just, I mean, I'm, I'm sure you have, uh, well, first welcome to the show. Great to see you.

Gavin Crump: Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Great to be here. Um, like I was saying before we kicked off, it's surreal to be on a podcast I've listened to for probably the better part of almost four years. I think you've been running about five years now. Right. So I think I joined on in 2021.

Evan Troxel: point. Something like that. Yeah.

Gavin Crump: Yeah. So it, it's surreal, but, um, thanks for me on board.

But, um, it's, it's a good introduction. BIM is dead. Yep. It's all over the socials at the moment. Um, I think there's a lot of, um, marketing standing on the corpse of bim. That seems to be the primary motivator behind it. But, um, I mean, BIM is changing. That's, I guess, the ultimate sort of retort that people seem to make.

It's, it's, it's still very much here. It's very much my nine to five or some people's, you know, five to nine, um, in some cases. So, yeah.

Evan Troxel: just when you're trying to fix a problem,

Gavin Crump: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: how,

Gavin Crump: yeah. I,

Evan Troxel: are those elements hidden? Uh, let's count the

Gavin Crump: yeah, there's like 26 ways. I used to have a chart.

Evan Troxel: I

Gavin Crump: Um,

Evan Troxel: than that. I think there's

Gavin Crump: yeah.

Evan Troxel: double That is,

Gavin Crump: 26 ways that we have discovered as BIM managers, but I, I used to have a chart where the last step was consult the BIM manager, and I think I used to turn the chart upside down and start, start there. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Well let, let's go. Let, instead of, instead of going down this provocative, uh, clickbaity headline kind of approach, tell us about, about you and, and where you've come from and, and how you've kind of found your way in the architecture and AEC industry, but also the technology side of things.

Gavin Crump: Sure. Yeah. I mean, my, my career journey's not too dissimilar to a lot of people I know of my age. Um, so we sort of entered the world just after the GFC, um, from a, from a professional perspective. So I. I think I finished university around 2012. I'd just done a pretty traditional, uh, bachelor's, masters of architecture straight run for five years.

And I hadn't managed to land any work along the way I had tried, but it was a tricky time. Um, and luckily I landed a role on a major hospital in my hometown of Adelaide. Um, so this was a $2.2 billion project at the time, which I think was the most expensive in the Southern hemisphere, and they were using Revit to deliver it.

So we had about maybe 50 people in the same office for this project. And it, it just taught me so much about, um, the value of software for collaboration, communication, and, um, just making sure that, you know, things are being delivered on time and well, and I, I sat next to the BIM manager as well, so he actually gave me a chance.

I failed my Revit test miserably. Um, I, I somehow got us so far zoomed out in the view that he didn't even know where we were. And I said, well, technically you don't know either. So I passed right. And I, and I paused.

Evan Troxel: two miles of the origin, I think,

Gavin Crump: It was something like that. I think I zoomed out accidentally and then I drew two things that were tiny and you couldn't see them on the screen.

And he is like, what's going on here? And yeah, I think that's how I got the job. Um, but uh, from there, I, I guess I, I realized that this was probably something I wanted to do for a career as well. Um, I, I'd done a very traditional architectural education where we, I think we used Revit for one tutorial and that was it.

Um, so I'd use SketchUp, AutoCAD 3D Max, um, but bit of, bit of, I think, um, I think Scape was just coming out then, and I was playing with that. But um, that was really the closest I got to bim. Um, but this project just. Di completely, one aided my perspective of what I thought a career path could be for me. I saw the BI manager and I said, wait, this is like completely different to what the universities told us architecture could be.

Um, and sort of gradually worked my way from delivery based roles to coordination based roles to eventually a management role. Uh, when I flew to Sydney in Australia, in, I think that was 2015, where I'd been given a bit of an opportunity at a quite a young age and, you know, wasn't quite as experienced as I probably, probably could have been or needed to be at the time, but I learned a lot very quickly about management, communication, the realistic side of bim, having to make it work as a company and a business.

Um, you know, licensing costs, you know, budgets, all those things that come with it. Um, but I took a step back into coordination roles, recognizing that I sort of lacked project experience, um, at a coordination level. So I moved to HDRI. And then Woods Bagot, um, and eventually moved into consulting. But through that time, really built up, uh, I guess more experience with coordinating with engineers, managing BIM at the project level.

So not necessarily focusing on libraries and templates as much as everyday user needs. And in that time I just learned that like, that the users, you know, they, they have to do a lot of really hard work and a lot of really manual work. And this thing called Dynamo came along and, um, which I saw you had Ian on the other week for, um, and it, again, it just completely 180 how I looked at bim.

Um, suddenly we can automate a lot of things and I sort of picked that up into my skillset. And then Grasshopper and eventually PiRevit. And, um, more recently C# and sort of found my way more into sort of a computation slash automation, uh, management role, uh, with, with companies and consulting that I worked with.

So it's been a pretty wild journey, very focused around software, but also the realistic nature of the work that we do. So I've tried to really keep in touch with, um, I guess the, the trenches that I know people are in, that I've been in myself and trying to pull them out and help them out. And, you know, somewhere along the way I made a YouTube channel as well.

So that was sort of my, my way to sort of broaden my network and meet more people and share my knowledge beyond the four walls of the company. But that's, um, that's sort of it in a nutshell, I guess. But, um, yeah. Happy to dive in. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I think it's interesting that you started with like sufficiently you got hired because you could sufficiently break Revit. Good job. I mean, that's a great way to start and because it's like people break it every single day all the

Gavin Crump: Yep.

Evan Troxel: right?

Gavin Crump: Yep.

Evan Troxel: then you have to figure out how to, how to dig yourself out of that trench, as you said.

Right. And

Gavin Crump: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: like the trench only gets deeper. I mean,

Gavin Crump: Yep.

Evan Troxel: break it harder and harder in so many more ways than you could before. Right. Uh,

Gavin Crump: Mm mm

Evan Troxel: that's an interesting kind of perspective about it. I, the this that you had to programming through visual programming, I mean, and you've kind of gr gone several steps beyond that, but I'm, I'm just curious of, of what that felt like to you.

You said it kind of broke how you thought about it or, or turned, flipped it upside down. So maybe go a little bit deeper into that because I bet a lot of audience members who listened to this show are probably. Come from a similar kind of set of circumstances where it's like when that, I mean, obviously it's been out for a while now, right?

And there's been, there's, but back then there was very little available online and it was just really for you to tinker or scour the forums or find the right people to, to chat with or talk to. But, but it's quite different than it is today. And I, I would just, I mean, kind of story time mode, right? But it's like, what was it actually like what to when you first got into programming and the visual programming side of things to operate Revit and, and Rhino.

Gavin Crump: Yeah. Um, I mean, visual programming spoke to me just at the process level so strongly. Um, when I came across it, I mean, I used to do a lot of highly repetitive manual work at, at systems level. Um, so things like creating families, adding parameters one by one, and then doing that again for a hundred more families, like super manual stuff.

That was just like, uh, in my head I knew that this isn't the way, there's gotta be a better way to do this. And, um, I think the first task I automated using Dynamo was, uh, automatically numbering doors based on the rooms that they relate to a classic, you know, first task to automate. And, um, that was something that people literally right next to me on my project would doing manually as I tried to automate it.

And I, I sort of went, everyone stop. Like, you know, I've just figured this out. And it, yeah, I just.

Evan Troxel: close out, right? Let me do this. I

Gavin Crump: Yeah, it was, it was such a, a change in how I looked at it, not only just for me, but for other people. Now, I had the ability to give other people these things that I could do at a system and methodic level, um, but not automatically.

But now I, not only can I do this for me, I can give this to other people. And I think that was the part that excited me the most. And I, I'd sort of done visual programming before, but hadn't realized I had, like I used to. Develop. Um, so Warcraft three custom video game maps, and they had a, what's called a trigger editor where you had conditions and actions and you sort of worked upon groups of units.

So you might say, if you got hit by this unit, do x damage and you could sort of program behaviors. And I, I never really thought about it as programming. For some reason when I did it, it just felt like a, a game. It wasn't really programming to me, but I, I instantly recognized in Dynamo, oh wait, these are like concepts I'm familiar with.

Um, not at a visual level necessarily, but at a a process level. I immediately understood, you know, a group of units could be like a group of rooms and Revit, um, programming upon them. And it, it just suddenly there was a bit of a, like a switch in my head where I went, wait a second, this is like this. I mean, I wish I'd got on it earlier.

I think Dynamo's been around since like almost 2011 and I think I was really just getting properly into it. Around 2016 I think is when I first. Really became aware of it. So, I mean, I would've loved to have been there at day one with all the, you know, the original, the OGs, like John Pearson and all them.

Yeah,

Evan Troxel: not. I mean, it

Gavin Crump: yeah.

Evan Troxel: a lot more broken than the,

Gavin Crump: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: you found it. That word keeps coming up already in this, it was a short, short into, we're not even that far into this episode, and the word broken has come up so many times. It probably gotta work its way into the title somehow. But, but this idea of, of wiring up nodes and like finding the nodes, dropping 'em on the canvas, wiring them up, and I mean, to me. It's a, there's a super strong analog, right? When I was like a kid

Gavin Crump: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: taking apart the radio and then trying to put it back together, and we didn't have cell phones. We didn't take a picture of what it looked like when it was together so that we knew how to put it back together.

And there was no manual. This was just, we're playing around

Gavin Crump: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: grandpa doesn't want the AM radio anymore. Uh, okay, cool. I'm taking it apart and then I'm gonna take it all the way apart and then I'm gonna try to put it back together and actually

Gavin Crump: Mm

Evan Troxel: wiring up components and, oh, that didn't work.

Okay, pull it apart, try it again. And, and something about that kind of analogy of, I mean, it, it's still, there's still something manual to it, right? I mean,

Gavin Crump: mm

Evan Troxel: so different than writing a line of code and me as a visual person, as an architect and as a designer, just made so much more sense,

Gavin Crump: mm mm

Evan Troxel: to play and experiment in

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: to see what I could do.

And, and, uh, you know. Failing way more than succeeding, right? For

Gavin Crump: Mm.

Evan Troxel: When I

Gavin Crump: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: but then it's like, okay, well who do I talk to about that? How, who knows what, who, who can I go to? Who can I send this to? Then they can just fix it and send it back to me. And like that portability aspect of it, like you're saying, you could deploy it or give it to somebody else on your team to hit run, right?

Um,

Gavin Crump: Mm.

Evan Troxel: or noodle with your, your layout and, and come back with something better or different or whatever. I think was just something so novel about all of that, and it was like, it's those kinds of things to me that still get me excited about computing. Right.

Gavin Crump: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: wow, computers are super powerful.

They can do, and it's so funny how many layers of extraction have been built on top of that incredible

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: to make it easy and to make it accessible and to do all these, and then you do something like that and you're like. This is real computer. I mean, the, okay, so another analogy, time is like rock climbing.

Like there's, I, I go to the climbing gym with my 23-year-old like, he can climb way harder than me, right? But there's some things that I can do that he just doesn't have the experience with yet as far as like a technique or a type of move or something. But there are certain climbs that feel like rock climbing and there are a lot of climbs that don't feel, and so my analogy is like, oh, this feels like this really felt like rock climbing, outdoor, natural.

It felt like even though it wasn't, and that to me is something like using a tool like or Grasshopper. It's just like, oh, this feels like Com computing, right? It's like when I used to hand code a website or something like that and

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: it would render in the browser. It's like, holy crap. It worked. And, and to me, I, I, I've always kind of loved that. Discover that process that you go through when you wire it up and, and it produces something that you were trying to produce that, and, and maybe not more than not, but, but when it does, it's like, oh, this is computing. I, I don't, there's something visceral about that.

Gavin Crump: Yeah, it's tinkering, I guess. Yeah. Like I, I, I've always been a tinkerer. Anything I'm given, I'll, I'll play with, I've, I've pulled things apart for fun sometimes. I mean, I'm a huge Lego fan. I used to love pulling all my sets apart and figuring out what we could do with them and combine them into, um, but yeah, it was, it was just as fun.

Like you said. It is fun, right? It's just computation is, is such a broad spectrum of people and ways of thinking and doing, and suddenly you find yourself. F almost in sync with like other industries and other people that you would've almost had nothing in common with, if not for the programming being the connecting factor.

So like I, I could, I could talk to my friends that were doing, you know, Python in, in completely different industries and we could suddenly have a really fun conversation about programming syntax and logic and use cases. And I found things that they were doing and I'm like, wait, I can use this. Like, this is useful.

Like, I can actually add that they found like, you know, an Excel library that was way better than the one I was using and suddenly we're trading, you know, fun and experience and we're sort of almost tinkering together. So I found it was a really good connector like that. I mean, I, I did a course with, um, Harvard.

They did do a CS 50 beginners free course and they literally teach you about binary is the first thing they teach you. They start at the ones and the zeros and they literally abstract you up. A layer at a time. So you come to really see and appreciate, uh, like you said, just how much history, uh, you are engaging with in, in computation.

When you know, and we're like, you know, 50 layers above this when we're in Dynamo, there's so many things. There's like binary assembly. Then I think you get to see at that point. Um, but then like all the libraries and the choices, the decisions that people made historically, like, you know, this Unicode represents five, this represents a, it's like those, those encoding conventions that people had to agree on at a global level.

It's just, it's such an amazing thing to, I guess, you know, be, be engaging with even just for that reason. So I, I think it's a really fun and interesting paradigm that, you know, takes you outside the industry almost in, in your, your scope and perspective.

Evan Troxel: I think it, I think when you made me think about how, how, like talking to your friends, and you obviously have very nerdy friends, right? You're talking about

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and you're Yeah. In different industries and it's like sharing that kind of stuff. And I, I, that, that's awesome. I like being able to go outside of your close group and say, you solving this problem?

And, and not even, it's not even the same problem that you have, but. they've found maybe still applies in some way, but I was thinking about, um, I, I watched this, this YouTube video, um, about the thing that Google just came out with this, A two A agents to agents kind of a thing, and, uh, building on top of this MCP.

So it's all this AI stuff. So just bear with me for this one, short tangent. But I think it's really interesting because this idea now is that like has always been written to do a thing, right? And, and it's explicit in that way. It's like we write the code to accomplish these things, and of course people have to come up with workarounds and use apps to do things that maybe the designers didn't intend for or what didn't think of, or whatever.

I mean, we've all been there, right? Um, but, but now I, that game is going to seriously change in

Gavin Crump: mm

Evan Troxel: not too distant future where these agents can discover on their own these other agents collaborate.

Gavin Crump: mm.

Evan Troxel: solutions to do. I think that's wild. And, and it's like, kind of looking back at the history of what it's taken to get to that point is absolutely incredible.

I mean, that that progression, that many people my age and, and older and younger, I mean, we, we've witnessed that happen from, you know, my first Apple two e computer Apple, you know, or, or my Commodore 64, 64 bites of memory

Gavin Crump: Yeah. Wow.

Evan Troxel: it's crazy. Right? And,

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: see where, where that's where that's gone. Um, starting with basic programming to, I mean now we're talking a to a right, like absolutely wild, uh, kind of stuff.

And, and it makes me think like people are, are gonna be, they're building these things that have APIs and they can talk to other things and there's going to be software. Writing software to bridge the gaps between those things and I, that just kind of blows my mind.

Gavin Crump: Yeah, mine too. I mean, uh, I will admit, I, I'm aware of a lot of this stuff, but I, I still have no idea how a lot of it actually works behind the scenes. I'm trying to, that, that's more what gets me excited. I like to find out, okay, like, tell me all the dumb stuff that is behind this to make it be smart.

That, that's part of what I enjoy with ai, but appreciating that there is still, you know, all those abstraction layers behind this, that eventually goes back down to very rudimentary principles. Um, because a lot of people look at it and go, it's magic. I'm like, no, no. It's just a lot of work that's like, come together to build this, this system.

Um, so it's, and I do try to keep that, I guess as the, the underpinning thing that I relate with AI is like, at the end of the day, it's still just code. Like we have to remember. That, you know, it, it emulates intelligence. But to me it isn't intelligence in itself, but how you employ it and use it and in interface with it, that's where the intelligence lies.

So, um, I think agents are gonna be a game changer, and I, and I hope they are, because I see a lot of tasks people do in our industry that aren't like architecture. They aren't engineering, they aren't construction. They're busy work that could be better spent doing what people actually want to do as their role.

So I'm hopeful that we will see, um, you know, a severe amount of impact from agents, even if I'm no longer coding. Um, I, I don't mind, as long as there's meaning to the relationship we have with this technology and how we deploy it and do we still have con agency over our work? Um, to me that's the important part.

But it's an exciting time to be around too. Even for me, I, I saw the in internet kick off really big time in 1995. And to me that was probably the last really like, wow, like this is a, a game changer. Maybe the cloud, the cloud was another pretty big moment and in my time, but this is. Definitely one of those.

Okay. I'm here for this moment sort of things. Yeah. Even if it is Skynet.

Evan Troxel: I I I'm curious you, if you could kind of tell the story about how, because you know, you, you talked about breaking Revit and getting hired and, and saying, oh, like this, this might be a path for me. I'm, I'm curious like how that happened because you went to traditional architecture school.

Like you said, had a very tiny bit of Revit. Obviously you can't, like, a disconnect between the industry and education when it comes

Gavin Crump: Yep.

Evan Troxel: for software so that you can get a job to do a thing. I think a lot of universities like. We don't care about the software, we care about the ideas.

Right. Especially in design schools and things like that. But, um, so you failed, you failed the test. Right? And, and at the same time you saw this opportunity like, uh, and I'm, I'm, why? Why? Why did that land like that for you?

Gavin Crump: It's a good, really good question. Um, I think to me the, the first really big moment is just when I realized the amount of systemization that was available. I'm a real systems geek. Like I love taking things that don't work and making them work or building a framework that helps other people understand something that might be more complex otherwise.

And being on such a large project, we, we broke this model down into, I think it was like 30 sectors in plan, and then they were broken into chunks of levels and there was so much systems management across like, you know, hundreds of models. And I, I, I really, um, I mean, I, I still talk to him occasionally. I had off to the bit manager.

He really gave me this window into the industry that I guess I'd never seen at university because we were just doing drawings. We were, you know, pushing out renders. It was a very different culture and I never really,

Evan Troxel: most

Gavin Crump: yeah, yeah, like, like.

Evan Troxel: of the time probably.

Gavin Crump: Even seeing work sharing for the first time was like, whoa, like this is, this is completely different to what we had before.

And I think that's why Revit has such an edge. It's got that work sharing system down pat. Um, but, but that, that to me was even just a game changer. To see that you can just push things back and forth to each other, like GitHub. It sort of introduced me to GI Logic, I guess, at that point. And that was just such a game changer too.

So I just saw a, I guess a better use case for technology than I'd ever experienced before. And I've always loved technology. I've always been the person that breaks the family computer and fixes it. Um, so naturally I was just inclined to, to follow, um, the tech where I found it. Um, but I think they're the, they're the main triggers.

And I think too, I did recognize that that was gonna be the thing. That would probably accelerate my career if I jumped on this, it would probably be the, the changer in my career. Whereas architecture itself doesn't change too much as a profession. It's more the things around it that seem to change.

That's at least my observation over the years. And I could, I could see the potential for stagnation in my career path. Um, I'm not a natural communicator. I'm not an extrovert. Um, so I, I could see that there were gonna be challenges for me in that profession if I stuck with a traditional, you know, aim for the director spot sort of career pathway.

And I thought, this is my, a way around the industry that still keeps me in touch with it, but is more in tune with me, the way I communicate types of people that I, I sort of resonate most with professionally. And I, I saw that as also another, another offering that it gave me. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: So, and then it sounds like you kind of had a foot in like the production side and then the,

Gavin Crump: Mm,

Evan Troxel: I hate to say technical side because I, I

Gavin Crump: no, that's good.

Evan Troxel: production, right? So it's like you, but you know what I mean. It's like the,

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: side, let's call it that. And so you kind of went back and forth, like you said, you wanted to go back into production to get more experience on projects directly and like what users are experiencing and the kinds of things that break and have to be fixed on a daily basis. And then you, you eventually ended out in the consulting side of things and, teaching like through your YouTube channel and, and sure you've done courses and all kinds of things, but, but

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: navigating even that kind of differentiation. How did that happen for you? Like, were, how did you determine that, the value for what you were, because I think both of those kind of lend themselves to the personality type that you even discovered.

Right? And I think that's what happens even in school, right? It's like design, design, design. And then you realize pretty quickly, like there's a small percentage of people who are really good at communicating. They're, they're not afraid to get up in front of an audience and share their ideas and be bold and do the, and that, that really kind of lends itself better to an extrovert, for example.

Or maybe an ambivert, maybe somebody who can do both, right? But um, then there's like other roles and, and there aren't that many. I mean, as far as we were taught when I went to school, there aren't that many options, right?

Gavin Crump: Mm

Evan Troxel: more introverted and technical, like there's a technical side to architecture and drafting and, and eventually that became BIM and all these things, but, but it was like. Now there's a lot more paths. Right. And, but, but if we just kind of keep it in these big buckets, you still kind of had a, a determination to make between technical architecture and technical support role. I don't know how you,

Gavin Crump: mm.

Evan Troxel: what the words you use to describe it, but

Gavin Crump: Yeah, it's a fantastic point. Um, a lot of my career would definitely have been focused on the delivery side, which is not necessarily, um, you know, the, the large side of architecture, like everyone wants to design, not that many people want to deliver. It's a bit of a, like, you know, necessary evil for some people.

Um, but I, I guess I just saw the, that was where the, the sheer amount of waste was being produced in our industry. I sort of recognized that quite quickly that that was where most of the things that went wrong went wrong. Um, so to me I thought, well, I have, if I'm systematic and I target the side where I can see all the problems, like that's where they're gonna want the solutions.

So it's sort of naturally lined up. I, I did rediscover design and technology for the purpose of design a bit later in my career. So probably around 2020. Just before 2020, I really got deeper into Rhino, um, because I saw there were quite a lot of architects that were really passionate about this software.

And I, in a BIM management role, I didn't want to be that guy that just says it's Revit or bust. Like I said, no, we need to support more than just one platform. Like you can't just do everything in one platform. And I want to let people use the platforms they want to, but give them systems and frameworks regardless of where they are.

So Grasshopper was sort of my. My sort of my rediscovery of design and, and, you know, computational design reintroduced me to, to different ways of approaching architecture from a technological standpoint. Um, but yeah, for the vast majority of my career, I would say delivery was my, my, my focus. And it's, it's where I began.

My, my first role, I like keynoted for about a year, so I just tagged and, you know, almost went crazy. But in that process, sort of realized that the methods and the systems that are required to deliver large projects, so,

Evan Troxel: Wow. Yeah. Right. There's so much manu, uh, manual that, that kind of ma tedious manual stuff. I could see how that could drive you. Absolutely crazy.

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: so, so you said you kind of discovered Rhino at that point. Um.

Gavin Crump: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: When I went to school. Okay. So I keep, keep going back to this kind of my story part of it.

There was no, I mean there was Rhino, but it wasn't used for architecture at all. And then you kind of discovered that, oh, there's like this thing that people really love. did you find in that process for that?

Gavin Crump: I mean, a big part of it was actually the graduate culture that that's how I really engaged with it. Um, at least at the business level. 'cause I, most of the seniors weren't really RiNo users, like you said. They, they weren't really familiar with it. It hadn't really been the thing when they were studying.

But we just recognized that nearly every graduate was coming in with like zero Revit experience and didn't want to use Rev and design either. They wanted to use, you know, more fluid programs and they all knew Rhino. Um, 'cause I, I worked in, um, Sydney at this time and the universities over there. Are all very, very focused on Rhino and Grasshopper, um, in their education efforts and technology.

And I, I guess I recognized that was my way to sort of reengage with that layer of the business. Um, when you deal with delivery, you're often dealing more with middle management and, you know, senior technicians that you don't necessarily capture the full range of people. Um, but I found that that was, you know, really my way to reengage with the broader, the broader company.

Um, and I guess, uh, rhino for me too actually was like freeing for me as well. 'cause having used Revit for so long, I, I recognized its limitations and where it didn't actually necessarily deliver what we needed. So like, if we're dealing with a really large cityscape as a mesh, like you're not gonna import that into Rev.

It's just not gonna happen. And the first time I loaded the city of Sydney into Rhino it, I just went, whoa. Like that was like, it was like not even a minute to get this thing in and it.

Evan Troxel: sweat. Yeah.

Gavin Crump: Yeah, so, and I, and I went to export and there's like 50 file formats you can export As, and I'm like, whoa, I'm so used to, you know, it's Revit or Revit and that, that's it.

Evan Troxel: three. Yeah.

Gavin Crump: yeah, so it actually begun for me as just like a file format processing environment, but then I sort of went, wait a second, there's a lot more to this. Like, it's a, it's sort of like a super sketch up to me and how you can use it, like it's still got layers and similar solid primitives, but, you know, the, the, the power is, uh, for a lot of people in Grasshopper, but for me it was in the command line and some of the things that it reintroduced to that type of environment.

So it was a really nice union of design logic mixed with like systematic thinking, um, if you want to. So yeah, it was a, it was a fun sort of break away from Revit, if anything.

Evan Troxel: Nice. I, I'm, okay. So the, the next part of your story, I think is, is you kind of breaking out of, and I'm sure it started off maybe as kind of a side hustle and then turned into a, a full-time thing that you're, you're offering as a consultant and, and even now teaching, but. did that come about for you and, and why did that become the decision that you, you went

Gavin Crump: Sure. Yeah. So I guess I, I naturally began this trajectory when I launched my YouTube channel. So I think at the time I was working for a small practice in Sydney. There was only about 30 people, and there was just no time to produce any training content. Basically, it's a small business, like training is a massive overhead unless you do it through a platform that already exists.

And, um, I think my, my boss at the time and one of my friends said, Hey, like, why don't you just make some stuff for fun outside the company walls? It's fine, you know, manager won't mind.

Evan Troxel: work after work, Gavin?

Gavin Crump: Yeah, it was, but I guess they were like, they sort of opened my eyes to um, the fact that there was a bigger world out there that I could engage with.

'cause my, my manager at the time was quite in touch with the market movements around bim. Like, so he, he said, Andrew Annuls, and I was like, who's that? And he's like. Uh, CEO of Autodesk, like, you know, I wasn't really

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Gavin Crump: I didn't have my eyes that open at that point to who was who and what was what and where everyone was and what was going on at that level.

And, and YouTube yeah. Became this weird little thing that I just did on weekends and smashed out a few videos. I mean, my first few videos, I think I'm staring down the whole time talking to the ground. Um, I wasn't a natural. Um, but over time I think I got my first comment and I was like, oh, that's weird.

Like, okay, maybe people actually want this sort of thing. And, and yeah, it sort of grew after a year, I think, to a thousand subscribers, which was crazy at the time for me, I'd been watching, uh, the Revit kid, Jeffrey, Ben Harry for a while, and he was like, pretty much my, my role model in the space that I sort of tried to emulate in, in my own style and content.

But, um, it was weird to just get engagement and I think eventually he reached out to me, uh, through LinkedIn and just said, Hey, like cool stuff. And I was like, what? Like, this is crazy. And I suddenly went, wait a second. There's like a. I can be more than just, you know, my nine to five self. And that sort of ga it got me thinking about, you know, the nine to five and is it, is it what I want to do?

Is it, is it working for me? And I thought, what, what if I could be more flexible? And that sort of got me thinking about consulting and that point I already had people coming to me saying, I love this video. Can you do like this for me? But like, do this as well. And I'm like, uh, like I haven't got time.

Sorry. Like I'm too busy. And I didn't even realize they were probably willing to pay money as well. It was a sort of natural thing I missed. And then.

Evan Troxel: thing that I don't get paid for.

Gavin Crump: Yeah. Yeah. I'm already used to not getting paid. No. So, so, um, so I just naturally just found my way into the space and I just jumped in head first. And then I think about a week after I started, like the pandemic hit.

So it was obviously a terrible thing to happen, but for a business jumping in digital consulting, it was, I had immediate flexibility

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Gavin Crump: all these companies were suddenly looking for different ways of engaging with the market. And consulting seemed to be. Away. A lot of them were considering at the time.

I did a lot of templating and systems management for medium to large firms. And, uh, eventually found my way to architect this where I work currently as a client. So they, they began with me as a one day engagement per week. And, um, over time I sort of gradually shifted once I realized there was a bigger, a bigger opportunity here, um, with a fairly high level role that could, could deploy strategy across, you know, 700 people at a company.

Um, but yeah, consulting was a rush. I, I really enjoyed it. Um, it was good money as well. I went live. If people are looking to go into consulting, if you have a personal brand, it's, it's a definitely a viable business avenue as long as you have the market fit. That's the important part. Um, but um, yeah, I sort of found my way back to back to practice eventually through it, but, you know, engaged the market in a more.

A way in which I wanted to. Um, so I almost set the terms of my role when I jumped in and said, uh, they gave me a contract and I said, eh, not quite. And, you know, proposed some changes and it was a different way of engaging companies. So yeah, it was a rush. I loved it.

Evan Troxel: You know, I think it's worth going into that because I, I agree, but I also think people would like to hear why you said that.

Gavin Crump: yeah, personal brand for me has been, um, a complete change for not only how I engage with the industry, but how the industry can engage with me. I. So by putting myself out there and not really hiding behind too many logos or brands and putting my face on video, um, being very present on LinkedIn and those sorts of platforms, um, I, I found that it helped give me a, a layer of authenticity, um, but also I guess the ability to be respected by my peers.

That wasn't really available before. So people at firms respect their BIM manager internally, but like, we don't tend to talk to each other too much as BIM managers, we don't. Occasionally we might get to the pub and talk to one another, but by putting myself out there as me, um, I found that, I guess it helped me build like a credibility that, you know, goes a long way and, you know, finding career roles and engaging with people, get, getting software vendors to talk to you and, you know, show you what they're up to.

It was just such a good decision that I made and like, I encourage anyone who's willing to put themselves out there to try it. It's, it's. Pretty low risk. I mean, obviously, you know, don't tell anyone where you live and all those obvious things, but by being so accessible, you just get a different, a different experience with how the industry engages with you and sees you.

And it's, it's always strange going to a conference and, you know, someone comes up and just drops you a thank you and you don't, you don't even really know who they are, but you get that, that sort of, um, I guess you give and you receive sort of thing. I like, I like the idea that, you know, the, the industry is as big as you make it, I guess.

Like, and, and I found with my personal brand, the industry became, you know, huge for me. I can suddenly see, I guess, see the forest for the trees as well. Um, like I, I got to meet the Revit developers through it and all these things that just wouldn't have happened if I'd, um, just worked nine to five and talk to my Autodesk rep.

And that was pretty much my only window and into the market. It just was a game changer. And, and meeting personalities like yourself, John Pearson or all these people, like it was. Just a such a bigger community than I guess I ever would've realized without putting myself out there and saying, Hey, this is me.

Like, this is what I think, this is what I do. And you know, you don't have to like it, you don't have to engage with it, but it's me. Um, yeah. It was a game changer. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: it, it is interesting also when I think about that in con in the, with the context of what you shared earlier about being an introvert. Right. And, and I, I, I wanted to bring this up because consider myself an introvert, and I don't consider myself an extrovert.

Gavin Crump: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: definitely kind of in the middle, you know, and, and I can be whatever I need to be, when I need to be it.

And I, that might be a little bit luxurious because, um, I have a lot of empathy for both sides of, of that equation. And I also understand how valuable both sides of that equation are. Right. I, especially in an architecture firm coming from my background, it's like you need, you actually need both because like, you need to win the work and you need people to do the work.

Right. You, and, and those tend to fall into pretty clear, distinctive roles,

Gavin Crump: Yep.

Evan Troxel: to your, what, what you're doing by putting yourself out there. I think it's, I also want to help people understand that if they are like if they are like you and they're, they tend to be more quiet. You're not just gonna go out and announce things, but, but you're literally just talking to a camera

Gavin Crump: Yeah, exactly.

Evan Troxel: you're just saying what you're doing

Gavin Crump: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and you're talking through the logic of it. By doing that a lot over time. You do definitely get better and better and better at doing

Gavin Crump: Mm.

Evan Troxel: you also get a, a better command of the things that you're doing and, and the production and all those things like tangentially.

Right. But actually putting it out there. you, you, you talked about like this authenticity layer to it. I could, when people reach out to you, they know who they're getting because you've built this reputation for a long time online and the only way to do that, it was to have started and then to keep at it.

And it's, it's funny that you would turn down, maybe you didn't know it at the time, right? Paying work, but, but you were investing in this thing and it wasn't just something you were doing to attract. You know, somebody to court you to eventually hire you. That may be what happened. Maybe it's happened three or four times, right?

But it's like, it's one of those things where it's like you, you invested and you kept reinvesting in that to make something over time. I think about, I think about the podcast like that all the time. It's like

Gavin Crump: mm.

Evan Troxel: it's never been easy to do, right? And, and my production values are high and I like things done a certain way. but it's the, it's the big picture. It's the whole story. It's like, this is why people listen to hour long plus conversations on, on a weekly basis. It's because of the big story arc. It's not the little pieces along the way. And to me, like having that body of work, and you've created one too, is like, it's a really amazing byproduct of, and and you never even have to really think about it at that scale.

Like it's just slowly building over time to become. That thing of value. And it's, it's not just valuable to you, it's valuable to the community, it's valuable to people interested in accomplishing the kinds of things that you're teaching them how to do. And I mean, I, I, part of this is just an appreciation that, that you're doing this kind of a thing and that I, I do want to ask you about your branding, like your

Gavin Crump: of course. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: pretty pretentious Kevin.

I have to say. No, but,

Gavin Crump: it.

Evan Troxel: just I, I mean if, does this, does this stir up anything for you in regards to what I just said that you think could be helpful for those out there who are who, who are just literally toiling away at their thing and, and not building a network intentionally, unintentionally, whatever.

Gavin Crump: Definitely. I mean, it's, it's been such a great thing to have that transcends the places I work at. That's probably my favorite thing about having this is like even if I go to another company, 'cause I have jumped around a fair bit, I'll be honest. Um, you, you lose nearly your full career and your reputation every time you do it.

You, you, you become a CV again and like revert back to a CV and then try it again. CV time. It's, I, I got tired of that and it was nice to have that, that identity that, you know, persists regardless of what you're doing. If I took a break from work for a year, I'd still come back and people might remember me if I'm lucky.

So I think that was a big part of it. I mean, like you said, to begin with, I really just sat in front of a camera. I didn't really sit in front of an audience and even mentally, I don't really put myself in front of an audience when I talk. I just, I just nerd out and just. Do what I do. And yeah, I think that's just naturally something.

I always looked at it like it was a bit strange when you started getting comments and engagements and you're like, oh, I have to actually, you know, think about how I talk to people and make sure I don't, you know, turn people away from my content if I don't, you know, if someone comes and disagrees with me, like, let's have a debate.

Let's not just go, oh, go away. I don't like you. Some people don't always handle criticism too well, whereas I've built up a pretty, you know, thick shell through, um, getting a lot of people that don't always agree with what I think, and that, that's actually why I use LinkedIn. I really enjoy debate and, you know, challenging people's beliefs and opinions and ideas and getting a better, a better understanding of my own through it.

Um, but I guess, um, yeah, I encourage anyone who's just, you know, in that space where they're not necessarily comfortable just jumping on a TED Talk or, you know, something that extreme. It's a, it's a nice starter point. Um, yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Gavin Crump: Yeah. And you did mention the branding, the, um, the name Aussie Bim Guru. Um, yeah, it was, it was, it is a little bit pretentious looking at it like, you know, I don't want to, 'cause some people do actually criticize that in the past who said, oh, you, you think you're that, don't you?

You are the guru. You're better than, no, not at all. I enjoy the idea of the, the guide. I wanted to become like a guide through the industry. Um, so gurus, yeah, they, they know a lot, but their, their focus is on teaching and imparting knowledge onto others. And that's where the gurus sort of term to me sort of clicked.

And I also respected that a lot of people that were gonna follow me, were probably gonna be from India as well. So I'm like, this will be a word that resonates with them at a cultural level, and they'll, they'll appreciate it. And they, they generally do. They're like, oh, using Guru, I love it. Awesome. Um,

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Gavin Crump: in the West, obviously it's got a bit more of a elite sort of association.

Um, I mean, I like to think I'm, I'm, I'm pretty good at what I do, but I don't, I don't like to toot my horn. Um, so that was sort of the brand. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but I guess like I've, I've generally had positive engagement with people when it comes to, comes to brand and it's all a name anyway. Like, you know, looking back I'm like, ugh.

Like is BIM the right word now? Bims dead. Should it be the Aussie?

Evan Troxel: Nope.

Gavin Crump: Yeah. Gotta commit to it now. Yeah. Yeah. But I guess, um, you know, on top of that, it's cool to have like a, a catalog of stuff that I can just share to people when I need to. Like, you've probably got the same thing. You're like, oh, I've met this person.

I've literally got an episode. Like, check it out. Like, it's like this, like library of your own brain that you no longer have to just hold in there all day. You can like, sort of put bits and pieces down and almost forget about them yourself and come back to them later. Like, I watch some of my own videos when I forget things, I'm like, wait, I've done this before.

I forgot about this, but I've got a video and I watch myself and people at work are like, are you watching yourself? I'm like, yeah, yeah. I don't remember how to do this. No idea. So for me it's also just a nice way, like you said, to build up a, a catalog or a library of parts over time that, you know, naturally grows into this big thing.

Even if it is a little, little bit unorganized and chaotic, it's, it's YouTube. It's gonna be pretty sporadic. But to me, I have that catalog available that I can index when I need to. Um, yeah, so it's been, been good for that too.

Evan Troxel: I, I hear people who tune into like my arch speak podcast, which is, we go and we're on like year 13 and they're like, I started it. Episode one and like now. And I, I, that sounds like torture to me. I, I know that those were not good episodes and I also know the quality was not good. And I knew the, the equipment wasn't good to capture the audio and all those things.

And podcasting has gotten a lot more sophisticated over the years and, and simpler in, in many ways. Like we're talking on video call right now. Like I, I did, I did that show for pro almost a decade with no video. Right? It was, it was

Gavin Crump: Wow.

Evan Troxel: we just, it was like a phone call or like a conference call. And, um, I think it's interesting to have that body of work that you can kind of even self-reflect on.

Like yeah, there's content there. Um, I actually had a listener at one point who was like a principal in a firm say, oh, you know, you, he heard me in a conversation. He is like, oh, you didn't use to think that. You and I and I thought that was, oh, that's interesting because like, I don't really keep track of how often I change my mind, but I sure hope I do.

And it's kind of

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: there's a record there that, that I have a, oh yeah, I, I do update how I think about things over time. I don't

Gavin Crump: Mm

Evan Troxel: them forever. And I thought, oh, that was just kind of a cool reminder for him to actually say that at, at that

Gavin Crump: mm mm.

Evan Troxel: But

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: one of those things where you, you, yeah, it's like a timeline on the internet.

Like I hope it doesn't get used for evil, but it's having my voice out there for that for a very long time. I'm sure could be used in many different ways, but it's one of those things where it's like, uh, I think about it. Maybe think about it this way too. It's like, oh no, it's just whatever I'm doing right now. And, and you're right, I'll pull out, oh yeah, I've talked to person. Oh yeah, they were on the show. I'll put a link to that. should, people say you should have this person on the show. I'm like, I've had 'em on the show. Here's a link to it. Right. And, and it's because they have picked it up since then.

Right. And they didn't go back to episode one and start listening. But, um, it is, it is, it is just kind of a weird, it's a weird thing, but at the same time it's a really cool thing, um, to have out there. And, and I would also echo what you said. I would encourage people to, to do that and just kind of do whatever is interesting to you. There's a book I read years ago, um, called We Are All Weird. And it was a, it's a Seth Godin book like the internet opens up you to an audience.

Gavin Crump: mm.

Evan Troxel: the goal is to connect with the other weirdos out there because we are all weird. And like there's a, there's definitely a group of weirdos. enough to what you're weird about to come together and build a community.

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: that, that's a big reason why I encourage people to go out and do this because you think like, oh, this doesn't have, you don't need mass appeal. Like there's no such, who cares about mass appeal? It's about actually connecting with people

Gavin Crump: A hundred percent. Yeah. Like I found that on my channel. Yeah. But like, I was looking, I was looking for those people, um, like people are like, oh, you, you should have like 5 million subs and all. I'm like, I don't want 5 million subs. Like, I wanna find those people that, you know, are resonating on my level.

And if it's like, you know, only a few of them that that's okay. Like it's, it's still worked for me. Um, I'm more than happy if more people watch my stuff. Cool. Like, as long as it helps them. But yeah, finding your weirdos is definitely like a,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Gavin Crump: a really cool part about doing this. Like I've really managed to.

I think at this point almost come across most of the people like me that are comfortable being in that space and collaborated with many of them and just got to know who they are. And whilst I haven't met a lot of them in person, I'm sure one day I will like, um, you know, Nicholas Elia for example, should, should have a chance to meet him quite soon, fingers crossed.

Um, based on some events. But, um, so it, it's been a really good way to just find, yeah, find my tribe, um, per se, but, but figure out what I want that to be as well. And you were mentioning before the, uh, the timeline, the, the, the ability to self-reflect on this, that, that's definitely relevant for me. I've, I've literally come back to some workflows multiple times across my, my YouTube series and, and approach them in different ways and it's helped me I guess, appreciate that.

Yeah, it is a journey like you do begin in different places and it's kept me. Humble as well, because I wouldn't, you know, get to the point I'm at now and go, oh, you should just do it the way I'm doing it right now. 'cause a lot of people do that in programming. They just say, you should just start with, you know, c and call it a day.

And I'm like, I know that's not how people work in most places. It's just not possible for people and it wasn't for me. And I've got the videos sitting there reminding me of the, the way I used to do things to, to keep me humble and say, you know what, you, you used to be like that too. You weren't just working the way you are now.

So it helps me stay, stay pretty grounded. Um, and some of the videos are quite funny too, to rewatch one's like, oh, this is why Dynamo's better than Python. And I'm like, oh, why do they make that video? It's not gonna age well. And then I had the,

Evan Troxel: also good you, you show that you could change your mind.

Gavin Crump: yeah, yeah. And I had one like, why is Python better than C? And I'm like, now I'm gonna have to make one wise c better than the rest.

So it keeps, keeps me grounded and, yeah.

Evan Troxel: perfect segue, I mean, talk about what

Gavin Crump: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: you're working on now when it comes to your YouTube channel and, and,

Gavin Crump: Sure. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: this, I mean C# and, and your, you're doing, are you doing live streams? Tell, tell us what you're up to.

Gavin Crump: Uh, not at the moment. I haven't really cracked the whole live stream recipe and timing. I, I've still enjoyed the ability to sort of just pump a video out and release it when it's ready sort of thing. Um, but yeah, C#, so I, I used Python and Py Revit for the better part of like two and a half years.

Um, and a lot of people told me during that time, you should go to C#, try it out. And I tried it, it didn't click. Um, it, it is a difficult language, I think to approach if you're not naturally inclined to, you know, thinking the way the language encourages you to think, which is very much in an application sense.

So lots of parts coming together to build this like product. Whereas Python's sort of like a, almost like in the Matrix where he says, oh, we've got guns and this huge rack of guns rolls out and you've got 5 million libraries to draw upon. Really jangly from people. I enjoyed that side of Python, but C# is a lot more programmatic.

You're deploying an app, it has to work, it's gotta have dependencies considered. Um, but I actually broke into C# using chat GPT. That was literally where I started learning C#. I just started conversating with our chat bot at work, um, who's a private facing GPT, but still roughly at that level.

And, and I realized it was pretty good at working with code, um, and writing code and responding to code and modifying code. And I just. Finally figured out those first few building blocks in C# that you need to get started, because there's a lot of things you have to get right in a project of C#, of the C# language to get your add in to even run in the first place.

So that was where I usually got stuck. Like one of those 50 things you needed to line up just didn't line up and the whole thing threw an error at me and I'm like, Ugh, I'm out. But I finally had this co-pilot that could tell me, oh, this is where you went wrong. Don't worry. We got this. And, and eventually, you know, I ran my ad in, it worked.

Um, John Pearson, he also recommended a really good template to me, um, by a guy called Roman on GitHub, um, the nice point template. And that saved a lot of the, the hurdles that you have to jump over to get into a C# project. Um, so once I was in, I naturally saw the parallels to python, python's, almost like an abstraction of sea in principle.

And C# is a, a lesser abstraction of sea. It's got some, some benefits over sea, but they, they're very similar. And at that point it was just an easy switch for me. It was just those, those things I couldn't do before they were blocking me from really getting into it. So, um, I started pretty much doing C# every week on the channel, and I'm trying to build people up through.

What I see as a fairly methodical process of getting towards an add-in that works in Revit in a similar way to Dynamo or Python. Like it's very delivery focused. Um, and it's almost me just re documenting my steps one lesson at a time and building a series that I don't think I found when I was trying to learn it.

There's a lot of great resources, but none of most of them said, let's begin by building our add-in system. And you spend like. All this time doing all this stuff that doesn't translate into a working application until less than 20 or something like that. I said, no, we've gotta get in faster than that to give people that reward.

Um, so I guess a lot of what I do on YouTube, especially with C# now, is I like to see that I'm sort of holding the ladder down for everyone and saying, come on, come on, get up, get up. We're going to the next thing. But I've got the ladder. I'm, I'm, I'm on the helicopter saying, no, wait, there's still people coming.

Um, so I sort of hold myself intentionally back a little bit from the leading edge of what's going on. And, and this is my, my Motive with C#. I want to bring that opportunity for other Python developers and Dynamo developers. They now have like a ladder they can climb, um, before the AI agents all come and completely, you know, pull the carpet out from under our feet.

Evan Troxel: You're, you're on borrowed time, Gavin,

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. This is all gonna be unnecessary soon.

No, I, I, I, I applaud what you're doing and I think what's so interesting about the YouTube today, right, is that you can learn anything. You wanna learn from who you wanna learn it from, and, and that to me is an incredible. An incredible thing that exists. I mean, it takes people to say, I'll, I'll put myself out there. I'll, I'll do that thing. And again, it can be super niche and weird. Right? And it can, I mean, not that this is weird, but it can be, it can be super niche and,

Gavin Crump: Oh yeah.

Evan Troxel: gain a, you know, the right community around it who's willing to go on that journey with you? And that's, that's super cool.

Gavin Crump: Yeah. And I found the, the community around C# is quite strong as well. And I think once I sort of signified to them, Hey, I'm in this space and I'm doing this. A lot of them have reached out and given me heaps of really cool tips. So I've got a, a toolbar on GitHub that's open and public. And through that I've got a lot of feedback behind the scenes saying, oh, I noticed you did this.

Have you thought about this? Have you seen this package? And it's sort of like rediscovering a, like a dynamo community that's a little bit more covert than the Dynamo community. They, they have like forums to some degree, but that they're honestly just all such busy people building apps that they don't really have that come together environment naturally.

So I found it's given me a, I guess, a different window into the industry and all the work that all these Adam developers have been doing over the years without ai. My gosh. Like that, that's hard work. Um, it's given me a respect for, I guess, those developers as well. But, um, I've been conversing with a lot of people like John Pearson, Sean Page, um, some people that are really heavy in the C# space.

And it's, it's been fun to, I guess, talk to people. At a different level that I wasn't at before in programming and have like more natural conversations and also read Jeremy Tamacs build a code of blog and actually understand what it says. Like that was a, a pretty cool moment because I used to go to Jeremy's blog and I'd always get halfway and go, I have no idea what any of this code means.

Um, I know I need it, but I don't know how it works. And now I can look at it and go, oh, actually understand, you know, half of this at least. Yeah. So it's been a, it's sort of like, you know, the matrix. I sort of see the matrix for what it is now. It's one of those sort of moments, but

Evan Troxel: Another matrix reference. Good.

Gavin Crump: yeah.

Evan Troxel: of my favorites. I, I am curious if you could just give a kind of, uh, an idea of like what kinds of things you're building with c

Gavin Crump: Sure.

Evan Troxel: understand why they might wanna look into what you're teaching them on YouTube.

Gavin Crump: Sure. So, I mean, a large part of what I'm building is probably still quite delivery focused. Um, once you get into design tasks, you deal with geometry, and geometry is much harder. Like you're using pretty raw mathematics when you get to like the geometry tasks. Um, so like, I mean, probably the, the main geometry task that I built early on, for example, is the classic task of you've got a topography and you wanna put paving onto it.

So if you sit there and you pull points onto the topo until it. Doesn't go through the topo, so I just built that as a actual task. You just pick a floor, it puts a grid in it and it drops it onto the floor. Um, but, but like the, the main things that I've built that have resonated at my company, uh, are generally toolkits that really tap into those pain points.

So, for example, we have used various batch printers and exporters over the years, and you have to get all the settings right, you have to distribute them through very, you know, awkward ways, like sending files to each other or getting some file on a server and hoping that it works in the next version.

And I said, I'll build you an exporter. It does P-D-F-W-G-N-W-C-I-F-C, and it's got pre-built naming standards that we can share as a company. Um, at the company level very easily. So like we built that, for example, and, you know, we do a lot of exporting in, in architecture unfortunately, but it resonated because people were like, oh, okay, we own this printer now.

We can change it. We can make it what we want it to be. Um, one really popular one I made is a room layout, sheep creation toolkit. So when you do hospital jobs, every room has to be documented on like an a three page. Um, highly wasteful. You spend like half the project just documenting rooms basically. So I just said we, we can automate that a hundred percent.

Um, but the way that I built the toolkit was very different to the other apps we'd used before that try to do this. So most of them try to build the entire sheet all at once. Um, and the views just get put on the sheet and they have no idea that they belong to a room layout sheet or a room. So I built in a relationship system where the views and the sheets all know, okay, I actually belong back to this room and if this room's name changes, I can like push the name change back to all these elements that relate to it.

So we built a, a much more, um, intelligent approach to just holding all that data together and, um, making it so that you can like, create views and it'll know there's already a floor plan. I'm not gonna make it again because I already exist on like a sheet over here. So building intelligence that doesn't exist at the Revit level, that that's a lot of the tools I build, or taking advantage of features that I'm exposed in Revit naturally to the user.

Um, one, one of them is a funny one that there's a, you, uh, you might have seen when people use Revit, they often do this big marquee across the whole model screen, and they like, say they want to select all the walls in a view, they'll select everything in the entire model, and then they'll filter down to walls and it takes like a long time.

So Autodesk has this thing in their API that lets you filter your selection before you make it, but it's just not really used in Revit naturally, but it's all sitting there behind the scenes ready to use, and you can select everything super fast and it, it, it gives you access to just things that Revit naturally doesn't give you for some reason by default.

Um, so yeah, but lot, lots of random stuff in there. Like I could, I could go on and on and on, but, um, a lot of the typical bread and butter tasks, but then some, some more fringe things as well. Um, that yeah, you wouldn't always think of. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: Very cool. is there anything that we haven't talked about that, I mean, I mean, go, let's just go back. Let's, let's just jump to the high level again. I mean, this whole idea of kind of navigating AEC as a programmer, right? And, and I mean, you went to traditional architecture school, you are, you're working at a company doing custom add-ins for Revit using C and you're documenting, uh, teaching other people how to do that on YouTube. Whoa. Like, okay, you, you never saw that coming, right?

Gavin Crump: not at all.

Evan Troxel: Never. And you've kind of gained some notoriety along the way because of these, you know, things that you've, you've put out into the world. Um, I mean, just, just if I just, this is your story, right? And, and how, how that happened could not have been planned out in advance, right?

It,

Gavin Crump: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: that kind of happened organically along the way. Um, I. With some, you know, raising your hand for, you know, making your own opportunities through the agency of creating your YouTube channel, being prompted by other people to, you know, a little bit of a push, you should do this and then you doing it. Um, I mean, there's a lot of ingredients that have gone into what this is, but you're definitely like a well-known individual in AEC technology. Uh, I mean, you've accomplished a lot and, and I'm, you're, you're way younger than I am and, and you're well on your way to doing a lot more. Right. So really cool story.

But just curious for, to hear kind of your, when you, when you hear it presented that way, I mean, you live it. I mean, maybe, maybe you think about this more often than, than, than I

Gavin Crump: Yeah, quite,

Evan Troxel: like

Gavin Crump: quite long.

Evan Troxel: if you're encouraging other people like Maybe they're, maybe they're being trained as architects, maybe not.

Right. But, but, and you've chosen to stay in AEC this whole time too, and you didn't have to do that. I think that's also kind of an interesting point, right? So, and not even going out just to do the software like a lot of people have who are in this piece of the industry, they leave to go into tech.

Right. And they, they are part of a startup and all these things. And anyway, um, I'm just throwing all that out there because

Gavin Crump: No, no, it's, it's.

Evan Troxel: your

Gavin Crump: It's a great, a great, um, lead in. I, I guess, yeah, you're right. A lot of people don't stay in a a c and I've, I've had opportunities presented to me to leave, um, or to go sideways, like way sideways, like, you know, software vendors and developers. And, uh, I guess unfortunately I just love working with architects.

That's my, that's my, my poison. I, I empathize with them. I've been one, I don't feel so much as an architect anymore, but like, they are my people, I guess is the way I see it. Um, but I guess, yeah, a lot of what I do, I do have to think, how do I relate this back to people just getting started now or people that haven't found their place in the industry just yet.

Um, and I always usually impart a few common tips. I mean, one is to. Look at what is going on at the bleeding edge of the industry and try to figure out what that might look like in like five years. Like if it was the way things were gonna normally be, and which parts of those things would you want to make a part of your skillset if you didn't have to convince your boss?

It was just a logical thing. Um, AI will, will be a game changer for the industry and like, architecture is probably, I dunno if I'd say under threat, but it's gonna be heavily transformed if the right pieces of tech get delivered the way that people are promising they will. Um, whether that happens, we'll see, but I'm sure it's gonna happen.

It's just a matter of when. Um, I always encourage people to sort of look at what everyone else is doing around them, and if everyone's doing the same thing, don't do that because like, you'll just end up doing that and eventually it won't be relevant. So if everyone's, you know. Learning Revit and that's it.

Like there's gotta be more to it than that. And that sort of like underpinned my own choices along the way. I've tried to find things that not everyone's doing and say, okay, like Bim literally getting into bim. That was for me the start of that. Like, not everyone really cares about bim. I do. 'cause like, you know, there's gonna be a need for this.

And, and I think programming was also that moment I said, okay, this isn't something I see very often around me. And whilst I also enjoyed it, I recognized it's got power. It's got agency that, you know, you have more control over things that you wouldn't have otherwise. And the software is sort of in charge of you if you don't know how to program these days.

I find, um, I think as well, uh, don't expect a traditional career path. That's probably a hard lesson that gets taught to you over time in your career. I think that, you know, it's, you're not gonna be where you expect to be in five, 10 years. I'm sure I won't be where I expect to be in 10 years by any means.

Um, but don't let the industry tell you what you should be and don't expect it to either. That's like a pretty hard lesson. I try to impart to graduates. Don't seek all the guidance from others like you. You do have to sometimes just make, take risks and, you know, make decisions that might seem like they're not necessarily gonna be the easy choice, or the one that is, is guaranteed just gonna work.

But that's the only way you really get ahead of the market by taking those risks and trying to figure out just, um. I guess, like which decisions have the, the potential to pan out well, um, and knowing what you do, if they don't, I guess, like I've, I've invested in platforms and ideas before that didn't take off and businesses closed that I was literally collaborating with behind the scenes.

And I went, well, that's a skill set that I just have to put down. But, but through doing that, I've, you know, I, I, I found other people and connections and it all sort of somehow delivers to you in the end. And if anyone is just trying to seek guidance, I guess I like to tell them, you can reach out to people like us.

We're pretty accessible. Like we're, we're not like, you know, gonna say no and just ignore you in the, in the dms or whatever. Like, it's, it's, I try to be very accessible for the people that, that need, need guidance and help. And I won't always get back to you straight away, but like, I like to promise to everyone.

I, I will reply to you. So, um, try, try not to find me too scary. I guess. I know I do a lot of debates on LinkedIn, but behind the scenes, I'm a nice guy, I promise. Yeah. So a whole bunch of tips in there, but yeah.

Evan Troxel: gotta, you got a mean bite there? Yeah. On LinkedIn

Gavin Crump: Occasionally. Yeah. And I guess I self, I self-reflect sometimes saying, you know, like, will I be in the industry in five years, 10 years? Who knows? I mean, I don't, I dunno if my boss watches, but hi, if he does, um, I, I have to, but I have to constantly sound check myself, um, saying, you know, is there different things that I'm not looking at right now that could be a different opportunity?

Like, should I go and go into video game architecture or, you know, go completely left field and just see where it takes me. But it, it's a temptation that's always there. But I guess I, I like to think that I, I take this as far as I, I can before I really do a quantum leap, but in my head, I know that probably one day the industry is gonna force me into some sort of situation like that through just transforming so much that those connections become so obvious or, or necessary.

Yeah.

Evan Troxel: You missed, you missed that whole metaverse train. That thing took off like,

Gavin Crump: Yeah. Luck. Luckily I, um, I just waited for the next train for that one. Um, yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. You never know. Well, this has been a great conversation. Everybody needs to go over to the Aussie Bim Gurus YouTube channel and subscribe. Subscribe to Troxel while you're there. He, he has way more subscribers than this podcast does on YouTube, uh, for sure. And, uh, this has, this has been a fantastic conversation.

I'm gonna put a link to that in the show notes and I'm gonna put a link to you on LinkedIn so everyone can read your spicy comments. Anything else, anywhere else they can go to find, get more Gavin.

Gavin Crump: Uh, that's the main place you, you're welcome to email me as well, Aussie bim guru@gmail.com. If you've got like a more technical question, I'm happy to take those. Um, if you send a script, they'll usually look at it, so, um, but yeah, no, I'd just like to thank you for having me on the show. Like I said at the start, it's, it's surreal to.

Be able to, to engage with you in, in this medium and, and, you know, be on the show that I always watch and listen to these days. And, you know, I really admire the work that you do and the people that you give, um, people access to and you know, that you give them access to more people through being able to talk about their ideas here.

So I really appreciate, um, being a part of that, that collection of people that you've given, um, given, given that opportunity to. So thank you.

Evan Troxel: Nice. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. uh, let's do it again.

Gavin Crump: Yeah, certainly. Alright, take care.

Evan Troxel: Before you take off, I wanna wrap up this episode and revisit two main themes that stood out to me from today's conversation. The first one is about Gavin choosing to stay in AEC instead of leaving for tech. He makes a clear conscious choice to stay.

That decision speaks volumes in a time when so many technologists are exiting the industry due to burnout, lack of innovation, or better pay elsewhere. This is important for AEC tech leaders trying to retain and elevate talent. It hits the core of a major issue. Why talented individuals should stay and how firms can enable that.

Gavin is an outlier in this regard. It's uncommon to hear someone with programming chops and a YouTube following choose AEC on purpose. His story makes the argument compelling, and this should be a topic of conversation in firm leadership meetings. The second one is about personality traits, AKA, the Introvert's Guide to making an impact.

I think Gavin's story is deeply human and relatable to many of my podcast audience. Many in AEC are introverts by nature, especially those in BIM tech or technical roles and Gavin's self-awareness, humility, and approachability. Create an empowering narrative. You don't have to be loud to lead. His story offers a roadmap. Start small, be consistent. Speak to the camera, not the crowd And his brand building journey is proof that introverts can thrive publicly without changing who they are. What makes this theme particularly powerful is its relevance both within our industry and beyond AEC. The approach to content creation and public sharing provides a valuable model for professionals at any level.

We see excellent examples of channels producing impactful content across all generations from Gen Z to boomers, and you don't have to be an extrovert to do it. That's all for this episode. Tell me what you think by clicking the feedback link in the show notes, or leave me a comment on YouTube. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.

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SummaryIn my conversation with Robert Yuen, we took a hard look at what it means to bring radical transparency to the AEC industry—and why it’s essential for the future of practice. Robert and his team at Monograph are not only advocating for a cultural shift but actively building the infrastructure to support it. At the center of this effort is their new benchmark report, which uses anonymized real-time data (not surveys!) to paint an accurate picture of firm performance. This is particularly relevant due to the small firms that make up 90% of the industry. We talked about accountability, financial literacy, data-driven practice ops, and why transparency is no longer optional.

“If you do good work and you’re not profitable, you might not have the opportunity to continue to do good work.” — Robert Yuen

Key TakeawaysHere are my top 6 takeaways from the podcast episode. Then we'll get into the deeper analysis.

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Rob Asher and James Blackwood join the podcast to talk about the real-world complexity of designing and delivering projects—and how their work at Giraffe is bridging the gaps between technology, governance, culture, commercial intent, and design.

We explore the limits of traditional tools and approach, the pitfalls of over-simplified models, and why real integration requires more than just good geometry. Rob and James share insights from their experience building Giraffe—a collaborative platform that combines design tools, mapping, data, and financial modeling—to empower better, faster, and more informed decision-making across teams and disciplines.

Watch this on YouTube:Subscribe to the podcast on YouTube

Episode links:Connect with the Guests Rob Asher on LinkedIn * James Blackwood on LinkedIn * Giraffe website - try for 2 weeks for free* * Giraffe on LinkedIn

Books and Philosophies Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language + Amazon Link + A foundational work in architectural theory that emphasizes user-centered design—an underlying philosophy reflected in TestFit’s practical approach to site planning. * Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn + Amazon Link + Highlights the adaptive nature of architecture over time, relevant to the notion of flexible, real-time site planning tools. * Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman*** + Amazon Link + Explores how mastery and tool use define human capability, relevant to the evolving tools for urban planning and architecture.

About Rob Asher:Rob Asher is the CEO of Giraffe, an early stage real estate development platform that accelerates finding, assessing, and developing sites, which he co-founded in 2017. Supported by real time data from designs and detailed customization opportunities, Giraffe empowers users with connectivity to quickly scale developments with confidence.

Rob sits at the intersection of real estate development and technology. As CEO of Giraffe, he is the driving force behind ensuring cities’ digital transformations are equitable, sustainable and in concert with the people that live there.

Prior to founding Giraffe, Rob worked as an architect at Cox. Working with a global client base, he used his technical expertise with parametric modelling and building information modelling (BIM) to develop design approaches that emphasized robustness, reusability and community.

In addition to his work as an architect, Rob taught at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He brought his global hands-on experience in creating equitable, sustainable, livable cities to the classroom to educate future architects, developers and planners.

Rob lives in Sydney, Australia with his family.

About James Blackwood:James is the CRO of Giraffe, and a leader skilled at guiding traditional enterprises through data transformation.

As part of the founding team of Giraffe, James has successfully led its go-to-market strategy across multiple markets (US, APAC, ME, UK/EMEA). James is pivotal in educating how urban professionals can unlock, utilize and leverage digital workflows across capital allocation, design & planning & governing bodies.

With his combined background in enterprise leadership, data and Saas technology, James encompasses a unique perspective on where the AEC industry is headed and what the steps are to get there. He is driven by his passion for the potential for city maker’s shift to digital & generative workflows and the opportunity that awaits.

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Episode Transcript: 187: ‘It’s Just Poly’s on a Map’, with Rob Asher and James Blackwood

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in today's episode I welcome Rob Asher and James Blackwood. Rob and James are co-founders of Giraffe, an incredibly powerful web-based 3D platform that combines design, mapping and financial tools to reimagine integrated design and development. In this episode, we explore the topics of rethinking data process and innovation and discuss the challenges of redundant work, the myth of spontaneous innovation inside firms, the value of knowledge retention and how purpose-built tools like Giraffe are transforming how architects access information during the design process. Rob and James share their personal journeys. Rob, coming from architecture and James bringing his data and analytics expertise to becoming tech founders, offering insights into software design, user behavior, what it really takes to build a more sustainable and creative architecture practice. A key theme from this conversation, which connects to many other TRXL podcast episodes is the need for technology that integrates design across commercial, technological, governance, and cultural dimensions.

Too often our tools force separation between these aspects, making it nearly impossible to design in a way that reflects real world complexity, that not only influences and constrains the design of a project, but also exists beyond the property lines of a site. Rob and James are working to change that, and their vision is one that could reshape how we think about integrated design and delivery at scale because Giraffe is not just another design app. It's a tool that builds tools.

And as you'll hear in the conversation today, it's a pretty clever and simple way to implement and scale distributed computational design. And the timing couldn't be better because they've just launched a new core product for single users of the Giraffe platform, which makes it incredibly accessible at 45 bucks a month.

As usual, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes, so be sure to check those out. You can find them directly in your podcast app if you are a paid supporter of TRXL+, and if you're a free member, you can find them on the website, which is again TRXL.Co. Lastly, you can really help the podcast by sharing the episodes with your colleagues and by commenting and sharing my LinkedIn posts You can also leave a comment over on YouTube and engage with me and the other listeners there, and I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this episode. So now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Rob Asher and James Blackwood.

I'm very excited to have team Giraffe here on the podcast today. I'm joined by Rob and James. Welcome to the show, Rob. Great to have you back and I'm glad to talk to you on the podcast officially. James, this is gonna be fun.

Rob Asher: Thanks for

James Blackwood: Thanks Evan.

Evan Troxel: Rob, us your story to kind of set the stage here, because this is, I, I think it's emblematic of a lot of people in the industry and a lot, I, I don't, I don't know how to put a number to that, but at least people who listen to this podcast, I think are very much going to be able to see a, a commonality, a common thread in their lives to what you've gone through.

But I would love it if you could give everybody that story so that, that gives us kind of the jumping off point for this conversation.

Rob Asher: Yeah. So I started, uh, as an architect, um, at a tier one, sort of a classic big office in Sydney, um, which was called FJMT at the time, which was a de a design driven office. I think the year after I there, they won the World Architectural Forum Building of the year for this museum in, in Auckland. I think last year they won it again for a school. So design excellence and. And in Australia we do a lot of design competition. There's a sort of, you get a, an FAR bonus if you go to competition. And so you do these, uh, three-way like head-to-head competitions, very short, intense, um, sort of six to 12 week design competitions, which, you know, no sleeping classic architecture, which I, I really enjoyed.

Exactly. Yeah. Um, so big ego design excellence, highly intense going for the big prize. Normally in core markets are doing towers or museums or something very, yeah, right in the city center. That was, you know, a lot of eyes on it. A lot of, you know, the, the, the city and the officials and the client and everyone had really high expectations. basically the reason I got into the design sort of excellence competition side was because of grasshopper. So I did a maths degree well as my, my architecture degree. so very shortly after starting,

Evan Troxel: wait, wait,

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: What?

Rob Asher: Yes. I didn't know what to do at leaving school, so I did, I did maths, so pure maths, which has actually turned out to be amazing because

Evan Troxel: I

Rob Asher: that, that way of

Evan Troxel: time, like, okay, so everybody who was in, uh, high school, or I don't, I don't know if this is still the case, but every counselor always said, oh yeah, you gotta have a lot of math if you wanna go into

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Evan Troxel: was engineering, they had no idea

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: they were actually talking to some, they didn't know what an architecture degree was.

They just made these kind

Rob Asher: yeah. They like, it's left brain or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: so did you take their advice, or, or you were just good at it, or, or this was just something, like you said, you just didn't know what you wanted to be kind of a thing. You didn't know

Rob Asher: And my family is very mathematical, so it's kind of like I had to, you know what I mean? So my, my dad and my two brothers, I sort of, not, not, not, not, yeah, as in, yeah, I was like always the English guy, like the artsy guy. But, um. But no, so I did the maths was, I did a very high level of maths, which, which, so you start off maths, very concrete, like, you know, like vectors and, and things you can actually visualize.

And very quickly, like by year two and year three, you're talking about spaces and operations and it's so abstracted you don't, and I was not good at that. Like I actually really like the, the concrete space, like, you know, the, the dimensional stuff. So I wasn't, I wasn't particularly, I, I could get through, but just, but that, that, that process and that way of thinking about how do you abstract a problem, how do you make it as simple and as general as possible? Is, is essentially like, you know, you can see that in Giraffe. Like that's basically what we're doing. And it's like, you know, it's almost the opposite of, of where software normally goes. Like if we think of. People talk about digital twin, it's always funny to me. I just sort of, this is an aside, but the mesh models are more complicated.

There's more polygons, there's more features, there's more, there's more, there's more, there's more. And like, what are you describing? Whereas in mathematics or physics, like a whole branch of physics will collapse down into like e equals mc squared, and there's four other equations. And once you've got that, you've got it all.

Like we've, we've made it simpler and more abstract. And so it's, it's more useful. Whereas we

Evan Troxel: maybe

Rob Asher: It's more Exactly. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: far as the concepts and the foundations go.

Rob Asher: And they, yeah. So the, the better, you know, something, the simpler it should be, the more lightweight. Whereas so often, and software like version 20 of the software as opposed to version one is like more cumbersome, more features, more boltons.

Do you know what I mean? It's like the other way. So, so trying to really get to simplicity. Is basically what, like what maths is. It's simplicity. The other side of complexity, you can't sort of, you know what I mean? It's very, it's not like you can ignore the complexity, but when you really get your head across it, can find simplicity. So I did the maths and I, I sort of got into the profession probably about 2011 it was a Mac, there was generative components at the time, which I think was coming out of the Foster's computational design group, or at least Allied. And so I spent one summer holidays learning that. I absolutely like clicked on that. Um, I think that was on Microstation. It was very old school looking, got back and, you know, had to battle with Got Grasshopper and then basically just, you know, my mind exploded. Loved it. And, and basically then grasshopper on design excellence teams, like as in Grasshopper for design. So not doing sort of engineering interop stuff that sort of came later. As in beams and, and parabolas and you know, these complex geometries, but more it sometimes doing that if it was gonna help us win the competition. But sometimes just doing area schedules or, or much more Giraffe looking stuff. You know, very simple stuff.

Evan Troxel: and so I, I'm just curious to, to drag this out a little bit more, like what was your experience moving into the profession? I mean, it sounds like you were able to pursue kind of that trajectory because is it because you were doing competition based projects, or, or is it really like, and then I'm just curious, like where did that lead you to in, in the profession and kind of your overall feeling about it?

Rob Asher: I, I would say I have design ability, but really the reason I was on those teams was 'cause I could do the complex geometry. So if the design director was like, we need the roof to just do that, then I could make it do that. Do you know what I mean? And then he, you know, and especially, you know, with the sliders in Grasshopper where you, you're changing a parameter and then seeing a change in real time, it's a very, you know, it's, it's, it's like a drug for a design director because they can see the thing working, right?

Evan Troxel: sitting there and they're like, a

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: a little bit that, you know,

Rob Asher: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: out there where it's like the guy's telling, sitting over the shoulder and

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: the toilet, you

Rob Asher: exactly.

Evan Troxel: a time.

Rob Asher: Exactly.

Evan Troxel: it's, it is a drug

Rob Asher: Yeah. But, but, but what was really good is the design director I was working for. As he was doing, uh, uh, I learned a lot around what the actual job is because he would sit over my shoulder and he would be practicing the story that he would have

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Rob Asher: the jury, the design jury.

And he'd be like, okay, so what we'll say to the cost guy is this, and if he says this, we'll say this. And then what we're gonna say to the city is that, and okay, can you move it like that? So then if he asks about that view, then we, he was building an argument with,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Rob Asher: he was building a narrative and he was,

Evan Troxel: audiences.

Rob Asher: exactly.

And, and not only one, but he had like levels of response, as in he'd war gamed out every, you know, little eddy that he could get trapped in. And just knowing, again, coming back to the simplicity, he wasn't gonna tell that whole story like from notes, but he had the whole story there. He was just gonna show the pictures and if he got blocked and, and seeing how profoundly import narrative and concept is to the actual business of architecture.

It was very, very cool. So I was working on my computer coding away and then getting the narrative over the top of my head. Um, and that was a great, yeah. Intro to the,

Evan Troxel: curious because before, before we move on to James here, like, like that experience for you. I'm curious how that worked. Its way back into like the tooling, because the, like flexibility in those early stages are so, so, so important. Right? And, and it's like you don't wanna have to remodel stuff all the time.

Rob Asher: no,

Evan Troxel: of those things independently from scratch or, or the pain staking process of, you know, because if you're just brute force modeling, right?

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: gotta remodel or you've,

Rob Asher: yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: likely to break something if you have to modify it. And so kind of going back to this idea of describing intent

Rob Asher: Yes. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and storytelling and narrative that actually being possible through the tools is, I mean that's,

Rob Asher: That's the thing. Yeah. And, and, and that's why like the, the sketch pad, this, I like to talk about this integration. So I often in my, you know, if you go to a very good doctor or an any good professional, they are more calm, They don't come in and they're like, okay, we're gonna do this test and this test and this test and blah, we're like, CAT scan and we'll, 3D scan, whatever.

They're like, okay, right. This is what's gonna happen. We're gonna do this test and we're gonna get the results. Then we're gonna do, you know what I mean? And, and, and they, and they slow it down for you and they see the whole journey and they may, you know, have their worries and, but they don't like hit you with it, with this complexity and they stagger it out.

Right. And I think

Evan Troxel: would be crippling. Right?

Rob Asher: it would totally be crippling and the, and the number of times, early stage where like when I was a younger architect and you're drawing and suddenly you're trying to get a core, right. Like get it efficient or something like that. Or your fire escape's not working and then the director comes in and he's like. Ah, yeah. We're not building a residential tower anymore. It's now it's an aquarium. Do you know what I mean? It's like, you know, it's be because it's not sequenced and you haven't fully understood how fluid that early stage of design is, and so you've really gotta match you are. So just take it, take it easy if it's a half a meter out or half a foot there, or

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: worry, we don't even know if there's a scheme yet.

You know what I mean? Like, let's just relax. Um,

Evan Troxel: you'll see architects sketching on trace with

Rob Asher: exactly.

Evan Troxel: in

Rob Asher: Exactly. Exactly.

Evan Troxel: uh, how thick is that? Who cares? Right?

Rob Asher: Yeah. Don't think about that. If you think about that, you're not thinking about the right thing, which will actually cost you. So think that the trace technology, like an internal challenge for us is when does our software become better than trace?

Because trace is still the premium technology for that early stage, I think. Do you know what I mean? It's so good. It's, it's intimate.

Evan Troxel: loose.

Rob Asher: around it, it's fast. You can give the pen to someone and say, we will show me. So in terms of building. Consensus, building that narrative, getting the principles.

It's an unbelievable technology, which is why senior design directors use it to run you, to run their businesses, and you've gotta respect it. It's a superpower. Absolutely. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: and not, there's so many, and, and I think sketching nowadays could mean a lot of things to, to, if, if you surveyed a hundred different architects from

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: to seasoned architects, you would get a lot of different answers. For some people, sketching is grasshopper.

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: sketching is cad. For some people, sketching is 3D modeling, you know, and there's very, there's a lot of different, ver some, for some people it's AI now,

Rob Asher: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: but, but like that really simple, fundamental writing implement. On a

Rob Asher: Yes, exactly.

Evan Troxel: and, and like that is captivating for people to actually sit on the other side of the table and watch

Rob Asher: percent.

Evan Troxel: and unfold.

And you're right, you can hand that writing, implement over to somebody

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: how to use it.

Rob Asher: totally. Exactly.

Evan Troxel: no, I don't know how to sketch.

Rob Asher: No.

Evan Troxel: It's

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I don't care. Like

Rob Asher: That's right.

Evan Troxel: steering wheel drive for a

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: communicate. That's, that's really what we're asking for in those, in those.

It's really

Rob Asher: We we're asking exactly. And, and what it does is it reveals a mind that understands, like if the, if the person takes the page and he says, all right, the most important thing is this, and he starts diagramming, and then we're gonna do that, and then, and it, that, it just reveals a mind with expertise. It's very, it's very hard to hide, you know what I mean?

It, it shows so, so Giraffe trying to be, that, that is like our gold star. And, and

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Rob Asher: the one thing the sketch doesn't do, it doesn't do the numbers. It doesn't calculate. And I think computers,

Evan Troxel: inherently, right?

Rob Asher: that's right.

Evan Troxel: you have a ton of experience and it's like, what scale is that? It's like, I don't know, seventh scale. I don't,

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. So, but, but, but, but the guys with the ton of like the directors that, that, you know, that have that experience, they know it's very interesting. It, it's very interesting when you watch of someone very good and you'll sketch and they'll be like, what scale are you working at?

Like, isn't the scale in your blood yet? Like, what are you doing? So it, it's funny what you can learn, but it doesn't do the, it doesn't do the numbers. And so where I got to is I was building these clusters in Grasshopper. I would say probably what distinguished me from most of the people around me, like computationally designed, was I would just cluster and I would iterate on my clusters. Uh, or, or like, kind of like an Andrew Heumann, you know, where you like write your own code and you have version 1, 2, 3.

Evan Troxel: reusable tools. Is

Rob Asher: Correct. Exactly. Reusable tools because it's very boring. It's not as fun, but man, it's sort of, and it's slow initially, but man, it gets fast. So I would have like Fiso 11 and I had this tool the funny things about being an architect.

Like I could pull the area out. in 30% of meetings, people would say, I don't wanna know the actual area. I actually just want you to say that this is 800 square feet. Like

Evan Troxel: yeah,

Rob Asher: a, so I had this deemed area parameter, which is like, you tell me what the area is and I'll put it in. And it's not the area, but you know, but that's so critical because they're like, we'll get the area right later,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Rob Asher: but if we change the shape of the building to a true area, now what's gonna happen is, you know.

Evan Troxel: focus on that.

Rob Asher: Exactly. And so it's this whole thing around actually sequencing the information. So anyways, I had those and I would sit, the way it ended up was I would sit with the design director in a meeting with a client and the design director would sketch and I would sketch digitally model next to it. I was about half a se, you know, maybe 30 seconds slower. And then the numbers would come out. And after about 20 minutes of that, we'd have a workable 3D model. And then everyone would start looking at the 3D model. then we would be like trying to get the areas right, you know, so they would go concept to model, to, to refinement and, and I was like the offsider and of the design director it was incredible way of running meetings and the client buy-in was, you know, 'cause then the client was, oh, just move that and you do it.

And they see the areas change and they go, Ooh, okay, it's not the ROI need or whatever it is. And, but then by the end, you've done 20 or 30 iterations and you're not doing this thing of, of going back to the office and optioneering and then coming back with options. there we saw, or I learned just the power of sketch, the digital sketch or a 3D model that can actually tell you stuff is, is also an incredibly valuable And I guess that was probably the first time we got some of the essence of the sketchpad into the computer where it's literally you have to use it in front of the client and we still say it.

Evan Troxel: super user to do that, right? Like in real time, 30 seconds behind the DI design director, like you had

Rob Asher: I was a beast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if I was gone, it was dead. It was finished. That's right. And it was 'cause, and there was so much processing there in Rhino in terms of like cleaning up the lines and, and making sure that like, you know, degenerate geo, like there was just all this stuff to make sure it was quick. Um, but, but, and it wasn't even, yeah, if you didn't know Rhino, if you weren't very facile with Rhino, it wasn't that, it wasn't that quick and it was trapped within me. As in I would try and get people to use my clusters and they just, like, my clusters had like 25 inputs, you know, and four outputs. They were just like, no, nah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: So what it meant was I could become my career, sort of did two things. I was like, then by then an associate, so client facing, so I could start, run my own projects, you know, little ones. so rather than going the tech route, I went the client facing route. So used the tech, but I. Design first. And then the other thing I did is started moving with Lucy, who's the one of our other founders into urban planning, strategic planning.

So sort of one step bigger, um, master planning. And that's when you're doing infrastructure and, and rezonings and you're thinking about the city in a much more holistic way. And there you're abstracted over the building. You're like, don't even worry about what the is like, we're just doing like a blob.

Right. And that'll be a school, um,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: which was really fun and, and

Evan Troxel: the property line of like a project. It's

Rob Asher: Correct. It's like multi, it's like, what if we do this one and this one? And they're, the questions of are like, well, what if we bought both properties? Or what if we put a road through the middle of them or, or what if this train station went there?

So it's much more, it's like, it's more Sim City-ish in a way. I mean, you've got these political overlays. It is not, there's huge constraints and challenges, but it's. Amazing to do, and I recommend architects do it just because the code which they're operating within distilled out of this design, you know, urban process. then it falls down into code and then that falls down into the buildings that they're designing. And I think seeing that full stack is very helpful.

Evan Troxel: Rob, do you think we've made James wait long enough?

Rob Asher: I think so. Yeah. I can see him just absolutely desperate to climb it.

Evan Troxel: He's antsy. He's, he is over here

James Blackwood: Oh, I'm loving it. I love, I love listening to Rob talk and it reminds me of, um, when we start, when I first got intro to Giraffe, you know, Rob and I actually know each other from, uh, when I was working at Tableau and Salesforce and I was doing these large. Enterprise data transformations with, you know, big Australian clients, which to me, with massive companies, but you know, on a global scale aren't, I guess aren't that big.

But, um, we all lived in this house together and Rob's brother John, who is a part of Giraffe, we were all living together. And I remember a lot of those conversations had this element to them where it's, the conversation's fascinating. And I love listening to Rob think because he has this first principles brain, uh, and everything is an interesting observation to Rob.

So people are fascinating to Rob and I as a friend of Rob, you're like, oh, it's very stimulating. So it's like a nice, um, culture to be a part of. And I remember when Rob first showed me Giraffe, it was that thing you were describing earlier of looking at a master plan and talking through it live. And Rob was just doing a little demo of drawing on a map.

I mean so simple and drawing like lines of, um, corridors that you wanna preserve or view access that you wanna preserve. And then drawing and seeing the data update. And my brain went like. Holy moly, I understand this completely. 'cause what I was doing at Dr at, uh, Tableau was that for massive organizations, but with these huge data sets that they had no idea how to get any value out of.

And they need a visual, concrete way to tell the story about what's in that data. And when they have that within their organization, it's crazy what it does for culture totally transforms their culture and explaining to themselves what's already happening in the business. You know, there is like a intuition that good business people have about what's happening, but their ability to tell the story with good facts is totally limited by their ability to process huge amounts of data.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

James Blackwood: you give them a tool that's easy to use, that's visual, it lights people up. And so when I saw Rob do that with Giraffe, I was like, I get it. I mean, you need to give me a job, basically. And that was the genesis of this. And you know, I'm the last, really, the last founder I guess, or the first employee, however you want to describe it.

The last one in. Um, so to speak. But man, I, I am the, uh, I got so excited about it. I remember my first kind of, uh, conversations with clients were totally overwhelming 'cause I didn't really know the sector very well. I know data and I know I knew, um, I know the power of being able to tell a good story, but

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: learning the the sector was a real challenge for me.

And, uh, you know, that's a whole story in of itself. But I've become a huge fan of architecture. And so even as a kid, I wanted to be an architect and, uh, a civil engineer is what I started studying at university. But data is really the unlock for me, and I love watching what data does for, um, our clients.

And seeing Giraffe as a data tool is really, I think, the essence of what it actually is. It's a giant database. So that's, that's what, how we got started. And I guess it's been five years

Evan Troxel: I would love to hear just that you explain, because maybe there's people out there who don't know what Tableau and Salesforce are from like, a, a nuts and bolts, kind of like knows Power BI most

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: it's, it's, there's a lot of Microsoft shops out there. I'll just

Rob Asher: Oh, Evan,

Evan Troxel: But.

Rob Asher: how could you

James Blackwood: Oh yeah.

Rob Asher: beer?

James Blackwood: Power bi. It's just offensive.

Evan Troxel: talk about what

James Blackwood: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: so that people understand where you're coming from.

James Blackwood: yeah, sure. Okay, so Tableau, oh gosh, you're, take me back. I need to remember my elevator pitches, but,

Rob Asher: got it James.

James Blackwood: okay. So before Tableau I was building, uh, Excel models as a consultant for. Anyone who needed one. And my last job was a, uh, looking at a commission statement for a financial advisor. And I'd build these massive pivot tables, which would then say, you know, if the legislation changes with X, what's that gonna do to our trailing revenue stream?

And that Excel model took me probably two weeks of solid thinking to build and what the outcome of that was. A, uh, messy table that would break every time. You know, we needed to put a new data dump into it. Um, but it was functional.

Rob Asher: Yes,

James Blackwood: Yeah, exactly.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Yeah. Or, or like any master plan area schedule where you have that much data coming out of the model and then you have to like figure and then.

As soon as you have to do any different kind of question, you're like, oh crap, I have to re-engineer this whole thing from the get go. You know? Any different question you had? So what Tableau was, and Tableau's pre power bi, and there's a whole thing we can talk about there that, you know, power BI gives me sort of the sweats late at night.

Yeah, that's right. Tableau was first and uh, uh, basically what it is, it's a piece of technology that looks at a data set, breaks it down into its, um, smallest components, and then allows you to reassemble it as a graph first, as a visual. They invented a language called VisQL. It's basically just SQL that turns, uh, drag and drop functionality into a, into a graph that can help you explain the dataset.

So finding trends becomes a visual exercise as opposed to a,

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: a coding exercise or a writing.

Evan Troxel: incredible, right? Be for, for people who are, I mean, people are amazing at pattern recognition

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: be able to assign sizes and shapes and colors and have things triggered by different variables. You know, conditional kind of formatting stuff, but, but very visually, not just changing the color of a cell right.

James Blackwood: Yes, exactly

Evan Troxel: But man, like what a, it's like, I, I imagine like when, when, Rob showed you Giraffe, like you probably had a similar moment when you went from like excel to Tableau.

James Blackwood: I did. Yeah. And actually that, that was my sort of other software aha moment, where I was like, I need to work for a software company. 'cause this is unbelievable. What's happening here is game changing and yeah, it's exactly right. I had, I plugged in the, the, Tableau, 'cause it's a desktop tool, you know, super old school, uh, to the dataset that I'd done with that.

Financial advisor on their commission plan. And I was like, oh man, I could have answered that question in an hour, and then I could have answered a hundred other questions that the guy even had didn't ask me that would've been massively, you know, value add to his business. And so I thought, I don't wanna do spreadsheets anymore.

I wanna go work for that company. And so, like I did for Rob, I, I called them and was like, I wanna come work for you. And I chased them down for a job, um, which they eventually gave me. So that was a, and I loved that job. I loved that company. And I saw the same thing with, uh, with Giraffe and what, what Rob's done and, and the guys had done.

Evan Troxel: Well, Rob, maybe now we can shift into your shift of the profession and your experiences that you got up to that point to becoming a software developer, basically. Right? Like you turned into a startup. I, I mean, that story again, kind of a common thread probably, or at least a, a, a thought, maybe a fleeting thought for many audience listeners who are hearing your story like they, you

Rob Asher: They're like, I'll do it. I'll do it.

Evan Troxel: Well,

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Evan Troxel: architecture isn't quite what we all thought it was gonna be when we were in school, right? Like

Rob Asher: No,

Evan Troxel: so, so anyway, I, I want you to tell that,

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: bit of the story.

Rob Asher: Yeah, I think, I think that's exactly right. Architecture is, it's a, it's hard, it's a hard profession and it's a profession that I think is, it's not lost in the modern world, but it's, it's changing so quickly in terms of the fees are gonna, the contractors and the da da and it's just, it's just a very, it's very, it's very hard.

I think it's one of the most important professions in the world, as in, because we're, we are living on an urban planet and we're urbanizing the planet. It's like we're terraforming earth

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Rob Asher: architects are basically doing that. And if we do that badly, like that's earth, terraformed, um, and if we do it well, that's, you know, that's incredible.

So I, and architects hold, I think, an absolutely critical function of like, how do you make design, how do you make this human centered? How do you do this well? the profession is so overwhelmed with like, just doing area schedules and yeah. Blah, blah. And so it's, it's,

Evan Troxel: Busy

Rob Asher: I sort of looked at it as systems problem. Was going, could do say 10 great buildings or precincts or something, I could set up a firm. not, you know, as I'm very, I dunno, after my maths degree, I'm more comfortable with the computer than with like, client facing work. So, so you go, okay, strengths are, I see this systemic issue, this problem, and I want to make city making better.

And I think the tooling is, is one area where we can contribute. you know, it's not like we're gonna change the, the entire thing. It's not like Giraffe will solve the problems, but this is where we can work really hard and really well and do something really good. knew that was, I, I could feel that. And I had this, you know, I was speaking to clients, I was using my, like my Rhino version of Giraffe to do gigs and deliver them in, in ways that were just blowing people's minds. And so I had this strong feedback that what we were doing was new as and, and people were loving it. And so I thought, okay, let's do it.

And we went and we, we went through a startup accelerator, which was really good because it gives you this whole kind of, just a different paradigm, like this kind of vc, you know, hype machine paradigm, which we didn't fully buy into, um, but was very helpful, um, and very useful. Uh, we, we'd never taken VC because I think property, I think property's too slow for vc, fundamentally, like, you know, you can go to like a property company and, and like someone's made their career on two deals, you know what I mean?

It's taken 'em 10 years to do that, and then, whereas vc like they, you know, it's much quicker. So, but it was really useful seeing that that ambition and that kind of, that whole sector is like they, they're ready to like smash things and just do stuff and then, and, and started the business so that, that was happening.

But the fundamental thesis was that the tooling is broken, right? Is that, that the, the architectural stack is broken we need to build something. That is, is better. And it's very hard to explain. 'cause at the same time, I'm talking to James and I'm getting this kind of down enterprise view of what data is and how decision making works within corporates and what's a corporate, just a large body of people.

Right. then I've got my bottom up, like art, black t-shirt architecture, sketchpad kind of artist's view of the world. And it's all kind of stewing. And we're making a product that is very, very disparate, as in, it's a database, it's on the map, it's a sketch tool, it's an areas tool. We, we want, we're trying to, we're trying to basically put in grasshopper in there as well so that people can code on top of it.

And so technically it's, it's very challenging. And so we sort of hit the market with this kind of hot mess as in, it's, it's cool, what

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Rob Asher: not, not

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Rob Asher: Um, and I mean, and it's really cool. Like you can tell, because like even the word I'd use now is integrated, integrates so many factors. As in if you don't, know, there's that Sarinnen quote like design a door handle in a room, in a building, in a city.

Like just expand your scales. And then people open Rhino and it's just a gray box. And then they're like gonna Google maps and like screenshotting and then like scaling in a satellite image or, or even the newer tools or like sketch up, you click and it cuts like a square out. Whereas we were like, let's just put it on the map.

Let's just get everything in. Let's turn that inside out. So you're always on planet earth. And wouldn't it be cool if you could see all of your projects all of the time? 'cause you know, even like in in the design firms I worked, it's like. the projects are just in the, in the p drive or whatever it is.

Like they, you know what I mean? And, and people would be like, oh, didn't we do a project in Parramatta two years ago where someone actually got this survey? Like, where's that? Was it 2 1 9 4 4 3? You like, I, I dunno, that data's gone. It's finished. Whereas we were like, all the projects in Giraffe on the map.

So you just, you're like, where's that Paramatta project? You just go to Paramatta and you see that project. There it is. And you grab the stuff and come back. So we were like reconceptualizing at a very fundamental level, how, how you interact with the, the database. 'cause it's just a database. At the end of the day, it's just polygons.

It doesn't matter if you're Rev, it doesn't matter who you are, it's just polygons on a database. you've gotta come up with a special name for BIM 2.0, whatever. It's, but it's just that, you know, and so, so, so I don't know. There was all this potential. And basically what happened then we, we thought, okay, let's take this to the architects.

And the architects were like, we. We've got so much software we are not getting anymore. Um, but we have this insight mainly coming from James around, the actual, the corporate problem of actually pulling this information apart in an a EC space, when you're talking about property is unsolved, like 'cause Power BI and, and Tableau, there's all these, there's massive amounts of capital in invested in software that helps corporates pull their data apart, but not in AEC. And, and the opportunity is that all the BIM vendors like Autodesk and Nemetschek are on the technical side of the fence. And so they're going more and more deeper and deeper and further away from the corporate. As you know, the tools are more complex and heavier, whereas there's some person, and I tell you right now, somewhere on planet Earth, someone is doing a billion dollar deal.

I. And they're doing it on if you are lucky, Bluebeam and a hand calculator. Do you know what I mean? They're going, I can fit a rectangle this big on this site. I haven't spoken to an architect and I'm gonna option that site up right now. As I said, they're so thin and there's no tools to support them. And we realized that, you know what we'd had built over here in techno land, you could sort of sling out into enterprise

James Blackwood: actually.

Rob Asher: It is

James Blackwood: I, yeah, I was, you know, we, in that first year, we probably did, I don't know, hundreds of conversations with people, architects, engineers, developers, government people, and I could not believe how underserved that. Um, corporate side of the fence was in terms of technology and it's amazing.

Like there's not much they need to do great deals. They've been doing great deals for a while, but there's still so much risk at that top end of the

Rob Asher: Mm-hmm.

James Blackwood: and very little digital tools to do it. And at Bluebeam, you know, I was fascinated, I listened to your Bluebeam episode 'cause it's so fascinated by that tool is for sure, uh, used.

And so there's this kind of stigma of I don't wanna draw. But then if you actually double click on what they're doing, they're all drawing something at some point somewhere. 'cause if they have to think about it spatially, 'cause it's a spatial problem first and foremost, it's like where am I gonna put my 70 by, you know, 150 box and it needs to fit here or here or here or here or whatever.

And so it actually is like, uh, uh, the same problem just to a different audience and early. So when we struggle to like get, um, penetration with architects who've got great tools and there's a lot of Robs out there who think like Rob and are building their own tools. Because we were a bootstrap company and we were trying to, um, you know, make ends meet, we went to where the opportunity was.

And that was our first kind of big traction of, um, funding the, the business via actually making sales for the first couple of years.

Rob Asher: And that's just zoomed up. I think it's like zoomed out and almost reinforced our. Systemic understanding of the problem. Like if you look at the problem is the planet, or, or, or we say city making, it's such a, such an abstract problem. We, we dunno how to tell it to the market. It's not design because design is actually one step on like a 10 step process. and gotta think about the policy and the financial and the da, da da. And only when you get a full integration of all of those considerations, are you gonna get a good outcome? Are you gonna get a human place? 'cause if it, know, if anything falls over the designer could be excellent, da da da da da, but the code doesn't allow x, it's not gonna happen.

And so I love watching like, you know, these guys trying to get, uh, point loaded stairs allowed and state of Seattle or in America where you have the double stair. And that bit of code has been the most profound designer of, you know, of, of multifamily in America. To change that code, you have to hop out of the, the design bucket and you have to go up the policy bucket

Evan Troxel: Right.

Rob Asher: and it's, and you have to do that like 20 times.

You can't just be like, Hey, I'm a designer. I wait for a brief and when the brief comes, I do great design and then my designers build because that's just, it's just disintegrated thinking. As in, if you wanted to actually do really well, you need to somehow bring all of it together. And the fragmentation, like, so we are crossing this boundary, like you imagine Giraffe, we came as architects and now we're selling to corporates, and we're slowly starting to sort of build this bridge conceptually between these two kind of islands.

And we're finding actually, it's like a whole series of islands and everyone's very fragmented and the opportunity suddenly emerges, like with more clarity of once you bring this stuff together, it's crazy, you know? And it's, it's, there's so much you can do for good design. Like, it doesn't matter what your actual, like, do you wanna make heaps of money?

Do you wanna do great design? Are you go like, whatever your kind of motive is. the things together allows you to do that thing.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: so that's sort of where we, and it's kind of like BIM interoperability. It's like, oh, I've got this file. I need to get it in a Revit, and then I need to put it into ion or whatever.

It's the same kind of thing, except it's just zoomed out. And the difference, I think, is that the, the mental paradigms that people have are, are not, not always commensurate in that way. Like Lumion and Revit and Archicad and whatever, Rhino, they're all describing geometry, building geometry of some in some way.

Whereas a financial analyst and a urban planning policy person and an architect and a retail specialist, they may actually have a different mental model about what the building and the development is like. It may be a cash flow to someone, a building to someone, a piece of, you know, opex, like maintenance problem to someone else. And if you can stitch those. So, so it's like an interoperability problem overlaid with a paradigm split, you know? So you've gotta somehow bring paradigms together and do the data interop at the same time. So again, you can imagine we are two years into this, we're talking this kind of language, which is very mathematical.

You're abstracting it. The market's not understanding what we're, what we're

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Rob Asher: all

Evan Troxel: I, I mean this, this concept of zooming out right is really, really important because what you're talking about as an architect, potentially having a seat at that table,

Rob Asher: a hundred percent.

Evan Troxel: So that they can be part of actually having a chance at changing the world. Because I think, I think if you really were to just generalize and put this across, it's like really hard to do that with one project,

Rob Asher: can't do it with one project. It's possible. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: and for your example of you've gotta do it 20 times to work your way up the policy ladder to actually get the code to change, to do that thing, you actually have to zoom out and be at that

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: of where all of that is being taken into consideration.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: what you're talking about Giraffe doing right, is integrating, becoming the common glue between, or the potential to become the glue at that level so that Really amazing things can happen. Right? Like that's

Rob Asher: that's the point. That's and and that's exactly a hundred percent right. That's so well put. it's, and the re we we're sort of urgent about it because we see it's having such an impact. And also there's just, it's not done at the moment. As in, if you go in an architectural office and you say, show me your projects that will show you the P drive, or, or worse, they'll show you their website with these like 25 megabyte images and you're like, no, just on a map. So and so, you can't go to a policymaker and say, Hey, I've done 45 multi-families in this corridor and I'm gonna show you that the average area is this and if we did this, da da. that's the kind of evidence language that a policymaker would say, oh, I'll do the code change for you now, which is kind of impossible.

The tooling just doesn't allow it. And so. And so the tragedy unfolds because it now, it takes 15 years to change that code. And, and there's 15 years of, of potentially compromised buildings. Do you know what I mean? I'm not saying every code is terrible, I'm just saying when there's things that, so, yeah.

So it's an urgent and we, we, we spotted this void, and it's such a weird void because it's so complicated. That's where we're sort of building software into that void. it's, and what we've found, so now we're sort of, we've done this big journey. We've spoken to the capital deployers. People want an architect at the table, as in everyone really recognizes the value of design and they see, and they don't wanna carry design risk. there's a whole bunch of reasons why they want, you know, and, and the, it's almost like a structural reason not to have one, because it's slow to procure and da da da da da. And so if we could get this common glue, we can actually integrate. And so some of our developer clients now. Especially the ones who are operating at scale are saying to their consultants, do it in Giraffe.

And the reason you gotta do it in Giraffe is because I've configured Giraffe, my finance team, my investment committee, my spatial data team, my enterprise data team are in Giraffe. And so if you draw in Giraffe, all the data automatically flows to those guys. So my life is, as a corporate, is easier. I can now plug Tableau into it or power BI and, and I can see what's going on.

Right. If you must, if you will. And, and, and it's impossible if you send me PDFs or if you, if you, you know, publish a drawing set. 'cause then I have to ingest it and then it doesn't happen. But if you do this in this like big digital twin, then I can get your design in a format that it sits on the data structure and it works. And that to me is unbelievably exciting because it means that we're. We're succeeding in our goal of kind of meshing these paradigms together in a true, like, true interop, deep interop. um, and that's where we are now. And so that's why we, we think now we can come back to the architects and say, actually there is something valuable here.

You know, so overwhelmed by choice. There's like, there's all the old ones, sketch up, Revit, you know, there's the new ones, there's Arcol Snaptrude and like, you know, so this new gen, old gen, you gotta choose. But I think we've got something here that is definitely worth considering. So here

James Blackwood: I would say it's, you know, it sounds complex, but. It's not that complex. There's like three fundamental tools you, you need, if you want to be the translator between all these stakeholders, which is maps, drawing, tools, and a calculator like Rob, exactly what Rob described. And if you have those three things in one place, then you can be the Rubik's cube or the, you know, whatever the, the translator is between those elements.

Because I can log in as a numbers guy and I can just see the numbers or I can log in as a drawing guy and I can just focus on drawing or I can log in as a policy person and just look at maps and do spatial analysis. And we haven't even touched on that. But when those three things come together, that's the magic, the maps, the pencil and the calculator.

And that was my byline for describing what is Giraffe for so long, it's map pencil calculator. Um, then that's the opportunity I think is this, each one of those tools. And where, what I think Rob's about to get to is I think our drawing tools are actually good now. You know,

Rob Asher: they, they're actually good.

James Blackwood: I think it takes. Yeah.

Rob Asher: man, holy moly. Like, but to get Control z done, do you know what I mean? Woo.

James Blackwood: Yeah.

Rob Asher: it's just implementing a, a good drawing tool like this is where like, Rhino is still probably like my gold star of software in terms of just how, you know, point to line to surface, to solid.

Like it's just such a beautiful thing. Um, but to get back, I dunno how many person years of development on Rhino, but it would be probably of millennium. you need to spend years and years and years to get something good. And so it's taken us years and years

Evan Troxel: but

Rob Asher: you can actually draw quick

Evan Troxel: demand, right? And, and, and so

Rob Asher: and it's kind of They should, yeah.

Evan Troxel: Well, yeah, I mean the

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah,

Evan Troxel: have to be something I I, I, especially in the, like the new class of tools,

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: you want to use because we all use stuff we don't wanna use and we don't want any more of that.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: So,

Rob Asher: percent. A hundred percent.

Evan Troxel: I think, you know, it's really interesting to kind of think about, you know, James, with these kind of three different buckets and how interconnected they actually are and how when you are making changes and observations in one and tweaking, say tweaking the drawing and seeing all that stuff update, like that's super powerful and informative and part of the decision making process and the more disconnected that is, like the slower it goes.

And, and the thing I keep thinking of as you guys are describing, what, what's going on here is like, there's that, that old saying like, work smarter, not harder. And architects are like. We do hard work. That's what we do. So

Rob Asher: That's right. I'm here for it. That's it.

Evan Troxel: and we're not, we're not allergic to hard work.

Like that's, that's

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: the job requires. it is so hard to say, what do you mean? Like, look over here at this new thing coming because I'm so busy

Rob Asher: Mm,

Evan Troxel: thing right here. And so you really have to create basically a world class product, you

Rob Asher: exactly.

Evan Troxel: to, to even get them to look at it.

Because, I mean, I'm sure you have stories upon stories

Rob Asher: so no, and, and we, and we do, and, and I think it's fair, as in why would you, if you're doing a high risk job, you're personally liable. You've got a, you know, why would you chance it on something that, that didn't feel good?

James Blackwood: Yeah, it's totally reasonable. The uh, yeah, we.

Rob Asher: I wouldn't, so, and the offerings are good and they're cheap.

As in Rhino, like, it's like unbelievable. You know, you pay a thousand bucks, whatever it is, and you get it for eight years. It's like, it's so good and so cheap. And I think the, the, the thing that we've been trying to push, as in the, the message we're trying to get is, it's almost, you're not talking to Giraffe for the drawing tool.

Like this kind of, it's kind of table stakes now. Everyone's doing it where you like, you know, everyone started doing feasibility tools. I dunno why. So like, you draw a colored box, you see the area great, right? It's good. It's, it was missing. So it's good that it's being done, the collaboration now, everyone's doing collaboration.

Everyone, can you see your cursors, right? Yeah. The, the true thing that you're wanting to try and get to is, uh, like technological empathy with what your client needs. And I think that is, it's a problem as in it's difficult knotty education piece that's uncomfortable for an architect. But I think it's the right discomfort, as in, if you're not doing that, if you're not saying, okay, hang on, let me just take some time, look at my deliverables, look at what my client's problem set is, and actually design a way of working around this reality, right? Then you do a disservice to yourself, because the reality is here, and I would say I see, I see that a lot because it's just, you know, I think it's so new. So I would say there's a couple of layers that that Giraffe has. So drawing calculator maps does that, but there's two more layers which are critical.

The first is it's actually on the internet, and it's properly like ontologically on the internet. There's a lot of things, which it's like, it's a desktop tool on the internet, as in you open it in Chrome, right? But Giraffe is a database and APIs, that's all it is, as in it's Postgres with Django and JavaScript, that's exposed to the user. So if you want to use the SDK or iframe in some REACT or do something that's internety, and when I say internet as first principles, like you can make HTTP requests and you can do all this stuff, and that kind of clarity of this is just an internet tool, it's just polygons on a map using internet technology on a database that is up and down the tool.

So it's, it's very, uh, what would I say?

James Blackwood: This, this,

Rob Asher: yeah,

James Blackwood: this first principles thing used to drive me insane because I'm like a front end sales guy, and I would be talking to clients. They'd be like, what we need is this one thing. We need a button that does X and or we need a tool that does financial feasibility. I'm like, okay, great. So I go to the develop team.

We need a financial tool, feasibility tool, and what our team would do is say, what we should do is build a tool that builds a financial feasibility tool. And my brain would explode 'cause I'd be like, oh my God, now I have to sell services to the client to configure it. but it was actually the true genius of Giraffe.

And every time I struggle with it, I know that it's actually for the benefit of the company long term and for the clients. Because what is true about real estate that's different to banks, it's different to telcos, is that it is a very unique problem set for every client that we talk to. The way you design in Orlando, Florida is so different to how you design in Sydney, just a different set of problems.

And so the way they underwrite deals in, in, uh, Orlando is different to how they underwrite them in Sydney. So if you wanna build a platform that speaks to all of the users and truly stitches them together, then you can't just build the financial model that I wanted to build. You have to build the first principles tool, and that goes all the way down to.

The technology stack, which is what Rob's saying, which is actually if you really wanted to, you could just build your own software on Giraffe,

Rob Asher: Yeah,

James Blackwood: know, like the SD K is exposed. And I think, um, you know, I would often say to, to Rob like, Hey, can we do this? And he's like, yeah, you do this, you pop open the the JSON and you change it here.

And you know, again, my brain would explode 'cause I'm like, how am I supposed to sell that to people? Uh, but the true thing about architects and why I think architects love our software 'cause they love the way that works. They are first principles thinkers. And when you put that thinking inside of a developer, you get some real power.

And what Rob's saying, I think, to circle this all back to, uh, the story that we were telling a few minutes ago, is our clients are seeing the value of that level of thinking and the value of design in that kind of first principles workflow when they have a design thinker in the room, and it's pretty cool.

So then you can go and build a. Unique tool that does the proforma or it does the floor plan, or it does whatever the specific job is, but it's elevating it up to the right level of, uh, zoom, if you will, to the business problem that the developer needs to solve. So it's really cool. I think it like brings it back full circle to where the storytelling is the actual issue again, and the architect can build the unique tool for the unique job that needs to get sold.

Rob Asher: so like a concrete example, 'cause this is pretty abstracted, like, because it's like, it's there, it's so open. It's like inside out software. You can see how it works. A way it, it often pays out for us is because we're API first, we can connect to spatial data. So you can go to basically any city in the world, you can go to London and like within 20 minutes because you're on the internet. Their data's on the internet. You just pull their data in in an open format, and anyone could do that. If you're building a website, it's not like we're it and making it closed source. It's literally just connect to the internet. You know, they're serving it via API read it. And so you can land in London and you can have climate risk zoning, protective view corridors, buses, census data, as in deep imagine a context site analysis for an architect. You can have so much site analysis that's gonna inform your design, that's gonna help your thinking and deepen and enrich your response to the client. You can just get that and you can get that through the technology. You don't have to copy paste the PDFs or do any of that stuff. And that's only possible in every city in the world because Giraffe is, takes the internet seriously. And so you're just navigating like terabytes and terabytes of data. because that's what the Internet's designed to do. And so as, as soon as you sort of say, okay, well let's really treat this internet thing seriously and actually like jack into the mainframe, you know, like Neo like, then it's like boom.

And, and I don't think people are logic. They're doing that in different ways, but there's still a gap there because That's the, and it's very, very exciting. So that's the, the first layer on top of those like map calculator box on the internet?

Evan Troxel: can I just like plug in here for a

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I think what a lot of people have experienced, my, myself included, and now this information's a few years old at this point for me, but it's like a lot of people have built what you're talking about for really specific

Rob Asher: Correct. Yes.

Evan Troxel: all of those scripts are broken now, right?

It's like over and over and over again is basically how that happens in firms. And obviously there's people who are super way more advanced and, and maybe they have the, the staff who can keep that stuff running. we're seeing more and more tools come out with, with some of the things you're talking about.

Maybe not all of them. You know, I, again, like feature sets are changing

Rob Asher: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feature, feature, feature, exactly.

Evan Troxel: but this idea of using a tool that, okay, I I, and I'm, I'm sure you kind of took a little bit of inspiration from the Rhino team and just make, making it

Rob Asher: A hundred percent.

Evan Troxel: to

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: inside your

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: Right. But, but number one, like you don't have to build tools like you be, and a lot of people, like, they just don't have the staff for that.

They can't retain the staff for that.

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: know where to find the staff for that. Uh, you know, and, and so there, there's a lot of problematics. Is that a

Rob Asher: yes. Yeah, yeah. No, it is, yeah, definitely. That's an architect's word. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: So like this, this idea of, of making a tool that gives people that power that they don't have to maintain is a big deal.

And like you say, they can, they can just go anywhere in the world because one of the guiding principle is location, right?

Rob Asher: Hundred percent

Evan Troxel: are put

Rob Asher: on planet Earth. They are.

Evan Troxel: So,

Rob Asher: weird.

Evan Troxel: it's, it's, it's like, like just really, again, kind of going back to your idea of abstracting this and, and like distilling, let's call it

Rob Asher: Yes. Yes.

Evan Troxel: down to this, this fundamental level. I mean, that sounds like too good to be true.

Rob Asher: Well, and it it, yeah. I mean, I'm telling you, I'm telling you it's real, Evan. Trust me. No, it's because it's the pro, the, the, the, okay. I think to that, like people wanna build tools. This is the other big reason I started Giraffe as opposed to using Rhino. Like Rhino is basically like 9.9 out of 10. Like Grasshop is so good. If you don't like ra, you can do Python. If you don't like that, you can do C#. It's solid as heck. It's like robust. It's cheap. Like what's wrong with it? It's not on the internet. It's basically your only problem. And something that is critical to the internet is distribution. Like distribution is out of the box of the, the internet is essentially distribution. It's this distributed network. And you know, it was designed so that as the nukes take out this line and that line and that line, that the distribution of data will still find a way through the network to where it needs to be. It was literally designed to withstand nuclear attack. So it's so robust in terms of distribution and it's like, let's use that.

That sounds like a good idea. You know, why, why change it? So Giraffe is around the distribution of this knowledge. So I can write a script. Something that's different between like Rhino and Giraffe is the scripts actually sit on the geometries. So rather than in a document, you sit on the geometry. 'cause in Giraffe you don't actually have a document. have every single geometry you've ever drawn on an inter on a, a database. And we just say, oh, for those projects, we'll get that project geometry. But at any point you can say, Hey, that other geometry, just me. So it's a completely different paradigm around what the data is. And the script sits on the geometry.

So I can have, I can just copy paste geometries into my project that comes with the script, and then that script then runs and executes on those geometries. And this solves the distribution problem because if someone says, Hey, I need to do an apartment. Like, do you, didn't you have a core script? Or like, didn't you have a script that did that?

Angled the windows to the view? It's like, yep, copy paste that in. And it comes. And then the way we've done it is the script is hidden until you open it. Like a, like Steve Jobs, like with the macOS is the, is the gold standard on this? Where it's like, it looks super simple, but there's always like deeper, deeper, deeper shortcuts.

Like if you're a power user, you can go in. Same with Giraffe, we want it to be like one big button. But then if you want to, you double click and then double click twice. And then you're actually editing the JSON like you're in code land. And so we've solved, like we've been working on solving this distribution thing, which is basically how do you get the computational designer out of their bubble?

'cause the problem now is they do the work and then because they can't distribute it, there's no distribution, they have to, they build the tool and then they do the work. And so they turn from a tool maker to like, like a trench digger. They've like designed the spade and now they've gotta dig the hole.

And that was like probably the thing that killed me at at work when I was an architect was like, I'd done all this work building these scripts, but then I had to run them. So people would come to me and say like, Hey, can you just quickly do this master plan and tell me what the areas are? And I'm like, can't you?

And they're like, no, we've tried. And I would train them and they would forget and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so then I was like, I'm not doing this anymore. And I think that's a universal problem. And I think that's distribution. I have this code, I have this logic, I have this ip, this insight, this design thinking, and I want to get it into your hands in a way that's robust to a nuclear attack and that's gonna work when you need it in front of your client. that's that's what we've, that's what we've done. I actually think we've done the reason I know we've done this is because we have people building scripts and distributing them that are not experts and they're doing it in anger. And look, every now and then there's a bug. Someone gets really upset, but no more or less than like Excel because it's complex. But they are people using scripts that we wrote that I would never have imagined would be technically proficient enough to use those scripts. But they're there in the client base and they love it and it's, it's crazy. It's so satisfying. Oh my goodness. It's satisfying.

Evan Troxel: you, you totally missed your opportunity here though. I mean, surviving nuclear attacks, a Giraffe is not going to do that. I mean, you, this is obviously a, a roach.

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Yeah,

James Blackwood: Yeah, that's a good point, cockroach.

Rob Asher: Our marketing people made us change it

James Blackwood: That's.

Evan Troxel: I, I get it. It's not as, yeah, it's the aesthetics. Uh, there may be

Rob Asher: there. Yeah. Cockroach. I mean, yeah. We should have, yeah, it's good. It's good.

Evan Troxel: it's, it's interesting to think about how kind of trapped architects feel with their tools

Rob Asher: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: kind of, again, the, the new. The new version of tools that are coming out and what's possible.

And it was possible because you built it from scratch, right? Like, and you lived through things that you're solving

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: you're continually evolving by talking to people, getting feedback, and, and watching the tools they're building. And I mean, to me that, that just seems like that to me, that's a real message here is, you don't have to be trapped in the

Rob Asher: And, and I would say, I would say it's like it's urgent as in it's in I think an imperative. As in if you're not thinking about your software tools, lemme just tell you this, there, there's this thing very influential to me called the the infernal bicycle or the satanic bicycle. Have you heard this? This's A UI concept.

Evan Troxel: I don't think so.

Rob Asher: Okay, so the bicycle, the gearing system, there's the front and the rear and the number of teeth, right? That is how much power goes from the pedal. And you need to understand that when you do easy, you just change the front and the rear gears. You go down in the snow uphill, downhill. Imagine someone designed a bicycle where they hid the gears and then they had gravel mode, uphill mode, downhill mode, snow mode, right? Which is what modern cars do. You know, like in my Mitsubishi, it's like I'm in tarmac mode and I'm like, what is tarmac mode? You know, it's, it's just, well, it's like 50% of the power goes to the rear and 50 to the front, or it's something simple, but they don't tell you what it is.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Rob Asher: And that's the feral bicycle, because it would be impossible to learn that because now I want to go gravel uphill, but there's only like two modes, like which do I choose? So you, the user needs to see, you should trust the user that they are gonna learn how the tool works, right? And they're gonna figure out how gearing works on a bicycle and use it. And when they do, they're free. And until they do, they're kind of like actually underserved. Like if you've got the modes, and that's why it's the Satanic or the infernal bicycle, whatever it's called, right? And it's a UI concept. You, you wanna expose the workings of the tool to the user. as a designer, as an architect, you want the workings of your tool exposed to you. Because in this age, with the ai, where it is, where the internet, the data infrastructure, where it is, if you're not. Making the tool, like taking ownership of the, of your software and using it to divine and build and create. I feel like the world is moving very rapidly past you because that's just so fundamental and important. Um, you know, it's like an electrician not having, imagine an electrician just had a big machine that he put over things. He didn't know what it did, you know what I mean? He's clearly, you know, you need to be very first principled and so out, out, that's where we talk and talk and, and have a belief that there's always a space for that.

That there's always people that are ingenious and want to think from first principles and wanna build their own stuff and like love it. And Giraffe is basically a tool for that kind of a user. Um, and it's, and it's, and then it's very humble because it just, it's just polygons on a map, on a database if you understand that. You understand Giraffe, you know what I mean? And, and so it's very, it's very aligning.

Evan Troxel: This, this concept of like, trusting your users are gonna learn how to use a tool, and then there's kind of this, you know, different steepness to different learning curves.

Rob Asher: Yes.

Evan Troxel: talk about kind of the, the, the steepness of your learning curve for this? Because I, I assume there's probably different levels of approach that you could come in and use a tool like this, but, but like, because that's one of the, the kickbacks, right?

That's one of the, the, this is, this is where I have an issue with software. It's like, oh my god, I can see. long it's

Rob Asher: yeah.

Evan Troxel: me to become even, let's just call it proficient, not, not a master, not a power user, just proficient enough to use this on a day-to-day basis. Like, that's just another objection that you'll hear all the time because there's so much

Rob Asher: Total, eh?

Evan Troxel: sunk cost in the existing software. But we have all seen examples on our phones especially, right, where it's like, oh, you, you already know how to use it. You

Rob Asher: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: just downloaded it. You already know how to use it. Because the paradigms are different in modern tooling

Rob Asher: True tone.

Evan Troxel: in tooling. That's been around forever.

Rob Asher: got, I got two stories on that. And James, I'd like to you to sell the one about you building an app for the client. The

James Blackwood: Oh yeah.

Rob Asher: site search. But I'll tell first. So first Giraffe, it's just Polygon editor on a map. So you just draw a polygon and then you tell Giraffe, Hey, this has three levels and you should classify it as classroom. All Giraffe is doing is calculating those areas and then allowing you to do Excel with them. So if you know how to use anything, Adobe or Revit or any drafting package, Giraffe is like, it's just a drafting package. And if you know how to use Excel, it's just Excel. So at the most basic level, it's a very familiar thing and it's on a map, but it looks like Google Map, it's Mapbox, you know everyone you know.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Rob Asher: it is under the hood though. Goes, you can go, you can go further, but you may not need to. Like, if you're a developer, you could be very happy just doing shapes on a map. If you're a design director, you could be telling narrative with the shapes on the map. We've got lots of hot keys, lots of speed, lots of, lots of ways of manipulating the information.

So it works in a meeting, like at that speed, but it's just shapes on a map. And then it does everything automatically. The, the, the fact that it makes a portfolio of your data, of all your projects, the fact that it, you know, you can access any geometry, that's all that we do, as in the geo, the, the database is just architected to do that. So it's easy on that level, but then it goes very deep and, and this is where the thing that's, that's really exciting to me is like, is this story that James will tell you where a non-expert user, as in a, not a professional coder or computational designer, can take that very basic shapes on a map. magic with it. Mainly using the LLMs to write code. 'cause this is the other thing used to have to like do grasshopper to tell Rhino what to do. Now you can go to ChatGPT and say, Hey, write me a function that takes this square and puts a window on the three shortest and a door on the longest side and ChatGPT will one shot that thing done.

And you copy paste that into Giraffe and that code is executed and it'll work. It's crazy. And

James Blackwood: Oh, it is

Rob Asher: uh, it's a whole new world

James Blackwood: definitely. And you know, um, before I tell that story, the, the rectangles on a map thing is actually profound in that the, the first learning hurdle is how do you draw a rectangle on the map? But that fundamental concept, I think is the most valuable part of our product in that it's, there's infinite context.

You can come to the map at any scale and draw a rectangle and understand immediately the areas and start moving them around. And it is amazing what that does for your brain. And it actually changes the way you think about space. So anytime I have a, like even a question about my house, the first place that goes Giraffe, and I draw a rectangle and I start moving it around, like, what's the setback on the rear fence?

Can I fit in a DUI go straight to Giraffe, I can see the boundary, I draw the rectangle city of Orlando's 10 foot, if you have an A DU, no, I can't move on. You know? Right. That's, it's, it's so simple. It's like a really complex comp question,

Evan Troxel: Uh, a

James Blackwood: but hyper valuable.

Evan Troxel: answer. Yeah.

Rob Asher: yeah,

James Blackwood: Yeah. Yeah. But all I did was draw, you know, a five foot by five foot rectangle problem solved.

Rob Asher: yeah.

James Blackwood: um, so, and I've heard one of our clients describe, you know, HKS, um, are a client of ours in, uh, the cities and communities team, and they describe it as a thinking tool. And I just think that is the best way to describe what Giraffe actually is. It's a way of thinking spatially with infinite context, and it's addictive.

Like, once you start thinking about it, you're like, ooh. Oh, maybe I'll do this problem or that problem. And the, the, uh, problem that a different client, uh, developer client came to me with was, you know, we make available this, the problem Rob's describing of go to any city in the world and connect to its data is, um, truly cool.

And then the market is doing this job of consolidating all that data with, you know, AI is helping these companies spin up and build these data sets of, uh, governed data, parcel data, probably being the fundamental, you know, asset class that we're all thinking about here. ReGrid in the US have a, um, API database of every parcel in the u in the United States.

Now it's, uh, most of Canada as well, along with all of its zoning information. And it's incredible. And they're building that data set as a service, which we then provide to our users as a optional extra if they want it. And the client needs to be able to search that data set more than just look at it.

And so I was like, okay, well have an API. It's a really well documented API, Giraffe has an SDK, it's a really well documented SDK. I don't have time to wait for the development team to build this feature. I'm gonna see if I can build it. And so I jump into ChatGPT, and I dump the docs in there. And then I say, teach me how to write this thing.

So, you know, I download Visual Studio Code, I download the GitHub repository of Giraffe. Two hours later I built it. And it is unbelievable. It works. You know where you can and, and it starts, that also gets your will spinning.

Evan Troxel: I thought you were

Rob Asher: No, no, no, no. It's two hours. It's

James Blackwood: Now I built it in two hours.

Rob Asher: And then,

James Blackwood: It was, um,

Rob Asher: And once it's built, because it's on the

James Blackwood: Hey,

Rob Asher: you literally

James Blackwood: I can just publish it

Rob Asher: user there. They get it. It's like they don't need to download an E XE and then update like whatever it is. It's just, boom.

There it is. It's cr, it's

James Blackwood: and it

Rob Asher: When, when that

James Blackwood: it,

Rob Asher: like, oh, whoa, this is crazy.

Evan Troxel: If James can do it.

Rob Asher: If Jet

James Blackwood: yeah, no, for real.

Evan Troxel: so cool.

James Blackwood: And I think, uh, that's the thing that gets me super excited is like a lot, most software is built to be the form, you know, for that problem. Like the building that form took me two hours to build a form. It's like, I want to search Florida for, you know, multifamily parcels greater than 10 acres.

It's three inputs. And it took me, you know, two hours to write that form. The purpose of the software used to be to build that form, but if you can build the form in two hours or quicker, if you know what you're doing, like now I know what I'm doing, I can build those in 10 minutes. Um, then the software actually needs to be the thing behind the form.

And that's what Giraffe has always been. And it's been difficult to explain to people.

Rob Asher: guess

James Blackwood: Yeah. It's,

Rob Asher: yeah.

James Blackwood: the, the underlying problem, which is I need to be able to take bespoke logic and stick it on a map so I can actually understand what I'm doing.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Draft built that in 2018 and we've been building these little modules ourselves, and at the same time building this layer of.

You know what the, um, AI guys are calling MPCs or whatever they are, MCP's, uh, model context protocols. Basically, if you write a JavaScript SDK, you've pretty much written an MCP because you're exposing to the internet the logic of what your app is doing, and then the LLM can go read it, build code on your, like working code on your application.

Rob Asher: It's crazy. It's

James Blackwood: It's super cool.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: we're building like bespoke little stuff for clients all the time now, and it's, uh, it's super addictive.

Evan Troxel: Nice. I, I feel like we've told a pretty compelling story, but I think we need kind of a call to action here at the end. And I've been thinking of two things as we've been talking. Number one is like, people have to go check out Giraffe. and I know you're really focused on architects right now.

You've, you went, you started somewhere else because you

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: to

Rob Asher: do like that. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: but you've made it back to

Rob Asher: We've made it back. We're home. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I feel like that's, that's not an uncommon story in today's day and age with, with new tools. I mean, it's

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: because of the things that I kind of outlined earlier, it's like, what do you mean another tool?

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: there's no room for another tool and, and maybe it isn't another tool in this case, maybe it's replacing tools,

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: so it might be another tool for a short time, but I think it does start to replace tools. But the second, like, call to action here, and I know that's kind of a, like a weird marketing, you know, maybe architects are a little bit allergic to that, but it's like. You need to support like this idea

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: audience members, you need to go and check it out, but also understand the passion for our profession that is being put out there as a, as a true useful, valuable. if you can't tell through this conversation, Rob and team, deeply care about this and these are the tools for the current and next generations that are coming into that are part of this profession.

And I, 'cause I don't wanna say coming in, I, I want to, this isn't for the next generations. this solves real problems right now. And yeah, this is going to be the kind of tool that the next generations use. They will not use the same tools we do for good reasons, right? Because. Of the kinds of things that are possible nowadays.

So like, really my hope by having this conversation is number one, that you will go check out Giraffe, but that you will also have this kind of appreciation of what's happening in this space and how amazing it actually is to be on the receiving end of this. Um, it's not a free product, but think of the value that it actually delivers and how quickly it delivers that value. And then you start to understand how this could actually replace so that you can work smarter instead of harder. So we will have links in the show notes for where to go to check it out. share this episode with people who you feel like need to hear this from a conceptual level, but also from like a tool use level. And I wanna give Rob and James the opportunity to tell you where to go visit if you're driving right now and you don't have time to stop and click on a link, right? But tell us where, where people can go to find out more about Giraffe.

Rob Asher: So our website's best, which is Giraffe Build, B-U-I-L-D. Um, and then we're very active on LinkedIn, so you can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm posting gifs most days of the week

Evan Troxel: Yes you are. And they're beautiful. They're beau. It is like, oh my gosh, I can't believe Giraffe can. Oh, it can do that too. It can do that. And that, I mean, that, it just kind of shows. you do it so simply and they're short, right? They, they

Rob Asher: for sure.

Evan Troxel: but it's like, oh wow, that, like,

Rob Asher: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: that,

Rob Asher: fun, it's creative. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: and it is polygons on a map, right? Like that, that's what it, it,

Rob Asher: Don't tell anyone. Sh sh sh sh. It's, yeah.

Evan Troxel: story too late, I think. I think that's the title of this episode.

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Uh,

Evan Troxel: just

James Blackwood: title.

Evan Troxel: on a,

Rob Asher: Yeah.

James Blackwood: Definitely.

Evan Troxel: well, well, James, any final thoughts that you wanna, you wanna share before we jump off this call?

James Blackwood: Uh, do we wanna share our pricing strategy, Rob, and what we're thinking about in terms of

Rob Asher: can put that

James Blackwood: the

Rob Asher: So, yeah, so, so we we're selling at three grand per year per user for the, the developers that are mainly leveraging the enterprise as in it, the value there is sitting when you have many users doing an enterprise thing, whereas architects are much more individual as in the, the designer is bringing themselves and that pricing doesn't make sense. So we are introducing a Giraffe, like a core tier, which is $45 a month, and it's month by month by month.

Evan Troxel: that just sounds kind of, kind of crazy low, right? I, I think you said before, like if you're an architect, 45 bucks a month is, is probably less than your coffee budget, right? For,

Rob Asher: Oh, should it? I, I mean, yeah, it depends how much coffee you drink, but yeah, it's, I I think it's like 20 minutes of billable time.

Evan Troxel: There you go.

Rob Asher: And I think, and I think it's, think it's fair because Giraffe is a vessel, but like we've been saying, a lot of the value is how you, it's like a piano. It, you need a player as in, it's a good piano, but you need someone who real to make music with it. And so it's, it's not like a, it's not your job for you. Right. It's like a hammer. So it's gotta be high quality. You pay for it, it works. But most of the skill resides with the user.

James Blackwood: Totally and 45 bucks for polygons on a map, you know? That makes sense.

Rob Asher: Ultimately it's Polygon. We can't charge much more than 45 a month.

James Blackwood: this is well put though, because like you say, architects have so much software already and so much, um, operating costs just to keep that software and a lot of vendors look at, um. How can we charge more? And the whole time we'd been going, how can we charge less? How can we charge less?

How can we charge less? And I think we're finally there where we can do it. And so it's super exciting where not only is the tool, you know, the most sophisticated and competent it's ever been for designers, but it is now the cheapest it's ever been. And, uh, so we're, we're really excited and you know, we're the first, you're the first person we've we're telling about them.

Um, so yeah, obviously our enterprise clients will have a different set of features that are specific to their enterprise needs, but the designer doesn't need all that stuff. The designer needs the things we've talked about on this call and all of the good stuff is exposed at that price. You know, being able to draw polygons on map, being able to do generative workflows, being able to build your own calculations, being able to, uh, write apps and if, and dump LLM code into the browser, you know, that's all at that tier.

So I'm super excited about it and I think it's the right way for a vendor to be going and. 2025 is

Rob Asher: Mm.

James Blackwood: prices, not increasing prices, as technology's basically getting commoditized and the hero of the story is the architect. Um, and so I think the value ratio is correct.

Evan Troxel: I mean you saved that till the end, James, but that, that's a pretty, pretty cool kind of concept that the hero is the architect here. And, and I think what you're bringing to the market for, I mean, uh, let's just say it like a lot of people are hearing about this for the first time, right? Or maybe they've seen glimpses of Rob's GIFs on LinkedIn before and, and it's like, oh yeah, Giraffe.

just seriously take a step back and just say, is a really featured tool set for an affordable price to get some serious work done. I mean, to me. That's kind of what we're talking about here. We're

Rob Asher: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: about a toy, we're not talking about a, a nascent tool or nascent, nascent,

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: know, like we're not, this thing is, you, you've been working on this.

It comes from this pedigree of what you talked about, like a, a 9.9 out 10 kind of a tool. that's where

Rob Asher: yeah,

Evan Troxel: is being fed from and the passion and the, the, the overlay of experience in the profession and going and, and working with developers and enterprises at really large scales to make really impactful decisions in urban planning and, and space making and place making and all these things.

And then coming back to the architect after have learning all that and just saying, here's a tool that you can use today. Like, it is gonna take very little time for you to get up and running. that's a huge deal. So, uh, kudos to you guys for, for doing this and thank you for coming on the show to tell everybody about it.

Rob Asher: Thanks for having us. I really

James Blackwood: Yeah. Thanks for having us.

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SummaryIn episode 184, I sat down with Stephan Sieber, CEO of Chaos, and Bill Allen, former CEO of EvolveLAB and now Director of Products at Chaos, to talk about their merger and how what they’ve done could also mean for the future of AEC tech. This wasn’t just a conversation about M&A strategy. It was a front-row seat to how two innovation-focused teams are coming together to reshape design workflows, elevate practitioner agency, and accelerate the integration of AI across the AEC toolchain. From tools like Veras and Envision to the cultural synergies driving their partnership, this episode is a powerful case study on what’s possible when vision and execution collide.

“We want to close the loop from ideation all the way to construction documentation—and we want to do it without requiring a PhD to operate the software.”
— Stephan Sieber

Key TakeawaysThere were many insights shared in this episode, but here are my top 7 – then we'll get into the episode analysis.

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Clifton Harness joins the podcast to talk about the future of architectural technology, the challenges of competing with established software giants, and the importance of staying true to a focused vision. Clifton shares insights about TestFit's journey, the role of AI in architecture, and why attempting to compete directly with Revit might be missing the bigger opportunity. We also explore the human side of architecture, discussing the industry's spirit, its challenges, and the passionate people who make it what it is.

Watch this on YouTube:Subscribe to the podcast on YouTube

Episode links:Connect with the Guest* Clifton Harness on LinkedIn * TestFit on LinkedIn

Books and Philosophies The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz** + Amazon Link + Explores leadership and strategic thinking relevant to CEOs transitioning from hands-on roles to strategic oversight. * Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb* + Amazon Link + Philosophies related to resilience and innovation—highly applicable to the evolution of architectural practice and business.

Tools and Technology Concepts TestFit + TestFit Official Website + Explore TestFit’s automation approach, discussed by Clifton, to site planning and feasibility studies. * Figma + Figma Official Website + Understand how Figma’s collaborative, web-based approach is inspiring a new generation of design tools within AEC. * Procedural Generation* + Procedural Generation Overview - Wikipedia + Learn about procedural generation, the technology underlying TestFit’s automated solutions.

Events and Networks Autodesk University + Autodesk University Official Website + Annual event focused on the latest innovations and challenges in BIM and design automation tools, discussed by Clifton. * Real Estate Technology Conference (CREtech)* + CREtech Official Website + Network and explore innovation in real estate development, aligning with Clifton’s insights on the development industry’s innovation mindset.

Business & Industry Change OnlyPlans: Clifton Harness’ Blog + OnlyPlans website + Clifton’s own writing and thinking on the future of architecture, technology integration, and cultural change within the industry. * Understanding Design-Build and Architect-Owner Contracts* + AIA Contract Documents + Deepen your understanding of contracts, which Clifton identifies as pivotal to transforming AEC industry business models.

Psychology and Personal Development Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman** + Amazon Link + Explore cognitive biases and decision-making strategies, important for leaders navigating strategic shifts. * Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek* + Amazon Link + Understand leadership dynamics and team-building philosophies echoed in Clifton’s discussion about culture and team management.

About Clifton Harness:Clifton has been obsessed with building things—even from a very early age. While obtaining his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin, he was the first B.Arch to obtain certifications from the McCombs School of Business in Business and in Real Estate. After graduation, Clifton joined Streetlights Residential—a Dallas-based Real Estate development company.
Prior to starting TestFit, Clifton worked with college roommate Ryan Griege after work and on weekends. This work would become Residential Engine, the precursor to TestFit. Clifton is based in Dallas where he continues his passion for improving AECO with technology.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Episode Transcript: 186: ‘Bringing a Bazooka to a Banana Fight’, with Clifton Harness

Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode I welcome Clifton Harness back to the show. Clifton is the CEO and co-founder of TestFit, a company that's revolutionizing site planning and feasibility studies in architecture. As an innovative leader in the AEC technology space, Clifton brings a unique perspective on how software can transform architectural practice, and he is not afraid to challenge industry norms.

In today's conversation, we dive deep into the future of architectural technology. The challenges of competing with established software giants and the importance of staying true to a focused vision. Clifton shares insights about TestFit's journey, the role of AI in architecture, and why attempting to compete directly with Revit might be missing the bigger opportunity.

We also explore the human side of architecture, discussing the industry's spirit, its challenges and the passionate people who make it what it is. The main theme that emerged from this episode is about bringing the right tools to the right problems, or as the title of this episode suggests, bringing a bazooka to a banana fight.

It is about understanding when to compete head on with industry giants and when to chart a completely new course by challenging industry norms. Clifton's experience with TestFit demonstrates how focusing on specific high value problems can lead to meaningful innovation in architecture. And this doesn't just apply to tech startups and AEC firm strategy.

It applies to your own personal journey as well. Stick around to the end of the episode because I'll break it all down for you in summary. And as always, there's an extensive amount of additional information in the show notes to hold you over until the next episode, which you might wanna check out after listening to this one. They are in your podcast app. If you're a paid member or if you're a free member, you can find them on TRXL.Co. And so now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Clifton Harness.

It's like you've come to the, the here's the couch, lay down. Tell me about your father. It's a therapy session. I mean, and, and I mean a lot of, I think a lot of the beauty of kind of long form or media, however you wanna put it, is that you can actually just like, like use this time to think out loud about things. And then that will then like, show up in different ways. But like there,

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: sometimes it goes the other way around.

Sometimes people have to write it all down first and you know, maybe it's a, a blog post on only plans, and then, and then it comes into this where you can get into more nuance about that. But sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes you come, you, you do something like this. It's a call, it's a, it's a recording, whatever it is where you're, you're just thinking out loud and, and formulating or, or making those thoughts more. by doing the talking. It's just like architecture, right? Like you

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: process get to this in, you know, who knows what it's gonna be in the end, but you gotta go through all of the steps of doing the thinking and the discovery and that, whoa, I didn't think of that. Like, and then breaking it on purpose and then, you know, iterating, uh, that, that's to me what's, what's, you know, there's no right way to do it, right?

You could do it anyway, but it's, this is the process.

Clifton Harness: Well, so, uh, in the process of building TestFit, um, call it from 2017 until the end of 2024, like. You know, Christmas break, I kind of was like, okay, I need to reconsider a few things. But your, your limbic system, your fight or flight response when you're so heavily invested in a company like, uh, you and the company.

Like you don't know where the, where the separating separate,

Evan Troxel: the next one's, yeah.

Clifton Harness: right. And, and yeah. And so, so like, sort of like an attack dog for all that time. Like I was just like focused on our mission, you know, making sure that, uh, we keep growing, um, have the right people, you know, the right marketing, the right sales, the right operations.

Figuring out, you know, what, even a culture for a company like ours looks like. Um. And, you know, the product and the vision and all that. Like, it just, it, it just keeps going. Um, and it keeps going and it keeps growing. And, um, seeing like our, you know, head of new markets, Jack sold more than a million dollars of test with software now by himself, you know, on his own, his own book of business.

Hey, like, why are you doing this? Why do, why do you keep going to bat for TestFit? Um, you know, he believes in our, our mission, you know, Kelly, holy crap. Like, so we we're creating something here that, um, is having outcomes like I, I never even dreamed possible. Um, and, you know, you're, i four months maybe now into trying to.

To actually think strategically, you know, as a CEO here externally. Like, I'm no longer spending 99% of my time internally,

Evan Troxel: in the

Clifton Harness: know?

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Right.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. And, and so like my relationship to work is different. Um, it's, you know, it's maybe why I had to, to make a blog. It's like I don't feel like I ever complete any actual work and, you know, most of, most of my work is like intellectual or, or something.

Um, and then being the CEO, like, hey everybody, I want to have a debate about, you know, about BIM internally. Well, there's really only one viewpoint that's gonna win, uh, when it's the CEO talking about, you know, BIM or something. Um, so there needs to be more intellectual rigor, uh, at least from my point of view.

On our path forward, uh, the industry's path forward. I, I do believe that, uh, the strength of our vision is inspiring to a lot of people. Um, so I, you know, I, I feel like we have some modicum of leadership, uh, amongst the startup community. Um, and, you know, AEC is dying, like death by 10,000 paper cuts or something.

And I, you know, I, I think that it's the contracts mostly,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, you, you said to me one time, if you really want to change AEC, start with the the owner architect contract.

Clifton Harness: yes. Yeah. Like there's no amount of automation. Like there's no amount of incredibly well made automation software that we could make, um, that will change that relationship. Um. And, you know, as TestFit's, automation becomes more powerful, um, more intelligent because that's just what we do with customer feedback.

Okay, here, Hey, it's doing something stupid here. Can you make it not do this stupid thing? Okay, well, yeah, we can do that. Uh, well, you start stacking that over eight years and you know, there's not a single person out there that could probably draw a better parking lot, um, than what we can, what we can do, you know, with the procedures that we've, we've made, um, you know, that's just like one example is parking.

Um, there's some life safety code stuff that we do that I haven't seen anybody try to copy it in six years. Um, and it's really important for how, you know, double loaded corridor buildings are solved. But you know. We are bringing lots of incredible automation, um, and architects, uh, in the first few months of paying us in 20 17, 20 18 are still roughly paying us the same amount for a significantly much more polished user experience.

You know, and I'm like, I'm looking at it. I'm like, wait, so we can't, we can't charge more. And then you go talk to the architects like, well, you know, like, I own this business development relationship with all my clients and I don't feel like it's a great idea to wheel out, TestFit in front of them. And, and I'm just like, okay, uh, if TestFit can't continue to become more economically powerful for architects, what are we doing?

Um, because the real goal isn't to. Replace your billable hours, it's to like force the, the owner to pay you more value, um, because you have more time to spend on design. Like, that hasn't transformed, you know, that hasn't come to fruition in a way that, yeah. Um, so I'm sort of like, okay, if our, the strength of our vision is professional grade automation that architects trust, okay, we need to start attacking more of, are we gonna go into sds?

Are we gonna go into dds? God forbid, are we gonna try to attack CDs? Um, like where, where is, you know, where is the value for you guys? Um,

Evan Troxel: the interesting thing is, I mean, you got this feedback way in the beginning, right? Was well, you don't handle the market that I'm in.

Clifton Harness: yeah.

Evan Troxel: you that,

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: It was like healthcare or schools or, or whatever it, you know, whatever it was. And you're focused on commodity, you know, this and that, and you've added a few things over the years.

Um,

Clifton Harness: Right.

Evan Troxel: but at

Clifton Harness: So the, the

Evan Troxel: like there's, you could develop a platform for everybody, which is then it gets to the, to your kind of provocative post or, or comment on, on a LinkedIn post where you said, you know, well you're using 10% of a, of a thing and paying a hundred percent for it,

Clifton Harness: Yes. Yep.

Evan Troxel: or there's the really, the specificity side of it.

And I think about, you know, the way I, I, the analogy I thought of was like, if you go into a woodworker's shop, like it's all tools. It's all like the walls are lined with tools. There's not one tool in that shop, but there's a lot of architects out there for years who have fought for, I just want the one tool, man, like, why can't you design in the tool that I use for production?

Why can't you? And, and it's, and this is pressure with even within the firm, even with on the team you're working in to streamline that kind of thing, which, which takes a lot of the magic out of what architects actually do. I always felt like, it's like, what do you mean? Why do you wanna put me in this box so that we can design shittier buildings?

Like, why, why would you want that? And it's both because it's from my convenience and, and, and that software exists. Everybody uses it all the time for all kinds of things, for lots of things they shouldn't be using it for. And then there's specificity of tools, like what you have built. you're getting away from that idea.

I don't know. But we can see a lot of different startups doing this where it's like, we're this piece of the puzzle and that's all

Clifton Harness: Um,

Evan Troxel: is

Clifton Harness: yeah.

Evan Troxel: of the puzzle. as a designer or an architect, there's a lot of tools in my tool. Like, like if I, if I showed you my, my desktop on my computer, not my desktop, but like my, my app switcher, my task manager, there's 20 things running all the time for my tool stack as a podcaster.

Right? As an architect. Same. It would be the same. And, and, and yet there's people who just really rally for this idea of one tool to rule them all, you know? And, and so I can see like where this tension's coming from.

Clifton Harness: So for our part, I mean, I don't think the, the go-to-market strategy ever really changed. Like we focused on housing, um, for the first several years it was, you know, highly fragmented market still is. Um, but it's 40% of the, you know, the commodity markets, our, our housing. And so. You know, we started with high density multi, like it's what I believe in most as a new urbanist.

We need, you know, God forbid we just need parking garages so we can pull our whole cities,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: you know, closer together. Uh, seems pretty intelligent to me. Right? So then we do that and then, you know, interest rates start to change and then people can't afford structured parking anymore. Okay. So we follow our customers.

Um, we go into low density housing, um, garden apartments, you know, the kind of stuff that is commod, like the, the beating heart of commodity housing is these garden apartments. And, um, focus on customer feedback again. And that brought us into like town homes and then tracked home planning. Um. Stuff that's wildly different than, you know, new urbanistic ideals.

Um, but at the same time, we've continued to develop the high density stuff and then you start, you start to get feedback about how you haven't done enough and the thing you've building for six years. Okay, so what else do we need to improve? Well, memory care requires these kinds of things. Okay. Support that.

Um, this construction type needs to support modular Okay. Support that. Um, and then we, uh, thinking about a problem that, you know, being like a one trick pony right now. And, um, how do you get out of just housing? Because like the vision for TestFit is all, like all buildings. You know, some fe, some, some manner of feasibility for all buildings.

Um. And we, you know, we started work on, uh, warehouses with, uh, an investor with Prologis. Um, and then that led to data centers. So the, you know, that whole DNA, the large box in a field is a very different design problem than maximizing your FAR in an urban core. Um, and so you have these two very different sides of the business.

Um, but all of these sides of the business require roads, parking, uh, simple massing tools, a lot of the same data sets to be pulled in. Um, so for our part, like there's, I don't know, 80% of our business that's these configurators that it's what we're known for. And then there's 20 part, 20% that is new and growing.

That's like, um. We call it urban planner. Um, but like we take any manual tool that we've made for anything in the automated, on the automatic side of our business, and we started to push that into urban planner. Um, and that's new and growing and it's positioned to compete, you know, against like SketchUp, um, form a, um, to name two.

And that's growing and like, wow. Uh, so we're shipping a product that wasn't full. Automation wasn't, you click a button, you get a building and it uses all of the great math and solids, uh, stuff that we've built and the rest of our rest of our configurator business and we're just putting it in there. Um, and so that was a, a major kind of data point, at least in my own understanding of the market.

Like, hey. Thoughtful manual tools are still, uh, in high demand. Um, and so back to your analogy about the, uh, you know, walking into a carpenter shop, like they've got 7,000, or you walk any kind of wood shop, there's so many tools you don't really know. And there's ideally, you know, at UT when we had a wood shop, there was a guy there, John, uh, and you'd ask him, you know, how do I use a lathe or whatever, and he'd walk over, he'd be like, don't kill yourself, please.

And then he'd, you know, show you how to use it. Um, and then there's 75 other tools, you know, um, you know, same thing with, you know, I think with, with like Rhino and, and Revit and Grasshopper, and Dynamo and AutoCAD and Arc, GIS and Bluebeam, uh, and Procore Construction Cloud, Autodesk Construction Cloud, these are all tools that are used to get from.

You know, point A to point B, to point C to point D.

Evan Troxel: Don't forget Outlook and

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Well, I mean, then there's the, like, the even more important stuff is communication, coordination and like I was a young guy building, you know, TestFit the first time you met me. You know, I don't even, it might not have been tested at the time and like I didn't understand that there's vast complexity, um, just in the amount of communication happening, you know, from, you got, uh, 14, I, I have this diagram.

It's got, you know, 14 people and, uh, you know, uh, real estate owner of a piece of land doesn't necessarily know how to get the most, uh, sale for that land. So the higher broker and a broker doesn't quite know exactly how to find the highest and best use for that land,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Clifton Harness: so that they can charge the most for the land.

So they'll call their, their development buddies. And the development buddies, well, they'll have a pretty good idea, but if you want to get them at a hundred percent of what they need, they gotta go call an architect to design, you know, a spatial diagram to back up this highest and best use. And sometimes that spatial diagram, the architects might require, you know, structural engineering or, uh, interior design effort to really bolster the quality of the design.

And you roll that stuff up to the developer, okay, he is got a site plan, he is got kind of what he knows what it needs to be, and he's, but he still has no idea what the price is. He doesn't know what it's gonna cost. So you gotta go call a, a GC to figure out what the cost is. Now GCs, they do a lot of deals, so the general idea of what the cost is, but again, if they want to get a hundred percent on the nose about what the cost of this building is, they might require a GMP set.

They might require so much information. That you're not really able to get there. Um, and if you are there, then they need to call subs to get updated to the minute information on what the pricing is.

Evan Troxel: And this is all based off a design that is absolutely gonna change, right?

Clifton Harness: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The design is in flight,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: uh, and, you know, so, so you're spinning, you know, all these wheels, uh, or, you know, plates are spinning in the air. And, uh, you know, architect right now, you know, said one of my other only plans posts was about like, I never want to be an architect. I wanna be a master builder.

Like I want, I want to understand why I can't have steel and why everything needs to be built outta wood. Um, and I don't want to take your word for it because I don't trust you. Um,

Evan Troxel: There, there's another root issue right there.

Clifton Harness: yeah, there's, there's like, you know. Opaque, it's all opaque because, you know, everybody's profit margin is under attack and it's being, you know, preserved. Um, I don't have a problem with that. Uh, but if the groan knot of the bullshit I just explained is ever going to be cut, like, I think it's gonna come from the contracts.

I do not think it will be software driven. Um, I think software could be a catalyst to drive business, uh, model transformation. Uh, you know, like Cove, uh, Patrick and Sandy, like they did sas. Okay. I think they were moderately successful in, in doing exactly what they were trying to do. Um, and then

Evan Troxel: Probably the most publicly successful, at least that I've seen in that space for

Clifton Harness: yes. Yeah. Like, you know, but, but shit like, because of the whole circumstance I just described. Like, you're not gonna get the owner and the investor and the equity to invest in, you know, the, the right green stack for right now. 'cause they're worried about interest rate, risk and, you know, keeping their, their house in order.

Um, you know, so they go into AI and, you know, holy shit. Like, some of the stuff they generated with AI was like, you know, zoning reports and stuff. Like, it was really the first time I saw like AI driven services and I'm like, okay, like maybe that's another, you know, business model for, for an architecture firm at least.

Maybe you could go attack it.

Evan Troxel: Which is

Clifton Harness: Uh,

Evan Troxel: talking about doing. Right? Like an

Clifton Harness: right. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: Yes. Yeah. And like, that's why it's so interesting to me is like, wow, okay, so they might go, you know, attack the contracts. Like, that's my read is like, like if, if they're gonna go get an AI driven architecture firm and, and make it AI driven. Then I think the contract's the first thing to fall because like, hey, uh, we're AI driven firm here.

We're not gonna do design bid build. Like, you might want us to do that because that's what you're comfortable with. But it, it, it doesn't create a culture of, of wealth creation and architecture. Uh, the current contracts don't. So, uh, invariably I end up at culture, like what is the culture of architecture?

Like, what is the culture of architecture need to be? And what we have currently is not, uh, not something that is scalable and that Gen Z is gonna be delighted to go jump in in, into that. Um, and so you're competing against the AI generation in a way for the labor that you need to go do the buildings that you want to do.

Uh, and it's, you know, culture I think is a major problem.

It's

Clifton Harness: Um,

Evan Troxel: Right. Like that, I think that's

Clifton Harness: yeah.

Evan Troxel: read on what you're talking about, like just this successful, like the, the monetizable future of architecture is just this constant whittling down instead of up and out, right, up and

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: this trajectory, this

Clifton Harness: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: it's currently stuck in.

Clifton Harness: I'll, I'll give a parallel. Um, I've sold a lot of software to owners and real estate developers. Um, they're the reason why I think we've continued to have the fighting power that we do. Probably the reason why I can say a lot of things that I say is that, um, the vast majority of our revenue is not dependent upon architecture alone.

Like it's

Evan Troxel: you can prod

Clifton Harness: prod.

Evan Troxel: because,

Clifton Harness: Yeah. I'll be the, I'll be the resident lab person.

Evan Troxel: on it. Yeah. Okay.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Well, I'm not dependent, but I'm hopelessly in love with it. So it's, it's like, how do you.

Evan Troxel: It's like a critique. That's the point of a critique,

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Point of the critique.

Evan Troxel: stroke your own ego. I like the real point of a critique is not is, is to actually

Clifton Harness: Oh,

Evan Troxel: out the flaws in to ho because you want it to be better. Like that's

Clifton Harness: yes.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. All right. So the, the parallel, you know, go to go to architecture, you know, go to architecture au conference, uh, very little new innovation announced sadness.

Evan Troxel: Did you just call it architecture au conference?

Clifton Harness: Well, I'm just, uh, architecture conference typically is like au for me. Um,

Evan Troxel: Okay. That's where your, that's where that audience is. Okay.

Clifton Harness: yeah, if the a i a ever wants me to come talk, I'd be happy to. Um, but, you know, I don't, they'll have to invite me. I don't, I don't, I'm not gonna pay for that speaking slot. Um,

Evan Troxel: I think they even changed their rules this year. Like even people who did get chosen to speak actually still have to pay to get, to actually go to the conference.

Clifton Harness: it, all right. All right. If you tell me, if you tell me. You gimme a microphone in, in 15 minutes, I'll pay for, uh, I'll pay for my ticket.

Evan Troxel: right.

Clifton Harness: Um, yeah.

Evan Troxel: a i a leadership, let's do it. Make it happen.

Clifton Harness: Uh, but you go, you go to real estate development conference and like the disparity on like, there's so much hope and I, I've got these deals going and I think they're gonna hit and like they are invested in the future. So they have this, this mentality of like, the future is always, you know, gonna be bigger and better.

Um, and I do think it's this act of them having skin in the game on these deals. Um, and that if one of them hits, you know, it, it turns into a real deal. They can get the debt equity, you can grow it. Um, their drive is insane to go get that building built. Um, and I don't know, in architecture it's like. What, what's the drive?

Well, I got this commission, you know, I, I got this, uh, you know, won this project or, you know, finally get to design. You know, like it is just harder for me to see a scalable culture of plenty. Um, and it is just remarkably different, like going from one, you know, one conference to the other. And, it makes me feel, God, am I gonna do a feeling, you know, I'm gonna do a feeling on a podcast.

Evan Troxel: in the, you're in the psychiatrist's office right now. You're laying on the couch. You are. You're gonna talk about your feelings.

Clifton Harness: it makes me very, very angry. I think. Um, I, I mean, I'm not saying that developers are, are, uh, limited in, in like their understanding of the world, but, um, they didn't have to go figure out. The complexity of all of the, you know, innards that go into this building, they, they figure out the financial complexity.

But I, you know, I feel like if 10% of architects wanted to go learn finance and kind of understand that game and respect it, respect being the operative word, you have to respect finance in order to win and finance. Um, but then you would like go back to the architecture industry and they'd be like, why are you trying to go make money?

Or like, this isn't about the money, it's about the buildings. You know,

Evan Troxel: right, right, right.

Clifton Harness: so, so it's like.

Evan Troxel: that's an interesting mentality. Right? And, and what you're talking about is kind of this idea of it being a game to me. Right. And, and finance and real estate, like they're playing a game and people know how to play the game. Like that's how they win the game. And architecture is not a game. It's a what, what is it? What's the right word? Like, it's just escaping me. But it's like, it's like this loyalty. And it's not, it's very different than the game that you're talking about.

Clifton Harness: Yeah, possibly it's, I don't know, maybe it just starts in, in studio, you know? And

Evan Troxel: Absolutely. Starts in studio.

Clifton Harness: you know, like nothing's good enough, so you have to keep trying to make it better. And one of the core tenets of development is like, when it is good enough, you need to stop. You need to, you know, let the building get executed by the construction team.

Um, I don't know, like that's maybe there. It, it is two different mindsets. Um,

Evan Troxel: you're, you're a CEO of a software company and like a mantra of softwares work smarter, not harder. And how does that land in a profession where all we know how to do is work harder? Like that's all that, that's what

Clifton Harness: ooh.

Evan Troxel: What do you mean? Like we're up for the challenge, of course.

Clifton Harness: All right. So, so if you work harder, you build more hours, great. How about decoupling billing by the hour, like Bill by

Evan Troxel: talks about that, but

Clifton Harness: Value created?

Evan Troxel: Who's doing it?

Clifton Harness: Yeah. All right, so, um, let's get back to BIM for a second. Um, so I wrote a post, it's called BIM poster syndrome or BIM Posture, however you wanna say it.

Evan Troxel: I, I, I don't, I don't see a poster on the wall when I, I hear it. When you say BIM posture, yeah.

Clifton Harness: Right. So it, it is just, it's just me like, Hey, uh, culture of AEC. Let's, let's check our assumptions for a second, uh, about, um, you know, 25 years old this month. Um, it's a very old software now. Um, its trajectory into AEC was absolutely incredible. Like, I, I've got another blog post in writing trying to understand.

Revit's initial feature set, its initial go to market effort. Um, and they killed it. Like they absolutely killed it. Um, and, and I, I, I did another research about like, when did, uh, parametrics enter AutoCAD 2006? So, so AutoCAD had very limited parametric support, uh, until, uh, you know, 2006 and the, the graphical parametrics, not the, uh, li routines that you could write.

So, so you either, you know, before Revit came in order to to do parametrics, um, you had to like write your own code out of Lisp. Um, and, you know, you can still get on the, on the internet and find lisp routines that can do entire, uh, you know, kitchen layouts. It's pretty incredible, uh, the kind of stuff you can find.

Um, that's all just procedural stuff. Um, but they, they built this parametric interface for families that made, you know, doors and, uh, windows really actionable in a way that, you know, CAD block, you know, CAD blocks were not. Um, and then the parametric propagation engine, um, coordinating plans with elevations.

So like you'd move that door and then everything would update. Um, that's got incredible product market fit. Like there's no one out there that wants to, I mean, I've done thousands of elevations in CAD and not, you know, you're manually coordinating plan and it's annoying as hell. Um, and so, you know, okay, so we, we built,

Evan Troxel: back in the day.

Clifton Harness: yes, xfs, I mean, there's, there's so much you can do with XFS that, um, man, they're.

They're an amazing, you know, technology, but it's just like, it's a lookup table, right? So you have 38 xfs pulling in. Okay. It's just a lookup table of information that that exists elsewhere. Um, and then there's one other thing that Revit did really, really well. Well, two things that I'll say. Uh, collaborative editing.

So you could check out part of the model, even in 2000, um, while somebody else checked out a different part of the model, and then you could sync it and update. Um, and then work sets, sorry, that was work sets, uh, phasing. So like you're, remember, AutoCAD got maybe one base drawing and then you've got seven X refs, one's for existing conditions, one's for demo, one's for, you know, architecture, phase one, architecture, phase two, whatever it might be.

But this was like built into the same model. So, you know, if I dragged a wall, uh, in one, you know. A time it would update in a different time. Uh, okay. Mind blown. Right. And if you want to achieve that in AutoCAD, it's a bunch of xfs and a lot of, you know, attention to how you're managing your

Evan Troxel: think

Clifton Harness: xfs

Evan Troxel: design options too. I'll just throw that out there. Right.

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Design options. Yep.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Clifton Harness: Yep. Uh, so, so they, yeah, they, they killed the product market fit. Um, it was monthly only. So they're counter positioning to the annualized software payments or perpetual licensing. So the business model, I think is, is very important when you bring a new technology to market is it has to have a very different monetization strategy.

Um, that's something I didn't understand I think until maybe the last couple years at TestFit is how we go to market, uh, with the sort of business model, uh, as important as the technology itself. Uh, so they had all the right things happening at the right time. Um, now in order to get the amortization, uh, or the, the payback of building all of the parametric propagation engine, uh, past the basic buildings that it was able to do in the early two thousands, um, meant, uh, that it needed a very big go-to market effort.

And so what we see from Autodesk is them amortizing their investment in Bim, uh, over the last 25 years. Uh, so I, you know, I don't know how, how much it costs to build the, the engine, the Revit engine, but, um, hopefully they're making money on it by now. And if they're not, I, you know, I, I'd be worried. Um, so is the path forward for us to go build a parametric propagation engine?

Like, it was kind of me sitting there like, oh, okay, is it, you know, very quickly I found myself falling into the trap of, well, what if I just build an existing technology that somebody else has and that's how I'm gonna compete i's like the biggest mistake because you don't have the, the business model figured out.

You don't have how you're going to win in the long run, figured out. And worse, you're aiming your sights not for the stars, but for something that is very similar, uh, to what, what already exists out there. you know, it leads me to this next conclusion that's like

perhaps CAD had really good market fit. Um. And then you're like, well, CAD's just drawing. So then it's like perhaps drawing literally has really good market fit and, and the challenge is to reduce the amount of friction to getting drawing done.

Evan Troxel: like you're asking the five why's kind of a thing and you just keep going back, back, back. Right.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. And you keep noodling, noodling, going all the way in to what if, what if, what if? Um, and I will say like the Figma for bims I think are really interesting, um, for me to look at because it's, you know, a technology for a technology. So hopelessly, I don't know how you do your go-to market effort with selling a technology to people when they wanna be sold a story.

Um, but some of the sort of product market fit that I can see from that, which to me is people are using it and paying. Hundreds of thousand dollars for it or something. Um, you see products like, um, perhaps you could sell chairs or, or desks or, you know, sort of the product catalog, the ff and e product catalog idea.

So Revit has the, you know, the doors, the walls, all the stuff that the vendors can plug in. Well, perhaps this Figma for BIM idea is that we let the people that make the FFF and e sort of start to sell their wares, um, in this interface that, you know, we're, we're controlling. That's really interesting to me because it, it starts to solve like this ff and e problem, um, which sourcing good stuff and putting it in plan is, is basically the complexity that they, it's, it's a hard problem to get solved because it's gotta be a cohesive vision.

Um. But it's an interior design approach, right? Like, you know, what do I know about that we're, you know, we do site planning. Um, and that I ha I think has a lot of, you know, potential growth. Um, looking at the interior design, you know, how do you solve for existing space really well? Um, so it's not that I'm against Figma for bim, like what I would be more for is, you know, data rich interior design tool.

Just say that's what you are. Um, and then you can build your story on top of that, um, your go to market effort on top of that and build a corporation similar to TestFit, getting lots of recurring revenue. Um, that's what I hope for out of my competitors is that they stop building a technology and they start focusing on like one problem and focus on it really well for five years.

And you own it like. There are now copycats trying to create TestFit because we've owned housing so effectively for so long.

Evan Troxel: Hmm

Clifton Harness: Um, and you know, there's 7,000 markets that you could go attack in AEC. That was a lot. Any questions from that?

Evan Troxel: me, it makes me think of this conversation I recently had with John Cerrone at Shop Architects, and they talked about this idea of really having, I, I wrote a newsletter about,

Clifton Harness: He's awesome. I love John, by the way.

Evan Troxel: amazing.

Clifton Harness: Yep,

Evan Troxel: the newsletter really focused on this idea. Or one of the things I focused on, I did a follow up post on it, on, on my website, is about this idea of a lightweight like model of, it's basically just, it is design intent that everything gets hosted to, and

Clifton Harness: yep,

Evan Troxel: this idea because it allows you to stay flexible for as long as possible. Knowing whether or not you're breaking things

Clifton Harness: yep.

Evan Troxel: Right. And so to me, like when, when people say Figma for bim, you're talking like the audience that you're, you're saying that to doesn't know what that means. I mean, I might know that Figma allows multiple collaboration a file. That's all I may know about it.

All I know is it's like Illustrator and that's why Adobe bought it. But it's Illustrator on the web. Right? And so, okay. But the real truth about Figma is that it has all these smart constraints built into it. Like people wireframe apps in there. And you

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: pretty legitly build an app Figma, right? All this functionality, all these different screens, functioning buttons that look good.

But the important part is like. You're linking this to that, like it's this idea of smart constraints, the way things are flexible and the layout changes and does all like, it's it that's bim, right? And so

Clifton Harness: It is a, it is a,

Evan Troxel: to

Clifton Harness: it is a configurator.

Evan Troxel: you're saying the wrong word to the, to the, to the audience because they, they never used that tool to do

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Right. And so a younger generation may know what that means, but, but the older generations who make the decisions about what to buy for my firm, they don't know what that means at all.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. I, all right. So Figma, I mean, not that architects need to be designing, I don't know, graphical interfaces. Um, it's like when I use it for TestFit work, it's like we have a, a GUI that need, you know, you can see our graphical interface and we have a Figma file that's, you know, here, here's our gui. Um, or here's what we want our GUI to look like more of the time.

Um, and it's, uh, auto layout tools are, are really incredible. Um, and it's a parametric configurator that, that runs all the buttons, you know, button placement. And yeah, I would say like Figma is like a 2D bim. Maybe if you really wanted to build, you know, a BIM model in Figma, maybe you could, but it's, it can only do 2D.

Um, and it's, it's user experience and its story, uh, and its go-to market effort, like absolutely killed it, um, in their story. So they have all story, like you have to go in and see their story about how they were able to go build this thing. Uh, they didn't have any meaningful customers for a long time.

They just built and built and built and built until they felt like they had something that had market fit. Um, I think cad, like 2D cad is likely good enough for most buildings. Uh, and I'm, I'm saying by volume, not by. You know, I'm not saying it's good enough for 10% of your K through 12 deals. That's not what I'm saying.

Um, I'm saying there's commodity markets where, you know, you don't need to have a fully coordinated BIM and you can go make a lot of profit margin, uh, just by having really well coordinated drawings that are thoughtful. Um, and to the point on the market penetration of bim, like, it, it, it, I don't, it's not at, uh, well it might be at 50%,

Evan Troxel: I was gonna

Clifton Harness: but,

Evan Troxel: say, that was my guess. Yeah.

Clifton Harness: but if you look at that 50%, only 10% of it is, or you know, call it 20% of the 50%.

So 10% overall, uh, is deals that are 100% building information, modeling soup to nuts, nuts to soup. Um, you know, so. Okay. Noodling even further, like what are, what are the kinds of buildings leveraging, you know, bim to its entirety? Um, it's billion dollar, you know, it's the, it's the, it is the most complicated buildings that we have.

Um, and I'm okay with that. Like, holy crap, like, yeah, uh, you gotta go do a billion dollar hospital that has 78 different services. Good luck doing that in cad. You should go do that in something else. Um, but if it's a, you know, 500,000 square foot warehouse and my structures set is three sheets and my mechanical page is one page, um, it's like when you, okay, we're gonna use BIM on this.

I'm, I'm bringing a, a bazooka to like, like a banana fight or something. Um, it's very. Like he doesn't need it, so why are we gonna use it? Um, and my co-founder is a brilliant software engineer and like, one of our goals is to use the least amount of code to get the most amount of impact. And what it does, it keeps our overhead as small as possible, uh, as an operating business.

So if you say we are going to invest in bim, uh, you're gonna maybe build a template for every possible thing that you could possibly do, when in reality you, you might not even need most of that template. Um, and then there's like a whole cottage industry of people that are better at making templates than you.

Uh, so like you could just go rely on them. But instead now we're gonna have, you know, we're gonna hire a BIM manager and we're gonna have a standards committee, and we're gonna do. You know, we're gonna, we're gonna have all of this additional complexity to control the outcomes. Um, and I'm not like against that, but I'm just saying let's check our assumptions here.

Like, is all of that extra effort actually worth it? Uh, when you're just doing simple buildings that you have a great profit margin already in cad. Um, you know, if, if you know your floor to floor heights are gonna be like 11 foot the entire time you're doing a building, how much BIM do you need? I don't know.

Um, if you have very few, uh, services, how much BIM do you really need? I don't know. I build automation tools for, you know, site planning. Uh, but um, the coordination of services even seems to be an overblown problem. Um, because there are subcontractors that are highly. Skilled have vast intellect more than me on how the means and methods, uh, need to be executed.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Clifton Harness: And now we have to train them up on a new software system. So they're switching costs there. I mean, this is why people want to be a one software person because there is like a, yeah, there's like switching costs. There's very real human switching costs associated with learning anything new. And it's like, Hey, I need you to speak Greek.

Uh, you're good at speaking English, but now I need you to speak Greek. Uh, you know, we have a whole customer success. We have four people full-time at Testament, their customer success, and they're needed to help kind of lower the friction to firms changing, uh, their upfront behavior to, to be something different.

Uh, so there's no, there's no problem with change. Like, yes, change behavior. Uh, but if BIM doesn't actually achieve better profit margins for you as a firm, I don't see the point in it. Um, and I, I have a feeling that there's a lot of firms that, especially in the housing world, that are not gonna switch to BIM maybe ever.

Um, they have proprietary designs that were fleshed out in the nineties that are still being used today. Um, and they print money doing that. Um, you know, maybe my prayer is that, uh, some firms hear this and like, okay, well we just need to not fluctuate all of our decision making all the time on design be really solid and not change these decisions in this case so that we can execute faster.

Um, and that's again, the communication issue that run you run into is like, we need to communicate at a higher level what our goals are in all these buildings.

I mean, I could probably just keep talking for too long about all this.

Evan Troxel: I, it's, this is a, it is kind of fascinating to like really think about all this stuff and think about the whys. Uh, because I think, you know, when you think about the overall, in the US at least, what's the number? It's like 80% of firms in the US are quote unquote small firms. Less than 10 people, probably less

Clifton Harness: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: And

Clifton Harness: that's the long tail.

Evan Troxel: and they're not changing. Like they're, why would they, what, what's the incentive, right? It's, uh, you talk about switching costs like that, that might be the reason they say, but it's way bigger than that. I mean, it's, it's their identity. It's, it's, it's so many things. It's expense. Like they are running at the bare metal, right?

A lot of times. And they are living project to project and maybe, maybe they're living project to project and they have 25 projects going on at the same time. There's a lot of, there's robbing Peter to pay Paul kind of situations

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: these small firms because the margins are so slim and. It's, uh, it's, and they're not hanging out on LinkedIn all day long, reading about

Clifton Harness: Yep.

Evan Troxel: have my feed of high-end firms doing high-end things and all the latest tech and what's the latest ai, this, and they, Nope, not at all.

Like bare, barely even check to see if somebody sent 'em a message. Right.

Clifton Harness: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: they're

Clifton Harness: mean the, the.

Evan Troxel: with that, that marketing all the time. I mean, it's, it's marketing on the behalf of the users. Right. It's, it not even necessarily the people who create the software who are doing that marketing.

Right. They're, they're hearing it from peers and colleagues in the industry.

Clifton Harness: Yeah, I mean it's, uh, it kind reminds me of like, uh, that movie Mean Girls where there's the really popular girl and she's got the three other girls that won't let anybody else say she's not that popular. Um, you know, you feed the industry or the BI managers, you build them up marketing wise to be, you know, the best use of a firm's resources.

Um, then, you know, I, I don't know, like maybe here's what happens is like the BIM leadership is completely separated from firm leadership. It needs to be the same. If it's not the same thing, what are we doing like. Our technology needs to be like the first thing that the firm leaders are understanding and embracing and growing.

Um, and, you know, for the small firms like this is why chatbots are, are maybe, you know, if I, if I'm chaos or you know, rendering company, um, maybe a little worried 'cause like, you know, 10 person firm, okay, I've got 30 minutes to sketch out this idea for this client. Um, I can sketch it out, trace paper even.

And you know, if it's the scale, um, and you just put it through a filter on a, on a chat bot, hey, make, make this look like,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: you know, architecture, um, you know, all of a sudden you didn't have to go grab the intern to go make a rendering. Uh, it's been, I don't know, like. I did Photoshop renderings when I worked in an architecture firm, and I billed like 40 hours for some of those.

Um, that $400 that I made from that is probably never gonna be made by an intern again. Um, so, you know, even that's like a different, it's completely different rendering. Um, I don't think that rendering in a firm has a moat anymore. Like it, I don't, there's so many different filters and so many different things you can do with it.

And you see people sharing AI rendering on, uh, social media a lot. Um, and it is getting so much better every single time. They, they update their, their models. Um, you know, so then that, that quote from, um, Lord of the Rings, the two towers comes into my head is like, what can man do against such reckless hate, like.

Like it, like what, you know, how are we going to save, like, I don't like if they're successful in, in validating copyrights, architecture, professional services firms that had a copyright and they used it to create value, which isn't very many of them, but some of them did. Um, that might be invalidate. And then even what the software generates, you know, if you generate a TestFit site plan and you don't touch it, who owns that copyright?

Like, I don't want to own it. Uh, I'd like for my customers to own it, you know?

Evan Troxel: I don't want that risk. I don't want that liability.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. Like, so, so like. I mean, I can foresee a future where like we just have to like fire up a prompt at our users and be like, Hey, please manually adjust anything on this site plan so that you own this. Um,

Evan Troxel: Totally.

Clifton Harness: you know, like our, the a i a's goals right now are like housing equity, like all the stuff that maybe it should be their goals, but like maybe the top goals should be like figuring out how to compete with AI.

And, you know, if you don't change the contracts, I've worked with some of these developers, they don't respect architecture enough to care. Um, they'll go ask a chat bot to do it, do it all, and then they'll hire some firm in, you know, the Philippines that promises CDs. Um, you know, your relationship to your architect is, is very different, you know, maybe two or three years from now.

Um.

Evan Troxel: it, is it that, that they just see it as well? I mean architecture, if you think about it, right? Like the production of plans is a wasteful process, right? It does. It's not the final thing. Right. And so is that where that's coming from or is it more of like, um, like it's just this. Red tape that I, I don't want to deal with if I don't have to kind of a thing, or maybe it's both.

Clifton Harness: Um

Evan Troxel: I mean, I would argue it's

Clifton Harness: The,

Evan Troxel: a necessary waste

Clifton Harness: there's,

Evan Troxel: get to that outcome.

Clifton Harness: I,

Evan Troxel: get to that outcome without it. So I'm not just saying it's just like a hundred percent pure waste. Right. But at the, the same idea is like,

Clifton Harness: yeah, I'm, I'm gonna answer it a different way. Like, like the, the contracts say you get like 40% of your money from CDs, which are, which are risk adjusted drawings. Okay. And then you, you get like 30% from dds, you know, maybe 30 per. Is it 20%? I can't remember, um, the specific numbers, but like 70% of your value as an architect is in making drawings and like, so those are contract documents, so it's, they have legal weight associated with them.

Um, so I, I think I get very worried when it's like, yeah, we're just gonna generate with ai, you know, contract documents. That's nuts. Uh, they, they hallucinate, like I, I, I did a bunch of, uh, tests last year. I made a bunch of random software. I did some vibe coding, I guess, uh, with,

Evan Troxel: kitchen generator, your ca cabinet layout thing?

Clifton Harness: yeah, like all of it was, you know, maybe 20 little MVPs to get to that where, where it was something meaningful.

Um, it was a very stupid, uh, coder relative to the guys I work with. Uh, but the scary thing is like I was able to get something workable. Um, you know, I think I'm just more worried that like someone younger than me with a bigger cr you know, bigger, um, grudge to, to grind on the industry. Like just can you go embrace AI completely And like I might kill some people, you know, like, uh, 'cause it's contract documents.

Um,

but you know, small firms like how like if, if the chat bots are able to generate CDs, which maybe two year, three years from now they can, like small firm with three guys. Yeah. They're going to leverage to the hilt every automation tool they can. Um. Um,

Evan Troxel: Or a real estate developer, right? Like I, I would,

Clifton Harness: yeah, or they'll just hire an architect and, you know, in-house, Hey, I'll pay you, you need to stamp these drawings, you know, we'll take out a professional liability insurance. Um, you know, people will be smart about it, I think. But, uh, I think the real risk I'm trying to raise is like the a i a or you know, the architecture industry already fought for that stamp.

Like maybe it's time to fight for, for more protection. Um, you know, 'cause you're not gonna have much of a industry if, you know, copyright dies. If the ai, you know, LLMs specifically and test, it's a different technology than LLMs, it's procedural generation. We, we write all the automation code ourselves. Um.

We, we also have to like, get customer feedback from people. Like, Hey, this is how you could improve this. In the chat bots, you know, you'll generate an image and you'll say, okay, I need you to change this, this, and this because of this, this, and this. And like, in the act of telling it that because, um, you're giving more information into the LLM that you know it can then compete with you.

Um, so never have the free version. Always have the paid version where they can't have your data.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Clifton Harness: Uh, but if you're a small firm and you don't care, uh, you're in inadvertently training, you know, uh, the chat bot on how to get better at your job, um, simply because you're telling it, here's what it needs to be.

Uh, and that was, that was one of the things that freaked me out when I was. Building the kitchen generators that it got more intelligent after what I was trying to do because I, you know, it's all in one big, uh,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: And, um,

you know, you could probably even go back, uh, 'cause I, I think I built it with 3.5 and, you know, hey, 4.5, try to do all this again. Um, and I'm sure it'd be sharper, better, cleaner. Um, the rendered layouts maybe would look better, but all that improvement isn't coming from my session with the ai. It's everybody else pouring their hopes, loves, and dreams into the machine.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: And that's the big risk architecture is that it will slowly, maybe it's three or 4% today, but it'll slowly erode for a very long time.

Evan Troxel: What do you think the chances are of like, okay, so, so if you look at the numbers of like autonomous cars, like Waymo's and you know, what, what, whatever's rolling around taxis and stuff, and like the number of accidents versus human drivers and like, it's way smaller, right? The number's way, way, way, way smaller. I mean, there's definitely still this kind of moral argument happening and stuff. Um, for sure. But, with, with this kind of thing, you know, if you go back to your, your about what the a i a fought for, I mean, I remember hearing somebody on the board of NCARB say, well, it's a good thing, you know, architects have to stamp drawings that are of a certain size scale, you know, type whatever. And it's like, well, well, what if that doesn't exist? Like if you ask an accountant or a dentist, or if, if they could do a house without an architect versus with an architect, which one would they choose? Right. Would, because I think a lot of times for them it's like they're giving up control of whatever to an architect.

Right? They see it that way and architects are like, yeah, we

Clifton Harness: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: right? Um, we're, this is what we're trained for. But I think a lot of 'em would choose not to, right? Because it's red tape. Just because it's red tape. And so like applying the analogy of the, the. The driverless automobile, you know, the autonomous driving to architecture.

What if the AI and there's insurance involved and there's all these things, and they say, yep. Like, we're willing to accept the risk that it's right because it's, it's faster. Most of the time it's cheaper. My subscription is cheaper. I don't have to wait, I don't have to do all these things that are involved with the typical architectural process. We're willing to accept the trade off and therefore, you know, maybe you have an architect trained AI that stamps your drawings so that you, then it ties back into that insurance policy and just say,

Clifton Harness: Man.

Evan Troxel: here we

Clifton Harness: Yeah. I mean,

Evan Troxel: look at the numbers.

Clifton Harness: mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: let's just look at the numbers. We're willing to try it out in these controlled conditions for this amount of time.

And then we say, yep, that's totally acceptable Now.

Clifton Harness: I, uh, all right. There's gotta be some lawsuits or something, but I think the, I mean, here's, here's the most eloquent, uh, way I could defend architecture. Uh, you all are technically enabled storytellers and you efforts are to know 10% of what everybody is doing, uh, about your building. So, you know, you gotta, you know, I need to know at 10,000 feet what mechanical, electrical, plumbing, what they're doing, what structurals doing.

You know, maybe structure is, is closer to 50 'cause it's 40% of the cost of the deal. So you need to really be on, on, on top of structure, um, and defending that, that you are the ch the storyteller in chief. And there isn't a single deal, uh, in the real estate world that is done without some meaningful story.

Um, you know, this is a housing complex, you know, near, uh, these, uh, schools. Um, and we're able to get, you know, slightly more density because we're near, you know, a, a bus stop or a train stop or something. There's some meaningful story for every deal.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Clifton Harness: if you, as the architect, can't thread that needle amongst all of the consultants.

Uh, then I think chatbots like, deserve to take your job.

Yeah. And like, like too many of them think that their value is the drawings, the, the drawings. What you get paid for the value is, is building the story and keeping, you know, keeping everybody rowing in the right direction. Action. Um, you know, another thing I'll say is like, maybe the promise of AI is that that 10% grow grows to 20% and, and you, you might have more empathy for what, um, some consultants trying to bring to the table.

Um, and you might get that empathy even faster. Uh, and so maybe a story on that is, you know, I was kind of shocked when you get into practice where there's a landscape architect, there's an architect, there's a, a master planner, there's um, the housing architect, there's the office architect. And so you're like dealing with seven or eight designers, um, trying to weigh in on a master plan.

You know, that was crazy to me. I'm like, how is there, why don't we just have, let's just pick one of these people to be the one that has the master vision. And you kind of do, but then you gotta wait three weeks for, you know, all of the visions to come in and you gotta recoordinate. Um, and I think having, uh, LLMs maybe in the room, taking notes or something so you can try to understand what a person, like why a person did something before asking them, what the hell is this?

You know? Um, and that, that is the role of the architect is, is managing at scale personalities. And you know, the goal is the building and you gotta use all these people to get there. Um. And I, I, I think I just like, you know, architects, they, they like to own their business development relationship and they look at TestFit and they're like, I'm not letting you compete with me directly.

It's like you get paid on all the drawings, later you get paid. Like why do you care about like, spending all of your opportunity cost on, you know, yourself? Uh, 'cause smaller firms are not gonna do that. They're just gonna have, you know, render the, the sketch. Um, so yeah, like I, I think just reframing like your value is the vision.

You get paid by the drawings and like, I don't, like, it would be better if those two things were in much better alignment. Um, but they're not.

Evan Troxel: Right.

That's where it gets back to that conversation with John Cerrone because of this idea of this super lightweight. Thing that things are hosted to, like the, because the, you, you're spending your time the big, big ideas happen and the other stuff just falls into place. I mean, I don't know how perfectly it works, right?

But that's, that's been their goal for a long time is like really lightweight, flexible, because we want to, we want to iterate, we want to explore, we wanna do all these things. And we have the confidence that things that, that these assemblies work, that the numbers are penciling out, that we're achieving all these other goals all at the same time while keeping that really flexible going on because they realize that that's where the value is.

Right. And the

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Automate a way, like he said, he said like, like, we run away from abstraction. Right. Even though like they're, they're really dealing with this super abstract, lightweight model. Like they're not trying to come up with ways to represent, they're trying to go direct to fabrication.

That's what they're trying to do. Right. But what, but not having to model it LOD 3 50, 400, whatever it is that, that a fabricator requires. Right. So I think that's, that's super interesting, right? Because it actually does really talk about where they see their value in that process,

Clifton Harness: I think it's, they've figured out how to save intent. Um, so yeah, saving intent and keeping it, making it, it persists as a designer might be one of the most annoying things. 'cause you had an intent to do X and then, and then something changed. Um.

Evan Troxel: Because you get judged on the outcome. You don't get judged on the intent.

Clifton Harness: Yeah, yeah. You don't, but the intent, the intent kind of drives that larger than life outcome. You know, like, you know, you could hire a bad architect and he'll, he'll do, he'll make a building worth a hundred dollars. Like you hire a good architect to make a building that same exact thing worth 1 20, 1 30.

Um, and it's totally about intent management. And here's another plug for, for only plans is my, my white paper, which is sort of, um, you know, I really start on April Fool's Day 'cause he expects Clifton to have a white paper. But, um, it's, it's more about saving intent, uh, is I think the next stage for bim.

Um, and let's give a very specific example. And my kitchen cabinet configurator. I, I wanted to save the intent that the dishwasher would always be to the, you know, bottom right hand side of the, uh, of the sink. Um, that's, I don't know, a fairly consistently good design for where you put your dishwasher, um, and like

Evan Troxel: practices, right.

Clifton Harness: best practice maybe.

And, and so, you know, embedded into the logic of every single one of those permutations of the cabinet generator is like, you cannot break this rule. This rule must not be broken. Um, and it, it's just like an example of saving intent into, um, into a lookup table actually. Um, so that way I can call that same logic again.

At any dimension for any kitchen in the future and know exactly, you know, where a 24 inch wide dishwasher's supposed to be. Um, and then you can sort of start to build the logic of, of how you would save intent. Uh, for, for other things, like if I have, say my intent is single family residential and I, I want, uh, to make sure that closets have sliding doors or bi, you know, bi-fold doors or something, I could just save that into like a door schedule.

That's the intent for Clifton harnesses way of designing a single family home. Uh, and when I mash those two rooms together, the door pops in, you know, maybe at the midpoint, so I don't have to go figure out what door goes between closet and bedroom. Like it's just known.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: Um. And that maybe is, is, uh, there's two different ways to model.

I think there's, there's the tectonic way, um, which is what everybody builds, which is we draw a wall, draw a wall, draw a wall, draw a wall, place the door. Uh, I don't want this door. Delete the door, go find some other family door, put the door in. And there you have, you know, a room with the door. Um, there's, you know, you're adding elements to it to make the, the final, you know, kind of design, um, TestFit for its part works very differently.

It's, it's sort of stereotonic, like it shits out everything that's possibly possible. I shouldn't say shits out. Um, it generates everything, you know, that's possibly possible. Uh, and then it's up to you to delete elements that, uh, or edit elements that, uh, shouldn't really be there. It's very stereo atomic.

It's like removing as, as opposed to adding. Um, and we have so much data in these BIM models and like, in my mind, like, okay, well that data should be your intent and you should be able to apply that intent on any future model that you make. Um, and I don't think we've seen that leap, uh, from, you know, tectonic BIM to Stereotonic BIM yet.

And that, that might be like, where I think the future is, is like, we're gonna take these 300 BIM models you already made, and here's the decisions that you make between these two rooms on average. Here's the decisions that you make. Uh. On these facade orientations and what their, you know, facade orientation, adjusted for latitude.

Here's what you do, um, in this situation.

Evan Troxel: I think

Clifton Harness: Um,

Evan Troxel: see that, but you wouldn't necessarily know why. You wouldn't know the story behind it. And it seems to me like this kind of thing needs to, to do, achieve what you're talking about. It kind of needs to know why it needs to watch you do it and

Clifton Harness: yep.

Evan Troxel: it while you're doing it,

Clifton Harness: Well,

Evan Troxel: an art

Clifton Harness: you, you need to explain it to the people that work for you. And like, here's why, like, the best guys I worked for were ma absolute masters. Um, this guy Paige, he could look at, uh, survey at one to 100, pull out a flare tip pin and, and, and do the whole building in two minutes, uh, at every scale.

Like he would, he, he would even be worried about like, you know. Uh, how the, the windows on the bedrooms would, would need to be pointing in a slightly different direction for the best kind of view. And, you know, he'd look at the survey for four minutes before jumping in and, um, but hi, his intent moved so fast, uh, because of his 20 years of doing it that you, like, you could not keep up

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Clifton Harness: a, as a, you know, so invariably he's going to get your, you take a sketch, you go make it, you know, machine precision and cad, and then bring it back.

And, okay, here's, here's 17 mistakes you made. Uh, please learn. You know, do do what I, uh, do what I mean, not what I'm saying. You know, sort of, sort of the reaction, uh, to some of the feedback. And like what he meant was for, for, for me to really understand his intent. Um, and that same thing needs to, like, if we want to, for, if your firm wants to build an ai, you know, and actually make it valuable, you gotta teach it intent.

You gotta teach it why you're doing what you're doing.

Evan Troxel: and my, I think,

Clifton Harness: I,

Evan Troxel: I think that's an art form. It's like going back to this idea of going into a wood shop. It's like there's people who can make stuff. That is not the same person usually who can explain how to do it while they're doing it. Right.

Clifton Harness: yeah.

Evan Troxel: totally separate skill. And I like architecture does have a mentorship problem,

Clifton Harness: Yes.

Evan Troxel: whole idea of knowledge sharing and knowledge capture is, is a serious problem for the, especially when you get to kind of the idea of implementation, like what you're talking about, of like, how do we make the next generation of tool that understands intent

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: based on my 20 years, 25 years of experience doing architecture, because I've never explicitly trained anything to do that.

And if I have had to have a mentee at some point, like it was touch and go, like it was, it wasn't in there. There was no intention behind sharing my intent.

Clifton Harness: Yep. Yes, exactly. So there's design intent that needs to be captured. Um, you know, so I, I don't know, like I, I'm just dreaming of like a BIM environment where, um, it just is learning from what you do and it, it stores graphs, you know, ba based off of

Evan Troxel: It looks

Clifton Harness: what you, what you did. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: And, and, um, it's hard to figure out. How to build a drawing tool for people that are really good at drawing. Uh, and I think if you can bring that logic or, all right, so I grabbed a bunch of, uh, slack, uh, messages, um, on our channels to try to see like what our, what our major problems are and just paste it into the chat bot, Hey, what are our major problems here?

Um, it sort list here's, you know, here's a bunch of problems that I see. Um, I didn't have to call a meeting and ask 10 people for sort of what

Evan Troxel: Their

Clifton Harness: problem.

Evan Troxel: told you. Yeah.

Clifton Harness: Yeah. So, so like a, like the valuable AI tools I think are the ones that just sort of slot in where, where you are and, um, so whatever it is, whatever drawing tool.

We'll be this intent-based drawing tool. Um, it has to just slot right in and it has to, to immediately start to try to help. Um, and that's really hard to do. Like, oh, we're gonna do RCDs in this thing that we've never heard of before. Okay. Uh, no, you know, like, I, you know, it, it's hard to, to, to the high switching costs, you know, and Autodesk for their part, they're one of the most impressive capitalists corporations ever seen.

They've got, uh, ecosystem lock in from everyone in AEC. They've got high switching costs to anything outside of their system. Um, they have not completely burned, uh, bridges on pricing. I think they might be getting a little bit close. Um, you know, like the escalating software costs. Um. You know, it's like people po post, like, oh, we're gonna go, you know, compete with Revit.

And I'm like, no, you're not. You can't. It's like, it, it's moat is so, so, so wide and the, it's, the depth is really, really deep. So don't try to compete with it. Try to try to moonshot for the thing that happens after it. Um, you know, that's maybe my goal with, with, with writing is, you know, I had this very specific vision that like, I didn't think we should be drawing a bunch of parking lots and a bunch of, um, you know, opportunity cost stuff and, and feasibility and, you know, stayed true to that vision for seven years.

And it is bearing fruit like lots of fruit. Uh. In, in an industry where it's really hard for, for fruit to be born, you know, and it's like, I didn't think, hey, let's make a faster drawing tool. It's like, no, let's just go make the site plan, you know? Um, I don't think that what disrupts Revit though is the same DNA, like, I think it's different.

Um, yeah. I mean, I, I, we never, like, I never, uh, never raised money to go compete with them or anything, so, you know, like not, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm sitting on a fence here. Um, you know, maybe begging for the industry to ask me to jump in or something. Um, but it, you need to do it slowly and, you know, with in intellectual rigor, which you know.

Hard to get me to sit still and think for a long time. So,

Evan Troxel: I heard this term this morning, Clifton, a squirrel on a double espresso.

Clifton Harness: yeah. Yep. Exactly that.

Evan Troxel: Oh, man. Thank, thanks. It's been a, a good conversation and I, I agree with your final words there. I feel like it's like inspiring. Yes. Will it, will it spark action is the question and, and, um, I hope it does. I, I honestly hope it does.

Clifton Harness: I mean, I, I think, I think if y'all are foolish enough to, as an industry to keep letting us go, um,

Evan Troxel: What do you

Clifton Harness: I mean it,

Evan Troxel: What do you mean by that?

Clifton Harness: well, I mean, people keep buying our software. They keep liking our content. They keep helping us. Well, you know, 'cause, 'cause you're gonna have a madman trying to. Build, you know, even more tech like you're gonna have to deal with this for a long time, and.

Evan Troxel: That's what architecture is though. It's a bunch of crazy people, right? Uh, so, so maybe there's room for one more in the asylum. You know, I definitely think there is, and I think we should think about it that way too. It's like this, I think one of the, of the reasons that there has been staying power is because of like what this industry, what this industry actually stands for.

Um, and I think we forget about it all the time. I think we, but, but we keep going back. Like I, I'll go to the Monterey Design Conference in California. It's every two years and it's like this homecoming of what we got into doing, why we became architects. And it's, it's purely about the design and the outcomes and the beauty and the experience and the feeling and the story.

Like it's, it's about that. And that, that to me actually is the core of the, of this industry. The people, the core of the people of this industry. and for some, somehow we haven't maybe lost that, but I think we're distracted about it all the time. All the time.

Clifton Harness: Yeah, I would say

the heart of architecture. Uh, actually I did another blog post, some, it's, I call it the spirit of architecture. It's, um, you know, I'm from like a very well do background, like I didn't. Want for anything growing up. And then I'm in my first summer internship, you know, outta college and, um, was able to, you know, say what I was doing that week in front of the whole firm.

And, you know, I'm like, oh, I get to go on a vacation to The Bahamas on Friday. And everybody was really happy, excited for me. And, um, my mentor, you know, intern mentor took me aside and goes,

I think you need to understand that there are people that have been working here for 20 years that cannot afford to go on any kind of vacation, much less to The Bahamas. And it crushed me. I was like, you know, white Anglo-Saxon male. That I am. Okay. Um, and then I kept having observations like this because, you know, I come from real estate development family, and

there's another guy, uh, who I think it was a church. He had, you know, we were working on a church and the pastor couldn't, he couldn't really afford, you know, what, what we were trying to do. And he spent, uh, every night for two weeks, like basically pro bono, making sure that, you know, this church would get, get its day in court for design.

Um, it wouldn't paid anything he desperately wanted for the building to, you know, to serve the people that you know that it was for. And. It so humbling. Like I, I think about that all the time. Um, I don't know. And then I just get really angry 'cause it's like blood, sweat, and tears goes into these buildings and we can't even ask for a better contract.

What are we doing?

Evan Troxel: Existential

Clifton Harness: Sorry, I got emotional there.

Evan Troxel: more so more, more existential now than it, than it has been. And there's always been kind of an existential threat, I think at least a perceived one. And now I, it like really feels like it. Um, yeah. And what,

Clifton Harness: AI for sure.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Clifton Harness: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Well, only plans is the name of the blog where you can get more of this kind of thinking.

And I feel like it's, uh, it's needed. I appreciate you doing that and you didn't have to do that. I think it's a little bit of a, I mean, I didn't see it coming and when you did it, it's like, of course Clifton's doing this. Right. So I, I appreciate you actually being real with the industry in, in that way.

And, uh, and it has garnered some, I think, constructive. Maybe not all the time, but back and forth when you do that, when you post those posts. And, and so I, it's critical to get people thinking about this stuff, so

Clifton Harness: Yeah, can't just be me screaming into a box.

Evan Troxel: Right.

All right. Let's wrap this one up. One of the key themes from this conversation that really stood out to me was that professionals have to challenge industry norms to thrive because I believe that the AEC industry at many levels is broken and stagnant and blindly following tradition is pushing professionals towards irrelevance and obsolescence.

Let's break it down with five key takeaways around this topic from mine and Clifton's Conversation number one, the existing system is outdated and inflexible. Clifton points out that despite advancements in automation and technology like TestFit, the entrenched contract structures and business models of AEC have not evolved No amount of automation can fundamentally change the broken owner architect relationship without rethinking the contracts that govern them. Clifton said, there's no amount of incredibly well made automation software that will change the owner architect relationship without fixing the contracts. That is a brutal truth about the systemic barriers that tech alone can't solve.

Number two, staying in the box means diminishing value. Architects and designers are often trapped in roles that make them seem like commodities rather than valued creators. the profession has become disconnected from actual outcomes that matter to clients, like cost and timelines and flexibility.

Challenging norms is essential to reestablish relevance and value.

Number three, culture must change to attract and retain talent. Clifton talks about how the outdated culture of architecture working harder, not smarter, won't attract Gen Z or the AI generation without change. The profession risks a massive talent drain. He said architecture isn't scalable in its current culture.

Gen Z isn't going to jump into this broken system warning that without cultural change, the profession will lose the next generation of talent. Number four, current tools and processes are misaligned with reality. Clifton shares how forcing BIM onto every project, even when it's not necessary, is like bringing a bazooka to a banana Fight.

Professionals must rethink tools and methods to match the actual needs of projects, not clinging to the industry mandated defaults.

Number five, real estate developers lead by innovating, not by conforming. There's a stark contrast between the energy and future thinking seen at real estate development conferences versus the architectural ones. Developers invest in new ideas because they have direct skin in the game. Architects by clinging to old processes and slow innovation cycles risk fading away. Clifton said that developers are invested in the future. Architects are still waiting for commissions. This illustrates a stark contrast in mindset, proactive versus reactive. In conclusion, AEC professionals must challenge the norms because the norms themselves are outdated, ineffective and harmful to both individual success and the industry's future viability. But you already knew that. So what are you gonna do about it? Tell me what you think by clicking the feedback link in the show notes or leave a comment on YouTube for this episode. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.

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Matthew Krissel joins the podcast to talk about his extensive 25-year journey in the architectural field including his history at KieranTimberlake and now at Perkins&Will, his new design leadership course at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture in which his students design new business models for architectural practice, integrating Artificial Intelligence in architectural education, creative friction, group dynamics, the power of questions, the role of safe spaces for creativity, the impact of organizational structure on creativity, reimagining digital practice in architecture, the importance of presentation skills, encouraging entrepreneurship in architectural education, reimagining workflows with AI, and the impact of AI on architectural education and practice.

Episode links:* Matthew Krissel on LinkedIn * Matthew on Instagram * Built Environment Futures Council (BEFC) website * Creative Lab 3 website * Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture website * Perkins&Will website * KieranTimberlake website * The Practice by Seth Godin (Amazon) * The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (Amazon) * Do the Work by Steven Pressfield (Amazon) * Start With Why by Simon Sinek (Amazon) * The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek (Amazon) * Building Practice by Molly Hunker and Kyle Miller (Amazon) * Range by David Epstein (Amazon) * Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull (Amazon) * Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick (Amazon) * Good to Great by Jim Collins (Amazon) * Filterworl by Kyle Chayka (Amazon) * Refabricating Architecture by Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake (Amazon) * The Smartest Person in the Room by Christian Espinosa (Amazon) * John Cleese on Creativity in Management (YouTube) * TRXL 063: ‘The Thicc Middle’, with Daniel Davis * TRXL 105: ‘Pick Your Niche’, with Ian Janicki

About Matthew Krissel:Matthew is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and has led the design and construction of transformative architectural projects in North America and Internationally for over two decades. He is a principal at Perkins&Will, a global, interdisciplinary architecture and design firm.

In 2023, Matthew co-founded the Built Environment Futures Council (BEFC), a diverse, multidisciplinary group that advances design, technology, and Artificial Intelligence in Architecture and Construction with actionable leadership and insight. He also founded and directs Creative Lab 3, an innovative research and design platform focusing on architecture, writing, and photography to catalyze and shape ideas and research that inspire change and transform our collective future.

He regularly shares his work, methods, and ideas, speaking and publishing nationally and internationally on architecture, design, and the intersection of technology and the built environment. As an adjunct faculty member at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture, he is invested in developing the next generation of design leaders.

Before joining Perkins&Will, Matthew was a Partner at KieranTimberlake in Philadelphia. His design work over nearly 20 years at KT helped shape the firm’s most significant and impactful projects, including iconic, institution-defining architecture and small homes with big ideas.

Notable completed projects include the award-winning Paulson Center at New York University, Scaife Hall at Carnegie Mellon University, the U.S. Embassy in London, and Cellophane House™, which was featured at the Museum of Modern Art.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

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Episode 169 Transcript: *169: ‘Shaping an Innovation Culture’, with Matthew Krissel*

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode I welcome Matthew Krissel. Matt is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a Principal at Perkins&Will which is a global interdisciplinary architecture and design firm. Of course, you already knew that. In 2023, Matthew co-founded the Built Environment, Futures Council, a diverse multidisciplinary group that advances design, technology, and artificial intelligence in architecture and construction with actionable leadership and insight. He also founded and directs Creative Lab 3, an innovative research and design platform, focusing on architecture, writing, and photography to catalyze and shape ideas and research that inspires change to transform our collective future. Before joining Perkins&Will, Matthew was a partner at KieranTimberlake in Philadelphia. And his [00:01:00] design work over nearly 20 years at KT helped shape the firm's most significant and impactful projects, including iconic institution defining architecture and small homes with big ideas. He regularly shares his work methods and ideas speaking and publishing nationally and internationally on architecture, design, and the intersection of technology and the built environment. As an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture, he is invested in developing the next generation of design leaders.

Today, we talk about his extensive 25 year journey in the architectural field, including his history at KieranTimberlake and now at Perkins&Will. His new design leadership course at Carnegie Mellon in which his students design new business models for architectural practice, integrating AI in architectural education, creative friction group dynamics, the power of questions, the role of safe spaces for creativity, the impact of organizational structure on creativity, re-imagining digital practice in architecture, [00:02:00] the importance of presentation skills, encouraging entrepreneurship and architectural education, re-imagining workflows with AI, and the impact of AI on architectural education and practice.

As always, I would appreciate your help in giving this podcast a boost in the vast media landscape by subscribing, wherever you listen.

And if you'd like to receive an email, when new episodes are published with all of the links and other information from the episodes as they come out, sign up at trxl.co.

This was a great conversation with Matt and I hope you'll not only find value in it for yourself, but that you'll help add value to the profession by sharing it with your network.

And now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Matthew Krissel

Evan Troxel: Matthew Krissel welcome to the podcast. Great to have you. Finally,

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. Thank you, Evan. Great, great to be here. I know we [00:03:00] bumped into each other at the convention

and it was one of those moments where I've been a long time listener of the podcast and, uh, you just kind of came alive in front of me and we had a chance to chat, uh, in person. It was wonderful to get to finally talk to you and, uh, chat a little bit about some of the things on your mind and what you're up to.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And, and, and before you make this about me, I want to make it about you. So the, the idea of, of this podcast is really around, or that the topic is really around this course that you're teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in the School of Architecture, which I think is in the Department of Fine Arts.

Is that what it is?

Matthew Krissel: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Okay. and you have a lot of other things going on in your life as well. So. Before we get to that topic, maybe you can just give us a bit of let's just call it recent past, your history here, your trajectory of, of what you've been working on. I mean, I think we've probably known of each other for a decade or something, maybe even longer, but online only until we, until we saw each [00:04:00] other in DC at the AIA conference.

But give everybody

who's listening an idea of, of who you are and what you've been up to. Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: So I have been in practice for a little over 25 years.

My story began in architecture, really, at the University of Buffalo, where I went for college. Uh, four year degree program. I moved to New York City, 1997. Incredible time to be in New York. Incredible time. The economy was booming. Uh, I joined Skidmore, Wings of Merrill. I jumped on a bus with two duffel bags, moved to New York City, didn't know anybody, threw myself into the work.

I was there for about a year and a half and then transitioned to Cone, Pettersen, Fox. I was there for about four years and then the opportunity to go to graduate school presented itself. I applied to the University of Pennsylvania and began there and moved to Philadelphia at the end of 2002 and was there from really in the program from 03 to 05.

And that was that incredible time, Evan. You know, just remember that period of that transition [00:05:00] from, so when I was in college, we were hand drawing still.

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Matthew Krissel: I moved to New York. I've got to learn AutoCAD. I transitioned to ComparisonFox. They're using MicroStation. Halfway through my time there, they retrained the entire office to AutoCAD.

And then I go to Penn and it's all, you know, the emergence of Rhino and 3DS Max and Maya and all these other tools. You know, before Autodesk kind of bought all these things, things like EcoTAC,

these like, These, like, abstract, these odd programs on the periphery, these fundamental drawing and modeling programs.

And so early on, I was getting this sense of how you kind of start over that, that importance of being data nimble and kind of tool agnostic, as I describe it, that there's, you know, the ecosystem of architecture is going to be one that's always dynamic and always changing. And so Penn, you know, was transitioning from kind of a traditional pedagogy to this incredibly digital forward in that period of 03 05 that I was there.

[00:06:00] While I was there, I got introduced to some folks at KieranTimberlake practice here in Philadelphia. And I started working there as a summer intern, and I had, you know, in New York, I was working as skyscrapers all over the world, and I joined this incredible practice that was just really starting to take off in terms of some notoriety, some wonderful projects.

But what was fantastic was they had just published the book, Refabricating Architecture. And what I found when I got there as both a summer intern and then I joined full time in 2005 when I graduated from Penn was that they were a place invested in, uh, at the leadership level all the way throughout the culture, this idea of fostering exploratory behavior.

And so it was a little bit of reading that book and seeing it come to life in the sense of, uh, integration of research, of computation, tools, technology, and the value of looking outside of architecture. So. Through the book, it looks at the shipbuilding industry, the carbon, how can we look at other people to see [00:07:00] how might we think differently about fabrication is one way or the way we draw, but we organize ourselves.

So that's hard to plant another seed. So one is starting to become more nimble. Two is starting to look around outside architecture. And so when I show up there coming out of Penn, I was one of the few people who could model and render at the speed of design, as I like to describe it. I could actually change the workflows and how we were working and thinking, not just as a production tool, but as a design tool.

And so there's this wonderful, opportunity and confluence of starting to see what it means to integrate technology and research into every design project, uh, throughout. Um, and of course, James and Steve, the founders, James Timberlake, Steve Caron, the founders, recognized my propensity for an interest in technology and computation and research.

I was involved in the research group. I was involved in all the competitions. I was at the kind of forefront of a lot of Really interesting, speculative, sometimes proactive work that was going on in the practice. [00:08:00] And so that was the first key thing within my kind of 20 years that I was at CUNY Timberlake, was that first, that kind of leadership investment, and that shapes and drives the culture, of course, of that interest in kind of exploratory behavior in integrating research and technology through everything we do.

The second big milestone as I kind of reflect on my time there and how much that's shaped my point of view was in 2008, they hired Billy Faircloth to be the research director. And she came in and just completely, so I was part of the research group. It was a little bit of a wild west. We were jumping on all kinds of interesting things.

It was, um, extremely exciting and fun and a dynamic place to be. She came in and just brought a clear vision, intentionality, new energy, and focus, and accountability to a way that research could shape practice in a fundamentally different way than, you know, And

Evan Troxel: Right.

Matthew Krissel: this concept of [00:09:00] transdisciplinary design and started to set a course of how to hire and aggregate talent with all these different backgrounds to create a core group of people that then, as she and I began to work together on things, we'd start to figure out ways to deploy all these different skill sets on different teams.

So whether it's computational backgrounds, ecology backgrounds, creative writing backgrounds, and you're putting them into design teams that normally would just be full of architects, and then you'd have your kind of, you know, usual kind of consultant collaborations. So that was the kind of a second key thing as, as Billy came.

And so we really reorganized the fundamental trajectory of what it means to be, you know, a research integrated practice where there weren't that many models and architecture, really, it's more common now, but at the time, it was certainly at the forefront. And how much that changed and started to create a different sense of agency.

Uh, in practice and what you could do and what you could accomplish and then really again focusing in on how you [00:10:00] think of the way we organize ourselves as an active design, you know, to do great work, we have to design the relationship to each other. as much as we design the things around us. So that was the second kind of pivotal thing that really started to shape a point of view and an interest in, uh, this thinking of organization and the people we surround ourselves with and how critical it is to have that kind of diversity and multi dimensional, uh, thinking.

The third one was this opportunity that was presented to me, um, so coming out of the Great Recession, firms starting to build up, as I mentioned when we when I started there. 2005 was about 30 people. Uh, at its peak, it got up to about 130 people. When I left in April of 23, it was around 100 people.

So at this time, coming out of the Great Recession, we're starting to build up.

We won the U. S. Embassy competition that I was working on, and work was starting to come in. We're building the firm back up, and James Timberlake pulled me aside and challenged me to kind of re imagine digital design at KT. What might this be? [00:11:00] You know, they'd always been at the forefront of this. Uh, through the, you know, the challenges of the economy and everyone trying to keep the firm together and running, you start to, you know, those kind of initiatives can drift and the investments in those can start to drift.

And here we had a chance to refocus, re, reinvest, really reimagine. And he gave me complete flexibility to come up with something, see what he can come up with. And. So I set it back and this is one of those first chances I had, you know, chance to kind of rethink an entire structure of a firm and what were some of my observations, what might we do differently?

And one of the observations there's, you know, this A lot of people like to write things down, create plans, strategic plans. And so the way I've phrased it back was how about instead of a plan, we just build a platform. We need something that's less about writing things down that you can never keep up to date.

We need to just start putting people in conversations with each other. If we want to move ideas effectively, through an organization, we've got to be [00:12:00] faster, more fluid, uh, more organic discourse. And so I pitched this idea of we had a research group, communications group, and architectural teams, uh, about creating a new digital design platform.

Involve these kind of three key components, which was the visioning group, which brought together people from communications, graphic designers, architects, different, um, diversity of age and experience and research group members. There were times where to have strategic conversations once a month, there were times I'd bring in a summer intern, you know, who's there for a couple of months, have a strategic conversation, anything you could grab onto to get a different.

Perspective, different idea, pulse of what's going on outside the organization as much as what people are seeing inside.

So I had a chance to start to set up these kind of monthly strategic conversations. And then the second tier of that was we established these unique task teams. And one thing we learned was you really need to be.

Um, for digital design, you have to be addressing day to day needs. There's so many day to [00:13:00] day needs in an organization.

Um, but at the same time, you also have to be thinking far out into the future. You can't just be so focused in on putting out fires all the time.

So we created this range of taskings that eventually consolidated over time.

But in the beginning, there were so many conversations that people wanted to have. And on the far end of the spectrum, Billy and I co created this group we call Near Future Practices. And this set up a, a bi weekly conversation where again, all the different disciplines firm would come together and have a conversation about what you're seeing out in the industry.

What are you seeing outside of the industry? Um, what are some of the great ideas you're seeing in projects that are just getting crushed into the, The, the weight of deadlines and, and all that kind of, um, you know, value engineering exercises, a space to pull things out of project based exploration and get into another space that could have a different timeline to it.

We can nurture it differently. We could talk about it differently. And because the firm had always built [00:14:00] in a way for some proactive work, we had an opportunity to then actually engage and develop out ideas, just at least to get a little further. And it's amazing how many things spun out of that. Um, that the firm was involved in and just how that then feedback feeds back into the firm and practice throughout different projects.

The third component of that was, again, to get the entire firm conversation going. This was creating more robust knowledge communities, which, again, sounds really common now. But back in 2012, 2013, just wasn't happening as much. And this was monthly conversations. The whole office got together at one o'clock on Fridays, everybody.

And again, if the leaders show up

the room and engage in discourse and conversation, and it gave a chance to really create a forum of really robust design discourse and debates and, um, Demonstrate tools and workflows, demonstrate something on a project. We started a group. I'm going to refine that into themes, but basically all those parts working together began to redefine just how [00:15:00] ideas and knowledge flowed through the practice.

And so that was a, um, those are kind of three things. And when I really think about those 20 years that I was at Cure in Timberlake, were pretty crucial to starting to set up this, this mindset, um, and this way to kind of work and operate. So in April of 23, I decided to leave. Karen Timberlake. And I was, uh, made a partner in the firm in 2015, and I've been working on remarkable projects.

I was getting involved in all these initiatives from digital design to the research group to hiring, um, and leadership opportunities on various projects. But I found, and I know you've talked about this too at times, it's a little bit of this kind of restlessness starts to settle in. And, uh, as amazing as it was, and I'd reached the pinnacle of the profession in many ways,

it was also

I was getting very comfortable.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: And it's, uh, it's one of those things.

Evan Troxel: I'm thinking of this whole idea of like, it's an [00:16:00] interesting struggle to, your whole life as an architect, being an architect. Comfortable with being uncomfortable. And then you get to a point where you're comfortable and you're like, Whoa, like, and a lot of people stay there, right?

Like, be honest, right? Like a lot of

Matthew Krissel: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: at that point in your career, it's like, you've earned it. And

then on some level you kind of feel like that. And then there's, there's people like yourself who are, you're, you're thinking like, I kind of don't like being that comfortable and you have this, this discomfort with comfortability all of a sudden.

you want to, you want to kind of flip that over again.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. And to go back to, you know, where I began with all this constant change through my career, whether it was tools or just cultures or different elements, I, and just in my normal, non architecture life, all my hobbies and other interests. I enjoy new things, starting things over, building something from scratch.

And so here is getting a little restless, feeling a little comfortable. I know that to do great work, you kind of have to be [00:17:00] uncomfortable. It helps if you're really trying to stretch yourself, being uncomfortable is a wonderful way to do it as, as difficult as that can be. Um, so I wondered, was I losing a little bit of an edge?

Was things getting a little too easy?

and so I started, I just started an open conversation with my partners and, uh, they were in full support. I decided to, to depart. My projects were in a great place. The firm was in a great place and I just needed a, a change really. And so I stepped away and I honestly had no specific plans.

Evan Troxel: mm

Matthew Krissel: fortunate to be in a financial position that my wife and I and my family could take some time and, you know, consider my options

and really just step back and reflect. And so I stepped away in April of 23 and there are a couple of things that I did. So one I, I started to just re engage with so many people that I'd lost touch with, and you know, when you're in the AAC community long enough, you forget [00:18:00] how many relationships and just people you've met, people you've worked with over the years, whether it's really intense on a project and you haven't talked to them in a long time, or old friends from New York that I worked So I started to reconnect with people, talk to people who started their own practice, listen to their origin stories, see how they were doing it.

Randy Deutsch and I co founded a Futures Council, the Built Environment Futures Council. So I had this idea about, um. Everything that started to bubble up in 22 and 23 about artificial intelligence, it was very academic and there was no one really talking about what it means in practice. my natural inclination at my point in my career is when I see something, I just want to get some people together and let's talk about it and see if we can make it better.

Can we take a crack at it? Can we do something? Can we engage somehow? So my instinct is to build a group. And so we, uh, in this period of where I, where I, after I left KT, uh, Randy and I started [00:19:00] a conversation about building this national, diverse, transdisciplinary group of design and construction leaders.

And it was specific about this conversation around artificial intelligence, uh, bring our leadership, bring our insight, um, and make it specific to, to, you know, issues in practice. And because we had so many relationships, we were able to get Uh, landscape architects, people in robotics, people in software, authors, uh, people in construction, fabrication, um, and architects at all different scales of companies and organizations.

And we met once a month for a year and just started to continue. We did two hour workshops and just got a conversation going and we would connect us. What have you seen? What have you heard? What are you working on? And we took the approach within that. It was kind of a ground up infiltration into practice about, uh, synthesizing all these conversations.

So, so I step away. I've got the flexibility and freedom of time. I'm having [00:20:00] conversations. I start this futures council. That's great. The other thing it is. 1 of the folks I called was Omar Khan at, uh, Carnegie Mellon. And this is where this kind of feeds into this course. He and I met back, he was at the University of Buffalo before.

I'd given a talk up there. He'd run these wonderful ceramic workshops with Boston Valley, bringing outside partners in with the school. I have a really nice relationship. And so one of the things I did was I pitched a few ideas and it gets back to this opportunity I had that as I was reflecting on, you know, what I've accomplished, where I've been, the kind of work I've done.

There's a chance to say, you know, I've got a lot to give back.

And in this moment of pause and reflection, I could figure out a way to get back to, you know, teaching and

really sharing, sharing what I've, what I've learned and what I've,

Evan Troxel: was that instigated by you or was that prompted by him? Or how, how did, how did, uh, who, who, who knocked first

Matthew Krissel: uh, I called him, uh, he had seen the news that I had left and was curious as to what I was [00:21:00] up to and I said, Hey, you know, I'm in Philadelphia, Carnegie Mellon's in Pittsburgh. It's about 5 hours away. I've got family there. I did a project there and I know the campus very well that had just finished up as I departed.

And so I said, Hey, look, you know, I'm interested. I've got a couple of ideas. Can we have a conversation? I want to see if this gets any traction. And so I pitched this idea of this course, this idea of creating cultures of innovation and design leadership and agency. And with the. content that it was this conversation around something that was not trying to, well, within the professional practice realm, which has so many things they have to do for their accreditation and topic areas, there was a whole bunch of reality of practice that just doesn't fit into those boxes you have to tick that a typical professional practice course has to land.

So I pitched it as this idea of a seminar, uh, something that would bring [00:22:00] unique guest speakers and find sources of, of, uh, reading and listening, um, and really kind of reposition. a conversation about putting people intentionally at intersections, putting people at crossroads to look outside architecture for inspirational models of working.

And so I kind of loosely pitched this idea. He said, gosh, that sounds great. Why don't you work on it, build something up? How would you do it? So this is, you know, spring of, of, of 23, wasn't, wouldn't have time to do it by the fall. So I had till the spring of 24 semester to develop this out. And so I spent some time with him to develop these ideas and concepts out, which we'll, we'll get into a little bit more.

So in that year, I start to build this class. I am reflecting and having all these conversations. I decide to launch my own practice. I had a couple of opportunities bubbling up. So I launch. I practiced, which was called Creative Lab 3, and I got a couple of projects out of the [00:23:00] gate, doing some concept designs, doing some work, institutional work, some residential work, um, got this wonderful, uh, master plan at a museum to work on.

I started to, I brought, uh, a person on to work with me, and after about a year, things were going pretty well, I was actually at a point where I needed to start to grow. And had to really start to, again, I was at a crossroads of, okay, you know, right now I'm bankrolling everything out of my savings and,

uh, and anything that came in, just reinvesting it into the practice.

And it was at this point of, okay, if I'm going to grow, that's a whole nother kind of financial investment, intellectual investment. Well, I'm in this kind of crossroads and opportunity bubbled up and this was a conversation that started with the folks at Perkins&Will. So I had a conversation with the managing director from the New York office, um, about this opportunity to, they had, uh, uh, just the beginnings of a filled office studio.

And, you know, would I be [00:24:00] interested in doing what I'm doing now, which is building a practice from scratch, going and getting work, hiring people, building a culture of design and innovation? Would I do it with them instead? And, At first, I wasn't quite sure. I had already invested so much and started my own practice.

As I started to really think through, um, you know, if it was 10 years ago, maybe I'd have the energy for doing, continue to do everything myself. And when you're running your own practice, the chance to, um, really, um, a mature practice and infrastructure, the opportunity to be entrepreneurial, still build something in Philly, shape culture, design, talent, clients who we're going to work with within this incredible global interdisciplinary firm.

It became something it was almost too good to pass up. And so

as I'm having conversations now, I've never, you know, I haven't, I hired hundreds of people, but I haven't interviewed for a job in 20 [00:25:00] years. I'm in a totally different position. It's a principal level position. It's so it's just a very different process that I was kind of learning on the fly.

So you're having a lot of lunches, dinners, and you're meeting, just having conversations, you know, is this a good fit? And so some of my criteria of, okay, they do outstanding work. Do aspirational work, check. The other big one is at this position in my life, I just want to work with great people.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: you know, I need to be surrounded by outstanding talent and people.

And so the folks in New York I was meeting, and then the woman, my counterpart here in Philadelphia, principal of the firm, her name's Laura Morris, super talented, smart. Uh, met with her and had a really frank conversation about what, what the opportunity really was. What does it mean to build a new studio within this, you know, a place of 32 studios around the world.

And we had a great conversation and, um, Again, just became an opportunity is too good, too good to pass up. So I had to make the difficult decision to wind my practice down over the [00:26:00] summer, uh, begin to phase in at Perkins&Will. I said, I'm just kind of getting started. Um, so a lot of business development, a couple of projects I've been able to jump on.

Um, but that's where I am right now in October, 2024. I'm at the frontier of this new chapter with this incredible practice that I'm still getting to know and learn. Um, and the opportunity to really kind of build up the talent and growth and aspirations to reach for something, this capacity for positive impact that I just couldn't do building a practice from scratch on my own, you know, boarding this kind of rocket ship that's already in motion and the infrastructure and talent already in place,

um, it allows me to kind of pair and sync up with where I'm at and what the opportunities really are for, for impact.

Evan Troxel: Your career potential is what you make of it, right? Like, this is one of those things where it just kind of illustrates that it's like, what can [00:27:00] you do for your country kind of thing, right? Ask

your country can do for you. Like, what, it's like, what, what can architecture do for you? Or

what can you do for architecture?

And it seems to me, like, if you have the motivation and the will, like, there's so many ways that you can do it. Make an impact in architecture, right? And I think we'll, we'll talk more about your course and what you're trying to do with that, but it really seems like is a great example of that. And, and I imagine that this also makes for some great storytelling, uh, with your students that you have in the course, right?

Because you've, you've lived this. I imagine that there's, there's a lot of great information that becomes part of this, this course that you're teaching at Carnegie Mellon. Mm

Matthew Krissel: yeah, the idea that I, you know, joined a practice that had this incredible robust idea that I was a big part of shaping the culture over 20 years, to then going out on my own and having to build something from scratch and all the facets that entails, and then now [00:28:00] joining a place with a chance to build something from scratch, but now with a whole different set of infrastructure.

It's almost every possible way you can imagine. Different ways to begin, um, and, and develop over time. And

Yeah.

it's an incredible opportunity, great moment, and I'm excited to share it and develop it into this, this course.

Evan Troxel: It's interesting to think of you teaching this course that is really about the All of these outside influences and looking for maybe new ways to operate, new ways, different ways to build teams. And, and you're, you're doing that in a larger construct now at Perkins&Will, which is a stat, like how old is Perkins&Will, right?

It's

old, right,

Matthew Krissel: in 1935. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: right, right. So 90 years

almost. Right. and, and, um, It's, it's interesting to think about, and I've been through something similar, the firm that I was at was probably close to 85 years old now. Um, And, and developing something in, and it's not like every, nobody in the firm has been around that [00:29:00] long, right?

It's, it's obviously, but they've been there a long time and there's behaviors, there's,

there's just ways of working

that are embedded and so hard to break free of.

You do have a little bit of a different scenario there where you're in a new location for them, right? You're in,

where you are, you know your, you know your, area probably better than they do in some senses, and in other ways they have so much expertise in these different market segments, and you're trying to kind of merge something. Pulling all of these things together again, though, in a really established place and, and innovating in an existing environment is not easy, right? Like, I've been through that. It's, it's really difficult. Um, I, I'm just curious to kind of, obviously they're open to that. And so maybe before we get to your course, I mean, if you have some words around building intrapreneurial ship, right?

Like doing something inside of a firm. versus doing something outside of a firm where you are [00:30:00] starting your own practice and you have a complete carte blanche, right, to go off and do whatever you want. I'm just curious, like, what your experience or advice you could give people about doing that kind of a thing inside of an existing organization and how it might be different than starting fresh.

Matthew Krissel: can just say, you know, when I interviewed, that's part of what I pitched,

you know, there's plenty of people, 20 plus years of experience who just needs, you know, somewhat competent to go get some work and run a technically sound studio. But if you want somebody who's interested and you've seen my background, like.

Project experience and the kind of things that I've done, the other spaces that have been involved in. There are a few other things I didn't quite mention in that quick overview, but, um, if you want all that, you know, within this, this framework, um, then let's talk because that that's interesting to me.

And in fact, the challenge of. Um, merging those two spaces when you have a very mature practice, there's a lot of momentum there that [00:31:00] sometimes can be an uphill battle to untangle. Um, but if you have people that are actually open and receptive, you can then wire that energy in the right direction and just kind of reoriented to a different trajectory.

So, the key thing for me was, uh, so, uh, associated with the New York studio and New York studio leadership. And then I got to meet people throughout the corporation. But those early conversations were all around, uh, there's fresh leadership. Throughout the organization, um, there is a desire for fresh ideas, for what it means when you bring new people into a place, uh, to intentionally agitate, to stir a little bit of a different direction, and, um, you know, what I was bringing was mutually beneficial.

I was bringing, you know, a totally different perspective and a way of working and a way of thinking. I'm still just getting started. So we'll see. I haven't hit a lot of resistance and roadblocks. Actually, what I found is if you have really great ideas and you've demonstrated it, you've got a track record for it.

People are open to it. [00:32:00] Um, at least as, as where we are now, um, it's, it's, it's. It's been well received and exciting for, for the kinds of folks that have been able to meet. But it is different. It's a place that is, you know, very, uh, market sector and practice based. I'm a generalist. And so, one of the ways I framed it was, you know, we've got all these folks in the Northeast.

Well, Philly can be this generalist practice that then actually fits in as a great collaborator with all the other studios by virtue of being a, you know. organized around horizontal thinking and less about kind of the vertical thinking to compliment that we don't need to duplicate and start competing with all the other studios in the Northeast by trying to build up these, you know, highly specific, uh, market segment areas.

But I've got experience across a lot of these spaces and therefore it works really well to combine those. So that's part of the big picture strategy we're starting to map out. And now it's about how to actually execute that. And then, you know, the goal and purpose of this is to do better work by

That kind of, [00:33:00] uh, alternative organization, you know, the non status quo

version of practice is ultimately to do better projects, the create a better process.

Uh, the clients like it better. It's more enjoyable. The build team likes it better. It's more successful. The, the execution, the ideas, the innovation,

the whole purpose of all that intellectual diversity

is to actually ultimately create a better outcome for people.

Evan Troxel: Well, let's talk about this course that you've got. Um, the, the idea behind it. I, I want you to introduce it. Um,

but, but the, the name of the course is design leadership, creating agency, a culture of innovation and fostering entrepreneurship in the built environment. Right? And you were kind enough to share with me your syllabus and some other documentation that happened, I guess, from the first time that you put this course together, like you mentioned, last spring.

And you're gearing up for another round of this course, um, just to kind of set the table here for what it was. And, and so it's all architecture students. [00:34:00] Is that

correct?

Matthew Krissel: So it's, yeah, it's in the graduate program at Carnegie Mellon, all active students. It was about 23 students. Um, when I pitched the idea, that was, yeah, essentially the title and then the high level was, hey, you know, I want people to essentially design a practice of what it can and should be. Um, and I will lead them through with guest speakers and other types of conversations, um, and get them introduced to new ways of thinking to start to find new gaps to start to find new ways to think organizationally.

I found a couple of things when I kind of critiqued. Academia is the, there has to do so much and architectural education is incredibly complex. When you think of everything you're trying to prepare someone for.

Evan Troxel: The word that comes to mind is rigorous.

Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: I mean, you think about, you know, everything you have to do for accreditation, everything you have to do.

If you're just trying to design something, you want people to graduate with all the things you want to expose them to and get them interested in. There's an enormous amount of ground that has to be covered. The reality is the professional practice [00:35:00] course has a lot of. boxes it has to check right to meet accreditation.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Matthew Krissel: those are all important and real things that you need to at least have a sensibility around from the contractual issues to zoning to just all the kind of elements that are fundamental to a professional practice course. What I pitched was, okay, There's another part of professional practice that probably doesn't have boxes to check as part of the NCARB accreditation of the program, but are actually vital.

And so there's an awful lot of, um, uh, gaining of knowledge. There's an awful lot of kind of implementation and architecture program, but there's not a lot of people talking about how you organize. And organization, when you think about Cultures of innovation is that third stool element of great ideas, and I can execute, you have to actually know how to organize people, get people in the right place, get the right people working on things.

So I wanted to develop something that would get people to think about that truly as an active design. Not as, again, [00:36:00] just a kind of, um, a subset of their circumstance or an outcome of a circumstance of which they feel they have no control over. I got to put on this team or I joined this firm, it was the only job offer I got, whatever it was.

It's just the kind of

flipping that around to see that as

something you have agency over

and to organize that in a different way to think about, you know, how we did it. So the opportunity here was to say, okay, at the scale of practice, if you were to design a practice,

how would you do it?

Because students certainly have a lot of opinions about the profession,

they certainly have a lot of opinions about what's missing out there and things and territories they feel they should be involved in, or why are architects involved in this?

Why aren't architects involved in that?

Evan Troxel: Well, yeah, and graduate students are coming from a variety of backgrounds, right? They're not coming from architecture all the time. They might be coming from finance, or they might be coming from engineering. It could be a number of things, right? And so, curious just of the make up of the first cohort, what did you see as kind of, like the thing that you were just saying, architects should be involved in this, they should be [00:37:00] involved in that, and maybe or maybe not, they have any exposure already to architecture, working in firms. I don't, I don't know where these students are in their curriculum, but have they had any experience? Have they already identified some gaps that exist in practice or are they coming at this with fresh eyes?

Matthew Krissel: Uh, some are pretty fresh eyes. There were a handful that just went straight through undergraduate to graduate. Maybe they've done some summer internships. There were a number that had worked for three or four years, so had a little more exposure, worked on a project, maybe got something built even.

Certainly some had different backgrounds in architecture.

And so that already is like the first great mixing chamber, right? The fact that you already start with something that's evidencing where we're trying to go, which is, you know, great work doesn't come when everybody's the same, right? It's coming from us, uh, and, and being able to leverage our differences.

Um, so that's an important part of the, uh, the initial starting point was that, yes, we already had something to kind of, kind of work with. And [00:38:00] it's funny, I, um, so there's a couple of things I initiated as part of this, which is, um. Um, You know, I remember being in graduate school and I hated any time, you know, it was a group project or, oh my gosh, you know, and

Evan Troxel: then you graduate and, and guess what, right?

Matthew Krissel: everything's in groups and people.

So,

so I do acknowledge that. Okay, look, you're going to work in groups. And I realize that half of you probably really don't like that. Um, but it is essential and essential skills. How do you work well with other people? Because

Evan Troxel: absolutely.

Matthew Krissel: is something that requires not only other people in your practice, but obviously the team you build, the broader team, the consultants and groups, but when you get into the build teams, it's more and more that becomes integrated,

Evan Troxel: don't forget the clients. the clients are on your team too.

Matthew Krissel: yeah, so it is, um, you are always working with other people for sure. So getting people, um. Yeah. So I asked them to design their own group. So I start the class actually with a kind of workshop, freewheeling workshop and and first couple of podcasts. I have them listen to and we'll come back to why I do podcasts, [00:39:00] but.

Um, it was all about like the importance of diversity of groups and diversity of thinking. And of course, all the students are always thinking about,

uh, these questions of diversity, equity, inclusion, all these kinds of conversations are happening. So then I asked them to form their groups, the next class would come together and look at the groups and like, wait, you guys all just made groups with your friends.

Like you just listened to a podcast about the importance of designing a group by finding people who have complementary skill sets. They're not like you, there might be creative friction and the strength of that, you know, that it was kind of funny to see already the first task was like a fail because you go back to your old habits.

But,

Evan Troxel: But,

of course, you, you expect that as well, right? I mean, that's, it's a great learning moment, teaching moment, because you know it's going to happen,

Matthew Krissel: yeah, you know, it's going to happen. Are they already like, oh, yeah, you're right. We probably should have taken our own advice.

Evan Troxel: We just go, we just went with the path of least resistance, right? It's like, where's, where's the comfort lie? Let's do that. That, that's how we'll start.

Matthew Krissel: Right. So there are a couple of things I set up within this. So when I pitched this, I'm like, gosh, you know, there's this whole sense of [00:40:00] like, how we organize it seems to be missing. And there's some, some things around the edges of what I would consider professional practice. I'm just never going to fit into the standard template of all the stuff you got to cover.

Um, and to, you know, Omar's credit, uh, a wonderful, uh, person, a visionary, a great thinker. He's always kind of, uh, interested in thinking about collaboration and new modes of thinking. He got excited by it too. And it's like, Hey, this sounds great. It's exactly the kind of stuff we're, we're always talking about.

We just haven't had a place to kind of stitch some of this together or make it kind of coherent. And so I organized this around a seminar style so that it would, foster conversation. Um, and because I'm not a lifelong academic, you know, I also probably taught it a little bit differently than most people would.

I, I organize this all around, uh, podcasts, as I said, because to me, that's the contemporary mode of how you get great information in a kind of conversational way. It's, it's unrealistic to ask students to read a book a week.

and come back and be ready to have a conversation around. [00:41:00] You know, if we have a book by an organizational psychologist that you're going to read as a way to just think a little differently about how they see the world, that's in practicals.

But an hour and a half long conversation in a podcast after they just published the book is a great way to get the deluge of ideas, but get them to kind of really, um, in a, Fairly quick, but, um, more engaging way because of the nature of the back and forth that helps contextualize the information. Then again, if you just kind of read it, you get a little bit more of the background story.

So, what I did, what you were referencing before this, this giant Miro board, that's another thing in practice, you know, we use, you need collaborative. You know, infinite whiteboards to share and gather work. I organized this around this idea of this being one giant kind of class diary of ideas and observations.

And so I would issue a couple of podcasts a week. There were occasional chapters out of a book. Cause there wasn't anything you could listen to that they had to read. But for the most part, it was, it was listening. But the thing I did with [00:42:00] that, I don't know, was the other key thing I've learned as an architect this time that I just don't think it's Is taught or it's kind of hard to teach.

So maybe you have to do it through something like this. It's a couple of things in our case, you have to be able to frame a great question. Build a culture of how you ask questions as an active design and you have to be able to make observations and be insightful on your feet because you're walking a site with a, with a client, you are,

uh, everyone in the room looks at the architect and say something smart, you know, when you're like looking at something and no one knows what to do, or you're at an interview trying to get work or you're, you know, just kind of, you know, the nature of how business development works.

Um, so I, what I thought was, gosh, you know, how do you listen to these things? And every week we're going to have this giant mirror board where you have to formulate, you know, one to two questions and one to two observations, and it's got to fit on the little mirror sticky. So it can't be long. You have to be succinct, and you're going to see every, you're going to see everyone else's questions, and that's why I tried to show you a couple snapshots just so you [00:43:00] got a feel of it.

One, you see how incredible this just idea and conversational board becomes as a collection of thoughts and observations and questions, but two, because they see each other, they also force them to also think about other facets of what they just listened to, so they're not all asking the same questions.

And through that repetition, I hope they got, you know, they ultimately became better at asking questions. I think they did.

And just being more insightful, how you just take something, listen to it, distill it down to

two or three key themes that were most compelling to you.

And you had to write it in a way that became generative so that we could then talk about it.

So then I would, the conversation, I would use that board.

I'd put a few dots on some of the interesting ones and we would start the conversation.

in the seminar the next week about, you know, what they basically produced as a way to frame the conversation.

Evan Troxel: just the act of practicing asking open ended questions is a huge skill for anybody in that position to actually have. [00:44:00] If, if It's a great role play to do in a small team when you're prepping for an interview, for example, is, is to number one, just ask questions that, like, try to figure out what questions the clients are going to ask you.

I think every firm probably does this, right? They go through the, what objections are the clients going to have with this presentation? What could they ask us so that we can pre address it internally

so that if they actually ask it, we have an answer, right? But, but even. Reversing that and, well, so you become the question asker, but learning how to ask open ended questions to get more insightful, just, just more context to work with as the designer is huge, right?

I mean, it's one of those skills that is, most people aren't even aware that the questions that they're asking are yes, no, green, blue, like, what's the answer?

I'm not just looking for the answer. I'm looking for.

the next sentence in this conversation. I'm not looking for the answer. I'm actually looking for [00:45:00] where this could go, not knowing where it could go, and that's where these open ended questions really come in handy, right?

Because If you don't know what to say, ask a question and get the other person to do the talking. They're happy to usually,

right? Everybody loves to talk and talk about themselves. And as an architect, that's exactly what you want

them to do is talk about themselves, talk about their issues, their challenges, their problems, their What are they endeavoring for? What's not on your website? Like what are, what are some,

there's, there's so many ways to kind of engage people in a conversation like this course that you're talking about and coming up with new ideas, I imagine that can really only happen through the conversations that are, it's not just through my observations of what I heard in a podcast, it's like, it's the actual conversation.

It's the actual unfolding

with those people in the cohort. Having that conversation together and one idea sparks another. I mean, it actually now come to think of it, like in the Adam Grant video

that you link [00:46:00] to in your syllabus, where it's like a TED talk podcast, and he's talking about with the creators of the daily show.

And they talk about this idea of what they call it burstiness. I had never

heard that term. Right. But this idea of it's kind of like the ideas just start popping out. And so when

you're talking about organizational structure and who should be on the team, And creating a space where creativity and innovation can happen.

You really need to foster the ideas of, I think Adam calls it psychological safety. I've always just called it a safe place, right? But psychological safety is a great way to, to really hone in on it because you, you are more likely to put forth Possibly absurd ideas, knowing that, like, it's just for the sake of, like, this brainstorming session, and it doesn't, it's not going to get shot down, it's not going to get stomped on immediately, but having these conversations in an educational environment, the academic environment that you're talking about, I can imagine, led to A bunch of things that people didn't write [00:47:00] down through the conversation.

And it's all about kind of this open ended conversation, continuing and snowballing as it goes to really create a creative and useful conversation to inspire, to spark insight and, and, and new ideas.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, and that's, you know, the essential thing is how do you make it generative and action oriented because that's exactly right when you're doing programming, you're meeting with a client, you're trying to understand again, if you're doing service oriented stuff, and you're just trying to, you're just building your first draft, you probably just take whatever they say, and you just go do it, right?

But if you're talking about doing transformational architecture, we're talking about actually making significant impact. You have to dig beyond what people are saying. So even in the initial conversation and you're learning about how they use a place or you're touring an existing space that they're using a couple of things I've learned.

One, people will tell you one thing, but they'll act differently. A lot of times in these programming companies, people will describe kind of how they think they work. And, or even sometimes how they imagine where they're trying to get them. Um, but it's not [00:48:00] necessarily how they actually are. So you have to always complement it with kind of observational reads.

You have to like actually go and go, go show me your desk. Let me go see your storage. Let me see what's going on. How do you actually do this? And you start to read between the lines and you're starting to fill in the conversation through the observational side. But it's an essential part of digging deeper.

And so starting to get them comfortable with not only debating design together, And design discourse, creating that creative friction, but how to just use, you know, question asking as a fundamental infrastructure for doing great work. And, you know, there's a simple thing like the, you know, ideas tool, which is always, you just start everything with the, how might we, how might we, and it gets people already shifting their, their thinking into a future action oriented way.

How might we do this? It just, it changes the nature of what you can get out of, um. The environment that you need, the people you need, your understanding of place, and it starts, that incredibly starts to spark things. There's like two things that I see consistently crush innovation. There's probably, there's definitely a lot [00:49:00] more, but two of the most common ones are, you didn't ask the right question.

Right? And people converge too quickly. And those two things tend to, tend to crush, crush innovation. Um, in architecture, so if you're not asking the right question, of course, you're, you can continue to do things that you're just going in the wrong direction. And the other component is, you know, gosh, design problem.

So architecture tends to be fairly lean on the margins. So your innovation and your exploration tends to happen through projects. Now a lot of places can have incubators or separate research groups and spaces that can explore outside of projects, although I think they all should. It's a, it's a worthy investment.

But when you're only using your projects for that, they also get crushed because it's the timelines, the pressures, the reality of a product. You just can't get to all these things and do high quality design and technically competent work and be trying some new tools and be trying a new material and be prototyping something over here and be trying to convince them to try, you know, something that's never been done before.[00:50:00]

It's very, very hard. So these are the kinds of things that, okay, these weekly rhythms of asking questions and forming observations around material that you've never heard before.

And I'm glad you brought up the one about Uh, the Adam Grant one, because I thought that was wonderful kind of parallel to think about how architects like the design process.

So this is one where he, he basically is an organizational psychologist and he goes in to learn from Trevor Noah and the team. Hey, how do you create a show every single day?

Evan Troxel: Right.

Matthew Krissel: required. You have such a short turnaround time. It makes an architecture phase, a schematic design phase of three months seem generous, right?

You know, what if you only had 12 hours, right? Sometimes we only do, but, um, but I loved it because I got thinking about when I, I loved about how he talked about, um, how they come together for these kind of brainstorming conversation, that burstiness where everyone's getting excited at the same time. But then at the same time, he talks about how important it is to then step out of the big group and a smaller group comes together to do the editing [00:51:00] and the refining and the final polish of the idea or the joke in their case, the comedic part.

Ultimately, Trevor has to deliver it. And so he has to kind of put it in his voice and dial it all in. That's a beautiful way to think about how to, you know, Reorganize the way you think about design and the design process, and what it takes when you bring a group together,

and the, all the issues of group think and problems with brainstorming,

um, but that point of when you think about editing and refining ideas

and how you can reorganize the group, split off, go into smaller groups, do interesting stuff, you might come back together.

So it's a great one to, to kind of think about, again, through this other lens, if someone had to create through a different way that we can

think about as architects, how we might change our own design process at a different pace with a different type of ideation.

Evan Troxel: It reminds me of a talk that's on YouTube. I'll try to find the link to it to put in the show notes, but John Cleese has a wonderful talk on creativity

and he talks about that highly [00:52:00] creative time, but also the really introspective polishing time that you just referenced, right? It's like you, you have to have both and sometimes one might be bigger than the other, but it's relatively impossible to be creative on the spot. Right? You, you, this is something you show up and you do the work every day and, and that's what flexes that muscle so that maybe someday you actually can just be creative on

the spot, but like you were talking about earlier when you're walking the site with a client and you need to have kind of insightful comments on the fly, um, that comes through having done it a lot,

right?

Um, but, but this idea of actually kind of identifying creative time and putting in the work. You know, I think a lot of times that was with their group, you know, with the, when they were making Monty Python and, and coming, it's, it's very much kind of probably like a daily show writer's room kind of a thing, right, where it's everybody's just throwing out. absurd [00:53:00] ideas, right? And making people laugh and, and, and, and actually noticing what are people laughing

at? What are people interested in, in an architectural context? It might be, it might not be laughter, right? But it might be, you still need

Matthew Krissel: good idea. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: you can throw absurd.

I think it was Bjarke Ingels who, During it, maybe it was the Netflix abstract series, the episode on Big, um, if I'm remembering correctly, but he talked about like this, having a safe space for creative work to actually happen and, and, and he actually used the word absurd, right?

You have to have a place. Where people can have absurd ideas, because it's not until afterward, when you actually go down

that path, that you can look back and think that

that thing actually made a lot of sense, but in the beginning it made no sense at all, right? What do you mean we're gonna do a, a, a waste plant with a ski hill on it, in a, in a flat area? you know, in, in Copenhagen, right? And talking about what's the name of [00:54:00] that? I think it was called Copenhill,

right? It's like, It's this energy plant and recycle, like waste recycling, and they put a ski hill on it. And that is a, if you think about it without the context, like it is a completely absurd idea.

And yet it's a reality and everybody looks at it. Maybe not everybody. I'll generalize a little bit here, but it's like. What an, what an innovative idea to make multiple uses out of something that nobody would ever think of doing, right? Um, but having a design studio

where those kinds of ideas can even be proposed. A lot of places don't have that,

right? It's, it's too much check the box. And I think Adam Grant says it in the beginning of that, that podcast. He's like, large groups are where creativity goes to die,

Matthew Krissel: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: It's not a creative place. And yet here's, here are, here's, here's the daily show. Here's John Cleese and his troop of comedians.

And here's Bjarke Ingels group, right? Where they, they, they have a group. of people and they come together [00:55:00] and through their wide range of experiences can come up with extremely creative ideas and then execute

on them and and do what they need to accomplish with those because they have built a culture of creativity and psychological safety,

but also have the execution behind it to back it up.

Matthew Krissel: yeah. I mean, that's where I try to begin the class, which is where do good ideas come from? And just having a conversation because that kind of combinatorial thinking and approach that you just described is, um, one of those that again, you have, that's an intentional act. You have to put yourself at crossroads and intersections.

You can't just be in the constant flow of the way it's always been. Um, so that changes who, again, who's in the room, who are you hiring? How do you make a team? You know, what skillset and background do they have? Um, and then who are you bringing on as consultants and of course, who you're selecting in terms of your clients.

If you're in a position to be selective, um, all those things need to come together, but you have to design the process and the organizational thinking to allow those things to happen, create the culture for you to have people to speak [00:56:00] up, to be able to explore, to engage, and you have to still do it. And meet all your usual timelines and deadlines for architecture.

So it's, it's a beautiful design challenge of people and place and culture of how you kind of bring all those things together. But it's a, it's a wonderful, to me, it's, it's so much of the world is becoming more of that mixing. We want spaces that do more than one thing. We need spaces to do more than one thing.

Whether it's through the lens of sustainability and adaptive reuse and resilience, we can't have things that just do one thing anymore. I mean, some, some things you have to very specialized spaces, but most things you want that kind of adaptability, that transformation, it can do a couple other things, or has value

beyond its initial purpose.

We add that kind of 4th dimension of time to all these things, and you're starting to use that again as part of the design process and the way of thinking that that is a, um,

a wonderful driver to kind of instigate.

Again, this question of how we kind of think about the organization of people.

So it's, [00:57:00] yeah,

Evan Troxel: coming up with a balance in that group, right? Uh, because I think, you know, it's something that I think they addressed in that, in that video again, but, but this has come up many other times, right? If you have an overbearing or an extremely talkative person. Maybe, maybe they're a leader in, in that room. Like a lot of things just defer to that person because they talk the most or because they're the boss or whatever. And so

in your, in your class, you're that person, right? And So maybe I, I would be curious to hear how you handle You know, this, this discourse of ideas, but all the students are pretty much on a level playing field.

So maybe there isn't necessarily, there's like, there's no corporate structure in academia when it comes to the student body. Right? So, but in, in, when you're in practice, professional practice, there definitely is. And something that I've also heard about. And I could be incorrect about this, but like, there's this Japanese meeting culture where, um, the idea is that the, the junior est people get to speak [00:58:00] first, and the senior est people get to speak last, so that those ideas come out, and they're not just agreeing with something that a senior person said or completely deferring, because that naturally happens, right?

In these kinds

of organizational hierarchies that people are in, and then, and then they just don't say anything at all, or they just nod their head and agree, even if they think it's a terrible idea, because politically that's the right thing to do, you know?

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, that's the designing your culture and sometimes you can influence this. So if you're again, meeting with a client and you can or a user group and you're trying to manage a stakeholder engagement with all these different personalities, you can set up the exercises of engagement to allow that kind of free flow.

I think so you don't get. You know, through either anonymity or through other sorts of kind of games, interactions that you can design to get, you know, to break down those, those barriers, um, in our own internal organizations. I mean, this obviously is something that's plagued architecture because it's [00:59:00] for a long time and built around a cult of a personality, right?

It's the singular lone pollinator, the lone genius who moves around the room, sharing and tapping on the shoulder with a great idea and sending you off your way. And so part of this is, you know, how do you create a culture of collective fluency? How do you shift that, that model radically? And these are a number of things that I got to experiment with at Kieran Turmer Lake when I was there.

And I went, as I was moving through the organization, I had this wonderful opportunity to just re imagine the entire digital practice, coming out of the great recession. You know, there's, everyone was just kind of trying to hang on, you know, and there's this chance where James, Timberlake pulled me over and was like, Hey, you know, we need to, we used to be a leader in this.

We need to really reimagine some of this, you know, and it gave me a chance that it was one of the first opportunities I had to sit down and really think about, Hey, if I could design kind of hive of activity, how would I do it? And so I, I pitched him this idea, like, gosh, you know, there's a couple of things I noticed is, you know, we've got [01:00:00] people in the communications group are doing something, you got architects doing something, we've got the research groups, we use similar tools, we have similar challenges, but no one's talking to each other.

So we devised this idea, like, developed this, what we call the digital design visioning group. And it was intentionally, I had to go around and select people there and you made sure you had, you know. extremely inexperienced people in the room, extremely experienced people in the room. You had people from the communications group, the research group, the architecture, you had technical people, you had the kind of blue sky thinkers.

And so we made an intentional kind of Petri dish of all these mixes and created a space for that kind of conversation to happen. And so we would meet regularly. And one of the groups we devised was called near future practices. And every week to build discourse, it was about. All the things you're thinking about, the stuff that was getting crushed in projects, but you had a great idea, needed a space to move out of a project and just survive a little longer to get a little nurtured a little bit, and it spun out so many wonderful things.

And of [01:01:00] course, the firm, you know, we were set up to do software, hardware, design buildings. I mean, do all kinds of amazing things, remarkable infrastructure in place. But part of it, that opportunity, this was 2012 when I had a chance to kind of re imagine this. It was my first chance to like, not only just think of it, but then deploy it in practice and see it actually work.

So some of those things then became essential for my own development about ICON. you know, how I run a stakeholder engagement, how I organize people to make sure you're in a place where people can speak freely. But even in your own culture of design, how do you shift from a place, you know, again, around the call to personality to a place about ideas and, you know, really about the best ideas are going to be what moves forward.

Sometimes, like I said, you still have to have maybe a smaller group kind of eventually kind of edits and helps refine and select, but at least creating the space for that kind of exchange and dialogue Discourse to happen. So, so vital. Certainly what I saw in practice, certainly what I've carried forward [01:02:00] any place I, you know, go and operate at any scale.

And so for this class, you know, how do I, so one of the things I did, um, and it kind of is, it solves a couple of things. Every class I start with it just didn't ask me anything.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Matthew Krissel: what I realized, one, it helps diffuse the, the, uh, any kind of sense of hierarchy in the space to some degree in terms of just like, Hey, I'll talk about anything you want to talk about and it kind of relaxed, calm way.

But it also gave him a chance again. I had this opportunity. For everything that I have done, I had a chance to share in ways that they just don't have the platform for that kind of communication. So I would get questions about writing cover letters, you know, because I did all this hiring, like how, how do you write a great cover letter?

What are you looking for when you open an application? What, what, you know, uh, to negotiating salaries to, um, when you present complex environmental. information to a client group that doesn't understand how have you been successful in driving these, you know, unique innovations. And [01:03:00] we talk about visualization and presentation skills and things like that.

So there's a chance that you kind of just diffuse a little bit and then ease into it. And for me, I, maybe it's my personality, but I try to just stay as conversational as I can. I'm not there to lecture

there. I really am just hosting a conversation.

And if you treat it more as a,

Fireside chat. We're all sitting around camping.

It's a different kind of conversation in unity as opposed to me standing out. I'm the expert. I'm going to lecture to you all.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Matthew Krissel: there to just, I'm just guiding a conversation. I'll, I'll,

you know, try and draw people in who are a little quiet. I'll try and reshape it or reorient it if it gets off track a little bit, but

Evan Troxel: I want to take that a little bit further, and that is, uh, I mean, that is a, an amazing strategy to employ, because I think most architects are in the position of interviewing or presenting to win work, or, you know, most of the time where, where this comes up, where they're [01:04:00] leading a presentation, and it really is kind of a one way, until maybe the last 20 minutes is then opened up for Q& A, right?

A lot of times when you're, when you're presenting for work, it goes to that, but. I've done talks like about the kind of topic that you just talked about, which is just engagement. How do you engage people as an architect, right? And it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier about asking good questions. But the key is engagement, and that is how do you get the, whoever you're talking to, to be engaged in what we're talking about today, and starting your course off with an Ask Me Anything is a great way to just immediately make this a conversation, right? It's not just me delivering on a topic today, and I've, I've talked to AIA groups about a digital, you know, connection like the one we're having today as we have this podcast, right?

We're doing a remote recording here. And a lot of times, you know, especially during COVID, it was done this way. This was how interviews were handled. And, [01:05:00] and even today, like just let's cut out the travel expenses. Let's cut down on, you know, flying somewhere or driving somewhere to do something. Let's do it remotely.

And how can you engage? And still, it's, it's not like by showing drawings and screen share and showing renderings, it's, it's by asking questions, it's by within the like the first six minutes, I think, is what the research shows. You have to engage the audience within the first six minutes or else. They're going to pick up their phone, and they're going to start doing email,

right?

And they're going to start doing other stuff, because you're actually not talking with them. You're talking to them, and maybe they're interested, but probably they're not, right? And they've got other stuff to do. Everybody's really busy. And so, I think it's an interesting strategy. For you to kind of open up the, the discourse for that week to do the ask me anything and just say, you know, like, I'm not here to tell you something, let's have a conversation about whatever you want to talk about, you know, that's a, that's a great way

to, because if it's, if it, if it's them [01:06:00] driving it. They're invested, right? And, and they're going to actually get more out of it because they might have a little bit of a different angle than you're proposing for that, for that day. Right. So I'm really interested to hear like, what, how long did that ask me anything go on for? Like, did you have to stop it?

Did you have to cut it off because it just kept going or was it,

Matthew Krissel: I let it go as long as if we want to spend the whole two hours.

That's

fine with me. If it's only 15 minutes and we get on to, you know, the mirror board and the conversation from the, you know, the, the, the assignment, that's fine. Um, the other thing I will say that I think really resonated and again, I'm in a privileged position to be able to do this.

Um. Because of the projects I've done, but also the opportunity that because I happened to design and built a building on Carnegie Mellon's campus and it just opened, I also use that as a way to everything we talked about each week, I tried to bring something from practice

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Matthew Krissel: to just evidence. This is how this is.

This is why this is [01:07:00] important. This is how it has real impact. So I guess the first class way I kick this off as I do an interactive workshop. So I. This is how I would design a stakeholder engagement. I'm here to learn about you. You're here to learn about me. And so I ask questions like, what, give me three words that define your principles of who you are and that drive your actions, right?

And you got five minutes and they have little post its and they got to put them up on the wall. We talk about them. Then I tell them the three words I did. You know, these are how I, you know, define myself. And then we go through, you know, three or four questions like that. And I share my, my own version when I ran it essentially by myself to myself to test the questions.

But I already start to open up and try to connect through some of that. But the next week when we came back, I do a short lecture on, okay, I'm going to show you. So for this Carnegie Mellon project, I'm going to show you the, uh, process we did in terms of some of the interview, how we won the job. Uh, some of the insight we brought so they got a sense of like the slide deck of, you know, how you kind of present and think when you just have kind [01:08:00] of an RFP environment.

Um, but then I showed them the, the, the engagement we developed with, uh, faculty, students, builders, and the kind of, um, users we assembled to a day long set of interactions. And I showed them a number of them. What we did, the questions we asked, the outcomes, and then I showed how it changed the program and how it actually changed the project so they could

Evan Troxel: Hmm. Mm

Matthew Krissel: the activity to like actual impact.

It wasn't just some icebreaker exercise that seems kind of silly and ridiculous. Like, these are, these are real acts of design that shape. You know, rewrote the program, changed opportunities within the building, re centered priorities based on real faculty and user and student feedback on what the building could be and how vital that is.

It goes back to what we were talking about earlier. When you just get the program, it's a bunch of numbers in an Excel file. You start with just these really high level questions and you have your own observations of a building type. That's very similar. Precedent research gives [01:09:00] you a kind of a roadmap for some of these.

building types go. But to get to that next level of specificity, intentionality, real context and history and place and what it means to be a mechanical engineering building on Carnegie Mellon's campus at that corner of that site in this year, at this time, with everything going on in the world,

um, these are the things, you know, that's how you get to that next set of layers of intentionality and purpose.

That just make the work so much richer and compelling. So, so part of it, I think too, is that diffusing a little bit, shifting that, that hierarchy and sense of hierarchy,

but then really being able to evidence,

uh, some of the things that we're talking about that might seem a little bit on the periphery to show how you've been able to deploy it in practice.

Evan Troxel: That, that's really cool that you're able to do that, right? And they're, they are there in that space that you know so much about to be able to

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, we can just walk over to the other side of campus. At the end, I give a tour of the building, uh, and they can hear it directly, some of the [01:10:00] anecdotes and some of the stories.

Evan Troxel: That's cool.

Matthew Krissel: But the other thing, oh, go ahead.

Evan Troxel: yeah, go. No, you go ahead.

Matthew Krissel: I just said the other thing you brought up that I thought was interesting is the question of, um, uh, you know, how you build trust and relationships and whether this is a staff interaction or a client or a user group, you know, in order to get people to open up and to talk and be more kind of vulnerable and clear about what they need and want.

Um, you have to kind of establish some of that. And some of that too is that the kind of mentoring and trajectory of developing a culture of design over time. And it's interesting because through that kind of COVID period, when we shifted to all online, it demonstrated we can do a lot of things. Um, it did shift a little bit of the nature of how you build trust, uh, the people you had relationships with before COVID happened and you shifted online.

It was very different than when you meet a new employee. virtually, if they just joined the organization. Uh, the how design discourse, designer views through a zoom lens versus being in a room. [01:11:00] Um, it's amazing how the technology has opened up more opportunities for some of those. And it's also showed us in my mind, the value of why we still come together.

and the purpose of convening and when it's, it's, it works and is appropriate for, for being able to handle and do things virtually. And it's amazing to me to see the kind of, some of those patterns about, you know, one on one, I think virtually works really great. I think even sometimes when I was working with just a small team, like three people, two people, the virtual interface, you can have that kind of exchange or space for people to talk, space for people to iterate.

As the groups get bigger, it gets harder and harder through that format because you just can't have the simultaneity of the conversations the same way. Um, and the nature of just the way the room behaves versus in reality, if you were all there and the conversations before the meeting, or you go out to dinner and kind of all the other stuff that builds relationships that happen around at the times we convene and gather,

but this art of gathering.

Uh, and one of the podcasts is this woman who wrote this [01:12:00] book on the art of gathering and she's talking about through the lens of social interactions, uh, weddings, uh, corporate events, like the nature of gathering in a different way.

Again, you can begin to see that through how we internally in an organization, in a company come together and why and when that value of being in person versus when we can facilitate it in other ways.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. That, that's, I, I agree that that is one of those things where, especially in, in an environment where you are doing brainstorming and there's a multitude of ways, it's not just through conversation that it's happening. You might be sketching, you might be pinning stuff up, you might be pulling stuff up on a device, you might have stuff already on the wall. Um, but, but all of those things also, there, there's other layers to it that are body language and initial reactions that you will notice that somebody will have when, you know, a page is turned. That is really difficult to do, uh, through a screen, right? And, and having that kind [01:13:00] of, I don't know, it's, it's almost like you're an anthropologist on some level and you're there and you're, you're interviewing, you know, live in person.

And, and you're actually seeing. the the behavioral reactions and just the, the, all of those subtle things that we can read as humans, that's really difficult to do through a, through a 2D screen. So

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, and the passive learning part, you know, it's hard to go back and think about what it was like when I had two years experience and didn't know anything and was just trying to like pay attention to everything going on around me and what's happening. Um, but as we, you know, again, develop these cultures of innovation, the question of how you really grow wonderful talent and ideas through an organization, how good ideas spread through a place,

um, how people develop their own sense of professional development.

And you get the complexities of architecture. There is a part of passive learning, just being in the environment, surrounded by creativity, that, that hive of stuff [01:14:00] happening, um, in the spontaneity around it and the impromptu parts of it

that, uh, it's fascinating to me as we think about the future of the workplace, how we begin to continue to develop and balance those as, as technology and the kind of analog space of reality, the physical space.

Continue to push and pull until we find this, you know, each culture has their own,

uh, kind of, uh, equifinity of where it's, where it kind of lands and, um, what that feels like and what it should be. And that's, you know, those are some of the things you talk about when you're developing a place is what are we going to be?

How are we going to interact?

How do we gather? Are we spread out around the world and that gives you a certain reach capacity? Um, are we all together? When are we together?

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, let's talk more about some of the specifics of this course. So, generally, you've kind of laid out the idea, and then you have like a series of case studies, and podcast listenings, and video watchings, and all four. Like, [01:15:00] where are the students going with this information that they're kind of working their way through?

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, ultimately, there's a couple of things along the way. And so one is to create these unique collisions. So getting them introduced to new people, new ideas, new ways of thinking, and bringing things together that may seem separate, but suddenly when you start talking about it, you realize there's a lot of, a lot of interaction.

So along the way is a couple of milestones. One is the ultimate goal is they design a practice and they have to develop an actual mission statement. They have to actually develop sense of organization. They have to develop design principles. They have to define. You know, what's the change that they seek?

They actually have to be able to describe that and what they would do, the kinds of projects they would work on, the kind of people they want to work with, um, and some, you know, landed in kind of traditional architectural, let's say, um, outcomes, but with unique ways of how they wanted to get there. And some are already shifting into uh, user experience and technology and different kind of media and in a sense of bringing the [01:16:00] built environment and digital media together in a way that was kind of a hybrid between let's say a graphic design, a kind of user design and architecture firm kind of space, right?

So it was funny to see the, or interesting to see kind of the range of, um, total outcomes that came in terms of the products they imagined they would produce. But to get there along the way, they do a gap analysis, you know, starting to understand what's out there, what aren't people talking about. You know, what are, and so started getting them exposed to all these other unique design environments and people is for them to start to see these hints of things that might be new territories architects could operate in or spaces that they could certainly draw into a kind of traditional architectural outcome like a building.

So they're starting to do some kind of gap analysis, start to get them to look around. They asked him to identify a company can be any company doesn't have to be an architecture firm. Um, that they admire and why and have them really kind of study a place and think about what is it about when you just evaluate a [01:17:00] place, what is it that you really admire about them?

Why do you like them? Why are you drawn to them? What are they doing that's so interesting to get them to think about how you kind of present? yourself, uh, to the world and how you organize yourself in that way. Um, and then, so they have to, along the way, they make an elevator pitch, uh, and I help guide them and refine them when it's open for everyone to kind of give feedback to.

Uh, along the way, they also study, uh, places that have fostered innovation. So I do want to bring it back to some point, uh, there's a conversation around the physical environment that helps enable all this, this great ways of thinking and working. Um, so I, you know, task them with a set of case studies and get them talking about.

It was amazing. No one had heard about Bell Labs. No one had heard about. MIT's, Building 20, so there's like the one which is no design and like chaos, but it created all this incredible innovation and outcomes, Building 20 at MIT, then you have the like high design of the time, both [01:18:00] mid century incubators, you know, the Bell Labs and the Saarinen, uh, kind of overlay to the whole thing, you know, everything was so specifically designed.

to create those kind of interactions and spaces of innovation. This year I'm going to introduce a few other ones that are more contemporary that I want them to kind of look at. So I do want to have a conversation then around the kind of spaces to get them again going back to how you think architecturally about our environments, the physical environments, um, and the spaces that we can create that can actually help enable these.

These kinds of ways of thinking

Evan Troxel: Very

Matthew Krissel: and so then the other component to this I've realized is, you know, coming in again from the outside, uh, students, it's, uh, writing, writing and presentation skills are challenging again. It's something that isn't taught. Um, I don't know how students are expected to do it because no one's teaching it, but 1 of the most essential skills and practice is communication.

[01:19:00] You have to, you have to be able to write to clarify ideas. You have to be able to write to communicate to the world. Um, you have to be able to present. and pitch and get people excited in really succinct and clear ways. So the other component to this is I'm going to, I can't solve, I can't solve all those things.

So, okay, let's, let's try and just help them improve their presentation skills. So through this, each of these things are going to be less writing, more presentation. So get them to get things down 15 minutes. So group of five people, you got 15 minutes to do a case study at 15 minutes. Pitch your, your firm, your organization idea.

Um, and so even the final project

this year, I'm going to get rid of the final paper,

um, and just get it, just focus on delivering a great presentation because ultimately

their stage when they go into practice, if they can at least present, whether it's internal design dialogue or they do start their own place and they got to go pitch somebody an idea.

Um, let's see if I can help them on their presentation skills. Just get them more [01:20:00] comfortable and, uh, yeah, how you kind of organize ideas, pitch ideas. Okay.

Evan Troxel: Nice. A lot of this is reminding me of a book I read a long time ago. I'm looking over here on my bookshelf, but it's probably here still. It's Simon Sinek's Start With why, And he cites a few companies as case studies as well for kind of the types of places that they have where they've, these interesting things have come out of, you know, he talks about Apple, he talks about Nike, he talks about Southwest Airlines, he talks about Harley Davidson. And because all of these companies had a why, um, maybe they've strayed off course since then, maybe they haven't, maybe

Matthew Krissel: hmm.

Evan Troxel: they've been really successful with that. But, but I think that that was always interesting, right? It's like a lot of companies get, you know, Here's what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to do it, right?

Especially in a service

industry like architecture, right? It's usually an extremely complex checklist, right? Of, you know, you've got to get these people's approval, then you've got to [01:21:00] get these people's approval, then you've got to do this set of drawings, and then you've got the bids, and then you've got, and it's just like thing after thing.

Milestones and project management is just information management on steroids. It's insane, right? But it's the big idea is what you're talking about.

Like what's the big idea and how that

all the decisions have, it's like a party diagram and architecture, right? Here's the big idea and all of the decision making supports staying on course with what's the party say that we're supposed to do, right?

It's, it's, it's like an overarching set of guidelines that we can say, it all makes sense if you look at it from, from this origination point. That whole idea of start with why,

why being the most important, why does this company deserve to exist? Why do we exist? Why do we operate like this? Why do we speak the way we do? The why question is so, so, so important and I, a lot of architecture firms, Maybe start out [01:22:00] that way, but it's, I think it's difficult to stay on that course if you don't continually, I mean, and you're allowed to rewrite the why at

some point, right? You can totally have a revolution or an evolution in your practice, but I think a lot of that gets lost over time and just becomes like, this is the way we do it because this is the way we've always done it.

And here's, here's the checklist because it's all about efficiency and productivity and managing that part of it. And, and. Then it kind of waters down the creativity, and it waters down the innovation, and it waters down the impact that it could potentially have.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, and even just the connection. I mean, you know, when you go after enough work and you lose enough work and you get feedback from people, they didn't select you, you start to hear some of these common themes and it happens a lot in architecture because we're so fascinated with process

and because process is so critical.

To be able to do what we do,

um, but it's not that interesting to most people when they just need a building that does something [01:23:00] really great or they're trying to create a great teaching space or a wonderful place for students to live. Um, and so that whole, it's exactly why that, those kinds of, I, I, I, um, bring in Simon Sink's book, The Infinite Game.

Evan Troxel: Mm

Matthew Krissel: recommend that book. It's fascinating to think when you think.

Evan Troxel: Mm

Matthew Krissel: about, you know, architecture is not a game. It's not something you win. Um,

Evan Troxel: There's no end. Yeah, it's

Matthew Krissel: no end, the, the rules change, people come and go.

Evan Troxel: and there's no there.

Like, it's just going to go to the next thing

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. And why you don't focus on your competition, which is part of like, don't just look at other architecture firms and wonder how I'm going to do a little bit better than them.

Or these are all the people going into this interview because then you just become this kind of diluted version of essentially an averaging of everyone you've just been like.

Evan Troxel: Reactive.

Matthew Krissel: over you instead of really getting to what are we doing? What is our purpose? And so that start with Y is exactly that too, which is trying to really think of what exactly we're doing.

So you, so I actually start the first, the first line of the syllabus.[01:24:00]

There are some great quotes, uh, that I think help, help bring, give people a sense of the range of the way I want them to think, but the first way I start was we imagine a world where meaningful, transformative building spaces and ideas are accessible to more people in places, inspiring change and enriching individuals and their communities.

And then start with, okay, you're going to design a firm and we're going to meet every week and da, da, da, and oh, by the way, you know, it's like just, just the changing it around, putting it back to where you're trying to go

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Matthew Krissel: know, and inspiring people in a way. Um, but really the biggest thing is just talking about what they actually want and need and putting it in terms that they understand.

Whether again, you're pitching an idea to your own team. teammates, where you're trying to go, that, yeah, the party, the clarity, the big idea, because then everyone orients and gets behind it. You get everyone pulling in the right direction, everyone that the trajectory is set, and now you're aligning resources and intellect immediately towards a common place where If you're all over, [01:25:00] these things that are all over the place and people are imagining all kinds of strands and tangents, it just becomes an incoherent mess of the people in the room, what's going on in their, their brain right now.

And, you know, we talk about collaborative cultures and you can have, so you can invite all these interesting people to the room, all these different backgrounds, you can do all that hard work.

But if you, if at the end of the day, the space itself isn't fostering it,

It's pointless.

They're all just, they're all drifting and they're on their phone.

They're not following you. They have no idea what you're talking about. They you're using a piece of technology. Nobody can engage. It's why simple whiteboards are so great. Everybody can jump up and use it. Um, so you could, you know, half the people in the room can't collaborate. It's not a very collaborative environment.

So.

Evan Troxel: Right. Yeah. So you've talked about kind of this idea of identifying gaps in practice. What kinds of gaps have they identified that they are willing to maybe take on, at least in this course, as a thesis for the project that they're going to be [01:26:00] doing?

Matthew Krissel: Uh, in some ways, the.

There's a lot of conversation, certainly housing is one that is that people are talking about. Uh, that's fairly common. It's certainly resonating through academia and schools. People are understanding the concept of reimagining intergenerational housing, different housing needs, and that potential, a lot of conversation around adaptive reuse, about resilience, what that means, um, people paying attention to all these empty buildings around.

And getting kind of excited, you know, seeing those as opportunities. How do you reimagine those? Um, there's, and partly because I think it's Carnegie Mellon, there's a lot of people thinking about technology and technology spaces. Some either getting into literal software development, uh, or how you begin to bridge

digital and physical environments and the kind of relationship between them.

Whether again, you're kind of a media company that can work comfortably in buildings and spaces, or you're building spaces that are augmented with media

Evan Troxel: [01:27:00] Mm

Matthew Krissel: different unique ways. So certainly some of those are coming out as kind of focus areas from the first class, first set of groups in terms of the thing that they wanted, the change they were seeking to, to impact.

Evan Troxel: Randy Deutsch wrote a book called Adapt as an Architect, and I'm sure you're aware of it.

Um, but he talks about, right, you're, you're in the profession. What kind of entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial things could you do, or innovative things could you do in a practice that you're already in, or, or outside of practice, but staying in the profession? in architecture, I think is kind of the main idea, And it sounds to me like this course is pretty similar to that in the overall idea, right? It's like, you're bringing this back to designing a practice, identifying opportunities

within architectural practice for innovation, and then building these projects around that.

And, um, There's a lot of people in architecture in the last decade that have left architecture to go pursue technology, [01:28:00] maybe, you know, for, for a variety of reasons, right? There, there's work life balance, there's pay, there's, there's

all kinds of things behind that. You know, like how long it takes to, to ascend the ladder in, in a corporate structure, architectural, right?

Because of the business, the way that they're designed. And I'm curious, like, If you're intentionally steering students to stay in architecture within kind of the context that you're, because you're giving them a lot of outside influences, I would love to talk about the sources that you kind of, that you drip throughout the class

to them, for them to, to expand their view and get other ideas from, but are you, Are you really honing in on keeping it inside of architecture, quote unquote, like the profession or AEC in general? Or are you allowing them to go outside of that as well?

Matthew Krissel: Uh, certainly for this, this course, they're allowed to go anywhere they, as long as they can make the case and they can [01:29:00] get up in front of the class and defend it in the first go around. And if it survives the pitch, I'm here to help them with great ideas and great opportunities and great prospects. Um, the architectural education allows you to do so many things well, and the world, we need hope.

We need to see this manifested in whether it's the buildings we do, or if you, you know, whatever your kind of entrepreneurial spirit, you know, uh, sees a path forward to make the kind of improvement that we need to see around us. I certainly am here to help guide and edit and, and, and, and prompt and get them excited.

Ultimately, I would love some form of, um, helping to describe the shape of what, what we're doing. What is architecture evolving towards

and where is this all going because traditional practice, there's still a lot of traditional stuff happening, but it is definitely, um, under pressure to change, uh, you know, [01:30:00] some of the things I talked about in the syllabus, this, this need to redefine even what a project is, you know, the pressure points that we are constantly under to operate differently.

The relationship of time and money to outcomes are real and things need to shift and change and grow. So for architecture to. survive as an idea, um, we need to also evolve what we produce when we get involved. How do we get involved, you know, before a project begins? How are we still valued and, and able to produce wonderful things after a project's done that's still relevant and useful to the world as part of that project?

That initial vehicle and platform. So moving from kind of product thinking to kind of platform thinking, allow things to kind of survive and evolve and change. Um, but all of those things are a part of, um, getting it to think more entrepreneurially sometimes. You know, and you've got a range of personalities.

You've got some people who really just are excited to go design a house and build a house. I just got to [01:31:00] get it out of my system. And then there's people who are really like, I don't know, I'm in this architecture program. I'm not even sure I want to be an architect. So, the other thing through this course is I bring in guest speakers and.

All these wonderful people I know, I get an opportunity to invite them in and give talks. And so I had, last year I had a venture capitalist come in and talk about, they're one of the largest venture capitalists in the AEC industry. So in terms of how they think about innovation and how they identify, uh, people in the space to what to fund.

within architecture and construction. I had, uh, you know, a woman from, uh, mass design, a design director there talk a little, it's such a unique practice and how they're organized and their origin story is beautiful. Um, there's a different way of thinking that is it, And for all intents and purposes, an architecture practice, as anyone would imagine, but they do such different and unique work and are meeting different needs around the world and in a really beautiful and special way.

So, so [01:32:00] through guest speakers, this next one, I've got a software developer

coming in. I've got, um, uh, in academia, uh, we're teaching and creating frameworks for, for that next generation of where. The teaching pedagogy needs to go in a conversation around that. So I do try to draw in, uh, you know, the, the listening and reading allows me to draw on really.

different influences to help build that big pool of ideas for them to draw from to do interesting stuff. And then the guest speakers are a little bit more specific, but they're often people that, you know, what I asked them to do, I give them pretty, you know, a lot of flexibility to develop whatever they want for a presentation.

And then. Carry a conversation with the students. They often tell 'em, just start with your story.

Just tell your trajectory. And I, it really helps when students hear that not everybody just goes, gets the job and just works there for, you know, 30 years. Uh, a lot of people, they move around a few places.

They're not sure what kind of architecture they [01:33:00] wanna do. Like you said, some drift out of it, but they're on the edge or they're still servicing it. Um, but a different way, um. And then some have left it, you know, kind of entirely or never really were an architect like this venture capitalist, never really trained as an architect, but now is a critical part of innovation in architecture and construction because they are working on a financial side of how you make ideas happen.

So it's a, um, it's a nice combination of guest speakers that again show reality about how some people have developed their trajectory and that there's lots of opportunities around that.

My hope, you know, as someone who's deeply invested in the built environment, I want the smartest and brightest people working on the buildings that shape our world.

Um, so I hope the great talent stays within it and they just find the ways in which, as the profession continues to evolve, they become real

leaders in shaping the evolution of it.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I'm curious, are there I assume you maybe did a little bit of research about the overall [01:34:00] idea of this course. Do you know if there are other courses out there? Because I think this is a topic that came up in my episode that you have a link to in your syllabus with Ian Janicki. And we talked about kind of the scratching your own itch and entrepreneurship Um, trained as an architect, but kind of maybe, maybe doing any number of things from that. And really talking about entrepreneurship in. Architect, architectural education, because a lot of it really isn't a lot of architectural, it's just about design, or it's about whatever that school's kind of Purpose is, and, and most, most of the time it seems like that goes back to teaching people how to be, become great designers. But there's so much more opportunity out there, and, and it seems like there's probably a dearth of, of classes around entrepreneurship specifically because we've got so many other classes that we, so many things that we have to check off because of accreditation and things. Do, do you know if other ones exist and, or,

Matthew Krissel: I, I know, I know it's a, it's [01:35:00] a kind of buzzword that a lot of people will say, you know, whether they're actually able to execute it as, as an actual course, as opposed to maybe as a one week topic in a, in a space or a conversation. Um, certainly I, I got to imagine a lot of studio briefs are shaping around that, you know, the studio professors probably developing a way to kind of think as a product or something new, something different and try to try to expand the thinking.

So that's a great way to compliment. You know, if I'm talking a lot about organizational side, then you have the kind of, uh, you know, the building manifestation side of that through a studio, uh, course is a great way to visit. But when you look around at all these amazing universities and you see there still aren't the kind of cross pollination you might expect or desire, like why?

You know, you have like, uh, like University of Pennsylvania, I don't know, just the Wharton School. Ever really, could you get a Wharton student on your studio project as a collaborator? What would happen if you could convince someone to work with you for two weeks on an idea, [01:36:00] or could you actually develop some things that actually start to link with a business school program or with, you know, some of these other spaces where people are talking about similar things in terms of forming ideas to make big change in the world.

But they all have different skills and means how they want to do it. So it would be wonderful to see not just within the programs themselves, but how you kind of start to de silo even the kind of architecture schools. If again, the goal is to try and do this at the, that point of, of education, certainly in practice, in the real world, we can, we can, we can do that.

We can create those relationships, foster those kind of conversations. In fact, the story of mass design is a beautiful, that origin story, if you're not familiar, um, and I'm paraphrasing, uh, but the way it was described to me was, you know, the founders essentially went to a lecture in the medical school, and, uh, this doctor was talking about all these things that, For there, these two architecture students were thinking, Gosh, this sounds like a lot of [01:37:00] architecture happening in here.

They went up to him afterwards and said, You know, who's the architect you work with on this?

I don't work with an architect. What are you talking about? I've never even talked to an architect.

Hey, could we be your architect

Here's what we can do for you. You know, those kinds of, um, just even getting out of the architectural, let's say, lecture circuit.

and figuring out what's going on in the other programs, whether you're a professional or student still,

uh, you will find ways to start to build relationships and connections that will start these kind of cross disciplinary,

uh, moments and that kind of combinatorial thinking.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I would say any, any, any organized group would benefit from having an architect in it. Like any board of directors for, any kind of organization because we are trained a little bit differently than almost any other kind of professional organization. S uh, you know, outcome, uh, it's like architects are problem solvers, but in a very different way than most people.

Like if you, if you had a group [01:38:00] of, like you're talking about a board of directors at a, for, it could be a city, it could be a healthcare, it could be law, it could be real estate, it could be anything. And I think. If you had an architect on there, they would have such a different point of view when it came to the challenges that they were dealing with and how to go about solving some of those that they would be like, Whoa, and you don't have to even be talking about architecture. It doesn't have to be an architectural answer, right? It could be just how do we go about figuring this out? And to me, I think there's so much value in. the training that we have, like you said earlier, can be applied to so many other things. And that, as an architect then, gives you inroads

to become the go to person when any one of those people and, and beyond has a, a challenge that they need kind of architectural thinking applied to. And it builds amazing relationships and opportunities.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. And it's one of those things I think we take for granted. We forget that, um, [01:39:00] because we are so used to working with uncertainty, we're so used to operating years in the future. Our whole life is a simulation, right? All our work is, it doesn't exist. I'm designing a world that doesn't exist. I'm constantly in a simulation, right?

Evan Troxel: Right. Living in the future. Yep.

Matthew Krissel: And even just how to operate comprehensively and holistically, just like how to really step back, reframe, think more broadly, make sure you're thinking downstream, all the simultaneity of complex problems, uh, if you, we take that for granted, I think, unfortunately, that that is a rare set of skills that a well trained architect, uh, can't have.

who's done a few things in their career,

uh, does bring a different mindset and capacity and wherewithal to, uh, engage, keep a couple plates spinning at the same time, uh, be open minded,

Evan Troxel: Micro, macro at the

Matthew Krissel: thoughtful, yeah, moving and changing scale seamlessly. And again, that kind of comfort with knowing when things are [01:40:00] hard and complicated, but solvable.

So you don't have to worry about that right now. People get wound around the axle around things that are like way out of sync with the first order problems you got, the first principles you got to hit.

Hey, that's hard. We'll get to that. We've got time later. Let's just focus. These three things are where we need to get to today.

That is a, uh, it's, you know, and that's not a universal skill of every architect. Obviously there's lots of diversity in the profession, um, but the training itself is geared towards that way of thinking.

And, um,

yeah, there's, there's value in the hardest part, I guess, is probably that people just don't have time.

it's, it's the other age old problem in the profession is how do I find the time to go

Evan Troxel: Find more time. Yep.

Matthew Krissel: be on these boards and start engaging with these volunteer groups or, you know,

uh, so if only we could get the, you know, the broader societal appreciation and interest in that,

That cross pollination.

Evan Troxel: Well, we'll talk about that, the value of an architect and where you spend your time. Like, like, [01:41:00] yeah, okay, you do have to find, maybe you have to find more time. Maybe you can spend less time doing some of the incredibly mundane stuff that architects are tasked with doing. Automate that stuff, right? Like outsource it to, Yeah. a computer, right? Whatever you, however you want to frame that. But, but then really applying your time to where the value of an architect is to show people, show others around you what the value of an architect is. Like that seems like a self fulfilling prophecy on some level. It's like that's the kind of work we should be doing and that we want to be doing. How could we facilitate that happening? It's by actually taking the step forward. to start to do that, that then starts to become more of what you do. And, and, the, the, society's perception of what an architect does has nothing, usually is incongruent with what we actually end up doing, right? And, and there's all of this You know, hand wringing around nobody understands the value of an architect and the fees are [01:42:00] keep getting lower and lower and it's like, well, because what are you doing about that?

You're just continuing to do the mundane stuff that somebody can outbid you for because it's a race to the bottom. You know, fees just keep going down for that kind of stuff because it doesn't, it is a commodity. Like that, that part of it is commoditized. You need to focus on where the real value is. It seems to me like, Participating these kinds of things, finding the time, making the time to participate in these kinds of things are actually where the value is created. It's like, if you

give somebody a way to do something that they thought was impossible, and for you it was like, that was impossible? If you think that's impossible, you should see what we do, you know,

Matthew Krissel: all day long, yeah,

Evan Troxel: all day long. all the time.

Matthew Krissel: goes back to

asking the right question is so critical and the other great skill I find architects do that a lot of people aren't as capable is, you know, when to kind of expand the problem or when to redraw the boundaries of a problem, uh, just [01:43:00] because you start in one place doesn't necessarily mean you have to actually, you know, did you, did you really, you know, kind of reorganize things?

And this is, you know, going back to what we, Yeah. The earlier part of the conversation around the, that kind of frontier period of 2003, four or five, all the emergence of these new tools with the promise of all this efficiency gains. And then you'd hear all the kind of the folks who never really engaged the digital tools, but were.

Plugged into the amount of work, how many people it took to do a product. Hey, there's been no efficiency gains. What's going on? The project still takes 10 people and I'm this and we're not we're getting all this technology. Where is it?

And when you really start to think back to that time period, you know, living through that and being one of the ones in that production mode through those tool sets.

You start to realize, like, I remember when we would make these huge leaps in gains, you know, when a rendering would take a week and now it would take three days, now it took one day, we never stopped to ask, hey, what do I want to do with this time? We gained. I just made more options. Like I [01:44:00] did more rendering.

So, so we just, we filled that vacuum with busy work. We filled it with

now. Part of it is when you do great projects, you say, well, maybe. You know, seeing the problem or being able to see more parts of the building, be able to cut more sections and walk through the building at some point and probably made the project better.

I made the design better. I saw things I would have missed or I was able to develop an idea in a different way because I could see it in a new way. So there were probably there's a threshold somewhere in there where it wasn't all a waste of time, like the extra 5 days. I never got back just by generating a bunch of strop and options.

Um, But I don't know where that line was somewhere in there made the project better and somewhere it probably was too much and we could have dialed it way back. We didn't need 10 options. We needed 3 really good ones, right? That's it, you know, refocusing your time to think through what are the 3, what are the 3 really good ones, you know, that are actually going to set this project up for, instead of just generating a bunch of stuff, just filled up the screen.

So I sit there and I say, you know, where we are now, we're on this next frontier. [01:45:00] We're on the precipice of another radical reorganization of our relationship to time. Right. So we think about artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and automation, all these other things we, we think we can do part of the excitement.

After the novelty of all the goofy image making wears off is this question of, Hey, can I really reorganize my time and what would we do with this time if we get more time? So what I don't want to see the pressure to do what happened 20 years ago. We just filled the time with busy work. We filled the time with just more and more and more and more and more because we're already getting asked to do more for less, right?

The fees are getting tighter. The time is getting tighter, but we have to draw more in order to meet. You know, all that kind of insurance and liability issues and more risk gets shunted, you know, onto the design team to draw more, put more details in and all that. But this question of if we start to change our relationship to time of what we're actually doing.

What do we want to do with it? It's a real question. I want to see the profession tackle, because it could be, hey, that now allows me to do [01:46:00] these three other things. It allows me to do these things that expand my business development opportunities. It allows me to make the project better by doing something other than just iterating, for example, um, or it allows us to take on some of the other, you know, Larger systemic challenges of the profession, burnout, too much time, you know, overtime, the pay issues, just a number of things.

And the kind of frivolous nature of some of the work that happens,

you know, if we can let some things go and architects, it's hard to let things go. Sometimes we are used to being in control and having, you know, a lot of precision and, and, and, you know, pulling all the strings to gain some things. We're probably gonna have to let some things go.

And so that question of what do we want this to be, you know, this is that embrace our agency to be changemakers and let's design what we

Evan Troxel: It is a design problem.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah,

let's just not let,

Evan Troxel: think about our businesses as a design problem or our, our, our, approach or, but it is, it,

it's all a design problem. yeah.

Matthew Krissel: yeah. And that's part of what I want to get the students in this class to think about. Part [01:47:00] of what, when I talk about, you know, we talked about, we've been in these kind of lecture circuits in the same orbit for a while. Part of the things I've been challenging folks in this space is to think a little bigger, think a little broader, but also really be introspective about how we're operating, how we're using our time, how we're organizing ourselves, uh, to really embrace this moment

and and not.

Just, you know, get swallowed up with all the demands of projects and running a practice. That's easy to take those efficiency gains and just squander them again. And then it just, then it just becomes the new norm. Now everyone's expecting a thousand, you know, renderings and all these kinds of things instead of more thoughtful, more intentional, more useful, and actually just move the right ideas at the right time by just aligning our resources differently.

Evan Troxel: So what kinds of outcomes have you seen come out of this course that you were excited about? Um, it seems like we keep talking about outcomes. And we talked about kind of identifying gaps and looking for opportunities. [01:48:00] I'm curious if what came out of the first run through in this class that you thought was really interesting. hmm.

Matthew Krissel: it was the, um, the conversations that I knew were just not happening in any other space. So there are people talking and debating about design and ideas and things that were important to that. There just was no other real space for that kind of

the full graduate program to kind of have that exchange as opposed to just in your studio or in a small group perhaps.

And some of the feedback I got from the students were like, gosh, this was, this is, you know, one of my favorite courses. This was so great. I just, we just,

Didn't have access

the same way to the kind of conversations, but even just the, the way I was able to bring some of, um, real world examples in and

Evan Troxel: Well, because it's a haystack out there, right? And finding the gold in there is it's difficult. There's so much content, there's so many books, there's so many podcasts, there's so many YouTube channels. And so you've curated [01:49:00] a lot of this over time. Maybe before you finish your thought there, you could just list some of the people that you are drawing from to feed to these students.

Matthew Krissel: yeah, well, yeah, so the, uh, the quotes I put on the cover was, uh, one from Bruce Mao, a designer, Seth Godin, who's an author, but really in the marketing space, Ryan Holliday, who's an author, but writes about stoic philosophy. Sarah Lewis, who's an art historian up at Harvard. Ed Catmull, who's um, co founder of Pixar, but he really kind of started, he wrote a great book, Creativity, Inc.

Really started as a computer

Evan Troxel: another one on my bookshelf

Matthew Krissel: my gosh, so good.

Adam Grant, as we talked about, an organizational psychologist. He teaches at Wharton. Uh, and then the one, Kind of architect, Molly Hunker is an architect and Kyle Miller is an associate professor at Syracuse. They have a wonderful book, Building Practice, which they just spent some time meeting all these young practices and really talking to them about where they're trying to go, where are they seeing, [01:50:00] you know, opportunities and really focused in on.

The not the same old space, the same old firms that always get talked about, uh, as the ICONS of the profession. Um, how do we get out of those echo chambers? They did it. They went out and talked to other people doing interesting work that aren't getting the same kind of traction, uh, in traditional media.

So those are some of the folks that use these quotes in terms of the podcast world. Let me pull some of these up. So, um, so Steven Johnson, Uh, gosh, he does the one where the great ideas come from, wonderful TED talk. He's got a couple of amazing books. Farsighted is one of the, one of the great books

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Matthew Krissel: Uh, Your Podcast with Ian, which is great. There's such a good conversation around entrepreneurial. He has a certain idea and approach how to do that, execute that. Uh, Wes Coates is, is a writer. She talks about building a culture of rigorous thinking. So how authors build, A culture of kind of thinking and how they can operate in a great conversation.[01:51:00]

One of my other favorite books, David Epstein wrote this book, um, called range and it's about kind of skill stacking. And he,

it's a, it's a cool conversation around specialists and generalists. And he gave us this great example where he was, you know, kind of a young scientist and he kind of put scientists in quotes and when he was in the space of scientists, he was kind of marginal at best, but the moment he went to and said, I'm going to be a sports medicine kind of scientist.

I want to talk about what's going on through the lens of science in sport. All of a sudden he's a genius. He's the smartest person in the room in that topic area. And he talks very candidly. Um,

uh, and this is, I think this is the Chase, the Chase Jarvis, which he is a photographer, so he actually talks a lot about creativity through the lens of photography and other people in that kind of space.

But, um, David Epstein, that book is just fantastic. Highly recommend it. Really about kind of how you, if you just transfer your same skill set [01:52:00] transferring into other places, you can go from being marginal to fantastic pretty fast. Uh, but it's a great discussion. It does a whole compare and contrast of Tiger Woods as kind of the specialist.

And, uh, Roger Federer as the kind of generalist where he, like, didn't really focus on tennis until much later and how it just cultivated such a different kind of person and the way he still reached the, the peak of his, his, uh, profession. Um, uh, there is Tony Fidel, um, who was a long time designer at Apple, wrote a beautiful book called Build, wonderful book about just getting to execution, how to bring products to market.

Wonderful, wonderful book. Uh, Ellen Lupton, she's the chief curator of the contemporary Cooper Hewitt, Adam Grant, Simon Sinek. As I mentioned, you mentioned the book Why, I think the book The Infinite Game, highly recommend. Sarah Lewis, as I mentioned, she wrote a book called The Rise. Blind Spots and Grit are two chapters in that [01:53:00] book I asked the students to read.

And then there's a podcast, which talks about she's an art history historian background, um, Jim Collins. So this was, uh, Tim Ferriss's. He does really wonderful, uh, interviews. He's focused a lot on kind of entrepreneurial, uh, discussions. Jim Collins is kind of the, he wrote the book, Good to Great,

and he does this one about the flywheel and just talks again about kind of organizational thinking in a really unique way through the lens of kind of business.

Seth Godin, as I mentioned, he's got a book called The Practice and, uh, through the lines of it, more as a marketer, but he talks really about how you just got a delivery, talks about like, um,

one of the things he debunks is like writer's block. It's like, you ever notice how

there's no such thing as plumber's block?

Like a plumber doesn't show up and just say, you know what? I can't, I, I, I

don't know. I can't, they just go, right? They just go. And so sometimes how to like break through some of those blocks,

you just got to get comfortable with doing terrible work.

And so it's not writer's block. [01:54:00] You're actually just, you're afraid to do bad work.

So you don't start.

Evan Troxel: Stephen, Stephen, I think he references Stephen Pressfield quite often. They, I'm sure they have some kind of relationship, but he has a wonderful book called The War of Art, instead of The Art

Matthew Krissel: yeah.

Evan Troxel: right? And, uh, it's about, and, and another one I think called just Do the Work. It's just, that's the, the title of the book, Do the Work.

And they're, they're very much about showing up and doing, like trudging through the things that you have to do, so that when the moment arises you're already there, like you're ready for it.

But you, it's, if, if you don't use those muscles, they atrophy, right? And so you have to actually consistently build those muscles so that you can show up and do the work.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. The last

class I'm going to do this semester, there's two things I want to focus on. One is Ethan Mollick's book called Co Intelligence. Fantastic book about artificial intelligence. It's beautifully written. And he actually references some architecture in there.

Um, and I want, so I want to do a class on collective intelligence and Co Intelligence and have a conversation.

So,[01:55:00]

Adam Grant's book, um.

Hidden Potential, Chapter 8, Collective Intelligence. Beautiful chapter about how you see this kind of collective intelligence, which to me is how an architectural practice should be organized.

So I want to have a conversation around collective intelligence and co intelligence

as we think about technology augmenting

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Matthew Krissel: people in the room.

Evan Troxel: Well, let, let's start to wrap up here and talk about artificial intelligence. So I know you're, you have a piece in your syllabus about the use of generative AI. And I'm also, I'm sure this is something that. kind of dovetails into maybe some of the hesitancy or, uh, I don't know how you would describe it in, in your practice, but maybe there isn't any hesitancy.

Um, but, but just kind of this over, this new technology, this new wave of things. And, and I thought it was interesting that

you say in this course, you're expected to use generative AI programs. And I would, I'm very curious to hear why you say that. Um, and then, and maybe how that Dovetails between [01:56:00] academia and practice because you're, you're on both sides of that as well.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. Um, so I will say I had the benefit of when I went out on my own, it was also when I was able to start to explore with a lot of these tools. So one, it gave me time, but also meant I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. I just did whatever I wanted to do. So I built my own research, uh, work.

Uh, I developed the Built Environment Futures Council with Randy Deutch.

She and I co founded that with 15 folks around a national conversation that we met once a month for over a year. debating this about what's happening in practice. What are people seeing? So I spent a good year where I had essentially no constraints around. I could explore and experiment in doing this course.

I expect people to do it because that's what people do.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: The cat's out of the

Evan Troxel: you're

you're basically giving them permission to do something that they're already doing, right?

Matthew Krissel: what I do is I point them to, I would say Carnegie Mellon has some really well written ways of how to engage, um, incite the work. And so, of course, what I want people to do is [01:57:00] use it if it makes you smarter and better and allows you to do other things, or you can, you can query it and ask questions.

So it makes you, you know, again. More kind of comprehensive in your thinking, if you're seeing the problem differently, the thing I just want them to do is start to learn. Okay. Now, how do I cite that? How do I talk about that? How do we frame some of this? So there's some guidelines that Carnegie Mellon provides for that.

Certainly things that are that are written or image generated, but certainly in the conversation, I want to be able to talk about, you know, if they're using it for research, they're using it to kind of. I mean, ultimately, this is where a lot of this is going is you've got five humans in the room and there's going to be three or four non humans participating in a conversation and iterating work and whether it's someone guiding it through prompts and interacting live in a kind of design review kind of environment, or you've done something outside of it and brought it in, or you're using a chat bot as a kind of conversational tool.

I'll be using it for [01:58:00] role playing conversations, you know, in the world of architecture, it's a great opportunity for role playing. You're thinking about you know, work in an area or a neighborhood or an area of expertise you don't know yet. Um, you can play, you know, uh, devil's advocate with it to get it to ask you different questions, take different positions than you can.

Um, so that, that is happening. It's already out there. People are doing it.

So I'd rather create an environment where people, as long as they talk about it and are open about it, we could figure out how to do it ethically and openly, um, not pretend like we're not using it for something.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: Um, let's acknowledge it and let's see how can we make ours all better through it.

I've also dialed way back on the, the kind of, so they're not writing essays and things like that, where it gets, it's very complicated if somebody, you don't quite know what everyone says. So the fact that people have to get up and present work. You know, if they generate things, they use it for a lot of research, and even if it helps frame some of the things they might say, they ultimately have to stand up and defend the work and talk about it [01:59:00] and they have to answer questions.

So, once you put it in a back and forth, you have to own it in a different way. You can't just pass it off like the way you can just write something and publish it. And who knows, you know, if anyone can ever have a back and forth about it. So,

so part of it is the framework allows it to be utilized, I think, in a, in a productive way.

And, uh, useful way,

uh, and, and to be honest with you, it's just acknowledging that it's already happening, so let's figure out how to teach people to use it the right way or a productive way.

Evan Troxel: It's an interesting arms race, right? Because it is just a race to be the commodity. I think it's, it's like BIM in that manner, right? for architects. It's like, everybody saw this as a differentiator. Maybe it was some other design technology. Maybe it was 3d modeling. Maybe it was some real time rendering, whatever it is.

Like now everybody does all those things. Right. And, and it's, it's another tool in the tool box. And it. All of these companies are really competing with each other for your [02:00:00] money to ultimately just be the tool that everybody has, right? It's kind of interesting to think about it that way, but to your point, like, it is the elephant in the room, only if we never talk about it, right?

It's like this thing that is, if you're totally transparent and say, this is a tool that we are leveraging. And, and maybe it's to our advantage. Maybe it opens up something that we didn't think about and maybe not, right? But it's still a valuable conversation to have in this environment and even talk about how it can be leveraged for other, other, in other ways.

I don't know. It's a, it's a, it's a, it is interesting to me how many people are shying away from that conversation.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. I find it, you don't know what it's good at and what's not good at until you actually use it. And I think part of the things, you know, once the, as you start to experiment with its image generation or using, you know, large language models, um, or really useful things like upcodes and some of those where it just natural language interface for [02:01:00] complex things, or just uploading a complex PDF and be able to just communicate with it differently.

Um, what you start to find, and this is another, I, I didn't integrate this into the course, but another great book for your listeners to check out, there's a book called, um, Filter World, and it's about the kind of cultural flattening that happens

from algorithms, essentially, guiding so much of our thinking through the world of algorithms.

So, so much of the media that we consume has been pushed forward by a series of decisions of which we didn't necessarily make, but actually a fairly small group. And so the reason why he gives one example, why do all the coffee shops kind of look the same? Everyone's got a Bayer Edison bulb and the reclaimed wood chair in the corner.

And

he's like, whether I'm in Japan or Brooklyn, they're like, they're all the same. Design

Evan Troxel: vibe. Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: because the, you know, that the kind of culture is all accepted. This is what a, a new coffee shop looks like. This is what a third way of coffee shop. Like that's that look and feel I want. So everyone hands their design or the same.

mood board, right? [02:02:00] And then the designers, they get that, that's all kind of been assimilated. Oh, this is what new and good looks like, right? So to me, I, I, I listened to that, or I read that and I go, okay, this is pretty interesting. If you, if you now take this one step further from, let's say the algorithms of social media and other sort of things that are pushed to us.

We think about that through the lens of artificial intelligence. Now we're the director. I'm guiding the image generation. I have to be aware that ultimately this is going to just average out to something mediocre. And in one of the talks I give, you know, you just do a search of AI. architecture, Google image search.

And you start to, God, it all looks the same and your eyes blur on you. Okay. Cause it's, it's, everything's kind of promoting the same things and responses, right? To me, this gets me excited about this is if you see it opportunistically, you say, okay, and this gets back to some of the value of duration, guiding, editing, learning how to do some of that is that a lot of this is just going to make really [02:03:00] mediocre, really bad stuff, mediocre, and a lot It's just averageness.

It's gonna kind of even out in terms of aesthetic or writing style. It all kind of gets Somewhat bland and repetitive, but you don't, at first it's so dazzling. You don't see that until you do it enough, but then you realize, Oh, wait a second, I still have a lot to add here. I can actually make this a lot better.

Yes. This rewrote it in a really interesting way, or allowed me to put it in the voice of someone differently, or critiqued it for me in a way that I couldn't get that feedback any other way, or on the image generation, I could quickly experiment with something, it would just take too long to generate any other way.

But at the end of the day, I'm still seeing immense. value of that human interaction. With that, now this is, we're nearing the end of 2024, that will change. Right. And that our role and relationship with all these will continue to evolve. But to me, the best way to learn is you've got to experiment and, and start using it, um, in practice.

There's more [02:04:00] challenges to that. Um, I use it in my own practice with real people. projects and real clients in effective ways by inverting certain workflows to kind of reframe goals and aspirations at the beginning of a project. I could capture it a certain way. I could create the interaction a certain way to make it useful and expand the way you'd use a precedent study, for example.

But anyways, it's a, it's something, so I expect people to use it. I want to be able to talk about it. Let's put it on the table and hopefully

Um, you know, people get excited about the, Hey, wait a second, I could actually make this better. Or, this is all, this is nice, but it's not. It's just,

again, a kind of averaging of everything around it.

And you see that opportunistically as a designer.

Evan Troxel: yeah, it's a great starting point beyond nothing, right? So, because typically we're starting from a blank page, right? It's like you, you start with the asking good questions or putting together that, that mood board, you know, whatever it is, like you're, you start to, it's a, [02:05:00] a recent interaction that I had was, uh, I was, I was just down in San Diego for Autodesk University.

And on the way back, I got to stop and talk to some friends while I was in Southern California where I used to live. And, uh, one of my friends said, Hey, so have you ever had a conversation with ChatGPT? And I'm like, well, like, what do you mean by that? Because of course I've used it. And I've, I've, I've had, I've typed something in or I've said something into my phone and then it gives a response.

And then I, I, I might ask for, you know, okay, with this feedback, what would you do differently? Like, and so, so maybe it's like one or two or three or four back and forth. But. He's like, I just had like this mind blowing experience where I had a 45 minute long conversation with ChatGPT while I was driving down here. And he said, I would just challenge you to do that and

see what happens. And so I was going to be driving for two hours to Palm Springs, two and a half hours from San Diego. And, uh, and so I decided, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to give that a try. And I, [02:06:00] I ran some ideas through it and it asked me some very interesting questions as I did it.

And it was this really interesting conversation and it forced me to think about things that I hadn't thought about when I was presenting this idea to it. And then it gave me feedback on my

answers. And. I thought it was genuinely useful

to kind of come away with that with what I would call a starting point.

Right? It's not an endpoint, it's a starting point. And what's even better about it is, at the end, it can give me a list of action items. And it can give me a summary of the things that we talked about. And it can give me, like, here's some next steps, here's some homework, basically. And I thought that was so entirely useful.

And so I would just throw that out there to the listeners of this audience. Try that out and just see what happens. Like, of course, there's no guarantees that

it's going to be insightful or useful at all. I think it

You'll get out of it what you put into it. Right? It's one of those things where it's like, if, if you really [02:07:00] try to do some challenge, think through something rather challenging, it'll give you a direction to go if you don't know which direction to go, at least as a way to start, you know?

And I thought that that was really a, a useful thing for it. It was pretty cool.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah.

seeing it as, again, just another person in the room, another person on the team. It's not the end all be all, you're not jumping to the finish line without doing the work. But if you see it as a collaborator,

somebody that's offering a different point of view, it phrases things in a different way, organizes information, it finds things that you maybe never would have found,

which is really useful actually.

And just as another facet to the whole discourse and dialogue, it's still up to you to, to reorganize, repackage, extend it, do something unique with it, um, as a kind of broader design set of tools and resources. I mean, we've used precedent research all the time in architecture

Evan Troxel: of

Matthew Krissel: and, you know, whether you're getting, you know, oh, here's this great Tom Pfeiffer, [02:08:00] Pavilion down at Rice University and like Kengo Kumano over in Japan.

But gosh, I'm doing one up in Maine. It's so different. And so the fact that we can now hybridize, iterate, reorganize through the media that architects are really useful, which is visual. If you think of it as just a faster way to sketch or to test something, I just want to, I need a building on a city street with a big landscape in front, just so I can scroll through it.

Sketch on it. You can use it just to create even a quick framework as an underline. It's, you know, not as the final solution, but I just need something with some proportion and reality to it

that I can just draw on top of.

That, um, allows you to just work differently. So what I love is it goes back to what we were talking about before, the chance to reorganize our relationship to time, but our workflows too, and, you know, kind of how we're going to work together and, um, really reimagine, which hopefully is part of the, part of the excitement can really get us past some of these other hurdles that we're seeing internally and externally to the [02:09:00] profession.

Evan Troxel: is there anything else that we haven't covered, Matt, that we should, that you wanted to cover today?

Matthew Krissel: We've covered a lot of ground.

Thanks, Evan. Really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation with you today. Of course, I wanted to. Thank Omar Khan and the faculty at Carnegie Mellon, giving me the opportunity to create this course, uh, teach it last year. You know, they took a chance on me on something I pitched a unique idea.

Um, the feedback's been great. I'm excited to be back again this year and hopefully subsequent years to continue to shape, refine it,

develop it out, um, and see where we can really take this together. Um, I'm going to go ahead and wrap I'm hoping that,

Evan Troxel: I'm hoping that other people who are hearing this will, will be like, every architectural education curriculum needs to have something like this. It's just, it's really incredible. And while you're thanking people, I'm just going to thank you for giving back to the architectural profession in this way.

It's, it's really amazing what you're doing there.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, thank you. It's, it's been great to [02:10:00] reconnect and, you know, take so much of what I've learned and be able to have a forum and a platform to share that Yeah. Totally inspiring. Yeah, thank you. Of course, I, um, I wouldn't, this kind of point of view, all this background, this experience, I also just want to share that, uh, you know, my time, Karen Timberlake was really pretty incredible and as I mentioned earlier, I've come to really appreciate how special that was, especially at this midpoint of my career, that kind of late 20s to mid 40s period, the opportunities that were presented there, my partners, the, and the support, um, being in a place that just really challenged everyone at every level to integrate research, to think about technology, uh, reimagine different ways in which we could work.

Really shaped my trajectory and pointed me in a unique direction and I couldn't think of a better place to have been. So really wonderful. I want to thank all the folks there to you that have helped and supported me along on the way. And of course, the opportunity at Perkins&Will [02:11:00] now, where I am just just getting started, um, but certainly my partners there, um.

And this chance to help build out the Philadelphia studio, grow culture, create a place of innovation, uh, and be a part of defining the future of architecture and wherever this goes in this next step of my, my career.

Evan Troxel: You had this really incredible first act, right, that you just talked about it, Karen Timberlake, and you had this really tiny second act. Now you've got the beginning of a third act, right? Like, this is kind of how it goes in, in lives and time spans and stories and all these things. And I mean, who knows if this is really the third act or not, but, um, it's, it's incredible to have witnessed, uh, You know, what I've watched over the last probably 10 years of the things that you've been up to, uh, here and there, the things that you've posted online, and then through the, like, this lecture circuit that you did with the AI stuff, and now that you're teaching this course, and, I mean, it's just, it's, it's really cool to see architects like you, [02:12:00] I mean, and, and here you are. putting things out like that to really challenge people to think differently and to think about the profession differently than, you know, the, the common trope of this is the way we've always done things. Right. So, uh, I, I appreciate that and that you have had the, the serendipitous, you know, chances of being in the places that you have to, to be where you are now, like all of that you look back and you can see the path, right?

You could

never have seen it. I've seen it back then, right, but it's, uh, it's pretty cool to, to have

been somebody on the outside looking in on it as well.

Matthew Krissel: Great. Well, thank you very much, Evan.

Uh, I will say, you know, there are things that, uh, as I've critiqued this course, things I, I need to do better. I gotta continue to expand, um, the resources, the people diversify, some of the, the, the, the reading and listening I'm organizing. Um, it's a continual, um,

kind of curation effort that I'm, I'm working [02:13:00] on.

So I'm happy to share

where I'm at. Uh, please don't see it as the end all be all. I'd love to hear. You know, in the comments or other ways that people can give me feedback, um, you know, other great things that should be, would participate well within this context of how we as architects look beyond architecture and outside of these usual echo chambers of our practice to find inspiration.

Uh, so that would be really helpful to help.

Evan Troxel: well, so speaking of feedback, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you and, and provide feedback or have a conversation? Mm

Matthew Krissel: Uh, certainly on LinkedIn is helpful, uh, in terms of the messaging that is one easy way. Um, I do do some stuff on Instagram, more through my interest in photography, which I know you and I have a passion for photography. We'll have to do another conversation around. I love photography and through the lens of how I've become a better architect through photography and the way we think of photography.

Um, that's a conversation for another day. Uh, my, the firm that I started, I've now kind of transitioned to just kind of a research platform. So I've got a [02:14:00] new section on that that I published a couple of my,

uh, essays I wrote about some thoughts on artificial intelligence, some other things I try to keep up to date there.

So that's creative lab 3, number 3.

com. Uh, that's certainly worth, uh, if you want to look at any of that stuff, but I would say probably LinkedIn would be a good way to get a conversation going.

Evan Troxel: All right. Well, I will put links to all of that in the show notes for this episode. Thanks so much, man. This has been a fun conversation and thank you for doing this work. I think that it's extremely important and, uh, I'm glad that Troxel podcast has a couple of footnotes in your, in your syllabus so that students can get a little bit deeper insight into what other insights people have around architecture that they've shared on this podcast.

So thanks for that. That, that's been a cool thing to see and I appreciate what you're doing.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. And likewise, thanks for everything you do. The other one is Daniel Davis's that I've used from yours. You host wonderful conversations. All this is, you know, comes from all these different [02:15:00] inspirations and these conversations. So what you're doing is a big part of, you know, again, how we move the broader conversation forward.

To me, this is just a way to begin. I'm happy to share anything and hopefully more folks are able to pick this up and run with it.

Evan Troxel: Awesome. Thanks, Matt.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. Thanks a lot.

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César Flores Rodríguez joins the podcast to talk about various challenges and opportunities in digitizing the under-digitalized AEC sector and what the latest thinking in digital twins brings to the table. We cover real-time monitoring, cost reduction, and energy efficiency, and more. We get into the specifics of Nemetschek's new, open DTwin platform and the chellenging task of driving industry adoption.

Episode links:* Cesar on LinkedIn * Nemetschek on LinkedIn * Nemetschek on Twitter/X * Nemetschek on Instagrom * Nemetschek DTwin

About César Flores Rodríguez:César has more than 25 years of experience in the cloud space, especially in solutions for the AEC/O industry: Prior for joining the Nemetschek Group, he was Managing Director of Radius Telecoms Europe and CSO of the listed NFON AG, both companies active in the Telecoms and cloud space. Before that, César was one of the founders and managing director of conject Group, the leading Common Data Environment (CDE) provider for the construction industry in Europe, which he successfully sold to Aconex (now part of Oracle).

His early career was formed in strategy consulting at Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman). He holds a German Spanish double diploma in business administration from Universidad Pontificia Comillas (Madrid) ICADE and ESB Reutlingen.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this episode on YouTube: Episode Transcript: *168: ‘The Challenges of Under-Digitization in AEC’, with César Flores Rodríguez*

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and a little bit of housekeeping before we get into this episode, because October is a busy month for me. And I just returned from the AEC Acoustics Leadership Retreat in Melrose, Florida that I spoke about in the recent episode with Phil Reed and Adam Thomas. I highly recommend that you check that episode out if you missed it.

And the links in the show notes to learn more about the event, because if I could sum up that retreat in one word, it would be: transformational. And that is not hyperbole.

The good news is they have another event coming up in April, which has a different angle. It's a little bit more technical. So again, check out the links in the show notes for that episode with Phil Reed and Adam Thomas.

I'll also be attending Autodesk University once again, this time in San Diego, California, [00:01:00] as I'm sure many of you will be too. And if that's the case, connect and message me on LinkedIn while you're there, I would love to say hello.

Okay. In this episode, I welcome Cesar Flores Rodriguez. Cesar is the Chief Division Officer of the Planning and Design Division and Digital Twin Business Unit Lead at Nemetschek. Cesar has more than 25 years of experience in the cloud space, especially in solutions for the AEC industry. Prior to joining Nemetschek Group, he was Managing Director of Radius Telecoms Europe, and CSO of the listed NFON AG, both companies active in the telecoms and cloud space.

Before that, Cesar was one of the founders and managing director of Conject Group, the leading common data environment provider for the construction industry in Europe, which he successfully sold to Aconex, which is now part of Oracle, his early career. It was formed in strategy [00:02:00] consulting at Mercer Management Consulting, which is now Oliver Wyman. He also holds a German Spanish double diploma in business administration.

In this episode, Cesar and I talk about various challenges and opportunities in digitizing the under digitized AEC sector. A lot of today's conversation is framed by looking through the lens of digital twins, which I know can be a trigger word for a lot of you, but I think it's worth hearing about how Nemetschek is approaching this because it is a little bit different. We cover real-time monitoring, cost reduction, energy efficiency, and a lot more. We get into the specifics of Nemetschek new open DTwin platform and the challenging task of driving industry adoption.

As always, I would appreciate your help in giving this podcast a boost in the very big media landscape by subscribing, wherever you listen. It really does help. And if you'd like to receive an email, when episodes are published with all of the links and other information [00:03:00] from the episodes , You can sign up at trxl.co.

This was a fantastic conversation with Cesar and I hope you'll not only find value in it for yourself, but that you'll help add value to the profession by sharing it with your network. And now without further ado. I bring you my conversation with Cesar Flores Rodriguez.

Evan Troxel: Cesar, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Thanks for having me here, Evan. It's a great pleasure.

Evan Troxel: And as we just said, we're on opposite sides of the planet right now. And that's not new for this podcast, but it's in the evening where you are, it's in the morning where I am. You're coming from Munich, Germany. I'm coming from Oregon on the west coast of the United States. And it's a pleasure to have you here, but also just thinking about it, like how it applies to the AEC industry and how teams have become global, and I know you're not new to that concept, [00:04:00] maybe, maybe you can, uh, just Take us through a little bit of your history and how you've gotten to where you are at Nemetschek.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: I'm happy to do so, Evan, um, so I started in this industry, uh, in the year 2000, uh, approximately, uh, given that I founded a startup at that point in time called Conject, that was very much focused on the collaboration between the different parties, uh, involved in complex projects, uh, like architects and engineers and owners, investors, and all the consultants.

That's how it all started. It eventually moved on, uh, given that we sold it to a company called Aconex at that point in time, uh, and then, uh, we sold Aconex, uh, to Oracle, uh, and then I moved on and did some consulting works, uh, and that's how I got in contact with Nemetschek again, which is, as you're probably aware of, a very well renowned company [00:05:00] here in Germany for fully focusing on software for the AECO industry.

Evan Troxel: and how did you get interested in, in AEC? Was it purely through the connections through the software industry or was it something else?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: In my very first life, job life, uh, I had been doing some consulting already before at two companies, Ruhlenberg and Oliver Wyman. And during these jobs, I actually came the first time into real contact with the real estate and construction industry. Uh, I was fascinated and I also saw the endless possibilities given that.

Our industry is under digitized. Um, I still see, even now after 25 years, probably that's why I've got gray hair for the ones who see me on video. Um, I see the many possibilities, um, our segment offers. And I realized this very early on, I was fascinated and we started to work on it, uh, with a couple of [00:06:00] friends.

And, uh, that's how it all began.

Evan Troxel: So when you say under digitized, I mean, I, I hear that term a lot. Can you, from, from your perspective, kind of explain what you mean when you say that? Because I think a lot of people repeat those words because they've heard somebody else say it. It must be true. Tell, tell us what, what you mean by that.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: And have seen many, many processes that are either manual or or paper based, or in every sense very unproductive. So let me give you a couple of examples.

Evan Troxel: Perfect.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: If I look at something like permitting, it's still a process, at least I can say that for some countries where I'm very close to here in continental Europe, that you need to print out everything that was digitally produced at the very beginning, be it in some nice BIM authoring tools and including all the documentation related to it.

You print [00:07:00] everything out. And you bring it to your local authority regarding the local permit for it. And then they scan it again and put this back with some feedback. And you do exactly the same. You kind of introduce all these changes back again. into your digital document and then you print it out again.

So that's for me, something that is a little bit outdated and these are changes. I think that where we can have a very positive effect upon, um, and this is just one example. The same is true for the handover process, which is. It's also something that has been done for decades manually, and it's still partially being done manually, instead of having a proper handover process in a digital way in front of you.

And we have seen already some very positive changes, um, seeing the introduction of CAD software at some point in time. Now with BIM software [00:08:00] illusionizing into the architect's, um, uh, field. So there's many, many, many good examples, but there's much more that we can do in order to digitize our industry.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I think about all of the different municipalities, all of the different, uh, areas in the process, the steps along the process where just because the technology exists does not, there's no guarantee that people will adopt it or even properly, um, trying to think of the right word here, but adopt is, is what's coming to my brain, right?

Like there, there's just because it exists, doesn't mean that that is going to happen. And so there's training. And there's, there's so many, they have to see the value in it, but they also have to understand where it goes beyond them. Right? And I think a lot of times we introduce these, or we don't introduce, we continue to do these steps because My incentive isn't there to make it necessarily easy for the [00:09:00] next step to happen, right?

This is the way we've always done it, is something that comes up a lot on this podcast, and that, that kind of plagues the, the industry, right, when it comes to moving forward, is, well, this is the way we've always done it, and that we use that as an excuse, and, and the we is multi layered, right? There's, there's many layers to the we onion. And, and so when we think about this idea of technology existing, and you can see the vision of where it can go, but then there are so many individuals along that pathway, and all of these different, you know, machines that already exist out there. And, and I mean, that's something that you're coming up against quite often at Nemetschek, right?

Like you, you create software for the industry and you listen to a lot of people, but at the same time, there's a lot of people who are just not open to hearing. These things, right?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: I couldn't agree more with every word that you just said, um, given that that's how I have experienced it as well. and Nemetschek as well. When he started this company 60 [00:10:00] years ago, and then eventually came up with software solutions for all the engineers, calculating, statics, and other things, that's how it all started.

He had to overcome all these obstacles, and that's the same still today. I'll make a very recent example. As you know, we just started the digital twin here at Nemetschek, and It's not a resistance, it's rather sticking to the old habit of how a building is managed and how it's been refurbished and maintained.

It's such a pity that 95, there's no software or digital replica of a building in so many cases around the globe. Even of very prominent buildings around the globe, there's no digital representation of it. And I believe that represents a huge opportunity, uh, for all the software vendors around the globe as well.

Evan Troxel: There, there's been a few people come on the podcast to [00:11:00] talk about digital twins and some of the conclusions that we've come to on the show, uh, have to do with owners who, what we would call maybe like a serial owner, they, they have many properties or many buildings. And it tended, at least at the time of those conversations, it tended to make sense for owners like that, who are going to. Really be invested in the operations facilities management in a, in a very digital plus analog sense as they move forward. But the onesie twosies, the, the, the small, you know, if, if, if, if an owner has one building or two buildings, like understanding the value proposition of, What a digital twin could potentially be for them.

I think it was is a hard pill to swallow. It's very difficult to have adoption in there. Has anything changed in the in the past few years in that regard when it comes to I mean because like let's be honest. There's a big. step. There's a big [00:12:00] threshold to cross for an owner to continue to maintain a digital twin copy of their physical building, right?

I mean, there, you have to learn software. You have to keep that software up to date. You have to train those people to do that in addition to, you know, the, the physical manual work that they're potentially doing on the building as well. I mean, has anything changed in the past few years in that regard?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Uh, not really, with maybe a couple of exceptions related to, The reality capture has become far cheaper and far easier to realize. If I compare that to, let's say, even five years ago. Um, the second bit is that the connection to existing BMS systems or sensors in a building has also become far easier with some of the connectors becoming more standardized.

Most of the sensors now having an IP address that you can [00:13:00] actually call and therefore then have a proper and meaningful insight into that room or into an outdoor sensor related to temperature or humidity or whatever it is. And so some things have changed, but still, it needs some work. In addition to it, to get it really up and running and to maintain it.

It took us three days to do a full reality capture of the Nemetschek headquarters, for example. It's a 40, 000 square meter house. We connected then all the sensors and we connected also all the sensors to some of the assets. That are in the building and effectively it took us, I'd say, two to three weeks time depending on how detailed you want to go to really fully capture this building into a digital twin.

Now, the value that we perceive, and that's the turning point, is that it must be higher. then eventually the cost that you have in A, getting it [00:14:00] fully captured and B, maintained at that level. So what we see more and more with our customers as a value for them that they perceive as very high is cost efficiencies, energy reduction, then also playing with sustainability and sustainability reports as well that play a vital role, but also some of the processes given that.

You can actually, for example, do some part of the inspections, even remote, um, if required. So there's, for the owners that have maybe a portfolio of buildings, the value is higher, and the more complex the building is with more assets, um, so asset density plays a vital role. I think the higher the value that is perceived out of the digital twin.

Evan Troxel: It is interesting to think about this from an owner's perspective, because I think the criticism of digital twin technology in AEC is that it's a solution looking for a problem, right? It's like, it doesn't equally apply to everybody, I think is one way to look at that. [00:15:00] the other thing is, is like that you were just talking about, the value has to be higher than what it's going to take to actually do this and then do it over time, a very, you know, for as long as the building exists, potentially, right?

So, um, that is a, that is a difficult, um, problem statement for many to say, yeah, we're willing to go down that path. And, um, I come from a world of architecture in the public realm, right? And what I have found on projects that I have worked on, several projects, they don't even have a budget to maintain the building once they get it built.

Like they're spending all of the money just building the project. And they, they're like, we'll figure that part out later. And I think that that's wild, right? And so, Is there even the, the possibility of this digital twin technology being useful, valuable for them? So it sounds like what, what you're saying is, is from a sustainability standpoint and from [00:16:00] potentially even a remote operation standpoint. I mean, there's definitely value to be found there, but, but again, the owners still have to be willing to do that, right? Mm hmm, mm

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: I agree with what you just said. So the owner needs to be willing and to realize that value, um, is there always a budget for it? No. So it's really on us together working sometimes with a client and if I look at the, uh, public site and it's about then going through a tender as well and there needs to be a budget for that tender then in order to really make it happen.

But eventually the outcome of cost efficiency. Uh, and equally, uh, uh, well, combined with energy, um, uh, reduction or consumption, a reduction, plays a vital role. And I believe that's going to happen more and more as we see a regulation coming in strongly in a way to Let's say, control energy in buildings much better as we [00:17:00] have seen so far.

I don't know if you are aware, but in Spain for example, there has been some regulation in place, that at 10pm, in inner cities, you have to turn off the light. Um, in shops and in banks, for example, so where you don't need light, but you need to control that. You need to have a report on that. You need to ensure that it really happens from a customer perspective.

That's where something like a digital twin can really help you because this, I believe, is only the start of it. There will be much more processes of that kind coming through regulation.

Evan Troxel: It's interesting to think about this situation from kind of a, um, What's the word I'm looking for? It's like when you can play these scenarios out in advance, right? You can, you can basically do a simulation on if we turn this off at this time, or if we manage these things in this way, maybe it's the window shades to manage solar heat gain, or then we can, you can actually tie those. things to budget numbers, [00:18:00] right? And then you can actually play that out ahead of time without trying it in real time. Try it in the computer, right? First before you do it in the physical world to actually see what you can expect potentially to come out of those things. I mean, is that, are you seeing people kind of play these digital twins kind of like a video game where they're doing these scenarios, running scenarios for all kinds of things like that?

And maybe you can give some examples of the types of things people are doing with them.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Yeah, I think what you're alluding to is simulations of these kind of things. It may be all sorts of things, by the way, it may be heating, um, for example, it may be lightening, um, and we see that very often, uh, at Nemetschek, um, overall. So we have seen customers that even then, uh, turned off full buildings.

We had that for the first time two years ago, um, during the sort of energy crisis, as we called it here over in Europe. Um, given that there was a [00:19:00] strong power shortage, um, and then customers slowly started to turn off full office buildings and said we're going to redirect all our people to go to the other building.

We put some integrated workspace management that allows the people then to book their places and go in and we shut down. Water, electricity, and every other consumption, um, source, um, in the other building. And now they are starting off, well, again, some buildings, as people are getting back more and more to the offices.

But that's how they manage it. And now they are starting to optimize that. Because, um, actually office buildings are very inefficient, in a sense that they are not used at night, and they are usually not used over the weekend. So they are actually consuming energy, nevertheless, in all these times. So there's a lot of optimization in the not office hours that can happen for a building.

[00:20:00] I

Evan Troxel: office buildings didn't turn off and nobody was going to them, but they continued to operate as if they were full of people. I mean, I saw that first firsthand, you could have three people in an office, but it was operating as if it was full of 300 people with the lighting, with the cooling, with the heating, with the window shade, with, with everything. And that building had sensors. It had the ability to do the things that you're talking about. And so is, is it, does it actually just take a crisis? Like what is actually going to get people to change their behavior in order? Again, the tools exist. You can actually link the digital twin to the building management system.

You can remote control a building. You can get these reports. You can run these situ simulations. And yet, I mean, it's amazing to hear that, that that's happening in a place like Spain, but I, I think in the U. S. I, I would be surprised if it's happening hardly anywhere. I mean, maybe it is happening in, in [00:21:00] very large urban areas in, in certain situations, but, and our building stock is so old compared to, you know, having lots of buildings don't have sensors, right?

Lots of buildings don't have these remote control abilities. So there, there's this huge spectrum of. technology that exists in the physical world. There's so many barriers to something like this. I mean, it just sounds like a monumental thing to overcome. And, and I'm just wondering, like, is it actually just going to take more critical, urgent scenarios, like an energy crisis for people to actually perk up?

And because in my house, I'm sorry to go on so long here in my house, when I leave for vacation, like I, I do all of these things because I pay the bills. Right? And so, and so, like, people who manage buildings, I don't, like, it's not their money. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a corporate entity's money, and [00:22:00] it's just the cost of doing business.

And again, like, kind of really critically analyzing these things is, again, back to my idea, is such a monumental task to, to really take this on. And so Is it a crisis? Is that what we need? More crises to, to drive

behavioral change?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Okay, so first of all, Exogene factors like the energy crisis, um, uh, obviously, obviously have fostered many changes in the world. Take home office as a good example. Suddenly home office was everywhere. Um, so that's a typical example of how things can change rapidly. I think regulatory also helps as well.

Um, probably we are more prone to it here in Europe, um, as we kind of Uh, always looking up to the state to regulate such things, or the European Union if some new act comes into act. third, The example that I made about that office [00:23:00] building that was in Germany, this was a big industrial company that has to really manage costs really tightly.

And what they saw was that in their portfolio of buildings, since there was no use of the building, the energy bill was still so high, given it was the energy crisis and the electricity really, Uh, the electricity prices were sky high. They decided to say, we need to do something about it. There must be something that we can do about it.

And the introduction of software helped them to reduce, uh, the energy bill during that time, um, in terms of KWH consumption as one example, also water and all the other, uh, sources. So for me, it's. It's sustainability is a big issue and that's becoming stronger as well in Europe. It's cost reduction, it's regulatory, and it's some exogene factors.

So, I believe these are four major drivers to kind of really [00:24:00] initiate these kind of changes from outside as well.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about the new Digital Twin platform. I saw a word on the website that really piqued my interest, which was open. And maybe you can start off by talking about an open Digital Twin platform.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Yes, I think that goes and ties back a little bit to the NEMATRAC history. NEMATRAC has been always promoting IFC and open standards. Um, that's something that we really believe in. We don't want to create proprietary standards and proprietary formats, but rather have the data really, flow freely between the different applications.

Um, given for some of the buildings, there is already data that is existing in very different formats and from very different vendors around the globe. I'll take BIM as a good example for that. We have created our digital twin platform in such a way that Any [00:25:00] format we try to read in, even if it's not a Nemetschek format explicitly, that is, um, if by design, um, that means that any of our big competitors of Nemetschek, we can read in their format in a proprietary way and thereby then analyze the data for the ideal usage of the digital twin.

That's true also for point clouds, it's true for photogrammetry, they're very different formats. And we have built it up in such a way that it can be read in, so we can, we do not create silos, we create something that is a real open platform.

Evan Troxel: Interesting. So give us an idea of what it actually means to use your platform. So it sounds like it's, it can be authored that the, the model can be authored just about in any way, right? It could, it could start as a BIM and it could go like the building hasn't even built yet, but you could also do photogrammetry.

You could also do a laser scan of an existing building and bring that in. And then what are you doing in the platform and how are we accessing that? Is it a desktop [00:26:00] application? Is it through a web browser, et cetera? Give it, give us an idea.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: So, what you do is usually for existing buildings, in this case, because that's really most of our cases that we are currently finding, is to really fully digitize that building. And that means that we take point clouds with some of our partners, we do photogrammetry, we take photos with drones, and we combine it with everything that we can find that already exists digitally.

That means any BIM model or CAD model. And what we are able to do is to overlay all that information. Um, so what we, we have eaten or drank our own champagne, um, and we have actually, as I said already before, done the same for the Nemetschek headquarter, and we had different formats and different, uh, authoring tools, CAD and BIM that had been used in the past.

And we combined all that information with the point clouds and the photogrammetry and photogrammetry to come to a real complete [00:27:00] view of. what the building currently actually is. We then connect to the BMS system here. We installed, because nowadays sensors are relatively cheap, indoor sensors everywhere in the building as well, to measure occupancy, temperature, CO2 levels.

Even, you may laugh now, Virus Intensity, that's also measurable nowadays. Radon, and all of that is very applicable, not only to us, but also to hospitals as a good example for that, or for airports when it comes down to really measure a temperature rise in some corner of the airport where you don't see the fire, but it's kind of there, and you need to control it.

So, these are very Active examples of what we see, how a digital twin can be used, and how really to implement it in trouble.

Evan Troxel: So I imagine the authoring process, though, of kind of, um, filtering through many different layers and different types of information to [00:28:00] really get it down to something that is lightweight and useful is still a process that, that takes People have to go through, right? And, and then you're, you're not just connecting to a BMS.

You're also placing some representative node of what those sensors are, where they're located, right? In the model. So there's, there's still, can you give it an idea of And I know it would be different for every project, but just like, what is the process you go through once you capture the building that you then go through to get to a usable digital twin for various outcomes?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Yeah, um, good point. So what we do then is really to locate all the sensors and, um, really connect them with the right asset, the right room, and everything that is already in that digital representation of the asset itself. Once that is done, we connect all these points then, um, in such a way that It connects to our BI engine that [00:29:00] is in our digital twin.

We also extract from the authoring tools every bit of information that we can get, be it all the attributes, for example, from a BIM model. Whatever we can find, we try to really extract. And then we combine it to reports for the clients. It depends on what the client wants. It's very easy to do that, but in the end, there's some, let's say, logic that you need to apply to combine, for example, the occupancy sensor with all the rooms and then say, okay, please come up with an occupancy report that shows me on average per day occupancy for the specific floor, for example, if you want to do it by floor in order to make a decision how many floors you want to heat up.

Yeah. That's maybe a good example for that. So you connect the dots of the different data silos in the platform, and then you need to create the report out of it. Whether it's for cost reduction or whether it's for sustainability, as I mentioned [00:30:00] already before, it doesn't matter. In the end, that's the groundwork that you need to do.

Evan Troxel: It is interesting to think about this as like, uh, there's multiple interfaces, right? There's, there's the actual model, but then there's the, the BI, the business intelligence, the reports, the dashboard side of it, right? Which doesn't take a BIM operator. That basically democratizes the output, so that anybody can actually make a decision from it, or at least gain some insights from that.

And if it's a real time Dashboard, right? It's a living document, and it's something that people can actually follow and track trends over time, and that's where insights actually come from, right? It's by using this all the time, and it also kind of changes The decision making function early on in the process to say who is going to use this because it's not like once you get the model, once you plug in all the [00:31:00] sensors and you plug in the data for the different spaces and what they're used for and what are their hours and, you know, is it a meeting room versus a restroom versus a storage room versus a, like, there's so many different Typologies of space inside of these buildings, but it democratizes who can make decisions because it makes it available to so many more people, right?

Once that data is, is it exists or the collection can happen and the reporting. So is there a whole framework on the business intelligence side of things to make it easy to start getting insights quickly, once all of that data is put into the digital twin?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Absolutely, yes. That's what we are trying to achieve, to make the UX, the UI really simple to use from a user perspective. Um, you already asked before and I didn't give you an answer, I just realized. This is a SaaS product, so it's going through the web browser. So it's very, very easy to invite a new user and give [00:32:00] that person access to the data, so that he or she can really come to its own conclusions, take its own decisions, whatever is needed.

So he goes to the, she goes to the BI engine and then starts with what is the kind of data that I would like really to see for which kind of building. So he can do a building deep dive and then combine the different data sets that I have at my hands to come to one comprehensive report that I need in order to take my decision in a proper way.

Evan Troxel: So, so talk a little bit more about what people are experiencing, like the kinds of benefits that they're experiencing by doing this, because if it's a SaaS model, it has to provide continual value. It has to provide value over time. And so just give some examples potentially of, of what, what you're hearing from your customers.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: So it's really real time monitoring is one of the major values that is realized and that by that real time monitoring the whole time they're actually capable of [00:33:00] then achieving as I said before already cost reduction through energy reduction but also Uh, come up with some new reports that allow them to make decisions around refurbishments or maintain, maintenance.

Uh, I'll make one of my favorite examples, um, if you've got a big facility or actually a set of facility, a portfolio of facilities in one place, you may want to take the decision, to replace your air cons that you have on site. But for that purpose, you would need to know how many air cons you have, what model you have, what is the energy consumption of that air con eventually.

So, if you buy a new one, what's the break even then? So, you need to compel all the information from the existing ones that you already have in your digital twin, and then extract that information and compare it with a potential new one, that actually has maybe an energy consumption that is half of it and half the price [00:34:00] therefore.

So then you need to also add the capex cost and the installation cost of it. And that's your beautiful business case. So that's something, but there, there are also very simplistic cases. It may be even just to check the fire extinguishers as simple as that. So it's a point cloud and we have written, written a routine to really.

identify all the fire extinguishers because a lot of companies do not know where are my fire extinguishers, how many do I have? It's very simple cases as well that we are trying to solve for our customers.

Evan Troxel: That's a really great example. I mean, because it's not like the fire extinguisher has a sensor on it, or maybe, maybe I'm wrong, but right, but, but knowing where they are, what model it is, when they need to be checked, when they need to be serviced or replaced. And it's things like that that enable. An effective ma because what, what would be worse than having a fire extinguisher that is broken or does, it does it's expired, [00:35:00] for example, right?

When something wrong actually goes wrong. I mean, that, that to me, if you can have a dashboard that basically lays out a thing for your facilities, maintenance and operations team to be doing all the time, that seems to make a, a great use case right there for something like this.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: It's even very basic processes like the identification of these fire extinguishers as they don't know where some type of, most of the cases actually where they are. That also applies for all sorts of things like sprinklers or so many little components in the building. um, that make a difference, but they need to be controlled, they need to be checked, the battery needs to be replaced, and instead of doing that continuously, you can really measure it.

They sometimes have an IP address in the meantime, uh, so you can really fully integrate them into the digital twin, um, there as well. And, uh, AI, that's incredible, the [00:36:00] advances that we see there, allows us to identify, um, easily, in the point clouds, many of these aspects. So if the point cloud has a certain quality, we are able to identify The fire extinguishers or the sprinklers or whatever it is.

At least then we have the location and then we, somebody can be sent to really take on the very little nitty gritty attributes of that fire extinguisher if we don't have it. Because for most of the existing building that information does not exist. Here we can help with a concrete use case that is very pragmatic.

Evan Troxel: And it actually lays out a plan for you to follow to be able to get the most value out of something like this, right?

I think that's what's actually interesting about it is like somebody doesn't have to figure that out. like you're saying, AI can do that. So what I'm assuming what you're saying there when you, when you talk about AI, it's like, if you have a photogrammetry model or a laser scan and accompanied with 360 degree photographs, right? You can, you can do like a [00:37:00] computer vision analysis of that. And it can say that is a fire extinguisher with 98%, you know, positively like that. That's what that is. That's a light fixture. That's a fire extinguisher. Now we know where they are, and then you can actually have. A to do list to send your building maintenance out to identify and catalog, or just apply those attributes to those points in the model so that you have a full, uh, you know, exactly what's in your model.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Yes,

Evan Troxel: then

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: I couldn't describe it better. We are going to the extreme that we are working not only on this concrete little pragmatic use cases, but to have a full, what we call, scan to BIM automated. That means, if you have a point cloud and photogrammetry of the building, Our AI engine is not perfect yet. We are at a level of, let's say, 95, 96%.

It's not perfect yet, but we are getting there. And as a matter of [00:38:00] time, we will release something that will allow our customers then to create an automated asset register of its buildings. That is a great value, and it will exactly know, okay, that's where maybe that, I don't know, table, um, chair, and everything is located, and it's located in a certain room, and it's lo So you've got all the information, and you've written it at the moment.

Collecting all of that is a manual, typical manual, tedious work. that can be automated and it becomes an object, a database object, and not just some points in the cloud or just some pixels in a photo. That makes it really valuable information.

Evan Troxel: that would need to be updated from time to time because furniture moves around, for example, right?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: There are some goods that, and assets that will be moved around with certainty, so it depends on the accuracy of the use case needed, uh, how often you want to digitize than you're building [00:39:00] inside. Um, probably not that often, but a lot of the assets are actually quite fixed. within a typical room, be it the heating, be it the lightning, uh, lighting, be it the switches, be it sockets, be it whatever it is, all of that is quite fixed.

And identifying these structures is extremely valuable depending on the use case. Think about a hospital, for example. In a hospital, having that information, if you've got an old hospital somewhere, having that information is extremely valuable. Or for an airport, this is exactly the same.

Evan Troxel: Right. It, it seems too that what else is valuable is what is in the walls, what is above the ceiling. Is there, has there been any advancements in capturing that kind of information that, I mean, obviously it's, it's tedious, it's probably going to remain tedious, but has the technology gotten better to capture that, maybe not in a wall, but above a suspended ceiling, for example, of what's going on up there with piping and ductwork [00:40:00] and locations of things. Any advancement there?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Yes, um, actually, um, so we're playing around with LIDAR technology, um, to look at least a little bit behind the walls, as good as we can. Um, again, it's not yet there, as perfect as we want it to be, maybe in that sense we're a bit too German, um, but, That's something I believe requires accuracy, uh, so when we really look behind the walls.

Um, so, I think two examples we just used make so much sense and they will create so much value, because looking behind the walls is something at the moment that is extremely tedious, as you need to really I don't know, scratch off the wall or go to the ceiling and remove some of the blinders, whatever it is, that's the surface there.

That's tough. So LiDAR may be a technology that can help us here. So we are seeing some advances there and we're working together with some startups. [00:41:00] But I mean, the basics already would be great. Scan to BIM already would be a great move ahead. I mean, looking behind the walls and ceilings, that would be just the next step already, but Already the first one needs to be made.

Evan Troxel: So, so you, your, your company, you obviously understand the value of, uh, the, the BIM asset, right? And, and when you go from scan to BIM, depending on the age of the building, I mean, you could get very different. Output from that process, if the building is 200 years old, which, you know, in Germany has probably not, I'm sure there are many examples exist versus something that is, is much more newly constructed as far as like, Parallel walls and level floors and level ceilings.

And I mean, so, so doing the scan to BIM process, there is a level of accuracy that is useful, but then there's also a level of accuracy that is, as an architect, when it comes [00:42:00] to being able to do things with that BIM model, it is impossible if it is too accurate sometimes, right? Like it, it just. If the floors are, are not level.

Okay. On some, in some way, that's actually not useful to me as an architect, I need the floor to be level so that I can do things to it. In the software, how, how does that balance get achieved in that scan to BIM process? From, from Emtex point of view, like, like how are you giving people the con, the control that they want to get out of that rather than making that decision for them? Because I've again been through the process where. I got a BIM model from a scan and it was too accurate. The wall was slightly off. Okay, well that's not useful to me because maybe we just didn't have that conversation up front. Are you guys having those conversations? How is that being affected? How is that affecting the outcome of the scan to BIM process?

Okay,

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: is exact, is one case [00:43:00] where it's needed in a very high, well, relatively high accuracy level, given that there is a maintain, maintenance process going on or refurbishment, whatever it is. Most of the use cases are more oriented towards operate. and managing a building, but coming back to your point, I think it really depends on the type of building you're in.

For some of the buildings, the accuracy that is needed is that high. I'm talking, I make now an extreme example of a semiconductor building, or a plant, I should say. Accuracy, accuracy there is like everything. It's like you need to be super precise about everything. Whilst if I'm looking at an office building, well, that's not really needed.

It depends on the use case is the answer. So we need to ask our clients, what do you really want? And the same is true also for the point clouds that we advise our customers then to take. What is the level of accuracy that you need? So is it like, I don't [00:44:00] know, a point like two millimeters or is it two centimeters?

What is it that you really need for your specific use case?

Evan Troxel: Yeah, the tolerance is a big issue, right? Because the LiDAR can do something that photogrammetry can't, for example. Uh, and when we draw something from scratch in BIM, we're drawing everything parallel and flat, right? And that's what CAD does. has been designed to do. That's what BIM has been designed to do. And then when it actually gets built, it's something else, entirely, usually, right? And, and so, it goes through, then you have to kind of go through that as built process, and you have to do the comparative analysis of a LiDAR scan to what was built, and then you have to reconcile that in the model. But, again, just like telling the whole story about Digital Twin, this is all part of that.

Like, this is all part of There's so many layers to this onion, and, and it is, it's not easy to, for, for an owner, I think, to actually understand the true [00:45:00] cost, but also the true value proposition that it, that it gives us.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: What you just described perfectly matches also, uh, with our view. So, this whole design through construct process, and then you need to compare, especially when it comes later on to issue management and to hand over, what has been built, and then there are deviations. I've never seen a building where the deviation

is not there.

It doesn't exist, in reality.

And it also changes over time, um, not only physically only, but also in, in the building itself. There's all sorts of changes, sometimes smaller, sometimes big, sometimes bigger ones. And that has an impact, um, on building, um, overall. So, it, it, it, we need to really educate our customers and potential customers on that.

And we see some of them. Realizing the value very early on. Universities are [00:46:00] actually a prime example of that. Um, they actually realize that they have usually kind of old buildings, or a good set of old buildings, sometimes also new buildings, and they're trying to read to match them and to be able to read to manage them properly, uh, in everything that they do with them.

Uh, here Additional Twin is a massive step ahead.

Evan Troxel: Mm. Mm. I'm wondering if there's anything else on the agenda here today that you want to go over when it comes to digital twins that we haven't covered in this conversation so far. Have we missed anything?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: I believe if there's one thing that I would like to add, it's that it's beyond the owner. What I'm realizing, or what we are realizing more and more, it's that It's an operator, and it's also the architects, and also the engineers, and also the ones who write the certificates, for example, for buildings related to sustainability and everything else, that will realize the value out [00:47:00] of such a digital twin.

So we're seeing big companies and consultancies around the world taking the data, And creating new values out of that, like I was just describing, like certificates is a good example for it. Or continuous reports on the building. Um, so there's a lot of value that will be derived just by once and for all having the data of your building in one place.

And that's, I believe, something that at the moment it doesn't exist and that I think it's underestimated at the moment.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, just, just an owner knowing what they own is a huge value proposition

that I think, especially in large buildings. There's not a complete understanding of, of what is actually there. What are the assets? What are their ages? What are their model numbers? What are their warranties? When are they expected to be replaced? And there's so many layers to that, [00:48:00] that I, I think there is a lot of value there. But at the same time, You're talking about a very proactive scenario in a very reactive world, right? Which is, we're just going to wait for that. And, and of course, in many examples, like you've cited in airports and hospitals and fire stations, etc.

Like we can't wait for stuff to break. We have to be ahead. We can't have that scenario rise up because it literally is life or death for me, for people. But when it comes to regular buildings, I'll just say it that way, it's a very reactive world. They wait for the roof to fail. They wait for the air conditioning unit to stop working in the classroom over the, you know, in the school. And that behavior change is very difficult. Um, I'm, I'm rooting for you to help figure that out because I, I do think that not only is there value along the whole path of operations for. new businesses to exist and to extend [00:49:00] relationships. For example, with architects, right? Often like once the building is open and it's occupied, architects are onto the next project. They are not continuing to stay involved. They may do a after occupancy kind of survey to kind of see if it's working out. But, but that relationship really doesn't continue along with that. Owner group or that building because they built it, right? And now we're going to move on to another one, but this does provide an opportunity to stay involved in the satisfaction of using that building the way that it was designed in the operations of that building moving forward. And there are new value propositions, new ways of doing business, I think, that are afforded in, in, with technology like this and with this new way of thinking. So, in that way, I'm very much rooting for you because I feel like architects, if, if people don't understand the value of architects, it's not going to get any better by stopping the relationship when the building [00:50:00] becomes occupied, right?

It actually needs to continue beyond that. And I think architects are in a very good position to, to help owners. Get the most out of their new facility that they just went through this huge, uh, process with to, to bring into reality. So, I, I'm, I am rooting for you and I, I think that, I think that there is legs here, but I, I think it is, uh, you're, you have a monumental task ahead of you.

And it's not just you. Right. There are many people kind of trying to tackle the digital twin. There's the digital twin consortium. Autodesk is obviously has a big push into this. Nemetschek has a big push into this and several startups with the scan process, the scan to BIM process and making sense of all that data.

So, um, it's very interesting to kind of get this update and see where things have come in the last few years, but also potentially where they're going. Okay.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: I can only agree to so many things that you just said, and I am seeing as well that big architectural offices around the [00:51:00] globe are extending their offering into the operate and manage phase as well, for exactly the reason that you just stated, because it makes so much sense. Um, there is also the possibility of extending with a digital twin the lifespan of a building or of an infrastructure.

And allow me to make one very nice example where we have a digital twin of the Kühlbrandbrücke in Hamburg. That's the second most used bridge in Germany.

So this bridge, which crosses a sensitive point in Hamburg, was built 50 years ago. The city does not have money to actually build a new one. So they need to extend the lifespan of the existing one. They have no money. connected 500 sensors to that bridge and created a full digital representation for it.

So they completely, [00:52:00] point clouds and photogrammetry, they created a full BIM model, combined all the sensors and they are measuring live the bridge in order to make sure that they don't miss anything so that the lifespan can be extended, um, given it will take another 10 to 12 years until the new bridge or the new tunnel will be built.

So that's quite a very interesting example where it's not about sustainability or consumption or anything else. It's extending the lifespan of an asset or an infrastructure in that case.

Evan Troxel: It kind of is about sustainability,

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Yeah, true.

Oh, good point.

Evan Troxel: because if you're keeping an asset longer, I mean, that, that is a, that's a worthy goal. What kinds of things are they measuring when it comes to that? Is it, is it stress on the members? Is it cracking? Like what kinds of things are they actually measuring?

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: All and more. It's temperature, humidity, some sensors are inside the concrete and measuring [00:53:00] constantly the cracks and there's also some, I think some noise of sensors if I'm not mistaken. So it's really all sorts of sensors

to really come to a full and comprehensive view of the bridge.

Evan Troxel: Interesting. Wow. Fascinating. Well, thank you for sharing all that and I appreciate you coming on the podcast to share about the latest in Digital Twins and this new open platform that you've created. Maybe you can, we can just finish up here and you can let people know where they can go to learn more about this and then we'll include links to all of those places in the show notes.

But where, where's the best place to send people if they want to learn more about what

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Well, um, there is two, uh, places where they can go to. Either they go to Nemetschek. com, where they already will find a lot of information. And the other, uh, address to go to is Nemetschek DTWIN. com. That's where they will find the specific, um, information related to DTWIN. [00:54:00] That's the name of our platform.

Evan Troxel: Nemetschek, D TWIN, and that's one word, no spaces,

just D T W I N.

Cesar Flores-Rodriguez: Yeah, well, the URL to create is nemetshek dtwin and no space, no dash, no point in between.

Evan Troxel: Okay, great. I will put both of those links in the show notes for this episode. Cesar, thank you so much. it was a great conversation

View Details

Scott Reynolds joins the podcast to talk about the ongoing legal and legislative battles surrounding building codes and their accessibility. He gives us an update on the latest news and happening regarding the Pro Codes Act and elaborates on the contentious issue of copyrighting building regulations that impact AEC and beyond.

Episode links:

Scott on LinkedIn
UpCodes on LinkedIn
UpCodes website
Pro Codes Act (Article on the UpCodes website)
A Threat To Justice—The Pro Codes Act Would Copyright The Law (Forbes)
The Pro Codes Act Is a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (EFF website)
TRXL 021: ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’, with Scott Reynolds
TRXL 025: ‘Copyrighting the Building Code’, with Scott Reynolds
TRXL 123: ‘Bringing AI to the Building Code’, with Scott Reynolds

About Scott Reynolds:

Scott Reynolds is a co-founder and the CEO of UpCodes. Scott comes from a background in architecture, having worked for several years in Hong Kong and New York City at firms including both Kohn Pedersen Fox and Hassell. Being a Y Combinator alumni he has leveraged both industry and startup experience to launch and scale UpCodes.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this episode on YouTube:

Episode Transcript: 167: ‘The Battle Over Building Codes Continues’, with Scott Reynolds
Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, Scott Reynolds returns to the show to discuss the ongoing, legal and legislative battles surrounding building codes and their accessibility. When I was welcoming Scott to the show that you're just about to listen to, I said it was this third time on, but no, I went back and checked the records. This is actually his fourth time. Scott is the co-founder and the CEO of UpCodes. He comes from a background in architecture, having worked for several years in Hong Kong and New York City at firms, including both Kohn Peterson Fox and Hassell. Being a Y Combinator alumni, he has leveraged both industry and startup experience to launch and scale UpCodes.
Today, he's here to give us an update on the latest news and happenings regarding the new Pro Codes Act and elaborates on the contentious issue of [00:01:00] copywriting building regulations that impact AEC and beyond.
In this episode, we talk about the implications of restricting access to the code, the history of lawsuits, and the new push towards legislation that is currently happening.
I encourage you to use the show links in the show notes as a next step, after listening to join in the public discussion and advocacy of this important issue.
As always, I would appreciate your help in giving this podcast a boost in the vast media landscape by subscribing, wherever you listen to let me know that you're a fan.
And if you'd like to receive an email when these episodes come out with all of the links and other information from the episode itself, sign up at trxl.co, where you can also directly support the show by becoming a member. So, thank you so much for listening. And now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Scott Reynolds.

Evan Troxel: [00:02:00] Scott Reynolds, welcome back to the podcast number three for you, and I feel like, uh, we're just on this wheel, it keeps turning, and the, and there is a similar theme that we've experienced on this podcast, uh, but there's updates, and so, I, I hate to say it like this, but like, the more things change, the more they are, they stay the same, right?
And, and through the march of 2020, Progress and technology. There's also still kind of this idea of the old guard really, really, I don't know what's right. They're clamping down, they're hanging on really tightly to the way things maybe, maybe were, or maybe just the way they want things to be, but let's introduce this, this topic and then give us kind of a, um, uh, a background on what you're doing at Upcodes so that that really kind of creates the Venn diagram of the topic that we're actually going to be talking about today.
So start with, well, let's just catch up [00:03:00] on, on like the, the new developments and, and what's, what's going on with the whole idea behind. Copywriting the law.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me back. Great to connect again and chat through this and certainly a lot of updates. Um, so yeah, it's a broad context. Uh, at Upcodes, we take a lot of the regulations and put them together into one searchable database online. Now we've gone, um, you know, added a lot of features and functionality on top of that, but, you know, at the crux of it, That's kind of what we do.
We just, um, aggregate a lot of regulations, uh, into one place and just make them freely open and available to, to the industry. Um, and I know we've covered that in previous, uh, podcasts.
Evan Troxel: Well, put a, put a scale to that because when you say a lot of regulations, like you mean a lot of regulations. So give, give an idea because there's, how many municipalities in the US and everybody's got a different concoction of coded options. And so there's just, there's a ton of stuff out there that people, that architects, engineers, building designers, everybody has to deal with, right?
And, [00:04:00] and so I, that kind of sets this, the idea of what you're actually dealing with when you're providing your service.
Scott Reynolds: yeah, absolutely. And just to talk about the breadth, um, these regulations affect you at the federal level, the state level, city level, and sometimes local, uh, county level. And we try and track as many of those as we can, generally at the federal level, state level, and some cities. So, I think we're over 75 or roughly 80 different jurisdictions, and that's a mix of what I mentioned before. But just to kind of put a number to that, in terms of the code coverage, we have over 6 million sections of code. Those could be sections from the building code, the plumbing code, electrical code, fire codes. And it's constantly evolving over time. So we update over 7, 000 sections per month on average. And actually that number is growing as the library grows.
So it's, it's both a very broad database, but one that constantly evolves. And, and candidly, that's what we spend a lot of time, um, [00:05:00] focusing on and building the technology around is the backend system. How do we actually aggregate all this data and keep it up to date going forward?
Evan Troxel: Mm hmm. Right. So, okay. So now that we have an idea of that's incredible. Six million code sections. And, and I can't, I just, the scale of updating. So why are you updating so much every month? Is that because the code is changing that fast or like, give, give us an idea of like, what's behind that.
Scott Reynolds: Right. Yeah. So it's the code changing both the base adopted codes, but also the amendments. And if you're in one particular jurisdiction, uh, you know, maybe it updates once, twice a year. If you're in somewhere like New York City, a little bit more frequently than that, and everyone's on their own cadence. But when you put, you know, 75 of these jurisdictions together into one place, those updates happen very, very frequently across, um, jurisdictions. across the U. S. So it's, it's just this constantly churning process where we're kind of, you know, it's almost like playing whack a mole. It's maybe Connecticut updates and maybe California updates and Texas and [00:06:00] then New Hampshire. Um, so it's constantly keeping this balance and using our research team to keep on top of these changes and, and track this kind of constantly morphing, um, uh, target.
Evan Troxel: That's incredible. Because as a design professional myself, right? I, I obviously have to, like, like my job is to incorporate my, Design with the building code to land that building in a particular location. And I can't keep on top of those changes. I have to like, I always joke, like with the building product manufacturing industry, where I get an email or a cold call or something for about a new product.
It's like, You're not the only, I can't even spend, if, if every building product manufacturer called me and wanted to spend 20 minutes on the phone, I would never, ever get any work done. And, and that's just one little piece of designing a building, right? There's, there's way bigger fish to fry in the sea of.
designing a building, the building code being a huge piece of that. And for me to be able to rely [00:07:00] on an updated source of information is a very big deal because I have to comply with that, right? To get my building through the AHJ so that it can actually get built.
Scott Reynolds: And in fact, that goes back to the origin of, of the product. I was working in. And, you know, you'd have a project, uh, come in and you're, you're working on it and you're trying to aggregate and pull together what the code is, like get a complete picture of, of what the code is. And we would go to the physical library, you know, get some of the books out, we'd go to the government sites, PDF saved to the company server and try to not only, you know, stitch this together, but understand did those things actually change, you know, since we bought the book and put it on the shelf or the PDF saved down to the company server.
So
Evan Troxel: Oh, we would always have the new the new slip sheets that would,
you know, there were a different color so that we knew when a new version of that page was put in and, and they would release different colors of the pages, a physical paper that went into this three ring binder. throughout the year for the, or, you know, three years, whatever the code cycle was.
And, and it was pretty, I mean, [00:08:00] just, just the cognitive kind of, I don't know, it's not, that's not the right, the right word, but like the administrative level of, of, of, of, of, of, Constantly going in and making sure that you have this current. It was very difficult and so much so that, I mean, you're talking about providing access to the building code and I really think about the younger generations when I think about access to the building code because the older generations like you would go to.
This person who had been an architect for a very long time, and they lived in the code, and they, you would ask them, you would not go to the book first, you would talk to somebody who knew where to look in the book first, they were basically like a librarian for that, the code books that we had, and, and that was an incredible resource, and those people are far and few between in the industry now, and so when you're providing access, You're actually making it, I mean, this whole idea of what technology does, right, and it kind of gets rid of the gatekeepers of this kind of a thing over time by providing access [00:09:00] to more people so they can get into there and find what they're looking for because some of those resources don't really exist as much anymore.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And there's such a barrier to entry. If you're new to the industry, um, say your recent grad or just joining, you don't have those years of experience to jump into the building code and slowly accumulate that, that knowledge. And you end up relying on the few kind of technical leaders in the firm, and they end up getting overwhelmed because everyone's coming to them, knocking on the door and asking these code questions. And that's for a recent grad or someone joining the industry. Or you could be a veteran, but you're jumping into a new project type, you're jumping into a new jurisdiction. Historically, it's been so hard to build up and, and this, this knowledge set of that particular project type and jurisdiction and the, and the codes associated with it. And that's exactly the focus we do is removing those barriers, removing that, that friction, uh, to, to jumping into new code. And, you know, providing free and open access is, I believe, the first step and the kind of the foundation of that. But [00:10:00] what we're really interested in is going beyond that. How do we build automation?
How do we build tools, project management, capturing institutional knowledge for these firms so they can disseminate that through their whole, um, their whole firm,
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Right. So catch us up on what's happened since the last time that we talked because I, I, I didn't go back and listen to the episode, I'll be honest. I mean, too many episodes to go back
through. But, but the last time we talked, you know, there was, we talked about the whole idea of copywriting the law, and there were lawsuits that had been filed in an attempt to copyright the building code.
And so maybe you can kind of speak about that in a general, but, and then in a more specific way, like the whole idea behind copywriting, something that, and who it belongs to as kind of a foundational concept before we get into maybe the, even the changes that have happened since the last time we talked.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and, and this debate has been going on, you know, for literally decades for, for a long, long time. I think the first lawsuit [00:11:00] 2002 or 2004, uh, VEC versus SBCCI, which would go on to become, um, ICC. And it's it's the, uh, what we call the law publishers claiming copyright on, on the kind of content of the codes that get, uh, get adopted into, into law. Now, one of the notable things here is that a lot of these codes are written by volunteers. So industry professionals, uh, government workers coming together to actually write these regulations. Um, now organizations, um, like the ICC or NFPA, um, Convene those committees and they bundle up that code and then sell it back, you know, to the same individual, same volunteers or, you know, other folks in the industry and homeowners, uh, at a pretty substantial price.
So, um, these organizations often do north of a hundred million dollars in revenue. So kind of very substantial cash generating business, um,
and
Evan Troxel: And that's really based on the packaging aspect that you're talking about, right? So there's like a, and you tell me like how they deliver [00:12:00] that now, because I'm not, I'm not up on that, but is it a digital delivery? Is it a paper delivery? Is it a little bit of both still? Where are we at with that?
Scott Reynolds: a little bit of both. Um, so
historically, primarily it was on the physical, uh, book side, and now they've started to migrate into the digital side.
Um, so, so really nice to see that kind of progression and see the kind of advancement of this, you know, portion of our industry. Uh, so, but today it's, it's very much in, afoot in both camps,
especially on, on their side.
Evan Troxel: Okay. So that packaging is what they're then charging for. And, and, I mean, at, working in an architectural firm, there was, there was many code books in this, the office of the size that we had. And, you know, every studio had their own set of code books. And so, I mean, it was, and it was a pretty substantial cost every time they were going to, Go to a new code cycle because the entire book basically needed to be replaced at that point.
And, and that's what's leading to this kind of revenue generation for these publishers.
Scott Reynolds: Right. And, and historically, uh, absolutely the case. But even today, when it's migrated to digital, In many [00:13:00] cases, you actually just pay for access. So these things are behind paywalls and it will vary per, you know, per publisher and how they handle it. But ultimately a portion, and we can get into this, like how big is that portion or, you know, the size of it. Uh, but some of that comes from limiting access to the law. So whether that's complete limitations on, on those laws or restricted access, like not allowing copy paste printing
or for people to build tools on top of that. So it's, it's very much. a kind of monetization by bottlenecking and restricting access to,
to these, to these laws.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's kind of like, uh, It's interesting. I mean, I kind of draw an analogy to, like, uh, the music industry, right? Like, you can't, I couldn't put a backing track of some artist on this podcast and publish it without paying a royalty ahead of time and getting that agreement ahead of time.
Like, first of all, if this was going on YouTube, it would just get struck immediately for, it would get flagged. And, You know, you would probably [00:14:00] have to prove that you had somehow paid for the use of that, but you're talking about like that level of thing where you can actually, there's restrictions, limitations, or just flat out.
No, you can't, you can't even re copy paste, put that onto your drawing set. I don't know, like, tell me kind of what, what are the normal use cases that you, that people may want to do, but are, but can't do with these kind of limitations in place.
Scott Reynolds: And, and yeah, and I will say the, like, so there is the restrictions, uh, but first just to cover the analogy with the music side. Um, I think, you know, like candidly, in my opinion, that makes a lot of sense on, on, on the music industry, but very, very different from construction. The codes we're talking about are literally the law.
They're, they're
adopted into law
and it's a legal requirement. And, um, Unfortunately, uh, and I'm sure we'll cover this in more detail, but the laws, or sorry, the courts, uh, repeatedly have just decided you can't copyright the law. Now that sounds, you know, sounds obvious, but we did need to go through the legal system, needed, uh, [00:15:00] that to be said, all the way up to the Supreme Court.
And, as I said, in extremely clear terms. Um, But just to go back to the use cases and the attempted kind of, uh, uh, limitation of, of those use cases. So exactly like you're saying, um, copy, uh, pasting, putting it onto a drawing sheet or just coordinating internally. Um, so sending, um, code between, um, uh, project stakeholders inside the office, outside the office, talking to the homeowner, talking to the developer owner, uh, talking to the GC. including that in specifications. There's so many overlaps, uh, where you need to exchange this, this, uh, this information because it's just that we live, or we work in a very collaborative industry that relies on that exchange. So if
you constrict that, that flow of information, you're constricting the industry itself.
Evan Troxel: And so that flow of information is cut off. Like you can't, is that, is that part of the terms of use is that you cannot do that kind of thing?
Scott Reynolds: Right, exactly. And it'll [00:16:00] vary by publisher. Um, But that's what we see and limiting, um, uh, the, the flow and, and the kind of reproduction of it. Uh, but also hold another category, which is building tools. So it's, it's limiting, um, Kind of third parties or people to go in and, and build automation or workflow tools to actually help with that, uh, that process. And we could draw analogies to other industries like, like lawyers who have just a huge variety of tools that they can, and products they could put in their, in their tool belt to actually do their day to day job. So it's, it's not just the kind of the, the baseline access to the codes, but also the adjacent tools and, and workflows attached to those that get limited.
Evan Troxel: Could you give an example of kind of the, you know, just what are you talking about here? Like the, and I don't know if it, if an example of something people wish they could do, but they can't or some, or some examples of things that people have tried to do as far as these automations and tools go.
Scott Reynolds: [00:17:00] Yeah, absolutely. So, um, so one example, someone had reached out to us saying, you know, how do you do what we do? Cause we do a lot of automation and project management, um, in this, in the space around codes and, and their idea was around fire sprinklers. So they wanted to do a calculator that would determine how many fire sprinklers you needed for a building, how far apart they should be and starting to help in the schematics so you could start to lay that out and, and, and plan. So it didn't need to be, you know, very manual. Uh, process, but in developing this, uh, he, you know, was, was threatened by, um, a lot of these publishers saying like, Hey, we're going to, we're going to sue you out of business, like stop what you're doing. Uh, don't develop with that. Don't release it. And, and unfortunately that's exactly what happened.
He stopped working on it and it never saw the light of day. So that's the kind of innovation that I think gets suppressed when you don't have that open access to, to a lot of these laws. Yeah.
Evan Troxel: And, and what was the reason behind why they couldn't do that? Like, what, what are they accessing [00:18:00] there that was deemed inaccessible?
Scott Reynolds: Well, I believe the stated reason was just the reproduction of the laws themselves. So in
that calculator, there was references saying like it, this sprinkler needs to be, you know, this distance apart. And here's the code section. That actually
determines that, so you could,
you know, have some transparency in terms of that process. So it's the reproduction of those actual sentences. We're not even talking like, like, you know, chapters or, or different, uh, codebooks. This is just excerpts from that that they
didn't want to reproduce. Now,
that's the stated reason. I think a secondary reason is probably some nervousness around the automation of some of these things. Um, I think there's just a little bit of discomfort with some of the publishers when you start to build sophisticated tools. On top of the, the regulations,
Evan Troxel: And that's the case then with what you're doing at Upcodes, right? Like that, that discomfort about building on top of and displaying and making accessible information that otherwise is behind a paywall.
Scott Reynolds: right? And, and [00:19:00] we just fundamentally, uh, disagree with the fact that you need to pay, uh, to see the loss. We, we believe that everyone, no matter who you are, industry professional or homeowner, should be able to see the legal requirements that, uh, control and, and set up the constraints around your building. Um, but you can build a business model around the tools on top of that. So the free and open access is the foundation. You can build automation, project workflows, educational content that sits on top of that. And that helps the, you know, the power users, the industry professionals, the homeowners kind of navigate through the code.
So
we have a very kind of bright line rule where you don't, or we believe you should never charge people to see and understand the laws. But, but you can create products and workflows that, that, that, yeah, help them navigate through that, that
Evan Troxel: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Interesting. So you said that there, this has gone all the way to the Supreme Court about not being able to copyright the law and that that's been very clear. So maybe just lay out that that process for everybody so that they know what it's [00:20:00] taken to get to this point. And then we can talk about the twist that that has recently happened.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, absolutely. So, so I think I mentioned before, but that, that original case of VEC first SBCCI happened in 2002 or 2004. But since then, there's another eight cases that have happened. So a total of nine cases, um, in all different parts of the country. And one of them went all the way to the Supreme court. But regardless, every single case. Publishers brought has not succeeded. And
Evan Troxel: And were those always initiated? They were always initiated by the publishers, I
Scott Reynolds: correct. Right, right. And in every single case, the judges all came down to the same analysis that you can't copyright the law. Now they inspected it through a bunch of different lenses. Does it, you know, um, does it risk the, the kind of the ongoing operation of some of these publishers? They looked at that in extensive detail. They obviously get. Um, all the information behind the scenes and document discovery and see their financials and it all determined it, it was not, um, a [00:21:00] risk to the ongoing operation of publishers and that ultimately people needed open access to the laws.
So in all nine, the, the, um, the judges and the legal system have just reinforced the fact that you can't copyright the law. And. And in fact, that is a direct quote from the, um, Supreme Court who looked at one of these cases. And I, I believe it was, um, I, I, I, I think maybe Justice Roberts. Yeah, it was Justice Roberts said, no one can own the law. And that is a direct quote. And, and there's many really good quotes through that, uh, decision. But ultimately, all nine have, have come around the same thing, saying, you can't, um, copyright these, these building codes.
Evan Troxel: And so, so tell, tell us about this, just what U. S. copyright protection is. Like affords somebody who, like, so as an architect, my drawings are, are copyrighted, uh, just through the creation of them. So that, because those, somebody is paying me to [00:22:00] produce those, right? And therefore those plans then are then used as an instrument to build.
One building, right? It's not like it's, it's actually in, in the, the contract, but as, as well as just the copyright law of the drawings themselves, they can't just be taken and applied on some other location and built. I mean, Because I know architecture, I also know that that would be very foolish, right, because utilities don't come in in the same place, the building's not oriented the same, the soils are gonna be different, like, there's all kinds of reasons there, but it has happened, like, people have tried to just take this and plunk it down over there, and copyright, in my opinion, for me, means something.
I think it means something maybe a little bit different here, but can you just explain like why they're going for copyright protection beyond just limiting who can build tools on top of their, on top of the laws?
Scott Reynolds: Right, yeah, and it's a great question. And I think it [00:23:00] highlights that these cases and this kind of argument is a very thin kind of slice of industry. This is just talking about the regulations and the law. So are you legally bound? And is this literally the law that that is, that is kind of setting these constraints? And that would be very, very different from, um, like the drawings you do, the creative work that, that people, um, do. Um, doing these, in these drawing sets, uh, and then also like the music, uh,
example that you brought up.
So like very kind of, these are polar opposites and, and I do agree with you, like that is a good thing for people to have protection over the creative work and, and that works really well for, for the industry. I think what we're talking about here is, is just the legal requirements and in, in a democracy, can you or can you not copyright the law? And that, that now is kind of cleared up, but, um, but yeah, very different worlds, I would say. To answer your questions about the, the incentives and motivations, um, unfortunately, I think it, it just comes down to revenue generation that you look at these organizations and it, they make [00:24:00] a shocking amount of revenue from the attempted copyright of, of these regulations.
Like I said before, some of them, uh, north of a hundred million in revenue, often their CEOs are paid over a million dollars. Um, I think ICC's CEO is nearly 1. is 10 times the national average of a nonprofit CEO. So when you look at the tax filings in the 1990s, it looks a lot more like a for profit company than a, than a nonprofit.
Evan Troxel: So what's happened since, I mean, I assume that the Supreme Court ruling was the last one in the kind of that series. Is that how it went? It kind of culminated there in that, that one case that they looked at.
Scott Reynolds: Well, you would, you would think so, uh, but there's been cases since, uh,
there's a recent one in Texas that, I mean, again, like followed exactly the same reeling is, is, um, the Supreme Court, but believe it or not, it, the, the cases continue now, you know, I'm like, or like years ago, I was [00:25:00] like relatively new to the legal system and, and how it works, but, uh, unfortunately it does seem the case that you can quite easily Continually launch new lawsuit after new launch. Even if you lose that argument, you can launch it from new jurisdiction or you can slightly change it. And I think it's, it's a lot what people refer to as, uh, Lawfare. So it's, it's, it's a way to weaponize the legal system, to impose distraction, impose cost, uh, to uh, to other people. So. You would think so, and I would have thought that the Supreme Court would kind of be the bookend for that, for that argument. And in fact, it probably was in terms of the argument, but you could still launch more lawsuits just to its kind of imposed cost.
Evan Troxel: Okay. So, so, okay. So there's definitely that side of it. I, I assume like launching it in different jurisdictions is also strategic in a way to try to get a favorable ruling, right? Because it's a different jurisdiction than maybe the previous ones were launched in. So there's, there's that hope, but there is kind of this weaponization through, I mean, how much are these lawsuits costing [00:26:00] these different companies?
It's gotta be incredible.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, I mean you can look at the publisher's tax filings, like it's very illuminating when you look through the numbers, but I, I think it was the ICC in one of their initial years when they launched a lawsuit against us, it was multi million dollars per year. Um, spent on the litigation law firm. So it, these are massive resource drains, especially, um, on, on their side.
So it, it is kind of a very, unfortunately kind of a very destructive, um, uh, like endeavor for, for both sides.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, wow. Okay, so those were unsuccessful as far as the attempt to copyright the law, and, and it's been deemed nine times now that you can't copyright the law. So what's the new twist in the story since we talked last time?
Scott Reynolds: Right. So, so I think now that we're accumulating a mountain of case law on one, one side of this, this fence, um, a lot of the publishers have now turned towards Congress. Going to [00:27:00] Congress to introduce a bill that would, in effect, try to, um, be like a runaround through the, uh, around the legal system. So a bill saying, um, uh, giving copyright on, on the, uh, on the, on the base codes for, you know, the same, the same argument.
It may be slightly different here, but, um, yeah, but, uh, but effectively trying to do a runaround, uh, the legal system and go through, go through Congress.
Evan Troxel: And so, I mean, this wasn't done in the beginning, right? I mean, this, this, there was no law introduced when building codes were being formed early on. So, is it, is it purely just so that, because they can't win in court, or so it seems, nine times now, this is just a new tactic, right? To give it, realize their goals.
Scott Reynolds: Right. Exactly. And when you rewind to. 2002, 2004. There was just the one ruling, you know, and I maybe, you know, like the people perhaps didn't know exactly the way, you know the courts would rule. [00:28:00] But by the time you get the second ruling, the third ruling, the fourth ruling, the fifth it, it starts to paint a pretty clear picture.
And that's where we, um, saw the publishers start to do the lobbying efforts, start to spend millions of dollars going to D. C. trying to influence individuals there to get this, this bill passed. But we saw that introduced towards the, you know, the back half of these, these nine lawsuits. So I think when the case laws started to pile up and it became pretty, pretty clear in the legal system, they really looked for a, for a plan B.
Evan Troxel: Mm hmm. Okay. So, so talk about the, the, argument that they're making there because there, there is a website that you can go to and you can read the, the argument that they lay out about why this would be beneficial, right? Uh, from, from their side of the fence, for sure, right? So can you, can you list kind of what the benefits they're stating in the, in this legislation would be?
Mm hmm.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah. And I think it, it boils down to one primary argument. Kind of argument or, or a [00:29:00] claim and it's that they need to retain copyright, um, to fuel and fund the development of the codes going forward. So that's that by and large, that's, that's the big claim they make now for a couple of reasons. We don't think that's the case and, and also the courts also don't think that's the case. So a lot of these courts, um, have kind of examined that exact argument, but also equipped with their financial statements. They go through document discovery and, um, and testimony to, to look at that exact argument. And none of the courts have agreed with, with that argument. Seeing the kind of money generation and a lot of the services and revenue that actually does not come from publication sales. So when we talk about that side, like where does the revenue come from
for these organizations? If you look at ICC, for example, 88 percent of the revenue comes from things that are not selling the code. So it's things like consulting, Certification, Training, and Product Evaluation. So they're, [00:30:00] uh, the vast majority of that revenue actually does not come from, um, uh, selling access to, to the codes.
And that varies, of course, by, by publisher. Um, but I think that claim is, is perhaps like a little bit misleading, considering such a small fraction of the revenue actually comes from publication sales. Especially looking at just the. Uh, rather kind of bloated nature of, of their, you know, uh, compensation packages being 10 times bigger than the national average.
So I think there's a little bit of, of optimization they can do and they don't need to exert, um, kind of restrictions and bottleneck, uh, on the codes to generate revenue from that side.
Evan Troxel: Interesting. Interesting. So, so what other kind of nuances to the argument are they, are they making that are different than what you've seen before, or maybe the same as what you've seen before?
Scott Reynolds: Well, it's, it's the same. Yeah, I mean, that argument is exactly the same that they've been making, uh, through these lawsuits and, and that's why the, the, uh, legal system and the judges had an [00:31:00] opportunity to inspect that, um, uh, inspect that argument.
Um, I mean, in fact, looking at the VEC versus SBCCI, just to, just to quote the, uh, the ruling there, they said, it is difficult to imagine an area of creative endeavor in which the copyright incentive is needed less. So
like the, like these, these rulings are really illuminating when you read the actual language. The judges come in pretty strongly
to, to to really suppress that and, and, um, and I think it's because they get such a transparent x ray through the organization and understand like what it, it looks like behind the scenes.
But they, they are very clear, uh, on, on that point.
Evan Troxel: Interesting. Very interesting.
Let's just talk about kind of how this process has been going, where it's at in, in the legislation. Like, what, where, where are they in the submission and, and the process along the way to get, uh, legislation passed?
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, so, so, and candidly, this is very new to me, um, you know, the, the, uh, [00:32:00] the whole system of how a bill progresses through the House, to the, to the Congress and onwards, um, is new, so I'm also getting up to speed, um, but just from a very high level, they've been, uh, working on the bill for, I think, three years, you know, millions of dollars deep in, in trying to push it. Um, it was in the House, and I think it was just a couple weeks ago now, uh, maybe the end of last month or so. So, then it went to suspension, actually it went to a vote that moves the bill from the House to the Senate, and the vote failed, so in that kind of attempted pass it, it did fail. I think a lot of people started to get word of what this bill actually meant.
It seems to be somewhat of a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Um, so, so the bill failed in that regard, but I think People are still, or the publishers and the lobbyists are still going to push it towards the end of this year. And who knows, they've been working on it for three years. Um, the session ends this year, so they'll have to [00:33:00] reintroduce the bill next year if it, if it fails. Um, so we assume they'll, they'll probably try that. But, um, but yeah, so fortunately it did fail that vote. Um, but we, we imagine they'll try and mount another vote and, and bring it to, bring it to the floor again.
Evan Troxel: Is there any precedence for these actions anywhere else? Are there any other jurisdictions worldwide that, that do ha provide copyright protections for legis for, for the law like this?
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, great question. So, um, so I, so it's funny you asked. So, so the most recent ruling was in Texas. And I think that actually had to do with Canadian building codes. Now,
you know, it's kind of odd. I don't understand why the nuance and why they were doing it, you know, litigating it here in the US and in Texas.
But, um, but lo and behold, they agreed the same thing. You can't, um, you can't copyright the law. And this was, this was Canadian building codes. Now, that being said, I don't want to, like, disparage all of the Canadian building code regulation. I know one province, [00:34:00] I think, rescinded the copyright and apologized for having charged for access to the building code.
I forgot which province had done that. So they seem, uh, like, progressive on that front, um, but still working their way through it. So I know there's that, um, uh, precedent in Canada. And, uh, in, in Australia, interesting. Interestingly, the, the, uh, the government actually pushes for innovation. So they're approaching different startups.
Like we, we had engaged with them, um, saying like, Hey, here's our building codes. Can you develop tools? Can you, can you build technology to help our industry and, um, kind of progress, uh, the, the innovation forward. So they were very, very forward looking, not only making it available, but also encouraging people to, to operate on it.
Um, you can look at Singapore who, um, I mean, this goes back to the nineties. I forgot the name of it. Core, Core, CoreNet, I think was the name. Um, they, they tried to do automated compliance through the building and planning department. So for, and, and [00:35:00] fully government funded where you, for no fee as a developer or an architect, you could submit your plans or your BIM model and, and they would assess it, they would, you know, do a scan of the model, like a spell check, and then give you back compliance. Uh, report, kind of like a plan review, but really, I think, kind of amazing to see a government spend millions of dollars trying to, to, to build the tools themselves to give for free to the industry and help them along that progress or that process.
So, yeah, so we've actually seen a lot of movement, I would say, internationally, uh, which is, which is inspiring in these, these different countries.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. I, so I was expecting you to say, yes, this country has protected the building code and people do have to pay, but you gave opposite, the opposite examples of what I thought you were going to do, because it seems like, okay, well, there's got to be precedent somewhere that they're following here to, to use as like a, an example of, of what would be a successful outcome for them.
But no,
Scott Reynolds: Uh, no, [00:36:00] we don't, no, we don't, we don't see them pointing elsewhere. I think, um, Um, you know, I'm, I'm obviously a little bit biased here, but I think the, uh, internationally we've seen this kind of discourse move forward a lot faster. And it could come down to the way the American legal system works and the fact that you can, you know, do this nine times.
You can, you can
launch lawsuit after lawsuit and I, unfortunately, I think that really, uh, slows down the progress in an
unfortunate way. I think other countries kind of have got to that conclusion a lot faster than, than we're getting
Evan Troxel: Interesting. Interesting. Wow. So, so where does it go from, from here? Like what, you said that it did not pass the vote, right? In, in the house. And so you said they could reintroduce it again next year. So is that, is it dead for now until potentially next year? Or, or where do you see the, this leading?
Scott Reynolds: So, so unclear, they, they could try to mount it again in a month or two, uh,
as a final, like, last gasp of, of air before the end of this session.
So that's a possibility, uh, they could introduce it [00:37:00] again in next session, which starts, uh, early January of, of next year. Um, but in terms of what's next, we, we're just trying to shed as much light.
I, like, I think it's a, uh, I think it's a really important topic for the industry and why don't we just want to have, you know, people decide on both sides, but it should at least be something, uh, that, that people are aware of and talking about, um, and and fortunately, I think it's starting to go a little bit more, more mainstream, like I know Forbes, um, Forbes had covered this, they had a great piece called the threat to justice. The Pro Codes Act would copyright the law and we've seen a lot of online forums and, um, areas starting to discuss it, which I think is very, very healthy. It just needs to be in the public discourse, scientists, uh, discussed and, and, and moving away from kind of behind the scenes operation where there's a lot of, of money spent by private entities trying to, you know, create the law and, and, and have that happen.
Yeah. Again, behind the scenes and in the shadows. So we're, we're just trying to put a light on it. [00:38:00] Let people talk about it, give their opinion, and then also reach out to the representatives. There's been a massive wave of people, I think, when they kind of became aware of this, starting to reach out to the representatives, to their congresspeople. Um, uh, to, to kind of give their opinion to talk about, you know, being a homeowner or being an industry professional and the impact that this would have on them going forward. So we've seen that start to happen in a pretty significant way, and we hope that kind of continues over the next couple of months, just so the elected representatives are just as aware as people in the industry.
Evan Troxel: I believe that Forbes article was kind of coming at it from a different angle. It wasn't, wasn't. architectural or from the building industry, right? Like that perspective was offered because it seems to me like this would, could set a precedent if it were to pass, obviously, to be applied to a lot of different laws
Scott Reynolds: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. yeah,
Evan Troxel: of the, the, the, danger, the potential danger from the [00:39:00] author's perspective of that becoming a law.
Scott Reynolds: Exactly, and I think, um, that's why it's getting a little bit more into the public realm,
um, for exactly that. And I think the author brought up the example of tax law. So, like, we all have to fill out our taxes, and that's, you know, governed by the law. But can you imagine if that was copyrighted? We're
not allowed to see the tax laws that, you know, that govern how much we have to pay the government.
And it's a very similar analogy, and that's what the author was talking about. Like, it's a very, very dangerous precedent and slippery slope. Whereas if you give copyright to a private entity in one area of the law, can, why can't you do that in other areas of law?
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Right. Right. It seems like it would, it would kind of snowball. So Okay, so it's, it's interesting to see how this is developed. I, I'm curious to hear now, um, what people, you mentioned a little bit about what people could do about it. There's another subject that I want you to address specifically too.
So, um, [00:40:00] maybe I'll save that one. You talked about people can, can reach out to their congresspeople. We'll put a link in the show notes, um, that, and, and I believe that, that some of this is being driven through the EFF, is that correct?
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, there, there's actually a lot of organizations like the American Library Association, association of Research Libraries, the EFF, like you said, Wikimedia Foundation,
um, foundation for the Blind. There. There's a lot of public interest groups kind of take, like putting, putting foot forward and, and stepping into the ring.
So EFF is is one of the prominent ones, but, um, but there, there's a lot. And, um, but yeah, you're right. EFF would probably be the right, uh, right link to share.
Evan Troxel: It's an avenue, right? That, that, that kind of. preloads some generic verbiage about why you may or why you would support sending information to your congressperson about how you feel. But then I thought one of the interesting things about that was it actually says, you know, did you add your own?
Perspective to it. Did you add your own words to it?
And if you try to say yes, even if you didn't, it's [00:41:00] like you need to add your own, you need to add your
own thoughts to this. And I thought that was great because it actually does kind of personalize it and, and make you think, I mean, to me, it's, it's like, how many form letters have you signed in your life?
Probably a lot, right? And, and it's because you agree in principle with. Um, but I think it, it's a nice reflective moment to say, no, like, why do I actually care about this? And, and add my own perspective as a design professional, in my case, to, to why I think what, what I think about it before I send it off.
But it makes it easy to send it to the right person so that hopefully they're going to read that and, and understand what their constituency thinks about this proposed legislation.
Scott Reynolds: And you're right. And the tool is also really good to determine who is the right person. I think you put in your postal code and it looks up who your representatives and the
Congress person is. And like I was mentioning before, like I'm very new to this and I didn't know who exactly the person was. I know, you know, the, the names [00:42:00] in the area and in the state, but, uh, like who is that one person that you should, should be talking to?
It, the tool does a great job. You just throw in your. And it says, here's their email address. Here is like the three people. Um, and then, like you said, like suggest some verbiage, but, um, you can change it. I also just got on the phone with them because, um, so I could describe it a little bit more, you know, describe my background and like the impact it would have from, from both a homeowner's perspective, but also an industry professional.
So, um, yeah, there's both avenues to go.
Evan Troxel: Well, that's a good segue because you've said several times now that you are biased right in this and, and you, you're have a company called Upcodes and Upcodes is designed to provide access to the code, as you stated in the beginning. But can you just talk about your business model? Because I think, you know, I've heard several times, you know, free access to the business model.
The laws and regulations that are governing what gets built and how it gets built, right? To protect the health, safety, and welfare of the general public. And so, can you talk about your business model and [00:43:00] how UpCodes works? Because I, I don't want people to expect that everything that you do is just, It's for free, like you're, you're not building this business to just offer access to the codes for free, you're building on top of the codes to provide a modern service in a, in a very particular way.
So lay that out so that this is totally transparent with, with how this goes.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, for sure. And maybe I'll actually rewind a little bit back to when I was working, you know, day to day in, in, in the architecture offices. So, so how, I was so surprised that when it came to codes and regulations, there's so little tooling and, and, and software built for, for that workflow. And like we mentioned before, you know, the, the updated inserts in the books and PDF.
So really the ambition when we started was to get this information together to one place. Make it available, but then build those structured workflows and build those tools and, and, and see what we can use, look at other industries and, and get inspiration from the, the tools that they had. And the former [00:44:00] CEO of, of Google, um, Eric Schmidt had a great term.
It's called combinatory innovation, and it's looking at the changes in technology and what opportunities are available when you combine these new changes, often looking at other industries and put it into your own industry. Yeah. Sorry, I know that's a little bit abstract, but to answer your question more specifically, in this case, um, it was building search, it was building project management so you could start to save the code sections, you could comment on it, you could collaborate with your office internally, um, you could collaborate externally with other folks, educational content to understand what does the code actually mean, how do you actually, um, uh, you know, parse this very dense language and give visuals and details and assemblies. And then more recently getting into the AI side, like we mentioned before, there's such a broad base of, of information over 6 million sections of code. So actually, how do you as an individual kind of parse that? How do you start to understand, okay, I'm building a [00:45:00] high rise building in, um, let's say like Virginia.
What, you know, what's applicable to me and,
and instead of manually and tediously going through every single book and potentially missing sections, Saying let's, let's leverage LLMs and AI to, to tie that together. Now it's not going to, you know, it's not, it's not a fully automating way that, that process by any means, but it's a, it's a much more sophisticated starting point where you could get a high level overview and kind of be like a router.
So it'll start to route you out to the places you should start to look like here's a couple of sections in the building code, here's a couple in the fire code, here's an electrical code. And then again, bringing in the collaboration. So you can save that down. You can start to comment and then bring different people in. And, uh, into the project. So from a very high level, the foundation is free and open access to the codes. And then the paid service or product built on top of that is those workflows, is that automation and project management.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. I, I think one of the misunderstandings in the general public, definitely not, I, not for the listeners of this podcast. I think people who listen to this [00:46:00] podcast are, are deep in the industry and they understand that the code is not. necessarily prescriptive, right? It doesn't tell you if you're building a building here in this location, in this jurisdiction, here's everything you need to worry about.
Here's exactly how you should do these things. It's actually not like that at all. Right? So the general public point of view is that I think the code is really prescriptive and it's saying, but, but we know it's not right. Like I know that if I have several different options when it comes to construction type of a building and occupancy and side yard setbacks and.
All of these different things that then influence decision making along the way to create the ultimate final output of that process, right? So if I choose, Type four, type five construction, type three, like whatever that, whatever I'm going to go, that actually sets me on a different course right then that I could have.
And so a tool like yours, I think this is something that we talked about years ago, [00:47:00] Scott was like, okay, now that maybe it even says. Here's what you could choose, and it's kind of like a choose your own adventure, right? It's like, okay, well, if you choose this, it means A, B, and C. And if you choose this, it means D, E, and F, right?
And so, now you're making an informed decision based on this question. Kind of cause and effect that if you were to choose this in the code, then it means you have to follow this path. And if you, if you choose this in the code, you could follow this or this path and it starts to open it up. And I think what was so exciting for me talking to you years ago was like, it gives access to people who don't know how to decipher that because it is so overwhelming when you look at that code book sitting on the desk, where do I even begin?
And, and the, the decisions that afford you different options that could be extremely or extremely advantageous or disadvantageous to you when you're designing a building on behalf of your client, right? [00:48:00] So it's like all of these things that like you learn to dance with the building code. And it is not saying you need to do it exactly like this.
I mean, a lot of times, great architecture comes with great workarounds in the building code, right? I mean, it's not prescriptive on purpose. And, and to me, having new tools built on top of this existing, uh, You know, database, as it were, of code gives people the ability to learn how to dance with it at a much earlier level in their career.
And I think that is absolutely fundamental to the profession going forward, right? Because, I mean, we've complained for years and years and decades, right? Of, we don't learn this stuff in school. Architects don't learn how to dance. Use the building code in school. There may be some schools that have some course and construction methods that may force you to do that, but some of them don't as well, right?
And, and a lot of this is learned [00:49:00] by doing in practice once you graduate. And if you don't have that that amazing resource of a person who's been doing it for 40 years and they can point to the section that you need to go to, then you don't have that. Where do you go? And that to me is where innovation actually makes a huge difference when it comes to using tools like this and technology for, it's not just for new people in the industry, right?
Like, let's be honest, but, but this, it can be useful for just about anybody, but search alone is a big deal in the building code, right? To, to really boil it down to a most basic level.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, and you're absolutely right. So the, the, the barriers there are in a couple of different ways. And I think historically this code research happened often by the senior person and it would happen in a project. Yeah. The next project you do, you reinvent the wheel. Maybe it's the same person doing it, maybe it's a new person doing it, but a lot of what we do is trying to capture that institutional knowledge, like what were those decision points?
What was that code research? And what were the downstream implications of different trade offs, like your [00:50:00] construction type or occupancies? So capturing that in the project management. So when that person who's, who's new, or, or, or maybe you're just cribbing off a historical project, you can actually, um, duplicate that, that project, migrate it into a new jurisdiction or a new code year.
It automatically changes all the, um, the code sections and, and calculations for that, that new project. But it's a way to recycle and kind of build like, and compound on your, your, your code knowledge personally, but also in your firm. So
you're, maybe you're in the New York office, but you're. So if your, your Washington office, uh, had done a similar project, you can, you can crib off that and you, you can kind of, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants, you can, you can, um, uh, kind of start, uh, from a very progressed, uh, starting point. Now, just to touch quickly on another thing, you mentioned the downstream implications, you make one little change and you're doing this dance with the code. So we work a lot on code calculators and it's a way where you can, you can have these inputs and kind of dials and knobs where you. [00:51:00] You have a construction type, you have your occupancies, and a lot of these decisions that have very big code implications. But you can model that out really quickly, and you can make one quick change, and within seconds see the downstream implications. Okay, here's, um, you know, maybe this worked really well in heights and areas, but not in travel distance or in fire ratings. And the system will start to flag and give you warnings. But like you said, the code is not binary, you know, it's not prescriptive, and it's not, um, exact in its language and there is room for interpretation. So those warnings have to be kind of more like guardrails. Like we're not making the decision for you by any means, but we want you to be informed.
So you can make a little code change and we'll flag it like, Hey, you know, uh, based on what we think this, this is, this is an area for concern and you're going to want to address this. Probably something to discuss with your, uh, plans examiner or the inspector, but, but starting to raise that automatically. So people understand very quickly. What are those downstream implications of
[00:52:00] each small decision?
Evan Troxel: That's a huge deal. So back to this business model idea, I mean, that's kind of what you're, this institutional knowledge capture and proliferation, like building a library is, is a big piece of your revenue, right? Like, that's how you work to, cause you're, you're providing maybe, and maybe you can just be really specific about this.
You're providing access to, uh, Is it all the codes, some codes, at what level, and then, and then, and then maybe your business model actually turns on when it comes to, okay, bookmarking things, saving things, collaborating with other people. Can you just lay all that out?
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, yeah, so so all the the codes and regulations we bring together on the site You can go on there and see for free and in terms of coverage We're just costly expanding bring it up more and more jurisdictions and more codes over time The the library today looks a lot different than it did four years ago or five five years ago So it's just costly It's constantly expanding, but to be very explicit, that, that is not where we [00:53:00] generate revenue.
That's not, uh, we don't charge for any of that. That's just put on there, um, and, and kind of offered for free. We do integrate things like local amendments and that's also, um, offered for, for free. Where we, uh, start to monetize is more on the, um, on those product management tools like we were talking about, like those code calculators, the diagrams, capturing the knowledge and, and, and those decision points, um, is, is, uh, Yeah.
Kind of where we, where we draw the line. So all of that functionality built on top of the open access.
Evan Troxel: And so, I mean, there's a value there. I, I'm curious just to hear what people find in that value, because that, to me, is, is. That's kind of the magic of upcodes, right? And so maybe you can speak to just what, what that is, give you, give you a moment here to get on your, your sales pedestal and just talk about like, what, where the, the value is that people are finding using a tool like this.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah. And I think it's, it's a lot of those same guardrails. I, you know, I think we have a lot to go and a lot to build, but fortunately [00:54:00] I think we have fulfilled some of that original ambition to give the guardrails when doing code research. So cribbing off of your, your, maybe your more senior or technical leader in the and having caught that person's. Knowledge and leveraging that yourself so you can jump in there, get up to speed yourself. And I think the, where we are the most, um, kind of excited is when we hear those stories where a person who's maybe not as familiar with the code or, or jurisdiction or project type can, can get up to speed, can teach themselves, can, can look at the prior work the firm had did and then be very effective, um, you know, without, um, you know, having to constantly knock on the door of, of the more senior person.
So, so I know that's a little bit wordy, but basically if I had to boil that down, it's just empowering each individual in the firm with the tools so they can confidently navigate through the code and then also look at their firm's knowledge.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Empowering is a great word. I mean, that to [00:55:00] me is, so there's different areas of the practice of architecture, specifications, building codes. There's right where it's like, I didn't go to school for that. Like, I, I want to design buildings. Well, you've, you've got to do this stuff to get to there. And, and there's special, there's specializations in firms and then there's the generalists.
Right. And I think, Yeah. Providing early access lets you understand, to the building code in particular, lets you understand why you need to do something a certain way, or why you decided to do something a certain way. And that to me, and the ability to kind of save this information and make it easy to find later, like why did we decide to do that?
Um, I think in traditional projects that was very difficult, unless somebody was really specifically doing that so that they could. You know, pull it back up later. I think, I think that rarely happened, right? So now if, if I actually can go back and kind of see the breadcrumb trail, uh, because that happens all the time, right?
Somebody's like, [00:56:00] why are we doing it like this? And maybe they're new on the project or they haven't been involved or they, they missed an email or something. It's like, well, okay, now we can actually walk them through that because a lot of an architect's job is doing that. It's like justifying why things turned out the way that they did.
So many times the, the, there's a fluidity to the team who is on the project, right, whether it's on the the production side, the design side, or the, even the client side as well. Right? And so, um, that, that definitely is a, a necessary part of it, I think, and, and it was lacking for so long. It's like, well, Okay, now I'm going to try to remember, or I'm going to go try to figure out why we decided that, um, and, and this gives us a way to kind of bookmark and create a, a breadcrumb trail of, okay, we made this decision in September of 2018, and that's what started us down this path, and then we built and built and built on top of that, because that's how the nature of our industry works, right?
We have to make if not millions of decisions on every project, right? So, [00:57:00] um, having a way to access even that. pathology along the way is, is incredibly useful. Um, anyway.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, and just to draw a point of comparison here, so when we jumped in early days at Upcodes, I was doing software development, probably not that great, I think every single line of code I've written has since been removed, but we had to start somewhere, and it was eye opening to me when I was learning how to write code, how robust the communities online were, and
how easy it was to teach yourself, and the resources were there, the communities were there, and every single question I ever had. For every nuanced little piece of code or challenge I had, there was somebody else who had asked that question online and
was answered in a really thorough way. And just the, the resources and, and also just like online courses and in addition to these, to these forums were just absolutely incredible and very, very vibrant and robust. And it just doesn't exist to the same extent in architecture or
[00:58:00] construction. It's a shame because if you're, you're trying to get more familiar, like, where do you start? It's so difficult. You graduate from school, um, you realize that maybe, you know, you didn't learn actually how to put a building together.
You learned maybe how to, you know, do some, some fancy designs, and, and that's great. But, you know, the, the, the reality of putting something together is very different, at least what I, than what I learned in school. And there, I, I was hungry for that information, but could not find it. And, and I had to try and, try and get it from, from my colleagues.
And, um, I, I was just so inspired seeing the, the software, engineering side of, of that process online.
Evan Troxel: It is interesting to think about, right? Like the whole, think, think of software development without stack overflow. Like what, where would we be? Uh, or, or GitHub or, you know, these communities that, that do exist, these repositories. Uh, it's it's absolutely incredible. And the entire world runs on software now.
Right? Like that's what, If you, if you want to think about it, like think about the device in your pocket, think about this thing [00:59:00] that we're talking through right now, it's all running on software and it's all running on software that gets developed. I mean, I hate to, I'm not a software developer, so I shouldn't say software gets developed quickly, but, but in like the timeline of architecture, software goes very, very fast, right?
Architecture takes. It takes a long time to do one project and this idea of not having to start with a blank page in software development because of the resources that you just cited, right? As far as like, like understanding that they exist is fundamental to that working and for the proliferation of amazing software.
And it does not really exist in architecture, and that is, I mean, and architecture has suffered because of that, and this reinvention, this starting with a blank page on every project is, it's a very difficult concept to have to be forced to deal with. I mean, when we're thinking about our industry, it's kind of a sad, sad state of [01:00:00] things.
Scott Reynolds: And if you look around at different software, it all looks very different. You know, it functions and the aesthetics look very different, but a lot of the building blocks behind the scenes are the same. And they're more often than not, they're open source packages, uh, different repos you can, you can find online.
And then you, you kind of bring them together again, choosing from a pretty wide variety. So you
Evan Troxel: It's like a, it's like cooking a recipe in the kitchen, right? It's like you've got access to all this stuff and how you put it together. Right. You get a different output because you put a different combination of it together. But that's, that's kind of what you're talking about. You're talking about these chunks that already exist.
Like anybody who spools up a new WordPress site does not have to code the thing from scratch,
Right.
They, it's, it's really, it's really foundational in the way that, that technology works today.
Scott Reynolds: And, and, and it's really nice in a way because you don't have to focus on and spend time on the things that are the same in every site. So user account management, login flows, those are all the same. And there's nothing that will set you apart if you spend a lot of time innovating in those areas. [01:01:00] But what will make a difference to, to your end users and to the industry is if you spend all your time innovating on the areas that, that are unique to that industry, unique to, to that workflow or to to the end user. In this case, you know, obviously like architects and. Homeowners and GCs and governments, but, you know, get all those building blocks together, like the recipe, like you're saying, and then that, that remaining, you know, 40 percent or whatever it is, 30%, that's where the magic happens. And I think that's where you start to adapt these things specifically for those, those workflows.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, absolutely. So what's the call to action here? Is it to reach out through the links that we'll put in the show notes and let your voice be heard and tell your representatives why this matters to you?
Scott Reynolds: Exactly. I think just the more open dialogue there is, uh, people can share their perspectives and opinions and just getting in touch with the representatives. Because at the end of the day, that's what the representatives are for, is to be the, the, the kind of vocal point and broadcast, you know, what their constituents care about.
Um, [01:02:00] so it's, it's, it's really just educating them on, on how you feel and how it impacts your, um, your day to day. So I think, yeah, it's exactly that. And I think the EFF link would be a great, great place to start.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, we'll include that. We'll include the link to the Forbes article so you can see another perspective on, on the, you know, somebody, somebody's thoughts about what the potential outcomes of something of legislation like this could be, um, across multiple industries, uh, and if there's anything else, I will throw it in there that you can throw my way, Scott.
But otherwise, thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation and to expose this information to people. I think. Everybody's so deep buried on their projects. It's, you know, it's difficult to know everything that's going on, but this is a big issue for the building industry. And so I think it's something worth being educated about.
So thanks for raising the flag and saying, you know, let's expose this information so that more people can be a part of whether it passes or not.
Scott Reynolds: Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's great to [01:03:00] share and put a little bit of a spotlight on the topic. So I really appreciate it. So
yeah,

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Bringing Newforma to the CloudCarl Veillette of Newforma joins Randall and me on the show to talk about the transformation and integration of BIM Track with Newforma to revolutionize project management in the AEC industry, while bringing it all to the cloud for collaboration.

In this episode, Carl shares his journey from architecture to leading product development and the challenges of merging two powerful platforms. Dive into the evolving role of 3D models and data integration, the impact of AI on project activities, and strategies for bridging communication gaps between field and office teams. Learn how they are enhancing user experience, adopting asynchronous communication tools, and balancing AI trust with human judgment to reshape the industry's future.

Episode Links* Carl on LinkedIn * Newforma on LinkedIn * Newforma website

Watch this episode on YouTubeSubscribe to the podcast on YouTubeListen to this episode

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I recently hosted a live webinar with Britton Langdon, Chief Strategy Officer at Snaptrude, and Clifton Harness, CEO of TestFit. The discussion covers recent advancements in—and possibly the re-emergence of—useful generative design tools, focusing on early-stage concept design, land use, feasibility, and evolving digital workflows in architectural practice.

In this replay you will learn about how Snaptrude's cloud-based collaborative design software and TestFit's feasibility software for commodity buildings are bringing useful generative design tools to the market. Discover how these tools integrate with industry standard platforms like Revit and how they are focused on improving and simplifying architectural workflows to save users a lot of time in the design process. And don't miss the Q&A portion where many great questions were asked by the audience.

Timestamps:00:00 Introduction and Host's Background
01:03 Meet the Guests: Britton Langdon and Clifton Harness
01:42 Britton Langdon's Journey and Snaptrude Overview
03:58 Clifton Harness and the Evolution of Generative Design
05:35 Challenges and Progress in Architectural Technology
09:22 Generative Design: Past, Present, and Future
16:13 TestFit Demo: Real-Time Generative Design
24:42 Snaptrude Demo: From Concept to BIM
29:04 Internal Use of Design Tools
29:52 Understanding Level of Design (LOD)
30:28 Solving Workflow Problems in Architecture
33:42 Generative Design: Hype and Reality
34:39 Future of Generative Design Tools
42:36 Interoperability and User Questions
48:36 Case Studies and Real-World Applications
52:25 Regional Adaptation and Pricing
54:17 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

🎙️Clifton Harness, CEO of TestFit and Altaf Ganihar, CEO of Snaptrude have also been on the TRXL podcast. You can find out more about them by finding their episodes here and here.

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Parley Burnett and Chris Shafer join the podcast to talk about the hidden inefficiencies within the AEC industry. We discuss the automation of industry standards, educating software users in real-time, streamlines processes, the importance of BIM model health, eliminating technical debt and the ROI associated with these things, and more.

Episode links:* Parley on LinkedIn * Chris on LinkedIn * Guardian for Revit website * Guardian for Revit on LinkedIn

About Parley Burnett:Parley is the CEO of ICONIC BIM and original visionary of the product Guardian. Parley has spent many years working in the AEC industry believing in a better, more proactive approach to managing BIM standards, model protection and best practices. Today, Guardian is used by leading firms worldwide and it has proactively guided users into a better workflow several million times. Previously, Parley has lead product and customer success efforts at UNIFI Labs, worked as a BIM manager, lead large content development efforts for manufacturers and served on several different BIM standards committees. He enjoys the challenge of solving large, complex problems in simple ways. Parley has also taught several Revit courses at Montana State University and enjoys sharing his passion for better processes.

About Chris Shafer:Chris has nearly 20 years of experience as an architect and leading large firms in their adoption of Design Technologies and Revit. Chris recently joined Guardian to help digital design and BIM leaders better support their staff in their use of Revit. Prior to Guardian, Chris Shafer was a Senior Project Architect and the Digital Delivery Leader for HDR Architecture. As the Digital Delivery Leader, he led global teams in North America, Australia, and Germany developing and implementing firm-wide digital design technologies, standards and processes. In addition to working with Guardian and HDR, he has also worked with Perkins+Will and CBT Architects in Boston.

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Episode Transcript: Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode, I welcome Parley Burnett and Chris Shafer. Parley is the CEO of Iconic BIM. Previously. He has led product and customer success efforts at UNIFI Labs.Worked as a BIM manager. Led large content development efforts for manufacturers and served on several different BIM standards committees.

Chris has nearly 20 years of experience as an architect and leading large firms in their adoption of design technologies and Revvit he recently joined Parley .To help digital design and BIM leaders better support their staff in their use of Revvit. Previously, Chris was a senior project architect and the digital delivery leader for HDR Architecture, where he led global teams in north America, Australia, and Germany, developing and implementing firm-wide digital design technology. standards and [00:01:00] processes. Previous to that. He worked with Perkins+Will and CBT Architects in Boston.

In this episode, we discussed the hidden inefficiencies within the AEC industry. We discussed the automation of industry standards, educating software users in real time, streamlining processes, the importance of BIM model health, eliminating technical debt and the ROI associated with these things. And more. It was a fantastic conversation with both Parley and Chris, and I hope you'll not only find value in it for yourself. But that you'll help add value to the profession by sharing it with your network. Please give this podcast a boost in the vast media landscape out there by subscribing wherever you listen.

And if you'd like to receive an email, when new episodes are published with all of the links and other information from the episode, sign up at trxl.co. You can also directly support the show by becoming a member at the site as well. So as always, [00:02:00] thank you so much for. For listening. And now without further ado, I bring you Parley Burnett and Chris S

I am joined today by Parley Burnett and Chris Shafer, and it's great to have you both here. Welcome to the TRXL podcast.

Parley Burnett: Thank you, uh,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it's going to be great conversation. I, I am excited to hear kind of where we're going to go. I think of this, uh, the topic that we're going to be speaking about today is kind of like the industry's dirty little secrets, but there's other ways to, to phrase it. I think with waste in the industry and, and things that, that people actively ignore.

The, the idea of, of Dirty Little Secrets, I think is a good enough clickbaity kind of, uh, title for this episode. So, uh, that's why I'm going with it. But, but before we get to that, um, because I think a lot of people will be able to kind of nod along in agreement, but also I'm hoping we can, we can really hear about some ideas to, to [00:03:00] move forward in, in the industry.

Let's hear your stories first. So Parley, why don't you kick us off and tell us how you got to, uh, where you are today?

Parley Burnett: Yeah, perfect. try to keep it brief, I guess.

Evan Troxel: No worries. This is long form. This is podcasting, man. This is where people get to get to know who you are. So yeah,

don't, don't try to keep it brief. Just, Just,

tell the story.

Parley Burnett: yeah, I guess I, I usually, I, I usually say that, um, fundamentally I'm a Revit nerd, right. So just to begin with, been basically working with Revit since 2005, and I think I quickly gained a passion for Revit having come from AutoCAD architecture desktop, um, and basically kind of. Went into drafting, thought I wanted to be an architect, quickly changed my mind, thought I wanted to be a developer. I think I got a D in my first class of, uh, of, of that.

Evan Troxel: D for development. I mean,

Parley Burnett: yeah, D.

Evan Troxel: [00:04:00] sounds right.

Parley Burnett: So I, I guess I

was sort of not sure what to do, but I knew I had interest in the building industry and design industry. So, um, went to UNLV construction management, But really have always been working with Revit in one way or another and kind of had my own drafting service for a time there to get through school, but then really gravitated towards especially the content side of Revit and the content strategies, everything else that goes around with that created a lot of content. And I think perhaps most. impactful to my career was my time at Unifi Labs. So I joined up with them in the very early days. It was 2010, really, before it was even called Unifi. We went through several different names, and I was, I think, the third person there. [00:05:00] And together with a couple of really close colleagues, kind of, Conceptualize the idea of cloud based content management, and, uh, that was a, an incredible learning experience.

Um, it obviously kind of took hold on the industry as a, as a concept. Um, now there's other products, of course, and now UNIFI is acquired by Autodesk, as a lot of us know, but during my time there, my 7 or 8 years, I, I, was, uh, a manager of content creation efforts for like manufacturers back when Autodesk Seek was a thing.

So we've developed a lot of content for that. And then I became a product manager and then near the end I was leading our customer success efforts. So, um, you know, I, I, there's been a couple stints where I was a BIM manager, but typically for like smaller [00:06:00] firms where things were much more nimble. Um,

but then that was kind of complimented by a lot of conversations held with other firms during my, my time at Unify. Um, so kind of to the Guardian story, I guess, um, back in 2018, left Unify and really wanted to do something that was unique for the industry. A lot of times I would be on the phone with, um, firms of different sizes, different disciplines. But I would always hear the same kind of problems, right? And a lot of them trying to address those problems in the same way. So, first off, it felt like an opportunity was there to kind of level that out a little bit and not make everybody take on so much on their own. but also do things in a much more, like, natural, intuitive, um, way. in the [00:07:00] flow kind of process, right? I, I, I had seen firsthand how anytime you have software that requires user interaction, like, literally any buttons that you have for users to click on, that's a barrier for adoption, right?

So we

really wanted to do

Evan Troxel: you say this and I'm like thinking about the apps that people use on a day to day basis and there's hundreds and hundreds of buttons, right? And so you're saying anytime there's a button, right?

Parley Burnett: anytime.

Chris Shafer: Yep.

Evan Troxel: it's like, you pull up these, like, it just reminds me of like the dashboard of an aircraft, right?

It's like, Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of buttons here, right? Uh, I can, it's completely overwhelming for a lot of people. And, and you're talking about software that it just keeps adding buttons, like is, that's kind of a fundamental feature. It's buttons. We added buttons. Yeah.

Chris Shafer: Yeah.

Parley Burnett: Yeah, a feature is that we removed buttons, right? That's kind of the way we [00:08:00] would like to think of it. Um, that just introduces more complexity. So we really do think hard about any time we're adding interface for the users. Um, that's it. That's almost a bad thing. It has to be done out of necessity.

So, um, kind of quick profile now. It's been about six years. We work with firms all over the world now and the hundreds, and it's just been quite a wild ride. Chris has been a big part of the story actually, even though he's joined the team recently.

Chris Shafer: Yeah. Parley and I go way back. Um, him and I first met, uh, during the unified days. So, um, he was, you know, he was our customer. with my previous firm and, and we just instantly, I think we instantly connected on a lot of things he talked about, especially when it comes to the content and the, and the, the problems [00:09:00] that, that we're both seeing, um, and, and fundamentally understood them from, from the same perspective.

I actually come from. Come from a whole different perspective and kind of path kind of getting to where I am here at Guardian is I actually started off as an engineer in the aerospace industry. Um, but I was really lucky early in my career, um, you know, working for General Electric producing jet engines.

I was actually part of a team. They call them the, uh, the blue sky team because they always said their heads were in the clouds. And, but we were, we were responsible of converting the assembly process of jet engines from a analog one to a digital one. And, this was a really interesting learning development for me was we were, we were responsible first and foremost to solve problems that were kind of plaguing the assembly of jet engines.

Um, and, but as we did that, we would introduce technology into solving the problems and making sure those problems don't reoccur. And one of the things I really [00:10:00] learned as an engineer solving these problems was. At the root of every problem, there's the lowest common denominator, and that is the driver of that problem.

And it's through research, it's through data analysis, and, and just testing to get to what is that lowest common denominator. And so, fast forward, always wanted to be an architect, but for whatever reason, at 18 years old, I chose, chose engineering first. Um, but then, after doing that for almost six years, I decided to go back to school and become an architect. And as soon as I got into architecture, I was like, Whoa, this, I'm, I'm stepping back 20, 30 years from a technology perspective. Um, but then Revit came out and I was like, wow, all right, this is the tool. And, and I started using it in about 2008, 2009. And I was like, this is the tool that will drive the industry to the future.

Um, [00:11:00] and, and I kind of fast forward, um, many years as, as being a, a project architect, um, leading projects, you know, make, you know, through design and construction, done everything from, you know, from the very beginning to the end of the projects, every step along the way. Um, and. I really came down to, there is a few drivers in our industry that is really preventing us from really maximizing the potential that's in the technology that we have in front of us, right?

And one of that was, was content, and I think that was partly had mentioned as well. Um, you know, simple, simple logistics, right? If we are digitally building buildings, we need the parts and pieces for those piece, for those buildings at our fingertips. It's not available. What do we do? I think we all agree.

We just kind of all make it up. So early on when, um, when I went to HDR, I just went back as, um, when I moved to [00:12:00] HDR, I was like, all right, I'm done with the technology side of things. I'm just going back to architecture. And, and so it's been my first year there doing architecture and designing a building in the Boston Seaport.

And then, um, Then I just happened to see, someone had mentioned to me, um, within, within the office, like, oh, I did see there's this corporate role for a content manager opened up, and I was like, I'll give it a go, I'll give it a go, and that's when I took the role, um, I met Parley and Parley had, Parley and I had a lot of conversations about, you know, content management and the, the issues that kind of plague the industry and so on and so forth, um, And then, then Parley went and started Guardian.

Um, and from, from then, Parley and I spoke almost on a weekly basis for the last six, seven years, um, about what's happening. So, um, as, as my career grew at HDR, we're, um, end up leading our, what [00:13:00] we call digital design. It was, um, digital design and delivery, which is alternative to digital practice. Um, you know, We were always talking about, you know, what are those needs and what are these fundamental problems that's, that's, that's limiting the industry, um, and from, from really meeting that, that potential that's right in front of us.

Um, so yeah, um, after, after kind of, kind of, In my off hours helping Party help from time to time, uh, this past, this past spring, I finally made the leap and said, All right, let's give this software development thing a try. Um, and so it's been, it's been an interesting three months now since I've been here. Guardian.

Evan Troxel: Nice. The thing that you, you mentioned about when you were, when you were working at GE and transitioning from analog to digital process in order to solve problems that were plaguing the, the process of building these [00:14:00] engines. I'm curious how you, do you see an, an analogy there, I mean, with what you're doing now?

I mean, the whole point of, technology implementation is typically process, right? It's, it's on the, rarely do people focus on the people side, right? There's, there's, which I think is, is another issue, right? Like you can't just put software into the pipeline and, and then just say, okay, check, done, solved, right?

It's not like that at all, but working together between people and process is the key thing here. And, and I'm curious if you. Like you said, at some point, Revit came along, you saw that as the future, and you said, Okay, like this, because before that, you said we were 20 to 30 years behind what you had already experienced.

Aerospace, right? So I, I'm just curious, like I just threw a bunch of stuff out there. What, what do you see as the, both of you, what do you [00:15:00] both see as kind of the current state? You, you have your fingers at, you know, you're on tap with a lot of people in the industry, across the industry, you have international customers, as well as.

You know, customers here in the US, what are you, because, because you said something earlier too, that, that just, all of this is just kind of firing off in my brain at the moment, so I apologize for it being so sporadic, but, like, you, you hear the same things all over the place, and I'm, same thing here, I hear the same things all over the place, I think a lot of people think, oh, we're, only we're having this problem, um, But it's not true, like everybody's having very similar problems, if not the same problems.

And so, just thinking about all that, I mean, your story, the development, the path that you've been on, the trajectory that you've been on. really matters when it comes to kind of thinking about these industry wide issues, touching base with a lot of customers, really matters when you're, when you're considering how you're going to solve problems for people.

And then there's [00:16:00] implementation and then there's training, like there's the actual people side of it and getting back to Parley's initial thing about adding or removing buttons, right? That's to the actual user of, of the implementation to solve these problems. And, and all of this kind of ecosystem, I'm just curious, what are you guys hearing, feeling as kind of the pulse of the industry?

Are we still really far behind? Are we not far behind? Are we, are we cutting edge? Like, where are we on the spectrum? And then, like, what, what are you still hearing as kind of the issues plaguing the industry? Either one of you, take, take that and run with it,

Chris Shafer: probably if you don't mind, if I'll start off with sort of the analogy that you asked about that is one, it does start with people. Um, that is one of the things I first learned about, um, when solving these problems, these the majority of time, unfortunately, it was people problems, right? It wasn't, It wasn't intentional or, or, um, [00:17:00] bad intentions, um, by anyone.

I mean, if you think about it, it doesn't matter what you're doing. And I would say, especially if you're doing something where you're producing something, the same thing over and over and over again, it becomes mentally taxing. Right. And when it comes to the jet engines, one person would be responsible for fastening, say 700 bolts over an eight hour period.

One of those bolts wasn't fastened to the proper torque. That was enough for an engine failure. And so like, how, how do we use technology to ensure that everything is done exactly the way it should be the first time? Right. So, So you don't have these downstream mistakes. That's just human nature. And, and kind of time us back to, to architecture is we are a, a deadline driven industry.

Um, there's big deadlines, there's small deadlines, there's daily deadlines, right? [00:18:00] Always, we're always working at 100, 110%. When you're working at that capacity, you're bound to make mistakes

Evan Troxel: or take shortcuts, right? Like that,

Chris Shafer: or, or take shortcuts. Yes. Yeah, that's exactly right. Um, and, and so, and that's where I kind of see Guardian comes along, and I'll let Parley kind of extrapolate on that, but it is, there's so much of what we do is, is really repetitive, and it is common, um, throughout the podcast.

All of design. Um, you know, one may argue that when you're doing commercial construction versus residential, you know, the parts and pieces are a little different and whatnot, but if you're in commercial design, if you're designing high rises or whatnot, there is, there's a lot of, you're using the same kit of parts.

more or less. Um, it's just the arrangement. So there is a lot of repetition and commonality in so much of what we do. Um, and I think there is a, [00:19:00] I think there is a, I don't know how to phrase this, but a A thought in the industry, what we do each and every time is unique. And, and the way I see what we're doing is we're saying, well, let's be honest here that there, there is this thing we do over and over again.

Let's figure out how we can apply technology to that. So, you know, those little mistakes aren't happening, or we're not cutting corners because we, to prevent those downstream impacts on, on all of that. And partly, if you want to. expand on how Guardian is, is helping, you know, solve some of those.

Parley Burnett: Understood. Yeah, I think it's, those are great questions and it's true that we do talk with a lot of different firms every day, right. Um, and it's fascinating. It's really interesting to kind of, um, step back a little [00:20:00] bit and ponder what the what's this culture at this firm look like. Right. and you and you can see a lot of themes kind of extend throughout.

The entire workforce that we touch and talk with, um, kind of on the software side, we kind of look at ourselves as, as software, of course, but, but really more on the human side of things, where we're more of a reflection of a firm's existing culture. Um, basically everything in Guardian, just in case anyone hasn't seen it yet, everything has a setting and it's highly customized.

that setting. So as you're a BIM manager, a design technologist, kind of setting up Guardian, it tends to reflect your own [00:21:00] personal style, really. Um, we're there as a tool to kind of just allow you to scale that, right? Um, so I think that's, that's what we see as, um, you know, maybe Guardian is sort of an analog tool, basically, in that You've got the soft skills that are still required.

Um, and then if you develop that, then it can be very effective to driving culture and change at your firm.

Chris Shafer: I think there's one thing that's, sorry, go ahead, Evan,

Evan Troxel: you go ahead, go for it.

Chris Shafer: is I think that's one of the things that's, that's really important is when it comes to digital practice, we'll just use that as the kind of catch all phrase is, is from my role and I, you know, from my, my peers in the industry, a lot of conversations we've had is everything that the practice does. The, [00:22:00] The crossroads of where all the, you know, the, the marketing, the, the sales, you know, the project management, the technical leadership, you know, the project delivery, it all comes to that crossroads at the, at the interface of people and technology. And, and so understanding those dynamics and understanding the people behind it and what their needs and how they operate is really important.

And I think that's, um, from my own career, that's what I've seen is, is really understanding what are those needs of the people. Um, that are doing the work and making sure that all the other externalities within a firm and those requirements are being communicated and being, being adhered to throughout the process.

Um, And because at the end of the day, when that deliverable, you know, when the deliverable is, is out the door [00:23:00] or whether it's, you know, doing the QAQC process, you know, all that is, has to be done before that, that, that juncture in the project, right. And getting the people to start thinking about things kind of ahead of time, you know, before, before things become problems, before they become mistakes.

Um, it is about really understanding. The people, their mindset, what they're thinking about, what their priorities are and how they like being communicated to as well. I think that's a big aspect of what we do is understanding communication in a firm, big and small, is really difficult. And how do you communicate the needs of technical leadership or design leadership or whatever it may be while you're in the flow of producing? So I think that's a really important, um, aspect of what we do is, is think about the people and how people communicate and how [00:24:00] people interact with one another.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it's interesting for you to bring up the needs of the technical leadership, because I'm trying to think if I've ever heard of that being phrased like that before. I feel like the thinking in firms is that the technology is there to serve the people, as tools, but not to serve the people. Not that there's needs there that need to be met.

It's more like, no, the function of this stuff is just to do what I tell it to do, however I tell it to do it. But you're reframing that to say, like there's a structure that is required, it's required that you adhere to it, so that we get the value, the benefits out of it. You know, probably later, right? But a lot of people are totally willing to hijack later for the, the, the comfort of like now, and by comfort, I just mean like getting something done, right?

Like I just need it off my list. [00:25:00] Um, and that's where this kind of perverse incentivization happens, right? Which is like, just take shortcuts now. The idea of technical debt creeping into projects because people aren't willing decisions, or they don't know what they don't know, you know, early on to benefit the project, to benefit the value of what technical leadership needs out of projects.

Um, that, that just gets, you know, the, to use the Karate Kid metaphor, right? Sweep the legs, Johnny. Like, just, just cut the legs out from underneath, underneath it now, because it just, I have a deadline, like, to your point, Chris, I have daily deadlines, right? I just need it to, Kind of work now, and I'm, I'm, you know, screw around and find out, right?

That, that's what ends up happening, right? And so, this idea of kind of, okay, so, so, okay, so here's the other thing that's going on in my head, based on what [00:26:00] Parley was saying, which is It's every firm's the Wild West, you know, and to what you said, Chris, every, every project is unique, right? Everybody thinks their project and, and, and to some extent, yes, unique assemblies, unique site, unique client, um, environmental orientation, all these things.

Yes, but using the same parts to put, put things together. And so, um, what's interesting to me is you guys are responding to. That situation and saying, well, your, your culture is unique because it's made up of individuals. who come together to form that culture and we want to meet you where you're at rather than force you to use a tool in this very specific way, which is big platforms kind of do that, right?

They force people to use the software that their way. Um, and that's where all of this screwed up. Behavior happens, right? It's like workarounds, like that's what this is because it's complicated and not everybody has the same training [00:27:00] and the same know how and, um, they haven't been using it as long as the person, you know, the expert over there.

And so I don't want to ask somebody and look stupid, risk looking stupid. So I'm going to like YouTube it, or I'm just going to try to figure it out and I'm going to figure it out, not the. standard way that the technical leadership needs. Like we've seen all of this happen all the time, right? And I think it's really interesting that you're approaching this problem from a different perspective, which is, okay, your firm culture is unique in what you're doing and how you're delivering it and how you're using the tools because you have different people.

You've got different standards than that firm. You've got different content than this firm. You've got different market segments and different project types and all these things, right? Those are, those are differences. And you're saying like, we tailor it to you rather than forcing you to use it a very specific way.

When I. Throw all this at you. I, I apologize. Like, I feel like super unstructured about how I'm, how I'm talking about this, but this is [00:28:00] very much like, Oh, I'm working all this out in my head. And I, and you prompted it, Chris, by saying, you know, what technical leadership needs and, and based on some other things that they came up before that, like, this is the kind of stuff that I think lots of people are struggling with.

Right. And, and I know firm leaders out there who have just said, like, we just declared digital bankruptcy and we let the teams figure it out. Right. And, and then we're just there to put out fires and we're there to kind of smooth over the road bumps and we're just trying to just keep it going. Right.

Just keep the tire, keep the wheels on. Right.

Chris Shafer: Exactly.

Evan Troxel: and there's another, there's the other side of that coin, which is like, it's super structured. You have to do it this way. Um, and, and I mean, You know, trying to limit technical debt buildup. So if I throw all this out there, I mean, I'm really interested in how you're kind of approaching this from a different angle than like the big platforms even can.

Right? You can't. And so what you're saying [00:29:00] is like, Guardian is super customizable to the way firm cultures and people use the software and what their technical leaders need to get out of it and all these things. Um, I, I just imagine that, like, at some level, and maybe I'm wrong, that's got to be a little hard to manage because everybody's doing it a little bit differently still, right?

Um, there's no industry standard here, right? Like, this is still kind of firm culture, firm standard kind of stuff. So, I mean, what does that trigger for you guys? Kind of, like, me bouncing this back at you.

Chris Shafer: One of, one of the things, hearing, hearing that is, take a simple thing, say, browser organization. is

Evan Troxel: You're talking about the Revit, like,

Chris Shafer: the Revit browser, Project Browser Organization, right? Something as simple as that, right? All that is, is an, is organizing of your views and sheets.

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Chris Shafer: Um, Especially early on in, in, in my career and using, using Revit.

And this [00:30:00] happens with everyone in architecture. You kind of bounce from project to project, right? And you go from one project to the next. And the browser organization is completely different than the other. There's a learning curve. And there's just, you know, talking about waste in the industry, right?

That's, that's just waste.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Chris Shafer: And then you would have, then you would have, say, you hire a new architect or a new architect or a junior architect and like, well, my last firm, we organized it this way. And they go in there and start changing their organization right within that active project to that organization.

And then you have just, Layers and layers of all these other standards, and at the end of the day, you've got nothing, right? Everyone's just confused and I think we've all been there. We spend 20 minutes just looking for a view. And so with, you know, one of the things with Guardian is we're not saying what that browser organization should or shouldn't be.

We're just saying, hey, this is something that is set up by the company as a company standard. Those, you know, [00:31:00] the administrators, the digital, digital design leaders in the firms, they're the ones who's responsible for setting that up. But Guardian just ensures whatever was set up by those leaders that is being adopted and adhered by all the team, all teams and everyone on there.

And if, if the Guardian administrator chooses to do so, people are prevented from changing it, right? So they're being asked to kind of follow the rules and there's a lot of layers of tools that make sure that, you know, those, you know, those standards are set. And they're easily adhered to. And I think that's something that's really important is it's one thing to say, Hey, here's your standards, but it's another thing to say, say, well, we're making it easier for you to do your job by the standards are kind of set.

You don't have to think about it. They're there. And whenever there's something that is not meeting the standards, we're, we're just going to change it for you. We're going to change it to the [00:32:00] standard. Um, but partly actually has a really. Um, cool history on, on where he ran into a situation where, um, someone wasn't a big fan of, of the standards or lack thereof, and, and how, how a simple interaction, and again, come back to communications and people, um, how that led to, um, actually winning someone over.

Parley Burnett: Yeah, yeah, it's a fun one. Um, but, and I'll share it, but Evan, I think you said it better than I did. You know, we, we do try to arrive at where they're at from the beginning and we kind of view our role in, in the lifespan of our relationship with a firm as consulting them and guiding them. And taking the good parts that we see at other firms and kind of allowing them to kind of morph into a more positive culture. Um, and technical debt [00:33:00] for sure is a, is a concept that as, as software developers, we're, we're well familiar with, right? Um, and, and the reality is like, we are technology people. And so sometimes we're not aware of the technical debt that we're accumulating. Now, think about Revit, right? We're working with artists and designers who, who may not be as technically minded, they don't even know they're creating that technical debt.

Right. And so, so we kind of see that as our role is to kind of bring that to light as well. And the story that Chris is talking about, um, in software, we, we often say, or there's this phrase, you know, we need to eat our own dog food. Right. And so, um, early in the development of Guardian. We put it into practice with a close firm here locally, um, kind of in partnership with them.

We deployed it to the users and, you know, we, I think we had a [00:34:00] prompt show up to users when they went to the line styles management dialogue, um, that basically said like Chris was saying with the project browser, okay, this is our standard. If you're going to make a change, tell us what you're changing.

And, and we had a user there that was like, well known for being the bull in the China shop, right? Just kind of go, go, go. Um, very quick, um, not really caring about

Evan Troxel: Move fast and break things. Right. Yeah.

Parley Burnett: Just break everything. Yeah. Notorious for this. And he sent me this message of the guardian dialogue. Like, Hey, how do I get rid of this?

Right. He's, he was quite adamant about this. And I basically had a conversation with him. I was like, well, why do you want to get rid of it? Well, I'm, I see it every time I go to Align Styles. And then I asked, well, What are you trying to do there? And he's like, well, I, I'm trying to make a red line style that I can mark my plans up with so I can come [00:35:00] back later and make changes as like, well, sounds like that's something that you're doing on every project, right?

It's like, Oh yeah, for sure. It's like, well, now that I know this, I can add that line style to the template and you'll never have to do this again. Right. And that's when the, the light bulb went off to that user. Um, and became almost the biggest advocate for it at the firm.

Evan Troxel: Something you mentioned earlier, Chris, was the 20 minutes that somebody could spend just kind of learning how to navigate a project. And this is, I guess, what I was alluding to in the very beginning about like these dirty little secrets. It's like nobody really wants to recognize that this happens all in many different forms.

with, right, it is not always just the inexperience of, of a user, right? It is, it is often because we are, you know, ad hoc, you know, as a previous title of an episode, AEC is an adhocracy, right? It's like this [00:36:00] idea that every team we disperse, we come back together in a different form. Uh, different phase of a project, different project type, different template maybe for that project, different project leaders, different technical advisors, uh, different structures in these files, these giant databases that we all get into to work on a project.

And, okay, so what we've buried so far is just like what Guardian does, and you've mentioned a few things about it, but I think from a, I, I would like to, uh, to set this up so that you can talk about what Guardian does in a more comprehensive way so that people can get like, they can actually say, Oh, okay, I get it now.

Um, but using this as like the way to get into there, which is like this 20 minutes that somebody spends just learning how to navigate through the views, how to find a view that they're looking for in a, in a project browser. That's one example. And you've talked about line styles and you've talked about content and you've talked about kind of these, these pop ups that happen that [00:37:00] You know, maybe they give somebody information, maybe they ask them to make a decision, maybe they're, you know, they're these prompts that happen.

Um, so all of this has, has been stated, but now I, I want you to kind of give a, a, a broad overview because I know we can't get into the specifics of every single thing that Guardian does because it's so comprehensive. It's like as comprehensive as Revit is itself, right? It's like, Yep, it does everything, um, but, but at the same time, like, I want you to give it, give people an idea, like, why is it called Guardian?

Like, what is it guarding? What, what is going on here? Um, and, and how is it addressing, um, The dirty little secrets of every single project that people get into and how nobody wants to actually say that time matters and it adds up and it is worth something. What can we do about it? Right? Like to me, that's, that's really what we're talking about here.

And we're talking about a tool that kind of helps us address those issues. I

Chris Shafer: Yep, Parlec. [00:38:00] Yeah, I'll take that. Yeah. So, Guardian, um, at its core, what it does, it automates consistency across standards and processes and best practices. It educate users in the moment of, you know, what are those best practices? that firm's standards, best practices and, and, and processes. Um, but then also provides, you know, actionable insights on how people are actually utilizing for, to actually execute their projects.

And so we really see that, that standards and process is, is such important to the culture of what a firm is. And, and so what Guardian really does is, does it kind of on a almost a command by command basis under tries to figure out to how are your users utilizing that command and how does your digital practice, your digital delivery leaders, how are [00:39:00] they working to make sure that everyone understands what are those standards around those with the process around each and every command.

Um, and in addition to that, you know, it, having the, the data behind all that, it helps. It helps the digital practice leaders to understand with this particular command, and we can just go down the list there of, of all the different features, um, and commands that, that Guardian is addressing. By providing that data, it gives them the opportunity to say, well, I see this amount of people are using this command incorrectly.

Maybe I need to focus our training this week on that. on that command or, or that process or that best practice. So fundamentally it's a way of providing consistent standards process and, and communications around that. Um, I, I think what [00:40:00] most people know Guardian about is, is the command prompts. When a user goes to execute a command, rather than instantly, Going into that command, Guardian will prompt the user a customizable message by the firm, which can also be customized at the project level as well, um, of how, how this command is to be used, the best practice, the process, and so on and so forth.

And so it's a great tool of just communicating standards, processes, and best practices.

Evan Troxel: want to raise my hand here and say, okay, that sounds, and I'm no, no offense, Chris, that sounds terrible. That sounds terrible. And because I think people are going to hear that and be like, what do you, now it sounds like everything's going to take twice as long, right? Because every time I click on a tool, it's going to prompt me.

And I know that's not how it works. So I want, I want you guys to, to, to, to, Take that little bit of feedback right there in the way that you talk about your tool and talk [00:41:00] about that because, because addressing that is definitely going to be a concern for people. It's like, because I mean, one thing is as a former digital practice leader myself, right?

It's like, we talk about the difference between handcuffs and freedom when it comes to standardization. of processes, right? And, and the way that we use things. It's like, some people say, that sounds terrible. That sounds like handcuffs. And at the same time, we're, we're saying, okay, but if we reframe it to say like, okay, now you don't have to think about that stuff anymore because we've taken care of it.

And now you can go focus on stuff that really matters. Like that's one, one example, right? But the things that you're talking about here, it's like, it's not, It's not slapping you on the hand every time you do something, right? It's, but, but it is a training tool in the moment. And I love how you said that, where it's like, it's in the moment.

And it says to, to Parley's point earlier, all I wanted to do is create a red line, right? So that I could mark up my, my drawing so that I wouldn't forget what [00:42:00] to come back to. And it's like, well, and then it, then it enables. It's a communication to happen for people to understand because what's the ratio of BIM managers to users out there?

Like what are you guys seeing? Is it like 50 to one? Is it bigger? I don't even, I don't even know where it is, but it doesn't scale. Everybody knows it doesn't scale to all the problems that happen on a daily basis with all the team members. And this is another dirty little secret in the industry, right?

It's like it, that it doesn't scale. And so we need tools like this to automate that process of. Engagement and not accruing technical debt over time so that we can get the value out of these exquisite models that people craft on a daily basis. And so I, I want you to speak to that point about like, okay, it's not like just, it's not gonna take twice as long to do this stuff because it's actually training people to not have to worry about doing it like the wrong way again, right?

Chris Shafer: Yeah, exactly.

Parley Burnett: Chris has some good experience [00:43:00] implementing

Chris Shafer: Yes, yes. Um, you know, having implemented to over 1000 users, I've seen and heard it all over the years. Um, but just from my own personal experience, um, you know, I having been a Revit user, a Guardian user for years, I developed a little saying. I don't get in a car without fastening my seatbelt.

I don't get into Revit, without having Guardian, um, even as a power user myself, I've experienced where, hey, our natural tendency is to, you know, to just, to cut corners sometimes or, you know, I can, I can, I can get away with this, right? I'll come back to it. And sometimes those gentle reminders are like, Hey, you're, you know, we're all prone to making mistakes, especially when we're in a hurry or under the gun of a deadline.

Um, I actually have a, an interesting, my very first project utilizing Guardian, um, [00:44:00] we, this was a developer driven. building in, in Boston, you know, very fast pace and whatnot. And just, just five, you know, 400, 000 square feet. And we were, it was a really interesting case study here where, where we had the team.

all operating, um, in the same direction, rowing in the same direction. Right. And, and another saying I have said over my career is, you know, Revit's like death by a thousand cuts, right? It's never this big thing. It's always this one little thing, but over the course of a project, you know, all these little cuts add up to something big.

And what we saw with this project, with the help of Guardian, is we stopped. Cutting those, those cuts never happened, right? And so what you saw was you're constantly just moving the ball down the field, right? You're going towards your project deadlines [00:45:00] more efficiently and you're in many ways you weren't, you know, fixing mistakes along the way, right?

You weren't being that firefighter that you had mentioned earlier. It was all about just moving that project forward, everyone in the same direction, and it And that in the day, um, it was a very tight schedule, a very tight budget. Being developer driven project is always a tight budget. We ended up making 17, 17 percent profit on that given project, which was unheard of.

You just stop doing the little things, the little things that set you back and moving it forward, that's when you start seeing the real value that That not only Guardian provides, but also Revit provides, right? Is, is coming, we talked earlier about the potential that Revit has. When you're actually getting that potential out of it, some great things can really happen.

Parley Burnett: And, uh, yeah, I think it's definitely a [00:46:00] case of like how you message that too, right, Chris, like sharing the wins with the users, um, can really build that consensus, that, that kind of mentality that this is a good thing for us. We do talk a lot about, um. communication. So like before you put out a dialogue that you kind of communicate to users, but what that's going to look like. Um, and then the other thing is, um, just to shed a little bit of light on some other aspects of Guardian too, because it's not just like workflow prompts. It's also like, Hey, somebody else is syncing their model right now, right?

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

Parley Burnett: Just, and so users appreciate knowing that so that they can add themselves to the Guardian queue.

without having to face that like 2x sync time that they would have faced otherwise. So like, over time they really start to [00:47:00] see the benefits of that. And there's other things behind the scenes like works at automation, things get put on the work set just automatically as things are placed or drawn. Parameter prompts. There's a lot of like automations behind the scenes. That's, that's what I would like to say is that it's not always a prompt and there's a reporting component to it as well.

Chris Shafer: One thing I would like to add regarding the prompts and that you had alluded to, Devin, is like, oh, I'm being slowed down, but that's prompt. Um, and one of the things, and who I heard this mostly from was the power users. And, you know, as, as someone who was leading. You know, the whole firm of, of Revit users is.

I would always remind them, I'm like, well, usually as the power user, you're the person responsible for fixing the mistakes of others. And so while, yes, you may have a prompt that, that pops up once [00:48:00] every, you know, two hours when you're working in the day and that prompt takes you five seconds to read and go and to clear and whatnot, that is much less time it takes than cleaning up the mistakes of others on your team.

As the power user, you're the one who's responsible for. doing the cleanup, doing the fixing, and that takes a lot more time. And so the peace of mind knowing that the others on your team who are prone to making mistakes just from inexperience or not knowing or knowing your firm standards or whatever it may be, you know, just that actually creates more time for you and whatnot.

Um, but then ultimately there are tools within Guardian to you know, for your power users saying, well, you know what you're doing. You don't, you know, you don't need this as well. So, you know, there's coming back to finding that balance of how do you communicate, but not over communicating or being too much of a burden on this user.

So, [00:49:00] you know, there's something as party alluded to earlier that we're always striving for is, is how do we, how do we figure out how to lessen that impact

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I think part of this is, you have to communicate this to all the different levels, right? You've got, you've got the user level, like, and then there's a spectrum there, beginner to expert, um, user level. Then there's technical management leadership, and then there's, like, firm leadership. And just talking about the value proposition at every one of these levels has got to be, you know, I mean, I'm interested to hear from you guys how you do that because I think a lot of technology vendors need to do the same thing, right?

Um, and, and I'm just curious how you do it because I'm reading this book by Cal Newport and, and the idea, like he's, he's had a few different topics kind of all around this idea of, Pseudo productivity, uh, and [00:50:00] doing deep work, right? Like, like our life is full of distraction. We've got teams or Slack running all the time.

There's constant messaging. There's email, there's notifications. There's all these things. And yeah, I'm busy. I'm busy doing email. Like nobody became an architect to do email. Right. Um, but that is what, how much of our day is spent like just. Addressing the inbox, right? New things to do. Like that's what your inbox is, right?

It's new things for you to do given by somebody else who didn't have permission to tell you to do something, right? It's just like, but that, that's what it becomes, right? And, and firms don't address like firm leadership. If they, if they actually counted how much time people spent in Outlook every single day, they'd be like, what?

We're not doing projects when we're, when we're doing Outlook. Like you may be addressing a client's concerns, or you may be kind In a roundabout way, you know, getting something done by assigning somebody a task or, you know, consult, you're [00:51:00] talking to a consultant or something like that. But in an inordinate amount of time gets spent doing email, which is not doing architecture, right?

So if, and we don't talk about that, like we don't talk about how much time people are just spending. Chatting, which is, you know, maybe it is project oriented when they're chatting on teams or slack or something, but a lot of times it isn't right. And so, and it's not like we need to be 100 percent productive all the time.

That's not what I'm saying, but there is a huge amount of like, we just don't address the waste that's going on here. And so from a leadership, like people who do the work know exactly what I'm talking about. It happens all the time. We're all guilty of it. Um, and at the same time, we're, we're. Quote unquote using these tools to get work done, but we're kind of not at the same time, right?

And so from a messaging to the leadership standpoint when you guys talk about addressing Waste that's going on. And what is the return on that investment of getting that time back? How do you [00:52:00] communicate to those people? Because to me, like they're the decision makers in the firms, like users of any level can go say, Hey, like I heard about this thing.

It sounds incredible to actually get us all on the same page and, and, and enable us to get more value out of these intricate, incredible models that we're building over many years and it's standardizing our data and it's standardizing, you know, when, when. Sally goes from this project to that project.

She's going to know right where to pick up because we're developing these with the same standards and there's lots of value to be gained in that. How do you communicate that to leadership so that they actually understand that?

Chris Shafer: So I'm going to provide a little antidote here to start answering that question is when when I first implemented our model health strategy and Guardian was a vital tool in that process with my previous firm. It. In my role, and I guess my, [00:53:00] my boss who I reported to, we never felt like we had the, the authority to actually require it.

And then after a couple of years of doing this on a, I wouldn't say a voluntary basis, but we were, we were really focused on our largest projects, um, getting the teams to utilize, uh, utilize the model health strategy. Again, Guardian was a critical part of that. And, um, And that equate that covered about 60 percent of our firm and and as we are wanting to do and grow and, you know, ask for for for more money to do other things as well, we were presenting the savings that we were seeing with.

And with our model health strategy and one of the things that we were presenting was just say sync times party had mentioned earlier is we were through that model health strategy. We were able to reduce our sync times by over a minute across the firm. Um, and when. each

Parley Burnett: sync.

Chris Shafer: [00:54:00] each sync. And so when you look at that across the board, you know, that equated to almost a 600, 000 a year savings.

Just, you know, obviously not all that is seen or gained or whatnot. The reality and coming back to dirty little secrets, everyone knows as well, people kick sync and then they go check their Outlook or they go to their IMs or they go get a cup of coffee. Right. So. That two minute, right? So that two minute syncs ends up being 10, 15, even longer, right?

It becomes a distraction. And so

Evan Troxel: doing something else, right?

Chris Shafer: exactly, exactly. So how do you eliminate the simple setbacks, the simple distractions that lead to larger distractions? And one is, is, is, is quite, I'm going to say, you go down the list of so much of what Guardian does and you start looking [00:55:00] at how, how much this actually costs a company by not preventing, you know, mistakes or misuse or, or whatever it may be, or the lack of standards.

And, And on its surface, the ROI is just instant. It, you're just like, wow, you know, this, this pays for itself in a matter of weeks here. But then the layer of additional waste that comes out of this, you know, the, the secondary, the tertiary, um, downstream impact, you know, that's not really accounted for that.

Um, and, and a lot of times making this argument to leadership and say, Hey, having everyone operating in different ways And we're not even, don't even have the word to bring up the word standards, because even a lot of leadership, they start to like, Oh, here goes the standards thing again. Right? Um, just saying, Hey, just, just having people just all operating in the [00:56:00] same direction and doing things really in the same way, really being a team and the way that they do things and making sure the needs and the of the project and the needs of the team are being met throughout the course of the project.

That alone has tremendous value and it's measurable value. Um, and And when you see it in the profitability, um, on projects, you know, that makes it, you know, makes it an easy, sometimes an easy sell.

Parley Burnett: And Chris, you even got your hand slapped a little bit by leadership once they understood that, right? They're like,

Chris Shafer: Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Parley Burnett: why aren't we using this on every project?

Chris Shafer: yeah. Um, where, like I said before, I never felt in my role that I had the authority and, and, and my boss, who I directly reported to didn't have the authority to say, no, this is mandatory. And the president was like, why aren't we doing this on? This is such, this provides such tremendous value to the company.

Why aren't we [00:57:00] doing it on every project? Why isn't everyone following this? And I think that's something a lot of people in that digital practice role. They're kind of caught between right there They're given this tremendous responsibility to make sure the firm the fundamentals of the firm are being Executed but they're not given the authority to do so

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Chris Shafer: And, and what Guardian does is, is it ensures that the best practices, the standards, but more importantly, the knowledge and experience of your digital practice people are being, being gained by everyone, all the time, by every project.

And, and there's a tremendous value about having that knowledge and expertise right there as people are doing their work. And not being, and not being the firefighters, right? You know, preventing mistakes before they happen versus being the person for cleaning up the [00:58:00] mistakes.

Evan Troxel: Right. It seems like that kind of just in time methodology of of providing. Insight prompts, um, you know, action items, training. There's a lot of different ways you could kind of categorize these things is so important because I mean, to your point earlier about kind of, you know, technical debt and just saying, you know, I'm incentivized to figure out a work around right now and I'll come back and I'll fix it later.

And then you get distracted and you're doing a bunch of other stuff. And then. It's, it snowballs, right? Like you forget about this one and then somebody builds on top of that, which relies on what was already done and it was already done wrong. So now we have to do it a little bit wrong, some more, right?

And then, and that, that just keeps snowballing. And at some point it's like, who's going to fix this and what do we do? I mean, how many times early on in those, in those early days, Chris, 2008, 2009, right, did you say, okay, export to AutoCAD right at this [00:59:00] point, because we just can't We can't deal anymore, right?

Like everybody's, everybody who's been doing this a while has lived through that, right? And at some point, like now, now that's not an option, right? It's like now we just are completely weighed down for the rest of the project because it gets so bad. And I'm, I'm just curious, like what other kinds of examples you have besides like sync times when it comes to communicating, you know, so, so a more fundamental question is like, Are architects very good at like, valuing their own time?

And I, I tend to think no, because we're all trained to like, just solve the problem, no matter what it takes. Like we're up for the challenge. We know that there's an answer. We'll figure it out if we just try hard enough. And everybody, like to your point earlier, Chris, like everybody goes to work wanting to do a good job, right?

Like they don't, they're not going in saying, man, I'm going to take a bunch of shortcuts and leave early today. Like that doesn't, doesn't really happen, right? So, [01:00:00] so people want it there. They want to do the right thing. But at the same time, like they do have the real constraints of deadlines and, and sync times is one example.

But like. When it comes to learning how to value our own time, let's put some values on that right now and like, what are some other kinds of qualitative or quantitative metrics, either category there that you're really seeing that tools like this can, can provide to the users and the firm leadership alike.

Chris Shafer: Yeah. Um, one of the things I would just quickly hit on, we have a feature called delete protections, um, where, so for instance, is when someone goes to delete something and there's a, an item that is hosted to that element. Well, everyone has conditioned themselves to ignore the yellow warning box that Revit produces.

And just hit delete, right?

Evan Troxel: even sees that corner of the screen.

Parley Burnett: If it shows up. Yeah.

Chris Shafer: Right.

Evan Troxel: Complete blind spot.[01:01:00]

Chris Shafer: and, and so, so what Guardian has done is provided a prompt that shows you everything that's being deleted and all it does, and, and, and I've heard you mentioned this another podcast, you have to go, you have to go slow to go fast. This is slowing people down just enough to say, yes, I intentionally.

want to delete all this other stuff that I don't see in front of me, right?

Evan Troxel: You're right.

Chris Shafer: Um, and, and

Evan Troxel: think I shared a story with you where every day I'd come into work, and the main stair in a three story school classroom building was gone. Every day. And it was like, somebody was deleting something. They had no idea that somebody else had pinned another out the stair to that element.

And they were like, this, this element does not need to be in here. Like it, but, and so, so every day we'd roll that model back to grab that piece out of it and bring it back into the new model. And then the next day it'd be gone again, because somebody would be like, what, [01:02:00] what I thought I'd delete, I'm going to delete it again.

Right. And, and it's gone. And so to your, to your point, it's like, if you don't know, You're, you're not doing it wrong on purpose, but if you don't know, I mean, all you're doing is saying like, Hey, here's some additional context you might want to be aware of.

Chris Shafer: that's exactly right. And, and it is just communication, right? Communication. Hey, these are, these are the things, because we, we understand, Many of us understand with Revit, I, I call it the butterfly effect, right? You touch one thing and something on the other side of the model is, is impacted. A lot of people just fundamentally don't understand that about Revit, right?

There are things outside of your immediate view that you're impacting. And, and all we're doing is bringing awareness to that. And we're seeing that in the data, how, how frequent people are actually saying. No, I don't want to delete all this. Right? Um, and so when we, so I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head on how [01:03:00] much this is being used, but this is one of the most common data points that we see is people just have stopped, um,

Evan Troxel: Well, and if you use my story as an example, like every single day, we're going back and opening the old model. We're pulling that piece out. We're copying it. We're pasting it into every single day. And then somebody else is finding that element and deleting it every single day for a week, right? And it's like, okay, well, there's, that's just one version of, of.

you know, why this kind of thing exists, right? And it's like, it is, it is an actual amount of time. It is not incidental.

Chris Shafer: right? And coming back to your example is, is And why does someone keep on repeating that? Because they don't know that they're, they're deleting the entire stair while we're at it, right? And so, having the information about who deleted it, when, and where, and what not, provides the BIM manager, the model manager, to, hey, this so and [01:04:00] so went and deleted the stair, let's go have a conversation with them about, hey, I understand that you're just, you weren't trying to delete the stair, you're only trying to delete this, right?

This provides an opportunity to have an educational moment and say, well, by not knowing that they're deleting this shows a, a, a fundamental misunderstanding of how Revit works and also opens the opportunity to have a teaching moment and say, Hey, this is, this is the way, say, annotation and Revit work and so on and so forth.

Right? Um, you know, annotations, views, specific, well, model elements is, You know, in every view. Um, and you know, those type of things, you know, a lot of that is, is missed. You know, those simple opportunities to teach are missed. Um, and by not knowing and kind of sweeping it under the rug actually doesn't really help. Anyone in that situation, and especially the person, um, the person who's deleting the stare, right? No one, no one wants to make that [01:05:00] mistake, right? Um, and so have an opportunity to, to help people before they get into that situation is, we feel is like the, the better opportunity or the better position to be in.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Parley Burnett: We've, we've heard from a lot of interns and that junior level of designer, Brevitt user, um, appreciate the fact that the guardrails are up right to that point. Nobody wants to make the mistake. Um, on that feature, the number, Chris, is about 50 percent of the time users are canceling. So, so we do track, um, the cancel rate on every kind of prompt, um, which is incredible information to show leadership.

That's another way that we kind of go up there, Evan, and kind of inform them about what Guardian's doing. Um, yeah, 50 percent and the numbers aren't small too. We're seeing a lot of cancels and it does track the actual elements that would have been deleted. So [01:06:00] when you see that, there's a lot of work product that would have gone out the window.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Parley Burnett: Um, another

Evan Troxel: gotta be, I'm interested how you talk to firm leaders who say, what do you mean I have to get another piece of software to plug all these holes in the main software we use to deliver projects? Like, I mean, that's gotta be a sentiment of, you know, You know, I've I don't know what, you know, we've got to be frustration there for sure, right?

But, I mean, it's great, great for you to be able to create a business out of all the holes that do exist, but the, the platform is not solving these problems. And that's got to be a little disheartening for, for people to say what, you know, we already spend probably the biggest chunk of our software budget on this platform that everybody uses differently in very different ways, you know, and, and, and there's all these.

potential problems that just creep up here and there. And now I've got to get [01:07:00] this other thing to help do that. I mean, what, what do you, how's the story go? How's the communication go around that?

Parley Burnett: I mean, back to that example of, um, CAD and, you know, like, Let's, let's just print this all to CAD, right? And kind of scrap it,

Evan Troxel: Right.

Parley Burnett: export to CAD. I think there's been enough of that in the past that, um, a lot of leadership does feel like the promise of Revit hasn't been realized, right? And it's unfortunate. I wish it wasn't like that. Um, I think we, we try to convey that we're a complement to the tool and providing a level of customization that, like, Um, a company like Autodesk isn't likely to, um, who knows, um, seek, seek after providing. What's your take on [01:08:00] that, Chris?

Chris Shafer: Yeah. And, and if you think about it, is Revit's designed to, to the tallest skyscrapers in the world to

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Chris Shafer: residential sheds, right? Um, and, and, and a little inside joke. Um, um, and, and everything in between, right? And, and how do you, how do you create a tool that has to work? that broadly. And, but then so specifically for a firm that does a residential versus a firm that does healthcare specifically, right?

Um, I don't know how Autodesk, um, could do it, um, in a single platform. And then I think that's where Guardian really comes in is like, well, Guardian is really providing that layer of your firm's culture, your standards, your processes to that where you can customize basically [01:09:00] how your users are using Revit to deliver projects in the way that you want to, um, and, and not have this sort of open, open book or open process.

Um, so in, in many ways, and this is something that I've heard over the, over the years, um, whether it was in my previous firm or, you know, here with Guardian is, is there's a, there's a level of comfort and you, you had mentioned freedom, right? There's a level of comfort knowing that. A lot of this has already been figured out you, you have the runway to focus on your job, right?

You know, the standards, the processes, everyone doing the things in the same way that's taken care of. And then you can focus on doing your job.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Interesting. I, I know that this, this is sounding, I don't know, maybe people think it sounds too good to be true. I mean, everybody [01:10:00] has that story. I have this, I hear this story from my wife all the time who literally hates using Revit every single day. And, and I know not every, there's a lot of people who love using Revit every single day, but I, I do want to, like, to your point.

I saw a comment earlier, Parley, about, about junior architects or graduates coming into firms and saying, because every one of them, I guarantee you is coming with bad habits to your firm, right? 100%. Like this, the, the training that people get in school when it comes to digital tools is probably zero and they're learning it on their own from their friends and the internet, right?

And so when they come in, like, I guarantee you they're doing it. Wrong, right? In air quotes, because they're not doing it to your standards, your firm standards. And I mean, you mentioned it also from people coming from other firms and how we did it there is how I want to do it here, because that's my experience and that's, I'm comfortable with that.

And so I want to implement that on my [01:11:00] project and bringing that consistency back to the firm's, you know, culture, technical leadership requirements, you know, profitability, like all of these things. It's a really big deal, like in, in, in, in, or we mentioned earlier, like this stuff just doesn't scale with a per at the personal level because the technical staff, there's just not enough.

There's never enough. Right? And, and these tools are table stakes. They're just a guarantee. We're going to use these tools on every single project. This is how we deliver projects. We don't deliver projects any other way. We're not going back to hand drafting. We're not going even back to CAD. We're not doing any of that stuff anymore.

Right? And so to not understand that, that. This has a huge business impact, as well as a culture and training and professional development impact, like you have to realize that in leadership at these levels to understand why any of this matters, um, and, and to me, like, I know [01:12:00] at some level, maybe this does sound too good to be true, but at the same time, like, it's not.

You guys have done it. And, and that's why I wanted to highlight it on the podcast, because when I saw what this is, like, I have all of these scenarios and I started out this whole rant right here about what I hear from my wife, which is like, I've, Why doesn't it do what I want it to do? And like, she's working for very small architects here and there doing modeling and every one of them does it differently.

And, and so constant battles, constant internet searches on how to figure this stuff out. And so Chris, like you bring it up, like somebody's already figured this out so that you don't have to. And having a way to convey that to staff who doesn't know what they don't know. is huge. Like it's just absolutely huge.

And so kudos to you guys for, for doing the work and, and plugging a lot of these holes that do exist. And, but, but also like educating people through the process and meeting them where they're at. Right. Because it's not [01:13:00] just handcuffs and it's not just slaps on the, on the back of the hand or on the back of the head as sometimes it might be.

Right. But it's like, That you're, you're taking a different approach to it. And I think it's a, it is a very personal approach, uh, and it's a very human approach because those are the people who are actually using these tools to deliver these projects. And so it's worth highlighting, like absolutely worth highlighting.

And, and so I appreciate you guys coming on the show to talk about that today. And I want to give you the opportunity, if there's anything that I've missed here that we, we need to talk about. I think we've, we've talked about a lot of the problems, but we've also talked about ways to handle that. And, and some interesting ways to handle these things through, through the people approach to the culture approach.

Um, is there anything that we missed that you guys want to bring up before we, we call it quits here? Yeah,

Parley Burnett: It's been fun to talk about it with you. I think I, um, I would just say that we're not done yet. Right. It does a lot for sure. It does a lot, but the, [01:14:00] the challenges there in Revit are quite many. So we look forward to continuing the path.

Evan Troxel: I don't hear the same rant from my wife every time. It's always a different thing, to your point, right? It's like there's, there's a lot more work to do. So, uh, and, and I, I appreciate that you're up for it because I know obviously there's a business case for it, but at the same time, like you're interested in.

Firms getting better at what they're doing, delivering better products to their clients, because I know you guys as, as people, right? And these are the things that, that you're passionate about. So, um, yeah, so thanks for bringing that up because I, yeah, like it's not over. It's, and, and software is never done, right?

You, there's, there's, I'm sure you've got a roadmap that, that, that's enormous. So, um, that's cool to see. It's cool to see things coming out, new ways to address these problems. And, and, uh, thanks for taking the time to talk about it today.

Chris Shafer: Yeah. We really appreciate the opportunity, Evan. [01:15:00] Um, this has been, it's been fun.

Parley Burnett: Yes, it has. Thank you.

View Details

Phil Read and Adam Thomas join the podcast to talk about leadership development, the crucial balance between technical know-how and soft skills, cultivating interpersonal relationships, stress management, mentorship, where to go to foster leadership skills and behaviors, accountability, and more. You’ll also learn about the upcoming AEC Acoustics retreat that is blending leadership and technical skill enhancement through collaborative discussions in a low-key, energizing environment.

Episode links:* AEC Acoustics retreat information and registration * Phil on LinkedIn * Phil on Twitter/X * Phil on Instagram * Adam on LinkedIn * Adam on Twitter/X * Read | Thomas website * Read | Thomas on LinkedIn * Read | Thomas on Twitter/X * TRXL 145: ‘The Gordian Knot, Part 1’, with Phil Read * TRXL 146: ‘The Gordian Knot, Part 2’, with Phil Read

About Phil Read:Phil is the CEO and co-founder of Read | Thomas - a global BIM/VDC consulting group and go-to-market startup advisor.

In 2020, Read | Thomas founded the AEC Leadership Retreat, an annual event focused on developing good leadership skills for people in the high stress / low control AEC industry.

About Adam Thomas:Adam is the Co-Owner and COO of Read|Thomas LLC, an AEC/O consulting firm dedicated to delivering business continuity solutions to teams involved in the creation of buildings, products, and software. Read|Thomas specializes in on-demand BIM management, Revit modeling, and technical assistance services.

With a background in architecture, business administration, international studies, and construction, Adam brings extensive expertise in BIM and PIM implementation across Revit Architecture, Revit MEP, Revit Structure, Enscape, Rhino, and SketchUp. He has developed over 50,000 fully parametric families for manufacturers worldwide. In addition to his technical expertise, Adam excels in conducting training sessions, workshops, and consultations on Revit, while also managing the implementation of Revit systems.

Adam has authored a comprehensive Revit standards manual for multiple architectural firms across the U.S., India, and Australasia. He co-authored the chapter "Revit in the Classroom" for Autodesk’s official training guide, Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011, and served as a technical editor for the Revit Architecture Essentials series in 2011 and 2013.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this episode on YouTube

Episode transcript: 165: ‘Transitioning to Leading People in AEC Tech’, with Phil Read and Adam Thomas

*Evan Troxel:* [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. And in this episode, I'm talking with Phil Read and Adam Thomas about the complexities of transitioning into leadership within digital and strategic roles in an AEC firm.

We talk about the crucial balance between technical know-how and soft skills, cultivating interpersonal relationships, stress management, mentorship, where to go to foster skills and behaviors, accountability, and more. You'll also learn about AEC Acoustics, an innovative retreat, blending leadership and technical skill enhancement through collaborative discussions, which I will be attending in just over a month from now. And just for listeners of this show, Phil and Adam have extended and incredibly generous offer to get the early bird pricing, even though that time has already passed. So on the registration form, you'll see Phil's email address and once you register, you can email [00:01:00] him and let him know that you heard about it here, and you'll get that early bird price. You can find the link to learn more about AEC Acoustics and register in the show notes for this episode or on my website at TRXL.Co. You can also visit AECacoustics.com.

Please help this podcast by subscribing wherever you listen.

And if you'd like to receive an email, when episodes are published with all of the links, like I just talked about and other information from the episode, sign up at trxl.co. You can also directly support the show by becoming a member at the site as well.

As always. Thank you so much for listening. And now without further ado, I hope you enjoyed this conversation about mastering leadership transitions in AEC tech with Phil Read and Adam Thomas.

*Evan Troxel:* [00:02:00] Phil and Adam. Welcome to the TRXL podcast. It's great to have you both here. And Phil, it's been a while since we, chatted. It was Denver Airport, United Lounge. Uh, and I'm going to put links to those episodes. In the show notes, but something you said during that conversation, uh, it really piqued my interest and, part of the conversation was about the transition in leadership, especially when it comes to like digital tools and strategy, and there's, there's kind of a technical side to it, and then there's this transition to leading a team, and you talked a little bit about that during our last conversation there. And that being a difficult transition for a lot of people. We, we

work our way up, solving problems, working with the tools, really technically oriented. And then it's like the next step in that natural progression is, okay, now you're going to lead people to do that same thing.

And it's, and then we, we trip over those speed bumps that happen, right?

So like [00:03:00] set up the beginning of this conversation. Let's just go from, from that. And let's elaborate on that a little bit, because I think it's going to lead us in some interesting

*Phil Read:* Well, that, you know, there is the, kind of truism that you get promoted to your point of incompetence.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah, There's a name to that

rule. I can't remember what it is off the top of my head, but

*Phil Read:* we should do this like Rogan and go, Adam, look that up for me. Can

you, what's that, what's that thing called? It's not Murphy's Law, it's something else.

*Evan Troxel:* I

don't have, I don't have an intern at my fingertips. So, yeah.

*Phil Read:* right. No, so there, so, That's the thing that happened to me. And if I had known there was a strategy, like read these books or go to these things or talk with these people, cause it's going to be stressful, then I would have known that being stressed is okay. But when you don't know why it's stressful and it just feels completely unfamiliar, it becomes even more stressful. So I really struggled with that. And then only to find out, like there's [00:04:00] been people that have attended, The leadership retreat after the fact that I managed during that very stressful time.

They said, Oh, you're the best boss ever had. It was great. And I thought, you weren't inside my head. I

*Evan Troxel:* I was,

barely hanging on, man.

*Phil Read:* yeah, it was so, I didn't know what I would, what I had accomplished. When I was at Autodesk, I knew at the end of a day, a week, a month, a quarter, like in detail, what stuff did we do to help the customer?

And then I went to a place where I don't even know if the decisions we're talking about are going to happen. How do I know I'm making the right decision? And so it was very stressful. I still find it stressful.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah, it's a, it's an interesting predicament to, to get yourself into without like, this is not the kind of thing you get trained for in school ever.

So if there is, let me know that that exists because I don't know that that exists. It's just, it's like, And I saw this with other positions as well. It's like you become, you get promoted to becoming a project manager.

Like there was no, in architecture, there [00:05:00] was no project management school. There was, and it was just like, you just learn by doing along the way, but then all of a sudden it goes from maybe you're doing one project to now you've got five projects and all of a sudden you're, you're overloaded. You got to. And you get, you get buried deep, right? And, and it's like, where do you go for help? And I think that, that to me is what is kind of interesting. And maybe kind of the theme about what we're talking about today is like, where do you go for help? Where do you get

*Phil Read:* Well, the money trail to go higher up in the organization is tempting. And I mean, that's like, Oh, I should follow the money, right? That's what adults do.

But then you might, yeah, but the thing is, well, one of the things we talked about in Denver was the process of becoming a technical high performer. It's okay if that's trial and error, because you can squirrel yourself away after hours. And just put your [00:06:00] head down and figure out a way that that'll work, that you can implement. And that trial and error is invisible to everyone else. Trial and error with people, it doesn't work. You'll end up alienating

customer, you'll alienate your staff, you'll alienate your business partner. Hey, Adam. I think Adam does way better at it. He's more of a extrovert than me. I would, I would say in that he works with a team of people that works with. Big customers, and I primarily just still work within customers and I have to periodically connect to the team that makes software that we're implementing, but yeah, having a team of people that are unpredictable and, uh, yeah, I still find it stressful,

*Adam Thomas:* It is Yeah, it is

stressful.

*Phil Read:* well, then you just accept the stress.

Yeah, I,

*Adam Thomas:* right, yeah, roll with the punches a little bit.

*Phil Read:* Yeah.

*Evan Troxel:* So, Adam, talk about that transition. I mean, [00:07:00] you, you're the youngest here, so you've gone through this probably the, the most recently. I, I definitely went through this transition myself, and I'm happy to talk about it, and I know Phil, we talked about it a little bit in our last set of conversations in, on the podcast, but So, so you, you've, we've all been through this and I think navigating this is something that we're all going to have different experiences with and how, how we accomplish navigating that. But to Phil's point earlier about this becomes, you know, it's attractive because there's more money, but there's more money because the expectation is now you're going to multiply your skills amongst a team and you're going to help take our organization to the next level. But there's not necessarily a. a thorough roadmap of how to do that, right? It's like figure it out, which is, this is the, this is architecture in general, right? This is, you know how to figure things out. And I have faith that you're going to figure this out because I [00:08:00] don't have time to train you how to do it. I don't know what the resources are.

We all learn differently. We've all done it a different way. And somehow it's all just kind of worked out and I'm sure it's not going to be any different with you. Go. But what was your experience like?

*Adam Thomas:* Well, so yeah, I am the youngest, um, but I, I think I threw myself into it because I saw a problem with the first few architecture companies I worked with, there was no direct path. It was, I'm going to be a BIM manager and you're only going to talk to two people. And actually the first one I worked with said that I wasn't allowed to talk to certain studios.

So I couldn't effectively be a BIM manager then. Because I have to talk to the studios, the people, to be able to increase productivity. Um, it's a psychological problem, not a technical problem. And so I think 15 years I've been fascinated by the psychology of people more than the technical output of people.

And if I can somehow roll with the punches enough [00:09:00] to get someone to be successful in their own life, it comes back to their professional life, which goes back to their personal life, and it keeps building on each other. Um, and so I would rather get on the phone with someone and say, you know, how can I, how can I de stress you?

Or how can I help alleviate some stress in the next 10 minutes? And with some clients, it's literally, they just want to talk about their grandkids, because no one at the office wants to do that. But that's coming from a place of I get told all the time that the way we deal with architecture firm A or construction firm B, if they tried to deal with it internally the same way, they would be told to leave.

So there's a position of kind of,

*Evan Troxel:* Privilege.

*Adam Thomas:* privileged to say like this outside resource, we're going to listen to them, even though that same internal person has said it before. And I've talked with those managers. And I don't think they are ignoring the internal manager. I don't think they're in, they're ignoring that internal [00:10:00] person.

I think what that internal person has done is they've built up a kind of a tremendous wall in front of them. And they're talking at people instead of with people, or they're talking to directly, or they're making it all about them versus everyone around them. And we can come in and say, Oh, well, you figured it out.

I just did the last 2%.

We can highlight the person

without fear of our job being compromised, where an internal person might be guarded.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah, there's

politics, there's baggage, and, and you're, you're talking about kind of a, a counselor or a therapist relationship, right? Where, where it's like, I'm paying for this outside. ear, and they've, they're going to listen to me. I can't, and that, that it's

not than going to a therapist.

*Phil Read:* it's not just about the job and I like the way that Adam frames this. Our, our company, the goal of our company is to take people's stress away. And that takes lots of forms, yeah. So if your job is [00:11:00] to be a great reddit technical person, I think you're coming up short. If your job is to take people's stress away, whether you're making a cup of coffee for someone, whether you're helping them figure out, you know, a complicated family component or a construction issue, really, they're just paying you to help take their stress away. And that's how we always have framed it. And Adam was the one that brought that up. And I was like, yeah, it's a really good, that's like, to me, it's like a principle based approach to what is your big goal? What is the overarching goal?

*Evan Troxel:* How do you, how did you come up with that framing, Adam? Because I think it, do you think it's innate to you is my question, I guess. Or do you think it's something that you learned in how to deal with this and how to open people up when they're coming to you with a high stress situation that they need this problem solved right away? I'm, I'm, I'm curious about where that came from.

*Adam Thomas:* So, it's probably not innate, I can give a lot of credit to my father and mother, because they had me at a really [00:12:00] young age, they had to work twice as hard to move forward in life. And they took a tremendous amount of risk. They, they might not have been the best parents or the worst parents, but at the end of the day, they took ownership for what was going to, going to happen and move forward with it.

And where I grew up in the small town, Northeast Georgia is called Gumlog. Um, the closest big town is Toccoa, realistically. Um, so, you know, 28, 000 people. Um, Gumlog has 1200 people. And. It was you and your word are all you have, nothing else. So you really dig into you as a person becomes kind of your book or being, and then that's the only way you can move through life.

So you never. You never cross anyone. You never allow someone to go stressed out for multiple days or multiple weeks. You always help where you can. And I think, I think I was doing that at a really early age. Now I was, I was part of a church at a [00:13:00] really early age. So we had like elderly outreach and things like that.

I got, I got, I was able to help people just all the time.

And right.

I had the opportunities to do it. And I don't think you have as many opportunities. In larger cities or in certain family structures. In our family structure, we kind of had to help each other. My dad was one of like 12 kids, right? So you had to help each other.

And, um, with your word being your bond, you didn't really have contracts where I came from. I had to learn how to write a contract after school.

It was just, can we shake on it and let's do it. And I

was trusted to do it. And that's a really hard thing to just teach someone. You have to let them do it, and then you have to hold them accountable.

I was being held accountable as a six year old, an eight year old, and so accountability comes natural. But now we have 30 year olds transitioning into management, and they want the leadership and management position, but they don't want the accountability necessarily. And I would rather have the negative so that my [00:14:00] team doesn't get it.

I can set with a tremendous weight on me for a very long time because I've been doing it for a long time. But that's not something that's easily just, you know, you can't do it through matriculation is what I always say. I can't just sit with you and all of a sudden you can bear a huge burden and help your team.

You have to work through it. You have to go through some bumps and bruises with everyone. And everyone on our team's been through them with me. And for better or worse, they trust that I'm going to get it done. And every client we have trusts that we're going to get it done. If I can't do it, I ping Phil.

If Phil can't do it, he pings Gaines. If Gaines can't do it, we ping Will or Elizabeth or Don, goes on and on. Um, And we've got a bit of a network there. I might be the first touch point sometimes with some of the really stressful stuff. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of treating it as if What did you used to say, Phil?

What's the If you don't know the answer, don't be afraid to say you don't know the answer. But tell someone you'll find an answer,

*Phil Read:* Yeah, don't

just say, [00:15:00] I don't

*Adam Thomas:* and then do

*Phil Read:* let me find out. Yeah,

*Adam Thomas:* And we've done that for over 10 years now. And that's the only reason we have the client base we do. Because when I send an email, we have

*Phil Read:* work in a high trust environment. We have very simple contracts. We try to keep them as, like, I think our contract is two pages, Adam,

*Adam Thomas:* two pages, that's it.

*Phil Read:* and we try to keep it as clear as possible because ultimately, if it takes 20 pages to work with a customer, It's going to get too complicated. And so the advantage of being in a high trust environment where people trust people and you're not just there as a transaction to do a, to do a job for an amount of money, but ultimately to take their stress away, um, that ends up building really good relationships with customers because you're, they understand you're there for the whole person, for the whole team, not just for here's the product that you wanted, here's your invoice. [00:16:00] And sometimes projects go sideways, and Adam's had situations where projects, where, where maybe there's people coming in or some expectations not being met, but if you've built trust, someone else is going to reach across that table for you and go, no, no, no, these guys got it. Yeah, so that's how we tend to approach it from a, from a stress standpoint.

If your business isn't taking people's stress away, if all you're doing is providing a transaction. Then, um, I think you're right for competition.

*Adam Thomas:* I,

*Phil Read:* When

*Adam Thomas:* I tend to,

*Phil Read:* and says, Oh, we do it for a dollar less. And they go, uh uh, no, you can do that for a dollar less, but you can't take my stress away for a dollar less than these guys do.

*Adam Thomas:* I, I tell people, I tell people all the time that my, my first goal is to meet the goals of the project. My second goal is to get you home to your wife and kids, your husband and kids five minutes faster today.

That's it. Those five minutes add up. I have a four year old now, so I realize it more than ever.

That, that time It always goes [00:17:00] away. I can't just go to the end of the weekend and say, okay, I would like two hours back with my daughter and wife. I can't do that. And when I'm thanked, and thanking is hard for people to do too, but when I am thanked, I'm not thanked for being a technical expert. I'm thanked because they got to go home one hour early on Friday because I said I would handle it or the team would handle it.

If I'm the only one there, I'll open my computer and fix it. If we're still in the office, the team jumps in and fixes it.

*Phil Read:* But isn't that

*Adam Thomas:* later, they'll say, thanks.

*Phil Read:* isn't that the aspiration of architecture school, is that we're going to do this thing and that's going to allow us and afford us all this time to be. You know, the life of the party and, you know, waving our glass and talking about our projects. But the reality is we just work unforgivably long hours and then somehow it's worth it. Adam and I say to each other, you can make money, you can't make time. So you better find balance.

*Evan Troxel:* So, Phil, talk about this transition to overseeing a team [00:18:00] that you experienced, because I think that's where a lot of like that transition is very difficult, as we alluded to early on in the conversation. and and so, like, there is a progression to get to that point, and I think the strategies that Adam just laid out totally have a lot to do with becoming that person, that trusted individual who becomes kind of the go to person to be, you know, identified as a potential leader when it comes to digital practice, design technology, BIM support, you know, there's many variations of very similar technology kind of stuff.

But because you're so in the weeds with. Solving problems, tech, operating the applications and the computers and all the different technologies, the way they talk to each other, all these things. Now we're adding a layer of soft skills, you know, or people skills on top of that. And that starts to naturally build up. percolate you as the individual to that position for potential becoming that, that [00:19:00] spot. And then all of a sudden you're not doing the technical stuff anymore. You're not doing the, the nitty gritty details. You are making sure people are handling the right things. You actually have to completely change your day to day.

And, and that is a really tough transition.

*Phil Read:* Oh, it's easy for me. Managing people is so easy now. I just say, Adam, could you do this thing? And then Adam manages the

*Evan Troxel:* Uh, yeah,

*Phil Read:* I mean, that's, that's, I mean, I could, I've talked to executives now who've run multi hundred person, large companies. You go, how do you like structurally

*Evan Troxel:* delegation. Yeah.

*Phil Read:* And, well, the, the last time I spoke to a guy that I worked with back in the nineties and he said, well, I have teams of 10. And my team is 10 and they have teams. Each of those people have teams of 10 and it scales.

But I, it's hard to do that in a small organization. Cause there's, you know, the organizational structure is a phone pole. There's nobody, everybody has to do everything. I think Adam's great at it. Cause he has people that he [00:20:00] trusts and he delegates to. I don't really have to organize or manage a team. I'm primarily working with the Chaos team and the leadership of the Enscape and Chaos team. Um, I work with directors of companies that are implementing software, have technical issues primarily around Enscape. It's a go to market service. But as far as having a team of people under me, I'm still in that weird position of by the time I delegate, I would just do it myself.

*Evan Troxel:* But you did go through this transition earlier in your career, right? And And that's kind of

*Phil Read:* Oh yeah, I was terrible at it. Yeah, it was terrible. I was stressed out and you can't, I mean, you're asked, you're like, Oh, you're smart. You're going to teach all these people to. Figure this out. And then I find out Adam and I have a dominant gene where you just can't not show up, where you just

can't not get it done.

And not everybody has that weird dominant gene. And it is a feature in a lot of cases, but it is a horrible bug in a lot of cases. [00:21:00] Um, you know, with three little kids and you got to be there on time and on budget, and I'm the, you know, field marshal trying to march people along. I should have just relaxed more. So managing teams at a big, big E& A firm, I have a team of people that I manage, probably a dozen people or so. It was stressful and I never felt good at it. I just felt like I was barely above water and I never knew if any decision, I mean, we were solving the technical problems, but there's a, there's a, You're so detached from actually solving the problem where you're turning a gear that turns a gear that turns another gear. I don't know. Is it turning another gear in the future? Um, I still struggle with that part of it immensely, and I don't have to actually do that a lot in my day to day. What I do really like now from a leadership standpoint is, and I've learned a lot of this from Adam, and I finally just, Started talking to people who had been executives in big successful technical [00:22:00] companies going, just talking about, I mean, to be honest, I would go to breakfast with them.

That's what I started doing is these guys that I started with a guy that lived in the house, two doors down. He worked at a company called HALOID, which became Xerox. And he was a technical consultant at the beginning of DRY. printing and he loved it and we would go to breakfast and Ralph was amazing and he would tell me stories and I would tell him stories and talk with Ralph on Thursday morning is why Adam and I got in business because he's like, Phil, you should

just go into business for yourself. And that had never occurred to me in that way. So it's the part of it that's easier for me is I've learned not to have the hijack in my stress center of my brain when I hear something that I don't like. Because probably I just don't have enough information. And um, there's a, a frame to this. I sent it to Adam actually the other day.

It was a, it was a, a Meaningwave song. Who is he, who is that [00:23:00] guy talking to? Is it Akira the Don and he was talking to Jaco? So every time he hears something that's bad, quote unquote, bad news, he goes, Oh, good.

*Adam Thomas:* Yep.

*Phil Read:* That's like a frame. Oh, you hurt your arm. You, you, you blew out your knee working out. Good. Now you got time to rest. Uh, you didn't get the promotion. Good. Now you got time to be better. You didn't get the funding round. Good. Now you own more of the company. It's always good. And so I think the, Amygdala hijack is, I guess, what they technically call it, of hearing bad information. I just used to kind of get so stressed out, like, oh man, I got another thing piled on my plate, where now I

go, oh, I don't know what that means. Let's, what, what's going on? And then when you sit down and actually discuss, you're like, oh, that, that's okay.

*Evan Troxel:* Right.

*Adam Thomas:* early conversations with Phil when we would talk about this with, you know, he, he was able to experience 20 years before me. And, and go through 20 years of what he calls failures. So I should learn from those failures Phil

*Phil Read:* why it's so easy for you.

*Adam Thomas:* [00:24:00] yeah, right. If you have good, if you, if you have good examples, just don't replicate

*Phil Read:* do what he did.

*Adam Thomas:* And, um,

*Evan Troxel:* If only my

children would follow, would follow

*Phil Read:* Hey, we make better grandparents. We know that.

*Adam Thomas:* right.

*Phil Read:* I'll be, I'll be a better granddad.

*Adam Thomas:* but we, we, I think we discovered, um, in the first couple of years of business when. When there's an itch, I tend to scratch it, and Phil tends to think around it. Or if there's pressure, I tend to go toward the pressure, and Phil starts thinking about what the pressure is going to do.

And I just attack it, because

I was a,

*Phil Read:* things different ways.

It's good.

*Adam Thomas:* I don't, I don't mind diving into a pressure situation, because in my experience, pressure creates diamonds. So, if I finish a presentation, the first question out of my mouth is, what could I have done better? Now, what itch can we scratch? I don't think that's a normal thing to ask people.

Um, but it's because I [00:25:00] want people to hold me accountable. Now, Phil wants to be held accountable too. He just doesn't want to be held accountable for people he controls, necessarily. Or people that are under him, or people that work for him. I think everyone works with me, no one works for me.

*Phil Read:* Yeah. I

*Adam Thomas:* So, we're all

*Phil Read:* Yeah. I like to work with people. I don't like to

work for, or

*Adam Thomas:* yeah,

that's right. So if you set up that relationship, what happens is your accountability is everyone's accountability and it kind of takes the pressure and distributes it

all So I'm okay with that.

*Phil Read:* Is that there's a mindset and there's a, there's a, uh, venture capitalist named Involve that talks about this in terms of the owner's mindset. There's an owner mindset and there's kind of the employee mindset. The owner mindset is you hit your, your, the first thing when you start to wake up in the morning and it's not even 5 AM, it's 3 30 AM, now your mind is already thinking about, you got to make money for the day.

You got to hunt another project. You can't just put the [00:26:00] pen down at five o'clock at the end of the day. And that owner mindset, both Adam and I have that. Kind of owner mindset. And I think you want to look for people that have that same owner mindset, where they take ownership. Who's the champion, who's going to see it through. You don't have to chase people.

And if they cost a little bit more, it's a bargain. Like, I don't

*Adam Thomas:* so, so rare.

*Phil Read:* members that are going to add stress, right? We're trying to take stress away. I want people to have the same mindset. They want to work on a team cause they take the team stress away.

*Adam Thomas:* I do think that people are fickle, and Phil is a 1 percent of 1% er in terms of how he thinks about things. And if he expects that people are going to think about things the same way he does, he's likely not going to find that person. And when he does, that person is going to butt heads with him every damn day.

Because they're not going to think exactly the same, but they're both ultra high performers. I've never had a single person reach out to me and say, Phil has failed us. [00:27:00] Ever.

*Phil Read:* have pissed me off, but he didn't fail us.

*Adam Thomas:* He, he might have said something I didn't agree with, but everyone else agrees with, so we did it. And it's like, good, he made you scratch an itch.

He made you put things in a pressure chamber. Um, I don't tend to try to look for those people. I tend to try to look for people that have qualities of that 1 percent person, and then give them the tasks that match those qualities, so that they can hit home runs. More often than sacrifice flies or bunts, right?

I want to,

I want to, I want to build the field around somebody in a way that makes them succeed versus trying to find someone that can build a new field in order to succeed.

I don't necessarily need that.

*Phil Read:* yeah, I don't

*Evan Troxel:* you're getting, I think you're getting to kind of the leadership qualities of finding success means helping others become successful

and they, you

are more concerned about them and, and what happens then with your progression [00:28:00] becomes a natural process. outcome of your helping them achieve their goals and achieve what

they are capable of, even if they can't see what they're capable of themselves. You probably, if you have this relationship with that team, like you're talking about, you actually can see what they're capable of, even if they can't, and helping them achieve that raises the whole boat, raises

*Phil Read:* Oh, yeah, don't think that Adam and I always see eye to eye. We have different ways of approaching things. He is, I think we both have the same kind of characteristics around curiosity, around ownership, around responsibility and obligation. And, you know, the thing they say in the South is, uh, on time is, early is on time, on time is late, and late you're fired. both, but we express them in different ways. And we'll talk about obscure things, like even our investment portfolios, the way Adam will approach investments, and the way I approach them. We both have had very successful investing. experience, we approach them [00:29:00] differently. I think the, the way I tend to look at it overall, I heard a statistic not too long ago, and I'll try to remember the source, that the, the square root of an organization generates half the revenue. Now, if you're talking about a team of a hundred people, that's ten people that generate half the revenue.

Oh my gosh, what you could do with that team of ten people and not have the HR issues and the drama and the politics of 90 more people. And I think technology facilitates that. If you can find the 10 right curious high performers and build a team around that, you can run circles. I mean, it's just amazing. And I, feel like we have that.

*Evan Troxel:* the, the, the whole tool stack of what we have at our fingertips now versus five years ago.

It's completely different and it really speaks to what you were just saying, like, if I was starting my own firm today, one person, I can probably do what five people did [00:30:00] five years ago, right? Because of technology as a lever, the correct, using the right technology and the right application. can yield so much higher results now because of the interconnectedness of things and just the on, onward march of progress here, right? it's

*Adam Thomas:* We, we don't have

*Evan Troxel:* kind of think

what's going to happen in the next five years.

*Adam Thomas:* we, we don't have a technical drought though, Evan. We have an interpersonal drought.

*Evan Troxel:* AgRead Yeah.

*Adam Thomas:* can create a team that makes the best technology in my team's eyes with fewer people than ever. But I still have to go sell that and selling is about this relationship.

If you can't do this, you can't sell anything.

You can't create anything. It can, something in a silo or in a bucket off to the side is not really a creation because no one can enjoy it. If I painted and my art never left my barn, am I an artist? I might think I'm an artist, but once others start to

appreciate

I'm really, Right. I'm tech, yeah, I'm technically [00:31:00] capable of painting, but I'm not an artist yet.

And so I feel like something has happened and I've seen it in the last five or six years where our interpersonal skills have actually diminished

while our technical skills have increased. So I, I talk to people all the time. Yesterday included, I went to lunch with somebody who thinks they are capable of being a leader and they're upset that they're not in a leadership position.

And then when I asked them to define leadership. It said nothing about accountability or personal resources or psychology or stress management. Instead it was, well, I've made all these cool add ins for our teams and I'm not being respected for it. And I'm like, well, it sounds like you're a technical head.

You're not

necessarily a leader. Yeah, you're a very technical person. How about you work your way into that position? Well, I have to work myself into leadership to be a partner

in the firm.

*Evan Troxel:* is not a position. It is a skill set. Mm.

*Adam Thomas:* I always say that leadership is earned, not given as well. You [00:32:00] can, you can attempt to mirror leadership S qualities, but until others start saying you are a leader, you're not one.

*Phil Read:* It's hard. It's a big piece of it. I think it's just building trust, right? You have to build rapport. You have to build trust. Um, and that takes time and early on you build trust and people want to know, okay, what's the angle? What's he trying to get at? You really just have to build honest to goodness trust where people really can rely on you and you're not in it for an angle. And that

takes a long time and you can undo it quickly. Um, that's a, that's a big part of it. It's, um, yeah, the leadership piece. I don't know that it's something that just has to be innate. I think people are more empathetic naturally. They're more curious naturally. Uh, or they're either curious or, or not, or they have high, they're high in empathy, or they're high in other kind of characteristics of what good leaders probably do. But I think they can be taught to a point, otherwise they're just blind. I felt like I was blind to it, but once somebody [00:33:00] pointed out, like, what are the ingredients? I was like, oh, so those are the ingredients? Oh, I have horrible empathy. I have an impatience gene that's severely dominant. If I'm going to be a good leader, I need to turn that.

I need to be aware of it. And, um, once you're aware of the ingredients. Like even the craziest thing, Evan, breathing. Like breathing is a thing that you could do of not jumping to the answer. Like I tend to get too excited. I want to just jump into the conversation and pile on. Pausing and thinking, or when you get news, like I do breathing exercises when I get stressed out, Oh my gosh, they're amazing. Nobody told me about these ingredients. You could just kind of like. Settle yourself. Adam does a thing and he's taught me a thing where if you have to talk about something stressful, do it when you go, do it while you walk. That's like the simplest

ingredient. It doesn't even make sense. Oh my gosh, does it make sense? Like just when you have to talk about something [00:34:00] stressful or figure something out, that's not going to be, may not be an easy answer. You got pieces that don't fit, go for a walk. And the thing that I've learned working with Adam, I guess it's been this year's 11 years. Adam, did we just have an anniversary?

*Adam Thomas:* we're about to, we're about

*Phil Read:* was, I thought it was June, end of June.

*Adam Thomas:* I thought it was

August.

*Phil Read:* have to, I'll have to

*Adam Thomas:* This is like a married couple,

*Phil Read:* I know we don't care anymore. We stopped counting. We just love each other. Um, but so the thing is more times than not early on when I have to go into conversation and believe me, when I'm 20 years older than Adam, it's a, you know, approaching things like adult child relationships does not work.

You have to both be adults. And then at the end of conversations, I thought I was so glued to an answer. And then we would talk about it and we would end up coming with a third answer. I'm like, Oh, this third answer is so much better. So I've just over time learned to trust that that's going to happen.

And we even talk about it at the beginning of conversation going, okay, now I want to [00:35:00] do it this way. You want to do it this way. But if we talk about it, we'll come up with a better way.

*Adam Thomas:* Yeah, there's, there's two things there. One thing is never have a serious conversation setting. So if you can at least stand, I'm standing right now, I would never have a serious conversation or an interview or anything setting. You don't think well while setting in my experience. You're not as creative.

Stand up. If you can, go for a walk. I have 95 percent of any problem solving call walking the rail trail behind our office. 95 percent of them. Or I'm at least outside standing. So that's the first thing. The second thing is don't say things how you think they should be said. Say things how that person needs to hear them to understand what you mean.

That means you have to, I call it being a chameleon. When I like go to a company and talk about soft skill leadership, you have to first understand that person and then become a chameleon of that person and then say it, how that person needs to hear it. I would prefer to say things direct, Phil, you're gaining [00:36:00] weight.

Lose weight. You'll live longer for it. But that doesn't work. That

doesn't work anybody

*Phil Read:* though. I want you to know I've been trying to lose

weight. I'm actually in a pretty good fighting weight now.

*Adam Thomas:* right. I told him, five years ago, he was getting a bit tubby. No, he just did it on his own because

*Phil Read:* No, it's,

I, I, I agree with Adam. I would rather be more direct sometimes and just cut to it and then you burn a bridge. So you just

*Adam Thomas:* You can be direct with us.

*Phil Read:* Oh yeah.

*Adam Thomas:* fine.

We, we are okay receiving it. We just can't give it that way.

*Phil Read:* No,

you have

*Adam Thomas:* in, guess, same in marriage.

*Phil Read:* What do they call it? Um, like mirroring or mimicking or,

*Evan Troxel:* right.

*Adam Thomas:* it's, it's, yeah, it's

*Phil Read:* that's a communication style as well that we've, I've, I've noticed people in sales meetings, they talk about kind of try to detect the energy of the person, because if you go in all excited, and they're trying, they're relaxed and cautious, you're going to like the bullshit detector is going to go off. It's too

*Evan Troxel:* right. Yeah.

*Phil Read:* have to meet that energy and, um,

*Adam Thomas:* Listen to the cadence.

To how they're [00:37:00] enunciating. If, um, you can also sway a conversation a bit like that. You have to be extraordinarily on to do these things though. And I don't think most people can be this on all the time. It burns your brain up, right? Like if you have a fire in your brain, you can't perform, but if someone's coming in with high energy and you know that you need to bring their energy down, you bring your energy way down and they meet your

energy, like, like training and they'll come down and then you'll have a better conversation. If you need somebody to be more fired up about something, I can't talk to you like this. I have to really get fired up to boost them.

And, yeah, it's like, hey, we're going for a run right now. And it's like, I'm not going for a run. Yeah, you're going for a

run.

*Phil Read:* for a run.

*Adam Thomas:* I'll drag your ass outside. We're going for a

run.

And then get outside and we have a nice walk because I've set the expectation. We're about to sprint for a few minutes. Now we can have a nice walk because you were, you know, dragging a bit today. Or feeling down or feeling bad for yourself. Move the energy the way the energy needs to be moved. But that's, that's, that's easy.

That's [00:38:00] actually something you can train. You just have to practice it. Um, it takes a tremendous, tremendous amount of practice.

*Evan Troxel:* Just right before this conversation, I was outside doing some, some work with my, my youngest and he, he, he had done something, put something in the wrong place.

*Phil Read:* How old is your youngest? Just frame this. I want

*Evan Troxel:* he's 18. he's

So he's

not that

*Phil Read:* okay. He's not like eight.

*Evan Troxel:* and

*Phil Read:* He's

*Evan Troxel:* it's

*Phil Read:* not.

*Evan Troxel:* so, so the stuff, the thing that he put in the wrong place needs to be moved.

Oh, he says, I'm not going to do that. That's absurd. He said, I'm not going to do that again. He said it twice.

I said, fine, I'll go do it. He goes, well, I'll go do it.

*Phil Read:* Oh, yeah. No, you won't.

*Evan Troxel:* I

*Adam Thomas:* I'll do it. I'll do it

*Evan Troxel:* to do it So I'm

*Phil Read:* No, you can't do it.

*Evan Troxel:* go do it.

*Phil Read:* right.

*Evan Troxel:* You just have to give them permission to want to do it, I guess. I don't. Yeah, it is interesting. [00:39:00] If only there were a place where people could have more conversations. Like this. So this is my, my

segue into your, your retreats that you offer. You offer two different retreats. So you have a spring retreat and a fall retreat. Maybe, maybe let's just pay a tribute here to the spring offering because they are different from each other. And I

know you have a, a, a banner that you put these under, which we also must address. These are called AEC Acoustics. This is where you can go to learn all about acoustical treatments and materials.

And

*Phil Read:* It's down to attenuation, bad

*Adam Thomas:* That's right. STS ratings, right? Yep. Yep.

*Evan Troxel:* transmission, right? So, so let, let's set the record straight first around the name because that's the overarching banner of the two different, um, retreats that you offer.

Uh, but, but then we'll go, we'll get it, we'll pay homage to the spring one and then we'll get into the, because I think what we're talking about here really lends itself to the, the fall [00:40:00] retreat, which is, which is coming up.

So, Let's talk about the name.

*Phil Read:* Let me just go back up a little meta on this. You would not believe the flurry of text messages Adam and I went through going back and forth. I was so excited. About this like acoustic idea, AEC acoustics and metaphors and ICONs and, you know, why it's acoustic. And I thought it was so obvious when we got the little ICON label and my goodness, architects going, why are you doing an event about acoustics?

It's kind of niche. I mean, to

me, that ICON is the metaphor for why it is so obvious.

*Adam Thomas:* by the way, no one else. No, no one else had an issue. Engineers didn't have an issue. Contractors

*Phil Read:* That is true.

*Adam Thomas:* It was just architects that had the issue. But I, I, probably remember this story really clearly. We were talking on the phone saying there has to be something that's conversation focused, not sponsorship focused, or just like hard teachings on PowerPoint or with technology open.

[00:41:00] And I used to play the guitar. Phil still plays acoustic instruments all the time. And we said, well, conversations kind of have a melody and a rhythm. Right? We went really highbrow with it, and um, said, I wonder if, like, acoustic something is taken. It had

to have been, right? Because there's so many insulation companies and things like that, and I, I got on Hover.

com, AC Acoustics, no one has this.

Why does, why don't they have the com for this? I was like, yeah, I'm going to put it in the cart just because

*Phil Read:* Yeah, we should

*Adam Thomas:* we're talking about rhythm and

*Phil Read:* Every business starts with a website. You have to get a good domain.

*Evan Troxel:* Right.

*Adam Thomas:* exactly. So if you ever had a conversation with a company that's not in rhythm or not in melody, it's a terrible conversation. It's a terrible company to work with. But if you go in into a business and talk to them and they have a rhythm and a harmony with each other, you're like, this is going to be a really special project. Right. So why not set something up that, uh, attempts to. allow people the [00:42:00] opportunity and the place to develop rhythm and harmony. and have conversations. That's where

*Phil Read:* Adam used to always say the best part of every conference were the conversations you'd have after the presentation. Because during the presentation, that whole presentation always works. It's amazing. It's like, look at this technique. And then you ask the speaker question quietly. You don't want to ask them in class and embarrass them or ask them a tricky question.

So later on, you kind of corner. What's the deal with this thing? And they go, Oh yeah, that doesn't work. Here's what you, you might want to do it this way.

*Evan Troxel:* Under Perfect Conditions

*Phil Read:* I know under, under, in the, in front of a hundred people, yes, it works. But when you want to do it a little bit off script, Oh yeah, that'll break.

So we, Adam used to say, you know, these presentations after the conferences are the best part of the conferences. So that was kind of a meta theme, the idea of something being acoustic, is that it's quieter, it's the acoustic version of the louder events, which are all great, we have to go to them,

but sometimes you just want to get away from the, from the noise for a while, get [00:43:00] away from feeling that you're being marketed to at every moment, you're being advertised to. So it's the acoustic version of

*Evan Troxel:* MTV Unplugged.

*Phil Read:* Yeah, well, we thought about like BIM, BIM Unplugged. That was

kind of a thing. And Adam and I had been talking about this a long time and there, there just didn't seem to be the right. inflection point. Um, because we had some great, I mean, we have Autodesk University, there's Basecamp every couple of years, we have BILT in North America, and then when it looked like BILT wasn't going to happen this year, I was like, Adam, if we're going to do something, and we're not going to have an event with 500 people or even 100 people, I think part of that acoustic theme is that you have to be able to have honest conversations with people and get to know people.

So keeping it at 50. is one of the things is like, we're not going to have an event of 500, we're just going to have an event of like no more than 50 people. Oh, and coincidentally, that's how many people fit on a motor coach to go for an

offsite. So instead of having

the first motor coach that

everybody rushes to get on, then you have another bus with three people [00:44:00] kind

of like going, oh, this is a boring bus.

Yeah, so you just want to, and it removes complexity, like all the stuff Adam and I talked about. Like a conference that doesn't have lanyards, doesn't have PowerPoint, doesn't have big brought to you by signage, doesn't have obligatory marketing sponsorship. It's just like, let's just

*Evan Troxel:* Gold

Tier, Silver

*Phil Read:* that. No, no, no, no. And we've, we, people have asked to sponsor the event and we've said, I don't want anyone turning into Lake Swan Camp, seeing brought to you by. It's just like, no, this is, this is about you. It's about good food. The best things in life to me are good meals with friends. And so it's about that.

It's about sharing with people that you trust. So that's the overall idea of AC Acoustics. And if you look at the only thing I did that tweaked it, cause Adam like went out and nailed it. It's like, okay, it's this, it was a word bubble with a sound wave and the nice colors, the blue, the blues. And I changed the word bubble just to [00:45:00] make the second little. What are those little pointy thing called on word

*Adam Thomas:* Yeah. Like the waveforms.

*Phil Read:* No, no. The little pointy bit. So I was like, we should have two little

*Adam Thomas:* Oh, you may. Yep. That's a

*Phil Read:* And, and, and underneath that image, there was all of these red lines where things lined up and stuff, and I send it back to Adam, but, and then the other thing was the waveform instead of being waveform is, it's a metaphor for a skyline, which is a reference of course, to AAC. proud of ourselves. And I'm

*Adam Thomas:* See, I, I, I'm not

intelligent to, I'm not enough go a hundred percent. I just had to get it to 95%.

And hand

*Phil Read:* you show it to people and they go, why are you guys doing acoustic events? It's kind of niche. So, yeah, so,

*Adam Thomas:* laid plans.

*Evan Troxel:* Right.

*Phil Read:* event. First, that was in 2020 during pandemic and Evan, you and I talked about why that was important to me personally, and then Adam has endeavored to do a technical event focused on best practices. And [00:46:00] really getting people in a room to figure out, nobody knows what's going on, but what are some good vectors? And we, we held the first one this spring and I thought it was just a wonderful success, like suspiciously wonderful. It was great. Like some smart people, really super smart people, like Harlan Brum was there from Autodesk and Carl Storms was there and Craig Barbieri, like really smart people and saying some wonderfully complimentary things like, Somebody back, we were chatting one day on the deck, and this is a very modest environment.

It's a camp in North Florida. but we book out the whole camp and then we

*Evan Troxel:* it fits with the acoustic,

*Phil Read:* it does. And somebody said, we need more of this. I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, this, we need more of this. And he's standing on the deck looking at the lake and he goes, we just need more of this. And I thought, you know what? That's it. That's it. It's okay. It's

*Evan Troxel:* That's a

good endorsement right there.

*Phil Read:* Yeah, we need more of this. So, yeah. And this is a guy who goes to all the big events [00:47:00] that we love, but sometimes you just need to unplug a little bit. We have the technical event. How would you describe that, Adam, if we're focused on the technical side of things?

We still have good conversations, but it's not

*Evan Troxel:* a,

round table format, right? And the way that you, you do it, it's not like a one to many. It's, it's, we, we come together, we have a discussion about a topic potentially, right?

*Phil Read:* Mm hmm.

*Adam Thomas:* Yeah. So you, you have basically a host, And the host is kind of frame the topic and Phil and I help narrow the topic a little bit based on the people coming. Because you wouldn't want to speak about something that no one wants to discuss, right? You wouldn't want a topic that's seemingly random.

Um, it has to be on some kind of vector, so you have to curate it a little

bit. But, um, this, this, the inaugural event for the round table was one to many. Because there was, there was enough people to generate a large discussion with

each topic.

*Phil Read:* discussion. Yeah.

*Adam Thomas:* we did realize afterwards that that's probably as big as it can get.

Like we would have to [00:48:00] break it into different conversations, but there's opportunities to do that because what a general contractor is facing technically and needs to have conversations about might not be the same as an architect, but they should both be able to read each other's leave behinds. And that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to capture those conversations as well, and executive summaries and follow up, um, podcasts and recordings just to, to help keep the conversation alive on the website for, you know, the next year

so people can see what's actually happening. Um, if you could, Also record the conversation that happens after the conversation is supposed to stop.

That's the real special

*Phil Read:* Yeah. That was even

*Adam Thomas:* almost a primer.

*Phil Read:* Yeah.

*Adam Thomas:* Yeah, that's right. It's almost that you created a primer for people to stay up. Grown men and women staying up until 1 a. m. Talking about something that they thought they didn't care about. And you have to like, look at your door and go, Hey, could you guys keep it down? It's [00:49:00] one,

it's 1am.

No, one's drunk. No,

No,

*Phil Read:* way. That's right. Not loud drunk.

They're just

*Adam Thomas:* Yeah. They're, not,

They're, just having conversations like, Oh, I really appreciated when so and so brought up this. I haven't thought about it that way.

Um, I gained a tremendous amount of respect for people that in our industry, you would not know they exist.

And they came to this conference and I'm like, why are they hiding? have a wealth of knowledge that their team understands they have, and they're moving into a management or leadership position. But the industry needs to hear them. There's a, there was a tremendous amount of value, um, in doing that.

And my family got to come. So it was really easy for me to make the

decision.

*Phil Read:* In line with the idea of being the kind of quiet acoustic environment, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of posturing in the industry. You know, the people that get to speak, get recognized. There are so many smart people that don't have the, I want to speak gene. But when you get to know [00:50:00] them and talk about what they know, you learn a lot. And I feel like, you know, this is an environment for t shirts and shorts. And. Leave your expensive watch at home. We don't even have lanyards. Like, that's just another complexity for creating an event for 50 people. And you have these, you know, if we're, if we're the conversation after the presentation, to Adam's point, we end up being discussion after the conversation.

It's like,

it goes, it goes to a deeper level. And, and it's, if, if I put it, if I said there's 50 people at AU that I've got to catch up with, they're like all there. Like, Marty Rozmanith, who was the original Revit product manager, was there, and Harlan Brumm was there, who's the present Revit product manager. Like, we had good discussions and got to be part of that as well, and I think we just don't have enough of that. We have so many technical discussions about finishing the project, where teams have to get together and talk about, okay, what's going on this week, what's the deadlines, what's going on? But from a leadership standpoint, [00:51:00] The idea of getting together and going, okay, how's the team?

What's the energy like? How are people doing? What's happening? We don't have conversations like that. And

that's what I think that even happens at the technical event. So I really like this balance of having an event that's technical, where we can share things or at least vectors with the industry, like Carl Storms did amazing.

I think he was the, he was the first

Facilitator, he talked about AI, and he had been going through a series called 100 Days of AI, all this stuff. But Carl didn't get up and speak and tell us what he thinks for an hour and a half. We went around the table. I learned about tools and technologies I didn't even know existed that had nothing to do with visualization.

It was amazing. So the technical event feeds that part of me that is curious about all these tools and all these techniques. They're hard skills. You could probably

get on a vector.

*Adam Thomas:* if everyone's ever been a part of a book club, right, You, when you go to book club, you read the same book and then you discuss the chapters. This is like a book club where everyone [00:52:00] read a different book, but you get to learn what book they read. So I can say I read 30 books this year now because everyone read a different book, or you may have read part B of the same book and I read part A because I'm from the South.

I may have interpreted what the book said differently than somebody from another part of the world.

And those conversations are real. Well, as we learned, they're actually really difficult to facilitate and we need to have more like learning objectives, learning cues or ways to get conversations going instead of just setting.

Because my number one rule is conversations should be when you're standing up or moving. We set the whole time. So I, I learned immediately that we had great conversation, but we can still do better.

And I actually think this round table event is a good segue. into the leadership event. So for the technical people that are highly technical and want to discuss things at broad, but it doesn't have a psychological aspect at all, or [00:53:00] an empathy focused aspect, come to that event.

But if you see yourself being moved into a position of empathy and adaptability, and you're going to have to start taking accountability for things at a higher level, you should come to the second event. You should now come to the leadership event. Um, or if you want to do that, you aspire to do that, then you should

come to the leadership event.

*Phil Read:* Look, it's hard to transition from technical guru, where you are holding on and in control, and you've got hands on gears and dials. You know, the metaphor might be like, you know, the steam engine, and you're the engineer in the engine, and you've got all these dials. And now, The reality is, I think, in order to be very successful, you have to let go of that and learning to let go is stressful. Um, and, and we've all dealt with smart technical people that will have it their way or the highway and this is how we're going to do it. And boy, do people just not trust them because you can't, you can't enjoy the success of doing it that way. [00:54:00] But if people, if you'll actually let go and trust. I read this about Churchill during the war. Um, he would have loud yelling matches with his generals, but he never overrode them. And his thinking was, if he was right and they went into the next campaign, they couldn't take ownership of that. And if he was wrong, they would despise him because people were, what happens? And, um, but I think letting go is, Letting go and trusting, not just delegating, but actually letting go and let people have ownership is the only way to succeed in that sense.

And it's a hard thing for technical people to do because we have been conditioned that the way to success is figuring out the quote unquote right answer and then making sure that that right answer is implemented. And sometimes the right answer is. Let's just, I had a great mentor and Adam knows him, Dave Heaton at Revit Technology and later Autodesk. He would just say, well, [00:55:00] what do you think we should do? And I would go, well, we could do this or this or this. He goes, yeah, well, which one we should do? I think we should do this. He goes, well, let's just do that. And if it doesn't work out, we'll do something else. And that answer to doing something a certain way of, well, let's just do it that way.

And if it doesn't work, we'll do something else was so freeing and so stress relieving that if I was wrong, I was going to be accountable and, and demoted or whatever. It's like, Oh, well then let's just do that. And then we'll do something else. If it doesn't work out, it was like, Oh, not only can we do it this way.

And I think that that's a good way, but if it doesn't work out, we could do it another way that I think might be the good way. And Dave taught me that in a, in a wonderful way. I've been fortunate that I've had good mentors. So I think that's what the leadership part of it is about.

*Evan Troxel:* So these are the kinds of things that people could experience there. You've got a wide range of experience and you've got, so you've got people who have been [00:56:00] there, done that. And

to your point earlier, Adam, like Phil's got 20 years of experience and he wants you to be successful. So he's going to, Not have you start from a blank page and figure everything out on your own and reinvent the wheel and, you know, there's all these cliches we could say about, about doing it that way, but then there's, like, this is a place you can go and tap into the knowledge base of people who have literally been there and done that and

have had a wide range of experiences. and help you formulate how you're going to achieve the next thing that you're going to do. Yeah, I mean that the opportunity here is very different from other conferences where you sign up for a bunch of classes And you walk an expo floor and it's very salesy on the expo floor side of things Not always right, but but

you go to see the wares too. So, you know what you're signing up for But but you're going there to like tick off a bunch of boxes.

I get the feeling that going to [00:57:00] a conference like this, you don't know what the boxes are, right? It's like you're going in and it's a very open minded and that should be the approach to this is maybe, maybe you identify some goals ahead of time of like, here's what I would like to walk away

*Phil Read:* Oh, we have a structure. Yeah, sure.

*Evan Troxel:* is your oyster at this and you get to figure out who can help you get to where you want to go.

Hmm.

*Adam Thomas:* yeah.

*Phil Read:* Randy's done a great job. We have a framework around good leadership. That, I mean, it goes back to 2020, you talk about, you know, the, the, the kind of ingredient skill set, and this year we're going to explore that more in the context of, uh, implication from leadership standpoint, like how you communicate up, how you communicate down, how you, how you listen, how you, yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a framework and structure for that. I think the, the big pieces from a leadership standpoint is leadership is not headcount. You might have a team of [00:58:00] three people, just to be a good leader, just to be someone that's trusted. People can't come to you and tell you bad news if they think you're gonna pop. Good leaders don't pop. Good leaders go, Oh, good. Tell me more. Let's figure it out. And having that appropriate blink reaction, um, and then ultimately if people trust you more, You end up with more opportunities. You end up growing, you didn't need to grow a team of people or a team of trusted connections, but that it's nice. But I think for me, the key has been, you just have to let go.

And it's hard to go of. That feeling that, oh, if you're just not worried all the time, something's going to sneak up and get you. Like you have to let, like letting go of the inevitable, letting go of the worry, and not being detached to the point of suspicion. You still have to care, but being And not confident that you always know the right answer.

[00:59:00] That's what we're trying to facilitate with the leadership retreat. And it's helping people. It's helping in the most, in many cases, high technical performers go from being recognized as the high technical performer. Cause we know people that technically perform at a very high level. And then they don't know that people go, I can never work with them. They'd be so difficult to work with. And they keep losing opportunities. And they're smart people. Help them make that transition

*Evan Troxel:* And then there, that frustrated other side of the conversation that Adam had, like, I want to be recognized for what I've accomplished and what I've done. And it's like, on the outside, I can see exactly why you're not being considered for that position. Right?

And, and you can, yeah,

it does happen. So let's, okay, there's two subjects I want to talk about.

I want to talk about the other aspects of the leadership retreat. That are location exclusive kind of things that you guys do. I want to talk about the food, like, because I think your approach is really interesting when it comes to that. [01:00:00] Um, but before we do that, I want to talk about permission because there are people in situations where they can just say, I'm going, I'm going to something like this, or I'm going to go next year, or I can't go this time.

But, but the spring one sounds great.

They're, they have that, they have that ability to do that. But then there's a lot of people who are like, man, I really want to do this. I have no idea how to get approval for that from my organization, from some

leadership. Can you guys just talk about what, what has, I know you have talked about this before.

So let's talk about that part of it.

*Adam Thomas:* No, you actually have a really, I think, good way of thinking about this. I'm actually met with probably 50 50. Because of where I am just in my age and my progression, there are less people in a managerial or leadership position. Most people are still five to 10 years away from it. And so they see this. I actually had somebody tell me Monday of this week, Adam, I want to go, I need to [01:01:00] go to better myself first, knowing that it will better the people around me.

And better the business around that. So I call that communicating in three prongs. You have to communicate inward to yourself first, outward to your direct team and upward to your management. And if you can't do all of those, you failed. And some of us do one of them really well, or two of them really well.

And they have no capability to communicate up to management because management is so disconnected from their current position that these people are thinking about taking five days off and paying for it out of pocket

because they think it's such a value. And I would say half. Maybe

*Phil Read:* some do I know people that do it because they're

like, I don't want people in the company that know about this, so they don't ask because they're afraid it'll get out.

*Evan Troxel:* Oh, or, or you just, you just see the value of investing in yourself, right?

And, and, and ultimately it may come down to that in some cases,

*Phil Read:* you know, even if you go to like the Autodesk University, they do this thing where it's like, Oh, do you want to convince the boss to go download this form? [01:02:00] Right? And it's, it's, it's, it's the thing you have to download because they're like, well, how, how is this going to return on the investment?

And so there's lots of things about both events that we try to keep below the fold. Like the first thing that you see when you log in is not that we bring a French chef to a private event.

That's below the fold. The first thing is, Probably quotes by smart people who have been that said why this improved their relationship interpersonally, in our office, with customers, um, every, you know, I think management realizes that good leaders and, and the team that's managing the business have to have good soft skills, or at least somebody on that team needs to have the soft skills that are important for, you know, Keeping people from leaving because they get frustrated. Um, so for people that are already kind of in management leadership positions, they can kind of delegate like they have things that they can go to. It's the ones that are on that cost to go. I should go to a leadership things like, oh, we don't want you to be a leader. You're the [01:03:00] manager. We try to keep the important things on why good leadership is important, even for BIM managers. Above the fold. So without scrolling down, what should the C level see if they go to this website? And we do that for both events. We try to keep, so there are some very practical things by keeping the event at a private camp in North Florida and bringing a chef, including, like you sign up for these events that are 2, 000 and then you still have to pay for your transportation and hotel. Our events are below 2, 000, like early bird for the leadership retreat is 1, 500. That's everything about how to get there. That's your accommodation, that's off site, that's food, everything for the week, so that there's no surprises. So it's like, oh, you paid 2, 000 for the event, and then you had to get a hotel that was 300 a night.

No. So in practical terms, keeping, it's reducing complexity wherever you can. I think Adam and I agree, it makes a better event.

*Adam Thomas:* I think I have two call to actions I think about because every, everything I do [01:04:00] has to be, it has to be a call to action and accountable. Otherwise, there's no point talking about it. Um, one is like, if you're thinking about one of these events, show management that whoever signs off on your budget, show them the videos, let us speak for it.

So you don't have to.

*Phil Read:* Yeah.

*Adam Thomas:* the first thing, because then we're accountable to that manager, not you. That manager can call us. He can call Phil or I. We'll both have a very different conversation, but both conversations will end with you wanting to send someone to go. And hold us accountable for the event, not the person asking to go.

Secondly, if you're in a position, like the many I've talked to in the last couple of weeks, where management doesn't apply a budget to them, I would say, Roll the dice on yourself. It's a cheap enough entry fee, and it's a quality enough outcome of conversation and networking, and just the psychological part of it, and the empathy part of it, and the managerial part of it.

[01:05:00] Gurus charge, you know, 30, 000 for this. Do you want to go to Tony Robbins, or do you want to go to Randy Ben? Randy Ben will teach you everything Tony Robbins is talking about, but with no ego. And it's not 30 grand to go see him. And there's, there's armed security around the building. So take a risk on yourself.

Like if I was in where I am now at a, at a, I would like to believe I would be in a management role, but let's just say I'm not, I would take off and I would take a gamble on myself because that gamble pays dividends. If you think investing in Nvidia three months ago, Our four months ago was going to pay dividends, invest 1, 500 now and see the dividends in five years.

Um, so I would say that there's two ways of solving that problem. Hold us accountable, first of all, because that's what I want to be. I want to be held accountable for anything we turn over.

Um, so let

*Phil Read:* for your management.

*Adam Thomas:* right. Let it, let us speak for it so that we don't have to train you to speak for it and [01:06:00] then come learn how you're going to speak about it for others.

and fight for others to do events like this. I don't suspect this will be the first event of its kind. think it will be replicated. I think it would be replicated all over the world in the next five years. I think that people are going to get back to a kind of a grassroots, smaller format, highly conversation based retreat.

I think people

are craving it. Everyone I talk to craves it. It's just always, well, I don't know if I can take the time off. I don't know if I like how to explain it to management. Let us explain it to management.

Send them the links, send them the podcasts.

*Phil Read:* but it's, it's, I think we want to create an event that if people said I would spend my own money to do to the, go to this. But, but for some people they go, fortunately my company pays for it. But for other people, they go, you try to create an event that people will say, I would spend my own money to go.

Cause I go to technical events that I think some of them, I mean, I know I have to go to, but I don't necessarily, I wouldn't necessarily spend my own [01:07:00] money to do it. And so if you create the kind of event that people would personally want to attend, and we have people that do, um, and they, they've told me why they do it that way. They pay for the event, they take personal time off, then you're creating something that's. Authentic.

*Evan Troxel:* It's personal, right? That to me is what, what makes it so valuable. Because I think a lot of people go to something like an Autodesk University. There's thousands and thousands and thousands of people. You can actually go hide there, right? It's in Vegas. You can actually just go to a casino the whole time if you wanted to.

There's no accountability in that. In a small event like this, it's extremely personal and it is interactive and participatory and kind of what you put into it. I think you're going to see dividends on getting back out of it. But it is completely different. And you can still talk about the same kinds of topics you can with AEC leaders that you have access to at either one of these events.

One of [01:08:00] them, they're going to have five minutes for you, Max. In an event like this, they're going to have an hour for you, right? It's just you have personal time because you don't have all the distractions. You don't have the entire schedule, everything crammed into a day. And you've got to be on this side of the expo center at this time.

And you've got to be in this conference room. It's not like that. Right, you're

in venue.

*Phil Read:* it's, I have had people ask, they've looked at it and they've, um, said, you know, this looks like a junket. You guys have a, do you guys have an offsite on Monday at the beginning where you go down this river and people paddle or they paddleboard? And, um, I would approach it this way. When you mention it to your senior that you want to go to the event, go, and by the way, it's alcohol free. Cause that doesn't happen in the industry. You go to these events and there's open bars all the time. To me,

that's the junket and that's where it gets noisy. And Adam and I have done that. We have, there's no moral obligation. It just introduces complexity. Like there's a, there's a [01:09:00] lake, there's paddle boards, there's canoes.

I can't have the risk of anyone drinking and getting hurt. And then people wake up before sunrise and they go for a walk. So it's kind of a, it kind of works out, it kind of fits all together. But if you tell your boss, I want to go to this conference or this retreat or this round table, and it looks like there's no alcohol for the week.

To me, that kind of sets an air of, oh, this must be a serious thing. Like it's, you're going to be unplugged for a little bit

*Adam Thomas:* a lot of those, a lot of the, let's call them the, you know, the bigger AAC companies that go to the larger conferences. I've heard that they know they're sending people there. And they don't get anything back from it. Like even the, the recap afterwards, Hey, Evan, I'd love to send you to so and so conference this year.

Um, could you do a 45 minute presentation when you get back? And six months later, they're still asking for the 45 minute

presentation. And then

still send them to, they'll send them again the next year

*Phil Read:* Next year.

*Adam Thomas:* they,

they [01:10:00] think without visibility, they don't maintain their status as a company. And you just, you just kind of cued into it.

You're actually kind of invisible because there's so many people. So if you're trying to be visible. That's not the right place to do it. And if you're trying to be accountable, that's not the right place to do it. The right place to do it as a small circuit, a small conference of some kind. and then you can be highly accountable and you can be highly conversation based and you can actually do that 45 minute presentation the week you get back.

I mean, quite frankly, you could do it with just notes because you're going to have so many notes on a little eight and a half inch notebook that you could wing 45 minutes. The thing you're never going to be able to impart on people is the, the associative feeling of being at an event like this, where like people can understand what it's like to be in Vegas.

We've all seen movies, but I

don't know how to explain to, right. I don't know how to [01:11:00] explain to people The feeling associated with the noise being shut off and you being able to focus on a conversation for two whole hours. I had two hour long conversations with people that didn't exhaust me.

But in Vegas, the first morning I'm exhausted.

*Phil Read:* Look, there's

a thing, and it's just part of the, it's part of how it flows. You go, you get in all these classes and you're packed in and you're, you know, elbow to shoulder trying to make your way to the next session. And then at the end of all of that, the exhibition hall opens up and it's loud music and you're in line with your ticket to get a drink, to have a chat, to decompress. And so we're just going to do the whole thing where you're decompressed. If decompress means, like, in the afternoon, we decompress and we, for three hours, it's open time to just, if you want to go for a walk, if you want to journal, if you want to read, if you want to have a chat, if you want to go down lakeside and grab a paddleboard. And then after dinner, like, Randy would go, you know, guys, let's just go down to the dock and watch the sunset [01:12:00] at the lake and we'll have a wrap up session. Like why, why have a set aside time where you decompress? Why not make an environment for a week where the whole thing is meant to decompress and reconnect with people.

Try to put your phone down for a bit. I mean, during the open time, people have to sometimes send email and get back to the office. But create an entire week where people can decompress. And I was really nervous about the first event of not having alcohol because we were going to do something a little different.

And someone came up to me at breakfast and said, you know what? Normally at these events, I would be a little hung over in the morning and I'm kind of tired and groggy. But this morning I woke up 15 minutes before my alarm went off. So I thought I'll just go for a walk and watch the sunrise. It was really nice. And I thought, oh, that's what I like.

Yeah, go watch the sunrise. I mean, when's the last time you watched the sunrise?

When's the last time you watched the sunset? Like those moments, they're, it's a beautiful, quiet time. And doing that after a nice meal with peers where [01:13:00] you're learning stuff. Anyway,

*Evan Troxel:* it's a cool

*Adam Thomas:* I, I think there's one, there's one thing that I learned that is probably not apparent, but it's a huge value add. I learned it at the last event is I used to go to the large conferences to see the new things, see what people have been working on.

saw more new, I saw more new technology from just Kerry Thompson alone than I would have an entire exhibit hall from

one man.

*Phil Read:* Some

guy from New Zealand. He came all the

way to this round table event. He's a,

he's a mad scientist.

*Adam Thomas:* world and he was, he was the expo between classes. Like, Hey, have you thought about this for doing this? I use this for this other thing. These other three tools have helped me do this. And I'm like, wow, you've just done 50, 000 worth of marketing for those

companies.

should really

get a kickback from it. But I learned that if you're going to see the new things, the people that are highly curious and know what the new things are. I [01:14:00] have conversations twice a

week with startups. I can tell you a hundred pieces of technology you shouldn't be using. And I can tell you the three you should care about.

Phil can do the same, but we're not going to go set up a booth at a large conference to tell you those things. We want a small group that's polite and casual and we can do it there. But just from carry

*Phil Read:* lot of

*Adam Thomas:* I learned, I had a

*Phil Read:* Kerry's

*Adam Thomas:* full of products. could talk about

*Phil Read:* No, you go to conferences and there's booths and there's this technology, you know, it's like this, it's like the presentation where it works in front of a hundred people. This technology is amazing. You go back to the office a week later and you're trying to catch up on working this week forward.

You start playing with it like, this doesn't do what I thought it would do. And then you have to kind of go through the stages of grief to figure out if it's even going to work. I like the nice thing about talking to people that have used it, that can tell you where the landmines are and how to, okay, it's really good for this, but it's not good, but don't think it's going to meet your expectations over here, but here's why you still might want to use it.

Like to me, those conversations are really [01:15:00] valuable. It's um, the, the thing about the leadership retreat is we make these transitions in life from being a young technical person to then having families and mortgages and there's stresses outside of the office and inside the office, but it's just like the leadership retreat has helped me in my own just personal life, trying to just, you know, the kids are getting older.

Like, what's your purpose? Once the kids are grown, why do you keep wanting to do what you do? What's your, what, I still think struggle is important in terms of purpose and having something that you struggle with. Like learning to let go and learning to find good mentors. Randy Ben is a wonderful mentor.

And the fact that we get to sit in a room with him and we talk about these topics, and then I noticed that people will go away and have one on ones for half an hour or an hour, and I don't know what they're talking about. And I don't want to know. So the thing is like at the round table event, all the stuff that we learned there, we can share in whatever form we want to, whereas at the leadership retreat. What you learn can be shared, but what is shared [01:16:00] stays. We don't have executive summaries. Of the leadership retreat, like we would have for a round table of that. Um, maybe sometimes people share things that are a little bit close to home. Stays inside the retreat.

That's it. And that's why it's a, it is a safe space.

Yeah. Randy sets the ground rules for that right at the beginning. He's like, what we learn, you can share. What we share stays here. And people respect that.

*Evan Troxel:* that's cool. Well, I feel like we should wrap up, but I can't finish without talking about the cuisine aspect of this. Can you talk about, about that? Because I think, uh, this is, again, this is an anomaly when it comes to conferences and how you handle this.

*Phil Read:* Well, we like to have the big fancy dinner at the end of the event. We're like, well, why don't we just do that all week long? So I've known chef Charles,

*Adam Thomas:* three fancy dinners a day,

*Phil Read:* I know to the point that people go, actually, I've said last year, I was like, Charles is too much food. It's amazing, but we can't do this three. Yeah, Chef Charles is a French [01:17:00] chef who started his apprenticeship when he was 14. And there's actually an interview, a long form interview on YouTube with me and Randy and Charles. And you just get to see the wonderful, beautiful energy and spirit that he is. And without exaggeration, he prepares meals for heads of state, for rock stars. for multi billion industry executives. And then he loves to come to Lake Swan camp and be part of this group and make cookies. And, uh, he's just wonderful. So what we do is, I mean, Lake Swan makes amazing food. It's camp food. It's camp plates. But I thought, you know, if we could just have some, I was thinking the second year, like, who could we have? And I realized, Jeff Charles is just, I should just talk to Charles. And Charles drives his own car from Charlotte. He goes to Sam's or Publix or wherever. He gets all the food, you know, what, because you can get certain food with like ordering systems, but Charles wants certain things. I'm just about to release a menu.

Adam's seen it. He does an amazing [01:18:00] job three times a day for our onsite, offsite events. He'll have snacks ready, you know, uh, infused waters, cause you got to have nice healthy drinks and, um, he just, They love him. They love him. Chef Charles shows up, he comes out, he, oh, the food is not served like you stand in line and ask people for more of this and less of that and could have a little more of that. It's all served family style. So you might have to say, Adam, could you pass me those potatoes? You know, it's like a table full of people asking each other food and the food comes out. Charles, Charles plates it. He brings it out. He describes what he did. And, uh, then he goes, bonjour y'all. And he goes back to

*Adam Thomas:* Yeah, my, look, you, you, you just said it. My, my favorite part, right, is that. Because he's French, and because he's polite, he doesn't just give you food. He tells a story about the

food, and then he presents the food. And, I've never been to an event in my life where you [01:19:00] can have five star dining, in shorts and t shirt, and feel comfortable, and feel like you're at home.

And he somehow does that by telling a story, and then saying, If you need anything, let me know,

have

*Phil Read:* yeah. Yeah.

Charles loves it. He loves it. He's, he's, uh, he's just wonderful, wonderful energy. Oh, Charles Sun works for Autodesk. He's the HR director in EMEA. Like, that's just a weird thing. And, uh, but Charles will come out. Yeah. So it's a little aside. I get so excited. He comes out, he describes what he's done.

He puts plates out and every dietary restriction is covered. Um, you know, he knows all of that and, uh, but he's just part of it. Like any event, I don't think we've ever been to an event where the chef comes out and talks to you and says, this is what's going on and here's what I've done. And, and, um, so there's just a wonderful familial event to that. And, um, I think the best things in life are good meals with friends. It's such [01:20:00] a simple thing, but there's nobody sweeping under your chair and trying to get you out so they can put the next table in. And I remember, I get giddy now when I see people pull out their phones when Chef Charles brings out food and everybody's like taking their own little photos. but then I, it was Nick Kramer, uh, he's director at LPA on the West Coast, and Nick looks at me once and he goes, Phil, I'm eating Instagram food on camp plate. And I thought, yeah, okay. That's a good way. I like it. It's,

uh, it's authentic. It's authentic. it's Instagram meals on camp plates. Yeah.

Like, you know, the plasticky, how clamp camp plates kind of clink and clank like your school trays when you're a kid. It's

that sound. It's

not fancy silverware. Yeah.

*Adam Thomas:* one, one story I have to tell is my, my daughter came, so she was three at the time when we, uh, the last event came to the round table event

and we don't do sugar. Like, we just don't eat sugar. She doesn't have sugar, uh, she doesn't have iPad, she doesn't have phone, she plays with Legos, and she plays outside.

That's what I did, that's what she's gonna do. [01:21:00] You can learn the computer later, you can eat sugar later. And Chef Charles brought out like a, a pound cake he had made with ice cream on the side and went to set it down in front of us. We're like, ah, we, we'll, we'll skip this. And he goes, you'll have Chef Charles pound cake. have Chef Charles ice cream. And he goes, and, and the little one can have twice as much. And I was like, but we've, we don't do sugar. And

*Phil Read:* we don't do it.

*Adam Thomas:* he's like, it'll be okay. It's Chef Charles,

and I was like, okay, fair enough. So now

she'll ask, my daughter will say, when, when are we going to go see that guy that made all the food?

*Evan Troxel:* The

*Adam Thomas:* Um, and let me, and let me have ice cream. And I'm like, well, I can go see him right now. You want to drive and see him? Chef

Charles would think it's amazing,

but he's gonna, gonna feed you a dessert. So,

*Phil Read:* Adam looked over at the round table event and goes, we got to hold on to Chef Charles.

*Adam Thomas:* actually in our post mortem, right? I said, I don't care if we get rid of anything else, he is staying.

*Phil Read:* We got to

*Adam Thomas:* We can [01:22:00] change everything, but I will fight tooth and nail to keep him at every event and until he wants to leave. And then I'll still fight to make him come back.

*Phil Read:* Yeah, he, uh, he just does the photos online of him preparing lamb racks for one of the events, like how he sources his food. All of this stuff is beautiful. And the first year he said, Phil, I'm very busy. You know, I'll do it once, but I can't guarantee that I'm ever going to be doing it again. And then on the second day of the event, he was lakeside, sitting in the lifeguard chair, doing FaceTime call with his wife, Lee. He's going. You gotta come. This place is amazing. I love these people. And then by the end of the week, he's like, you know, if I was ever gonna retire, I could, I could work. What am I talking about? This is crazy talk. I'm never gonna

retire. He's just wonderful energy. And

it's, it's just, it's, just, a, it's just all these wonderful pieces have come together and the sum is greater than the parts.

And I'd love for other people to experience that. And Adam would too.

*Evan Troxel:* Well, and you framed it, you [01:23:00] know, in there somewhere about having a meal with friends, right? And that, and it goes back to your early having breakfast with mentors to glean insights. Like, it's a great spot to have meaningful conversations. And it doesn't have to be about work. It doesn't have to be about professional development. But all of these things, we know, they weave into each other in different ways. We find something that you, you pull out of this conversation and it applies over here where you would have never been able to

connect those dots, should you not have been in that conversation to have that experience, right?

So, this is a place, that is fertile for this kind of interaction and, and participation. And I think that that is worth talking about. So I've just, at this point, I think, invite you to give the details about what, when, where, you know, all those kinds of things. And, and we'll put links to all of this in the show notes for the episode as well.

So I want you to tell everyone, but then [01:24:00] everyone should also know that all of the details will be in the show notes for this episode.

*Phil Read:* A EC leadership retreat. Dot com.

*Adam Thomas:* No,

don't go there.

*Evan Troxel:* Don't

go to

*Adam Thomas:* No, it's just, it's just AACAcoustics. com. Click

*Phil Read:* Oh yeah, that's right. Sorry.

Adam .

*Adam Thomas:* no, you're good. Um, they're

*Phil Read:* Ac acoustics.com.

*Adam Thomas:* all the interviews we've talked about, they're still live on the website from the previous years. They're all there. Go see how Chef Charles talks. Go see how Randy talked. And then hold us accountable if you don't think they present themselves well.

Reach out to

*Phil Read:* Talk to

anybody who's been there in those photos. You probably know 'em, or you could figure out who they are. Send them an email and ask them.

*Adam Thomas:* yep.

*Phil Read:* Yep.

*Evan Troxel:* I appreciate how

you guys offer advocacy on other's behalf to make the case for why it's valuable to go to something like this. So, I hope people do take you up on that, for sure. So, I'll have links to your LinkedIn. [01:25:00] Profiles and aecacoustics. com in the show notes for the website. So people can reach out to you if they have additional questions, if they need help, uh, making the case.

Uh, and, and thank you so much for, for having this conversation today. I think, you know, big picture. The transition from technical to people, from single to teams, is a huge jump in one's professional development, and there is not necessarily a road map, and this is a great place to go get shortcuts. So that we don't have to start with a blank page with people who have been there and done that in their way over, you know, various years and years and years of time. Um, so it may not directly apply, but I think you're going to get some amazing ideas and amazing insight. And you're going to meet the people who have, who have accomplished what you're talking about. So this is, this is a great, great thing for people to definitely pay attention to. And I hope [01:26:00] that, uh, everybody can, you know, enjoy it. 50 people at least will show up and, and be at this retreat. It's going to be great.

*Phil Read:* Thanks Evan.

*Adam Thomas:* Thank you, Evan.

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Ryan Cameron joins the podcast to talk about the recent AI focused Technology in Architecture Practice (TAP) Symposium at AIA’24.

Today he shares insights from the symposium headlined by keynote speakers Phil Bernstein and Dr. Mehdi Nourbakhsh, PhD, who have both previously appeared on TRXL, and he provides an explanation of what these knowledge communities are and how they fit into the AIA.

Tune in to learn more about what TAP is doing at the growing intersection between technology and architecture, the importance of sharing across the profession, how TAP’s volunteers are leading the charge in this community, and some exciting opportunities for innovation grants being offered by TAP.

Episode links:* Ryan on LinkedIn * Ryan on Twitter/X * CMBA Architects on LinkedIn * CMBA Architects website * AIA Technology in Architecture Practice knowledge community website * TRXL 141: ‘AI is Not Your Strategy’, with Mehdi Nourbakhsh, PhD and Scott Thompson * TRXL 033: ‘What Other Dials Do You Have to Turn’, with Phil Bernstein * TRXL 073: ‘Design, Equity, & Data’, with Nicholas Cameron

About Ryan Cameron:Ryan leads digital integration efforts at CMBA Architects that range in practice from data analysis and strategy, technology, and data-driven design. You may have heard of Ryan from his long list of public presentations and innovative work have been commonly cited as representing the vanguard of critical directions for the industry. Ryan is recognized in the field as having reached tens of thousands of AEC professionals around the world with his vast technical skill and speaking opportunities. You can also find Ryan prominently featured in Randy Deustch's critically acclaimed book: Superusers: Design Tech Specialists and the Future of Practice.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this Episode on YouTube:

Episode Transcript: *164: ‘The Technology in Architecture Practice (TAP) Knowledge Community’, with Ryan Cameron*

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Troxel podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode, I welcome Ryan Cameron. Ryan is the digital practice leader for CMBA Architects. In this episode, we discuss the recent AI focused Technology and Architecture Practice, also known as TAP, Symposium that happened at the AIA National Conference in Washington, D. C. Ryan's going to share some insights from the symposium that was headlined by keynote speakers Phil Bernstein and Mehdi Norbakish, who was also on the podcast previously, and provides an explanation of what these knowledge communities are and how they fit into the larger AIA. Ryan is the 2024 AIA TAP Chair, so he knows what he's talking about.

We also talk about the origins and evolution of TAP, their mission, their annual symposium, their online forums, and future initiatives aimed at supporting small and [00:01:00] medium sized architecture firms, what TAP is doing in the growing intersection between technology and architecture, the importance of sharing across the profession, how TAP's volunteers are leading the charge in this community, and some exciting new opportunities for innovation grants being offered by TAP. Before we jump into the conversation, please help the podcast by subscribing on both YouTube and in your favorite podcast app to let me know that you're a fan. And if you'd like to receive an email when episodes are published with all of the links and other information from the episode, you can sign up at trxl.co. You can also directly support the show by becoming a member at the site as well. So as always, thank you so much for listening and I hope that you find value in this episode. And so now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Ryan Cameron.

[00:02:00] I am joined today by Ryan Cameron. Ryan, welcome to the podcast, great to have you.

Ryan Cameron: Yeah, no, this is great. Thanks. Thanks so much, Evan, for having me.

Evan Troxel: We just saw each other in Washington, D. C. at the TAP Symposium that happened, and that was like an all day event. That was the day prior to the actual conference kickoff, I believe, if I, if I got my timeline right. So, um, maybe we could start there and, and just talk about what TAP is before we get into maybe how that symposium went.

Because I know, Event planning is hard. I've

done it

Ryan Cameron: yeah, we'll talk

Evan Troxel: only imagine. Yeah, I can imagine what you went through to create an all day event with, I mean, a couple hundred people were there for that, so it was a fantastic turnout and fantastic content shared during that. I especially Um, the keynote speakers were just incredible.

So anyway, let, let's rewind a little bit. And, um, actually even before we talk about TAP, let's just talk about you and maybe you can give us your [00:03:00] origin story and your trajectory through the AEC tech side of things.

Ryan Cameron: Oh, Yeah. Um, so I, I think a lot of folks might know me from speaking at AU or

back in the day it was called RTC or those, those types of things. Um, but yeah, my, my goal in life was to become an architect. And so that's what I went to school for it in Nebraska. Um, I went to college with, I think a lot of people are familiar with like, uh, uh, Nate Miller, um, of Proving Ground and, uh, maybe Dave Patera of, of DeRofus. Um, and so. A couple of us, you know, took the technology route, it seems like, and, um, I am still practicing architecture. I'm stamping drawings, doing specs, all that fun stuff, but I also kind of do this whole technology thing on the side, too. Um, I think a lot of folks know me from back in my days at maybe DLR Group, but now I'm with CMBA Architects as their digital practice leader. And so that's just a fancy way of saying I'm here to help modernize the practice. [00:04:00] Um, and so, let's see, I've been licensed for, I don't know, 13 years, been in the biz for 23 years. Um, so, yeah, I've, I've gotten to know a lot of folks, and it's just an incredible community, and I'm really excited to share more about TAP, um, today, because it's, it's super important, and I don't think a lot of people know about TAP.

So, yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

let's jump into that part. Uh, and, and maybe you can explain your role there and kind of how that side of it works as well, because there, there is kind of the organization part of it and, and anybody who's an AI, a member can participate in that. But also there's just like this, like the structure of TAP and how it works and how long people are, um, you know, committed to it when they're involved.

And there's that whole side of it as well, which I would love to talk about so that people get a full understanding of what TAP is and how it's. Helping the profession.

Ryan Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. Who are we? Why are we here?

What is TAP? So, yeah, no, I'm

glad you asked. Um, so [00:05:00] TAP, Technology and Architecture Practice is, is one of over a dozen, maybe even two dozen AIA knowledge communities out of all the, uh, something like 52 community groups that the AIA has. So I think depending on what you focus on in architecture, I feel like most people know about maybe like the COTE, um, Knowledge Community, or the COTE group, I

try to

pronounce both ways,

Committee on

the Environment, the Academy of Architecture for Health, Project Delivery, Practice Management. So, TAP is the only one, well one, that has ever had a conference at the larger, like, national AIA conference. Number two, the only one that holds a symposium every year. And so formally, we called it Building Connections Congress. Um, so we're really thankful to have that opportunity. I feel like we do a really good job at it.

We draw a lot of folks, um, for a number of years. It was just hosted at the D. C. headquarters and we were limited to, I think, a hundred folks. But now [00:06:00] we're basically whatever, whatever we can fill. And usually we're 200, 300 folks,

um, attending every year. So it's, yeah, at a high level where it fits into the broader AIA national organization. Um, and so, yeah, so a knowledge community, that's, that's what we are, we're, we're. Uh, component of, of the IA, but why are we here, Evan?

That's, Yeah

the TAP, yeah, we strive to provide like world class resources that improve designers experience in learning about new technology. So we've got the online forum, um, we hold the symposium every year. We're, we want to be that resource hub. We're, we're, you know, trying every year to, to bring more information, more knowledge to everybody, have conversations about technology. Um, And we do this by building a community that focuses on the value of sharing insights and managing knowledge and discovering the emerging trends, um, with the future of practice. And right now we have roughly 15, [00:07:00] 600 subscribers, if you will, people

that,

that sign on for

the, the TAP forum online.

So we feel like that

represents a pretty good chunk of the overall 100, 000 or so. Um, members, uh, these are just the folks that are a little bit, maybe a little bit more technology focused and want to see, you know, how to improve the, the business from that angle.

Evan Troxel: So your mission, like, as you stated, is basically to provide exposure of new ideas, technology, new ways of doing things to the broader AIA community. And I feel like, you know, being part of larger firms, as you were with DLR and you are currently, and when I was digital practice leader at HMC Architects, like, we have access to resources that a lot of small and medium firms don't, right?

We were part of the large firm round table, large firm. Uh, just automatically segments that into a certain group, right? And that's

not the majority of the AIA, right? The majority of the AIA, so something like over 80 percent is small firms that, that make up the AIA. So [00:08:00] that's a lot of people who are underrepresented when, when it comes to.

technology sharing, things like that. And obviously resources are also more scarce in smaller firms. I would, I would just venture to guess. Um, I don't know budget numbers or anything, but so, so TAP really becomes kind of an all access. Anybody who has an interest or wants to be included, just opts in as an AIA member to that.

Right.

Ryan Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. It's free to join. There's no, there's no additional charge or anything like that.

Just,

um, jump on the forum and post a question. We try to get back to you as soon as we can. And in your first year, and I'll, I'll mention this later, but your first year, the first year of your five years, we, we try to have that person monitor the conversations and keep, keep that active. Um, in a sense, uh, to, to help folks who are maybe struggling, just have a question about, you know, what, what software does what, how much should it cost, uh, how long should I expect,

who do I ask for training, [00:09:00] um, yeah, just, there, there could be a million questions, and we'll, we'll, we'll talk about this here later, because I, I, I feel like, um, uh, the small firm exchange, which is also a component, um, we formed a group here at, at TAP, um, last year, and, um, I formed a group I'm in charge of it, I guess. Um, and we want to, we want to get out a survey. So we're going to work with National AIA to kind of come up with a survey of like, what are your questions? Um, and then Tesla, uh, Collier with HMTV, she's on the, on the committee with me. Um, she's been super helpful at, at helping get that move forward too. So that's, that's something to look forward to, um, that, that's coming.

We want to understand what is going on at small firms and how TAP can better serve. Um, we're volunteers by the way, a hundred percent unpaid, but we, we still know, I just deep down, I feel like we can do better and we need to do better. And so that's, that's one angle that, that, you know, [00:10:00] I'm here for and I'm in my halfway through my third year on the tap board.

So I want to make sure that this becomes a full thing every year to help keep small firms under a hundred, granted ten and under. And 11 to 100 is small and medium, but we want to make sure that group is represented, because as you mentioned, it's something like 80 percent of firms in the country are under 100, well

under

100.

Evan Troxel: Right. Yeah. Probably, probably less than 10, right? So

oftentimes leaders in those firms are wearing many, many hats, right? And so technology can be a very small hat

when it comes to what, what they have time for with all the other clients and project deadlines. And you know, the, they're, they're dealing with submittals and emails and all these other things.

And that becomes quite, quite a burden. So yeah, it seems appropriate to reach out and ask them there. What they are interested in [00:11:00] hearing more about and what kinds of questions they have, because I can imagine that they have very similar questions to a lot of other people. I always found this even in the large firm.

It's like, are you dealing with this? Are you struggling with this? It's like everybody raises their hands. Yep. Even though you feel like you're dealing with a lot of this stuff in isolation. You're totally not. It's just firms don't really reach out and talk to other firm owners about these kinds of things that often or other technology leaders.

It's like only during these conferences or symposiums is when that really happens at a, at a much higher frequency, right? So creating, I mean, it seems like everybody's connected all the time, right? So it shouldn't be that hard to figure out ways to engage, uh, and, and get people's questions answered. But also you're going to.

I, I don't like this term, but you know, you're killing multiple birds with one stone, right? Every, lots of people have the same question, right? It's so, so by answering somebody's question, you're going to help a lot of people out. And it seems, seems like this shouldn't, this should be a no brainer. There's easy to do.[00:12:00]

Ryan Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. And so we just kind of want to help monitor the development of technology and keep those conversations, discussions going. And then, like I said, provide resources, and actually AIA California came up with an absolute dynamite resource on their website. It's kind of like a, like a toolkit. It's like

you

pick the size of your

firm, you pick what area of practice, marketing, design, um, another pull down, and then you pick, um, um, something else. And then it comes up with a whole, granted it's a spreadsheet that comes back, but it comes up with a whole spreadsheet of like, here's Revit, here's cost expectations, here's, um,

you know, reviews and here's Enscape and here's the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of these things, it's like every software imaginable.

Here's how much, you know, you should expect to pay for Photoshop and, um, how many firms are using it. And it's just this amazing, uh, database of information that, that firms can, can access for, again, for free. Um, so hats off to that team

for, for developing that.

Evan Troxel: Nice. So how, what kinds of [00:13:00] initiatives are you, are you doing beyond, beyond that one at TAP?

Ryan Cameron: Yeah. So we've really picked it up a little bit. Um, it used to be, you just came in and put on a show and then you just sort of like, Relax for the rest of your duration. Um, I, I came in and I, I got really moved by the small firm exchange conversation.

Um, I, I basically

just sat in, um, on a, on one of their calls and just happened to be focused on like AI or technology and everybody was hurting. And I, that just really struck me inside. I was like, wow, what, what CAA, what's, hey, you're, you're going to be the chair someday for TAP. You better. Like, get on top of this, and like, help, help these firms, like, this is ridiculous that they, I, sorry, hopefully I don't get in trouble here, but, like, it's, we should be, like, helping, um, these firms that are, that are members, um, like, at least, at least come up with a playbook

of how to, how

to develop this, or strategize, and, and, and [00:14:00] help them move forward, and so that, that's where the, the theme from TAP really came from, we did, uh, brainstorming, uh, Smash Buzzwords Together session, But, um, that's where, where it really came from.

It went from being like developing a toolkit to really thinking like, no, it's bigger than that step back. It's a, it's a playbook. It's like an approach, right? We, AI can't like make, we shouldn't be making like demands or things like that. Like you have to do it this way, you have to do it that way. We should have a general playbook of like, hey, here's a case study of how you could do it. Um, and here's like a playbook of like, You've got these players, you've got this coach, you've got this team, here's how you can, you know, make play calls, um, sorry for the sports metaphors here, but here's how you can make play calls with these different options depending on the defense or offense you're going against, and what, you know, what's your strategies and objectives, are you going for delay of game, are you going for field goal, are you going for a touchdown or a 10 yard pass, like, that's how [00:15:00] businesses operate essentially, it's like, what are our positions, What are our people?

How much is it going to cost? How much time is it going to take? Like if you think about a game clock running down and your resources available to you, like you, you want a playbook that everybody, the coaches and the players are reading from. And so that's, that's really where that, it's important, right?

It's, it's important for firms to have that. So we want to help develop that. And then we, just like every, every person ever, Oh, Hey, I got it. Like, Oh, I know this. We didn't know anything. we we went into the second call. And we asked a couple questions and it's, it's scattershot. And so we, we realized that this is going to take a year to, uh, of probably half a dozen phone calls, like, like the ones we were having with a full map of different areas of technology, um, that, that need, um, you know, a resource management guide, essentially, again, a playbook, uh, for [00:16:00] folks to understand, like, when to, like, when, when are you. Large enough to move, um, from your, like a smaller enterprise resource, um, tool to a larger enterprise resource tool. Like, when you move from a JIRA, Dell type JIRA to, uh, a different time sheet management payroll type thing. Or, are you insourcing, are you outsourcing, um, that? Um, it's just, it's just amazing the conversations we started having.

So we started to break those into different categories that, like design, marketing, um, project management, um, all, all the different categories. And we're coming up with surveys. We're at the point now where AIA has a survey team that, um, we're going to be talking with to actually do a better job of, of, of doing that.

Cause that's, that's their full time job. That's, this is more of my hobby. So they will do a much better job. I just, Tesla and I, and that the rest of the team had just had the ideas to get this thing, um, off the ground. So that's, that's really what we're hoping to do over the next year. [00:17:00] I'm really excited about it.

Evan Troxel: I have to just pause and say hello to Tesla myself because I know she listens and every time I see her, I love her. Talking to her and seeing her. So hi, Tesla.

one thing that's interesting to me about technology and practice, it's right in the name, right? It's like, and this is something that we saw a big transition when I was at the firm that I was at, which is that technology impacts all the different aspects of practice.

And it's not just IT, right? I think before I really went into the role of digital practice leader, it was IT, and it was very reactive, putting out fires, setting up people with hardware, getting software installed, but it wasn't, it didn't include the perspective of the actual practitioners. It was more of a, it was like a service that operated within the firm that was just constantly, you know, Dealing with problems.

And so it was very hard for that to be proactive because all [00:18:00] of the time was spent being reactive. Right. And I'm sure smaller and medium sized firms feel like that all the time. And it's like, how do you get ahead of things? How do you get strategic with technology? And the things that you're talking about are in alignment with that.

And so for our firm to move from reactive IT to proactive digital practice, like what we were talking about, we, we're always talking about it like it was the future of practice, but, but it's just practice, right? This is how practice has evolved, right?

Ryan Cameron: modernize.

Evan Troxel: And, and people still think of it, though, as like these different buckets, like there's architecture, there's design, there's sustainability, there's technology, and it's no, it's actually horizontal, it's like, those things are in all areas of practice, so it could be HR, graphics, marketing, rendering, delivery of projects, QA, Specifications, like there's all these different pieces of [00:19:00] architecture that make up a project and make up how firms run that technology impacts.

And what you're talking about is kind of cohesively looking at all of that, right? Because you talked about practice operation software, right? It's like, how are we tracking what we're doing? How are we tracking our billing? How are we? How are we getting people to, to know what to do and when to do it and how, how do we get ahead of that when we're staffing projects and all of these things?

Like all of these things have to work together and it needs to be a cohesive strategy. I mean, that to me is where TAP can really make a huge difference in firms who are struggling with the transition of the way that we used to do it, to the way that people are doing it now. And when new people are joining firms, they're expecting.

this level of technology and they're just, they're, they're walking into firms and they're seeing the way that, that it's always been done still, right? So there, there's an, a natural contrast there that they're, it's like, [00:20:00] it's kind of shocking when graduates come out of school and they go into a firm.

where it's like, they're not modern. They're, they're still doing things the old way. Right. And, and I can, you see other verticals out there and it's like, they look really so much more attractive because they are just evolving and keeping up or getting ahead of it. So transitioning from reactive to proactive and strategic seems to be one of those things that TAP can really help with the conversation around and helping people make those transitions.

Ryan Cameron: Yeah. Super important. Super important.

We mentioned Tesla. We should probably mention all the board

committee

Evan Troxel: Do it.

Okay.

Ryan Cameron: I don't

want anybody to feel left out. We have an amazing group of appointments over the last two decades. I can't list everybody, but just the folks that are on now. Thank you. Um, yeah, they just deserve a lot of credit, and so our current group consists of Nick Cameron, FAA, who just got FAA,

um, yeah, um, he's, he's been on your show,

um, he's from Perkins and

[00:21:00] Will, um, he's my 16th cousin, no doubt, we have the same last name, um, both from Scotland and at some point in our lives, and in our history, I'm sure, um, and then, uh, Joel Martineau, DeRofus, um, he's in his, his 4th year, so Nick's in his final year, um, on the, on the board, and then Joel's in his fourth year. Um, myself, I'm in my third year in the chair for this year, um, so I think people, people remember that event. Um, then next up we have a, a good friend of mine, um, co, a co speaker for Top Speaker Award in, at 18, Cesar Escalante. Uh, he's at Autodesk. Um, and people know Cesar, he's on the AI California board, and, um, he's very active in the community.

Um, yeah. Created, like, San Francisco Computational Users Design Groups, things, things

like that. Um, leading a whole bunch of things. He's amazing. And he'll be my successor next year as chair. And then, um, our newest five year member is, uh, Vicki Harris. Um, also very well known from, from her [00:22:00] Bill at RTC days. Um, and she's at, uh, HKS. And so those are, those are our five year members. Um, but also, um, last year, um, we decided we were overwhelmed and we needed help. And so we expanded. Um, our, our committee and we, we thought to ourselves, Hey, we, we need like a design technology leaders group. We need a CFO or I'm sorry, a CIO, CTO, large from round table type people. And so, um, uh, luckily Alex, uh, Pollack, uh, Thornton Tomasetti, um, joined us last year and this year. And then we've, uh, got Brent Malti from, uh, Turner, am I pronouncing it right? Turner Fletcher.

Um, Yeah.

he's the CTO there, and so, um, they're, they're forming a little group, and so that way we have, uh, just an olive branch, if you will, to the, the other groups that are out there that deal with technology, because it, it seems like we're doing something, and they're doing something, and we just want to [00:23:00] make sure that we're not doing duplicate work and stuff like that.

Um, then we mentioned, uh,

Tesla, of course, from HNTB, and then, uh, Sarah Lobman with, um, uh, Lord Ack, Sargent. LAS. Um, and so all amazing folks and they're on, um, the subcommittee, uh, small firm exchange subcommittee with me and, um, sustainability. Um, so we have, we're not trying to take over any other groups. We just, we, we know that there's a lot of technology branches that, that we can help with.

And of course, Emma Tucker Emma Tucker is our AIA, uh, knowledge community liaison, uh, does like all the heavy lifting and she's super helpful in, in all aspects here. So. Um, hats off to her as well. So that's that's everybody. Um, and then, uh, we will be bringing on someone new probably in December or January. So

yeah.

Evan Troxel: Can you talk about that process and what the commitment is, how it happens, so that people who are interested just have an understanding of what the expectations would

Ryan Cameron: Yeah. [00:24:00] This is, I wish I would have known what, what I know now. So if you're listening to the podcast, get ready. Cause, uh, you know, we'll tell you that it's like an hour a month kind of thing, but that's, that's just the call. That's just the monthly call that you're on. Um, I'm not saying it's like 100 hours a month, but there are, uh, especially in your third year, there, there might be a pretty lengthy time commitment because you're, you're obviously sitting down with, with folks and, and, and trying to put on a conference that you've probably never done before.

But, um, and so initially, and I, I think, um, I think submissions for new members on the board are closed now, or it might still be open for another week, um, but we, we take submissions. So it's, I don't want to say it's an intense process, but we will sort of interview you. We have a list of questions we ask you. We ask that you provide like a cover letter. Why do you want to be on, uh, the TAP committee? Um, the, the most important thing [00:25:00] is let your firm know. Get, get, get somebody in. leadership, whether it's the CEO or CIO, let them know that you plan on joining, because there is some financial commitment that the firm needs to make.

So we do need a letter from someone at your firm that, you know, helps sign the checks, because there will be times where we can't reimburse you for a hotel or a flight or something like that, or an opportunity comes up and we need, we offer people, you know, the chance to go. to a leadership summit, um, like in DC or something like that, which is an incredible opportunity. We just need to let folks know, um, and then a resume. And so those three things, um, just, just to kind of get in the door. And then the, the five, five year people, um, kind of sit down in a, in a zoom call and, and go over them and then we kind of vote on it and we accept that the next person onto the, onto the team. Because again, it's like a, it's a, it's a [00:26:00] moving, um, situation.

It's a

five year commitment to Rolling.

So,

um, and so first

year, so now we're getting into it. Welcome to the like admissions component of this now, now that you're on, um, it's, it's like a, your first year. We just try to, like, ease you into the process.

You're basically in charge of the online forum, so discussion groups, um, comment section, that sort of stuff. Just, and we do that just so that you get to know the community a little bit. It's not the most active forum by any stretch of the imagination, but you can

kind of

roll back and see,

um, names and stuff and, and see what people are posting.

Just get a better feel for, um, the community, all 15, 16, 000 members or so. And then your second year. Um, so we've had to change now that we're, um, on the first day of the conference and hopefully that's going to continue. Um, we've had to change the role of second year and fourth year. So second year we're having that person, um, be in charge of, [00:27:00] um, what we call the forum day.

So don't forget we have symposium day, but then usually two days later we have open forum, which is like a 90 minute session. Um, and, and so that's, um, all the, all the different AIA tap chapters. Um, we usually call on them to come up with like a 15 minute presentation about the latest thing they're doing or what they're seeing. And that brings a lot of exposure to, to the folks that do show up to that. So hopefully second year, you've got the online forum under your belt. Now we're doing an in person forum for a, for a 90 minute session. Then by the time you're third year, you can put on a conference, right? I mean,

don't get me wrong, you get a lot of help.

It's Natural progression.

yeah. And so, a lot of the people that join have, so I have experience doing that with like the BIM workshops with Todd Shackelford and Carla Edwards and Bill Allens we talked about before the call. Um, like putting on something, at least, at least I had some ability to do that. My wife actually did the website for the BIM [00:28:00] workshops back in the day, this had been 12 years ago or so.

Um, so I, I, I kind of knew what was going on there, and I'd been to probably 40 different conferences speaking at every one of those. Um, so I, I had an idea of, of how to do that, so it was a little bit less stressful for me. Um, and then by your fourth year, you're looking, um, to tackle what we call now the Innovation Grant. And so, um, that's just us, uh, and this is sort of the first year of, of us doing this. It used to be called the BIM Awards, then it became the Innovation. Uh, awards, and then it was, I want to say it might have been like Ryan Johnson, Brad Prespo, who are, who are, you know, retired from the board now, and, and Nick and, and Joelle, um, said, hey, why don't we, why are we not making an investment in this?

Why are, we're giving like a piece of paper, great Revit award kind of thing. Why don't we take some of our funding and provide an investment? Um, for folks that are coming up, [00:29:00] maybe it's a Revit plug in, maybe it's the next test fit, maybe it's the, maybe it's an AI tool that could help architects, like, Yeah, I could go off on a rant on this, on how low the investment profile of, of AEC is in general.

We're like the fourth largest industry in the world. In the world and we're like the last place in terms of like investment for for technology and innovation. It's

I've got all kinds

of stats on that just it's super super frustrating. So we so we're like, let's do our part Let's do what we can and that evolved into yeah the innovation grant.

And so we've we've got some award winners That I don't know where that is because I'm not I'm not in charge of that But look for that in the in the coming months and years and then Nick We he's got Ideas from the five people before him. He can talk to the four people behind him. Um, we call it SAGE advice, and so the fifth year, you're kind of like helping set the direction.

Now that you've got like, you know, [00:30:00] almost a decade worth of, of, you know, just group knowledge there,

um, we, we want

that person to fill in where they, where they can, because they've done everything, right? They've done everything that the fourth year, third year, second year person's done, and and give us any kind of advice that they have, help us, you know, uh, improve our network. Um, and reach out to folks, and, and just, just give us sage advice. That's, that's what we say. It's, it's more

than

that.

Evan Troxel: kind of an, it's kind of an advisory position at that

Ryan Cameron: Yeah.

Yeah.

And so it's, it's

the place to be.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Ryan Cameron: But, I mean, if, if for some reason the, the chair can't, um, meet, meet the, um, you know, they get sick or they have a funeral or something that, that they can't make up, it's kind of the fifth year person's responsibility to kind of pick up the pieces.

Yeah. Be the co chair real quick. Um, if something like that were to happen, it's like it's a good gap

stop. Um, so Yeah. [00:31:00] and so that's, that's what you can expect. I mean, there are months where, you know, it's, it's probably two hours a month and there are months where 50 hours a month could be very, very much could be. So, especially in your third year, when you're putting on a conference. With

amazing speakers. We should talk

about the speakers and

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Let's talk about the conference that you just had. The symposium was fantastic. So you want to give us kind of an overview of, of it and then we can get into a little bit more detail into each one of those

Ryan Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. So, um, everybody knows, well, I shouldn't say that, but everybody knows Phil Bernstein. So, I'm just super, super happy that, that he said yes. Um, I, I honestly, when we, when we first started, I, we didn't even approach him because we, we thought we wouldn't be able to even get his attention and the fact that he came in and knocked her out of the park was, was incredible. Um, and he could meet, um, the afternoon. And so, um, [00:32:00] some of us knew, um, Mehdi Norbashk, and so I got in touch with, with Dr. Mehdi, and asked him if he could, um, be our morning keynote.

And pretty much right away, you know, I explained everything that was going on, how we'd be a great fit, and after probably one or two conversations, he accepted, um, and he had, uh, I'm so glad he did, because And, um, it's, for a second there, I didn't think he was going to, and we were getting to be late February, early March, maybe even late March, and, um, it would be really hard on short notice, like a two month's notice, to get anybody else, so I'm super glad he said yes, and he, he's got the book out now that's called Augment It, and

gave a couple copies away at the, at the, at the session, because that's, that's what I do, that's one thing that I'm known for, is I always give a book away when nobody's, nobody's expecting it, Um, and so his discussion was around how design professionals can augment themselves or the practice [00:33:00] with this concept of superintelligence, as we all know, AI, artificial intelligence.

So, um, absolutely mind boggling session. So it's un, it was unlike your typical session where you kind of sit back in a passive mode and just listen to a speaker. No, no, no. He has this great presentation that it's just this mix of like passive active, passive active. And so he would get up and kind of explain the thesis. And then we would break into, um, not small groups or anything, but whoever's sitting at your table, um, or group of tables. And he would just kind of broadly ask questions and you could use your phone to get onto this app and like explain like a quick survey, um, Mentimeter or whatever it was called,

and really got help firms.

I'm going to simplify this as much as I can. Helped everybody in the room at least start to get to a strategic thinking point written down that they could [00:34:00] take with them about how technology works in their practice and how they could do it better.

So that, that in itself was probably worth the hundred bucks, you know, to show up that day. That was absolutely phenomenal. And so it was again, him talking and discussing like, here's where it is, here's where it could go. Here's what other folks are doing. Here's what I'm doing. And then let's sit down and discuss it. in a way that helps you. And then he'd get back up and he'd do another thesis and then we'd sit back down.

So it was absolutely, you, you were there. I mean, yeah.

What was your

Evan Troxel: yeah.

A couple things about, about Mehdi. Mehdi's been on the show before and I've been through his workshop as well. And I think one of the things that I appreciate about his approach, number one, is like the, the way that he engages with the audience and has that, the, the delivery of information, and then there's like the active part that you were talking about, right, where people are having an active discussion and then maybe reporting back out of that.

It's fantastic because it keeps everybody on their toes, it keeps people thinking [00:35:00] and participating, not just sitting there, it's not just a one way conversation. But what I, what I appreciate about him is, is two things. Number one is that he gets everybody on the same page in a really, he does a really well, a good job at that.

Because the big problem with technology often is that people hear something, Secondhand, thirdhand, it could even be firsthand, but they're hearing a version of it that number one may not be current, and number two just might be scary enough to say, I'm never going to touch that. And so AI is definitely one of those things, right?

And this is his expertise. And so what he does is he takes everybody through, like, this is what, first he defines what it is and gets everybody on the same page. And then we start to talk about practical applications. Yeah. But the goal isn't just to find something to do with technology. So the other thing that I appreciate about his approach is that he's, he gets everybody to think about what they do best or why they do what they do.

And then we figure out if what [00:36:00] the right technology is to approach tackling that, right? So it's just like any tool. You need to use it for its purpose, right? And so you're not trying to find something to do with AI. You're trying to solve a business problem, or provide a value for your clients, and then you're going to pick the right tool to do the job.

And sometimes that might be AI, right? And METI's great at walking people through that. So, number one, it kind of gets rid of the fear and turns it into excitement about the possibilities, and then we start to think about what the possibilities are, and then we say, okay, are these tools the right fit? to start to try to accomplish those possibilities.

So overall, I totally agree with you. His, the way that he delivers his keynotes is fantastic. And it is very much like a workshop style of a, of an interaction. And I, I feel like we're all there to like, we, we're up for the challenge. We're architects. Like, this is what we live for is solving problems. And so he has a really [00:37:00] great way of kind of engaging people to flex those muscles that we already have.

in, in our industry and really like turn that in with everybody else in the room, kind of turn that into a really amazing session.

Ryan Cameron: Yeah, it was, it was very exciting. So I was taking pictures and taking video the whole time because we would try to scrapbook it too and collect all that. Um, and a lot of people had no idea that three hours went by.

They, they said it was not long enough and it was just so incredible. so yeah. Um, yeah, that was, that was great. Um, and then we obviously broke for lunch. We had our, our sponsor, um, Guardian for Revit, um, kind of give a little, uh, discussion. So, hats off to them. Um, with, you know, without our sponsor's help, we, we wouldn't have been able to pull this off either. Um, and we had Nemshug Group as a sponsor. Um, and we had them give a presentation later.

And that's, you know, Nemshug Group, DeRofus, and Bluebeam, and, and all the, all the crazy awesome softwares we use. Um, and then we came [00:38:00] back from lunch, um, and we had Phil Bernstein, and in, in, great presentation name, it was something like the overwhelming, unintelligible, meaningless mess, how will AI make sense of digital design, or will, will AI make sense of digital design,

um,

Evan Troxel: a great clickbaity

title.

Ryan Cameron: Ha ha Ha he, I know he does that on purpose, so, um, but yeah, I mean, just. Again, wonderful presentation that so many takeaways just, um, about how to be skeptical, but positive and, um, how to really investigate, um, and research, you know, a little bit like, like what Betty was saying, um, you know, right tool, right, right time, right, right project, right goal. And how, how AI has evolved since like 60, I think it went back to like the 60s or

Evan Troxel: Fifties or the sixties. Yeah.

Ryan Cameron: And so he just took us through that timeline to get us to today and then he took us from today where it [00:39:00] could go. And, you know, some of their, there was some stuff for, for shock value of maybe, maybe it doesn't go there. There was some stuff that's like shock value, but it is happening. And then there was some stuff that's like, it's not quite there yet.

Um, but it is developing, but it's maybe five years out. Um, so it was good to see how that branched off. In, in all the different corrections. Again, fascinating. Um, presenter. It's absolutely, you, you missed out if you didn't See, if you've never been to one of his, um, they're, they're so well curated. It's, it's hard to describe.

Evan Troxel: Absolutely. Yeah, his talk was, it's always, his talks are always filled with information, but in a really, he doesn't just present information. The way that he connects dots, I think is, is what really makes it valuable and meaningful to, to hear them in person because he, he has a way of, like his, His [00:40:00] understanding is, is vast, but also his experience is vast.

Like from, from his working at Yale and Autodesk and being, his involvement with AIA and Pelle Clark Pelle, and you know, he's, he's worked in the firms. He's worked at the, at the product, you know, providers he's, he's worked with the AIA for a long time. He's taught he, so he, he, he runs the whole gamut of.

age groups, right? Students all the way to the people who've been in the practice for a really long time. And so he, he brings a great perspective that is, is pretty all encompassing to the table. And so when he speaks, I mean, it's, it's, it's very well, not only researched, but delivered. And, and he has a research group at the school that's, that's helping pull this information together and put it into diagrams and really.

explain things in a way that architects can understand, right? Like it's, it's very visual, the things that he's saying as well. So he backs that up with, with, uh, the diagrams. And [00:41:00] I always find that to be particularly useful in the way that he gets his message out. So, uh, and recently wrote, wrote the book on AI and ML, right?

So this, this is kind of an ex this talk was an extension of what was even changed since that book came out, which was not that long ago.

Ryan Cameron: Right, Right.

Also, a book I gave away at the conference, both, by the way, both their books, um, for the first time were at the a i A bookstore and both books. That's sold out at the AIA bookstore. So any future speakers that have a book, um, just, just know that we, we sell, sell out.

Evan Troxel: You help sell copies, right? Which is hard to do in today's world. So, yeah, good

Ryan Cameron: Yeah, Yeah, I'm pretty excited about that. So yeah, again, we, we also want to be as, as, you know, gracious with our speakers as possible and offer them as much, you know, more than just a free meal that day. We want to. really connect with them and help move their message forward in whatever way we can. We're non profit, we're, we're a sub category of a [00:42:00] non profit, like, so we, we, unfortunately, we've never really paid a speaker, um, and, and so, um, I, I think we maybe got them gift cards or things like that, but, like, we've never, you know, never paid them, so that's just great that they were, um, able to do that pro bono for

us.

Uh, yeah,

then we

Evan Troxel: For the betterment of the community,

Ryan Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.

Um, and then we had a panel session and typically tap is just, it's like all panels for the longest time. It was very few like keynotes and presentations and things like that. Um, it was like, maybe we'd have a keynote and then the rest of the day was, was panels. Being the chair that I am, I wanted to change it up and wanted to totally change it up quite honestly and make it more interactive and make two keynotes and still include a panel because I still want people to hear from different groups. And we also wanted to [00:43:00] activate and involve other cases. Um, that don't get this opportunity, so obviously we reached out to Jeff Huber, he's on the Strategic Council. Um, Scott Knudson is the co chair, or former co chair of, um, Project, uh, I'm gonna say it was Project Management. And then, uh, Laura Wake Ramos, um, she's also involved in the Strategic Council. And then she's the co chair for, um, Project Delivery, she's with Mortensen. And so we wanted to mix as many Um, and we've been trying to get as many of our friends as possible into this and ask the AI question to project management, project deliveries.

How is the AI strategic council viewing this? Because this is a big, this is a big question right now. And it has been for three years, but like, it seemed like this year, like we're bursting at the seams with AI. Like it's this new miracle drug that arrived suddenly with this glowing promise and skepticism and how are firms using it? And how, how do we, how do we use it? She's even just [00:44:00] asking generally, like, how would project delivery use AI or how would construction use it? How would design use it? Um, and so we wanted to help people at least engage in the discussion to learn how to develop an AI strategy for firms and easy to do it steps. And so that's what that panel was all about. And just, um, it was moderated by our very own Alex Pollack. Um, again, she's on the, on the committee. She's a one year volunteer, but we hope to get her back another year. She's just been doing great, great stuff. Um, and so she had a whole list of questions. We, we batted a whole bunch of AI questions around, and I, I think she did a fantastic job.

Learned, learned a lot.

Evan Troxel: and can you talk about like why you picked those ones to, to participate in this?

Ryan Cameron: Yeah. So again, it just happened to be, I don't know if it's pure luck or just, I, I just started talking with folks and that's

really

what my, I guess my strategy was as chairs and just to get to know people. And, um, I got to know [00:45:00] Laura a little bit. Um, and she was just, how can I help? How can I help? How can I help?

And I was, I was just turning my head. I was like, I don't know how this is going to fit in until it clicked one day. And I was like, Oh, okay. Let's, we can't like, Help you put on a conference, but you can be part of ours. Like, is that helpful? And she, she'd loved that idea. And, and so then we're like, okay, let's, let's think about this.

And again, Alex Pollock's super helpful on this. Um, help me kind of like formulate this. It's again, it's, I I don't ever want to get the impression that I, I put on the conference. That's not about, that's not even close step, how it happened. Like everybody on the committee helps and you're just kind of the, the. phase for the day, I guess. And then you're exhausted. Um, but, uh, yeah, so this tremendous amount of help from, from all the committee members.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Ryan Cameron: So that's, that's how they got on. And then, uh, Scott and I, and I want to say Jeff and Evelyn Lee were going to submit, [00:46:00] um, a, a full session at the AIA National. And I think it was something, I'm paraphrasing, it was like AI for dummies or something like that.

And just like, Basically this session, but like a little bit different and so we, we kind of remeshed it up and, and Scott didn't want to present it. And I was like, no, this is kind of your idea. So you're definitely on the panel. And then Jeff was also involved in that. Um, and he

teaches down in Florida as well,

um, at the university.

So he, uh, he was absolutely super supportive. Fantastic on this too. Very knowledgeable, very well connected, um, and he's on the strategic council and hats off to him because the strategic council like two weeks before AIA National kicked off, they said that they were going to have a meeting on the first day, so he broke out of his strategic council meeting just to sit on the panel

for that

hour and [00:47:00] then went back and, and He did his voting and stuff like that, so he's a very busy guy, and I'm super grateful that he was able to come in and share his knowledge about how the Strategic Council is viewing AI. Because it's still very new, it's still like, what are the legal ramifications, what are the ethical ramifications? So those are the things that they're dealing with, and we're hoping that sort of comes back to us now that TAP has made these connections. So, to answer your question, I got really lucky.

Evan Troxel: Okay. So, so let's talk about the feedback that you've gotten from this. So I assume there's a lot of positive feedback, but I'm also interested in critical feedback as far as, you know, you had a lot of participants there. What did you hear when it came to how the day went?

Ryan Cameron: Um, yeah, everybody wanted, wanted more. And, um, yeah, I, I wanna say it was Ed. Ed Atkins. I, I wrote a post on this, on, on LinkedIn and it was something, I'll paraphrase it, but it was [00:48:00] something like he'd never been to something that had so much information in such a short amount of time, um, that was so digestible. Um, and so that's again, good, good criticism. I'd, I'd rather have that than, than the opposite. And so just tremendous feedback from folks. And it wasn't just him, I'm still, I'm still getting stuff, you know, a month later, you gotta remember this was only

last month. So, I, I kind of expect to get an email out of the blue, hey can you give me, we, we've had a lot of presentation requests as well.

From, from Phil and, and Mehdi, and and recording requests. And unfortunately it's not in our budget to record anything. So those, those are kind of the, the, uh. I guess non critical feedback things as we don't typically, we can't afford to have a videographer, but we can give you the presentation. So reach out to me. I'd get you, um, uh, a condensed, um, very shortened, abbreviated version of, of Phil's that, that he shared with us, which is [00:49:00] phenomenal. Um, and then Mehdi's presentation. Um, you can't really capture their energy and their involvement in those, but at least you'll

have

the, the quote

unquote digital paper copy. Um, other

things are the, the, everybody wants to do AI again next year. It seems like some of the feedback and, um, that's, that's not up to me, that's up to, to Cesar Escalante, my successor. And I, and I have a feeling that it's going to be a little bit more driven towards like sustainable efforts. So,

um, just kind of

dropping that out there for folks.

Um, again, we, we want your feedback if that's a direction, um, people are interested in. I'd, I'd love to get feedback from that too. Um, but yeah, just more, like, okay, great. We've, we, you gave us world class presenters and filled our heads with, with knowledge. What's the next step? And I think that's, um, where we're going with this is that after every previous TAP, TAP [00:50:00] symposium, which was BCC, Um, you talked a lot, you got a lot of handouts, and then now what?

And so we're redesigning the website or updating the website, I should say. To where we are going to start putting these resources up that are just a little bit more available So you don't have to like reach out to me or the next chair and say where do I get a copy of this? We're we're working on like the next step like okay now you've done this Here's how you get in touch with Mehdi if you wanted to come in and give a presentation Or or Phil if you want him to come into your firm or zoom call into your firm and give that presentation because again Seeing them in person is totally different than just reading it on your laptop screen. It's totally different You're gonna learn so much more if you hear from them. And

that's, sorry, does that answer your question?

Evan Troxel: Yeah, no, I, I am interested in where this is going because it, uh, I think often, you know, Phil Reed says it best. He says that the best thing about conferences is the conversations after the [00:51:00] presentations, right? So, and so a lot of people are left kind of after that, just kind of, okay, that was a, an amazing experience.

Now, what do I do? And so you do need to provide, I think, as a, as an AIA level, you know, group here, like, what are some actionable steps? How can I now, what, what is the next step that I need to take? It's like, not even 20 steps away, but what's the next step that I can take to start to implement these ideas?

Or who do I talk to? Where can I get help? I mean, um, all of these are, are, seems like the natural progression, so it's great to hear that you guys are actually putting that into practice.

Ryan Cameron: and anybody can reach out to me at any time. I'm fully available on LinkedIn. I do get emails and questions all the time about where to get started. And so that's Even even starting with me. I'm a great connector of like, hey, what's your problem? Oh, this is a really good person for that or here's my friend Bill. You know, [00:52:00] like you should talk to him. Like I can definitely help facilitate that as well. I mean, it's

We don't need a

website for that. We just need human connection, right? That's that's

where it

starts. That's where I feel it should stay

Evan Troxel: Maybe, maybe let's just go in that direction for a minute. As we, as we wrap up here, I think, you know, what you just said and the thing that you're talking about doing, being good at doing is so important in our industry, and maybe you can just talk about how that has been valuable to you, the whole, like building the network, because.

When I was starting as digital practice leader, I mean, to go back to one of your earlier points, there was no playbook. No playbook at all, right? And so it's like, who do I look at as examples? Who can I talk to? And it became about building the network, which is where this podcast came from, right? It's just building this network over time.

That's added value to me. Now I'm giving back and I want to add that value to everybody else. whoever [00:53:00] decides to listen to these. But for you personally, and maybe just to kind of talk about the power of networking and why it's valuable, not everybody's extroverted. I guarantee that most, I think more people are introverted in architecture than, than extroverted.

So it's, it's difficult, but just talk about the value from your perspective of networking, in person events and, and where that value can be, can be found and had, um, for the benefit.

Ryan Cameron: Yeah, it it takes a while it doesn't happen overnight, but I

think

my path if people were interested, I Probably was an introvert. I'm definitely not an extrovert. I'm maybe an ambivert I can

just kind of go between, between

them. I

definitely like smaller groups. Um, so getting up on, on stage and speaking at 40 or so, you know, different conferences.

I'll be speaking at AIA Nebraska. I'll be speaking at AIA Louisiana later this year. Um, [00:54:00] so that was not a natural progression for me. I, I'm going to give it to you raw. Here's what happened. I got laid off in 2011 or something like that. So Thanksgiving 2011. And, um, that, that kind of stuck with me. And that's when I started that, the architect machines that I haven't mentioned yet, but, uh, because I lost all the models that I was creating and they weren't necessarily my property.

I was being paid from the firm that I worked for went out of business, but, and I never wanted that to happen to anybody ever. So I created architect machines, which is like a model. I just would upload my Revit models and Dynamo scripts and Grasshopper scripts and say, take them for free. Like, I don't want to lose them.

I got them backed up on. You know, this website that has backup to backup to backup. So anybody can have it. There's free, free to log in and download a bunch of cool Dynamo scripts. Um, and so that's, that's what happened there. And then I, I thought about it and I was getting involved, um, eventually got hired at another firm. Um, [00:55:00] and I got involved in putting on a conference and that was like BIM workshops, again, Carla Edwards, Todd Shackelford, Bill Allen, a whole bunch of like HDR, Louie, Daily Deal, our group of folks, and that was in Omaha, Nebraska. And I went from like helping, you know, like I mentioned, my wife actually did the website for him. Um, I went from that side of things to actually presenting at it. And like, Steven Schell introduced me at my first ever speaking gig. Like, that's a huge, huge honor. That guy is amazing. Um. And so I started speaking and that led to another speaking gig and that led to another speaking thing. And all of a sudden I'm speaking at AU and BUILD, and I even got some research published and presented at Healthcare Design. Um, so a very mixed, like an M shaped person, right? Not a T shape or a pi shape. Like, very broad, very like,

I go

deep in like a lot

of different categories, I feel like. Um, and so that just, I meet this person and I saw him again at another conference, and I [00:56:00] saw him again at another conference, and hey, we should team up. And that's like, that's how my relationship with like, Cesar Escalante started. Like, we've been friends for about a decade, because we just, when we're together, we just kick butt. It's like, sorry, like we just do, we're just, I don't know why, we just really Get along. We have a lot of the same common, common traits coming. Um, yeah, so, um, that's how that all started. And that's taken about 15 years, um, to do that. Was it 20? Okay, maybe not 15. 2012 to 2024. And so, yeah, that led to, you know, being published in, in Randy's book. I'm, I'm heavily featured in

his

Superusers book. Um, and it's just constantly, you know, getting on an airplane. And putting together, um, great material. Again, like, Cesar and I, we, I, I, I'm not, I'm not there to present to do a bad job. I'm there to be top speaker. and and we would consistently be top speaker. It's, it's gotta be great material. Right, Evan? Like, this is why you do the

podcast.

You, [00:57:00] you, it's gotta be great material. You've gotta have your, your research done. It's gotta be, Top notch world class stuff. That's just how I how I think of it. That's where I've I'm not there yet But like like that's that's where I want to be and so

that's

that's where all the network

and connections and the human connections All came in and just slowly and slowly, you know, the business card pile started adding up I was giving away tablets at AU I talked to NVIDIA into giving me like 20 tablets when they were making tablets still I'd give those away at AU at my session and it's just, I've had the most incredible fun time like racing

Ferraris and stuff with, with, uh, some folks for free.

I just get out there. It's, you can have

a ton of

Evan Troxel: That's great. Well, and, and those conferences, to me, the value of those conferences is the people who attend them, right? And, and to have those conversations after the presentations, because that is really where you get to know people, right? Like you, when it's not driven by the agenda of the [00:58:00] presentation or the order of the slides, it's like, well, what, what else is going on there?

What are the actual struggles? What are the things below the surface that we can dig into? And, you know, let's go grab a beer and talk about it, or let's go grab some food, or let's go grab some coffee, or let's sit down right here in the hallway. There's so many great conversations happening. And, again, like, just to bring it back to the show, the idea of publishing those for other people to hear, I find is, it's incredibly useful for, to build the community

around these amazing conversations and the amazing people that are the basis of these conversations and why they're passionate about doing what they're doing.

Uh, that to me is the real value of these conferences. I always go for the people, not for the classes, not for the symposium. Sorry, Ryan, but like the,

like there's people in that audience, right? Who are in there and those keynote speakers that like we've said many times during this talk, it's like you had to be there.

You did, you had to be there, right? To, because if you just download the [00:59:00] PowerPoint, you are not going to get all the information and you don't get what, what was happening in that room at that time. So, and, and you know, there's say what you want about hybrid work and remote and, and onsite and all those things.

Right. But. There is a value to being around other people and sharing ideas or just absorbing ideas through things that you hear in real time during those conversations and during the right after those presentations. So I just want to put a plug out there for people who are, you know, thinking about TAP symposiums and hearing about these things.

Like there is a lot of value, uh, and information that's shared at these that you have to be there. So I'm just putting it out there. Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to Tell everybody about TAP and I'm hoping that this will bring some more exposure and awareness to technology and architecture practice and the knowledge community.

Um, we'll put links to everything where people can find out more about that on, [01:00:00] in the show notes for this episode. Also put a link in there to connect with you on LinkedIn. And, uh, is there anything else that you want to let people know about before we say just, um, yeah, come, come help us make it better than it, than it is now. Yeah, we need your help.

Ryan Cameron: Love it.

Evan Troxel: Great call to action. All right. Well, Ryan, it's been a pleasure and, uh, I'm sure we'll talk soon. Be able to do this again, uh, have another conversation. So thanks so Thanks.

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AI in Architectural PracticeCharles Portelli of Perkins&Will joins the show to talk about the themes presented in his talk at the Confluence event in Brooklyn, New York, focusing on the application of AI and machine learning in architectural practice. Key discussion points include strategies for handling unstructured data, the practical implications of AI for project management and design, and how emerging technologies can revolutionize architectural practices.

As a Digital Innovation Strategist at Perkins&Will, Charlie takes us behind the scenes and offers a deep dive into the dynamics and evolving processes within architectural teams and shares his experiences in integrating AI tools to enhance productivity and innovation. The episode also explores the future of the profession and provides valuable advice for architecture students and professionals.

Episode Links* Charlie on LinkedIn * Charlie on Twitter/X * Charlie on Instagram * Charlie’s website * Perkins&Will IO website * Perkins&Will on LinkedIn * Perkins&Will on Twitter/X * Perkins&Will on Instagram

Watch this episode on YouTubeSubscribe to the podcast on YouTubeListen to this episode

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Nirva Fereshetian joins the podcast to talk about the complexities of implementing and managing digital practice within an architecture firm, including the challenges posed by tool fatigue, the importance of understanding business problems, and the intricacies of vetting and adopting new technology.

Our discussion covers the evolving role of technology in architectural practice, the benefits of collaboration between firms within the AEC industry, and the importance of building a continuous learning culture. Nirva also shares insights on integrating technology seamlessly into architectural practices and fostering innovation through effective communication and relationship-building.

Episode links:* Implementing AEC Technologies: Insights from Industry Leaders (AEC+Tech) * Nirva on LinkedIn * Nirva on Twitter/X * Nirva on Instagram * CBT Architects website * CBT on LinkedIn * CBT on Twitter * CBT on Instagram

About Nirva Fereshetian:Nirva Fereshetian is a Principal & Chief Information Officer at CBT Architects, a Boston based award winning design firm providing services nationally and internationally in Architecture, Interior Design & Urban Design. With an undergraduate degree in Architecture and master’s degree in Architecture & Computation from UCLA, her career has been at the intersection of business and technology solving business challenges with the right tools and people. She specializes in leading and managing technology solutions in creative design environments, technology adoption and change management. She is currently responsible for aligning technology strategy to meet primary business objectives. She leads multiple teams within the Digital Practice group, including Design Technology, Business Technology and Computational Design. She is a results driven Technology executive delivering Practice Services (BIM, AR, VR, Automation), Knowledge Services (Collaboration, Corporate Knowledge, Training management) and Business Technology Services (Infrastructure Management, Vendor Relations, Application Deployment). Her experience includes delivery of cost-effective information services, outsourced business models, virtualization, cloud computing, collaborative technologies, and business analytics.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this episode on YouTube:

Episode Transcript: TRXL 163: ‘Confusing Evolution With Innovation’, with Nirva Fereshetian
[00:00:00]
Evan Troxel: Welcome to the Troxel podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. And in this episode, I welcome Nirva Fereshetian. Nirva is a Principal and Chief Information Officer at CBT Architects, which is a Boston based award winning design firm providing services nationally and internationally in architecture, interior design, and urban design.
Nirva holds an undergraduate degree in architecture and a master's degree in architecture and computation from UCLA. At CBT, she leads multiple teams within the digital practice group, including design technology, business technology, and computational design. And in her day to day role as CBT's CIO, she was also named one of the Top Women in Tech in Boston this year.
In this episode, Nirva and I explore the complexities of implementing and managing digital practice within an architecture firm, including the challenges posed by tool [00:01:00] fatigue, the importance of understanding business problems, and the intricacies of vetting and adopting new technologies. Our discussion covers the evolving role of technology in architectural practice, the benefits of collaboration between firms within the AEC industry, and the importance of building a continuous learning culture.
Nirva also shares her insights on integrating technology seamlessly into architectural practice and fostering innovation through effective communication and relationship building. As always, my ask of you is to help the show by subscribing to Troxel on YouTube and in your favorite podcast app to let me know that you're a fan.
If you're watching this video on YouTube right now, please click that like button, and if you'd like to get an email when episodes are published with all the links and other information from the episode, you can sign up at trxl.co. You can also directly support the show by becoming a member at that site as well.
Again, that's [00:02:00] trxl.co. So, thank you for listening, and now, without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Nirva Fereshetian.

Evan Troxel: to the podcast. Great to have you and see you again. It hasn't been that long, but it's always a pleasure to
speak with you.
Nirva Fereshetian: Well, thank you for having me, Evan. Um, I have certainly been the beneficiary of listening to so many great conversations you've had with other guests. So, I'm hoping that, uh, this conversation will be a good one for others.
Evan Troxel: I'm sure it will be. I, you know, I want to focus on the practice side and definitely give voice to that part of it. part of AEC tech, right? Because the practice side has to implement, we have to train people, we have to vet the software and the tech and we have to roll it out. And I know that you know how difficult that is, but I want to give voice to that and what [00:03:00] digital practice leaders are dealing with out there in the real world, not just kind of the fantasy world where everything works perfectly because. Turns out it doesn't, doesn't really go that, it's not smooth sailing like everybody
hopes it could be, right? So give us an idea of, of your, what your role is at CBT. I mean, we've, let's assume that I've already read your bio because people listening to this will have already heard it, but introduce what, what you're actually doing because there's, there's a title, but then there's what you actually do at a firm and, and give us an idea of the size of CBT and, and where your
practice is located.
Okay.
Nirva Fereshetian: Right. Um, sure. Um, so the title is chief information officer, but as you said, uh, title is, uh, one thing, but what we actually do in different firms, depending on size of firms or the practice culture, it's a lot, a little different. Um, for me, um, um, for the, due to our size, um, it's everything digital. But my main interest [00:04:00] is that I have an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree in architecture.
So my main difference is, um, the intersection of technology and architecture. But firms our size, I also have to take care of everything else. That is the framework. So, um, a lot of learning that has happened on that end. So, um, we have a business technology group. Uh, Design technology group, computational technology group, and a couple of years before, I've added a knowledge manager and a training, um, um, team member who is attached to our digital practice, um, and not to, um, HR, or, um, so it has been really, um, a journey, sort of, and my responsibilities have grown as the culture and the tech and the, um, implementation of things have changed, um, um, Recently, and more, you know, in the last 10 years, but more recently, right after COVID, um, I think the [00:05:00] opportunity to connect with the business, the opportunity to solve the business problems is what me and the rest of the group are really interested in.
Evan Troxel: and so maybe you could give, paint a picture of what it, that evolution has looked like and, and maybe not every step along the way, but, but what, what do you traditionally see as, as this kind of a role in a firm and what you used to do versus what you're doing now? Kind of paint, paint a picture of
what that looks like.
Nirva Fereshetian: I think the phenomenal difference has been that, um, A lot of, uh, you know, a lot of people have started similar to me, where they have an architecture background and somehow got involved to technology. Um, and, uh, but the major difference I see from now than it was before is that, um, technology has gained, um, to be not really in the forefront still, but to be on the table of the discussion.
Before [00:06:00] used to be, can you make something work? Or are we using the right version? Or can we get on Revit? We're on AutoCAD. But I think now the difference is, um, do we understand what the business does? Can we solve their problems? Can we enhance the, the, the strategy? Um, and so it's a very different role.
Um, especially firms our size. Um, I think if you are in the much larger and you still have a lot of segregation of, you know, infrastructure technology and other, um, things versus digital practice, uh, for our size, um, it's really or interdependent. And I think the main purpose of our existence is to show that it's not about the software, it's about the people and it's about how we implement and how we.
Um, PR it inside our firms. I mean, certainly none of these skills were things [00:07:00] that I learned neither at school nor at graduate school, or so seems a lot of the skill sets that are necessary, um, to, um, implement things is less technical, more, um, I'm not going to call it soft skills, but a lot of understanding, um, and a business acumen, um, uh, Relationship Acumen, PR, everything.
Everything that comes in that,
um, scope. Um, it's one thing to be good at the technology, um, but it's another thing to have those skill sets, and not just for me, but even the team members. Um, they have to have that convincing aptitude, um, and the psychology behind the scenes to make something happen.
Evan Troxel: feel like that's kind of a role of something, at least an outcome that I would like to see come out of episodes like this is giving people the tools to be able to have those conversations because by hearing [00:08:00] us talk about these things, it kind of sets the table for how we talk about technology and the practice of architecture and the merging of those things to give people I don't want to necessarily say the arguments.
It's not like you're trying to win an argument, but at least present these things in a way that, to your point, drives business forward, solves business problems. And that is a great approach to getting technology implemented in firms. It's not just, here's the latest thing that we should be using, but here's why we should be using it or why we should be testing it and trying to find out if this is the right tool to use.
Because the end goal is why do we practice architecture at all? Why do we do things the way that we do them? It's not the tools that we actually use, right? You, you want to define the goals and then backfill that with potential ways to accomplish those goals. That could be any number of technology. It could be any number of people, teams, training, [00:09:00] coaches, all kinds of things to get to that end goal.
But you have to kind of state what that end goal is and then reverse engineer it. And, and to your point, like, Why do we do what we do? What that, that is the real driver and how do we do business? And then how are we gonna achieve those are much more secondary to all that.
Nirva Fereshetian: Uh, to understand the goal is certainly the first, um, Requirement and a lot of team members when they, I always recommend them to go and sit to different presentations, different lunch sessions, even though it's not involving technology, because that's how you understand the business. And you could see their side of the story.
Um, so just set up standards and say, you need to follow them or, or set up things. It's just doesn't work. So the goal is the very primary, but I think moving. Um, Achieving that goal is, um, the key element is how to talk about it, how to present it, how to, not just [00:10:00] internally, but even working with the technology companies, even working with the startups, um, it's how you present and how you receive.
that makes a success. Sometimes, um, they don't understand what the workflow is, although some of them claim to be, have had past architectural experience or, um, not claim, but they really have had it and then moved on to work, um, at a startup. And some do not really understand why are things not working.
And essentially a lot of it is about how you present it and how you talk about it. Um, Technology is factual, you know, does it work or does it not work, or, but a lot of others, the, that, that part you can fix, what you cannot fix is if you've accidentally messed up the implementation, you know, so, um, sometimes you can never have those people back, um, to use the same tool.
So, [00:11:00] um, some things that work in other offices don't work in, um, Our office and vice versa. I think to understand the culture to understand sort of to be in their shoes Is how you can implement? You can't just say well, this is our stamp And why are you not following it or this is the tool we use and therefore we're not going to give you the other tool So it doesn't work that way So
Evan Troxel: how you learned how to do that. If it was just kind of how you're wired already as a person, or if these are techniques that you developed along your journey to get to where you are now, because When I, when I was leading digital practice at my firm, I felt like my success in that role was very much dependent on my career as an architect, getting to that point, working with client groups, learning how to, as a designer, I had to synthesize ideas [00:12:00] from 30 to 50 people on a project into a single, into a real project, right?
And actually implement their ideas and design. And that happens through building consensus, communicating clearly, taking people through a step by step process to get from A to Z, not just starting at the end, right? And so I developed those skills over two decades to learn how to do that effectively. And then when I stepped into digital practice. I could actually do that inside the firm. I didn't have to go outside the firm anymore, right, to do that. But there's various stakeholders of all different levels inside the firm that you need to build consensus, get everybody on the same page, talk about a, a strategy that, that encompasses all of those aspects of training and PR and communication and implementation and support and all of those things. I'm curious how that worked for you to get to, to where you
are.
Nirva Fereshetian: I certainly wasn't [00:13:00] wired like that, so I think it's a and And I think it's, um, the status is always learning and in, in process, you know, so I don't think there is a place you can achieve that you could say, oh, well, I'm perfect at this. I can, I can do any implementation or I can communicate. It's, um, it's personal relationship building inside the firm.
Um, we, I have tried to rely on, um, the team. Storytelling the way our designers, I've tried, I've aspired to do the storytelling that our designers do on a daily basis when they present to their clients. Um, it is about that and it's hard to explain to younger staff who are very savvy in tools and very savvy in coding and computational design and very frustrated when they cannot find the right words.
That, um, communication with the parties that they're trying to [00:14:00] work with. And, um, and I always think that there is a, it's all about human relationships, how we can make, we can understand each other and it's less about technology and it's more about trying to relay, um, my position to them and their position to us.
Um, so how can we bridge the gap, uh, where You know, typical problems are like, we want to, we don't want everyone to do whatever they want, but at the same time, we want to have the leeway for people to experiment. So it's a very fine balance, and I think every day is a new day to figure out how to do it better.
With who? Depends on who is on the other side. Personalities are different. People's experiences are different. There's always, well, we did this in another office or something. You know, so, there's always that challenge that comes by. And, um, yes, it might [00:15:00] be different with clients, with different team members.
And we just have to learn to adjust. But we also have to relay properly why are we as technologists saying that these things are important. So, it's, it's, you know, it's a very collaborative and yet very fractured process to me. Like, the designers at the front end produce things, um, and, um, without really, um, I'm not going to use the word caring, without really thinking through of how downstream.
that might or might not affect, um, other people's work. And then the kind of, the ball is passed forward and other team members take the, uh, model. And then it's passed forward and other team members take the CA process and pass forward to the owner or, so my take has been like, how can we make sure that all of us care about the same thing?
Because everything is connected and it's not just, you know, do my task [00:16:00] and throw it. Over the fence and send it to somebody else and the success of a firm I think is about understanding that and then carrying that success on a project level outside of our firm It's highly corroborative, but very much not caring about the transitional aspects And once those pieces come together, um, you are have a successful project It shouldn't be that hard to convince at each stage that there is something to think about when you move forward Move the baton.
Evan Troxel: You have not once said, and I congratulate you, you never said the word handoff. And this gets back to that communication thing, right? It's like, what words do you use? And, and you're using like, Words that are building, you're using, moving the ball forward, you know, progressing, you're talking about this in a, handing the baton, like it's a progression to the next, who's going to take this and build upon it, right?
Instead of, [00:17:00] The idea of handing off has always been kind of a dirty word in practice, right? It's like the designers hand it off to production, then the production people just grumble, grumble, grumble, hate the designers for all these things that they, no, it's a, how can we smoothly transition and get the most without having to redo work, without having to guess at what somebody was trying to do, without, You know, screwing it up. They did it wrong, and now we have to build, we garbage in, garbage out. Like, there's a, there's definitely a completely different approach. And that, to me, I think, is one of the, one of the really cool things that digital practice enables. And to your point earlier, where earlier in practice, technology was very much kind of an add on menu item.
It was like, well, do you want renderings? And then you're going to pay for those, and you're going to get them at these milestones. And it was really, It really was because it was so hard and it was so time consuming. It really was an add on, but now it's not like renderings are free, right? That's just part of the design process. And that has really evolved. [00:18:00] And that's just one example of this kind of integration, uh, and not only integration, but it's like, Technology is the backbone, right? It no longer is an add on. It is the way that we deliver projects and getting everybody on board with, with that process and how it can be utilized in a very efficient and positive way to enable success at every step along the path of project delivery is really where digital practice is.
And early on when you were just talking about digital practice at CBT, you mentioned off four or five groups. Can you mention what those are again to kind of give everybody a holistic picture of what digital practice is? Because I'm sure it
didn't start off like that.
Like it probably started off as
IT, like that's right.
And, but now it's
evolved into something
Nirva Fereshetian: Right. So, it started as IG T and I was the component of computer aided design or taking care of the um, um, [00:19:00] specific tools for this vertical. But, I have tried very hard the last ten, more than ten years to remove that word word. Um, and not talk about IT, but talk about digital practice being, encompassing all of that.
Um, so there is the business technology, um, which is just, um, basic, um, need for, uh, things to work. You know, um, whether that is internet access, your devices, your communication, and, uh, Um, design technologists who are, um, individuals with architectural background, passionate with technology, try to, try to stay, um, 5 or 10 steps ahead of everybody and, um, do the research.
And then computational design is, um, something we have tried to, um, Plan and do for the last, uh, last 4 or 5 years and now has taken off in terms of the necessity as being part of the design technology. [00:20:00] Colleagues and then, um, the last 1 was, um, something we added right before coven and because I thought that, um, Just parading these technologies without proper training with proper monitoring of those training.
So that's a knowledge manager that we have that manages our learning programs or our individual set up programs. Um, and, uh, lunch and learns, or, you know, I think a lot of it comes from, um, seeing, um, so. The ticketing system is a database of everything, Evan. I feel like if you look at it, you can figure out what is the pulse of the company, where are we lacking, why are they asking so many questions, something is broken, we haven't set it up correctly, or we haven't taught them or trained them.
So a lot of the training ideas come from that. So if it's repeatedly asking the same thing or repeatedly we're having [00:21:00] issues, um, in, um, um, setting up a model or whatever that means that I always say it's not them, it's us. And I want to make sure that there is no them and us. I shouldn't even have used that word.
I've tried to make it feel like we are embedded in their teams, that we are the partnership and not, hey, call them and something's wrong. And, um, so. That is the entire effort. Are we successful a hundred percent of the time? No. Like I said, it's always a new day and a new way of working, but we want to be considered as part of their embedded teams, be part of them, be part of the business.
And even on the business technology side, which is a little bit further out than all the others architecturally, I always tell them that if you don't understand what we're doing, you can't fix our devices. Because you have to understand what the outcome of the business is and what they're trying to do to give any [00:22:00] kind of support.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. That, that's a great point. And so when you said ticketing system, obviously
you're talking about help
Nirva Fereshetian: Helpdesk, yeah.
Yeah, but all these, all these three, four groups look at that ticketing system, you know? So, yeah, so it's one common system. If the, whether there's a computational design issue or a design technology issue or a knowledge issue or some training issue, everybody looks at it. And You know, it's kind of, to me, it's the psychology of the firm, you know, you could really detect there what is the pulse of the firm, what is our, um, uh, support structure, um, how many people are having problems, and so it's, it's a lot of help for decision making, just, just in general.
Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.
Nirva Fereshetian: Are people even, Evan, are people In the right groups, you know, uh, in the right teams with their skill sets, you know, sometimes, as you know, scheduling happens, um, on the [00:23:00] fly in all of our offices. Well, let's grab this person and that person because they're not, they're available. Um, so we can detect that immediately that the person might not be, um, available.
In the right role or might need something to be in help of or training of some kind to be in the right role. So I, I feel like, um, we're trying to connect technology, the right technology with the right people constantly, whether it's inside or outside.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. That, that's interesting. How, how large is CBT?
How many
Nirva Fereshetian: Oh, we're between 200 and 250. Depends when you ask us. Yeah.
Evan Troxel: Okay. I'm just curious because I think, you know, there's smaller firms
that don't have help
desks implemented. Right. And so at some point it becomes like, this is how we manage the flow of information in these ways, like for support or for information, right. That you're talking about. So, uh, smaller firms probably struggle with that a little bit more and they don't have the data to look at.
But I think [00:24:00] this kind of makes an argument for a system like this, because if you want insight into the pulse of. And, and it has to be a thing where people get results out of, or else they're not going to use it. Right. So if you have a help desk and you're just collecting information, you're never acting on it, like
that doesn't work either.
Right.
So people just won't use it. And then you still won't have insight into the pulse of what's actually going on on the floor of your office. So this is, these all go together. And I think what's so interesting about kind of what the structure that you just laid out as far as digital practice goes and how, Yeah. It operates as one unit, but you have several different special roles within that or groups that it really is a holistic, strategic endeavor. And you have to think about it that way, or else it's just not going to be effective in
your organization.
Nirva Fereshetian: right. And I see it like, um, A practice unit, you know, like, you know, interior design is a practice unit and then urban design is a practice unit. And it's a practice unit. That kind of, [00:25:00] um, is the center of all of the practice units to try to help as, you know, it's not only just. One size doesn't fit all outside of our firms, but one size doesn't fit all even inside of our firms, depending on the scale of a project or, um, the typology of a project and, um, the people that are involved in the project.
Evan Troxel: When I used to present the structure of digital practice and how it would be comma thing at the firm that I was at, first I thought about it as like we have these different practice groups and digital practice was a layer that kind of ran on top of all of those. But later on, I switched the diagram to be more like what you just said,
where it's a hub
in the middle. And all of these pieces come off of, but also feed back into. That hub, because it really is, like I said earlier, like the backbone of how we deliver projects. We're not going to do, we're not going to deliver projects any other way. We're not going to deliver Vellum, we're not going to, [00:26:00] right, we're not going to do Blueprints, we're not going to make, we don't have the Ammonia machines.
We're not doing it like that anymore, so we actually have to reconfigure the way that we think about this, so that everybody can use it to its fullest potential. Because if you, if you can't get out of your old way of thinking about the way that technology was implemented as a separate layer, if you can't think about it the new way, it's not going to actually reach its potential in the, in the
organization.
Nirva Fereshetian: Right, and I think it's the hub that, and the success of the hub is how far the extensions are and that relationship. To the surrounding,
um, I don't know what you, whatever you call it, either typologies or studios or whatever you have in terms of structure of an office or practice units, other practice units.
So, if you have, and I've tried to establish that on different levels of communication. So I have a group of people that I've picked from those practice units [00:27:00] as I call them like, um, technology allies, you know, so to kind of run some of our ideas with them. Um, first. Um, to say, hey, is this right? And then also get information from them as the inner workings of their practices and what their, what their experience has been.
Why are people complaining? Uh, what is it that not, what is it that, um, truly not working? Not the technology, you know? So those are, like, not the fix and break things, but what, what is the process? And in some instances it, the solution is ha might not have anything to do with technology, but it might have something to do with the way the process is set up or the, the way client demands are different from other, uh, projects.
So
there is so many factors and essentially, um, I think that we have changed processes. Yes, we don't use vellum and we don't use other things, but in some instances we haven't changed the way [00:28:00] we think. So. We, there, there is this, uh, you know, I think I can give the analogy of if your native language is not English, you kind of end up thinking or counting or whatever in your head with your native language, although you are saying it in English, right?
So I feel that that's the analogy. A lot of people are so much, um, um, rooted in the old way of doing things, even though the technology has changed and it's a PDF now, but, uh, and not a piece of paper. but their thinking hasn't changed.
and, and and that's fundamentally an obstruction in moving forward. And, and that goes outside of our firm into, you know, uh, not change contractual agreements.
Now, I feel in some ways, the technology is a little bit ahead of the game always and kind of retracts a little to support this types of, um, Thought [00:29:00] processes that are not changing. So it's funny because last week someone told me and on a projects like, Oh, you know that, you know, what do you mean the RFIs will be less?
Well, then that party that is benefiting from Making money out of the RFIs is not happy. So, Evan, how, how can you solve that problem when technology is out there?
Yeah, technology is out there to solve that, but we don't want to solve it because certain people were out of business for that, right? So, the same goes to, internally, when we show all these tools about, um, clash detections or other ways of figuring out things and solving problems before it gets to site, then these They ask us, well, are we contractually supposed to deliver these things?
Why are we doing these things? Well, wait a minute. You know, we're,
that's what, yeah. Which is why I said
that it says it's a collaborative firm, uh, collaborative ecosystem. But it's not [00:30:00] actually a collaborative ecosystem because, Um, we have, we're still thinking the old ways, we're delivering in new technologies and I can't wait to see what that AI thing is going to do in terms of that type of process, right?
So,
um, we, the tools have changed but mine, it's hard to change mindsets.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah. I, for the longest time I said behavior and I found out that people don't like their behavior to change. They don't like that idea, right? So mindset's a better word to use there because it's not so offensive to people. Uh, but, but your, your point is absolutely correct. It's, there's this, picture that gets painted of an ideal future scenario. And the only thing we can actually disrupt is ourselves and our processes, because there are so many hard constraints just outside of the organization, whether it's who's doing plan check or how they're accepting submittals or what's in the [00:31:00] contract, who wrote that contract? How has that ever been updated?
Like there's so many
things that we're kind of butting up against all the time. Like Clifton Harness from TestFit said, if you want to change things. The industry changed the
owner architect contract
like that. The agreement is where you need, you need to start there, not in the digital twin that you deliver, right?
Because like that, that to me is like, you're, you're aiming at the wrong thing. You have to start at the fundamentals that are actually going to have. the ability to ripple throughout the ecosystem to actually create change if you want to see change happen. But so many times we're focused on the shiny thing that looks like it's going to do something when in fact it's just, it's never going to make it because we can't get past the other barriers that are really hard to disrupt because that's somebody's That's where they're making their money, right? There's no incentive there to get rid of that for them, and so why would they? And we fight up against that all the time, and I think it's important for [00:32:00] technology companies to understand that ecosystem approach that we have to operate within as architects and engineers because we don't have control over the changes that are happening over there.
We have to work within the system that exists. It is evolving slowly, um, but it's very slow. Like, let's be honest about that.
Mm hmm.
Nirva Fereshetian: Yeah. And I think, uh, you know, I always, um, you know, there is all these things about innovate and what firms are innovating. And I've spoken in places where the titles of the conferences are innovate, and it's hard to see that a lot of things a lot of us are doing can be labeled as innovate. Um, I think innovate means to me that a fundamental change of the practice overall.
The entire ecosystem, we can only innovate when we get there using different tools and kind of solving internal problems or evolving to better practices. [00:33:00] Yes, it gets better. You know, we get better at it. It gets
less. Yeah, it's not. Yes, it's absolutely evolution. And, you know, I know the reputation is that change doesn't come easily.
Um, to specifically, it doesn't come easily to any humans, but specifically to this industry largely because we are chained to all these mindsets and not until those are collectively worked on and changed. I don't see innovation. I see gradual evolving of things to get a little bit better than yesterday, but I can't see innovate.
You know, there's some examples of, you know. Um, there's always that Uber innovating, you know, the whole process of, uh, the taxi, um, situation. Um, I, I think that's a, like a, um, a complete change of how we do things, um, that can be called, you know, beginning of innovation. But [00:34:00] Swapping some tools for others or creating some automations, which are necessary, um, to avoid waste of time or redundancies or things like that are good things, definitely, but not necessarily innovating.
Evan Troxel: There's confusion around those words because the confusion even comes from within our firms themselves, right? Our marketing departments in our firms want to. Pat ourselves on the back in front of our clients and say, look,
we're innovating. Right. And so there's, there's confusion because a lot of times it's like, well, we're doing AI in our firms and here's some, maybe some different ways that we're doing AI, right?
So that at least we look like we're. Um, but the fact is like, a lot of times that's, that's like innovation theater being put out there and it's not actually taking a foothold in the offices themselves. And, and it becomes this [00:35:00] game that we play with words to position ourselves to get the right perspective, like to, to, I shouldn't say get the right perspective, but to, to tailor the perspective that others
have about
us, right?
And so then we start using those words inside the firms, and then there's confusion, like what's actually happening here? Is it really innovation or is it just evolution? And, and, and words do matter, but at the same time, getting back to kind of, people's interests, like where the incentives are. The incentive is to show that we're leaders.
And how are we doing that? We're doing it through innovation. But how are we really doing that? By automating parking layout. Like, not really, right? So, we are
at odds with these
Nirva Fereshetian: Alright, I, I, I, but I think I've learned, um, you know, like I said, there is a lot of things that I learned along the process of skills that, um, not that I, I, that skills that I should be interested in improving, not that I am there, but perception is everything, Evan, you know, so, [00:36:00] yeah, so, even in technology, perception is everything, even though it is, you know, Technology to me is just black and white.
Does it work or does it not work? You know, so I, I can never be a salesperson because when those people start, they can embellish everything. Yeah.
So, so,
but still perception is everything. Like, I'm going to come back to what I said in terms of how you. How you, uh, present it, how you say it, how you talk about it, and I think, uh, you know, we work with dozens of startups.
It's something that I am very, very passionate about. That it is anybody in this ecosystem needs to contribute to those, all those people that are trying hard to innovate, you know? Do something very different, or go up against incumbents that never Had, had, was not a real reality in the last decade. So I think by contributing [00:37:00] whatever, you know, I think we're a beneficiary of others who've contributed and worked with the, um, startups.
And so we need to put in some things to our share of it. So I feel very, um, passionate about that. And we have worked with lots of them. Um, but I feel like, Them and us, it's all about perception, and sometimes they're not good at showing, you know, um, they're not good at presenting, they're not good at, um, although their product is good.
And sometimes they're so good at presenting, but their product is not good. You know, so, yeah, so, and the same goes for us internally, um, it's how good are we, um, to communicate with all and with all those other practice units and, um, collaborate. I think it's all about how we're perceived. And once we're, you know, we're, once with a bad perception is broken, Evan, it's, it's [00:38:00] like trust.
It's hard to get it back. Right.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, I was speaking with a building product manufacturer just yesterday, actually, and innovation is happening. Evolution, I'll say, is happening in their, in their category of product, but maybe an old version of that project, of that product. didn't fly with architects, right? And therefore the category has been written off.
And it's very hard to reestablish yourself as, well, we fixed all those problems and now
you can count on
us. That's a super hard barrier to overcome. And so you're talking about that from like technology standpoint, right? It's the same. It's, this is a human condition. Like this, it happens in all categories.
It's like, Oh, I don't trust that brand of vacuum
because.
Nirva Fereshetian: You've had one
Evan Troxel: me after a week. It doesn't, yeah, it's, it's all based on experience and it is very hard to, to reestablish, um, maybe a new
version of that in the market once you've already created [00:39:00] a, a bad situation. I want to talk about these startups that you're working with, not necessarily by name, but just in implementation, because something that you've talked about
is tool fatigue.
I've I've categorized it as digital fatigue or app fatigue. It's like more and more of our time is consumed sitting in front of a screen, whether it's a desktop or a tablet or a phone, right? It's just more and more screens. And there's so, we're being inundated with with the tool explosion that's going on in AEC, but everywhere else as well, right?
So they, these do bleed into each other for sure. And you talked about the different groups that operate under digital practice. And I'm interested from an implementation standpoint, because we're getting the fire hose of new tools, especially right now, it feels like more than ever now with, with AI and everything's AI, and there's all these different. Really specific AI tools, not to really
go down the AI lane here, but just tools in [00:40:00] general in AEC. I'm, I'm interested in vetting and implementation and support and training. And just for you to kind of tell a story about how you go about trying to accomplish that. And the reason why I want to talk about this is because these tech companies come to you like they are the only thing that you need to pay attention to right now. Because that's their world, right? It makes sense, but at the same time, they don't really look around and have the bigger picture perception that you have to have as a digital practice leader, CIO of CBT architects to say, we have to look at everything and how everything works together and how we would roll this out to 200 plus people across this many offices, and then we have to support it and we have to train. Like all of that responsibility falls on you. All they have to do is sell you the subscription. Right. And get you to buy into that subscription. But talk about the real world challenges with all of those things. Once it actually gets through the wall and maybe even step before that, how do you, how do you even go about vetting [00:41:00] or trying out or getting excited about these tools that are
on offer?
Nirva Fereshetian: Yeah, I think, I think, um, the, you know, I don't know, there are lists, AEC hub everywhere, over a thousand tools to look at, and,
Evan Troxel: Only a
Nirva Fereshetian: yeah, I don't know, over a thousand or whatever, but also the entire other ecosystem of non AEC tools that there is also, uh, a thousand of them to look at, and I think that, um, It's very much for me that I'm, one of the other skill sets is, uh, uh, I now investigate how they're backed up and what's their VC funding, things that I never looked at before, Evan, like, uh,
Evan Troxel: Because of longevity
Nirva Fereshetian: right.
Oh, because things that, you know, I always say that we're putting bets on the table. Um, and sometimes the company is disappearing. Like, uh, we never attested one, but like, I think the company's named co design or something like after four or five years, they just. Disappeared.
Right. They closed for good. And, [00:42:00] and that doesn't only happen with startups.
It happens with, uh, established companies, you know, like, um, Autodesk decided that they're not going to support Formit anymore, although they, they
really hard pushed it for a few years before that. So it's, it's, um, there is certainly risks. Um, but I think part of it is that I kind of categorize tools. Um, it's very important to look at them as to what process they belong to.
So, for the front end, and which is why everybody, you know, when you ask, does an office use AI, and mostly they talk about the image generation part of AI, because, you know, I think not only that is the most, you know, design seems to be the king of our, you know, it's always the flashiest, uh, role in our offices, you know, so, but beyond [00:43:00] that, it's more of a one to one relationship with the tool.
So. if it's an individual workflow, it's relatively easy to say, well, we can test all of these things. And it's just personal preference to say yes or no. So the examples are that if, if, um, they want to use Verus because they used it a couple of times and they think it's good, or even on a basic level, the, you know, we have designers who want Enscape, others want Twinmotion, others want something else, but those are relatively easy to say, well, we can test it.
And even if we don't. You know, if there's personal prefaces, we can, uh, kind of consent to that, right? So, this designer uses that and not that. Um, but when it moves beyond that, it becomes extremely critical to make, um, try to make good decisions. Um, and kind of pass it through, it says, uh, a couple of things.
Does, is this, uh, uh, solving a problem? Is this better [00:44:00] than what we, is it replacing another tool we have? Is it an adding to another tool we have? Um, definitely. Is it providing some, um, service that we can, um, do now that we weren't able to do before because we didn't have the tool? It has to kind of comply to one of these things.
Is it faster than what we have? So we, Kind of, I divide it to parts. It's some things the design technology team looks at some products as a replacement to an existing product that is not working or people in the teams have heard it or tried something and they think that it solves a problem they have.
So our initial step is to actually create a small, um, testing, uh, group, whether it's inside our teams or, uh, the design technology and kind of validate that before we move on. And in many instances, it's real hard conversations with the [00:45:00] startups to explain to them if that fits or does not fit in our workflow.
So, even established products is hard, uh, to implement if it doesn't fit. So, sometimes there's so many overlaps, um, the product builds a 3D model, but our designers don't want to use anything but Rhino. So, how does that work out? Because then they ask for the plug in to Rhino to that product and not build it there.
So, if you don't understand, um, the workflow, Um, if you're trying to build something, um, where there is a industry accepted, uh, sort of industry accepted product, if you're replacing that, you need to at least be as good as that. Don't come before that. You know? Don't come before that because we're not replacing it.
So there is so many things to look at as barriers [00:46:00] to move, and then there are things that are really expert products, like, I give the example of Upcodes and, um, it just services a small group of people, you know, our code experts use it. But then we proliferated that to say, okay, it's also kind of a training and education for people who are up and, up and coming and trying to learn that.
But that's sliver of a, you know, it's not, it's not really everybody. Um, so the last thing is, the most challenging thing is to implement platform products, which are supposed to be used by everyone. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.
So, and those decisions are really hard to revert. So if we made a mistake, and we don't want to use that, or we want to transition to another product like that, it takes a long time, because all that data sets are there, we have to move them to the new place, we have to train everybody, um, so the having the training [00:47:00] person attached to our department certainly helps, but, um, really looking at all of the implementations in their own context is what we try to do.
We try to make sure that we're not inundating people. So for example, a lot of things are now possible and available in Construction Cloud, including marking up drawings or whatever. So the question is, do we really need these other extra tools? But they're used to it, Evan, you know, so like, it takes a, it takes a, a whole training session to say, well, you could stay in this one product and do some of the things that you're doing with parts and pieces of other tools.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. I think the, the, what you're, what you're saying about implementing at the platform level is it is very difficult because of the reasons it plus, plus cost, right? It's, it's also a very expensive endeavor plus training and all of [00:48:00] the things that you have to do to bring people up to speed and keep them up to speed as it evolves. But then those platforms naturally leave holes, like they can't do everything perfectly well. So we see startups coming in with really specific things that they do and Now we're feeling like okay Well, I need to use this for the feasibility
study then I need to
use this for the programming I need to use this for the Conceptual design, then I need to use this for the design development and construction documents, and I need all these other plug ins to do all the little holes that those platforms leave, and all of a sudden we've just, we've gotta know a lot about a lot of apps out there.
And this is, and then you have to manage that. Your group manages all of the, all of the help desk tickets that come in for all those different apps. And I, and I just, it's worth saying all this because this is what firms are dealing with every single day. And then there's the cloud, and then there's where are the files, and then there's the governance and [00:49:00] the ethics around the AI stuff.
And there's. There's all these other pieces to that puzzle, and it is incredibly complex to manage all that, and have happy users, and get great outcomes, and all of those things, and that's what, that's what you're in charge
of at your firm,
Nirva Fereshetian: Right.
I, I think that we have to learn, um, um, celebrate small victories in order to get the,
the, to kind of have the bigger victories. So sometimes the, these tools plug holes, but you have to really think about, um, was it really worth the time and effort to learn something totally new because it plugged a temporary hole.
Some of them are plugging real holes. and really worthwhile to give it an effort. And the other thing is like, um, the, the, the way some of the startups are progressing is incredible. You know, something that did not work a couple of [00:50:00] weeks ago, they can make it work in two weeks. So you can't just leave them and say, well, it didn't work.
So in some of our instances, um, it's so refreshing to talk to owners and, um, Um, directly or developers directly on the issue, um, and immediately get response and fix it. And those are really, um, great experiences we're having in terms of using products that, you know, develop that fast or change that fast.
Um,
Evan Troxel: Versus the ones that
Nirva Fereshetian: that's right. That's versus the ones that, you know, people have been complacent about, right? So it's not going to work. That's it. We're set where we have 10 different workarounds and that's how we're going to live. Uh, because we know that nobody's going to do anything about it. Yeah.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah, so, so how do you keep, uh, a, or how do you develop and And just keep a [00:51:00] continued, um, like learning environment going, because there's probably all kinds of experiences around that. There's the, like, oh, I'm just going to keep doing it the way I've always done it because I know it works, and I'm okay with the holes because I know the ten workarounds that I need to do, versus, you know, vetting through a myriad of options of, of promises to fill those holes and finding the one needle in the haystack that actually works. Like, okay, that could be fatiguing just going through that process. Right. And that, that leaves, you could get a lot of different outcomes there. I'm just curious about how you keep this culture of continuous learning going and create. time for people to actually try new products because that's, I think, another thing a lot of firms struggle with, right?
It's like, we have deadlines. We don't have time to figure out if this new tool is going to do something for us. And so
can you talk about that side of
Nirva Fereshetian: Yeah. I mean, time, time is essentially the root of the challenge. [00:52:00] Actually, it's not the cost of the products. It's actually time, uh, to you. Um, implement it properly, test it properly. Some of the startups don't understand that things can't happen in 30 days. You know, so, oh, yeah, you're going to have to give, I'd rather pay, um, and have a paid trial.
So we all can sanely think about it, you know, rather than 30 days and so and so had the deadline and all we good intentions. We want to try it and they'll have a lot of eager people who want to try it. But, um, you know, how the deadline driven are we and how last minute projects change and then people get pulled from those.
So I think. Time is really a challenge. And, um, a lot of times it's the person's enthusiasm that has made a mark, Evan. And people have gone, if the product is good, have gone above and beyond, uh, to test it, even outside of our working hours to make it work. Um, so, but that, I'm not advocating that at all. But what I'm, [00:53:00] what I have tried to do is present the successes through Through, um, others, not through our team members.
So, uh, we want to, uh, showcase in our presentations, them, not us. Is, they trust each other more than they trust someone
saying that, Hey, you know, we think this is better than that, or you need to use this tool and that. So, let's show them. It's all by example. If we haven't been able to successfully make a team use it, make a few people test it, and share the outcomes, then there's nothing to talk about, Evan.
Absolutely
Evan Troxel: like, That's great framing. And I think that's a great way to think about it because it may, and it makes so much sense because it actually makes, it puts the impetus on the information coming from them to you rather than the other way around, which like now you're in a mode
of supporting for success.
Right. But you're not going to go out and find the [00:54:00] things and then
force them to use
Nirva Fereshetian: Right, and it's, it's, if the, we always want, we're always in search of success stories, whether it's computationally, we've helped someone, uh, automate something, or we've helped someone to use a different tool, um, to figure out something, or we asked a, a group of people, like I said, we do have, um, what I call our technology allies inside different practices.
And we rely on them. Um, and some of them have gone above and beyond to test something to a way that sometimes we, we don't have a real project to test on, so we go back and use an old project, uh, that has that scenario and say, can we, can we, if we had this tool, then would it have made a difference? Um, but these are real, but these are real commitments of time and effort and enthusiasm, um, that not, it's not like everybody has it.
So, you, [00:55:00] you kind of have to pick and choose and, uh, accommodate people's schedule, which is kind of hard to explain to our startups. Like, they, once we start, they keep emailing me. So. What happens next? Are we doing it? So, are we going to buy it? And unfortunately, I understand their predicament because they have a certain amount of money and a certain amount of time to prove themselves.
And I think that's the, that's the challenge we have together to minimize. So, understand each other to minimize that. So, it's a beneficiary, we're, we both are a beneficiary of the process. So, which is why I think that this ecosystem needs to collaborate, really collaborate with the big C. You know, so, sometimes, um, for example, I have found it refreshing that, um, some startups have set up calls where many of the people who have tried, like us, other firms, are sharing in the conversation.
It's not just us and the [00:56:00] startup. But we're getting the outcomes of others who have tested, because we cannot do this alone. And so you, lots of people have made lists of some kinds, and I've commented on the list, and like, don't put things in there that you've never, have never touched or know about, you know?
And, and so, or make us contribute and say, we've tested this, and I don't mean in a, In a negative way necessarily, you know, but sharing of our experiences and sharing why it worked in some place and did not work in another or contributing on how they continue to develop the product is really important.
So, one of the other factors is that there remains big name products that are, um, uh, like Rhino and Revit that are the dominant tools and everything else kind of has to talk to them. And if they don't talk to them in the beginning, it's just not going to work. [00:57:00] So,
Evan Troxel: seems like the strategy is, is it has to talk to them before
it can replace
them, right?
Because, because of the, there's so much already invested by the firms into those platforms. It's going to be very tough to switch to something at, at some point anyway, right? So it has to work its way.
The Trojan horse
has to work its
way into the
Nirva Fereshetian: Yeah, and even if it's not replacing them, Evan, it still has to work with them.
Evan Troxel: Absolutely.
Yeah.
Nirva Fereshetian: And, and there's a lack of understanding that and then A lot of overlap, you know, so like I said, so if you're developing your startup and there is a tool out there that is doing some part of your thing very well that I don't see why you're building it.
Evan Troxel: Yeah,
Nirva Fereshetian: I don't see why you're building it. Yep.
Evan Troxel: I want to talk more about your, this, the refreshing change in practice of this, this outward sharing, because I don't, I think that's kind of a, lots of firms have kept things to themselves and they're developing ideas and they're, they want to, they [00:58:00] think it's their IP and they want to keep it to themselves and, and there is much more of a sharing culture developing there.
Before we go there though, I just wanted to ask, how do you, Spotlight these success stories that you talked about with the people who are doing interesting, useful, valuable things with technology in your firm. Do you, do you have an intranet? Do you post those on there? Do you do it outside of the firm as well?
Like, how do you approach that and how do you
actually communicate those
Nirva Fereshetian: We, um, we internally have, uh, sessions every other week or at least, um, at least two or three times a month that something is profiled, something that has been done. And, uh. Mostly, we try to encourage others to present or co present with them. Um, we developed recently, um, a platform called Employee Experience Platform, uh, which is purely based on, um, communication.
It's a communication site. And, uh, Not an intranet. I don't want to use that [00:59:00] word, uh, is that as that is like a documentation and a depository of things and this one, so we just Deployed that about a month ago, month and a half ago, and we're trying to use that also as a way and means of internally sharing that information.
Part of the stuff is like sometimes people complain Oh, I didn't know we knew that or I didn't know we were using that so that's, that's a Equally. So I have tried very hard to pr that externally. Like I said, I've learned a lot and still need to learn a lot to move some of that engagement outside of our firm.
Um, even
I've organized things with our clients, with our internally, uh, with our clients and collaborators to have sessions inside to talk about things. How could we have done something better or how could have we collaborated? It starts small. I think the personal relationships are key. We can put things out there, but it's very hard, [01:00:00] Evan, to make them read, to make them see, and even in the communication site that we're trying to push information to, my take has been like, say short things, put an image so they can, yeah, so they can see like something changed, you know, maybe I should, yes, the attention is
and truthfully, I'm, always worried at the amount of information we're pushing or amount of tools and training we're pushing and I always say that Well, they roll they need to have time to spend to live to live and learn their professional expertise Evan, you know, they're interior designers and architects and urban designers who need to learn and learn Uh, educate, you know, keep, keep, uh, their professional growth, you know, for their topics.
On top of it, there is an avalanche of tools and technology and things like that. And in some instances, some people can't keep up with it.[01:01:00]
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah, the outward communication also I'm sure helps with recruitment and just, just getting eyeballs on the types of work, the kind of things that you're doing, the way that you're going about doing it to attract talent to the firm, which otherwise is kind of a black box, right? It's like they see a job posting on LinkedIn or wherever, and they, they get to read what their roles and responsibilities would be because they're just like everybody else's roles and responsibilities for that job profile.
But, but then there's like, To me, it seems like there's this opportunity for these channels to be presented out there for people to tune into and, and get more insight into the practice of architecture at CBT, as an example, and the kinds of user profiles and wins and success stories that you're talking about, that to me is a great way to get the word out about the culture at CBT and the, and so like the audience there is, you know, people who are interested in that content, but [01:02:00] also people who are job hunting, right?
And looking for a fit for them and their, the kind of culture they want to work for.
So I could see that being
Nirva Fereshetian: Yeah, I think that social media in general, specifically Instagram type things, are mostly translate, you know, um, Mostly they are presenting our culture, mostly it's for recruitment, mostly it's to have an idea of what kind of a firm are we. Um,
really the, uh, I think it's rare that people have found us and even given us a project because they've seen us, uh, um, on an Instagram feed or something.
It's, it helps. After they know about us, or after they talk to us to check out all of those things, uh, to figure out what kind of a firm are we and what are we posting and what are we talking about and what our thought leadership is. So, I have, I think that part of it is that, [01:03:00] uh, learning internal PR is 1 thing also learning how to do external PR and, but also making that as, um.
Not just about technology, not, it can't be about technology, it has to be about the business and our technology things should be incorporated in the project examples or what did it do for the project or what did it do for the team building or because the story is not about the tool, it's the story is about the outcomes.
And technology is just a facilitator to make some outcome better. or create an outcome that we couldn't have created without it. But it's, the story is about the end result. It's not about technology.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. It's why, why
do we do what we do,
right?
If you're, if you're into architecture, if you've chosen this as your career path, it should be to, change the built environment to make a better built [01:04:00] environment to affect, like I did schools, right? It's, it's like to create the best learning environments possible for,
for children,
right?
And tools that help us get there are, are exactly that. They're leveraged to get there faster, better, cheaper. more beautiful. Like there's so many different ways that we could go about doing that. But, but that those aren't why we do what we do, right? Those are how we do what we do and what we use. But the clients often even don't care how you get there.
It's like, just create the outcome. That's the value in it for them. And that's what matters for our
businesses to survive.
Nirva Fereshetian: And absolutely don't care about the tool. Why should they care? All they should care is about the outcome. And even internally, you know, at the end of the day, when there is this discussion about this tool or the other, I always say like, stop and let's go back and ask why are we doing this again?
Why are we doing this? Is it because we're going to change the outcome? So the [01:05:00] basic example is, you know, Enscape has taken off like fire and, um, as in many firms and when other things come into play, um, there's always this workflow issue, you know, like, um, somebody can't pick up somebody else's work if you do it in a lot of different formats, right?
Which, which is an efficiency issue. But, so when, when, Another product comes into play, then we always ask that, yeah, you can use that product, but is it doing something that this other product is not doing? And you, if it's an outcome based, and that you want to put motion that the other one isn't doing well, or you want to put some, um, you know, um, uh, different, um, analysis that the other, then it is rightfully so the tool to use.
But the client doesn't care whether we use A or B, all they care is they ask for something and they got it.
Evan Troxel: It's always interesting to me when a client does kind of prescriptively say we want this to be used on this project and you're like, okay, now, now,
we have to talk about [01:06:00]
Nirva Fereshetian: Yes, yes.
Well, that was a long time ago, decades ago when people wrote in the, in the project RFPs, uh, BIM and Revit, and really didn't know what they were asking for.
Evan Troxel: They didn't
have any
Nirva Fereshetian: they had no clue. Yeah,
they had no clue. And I'm not,
Evan Troxel: hadn't trained
anybody how to use
it. And yeah, any of those things that actually come along with that request. Let's get back to the, that collaboration or, you know, the, the sharing that's going on within the industry that you were talking about seeing on some of these panels that are put together or these, these zoom meetings or whatever they are, but also at the large firm round table that, that you're a part of that I used to be a part of. That was definitely a shift that's been happening is there's been a lot more sharing, and there's a lot more acknowledgement that these tools and these workflows are not IP for a firm, right? They're, it's like, are you having this problem? Raise your hand. Everybody raises their hand. Okay, it's not just us, right?
Let's talk about [01:07:00] this, right? It makes it easier to talk about things when, when we acknowledge like, oh, I thought it was just us. No, it's actually everybody. talk about the culture of sharing the evolution that you've seen there and, and why that's important for the industry to do more of. Because it's,
it's leading to something.
Nirva Fereshetian: Yeah, so at least from that end, you know, in terms of the A, you know, the large form round taper is mostly A's. You know, although some of the firms are, have, um, um, easy, uh, with them, um, there is a considerable effort to, um, share. And as you know, the large firm roundtable from the large firm roundtable, um, a group has developed called innovation design consortium, where it's officially sharing information and being a member of that.
Um, there's, um, It's, it's really, um, not very hard to think that many of us are doing the same things, um, and that could benefit [01:08:00] of making, sharing those, uh, resources or doing it once and sharing it all and not seeing it as a competitive advantage because they're not. Um, so, I feel, so that has started about a year ago and, um, certainly they're making progress.
They have, uh, um, uh, they're trying, they have, it's outside of the large firm roundtable. It started from there, but, uh, it's an independent organization now. And, um, hopefully it gives a voice also to develop things, um, together. Or have a voice to talk to, um, um, with the larger numbers, you know, because, uh, not every firm is two, three thousand people and has the leverage, um, to, um, make a change or request a change.
So, um, but there is certainly common things, uh, computational things or, uh, things that every firm is doing on their own. And we hope that we share that and do it once [01:09:00] and share it. And, uh, so that's, that's moving along. But I feel like, um, The first success of the ecosystem, something has to be developed that kind of goes across, uh, the entire chain, um, all the way to, um, the people who are operating the building.
Um, like I said, you know, before, um, the, it is born in our offices, the data sets as designers, but how we move that downstream and make it at least partially, um, Beneficial down and without recreating it at every phase and rehiring people to It's a very big disconnect. So The same similar way where we all are trying on the A side Share and give a boost to our ecosystem.
And in terms of just time, we share a lot of information about who has [01:10:00] tested what, and that information is valuable when you have a thousand things to look at, you know? So, and, and, um,
if that framework can move downstream, um, and also on every Every process need to be re examined, you know, contractual things, uh, relationships as we move from one phase to the other.
Um, if that becomes more and more thought about and those are the things that give us a heads up how to innovate, how to change us completely. And, you know, I think that, um, in this, um, I'm not sure we can evolve in AI. It's a drastic, drastic change. Um, the fact that we use small tools, uh, um, you know, render, rendering tools, or code tools, or anything, um, is not necessarily, in my opinion, make any difference.
A big use of [01:11:00] the AI ecosystem yet, you know, once the data sets are coming in, once we're making real conclusions, once we have shared, um, data sets where we're making some, um, Deductions from our previous projects, collectively experiences, so that we can project, um, you know, Potential predictions for how should we move ahead with the next project?
And what is the learning that's going to happen across that platform? Those are AI things, uh, which we are still pretty far from.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Where's the standardized, structured
data between all
Nirva Fereshetian: That's right.
Evan Troxel: How, how's that gonna
Nirva Fereshetian: That's right. We can't even structure our own data in one firm. But I think those are the things that would let us innovate and that's actually the term that we can legitimately use if we do collaborate on that level and, and change the way we think. We still are, we [01:12:00] still are in the old mindsets of how things should be.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, yeah, interesting. I'm curious about this idea of the tools proliferating their value beyond the role, our current role as architects, and what, what the incentive is there, because the business model hasn't changed or is it changing? Uh, the contracts haven't changed or are they changing? I'm just curious what the incentive is.
I mean, there's, I think everybody agrees that that would be great if we didn't have to
redo the
work at all of these different steps and pay somebody to implement that. And it seems odd that that happens, but it does happen because there's no incentive for the, like, like at that point, it
literally is a handoff.
Right.
And so. So what is the incentive to drive that from the architect's and engineer's point of view?
Nirva Fereshetian: It is changing. but not at a speed way. So I think before where, um, [01:13:00] years ago where we never gave our Revit model to anybody, um, that has drastically changed. So, yeah, I mean, even if we gave it, we gave it with all kinds of written statements not to use it, not to measure it from, you know, so,
but now, um, a lot of our, uh, contractors and CMs are saying, well, we want to use the model.
So, and if that means that we need to be a little bit better at building it, or understand how,
Evan Troxel: Can you
imagine? I can't even imagine being a, a Suffolk construction getting Revit models from all these different teams and all these different firms and the different Wild West nature
of every single project out there and having to pick that up and deal with it. It's just gotta be
crazy
Nirva Fereshetian: It is crazy, but the technology's out there to kind of, before when the, you know, years ago when there was this IPD concept, the technology wasn't there to support it. Like, I know we [01:14:00] experimented it with a little couple of different things. Uh, projects where they had to come to our office and, or we had to come to their, go to their office because the structure was not there, uh, we couldn't share a Revit file, so we had to use Revit server, whatever, but now I think there has been the cloud and, uh, posting about all of that content there, uh, makes it really, gives hope that these things are, can be, um, shared and work together.
And if you think about it, I, uh, the, you know, the, if you think that we are one company and do downstream everything, then we would behave very differently.
Right?
So if we are the designers and have the engineers and it's just there is a big company above it and all of us are working for the same concept to make it if but the fact of it is is just so [01:15:00] fractured that no one can see that this is it's a it's possible if we worked for one
Owner, which is, I guess, what the IPD thing was to make an, to make an organization that is, um, one ownership and make sure that everybody, um,
Evan Troxel: In this together,
Nirva Fereshetian: is together.
Yeah, so not until we feel that, I think it's hard to change anything because we don't feel that,
Evan Troxel: Are there tools out there that are making that kind of restructuring of data, maybe even after the fact, easier? Is that even a
possibility, do you
think? Hmm.
Nirva Fereshetian: I feel in one sense, some of these platform based things, um, are making, um, like Speckle and others are, have, I think they have a great future. The problem I see is that we are so much chained in products, um, and before if I [01:16:00] feel that it's, before I felt changing of tools is, uh, uh, an issue. Now I feel the platforms are the issue.
Evan Troxel: Mm
hmm.
Nirva Fereshetian: changing of tools is relatively easier. But because we post and collaborate in certain platforms, um, that is not going to go away. So,
um, it is hard to see, to be optimistic about that. I'm trying, but it's hard
Evan Troxel: that, that is a very difficult reality to deal with, right? Because all of the, the consultants on the team have to also
be using
Nirva Fereshetian: The same thing.
Evan Troxel: the same version of
the software,
right? Not, not just the same platform, the same version, exactly, right? Or else you're going to run
into potential problems.
Yeah,
Nirva Fereshetian: Definitely. Um,
Evan Troxel: Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about before we call it?
Nirva Fereshetian: uh, no, I, I really enjoyed the conversation. Uh, it's been great, Evan. And, [01:17:00] uh, I hope, um, the, I, I hope that these conversations and multi, uh, layer and multi people conversation actually make us, uh, become more aware of how we can contribute to this, uh, ecosystem. I think, um, We do a lot of talking, we do a lot of, uh, planning, but, um, IC not very much action, and all of us complain, uh, all of us are, uh, not happy, um, but I hope that, um, we actually do something about it.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, the complaint department, right? And then, and then the, the accountability part of, of like the next part after the complaint. It's like everybody kind of
looks over their shoulder. I
Nirva Fereshetian: Blaming somebody else, yes.
Evan Troxel: To actually do the thing to fix this problem is not the complaint part. That's the easy part, right?
The hard
part is the actual
Nirva Fereshetian: That's right. I mean, I hope, I mean, I see some [01:18:00] hope on some of those things and some conversations of real change and some conversations of sharing, but, um, there's definitely less action. I mean, uh, uh, podcasts like this are terrific, Evan, in terms of, um, bringing us, um, bringing our voices from different perspectives, from different roles from together to, um, to validate all of our issues.
But, um, what, what is disappointing is there's less, little action and more, um, more conversation. So, I, I do see some data, um, efforts, uh, the common data platforms and other things that, um, several, um, companies or other efforts that are coming together between the, Different European architects and others that are trying to work together for that, but, um, it's just too slow, Evan.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah. [01:19:00] Well, this has been a
fantastic conversation,
Nirva Fereshetian: Thank you
Evan Troxel: much. And I think just shifting the perspective more downstream, like you were mentioning there, if we think about our work product as Think about the next people who are going to get it. That, that alone is, is something worth contemplating and how it might start to affect what you do today to not incur
technical debt,
right?
Because That's if you do something now that, that just, um, benefits you in the short term to meet this deadline, but it breaks 10 things downstream, it's not worth it. And so to be thinking about
and have empathy for
those future users of
that data is,
Nirva Fereshetian: So, the small example is within the office, but the bigger example is, you know, from design phases to construction. That's the, that's the small example. Think about the other teams, but also think about the larger. workflow of moving it from one, um, office to the other in terms of making the building built at the end and, and operated.
I mean,[01:20:00]
Digital Twins and all of this, all these conversation, um, if everything's going to be starting all over again, and that's really a huge problem to solve.
Evan Troxel: Waste in the
Nirva Fereshetian: That's right.
Okay.
Evan Troxel: Thanks,
Nirva Fereshetian: Thank you, Evan.

View Details

In this special Campfire Series episode, Geoff Manaugh joins the podcast to tell us the story of BLDGBLOG.

We discuss how he maintains an online presence while playing the algorithm games of social media and talk about the topic of content ownership and the evolution of blogging.

We also get into the creative opportunities Geoff has found by blending architecture with other disciplines, learn about his journey from blogger to author, talk about his Hollywood experiences with his fictional writing, and hear about some upcoming projects including a new book on archaeology.

Episode links:* BLDGBLOG * Geoff’s personal website * Geoff on Instagram * TRXL 008: ‘This Reminds Me of That’, with Geoff Manaugh * Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine by Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh (Amazon) * Ernest (Motherboard) * We Have a Ghost (Netflix)

About Geoff Manaugh:Geoff Manaugh is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer regularly covering topics related to architecture, design, and technology for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, FT Magazine, and many others. He has taught graduate architectural design studios at Columbia University GSAPP, USC, and UC Berkeley, lectures at cultural venues around the world, and has exhibited twice at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.

In 2023, his short story, "Ernest," was adapted into the Netflix film, "We Have a Ghost," which was the #1 Netflix movie in the world for three consecutive weeks and reached #1 in 69 different countries. His 2016 book, "A Burglar's Guide to the City," was a New York Times bestseller for two consecutive months and was optioned for television by CBS Studios. His 2021 book, "Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine," written with Nicola Twilley, was named a Guardian, Time Magazine, NPR, and Financial Times book of the year. Since 2004, he has also been the author of BLDGBLOG (bldgblog.com), read by millions in the two decades since it was launched.

Images from the episodeClick for a larger version. Find all these images on Geoff's Instagram.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this on YouTube:- YouTubeBekijk je favoriete video’s, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.YouTube

Episode Transcript 162: Campfire Series - ‘BLDGBLOG Turns 20’, with Geoff Manaugh

*Evan Troxel:* [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I am Evan Troxel, and today I welcome back Geoff Manaugh to this special Campfire series episode of the podcast.

Geoff is a Los Angeles based freelance writer covering topics related to cities, design, crime, infrastructure, technology, and more for the New York Times magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Financial Times Magazine, New Scientist, Cabinet Magazine, The Daily Beast, Wired UK, and many other publications.

He is also the co author with journalist Nicola Twilley of Until Proven Safe, the History and Future of Quarantine, which was published during the pandemic in 2021, and in 2016 he published A Burglar's Guide to the City on the relationship between [00:01:00] crime and architecture. He also writes fictional stories that have been adapted into films, like his ghost story titled Ernest, and We Have a Ghost which can be found on Netflix. Now, if you heard that and are thinking, that doesn't sound like the normal type of guest for the show, you'd be wrong because Geoff has already been on the podcast. In this episode, we go off the beaten path and reflect on 20 years of BLDGBLOG, which is Geoff's blog and the evolution of online writing.

Geoff launched his blog on July 7th, 2004, and I invited him back after last speaking with him four years ago in episode number eight to talk about this rare internet milestone.

He recently put up an Instagram post that prompted me to reach out to him and catch up, and in that post he snarkily said, "Wild to think, it's been 20 years, I genuinely miss the camaraderie and friendship of the earlier phase of the internet, replaced today by an online culture so cynical and empty and sloganeering and [00:02:00] pointlessly embittered on every level. Alas."

And while that's true, Geoff and I continue to endeavor in creating valuable material for our audiences. And I've been a huge fan of his work for a very long time.

I also thought it was appropriate, as we find ourselves completely buried in AI generated content, found online today. And so, as we delve into today's conversation, Geoff provides valuable insights into maintaining an online presence while playing, or perhaps more appropriately, abstaining from participating in, the algorithm games of social media, the topic of content ownership, and the shift from traditional blogging to modern platforms like Substack. We get into the creative opportunities of blending architecture with other disciplines explored by Geoff, learn about his journey from blogger to author, his Hollywood experiences with his fictional writing, and upcoming projects, including a new book on archaeology.

As always, [00:03:00] my ask of you is to help the show by subscribing to TRXL on YouTube and in your favorite podcast app to let me know that you're a fan.

And if you're watching this on YouTube, Please click that like button that's right down below. And if you'd like to get an email when episodes are published with all the links and other information from the episode, sign up at TRXL. co. You can also directly support the show by becoming a member at the site as well. Thank you so much for listening and watching.

Okay, so now without further ado, grab a beverage, pull up a chair, and gather around the campfire as we celebrate two BLDGBLOG in my wide ranging conversation with Geoff Manaugh.

Geoff, welcome back.

It's been four years, almost to the day since you were on the podcast. You were a very early guest so this is a little bit of a [00:04:00] reunion, but it's an even bigger reunion of your blog turning 20 years old, which funny. I, okay. So I'm thinking about blogs in terms of timelines, and this is kind of geologic time for a blog and

you're super into geology and, and architecture and all these things too.

So maybe that's fitting. What do you think?

*Geoff Manaugh:* Well, yeah, I mean, it's a, it's, it's funny to think of my online writing as, as, uh, geologically aged. But, um, but yeah, in, in today's climate, that seems accurate. Yeah, 20 years is an extremely long time for, for a blog, especially because, I mean, blogs as such now are You know, have been replaced by newsletters and Tik Tok and even just longer posts on social media like Twitter and Or Blue Sky even for that matter But um, so yeah It's funny to look back and realize that it was 20 years ago this month that I first put anything up on on On the website and the fact that you and I spoke nearly four years ago is also pretty pretty pretty amazing

*Evan Troxel:* about that time, but not in one place. Like, I, I've, I've always been, [00:05:00] like, searching for, you know, so there was Posterous, and there was Tumblr, and there was the Mac blog, and there was Blogger, and I've been on all those. And, and then I eventually kind of settled into, you know. Um, where I was recently at Squarespace for a long time, and now I'm on Ghost, but, but, I, like, moving this stuff around is not easy, for one. How have you found the whole, like, you know, because, because ultimately you have a catalog of posts, you have books worth of posts. of posts, right? And it's like to have like the cotkey. orgs out there where it is a 20 plus year compendium of, of writing and stuff where it actually is all in one place. maybe there was some foresight there. I don't know. Did, did you plan ahead for longevity with this or what were you thinking?

*Geoff Manaugh:* I mean, I don't necessarily know how much I was thinking about genuine longevity, but I did think that the organizational, uh, pleasure of having all of my writing in one spot, and that [00:06:00] you would know where to find it, and that, um, you know, it was a, it was a single URL that you could visit, and I would just have, you know, basically an online portfolio of writing, um, that I could direct people to, um, was definitely a conscious decision.

Um, you know, there are, there were aspects of, you know, articles that I've written that, uh, to this day, even though, uh, I'm, I'm way less, uh, prolific on BLDGBLOG than I used to be. Um, but where I still kind of want to take old articles and just put them on BLDGBLOG, just simply to literally have them all in one spot.

Um, you know, to republish them there. But, um, but it's, I think it's great actually to have, have one's writing in, in one place. You know, there are a lot of people who I know who, similar to the description that you just gave of your own trajectory, you know, they've got writing all over the internet at different websites.

And Um, you know, some are defunct, you know, sort of, uh, groups that don't exist anymore or longer posts that they don't necessarily link to on older, on sites like Archonnect or, or that kind of thing. But, um, but yeah, having everything in one spot is, is great. Uh, the, the migration, I did actually change it at one point.

Um, I started, well, uh, BLDGBLOG on Blogger. [00:07:00] Uh, which, uh, you know, was pretty, uh, at the time was, was great because it was free and I didn't feel any obligation whatsoever to post because it wasn't, you know, it wasn't, I, I had no money in, uh, tied up in the, in the venture. Um, but around 2015, I think it was, I switched to WordPress and, uh, the migration, my friend Jim Webb, who's a, a, a web guy in, in, uh, Washington DC, was a, was a huge help with that. But migrating, you know, I think there were. I've deleted a lot of posts, but I think that there were something like 1, 600 posts that I had to migrate over from the old BLDGBLOG to get to the new, the new one on WordPress, and then, um, you know, it was There were some issues there too, just because every once in a while I'll reuse a title.

Like for example, I used to have a series of posts called Books Received, and it was just about books that I'm reading, or books that have been sent to me for reviews.

But I found, only after going back through my website on WordPress, that WordPress, the migration tool that we used, had mixed up the Books Received, so that like, a Books Received written in 2009 had been replaced by one written in [00:08:00] 2014,

and then I had to go back and figure out which ones were which, and you know, it was a It wasn't, wasn't very fun, but uh, but that's a minor, minor issue, you know, when the, when the, when the reward is that you have a place that you can post and you can get your voice out there and participate in, in the, in the larger architecture culture.

So, you know, the headaches, the headaches are worth it.

*Evan Troxel:* It's interesting to think of now with new context around ownership of your own stuff, right? So, I mean, to your point a minute ago, right? Blogging on other platforms like Medium or even on LinkedIn now, people put up longer articles. Um, there's, and they're not ours, right? Even, even Substack to a certain extent. It's your Substack, but it's still on Substack, right? It's a, it's a, and there's a reason people go to those platforms if they want to monetize their writing and have it behind a paywall or have subscriptions or whatever. But, for you to have your own place that you can monetize, It's yours, right? I think is, is kind of a, an interesting, [00:09:00] uh, it's, it's a great thing to have.

Like I, I own mine too. But the idea of having it all under your control is. I think something of value.

but it's also not where the eyeballs are anymore, right? even RSS is basically dead, right? When it comes to, to reading, we used to use Google reader to subscribe to RSS blogs or some other app that was an RSS reader.

So we would get notified at least when a new article was posted and we didn't have to visit a site that like, to your point, you're. You're not as prolific as you used to be on BLDGBLOG, right? So

BLDGBLOG, you maybe post every six months or something now, but it could have been any different timeframe.

It could have been three days. It could have been every day. It could have been multiple things a day, right?

Bloggers have different frequencies that they, that they publish stuff. And, and it was nice to just get notified and not have to go check.

And that's not even, nobody goes to anybody's website anymore.

Now you kind of have to have just a hookup to social media so that when you post people get notified and that's where they see it. [00:10:00] And they might. You might go back to your site to read it, whereas LinkedIn or whatever, people are doom scrolling on LinkedIn,

even, even on LinkedIn, right?

And they might see your,

your article there, uh, and, and, and, and catch when that you've published something, but it's a, it's a completely different world now.

And even with AI now, and just kind of, there's the recent thing that I've seen people trying to do is opt out of getting crawled by for AI training stuff. Um, and. I mean, this is something that architects are constantly worried about as well, with copyright and, and ownership of instruments of service and, and renderings and all this kind of stuff and, and being used for training data potentially.

And there's like, it's kind of a scary world out there right now. How, how do you feel about all that kind of stuff? Because Google used to crawl our stuff too, and it still does. Like I don't have a robots do text file that says, don't crawl this. Um. Because I do want to show up in search results, right? Um, and I publish my transcripts for my podcasts on my website and, and all that kind of thing [00:11:00] because I want to show up and, and also, you know, the exposure is nice, but also that, that it provides value when people do search for things.

How do, how do you feel about that whole side of things and platforms and monetization and paywalls and subscriptions? I mean, it's open ended, so you can take it wherever you want.

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah, no, I mean, it's a huge question, but, um, I mean, because the, I agree with you that the industry, uh, has changed, and I don't mean the architecture industry, but the, the, the field of online writing and of all kind of online content production, um, has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and, uh, I do think that a lot of, I mean, if you look at, for example, what Elon Musk did with X, aka Twitter, Um, you know, the whole point for people who will pay for the premium subscription is that you'll just put, you know, a, a 4, 000 word post up on Twitter because you, you have enough space for it now.

And that's where the eyeballs are, that's where the retweets are, that's where people are who are actually going to read the content. And then also it algorithmically down, uh, ranks, um, links out to [00:12:00] things like BLDGBLOG or even to LinkedIn or certainly to Substack. You know, there was a

*Evan Troxel:* They all want native, native posted content,

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah, and then Google will do things like, you know, list your website and allow you to show up in search results, but often at the penalty, in my opinion, of having your material stolen for AI to study and that kind of thing. So it really is a different world that is controlled more top down. And, um, it definitely felt way more bottom up, so to speak, back when I started, which was that, yeah, you can just start almost like a media empire using a keyboard.

And, um, owning the copyright of your material, or at the very least, you know, doing sort of copy left, uh, sort of, uh, share alike, sort of, uh, licenses that, that, that were more popular at the time. Um, but, yeah, I mean, there's not, and I think this is one of the things that has affected my, I mean, many things have affected my pace of posting on, on BLDGBLOG, including other professional, uh, uh, obligations now.

Um, but one of them certainly was that, that, you know, uh, it's just harder, people don't, are, [00:13:00] are, are in, are, are substantially less likely, not just to go to a BLDGBLOG as a, as a kind of, um, you know, that people have just lost interest, but people just don't go to blogs as, as, as much as they do anymore.

So, I mean, the temptation would be, well, I could join, you know, I could start paying for an X account and start putting stuff there, or I could start, um, putting things on other platforms so that more people see them. Um, uh, but. It's, it's tough, I mean I feel like the payoff there is that certainly I don't want to, you know, writing for Twitter or X means that I'm just enriching other people who are profiting off of my material in a way that my own website shouldn't necessarily be something that they make money off of.

Um, but at the same time if it allows me to make money, like is it, is it, am I doing my own self a disservice by, you know, putting, not taking money that's sitting there on the table waiting for me to grab it? Um, by, by not, you know, being more flexible in the platforms that I use. But, um, you know, there are a lot of problems with WordPress and, and the, and the individual hosted blog anyway, but I think a lot of those are more like [00:14:00] technical and typographic and user based.

You know, there are aspects of, of WordPress in particular that I really don't like. There were, there were aspects of Blogger that drove me insane, which is why I left it. Um, there are aspects of Substack, having sort of experimented a little bit with Substack, that, that I also don't like. Um, I, I personally, the entire newsletter idea.

I mean, I know it's where everybody is right now, but I, the one thing in the world I don't want more of is email and, uh, the idea that, you know, I've, I subscribe to multiple Substacks and some of them are daily, but it's just like, my God, I wake up in the morning and I've got, you know, 12 emails and nine of them are Substacks and it's, it's pretty overwhelming actually, like I, I'm, I guess I'm old school enough that I, I would rather actually just go to your website and just see what you have there, you know, I haven't been there in two weeks or I haven't been there in a couple of days, like what's new.

Um, I know a lot of people find that too labor intensive, but I think it's worth it personally, and it's better than being having my inbox explode with just what feel almost like, um, [00:15:00] you know, those, those notes that used to exist in the 80s, what were they called, like, uh, you'd get a chain letter, you know, and then you were meant to forward it on to somebody else, but, uh, it just, it just sort of feels a little overwhelming to constantly get everything as an email.

*Evan Troxel:* Well, and those nine Substack emails are book length, right? Like, they're

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah, totally.

*Evan Troxel:* book length, but they're, they're cliff

*Geoff Manaugh:* They're, they're articles. yeah, yeah,

*Evan Troxel:* and, and it's a lot of reading, and I mean, and this is coming from somebody who publishes really long podcast episodes, right? So, uh, it's just, it's just a different medium.

It's, it's kind of, it's similar in, in, you know, total output. It's a lot to listen to. And it's interesting to me to think about podcasting as kind of actually being one of the only places where it was like the true intention of the web, which was like, it was Yes, it was the Wild West, but it was, it was open and it was yours,

right?

To create that media empire that you, you mentioned, right?

And that's what podcasting still is. I don't think Spotify is doing anything to [00:16:00] try to help that. I think they're trying to actually hurt that with. Right, creating, again, this is a platform, they're creating a platform and they're trying to get you to go to their platform and subscribe to their music and then you get the podcasting and all those kinds of, and, and that is against kind of the, the original idea, just like so many businesses are against the original intention of what the, the web was about or what podcasting was about.

it's kind of interesting to me that, Apple being the largest podcast directory in the world hasn't messed that up, right?

They

haven't intentionally screwed it up and tried to monetize it. Um, they've just kind of been a benevolent overlord of it in some way. Um, so, it is interesting to me to kind of think about how this is also another long form way to deliver. ideas, content, conversation to people like writing is on, on was on the blogs and on internet. And at least there's a [00:17:00] subscription model still with podcasting that works pretty well. And by subscription model, I don't mean pay for, I just mean like to subscribe to be notified

when, when episodes come out.

So, um, Yeah. it's, it's, it's a similar but different and I hope it doesn't change because companies are interested in changing it for sure.

*Geoff Manaugh:* yeah, it's interesting actually just listening to you describe that because, uh, I mean, I do think that so many of these, these super platforms are going out of their way to make sure that you never leave. So, you know, if you go to x. com, you know, you'll read this article and then this video and then you'll watch an entire feature length film that's been released on X or documentary or that kind of thing, and so you just never leave, um, or same with other social media platforms or even things like Apple, et cetera, et cetera.

Um, but what's interesting is that I think that, you know, the, you could arguably sort of compare that to the growth of things like big box stores that took something like a very specialist butcher, put that out of business by absorbing butchery into the meat department of, say, a Walmart. Um, and then there was, you know, a local clothing store that, [00:18:00] you know, was selling quirky t shirts, but now it's out of business because now Target is selling those quirky t shirts.

But this, this kind of thing where you get absorbed into a kind of retail empire. Um, you know, and even to the point now where, uh, there was a, a, a, a minor, I'm not gonna say controversy, but a minor conversation online about a plan for Costco to that was, uh, they were putting out, uh, a new building where in order to, uh, uh, go along with local regulations, had to add housing and residential, uh, uh, uh, space to the, to the Costco.

*Evan Troxel:* that.

*Geoff Manaugh:* Um, so the idea though, you know, just to be cynical for a brief moment, although I'm very pro housing and pro dense, you know, walkable, uh, urban cores, um, you know, cynically though, you know, it's like if you actually live at a Costco or the kinds of apartments now that you can buy that are actually in shopping districts, uh, basically inside shopping malls, um, it's kind of an extension of this idea that you can never leave the one place that you go into.

You're, you're now in the kind of retail super family and I, I definitely think that that's what X is trying to do under, under Elon.

Um, you know, where just basically, yeah, [00:19:00] like you'll have podcasts, you'll have feature films, you'll have, uh, you know, photography, uh, exhibitions, like you'll have live events, everything will be on this one platform.

Um, but I do miss the, that other earlier internet, you know, where you did go to the individual butcher and then this one strange bakery and then this one whatever. Um, because I feel like that's what it felt like in terms of going to just find individual people's voices and this is their website, this is how they designed their website.

Um, these are the things that they linked out to. It was, it was much more sort of personality based. And, um, I definitely miss that aspect of things where everything feels much more shoehorned into a kind of, even like with Medium, you know, you go to Medium and you can, you know, everything's in the same font, everything looks the same.

Um, you know, or Google's, um, their automated, automated page, uh, design, uh, thing that they, that they, that they put together, um, about 10 years ago now. But where it just basically made everything look identical, so,

the New York Times looked exactly like a post on BLDGBLOG, which looked exactly like, uh, somebody else's rant about something, which looked exactly like [00:20:00] a, a restaurant writing about, uh, you know, a, a new night that they had coming up.

And so the internet became much more difficult to differentiate between types of content, Um, types of voices and even levels of expertise where it was difficult to understand what you're getting in, into. Is this a, is this an essay or is this an op ed or is this an advertisement? Everything looked the same, even typographically.

And so I think that that also, in tandem with decreasing media literacy skills in the general public, I think has definitely led to a lot of the things that we see now, where people just do not know what to trust or who to trust or what to believe. And, um, I, I don't see a way out of that problem right now.

I mean, aside from perhaps it completely absurd minor changes, like allowing more, um, visual differentiation between, um, users of major platforms, like X or Medium, uh, etc, etc. There, you know, there has to be a way to make things that they don't all look like it's just internet mush, and you have to read through it and decide what's true.

Because I feel like that's the [00:21:00] situation that we're in now.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah, it's a, it's a, the lowest common denominator kind of template, visual template. advertising of everything that, Facebook did it, I think, because

remember, MySpace was totally customizable, and then it

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah, notoriously.

*Evan Troxel:* were, and it was just the standard layout. You couldn't, you couldn't inject your own CSS code into the, into the boxes and, and make, make the flashing headlines anymore, because, I mean, at some level, like, yeah, it would, it looked really bad on MySpace, but at the same time, it was kind of yours, and so, Apple's done the same thing with the phone, right?

And it was, they, they don't let you do a lot of things because it wouldn't look like a great Apple device if everybody was allowed to do whatever they wanted to it. And so there's like this weird, it's your, it's your device, but it's not, you don't get to decide what it looks like,

right? As, as, as it's, you can see this kind of all over the place.

You can also see it in automobiles, right? Everything's starting to look like a Camry, for example,

right? It's like all the cars start to kind [00:22:00] of look the same.

And. But there's always kind of that culture that of outliers, but it's a very small percentage of people who actually do any of those things. So it could be car customizing.

It could be, you know, computers that could, you know,

there's, there are going to be people who still buy and build their own computers and run Linux. Right. So,

um,

*Geoff Manaugh:* It's a very small minority of people, but

*Evan Troxel:* it's a very small minority.

*Geoff Manaugh:* But you know, it's funny, it brings to mind, um, you know, the famous example of, uh, you know, the Gesamtkunstwerk in architecture, you know, where, uh, you know, if Mies van der Rohe is, is not only designing the buildings, but then also insisting on the placement of window shades, and the colors that those window shades can have, so as not to violate the artistic purity of the architectural space, of the structure.

Um, you know, I think arguably we're just kind of butting up against the kind of social media Gesamtkunstwerk where, you know, everything is being controlled, uh, for us. And, uh, and I don't like the results, so it's kind of funny, I wonder, um, you know, I don't want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but I do [00:23:00] wonder what would happen if I moved into a building where I couldn't change the window, uh, you know, shade, color, due to the vision of the original architect.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah.

*Geoff Manaugh:* It's interesting, but I feel like we're in that phase right now of the internet, or a comparable phase, I should say.

*Evan Troxel:* Right.

Right. yeah.

I mean, well, let's shift the conversation to what you do instead of writing on the internet, which is, well, you tell us, I mean, you're writing books, but you have other obligations as well. You're doing, you're doing a lot of stuff. Um, but There still is this option to write books, right?

Physical books, right? And to design the cover of those books and the layout of the books and the topography and the hierarchy visually and obviously the structure of the chapters and all this stuff so that it really is this stand alone thing. bespoke thing, right? Um, I mean, yeah, they end up getting mass produced, but, but this, it is a design, right? Um, so talk about your, your author, like where, where you been? Because the last time we talked, you had, you [00:24:00] were on the cusp of releasing a book about the pandemic that you started writing, I think in 2016, if I'm remembering correctly.

And so it was pre pandemic writing, you did a, and then the pandemic started and then you were. I think you said that the, it was at the publisher and it was like, okay, now we have to make some changes because a lot of this has, has happened now. And we know more than we did before you, before you started that publishing process. So take us kind of where we've been in the last four years since you were on the cusp of publishing your book on the pandemic

or pandemics, not the pandemic.

Yeah,

*Geoff Manaugh:* yeah, sure. I mean, specifically, um, yeah, the book is, um, it's about pandemics in the larger sense. Uh, it's specifically about quarantine as a spatial phenomenon and how architecture can be used to prevent the spreading of, of, uh, pathogens and diseases between people and animals and plants. Um, which I think is a, which I just, I just be, I'm specifying there because it's a, I'm trying to show that, you know, you can write about architecture.

Um, in ways that aren't necessarily, you [00:25:00] know, uh, stylistic criticism of existing buildings or historical monographs of architects who lived in, in the past. Uh, and I know there are a lot of other types of, of architecture writing. Um, but you can also look at how architecture plays roles in other fields.

And so, you know, um, my, the book before that that I wrote, A Burglar's Guide to the City, was about architecture in crime and crime prevention. Um, and specifically in the field of burglary, you know, which is a spatial crime because it involves, uh, illegally accessing interior space of architecture.

Um, and so with the quarantine book is similarly, it was looking at architecture as a, as a kind of frontline, um, medium through which we protect ourselves from the unknown.

Um, but so yeah, the book came out in, uh, 2021, came out ironically actually about exactly a year after our last, that, that conversation that we had, uh, because it came out in July of 2021. Yeah. And, um, since then, I, well, let me back up slightly. So since around the time of Berger's Guide to the City [00:26:00] came out in 2016, um, a kind of smaller secondary career of mine took off that then became my number one career, um, which was working in Hollywood for film and TV adaptations of things that I'd written.

And so, uh, that was gradually kind of growing in the background of all of these things and, uh, led to a situation where quite a lot of articles and short stories and even a burglar's guide to the city, uh, things that I'd written were getting optioned for adaptation in, in, in, in Hollywood. Um, and it got to the point where I think at one point I had 12 active projects.

Uh, you know, Hollywood is, is a funny place, so they'll, they'll often option something and not, literally not do anything with it. Or, or they'll take it all the way up to the finish line and then decide, Oh, nevermind. We're not going to, we're not going to work on this project anymore. Um, you know, which is sadly is what happened with the Burglars Guide to the City TV show.

Um, it got all the way up to the, the, the final decision about what they were going to release in the fall. And, uh, we had the pilot script, uh, anyway, everything was in place and then, and then, and then it [00:27:00] got turned down,

but, um, but yes. And then in 2023. Uh, a film finally did come out, a Netflix movie, uh, based on a short, short story of mine.

And, um, and that was exciting. It was really fun. I got to go to the, the red carpet premiere. And it was a, it was a Netflix movie, so it was only in the cinema for literally just one night, uh, when they showed it at their own cinema that's here, uh, a specially built place here in Los Angeles.

And, um, got to meet the, the stars and, and, uh, I knew, I knew the director already and that kind of thing.

But, um, so that was pretty, that was exciting, um, and for me. And, uh, but so yeah, in the last four years I've been working still on. Um, a lot of short fiction that is now in the adaptation pipeline. Um, I'm working on a new book now, um, and I'm still doing some reported non fiction for outlets like, uh, MIT Tech Review, Wired, I just had a piece in, um, Financial Times, uh, things like that.

Looking at different, different aspects of architecture. Cause still, at the same time that I'm, I'm diversifying maybe the audience for what I'm writing, um, I am still writing [00:28:00] about architecture. Um, in that sense that even a quarantine book is about architecture, uh, a book about a, a series of heists is about architecture.

Um, you know, even the story that got adapted into a Netflix film, um, was about a haunted house. Uh, so, you know, it's a, that's, that's a, uh, fundamentally has a, has a, an architectural, um, setting or an architectural structure around the, around the, the, uh, the idea of the story. And so, I think that that's, uh, going back to the conversation we were having about audience and platform.

Um, I definitely think that anybody listening to this should consider not just, um, you know, it's great to have your writing in one place online, um, but consider writing in different formats, uh, you know, writing in short fiction, maybe experiment with a screenplay, um, you know, do reported non fiction rather than just an essayistic or, uh, you know, just sort of a blog post.

Actually get in touch with people and do reporting. You know, quote people, go, go on first person reporting trips to see things in person and, and write about them. Um, and those kinds of things I think really do open doors in other [00:29:00] fields, whether it's a documentary film or whether or not it's a, you know, a feature film like the Netflix movie that I was a part of.

Um, but it's, there's a huge audience for writing and there's a huge audience for ideas and there's a huge audience for cultural production. Um, but I think it's easy to get frustrated when you put something up on a personal blog and it doesn't immediately catch fire. Um, well some of that is because people haven't seen it.

You know, it's the wrong audience. You might have an audience, uh, but it's not the right people for giving it, uh, getting it into the correct context to get picked up by Hollywood or that kind of thing. Um, but I think that if you're willing to seek out those kinds of audiences and try to figure out ways to write for them or get in touch with people or put your work in front of different audiences, um, I think the results can be really, really rewarding and fun.

And, um, for me, certainly have broadened the horizon of, of, of, uh, things that I cover and, and, and, yeah, where, where I cover them and that kind of thing, and, and for whom I do so. But, um, it's kind of a long winded answer to that question, but I feel like that's the kind of stuff that's been happening in the last four years, so, yeah, a lot of, [00:30:00] um, a new book, some Hollywood stuff, and, uh, some non fiction.

*Evan Troxel:* Interesting. And, and, like, you didn't plan that out in advance, right? It, it, like, it's it's interesting that, that what you're saying is you, you, you chased some of these, interesting ideas and they turned into something that opened a door for something else. And one of the things we talked about in our last episode was this idea of kind of connecting the dots.

You see these interesting connections. I mean, the name of the episode was this reminds me of that, right?

And, and so you, you, you're, you're just constantly observing and noticing and you see something and, oh, that reminds me of this thing over here. And that reminds me of this, The, the tunnels remind me of the subways and, and the inside of this and, and the under that.

And I think that that's really interesting how you're willing to chase those, not knowing where they're going to lead, which I think

is kind of like any design problem that's open ended. It's like a

wicked problem, right? You don't know where it's going

and you're figuring it out as you go down that path.

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah.

*Evan Troxel:* And to me, [00:31:00] like that, that's kind of what architects are, are built for, right? Like

that, that is, you're looking for interesting mashups, which I think every time I hear what you're working on, it's an interesting mashup. Like

I, Oh, I didn't think of those two things together before.

Right. And I think it's interesting that the kind of the thread that runs through this is architecture. And so we're, and we, we probably talked about this on the last episode, but it's been four years, so let's, let's refresh, like, where does that come from for you? Like, why, why is that the thread for you?

*Geoff Manaugh:* Uh, yeah, that's a, that's a good question. I mean, I can answer in the specific, I guess, uh, just, you know, for me in particular, I guess I, I, I, I noticed that so much of what I'm interested in, um, can be traced back to architectural or spatial questions. And so You know, as a child I was super interested in things like lost cities in the jungle and, uh, and, and ancient ruins [00:32:00] and I read a lot of, like, fantasy and played Dungeons and Dragons and I was really interested in the lost kingdoms of, uh, the past or whatever, but that's fundamentally it was about, it's an architectural obsession with,

um, lost buildings or abandonment or dereliction, um, and then similarly when I was got really into science fiction more as a teenager, um, you know, so much of science fiction is, um, Um, at the very least, set in an interesting environment, whether that's a, an alien planet, or a megastructure, or some kind of city, or a mining camp on an asteroid, or that kind of thing, but there's a spatial aspect to science fiction.

In fact, often in science fiction, the spatial setting, is the thing that makes it clear that it's science fiction. It's set on an alien planet. You know, it could be a, it could be a novel about a father and a son, but it's set on Mars. It's science fiction. Um, you know, or it's in a, it's set, you know, on a city on the Atlantic seabed.

Oh, it's science fiction. Um, the setting is often, um, not, it's not just the presence of technology or the fact that it's set in the future. It's [00:33:00] also the setting that it takes place in. Um, but so I also began to notice that with things like heist films, when I got really into, into those and crime. Um, that, uh, and, and, and, and those overlap quite quickly with things like action movies.

Um, but you, I began to notice that it's architectural, you know, that you have people in a heist movie are actually talking to one another explicitly and out loud about how you get from this room to that room. How do we get inside a building without no one

*Evan Troxel:* some wireframe 3D model that

*Geoff Manaugh:* Totally, exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's one of the only genres that you can get away with people looking at blueprints.

And it's not boring, it's actually like key to the plot. You want to see those blueprints. Um, you know, it's really difficult to get away with that sort of architectural obsession. Yeah. Uh, in a different genre. I mean, other than maybe, uh, like a murder mystery where you're trying to figure out how somebody got into that room.

Um, but so, and then of course, you throw in actual architecture, by which I just mean buildings and the built environment and cities and trans questions of transportation and, uh, you know, uh, park design and streets and, uh, even [00:34:00] now things like sea level rise, um, and then the aesthetic aspects of that as well.

Buildings I like, quote unquote, you know, just something as simple as that. Um, you know, the things that I like to see, uh, or the buildings that I like to be in spatially and atmospherically. Um, you know, again, those are all spatial questions. Um, and then things like, uh, you know, other aspects of things that I'm interested in, like warfare, and, uh, the results of war, such as, uh, you know, refugees, and, um, the, the, the humanitarian aftermath of, of conflict.

Those are also architectural questions. You know, where do, where do people go, uh, What was the, the, the, what aspect, how was the destruction wreaked by the people who did it? Um, you know, there are a lot of, there are a lot of aspects of, of, of those kinds of, of questions that are, that are spatial and architectural.

But so, I say all that to, that, that I then realized that I could write a site like BLDGBLOG, and it was kind of a magic moment where I suddenly, where, uh, and it, and it switched on over about maybe the first year of writing the [00:35:00] blog, the first six months even, where It just became clear exactly how much someone can cover if they're still focused on architecture.

Um, and so I think that the last 20 years really were just exploring that. And so everything from astrophysics to, again, like, uh, um, geology and mining, uh, to, of course, the issues that we were just talking about, social issues of transportation, um, you know, aspects of historical preservation and archaeology.

Um, all of these things can be written about through an architectural lens. It's just right there in the middle of, uh, at least for me, of so many different interests. Um, you know, and for me that was a great realization that I can actually cover thousands of topics and it's still on the same website because it's all relevant to the same underlying topic.

Um, and so that for me was pretty, pretty, pretty magical. I mean, I could imagine someone doing that for, and people have done this, but, You know, for music, you could just look at acoustics and sound and not just music, but, um, you know, uh, just all kinds of different aspects of, [00:36:00] of, of vibratory energy that re that results in, in sonic, uh, material.

Um, you could do that with arts and art history. You could do it with a cinema. I mean, there's any number of different topics that you could take and just figure out ways of, of looping these other apparently irrelevant topics onto that. It's almost like an embroidery pattern. And, um, You know, but as far as, just to go back to your question, um, go, go chasing after something where I don't know where it will go, um, I do agree that that's something that a lot of architects do as well, because, I mean, when you sit down to design a building, or think about a house, or think about whatever it is that you're working on spatially, um, you clearly don't know exactly where things are, how you're going to get from, you know, Terminal 1 to Terminal 2, or from the first floor to the second floor, um, all of those things are questions that you solve as you work on the problem, and I find that as a, for me as a writer, and I think other writers do this differently, Um, I really enjoy not knowing where I'm going when I sit down and I start writing about something and, um, you know, this reminds [00:37:00] me of that.

The thing, the that that I just mentioned is often not even front of mind when I started writing about it. It's just that two or three paragraphs in, I'll remember something or realize, oh yeah, this. And, you know, the older I get, the more I feel like, um, writing for me is, is kind of the way that you see people, uh, you know, they play Sudoku or they, they do other cognitive games in order to try to keep themselves young or keep themselves fresh.

Um, but for me, that's writing. Um, you know, writing is my way of keeping cognitive connections open of, of discovering new ones, you know, of kind of keeping the brain flexible. And, um, I think that can happen in architectural design certainly, but, um, I definitely think that that's one of the reasons why writing for me is such an exciting practice.

Um, it's just a way to consolidate memories and build connections between things and try to remain cognitively. uh, attuned to the world in a way that, you know, knock on wood, you know, I can, I can stave off dementia for a few more decades, but, uh, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a good way to keep the brain flexible, and so I think that, yeah, that's a very long winded [00:38:00] answer to that question, but that's, those are some of the things that were so appealing, uh, about BLDGBLOG when I started it, uh, and, and remain appealing about architecture and writing, uh, today in terms of how one can organize one's own interests into something that can be communicated to others.

*Evan Troxel:* You and I are very alike when it, as far, I would, I would call you a man of merit, of many interests. You have a lot of different interests and I'm like that as well. And I encourage that on My other podcast, ArcaSpeak, to architecture students or people working in architecture is like, get away from the desk, get away from the computer, take those vacation days, go do things that you normally, like, don't, don't do staycations, right, go travel, see things, because it makes you a more interesting person, number one, to have experiences like those, but also those experiences lead back into your projects.

Right? Those are things that feed, and you never know when that's going to happen, you never know how it's going to happen,

you [00:39:00] don't even know why it's going to happen, but it's going to happen.

And that, I think, is what is so, what makes architecture interesting, because every project is pretty much a team sport, and everybody's bringing that to the team, and you don't know what that is.

Because every project is an assemblage of a different team, typically, right?

So, unless it's a small office, um, especially in big offices, teams disperse and they come back together in a different form on every single project, maybe even on different phases of a project. And, it's really interesting to me to see, I mean, it happened in school, it doesn't really happen in the real world, where, you know, there's one brief in the design studio, and you get 16 different Versions of that one brief, right?

Because everybody's bringing something different to the table. And I think that's what makes architecture really interesting. When you're solving a, it's a particular problem that can be solved a million different ways.

Right. And we're going to solve it the way that we solve it [00:40:00] because it is an organic thing.

But I think that's what's so interesting is what people are bringing to it. And so you, you have a list of interests, right?

And they, you've talked about a few of them, like geology, archaeology, uh, burglary, crime,

architecture. Uh, you're, you're a photographic enthusiast, right? You, you're, you do a bunch of different things.

You travel, you, you hike, you get outside. Um, Can you just talk about kind of what are those various things in a, in a better explanation than what I just gave of like the bullet list. But because the things that you, I, the main place I follow you now is on Instagram, and

this is where I see kind of where you're getting out and you are experiencing things.

And I can only assume that, I mean, obviously you love to do that, but it is also informing what you do as a professional.

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a, I, I, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big question, but I do think that travel is certainly a, a huge part of my, the way I sort of keep my batteries charged. Uh, [00:41:00] it's a big aspect of my life. Um. I don't know if, I mean some of it is maybe that, you know, I moved around a lot as a kid, so I got very used to showing up in new places, you know, we were, I was going to new schools every four, four years or so, um, you know, and I know that other people have moved much more than that, um, but nevertheless every four years, uh, since I was born, you know, I had to show up in a totally different state, go to a totally different school, and meet totally different people, and figure out a totally different lifestyle, um, you know, different regions of the country, different sizes of metropolises from a tiny rural town to cities.

Um, and so I think I've always enjoyed that, showing up in places and meeting people and seeing new things. Um, and, yeah, I was a very enthusiastic budget traveler when I first graduated from college. Uh, almost immediately, I'd say about two weeks after graduating. Um, you know, I was off to go backpacking, I was in China, I was in all over Europe, and that set a pace that hasn't necessarily flagged.

Um, it's easy because my wife and I don't have children or pets, so it's quite easy for us to leave the house [00:42:00] and go do things together. And, um, and not worry about things like, yeah, where the kids are going to be or what happened, what's going to happen to the dog or the cat or that kind of thing.

Um, but I do think that, yeah, taking the time to see places is, is super important, especially if one is interested in architecture.

Um, you know, being able to see certain, going into structures and experiencing them. It's really not even a seeing at that point, you know, you're experiencing, you're hearing, you're literally feeling a space. You know, whether or not it's a draft or. the temperature inside, or if it's just the fact that the ceiling is a hundred feet above you and the acoustics have changed.

Um, you know, just recently I was in Norway for a part of a reporting for the book that I'm currently working on, which is about archaeology, and somebody gave me a tip to go see this really fascinating museum. Um, it's, uh, it's two brothers, the Vigeland brothers, and I think it was the Immanuel Vigeland's museum.

Um, the other Vigeland is the brother who designed, um, a sculpture park, um, that is this incredibly [00:43:00] weird, uh, park in Oslo. Yeah, it's super strange. It's kind of homoerotic, but also sort of, uh,

a celebration of family and human virility. It's very, very strange. Um, but in any case, the, uh, the chapel, uh, that I went to, and maybe you've been there actually, um, was his brother's, uh, work where it's very weird.

It's a, it's a church cathedral, or sorry, it's a chapel, um, or chapel like space. That's, uh, it's quite a long walk. I walked there. It was a nice day. So it was about an hour walk from my hotel. Um, but it's in the outskirts of, of Oslo, and um, it's, when, when, when I went inside, uh, what was interesting is that it was so crowded I had to wait in the lobby before they would let me in.

Um, but then eventually when I went inside, I, uh, everyone else had left by the time I was standing in there, so I was actually alone inside this place. Um, but so there's very little light. Um, so when you first walk in, you cannot see if there are other people in the room, you can barely even understand what's happening.

Um, but the human eye gradually gets used to the darkness quite easily. In fact, amongst creatures, we have extremely good night vision. Um, and then gradually you realize that you're in [00:44:00] this huge room that has maybe 40, 45 foot tall ceilings. Um, all of the walls are painted with these weird, almost paganistic, uh, sort of, um, writhing bodies.

It's all very fertile and very kind of Scandinavian folk horror. It's very, very, very weird. It's almost a Dantean, uh, Um, and, and as that comes out of the darkness, uh, also, and I remember when I accepted the fact that I was alone, I realized that I could start making strange sounds. And so you, I got to experience the space acoustically, you know, through little claps or, or click, clicking my tongue.

In fact, I made a recording, uh, just to, to hear it, cause the, the decay on the sounds was, was like seven to nine seconds long. It was very, very long.

And, um, I, I mentioned that as an example because, you know, you can look at pictures of a, of an, of an interesting chapel outside Oslo, and you can say, wow, that looks really cool.

Or you can go to it and you can stand inside of it and you can feel the air and you can listen to the sounds, uh, and, and really kind of, uh, and even just adjusting your eyesight within a space and seeing more detail emerge as your eyes get used to things, [00:45:00] um, is a pretty incredible spatial experience.

And to be able to do that with other types of buildings, you know, I, I, I had a bucket list trip, um, in, uh, I think it was 2019 where I got to go to Cappadocia, which is part of Turkey where, uh, for hundreds and hundreds of years, the Hittites had dug huge underground cities. Um, into very soft rock that after it's exposed to air hardens.

Um, and so you have these massive labyrinths of underground cities that you can explore. And, uh, my wife and I went and just were inside these places for just hours and hours at a time. And then when you go out into the greater landscape, you find hundreds, literally, of, uh, abandoned Christian chapels. Um, 99.

9 percent of which have been defaced since, since the, they were constructed. Um, but the frescoes are still in there. So you find a hot, you know, from one side, it looks like a hill. And from the other side, it's like a broken open geode,

um, you know, which is a hollow rock with crystals in it. Um, but it's a broken open hillside that has an old Christian chapel, you know, with fading frescoes.

And then you realize looking [00:46:00] out over the landscape that you're surrounded by dozens and maybe even hundreds of churches that are just hidden inside hills. Um, it's a, it's an amazing experience. And so, um, you know, and let alone going to major tourist sites, like going to the Colosseum in Rome or going to, uh.

Angkor Wat in Cambodia, or seeing the Great Wall of China, or, you know, other large architectural undertakings. But so, you know, travel isn't cheap. But on the other hand, you know, you can, when I, I know when I was fresh out of college, I was, it was quite easy to get student deals. I still have some of my old student ID, IDs that you could get international student identity cards and get really good discounts on things.

And, yeah, totally. And I mean, I definitely, I, I think that's a hugely valuable aspect of things. And then you mentioned hiking. I do think that Um, I know that not everyone is a, is a big hiker, and everyone has different levels of physical ability to, to, to do these sorts of things. Um, but to those who are physically able to hike, I do think that it's a, an incredibly invigorating and, and exciting way to experience the landscape, to actually be out there, um, [00:47:00] outdoors.

Uh, you know, if you go to places like Zion National Park in, in, in Utah, or Canyonlands, um, the architectural forms that are revealed, uh, some might use the word architectonic instead of architectural, which implies human design. Um, but the architectonic forms that are revealed over long term of, uh, erosion and uplift and earthquakes and landslides and just like general rainfall over millions of years.

Um, you end up with these absolutely beautiful sort of hulking geometric forms that you can walk around and you can experience the shadows and listen to the wildlife. And it's a really architectural experience. You know, it's a spatial way to engage with landscape. Uh, it's a way to bodily invest oneself in the world.

And, um, I think all of those experiences are, are, are very important. Um, having said that, you know, other things are also quite important. Like, I think as an architect, um, or rather for architects, I also just recommend looking outside of the architecture building. Um, not just by going to the Grand Canyon, but literally look at things that are happening in different [00:48:00] departments.

Uh, look in different fields if you're not in school anymore. Um, you know, you might find something quite fascinating if you go to an astronomy conference, or if you go watch a movie about something you didn't realize you were interested in. I often find with a lot of architects who are very pressed for time, as you know, architecture is a notoriously overworked field, um, that there's a feeling of, not urgency, but of lack of time, and so, you know, if you're going to go see a movie, I know, I know many architects who feel like, well then it might as, it should be as architecturally relevant as possible, or if I'm going to read a novel, it should be a novel that is as architecturally relevant as possible, because I don't have, I don't have a lot of time to read a murder mystery.

I don't have time to go see this kind of thing. Um, but I find very often, not always, but I, I, a very, very high track record of success and going to places outside of the field of architecture and finding something where you're like, Oh, wow. I hadn't thought of that from a spatial point of view, or the fact that what they're talking about has to be designed by somebody.

Um, you know, [00:49:00] I mean, even just an example is in the quarantine book, you know, we went to an agricultural, uh, disease research center that was under construction. And, you know, you might think to yourself, what does agricultural disease research have to do with architecture? Um, but we actually got into this conversation with this guy who's designed the building, um, about things that I had just never thought about, like, uh, extremely advanced HVAC systems that allow negative pressure disease research labs to maintain negative pressure, so the air is always pumping out of the room.

Or no, excuse me, I take, I take that back. The room is, it's the other way around. The, the, the air is always pumping into the room to keep the pathogen isolated. Um, but it was a building designed to get, uh, to survive being hit by a, a category five or a level five tornado. And so the idea is that when you have even extreme barometric changes in the atmosphere outside the internal barometric systems of the, of the building will, will maintain their own pressure and the way in which that was maintained and, and the technical expertise that that requires.

Um, you know, my point is that that is an [00:50:00] architectural phenomenon and it's a technical question. And you wouldn't know that if you didn't necessarily follow, you know, disease research or, for that matter, looking to tornado proof, uh, you know, cities and, and structures in the, in the Midwest. Um, but I just think looking outside the box generally makes you realize how little is inside the box.

And I think that that's a really important lesson, uh, in my opinion for life in general. You know, don't assume that your life inside the box is everything, because it's not.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah. Yeah, you, you really strike me as kind of an explorer or adventurer for sure. And, and the idea, like some of the pictures that you've posted of your travels in Southern Utah through the national parks, like my wife and I got married in Zion. I mean,

that's one of the reasons we chose that space.

Right. And I've done slot canyons there and we, we hiked the narrows for our, our wedding party, right? Like that

was what we did instead of. you know, doing it a golf course, right? So, um, but, but because it is so architectural and the national [00:51:00] parks of, of Utah are absolutely incredible.

*Geoff Manaugh:* Mm.

*Evan Troxel:* It's just like, they are kind of edifices, right?

But they're, they're just natural. And like hiking out to Delicate Arch and Arches National Park, right? It's, it's, it's, you, you you go on a journey to experience this thing and you wait for sunset and you walk back under the full moon and it's, it's absolutely incredible to have those kinds of experiences.

And they do inform the work that we do. I mean, it's, you can't not have it inform the work that you do. And it, I think it, it makes for some really interesting ideas to come out of. Who knows where they come out of, right?

It's like you can't even explain it. But,

but there's some, there's some really interesting work that you've posted on your Instagram where you've, We've kind of done deep dives into geologic illustration, right?

And I remember following those really closely because you're kind of unearthing from these, that are out there, right? [00:52:00] People have done these really intricate cross sectional drawings through, through the earth and,

and you're relating it back to kind of a spatial nature. Like,

I think we talked about this in the last episode, right?

It's like, we don't, it's not just the ground that we stand on, right? It's like, there's a lot going on under the surface. Spatially with plate tectonics and with stratification and the bending of all that and just, it's kind of a, it's an ever evolving thing as well. It's not static, it's dynamic.

And I think to me, maybe you could just explain kind of what, what that study was that you did because I, I'll throw some images here into the, into the video portion of this for those who are interested in

seeing what I'm talking about.

But, uh, The, the, the things that you were surfacing, I thought they're, they're really beautiful, scientific, right? They were, they

were done for research, but they're amazing drawings. And, and

I think that's what's interesting about the work that you're doing, Geoff, because, I mean, you're a writer, but you're [00:53:00] also very visual in the presentation of the work that you're doing. And I can see kind of how, where you're drawing that inspiration from, because you're kind of doing this deep dive into case studies or, or again, just kind of chasing Um, a trail down and not knowing where it's going to go and you're finding some really incredible stuff.

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah, the geology stuff, um, was, uh, er, is, uh, yeah, just delightful to look at, and I think that some of that goes back to, uh, one of those sort of if this, then that sort of realizations, which was that, you know, if architects are looking at space through things, through visual techniques like section, and if geologists are doing something similar when they're going to see, say, a road, what's known as a road cut, so when, um, you know, someone built a road through a hillside, you then see what was inside the hillside, so you can see levels of rock, etc.,

the straight, the stratification of the rock, you know,

*Evan Troxel:* Can I just pause you for one second? Because we've talked about this, I think, offline. But, like, my grandfather was a geologist. [00:54:00] We mentioned it in the last podcast. But he did a study in Death Valley of a road cut, and it's a very famous road cut. It's actually published in, like, one of the top 10 road cuts, like the

total geology nerd stuff, right?

But it's, like, number two in the top 10 road cuts kind of compendium out there.

So it's just funny, like, when you bring that up. These are the kind of thoughts that are flooding my mind. Mm

*Geoff Manaugh:* that right there would be, uh, you know, the top ten road cuts. That would be a fun architectural project for someone to take it upon themselves to go visit those. You know, go see the top ten road cuts. Um, there's a, there's one I really like that's just north of the city here in Los Angeles.

Um, it's right when you're driving into a city over the mountains called Palmdale. Um, but as you drive through, it actually, the cut goes more or less through the San Andreas Fault. Um, you are a little bit off the fault, but, um, it's still a spectacular way to see the kind of, like, compressed waves of rock that have been jostled and, and deformed over millions of years by tectonic movement along the San Andreas.

Um, but I would definitely say that if that isn't in that, in that [00:55:00] list of top 10 road cuts, it should be. But, um, but yeah, so I think the realization that geologists are visualizing internal layers of the earth in a way that architects are doing for the internal layers of a building, um, was a really exciting thought process and led to Um, at one point I was teaching a class at Columbia GSAP that was looking at the San Andreas Fault as a setting, um, where the idea was to, for students to design a San Andreas Fault National Park, and, um, it was also there too where I challenged some of my students to, to develop representational techniques that could be applied to architecture and the earth, so that you could see, you know, what was beneath your feet, but also, uh, what was inside a building.

Um, and then, so, when I started looking into these USGS, the United States Geological Survey, um, the, these documents and reports that have been, that are all uploaded and free. It's one of the reasons why I'm a, you know, patriotic taxpayer, because I feel like, you know, we have incredible government services, um, and, and I'm a fan of those, but [00:56:00] so the USGS has this amazing archive of, of free geological research that's published, and, uh, the ways in which they, the, the geologists and the geological illustrators that they worked with, Figured out how to represent complex landscapes are incredible and I think that if you could show those or adapt those to an architectural setting Um, there are things like the, one of my favorite techniques is called a fence diagram Um, which is basically you're taking a section not just through one hill or one part of the landscape You're taking a section behind it and then a section behind it But then you're also taking sections perpendicular to those So you end up,

*Evan Troxel:* it's

a grid of sections,

*Geoff Manaugh:* Totally, yeah, exactly, exactly.

And so, you know, you could imagine a fence diagram, a grid of sections cut through Boston or, you know, or cut through London, you know, cut through wherever you might want, cut through Cappadocia, the place in Turkey I just mentioned. Um, you know, the things that would be revealed by that is, would be absolutely incredible.

Um, and then also [00:57:00] isometric diagrams of mines, um, uh, maps of, uh, of mine tunnels, you know, that the USGS has produced, where You'll often have, you know, one layer of the tunnel in one color, or excuse me, one layer of the mine in one color, um, and then below that, uh, looking, you're looking at a plan, a sec, a plan of the mine.

Below that will be a different color, which will be mine level two, and below that is a different color. And you end up with these things that almost look like, you know, sort of, um, you know, abstract art meets a kind of mandala. And, you know, just the, the, and then as, as you know, from working in architecture, you know, um, mentally unpeeling what layer goes where and how they're connected, um, you know, goes back to the sort of the cognition stuff we were talking about earlier.

Like, it's a great way to just sort of keep cognitively flexible because you understand what you're looking at visually. And I mean, these tools then,

yeah, exactly, yeah, you're interpreting it.

*Evan Troxel:* like, it's like using AutoCAD, where different layers were just represented with different colors,

or different elements where, where, you know, you [00:58:00] had seven colors or eight colors that you would boil everything down to, but you knew exactly what you were looking at, just based on the color that the line was, right?

*Geoff Manaugh:* And, uh, I think that those kinds of things are beautiful to look at, scientifically communicative, and inspiring in terms of architectural thinking or architectural representation. And so, I still have unbelievable quantities of those geological, uh, materials, so I should, I should continue uploading them.

But, um, the, uh, the amount of stuff on the USGS website is, is unbelievable. And then, and then, and then, not only just those kind of 3D mappings, but even just, uh, or 3D diagrams, but, um, two dimensional maps that have been drawn that show the sort of weird fractal geometric forms that exist beneath our cities.

If you follow where the bedrock goes, or where the bedrock changes from one type of rock to another, or where it becomes topsoil, you get these shapes and lobes and outgrowths that look a lot like fractal [00:59:00] geometry, but are actually just what's beneath us all the time. And we just don't see it like that, because we can't peel away the soil, or for that matter, lift St.

Louis up in the air to see it, to look into the ground. But that's what's underneath St. Louis, you know, or that's what's underneath Oklahoma. Um, and also I find that many places that are allegedly quite uninteresting. You know, the, the fame, the famous boredom of the American Great Plains. Um, when you look at it in a geologic map, it's actually spectacular.

It's, you know, it's an unbelievably interesting place. And it goes to show that if you change how you represent something, you can often change your own level of interest in that thing. So to say that something is boring just means that it's been represented in a boring manner to you so far. Um, and there, there's a new way of looking at it and that, that those ways exist.

And so it's also exciting to see. Um, the USGS is a kind of a way of changing, um, yeah, changing how we think about representation and how we think about, uh, what, what we're capable of producing in terms of depicting, depicting the earth. But, um, but yeah, I mean, I think also then, you know, getting in [01:00:00] touch with geologists has, has been pretty exciting.

I've, I've, I've spoken with many geologists and, uh, plate tectonics researchers and all of this stuff informs my writing, my thinking. Um, and I certainly think it would be true for others as well, you know, to speak with people outside of your chosen field and get to know even just the vocabulary that those people use.

You know, like a fence diagram. It's an interesting, it's an interesting phrase to have in my pocket.

*Evan Troxel:* heard of that before

I saw that post that you had done.

*Geoff Manaugh:* yeah, and so,

*Evan Troxel:* I didn't know what that was called.

*Geoff Manaugh:* yeah, so getting, challenging your students to design fence diagrams of, uh, you know, buildings would be, would be quite exciting.

*Evan Troxel:* right.

Yeah,

you strike me as a very much of an inside out, like the way that you experience things, uh, you like, it's, it like you said earlier, it's spatial, I think a lot of architects are kind of outside in, we, we, We start at a very high level, we zoom in, zoom in, zoom in, zoom in, then we zoom back out, and then we zoom in, and then it's kind of this constant modulation between zooming out and zooming into the big picture and the tiniest details. And [01:01:00] obviously there's a spatial component to that and how all these things come together and spaces that people inhabit that are the things we actually create, but there's still kind of this aesthetic tendency that we, but you're talking about an experiential. Spatial, acoustical, right, light, like these are very architectural, like the very foundations of architecture, and I think it's so interesting to think about the spatial, they're not, They're not buildings, but they're still, a lot of times, they're man made things, like mines, like you were talking about, like subways, and different, uh, ways to convey people and objects through space, and mine shafts with, with carts, and obviously the shafts part, and it just seems to me like they're so experiential in nature.

I think that's really interesting, in the way that you, you even communicated, experiencing that chapel in Norway, right? It's, it's very inside. First, [01:02:00] outside, maybe second. I don't know. Um, but, but the idea of that experience I think is, is really the, the nugget of, of this part of the conversation because you don't get that looking at images.

Right? You just, you talked about that earlier. You, you, you can't just flip through Pinterest or Google or as it used to be magazines and books or in school we would do case studies. It was never the same as going to school. the place and experiencing it for yourself. And maybe even doing that multiple times. A recent, a recent example for me with this was, you know, I had seen images and I had heard other people talk about, um, the African American museum on the national mall, right in Washington, DC. And that's not the full name of it, but the full name of it is very long and I don't remember it exactly. So, uh, I'll, I'll put it in the show notes, but what an experiential. Museum to visit. I don't know if you've been there or not, but it's, it's, it's, you know, it's, I've been to the [01:03:00] Guggenheim in New York as well, and that is experiential, right? Like, it's like, go to the elevator, go to the top, and then work your way back down. And this one, it was the opposite. It's like, go to the bottom, and experience a timeline from beneath the ground, dark, and it still gets lighter and lighter, and, and it's, this progression through spaces on the inside is absolutely phenomenal.

Like, it blew me away. And it's not something you can take in in one sitting. Visit either, right? You need to go multiple times. There's so much content. There's so much to read. There's so much to think about. Um, I think that it, it is unfortunate that we are always so pressed for time working on projects and, and you don't get to take the time to really build your rapport with space as it were, right?

Doing these things to be able to then take that experience and apply it to your work that you do. Um, I mean, obviously people can choose to do that, but oftentimes it's like that these are the things that end up on the back [01:04:00] burner. But the work that you're doing, you're, it seems like you're very intentional about doing these travels, having these experiences. Um, if you were to, if you were to kind of lay that out for people, like how much time are you spending? I'm sure there's a blend, like you're probably working while you're doing this stuff too. But, but if

you were, the experience side versus the doing side, like what, what do you feel like you're, Your breakup is there, or the percentages of those.

*Geoff Manaugh:* I mean in terms of travel specifically, or

*Evan Troxel:* yeah, just, just like the experiencing of the, all of the different things that I see you posting about versus like the actual, like you're sitting down to write. And if you were

*Geoff Manaugh:* oh sure,

*Evan Troxel:* give some numbers to that.

*Geoff Manaugh:* um, uh, well yeah, I think that that number definitely changes over time. I think that, not that, and not in one direction, but there are phases in my life where quite a lot of time is spent more reflecting on things and writing about them. Whereas there are other times where it's very much more sort of doing centric, [01:05:00] so to speak.

Um, you know, where it's about the experience, it's about taking things in. Um, I find that when I'm traveling, one of the things that's so good about, and I like so much about being a writer is that it's quite difficult to not find something to write about. Uh, especially if you're traveling to a location where you're already kind of in Keyed up to see things because you're in a, you're in a different location.

You don't know, you don't know what's going on. So you're noticing more, um, very basic things that people take for granted as a, as part of everyday life, seem really exotic and strange. Um, you know, travel has that effect of heightening your sensitivity to detail. Um, and so if you also go, and that's even for people who aren't writers.

So if you, if you are a writer or a photographer or doing anything involving documentation. Um, you know, you'll begin to notice that, wow, I could actually write a piece about this building, or about this person, or about this place that I visited, or this landscape, or this historic site. Um, and so, it often means that when I'm traveling, I get to [01:06:00] see things that I might not otherwise have expected to see, or that I might not otherwise have gotten access to.

Um, because if you get in touch as a, as a journalist in town, you know, often it's, it's much easier to, for doors to be open to, to you. Um, and so that's one aspect of, of, of this that I like so much. So there's a, there's a, a friend and colleague of mine who, who I admire, um, who started an entire organization called the Infrastructure Observatory, um, because I can't remember this place he was trying to get into, but I, I want to say it might have been a data center.

Um, but the origin story was that he was trying to get a tour of a data center and they were like, why would we give you a tour of our data center? Who are you? Are you with an organization? And so about, he came away from that with the realization that, uh, all he, all he

had to do, yeah, so he started this thing called the Infrastructure Observatory, um, and then got back in touch with some of these people and, and, you know, got a group of four or five other infrastructure nerds together.

and all of a sudden he was getting permission to go inside places and see them because they were the infrastructure observatory. [01:07:00] Um, so I think that, you know, having a reason to see stuff is definitely, um, good for getting access to those places, um, beyond just showing up as a tourist, you know, and taking pictures and realizing that how cool it would be if you could see that, but you can't get in because you didn't, you didn't call ahead or that kind of thing.

But, um, but yeah, I think it's definitely, you know, with travel too, I mean, I do find that It's not all, uh, time off, you know, so I will often have days where I'll be in a great city or I'll be in a really interesting landscape or place. But I have to spend hours in the hotel room working on, you know, either a piece of writing that's due or preparing myself for what I just said, like a tour or an interview that's coming up later that day.

Um, and so, you know, it's not always, you know, it feels a little silly, like you've spent all this money to go to halfway around the world and you're sitting in your hotel room for five hours. Um, but, you know, that's the trade off, is that you have to get the work done and, and actually, actually do this stuff.

Um, and so it's a mix of, yeah, business and [01:08:00] pleasure, I guess you could say. But, um, speaking of the, uh, the African American Museum, though, I mean, one of the things that blew me away, spatially, specifically and only in terms of spatial, um, is just that, is just how much larger it is inside than it appears to be from the outside.

It's astonishing, actually. Because even, I've been back to DC several times since I was in there, and every time I drive past, or walk past, it always, it's always amazing, amazing to me, because it does not look like a large museum,

um, but it's an absolute cavern, it's enormous, so yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a nice, that alone is a nice architectural trick.

*Evan Troxel:* I knew you would like it because of the underground nature of the,

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah, yeah, well, any, any, any basements,

*Evan Troxel:* it's big underground. It's bigger than the footprint that is above ground, you know,

from what I can tell. I mean, I haven't studied any drawings, but that's my sense of it. It's kind of like the Griffith Observatory, right?

There's like,

you go into the planetarium, you go down below and you're underneath the front plaza. It's, it's kind of similar to that. Yeah.

*Geoff Manaugh:* yeah, yeah,

*Evan Troxel:* It's very cool. Um, there was something I was going to ask you about there. I'm trying to remember what it was.

*Geoff Manaugh:* uh, we were talking about travel, and workload, and [01:09:00] doing versus experiencing,

*Evan Troxel:* I was, I was, and I, I will echo what you're saying about starting the infrastructure observatory. That, that's what a podcast will get, uh,

an architect as well. I mean, basically I am a member of the press by having a, I don't, I don't even know what the timeframe would be, but I obviously been doing this for a while.

So I, I don't necessarily want to hinge it on a longstanding podcast, but I would assume also with your, with BLDGBLOG and things like that, like all of that helps, right. To be able to. Then apply for press credentials because I mean, whether you talk about it or not, like you're still a member of the press, right?

And

you then have opportunities to do things that the general public doesn't necessarily have access to. And so I would encourage people again to, if you come up with reasons to talk about this stuff, come up with reasons to write about this stuff, come up with reasons to draw these things and just put a name behind it.

And you

can also do the things that Geoff was talking about. I've. It's a first hand experience. It's great. [01:10:00] I think

it's absolutely fantastic. And those opportunities would not be available, and nor would I have foreseen them in any, and I still don't, right? But they

do show up, and I think it's absolutely fantastic to

have that ability to access those things that other people can't.

*Geoff Manaugh:* yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. I think that, you know, we live in a time where other people might be more inclined to take the influencer route, so to speak,

where, you know, you hear such nightmarish stories where somebody, you know as, as an influencer, oh, you know, I'm an influencer. I'm gonna depict your hotel room, so do, can I get a free, a free week in this hotel?

Or, you know, I'm gonna take a, I'm gonna upload a picture of my dinner to Instagram, so can I get 50% off the bill?

Um, you know, being an influencer purely to just get free crap from,

from, from places I think is definitely not the right way to go.

Um, but I think that, you know, having something like a podcast or a blog or a newsletter or just even just being, even if you're just a journalist for someone else's platform, Um, you know, you can still get access to places that you wouldn't normally get, get into.

I mean, I clearly don't [01:11:00] recommend that you take advantage of that and, uh, you know, put people out of time by pretending that you're going to cover something that you're, that you're not going to.

Um, but, uh, but I do find that, yeah, it's an extremely useful and, and great way to, to learn more about places and also I find people are very generous, you know, I think that, um, we live in a funny time, but I do feel like people are, they do want to share their experience in their life and their, and their, and their everyday environment and the things that they do for work and I, I often find that, you know, when I'm working on an article in particular, um, you know, people who do such interesting work that I can't believe that they're not inundated with requests to speak to the press or like, you know, They're practically like superheroes in my mind, you know, people, but they're people working on random scientific problems or people working in architecture offices or archaeologists doing something with technology.

Like in my opinion, they're celebrities and I can't believe they even will take the time to reply to me over an email. Um, but then I meet them and, and we talk and you realize that not a lot of other journalists have reached out to that person, you know, or not a lot of other people have actually expressed interest.

And I think as you'll, you'll find, I'm sure anyone [01:12:00] listening to this podcast will, will, will have found often your own family and friends. are a little tired of hearing your shtick. And so, you know, they don't want to hear it either. And so, you know, you might be the most interesting archaeologist in the world, but maybe your spouse is just tired of hearing about it, um, and doesn't want to talk about that anymore.

That's just work stuff. So when a journalist or a blogger or a podcaster shows up and wants to actually learn about and cover these things, I think that it's actually pretty refreshing and exciting for, for many people. And just kind of adds to a feeling of human camaraderie that is lacking when you're sitting at a terminal all day.

You know, just, uh, you know, in a, in a dark room, you know, where, where you're not interacting with people and you've got headphones on and you're staring at a monitor, you know, I think it's easy to lose a sense of, of, of human companionship and, and the idea that, you know, there are other people out there that are excited to know you and talk to you.

And, um, that's, and to have you around, I think that's just a really refreshing thing to be reminded, especially after the last four weird years of COVID and post COVID, [01:13:00] but,

*Evan Troxel:* My 18 year old son, you know, has a hard time striking up conversations with people and it's because of the way that he approaches it. It's like, what can I tell them about me? And I

said, don't do that. I said, ask about them.

Like your job is to learn as much as you can, but there's something interesting and unique and mind blowing about every single person out there.

And you have no idea what it is. Your job should be to try to figure out what that is about every single person you meet. Because I guarantee you, like, it's, it's something that will blow you away. Like, you

just have no idea what people have under, under the surface. Yeah, it's,

*Geoff Manaugh:* It's funny too, because I don't mean to give a more cynical reason for that, but it's also easier. Uh, you know, I find that if, uh,

I absolutely agree with what you just said. But in addition to that, if you can't convince your 18 year old son, I would just say, it's a lot easier, man. Like, if you go to a cocktail party and you don't know what to say, like, just ask questions.

You could be there for three hours. And also people will then remember you as a really fun person, because you'd [01:14:00] ask them questions. And, uh, like, oh, that person was really interested in me. And they'll, you know, it's a, it's a fun thing. But yeah, if you, if you aren't feeling social, I feel like that's the other thing to do is just start asking people what they do.

Oh, did you grow up here? You know, what are you working on now? You know, have you, you know, they're just stupid little small talk questions that, um, allow you to actually just sort of not have to come up with something interesting to say. And, um, I find that 80 percent of, uh, cocktail party banter for me is that, you know, it's just, uh, asking people things about the world.

But I agree, then you get to the less cynical stuff, which is like, yeah, you actually learn genuinely interesting things. I mean, there are so many things that I've written about, um, or think about, or have popped up again in my work or in my life, are just random throwaway comments from someone who had a bizarre line of work, or had a strange experience, um, or was going through something with their family that it just was so dramatic and bizarre that I, you know, I still think about it.

Um, and then, and then that's where, that's where the non cynical value of talking to people is. [01:15:00] It's just fascinating to realize what other people are going through. And especially when you realize too, that like, if you're going through a bad spot, and then you realize that other people are too, or that they've gone through that, and they've come out of it.

It's also just a way to remind yourself that you're not alone, and you're in the difficulties of life, because there are many of them. And it's, uh, it's easy to be, to get that feeling that somehow you've been singled out for, um, like suffering or badness, but it's just not true. You know, life is a very difficult, constantly aggressive, um, sort of threatening environment to, to be in, and it's, it's, it can be reassuring to know that other people experience that too, but that's, that's a different conversation, so I'll just leave it at that.

Oh,

*Evan Troxel:* I'll give an example of, of this wild phenomenon, right. And, and this just happened like two days ago. I, I met a guy down the street at a outdoor food place and I, I'd follow him on YouTube and I was like, Hey, I recognize you. He's like, Oh, cool. Nice to meet you. You know, I'll follow you back.

And that was it. It was just like So then [01:16:00] I, I started looking through his videos on Instagram and I see him doing a 50 mile trail run with another guy that I'm familiar with, an acquaintance of. And so I, I then see that guy that he's running with. And I was like, Oh, I saw you in a video with this ADU guy.

And I, I was like, so, so you're a, you're a endurance runner. He's like, I had no idea that he's an endurance runner. Well, it turns out that he ran the Pacific Crest Trail in 51 days.

Straight record holder. Like this guy is a better than Olympian quality. And I had no clue. And I found this out and then now I'm doing the research, right?

I'm like, look, I look,

it up. It's on the fastest known time website. They're making, they're making, they're producing a documentary about it. And he ran the Pacific rest trail from the border of Mexico in the U S to the border of Canada in the U S in 51 days straight, no rest days, 50 to 60 plus miles per day of running [01:17:00] fully supported just by his wife and kids in an RV.

Right?

So, some days he's off in the trail, in a bivy, just, you know, in a very small pack, but, but this guy just goes and goes and goes and goes, and I had no idea. Right? And it, and how would have, I, I was like, Hi, I'm Evan. Hi, I'm Timothy. Oh, you're a runner? I'm not, I'm not a runner. I didn't, I don't care about running at all.

Right? But, but I, I asked him about his running and it led to this. just, he blew my mind with, with what he's capable of. And I thought that was such an, and, and, and now I get to tell it to you on this podcast. I just thought it was so interesting that, that like all of the, the conversation led here, but anyway, it's really interesting. So

Geoff,

yeah, it is. Um, so tell us what's next for you. We'll start to wrap up the conversation here, but what are you, you, you mentioned you're working on another book. Uh, obviously you're doing, you're doing other things too, but give us an idea of, of where you're headed

in the, the near future.

*Geoff Manaugh:* Um, yeah, I guess I'd say in the, in the near future, uh, of, I still have a couple active [01:18:00] Hollywood projects. So, Fingers Crossed, Knock on Wood, do, you know, whatever, whatever it takes to, to get these, uh, one's a TV show and one is a, a feature film. Um, but they're, they're still plugging away, uh, and, uh, I'm, I'm optimistic, but they're based on two short stories of mine, so it's based on fiction.

And, um, and then, just, again, in the near future, uh, yeah, then I'm working on this archaeology book, which has been absolutely a blast in terms of reporting. Um, for me, specifically, archaeology was the, you know, when people ask you what you thought you were going to be when you were seven, um, or nine, or eight, or whatever the question might be, um, you know, for me, it was an archaeologist.

I was, I was, I was just totally fascinated, yeah, by abandoned cities and ruins and temples and artifacts. Everything about it just blew me away. Um, but, uh, so for me, it's also just exciting to be covering a topic that, that I'm excited about, but, um, but it's also architectural, so it's specifically looking at.

Um, different ways of representing the past of, and, and buildings that are no longer standing, but they're [01:19:00] still, they are still present if you use the right instruments. Um, and so I just got back from a long trip in April where I was hanging out with geophysicists who have designed experimental electrical devices that can see through the floors of cathedrals.

Um, there were some people that are working on an autonomous ground vehicle that can find Viking settlements. buried Viking settlements, uh, you know, it's, uh, and that's, that, that's on top of some research I was doing, uh, for the same, for the same project, uh, a couple of years ago where I met a guy who wants to basically start a kind of European space agency, but that's looking down instead of up.

So it'll be a terrestrially focused, archaeologically, uh, informed subsurface agency. Um, so I'm putting all that together into one book and, uh, I still have some travel and some, some likely some telephone interviews in some cases, just to clarify some details. Um, but I've just seen some devices and machines in person that, that blow me away.

I've met amazingly interesting people who again, in my opinion, are celebrities. [01:20:00] And I met them and they were like, yeah, no one's, no one's asked us, like, you know, we are, there are not a lot of journalists who are interested in what they're doing. Um, but so I'll be working on that for the next probably year and a half and, uh, some more short fiction that I hope is coming out soon.

And, um, then of course, like personal travel that I don't think will be too interesting to either the listeners of your, of, of your podcast. But, um, trying to stay busy and, uh, succeeding, at least at remaining busy. And, uh, we'll, we'll see. Uh, I don't know if I'm succeeding at success, but We'll, we'll, we'll see how that goes.

*Evan Troxel:* from, from the out, outward looking in, it looks like you're having a great time. And that to me looks like success. I have to imagine that you're a fan of Atlas Obscura.

*Geoff Manaugh:* Oh yeah, sure. Of course.

*Evan Troxel:* that, that just seemed like that's a great, just for anybody who doesn't know what that is. It's a fantastic website and there's, there's book version as well.

But if you are ever traveling and you want to take the road less traveled and find the ruins that exist, that have just been kind of forgotten [01:21:00] about or are neglected, it is an amazing resource to,

to find cool stuff, uh, that is kind of in the realm of what we've been talking about in this episode.

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah. Um, briefly, uh, I don't know if there'll be time, time, but uh. I also just want to say, just plug very briefly, my wife is also a writer and just put out a new book, uh, it came out about four weeks ago. Um, but it's called Frostbite and it's about how refrigeration has changed food in cities and that kind of thing.

Um, but I mention it because, uh, even though it's about basically the science of food preservation, Um, there are so many urban and architectural, uh, takeaways and, and sites of interest in, in, in the book, everything from, Um, ice caves that used to be used and pits where, uh, snow and ice would be stored, natural snow and ice would be stored with food to, to keep them, uh, fresh over long periods of time.

Um, to the point where actually one archaeologist had a, has a theory that one of the reasons why there are so many myths of, of little people living around the British Isles, um, you know, hobbit like creatures and [01:22:00] folkloristic creatures. Um, is actually because ice caves, uh, you know, used to be, uh, you know, carved into a hill with a tiny door that was just enough to reach in and take snow and ice and put some food in.

And so you'd have little hills all over, all over the British Isles with tiny doors in them. Um, you know, they sort of looked like, uh, you know, looked like, uh, Middle Earth.

Um, but, you know, we got access to places, again, that, like, just to continue this theme, um, that blew me away. Like, uh, there's a, there are caves and mines all over the Midwest, uh, especially in Missouri.

Uh, that have been turned into gigantic food storage, uh, facilities.

And so, you know, like the nation's frozen pizza is basically inside mines and outside St. Louis.

And, um, these places are huge, you know, so we drove around for, for not hours, but for 20 to 25 minutes just driving around in a Tacoma. Uh, you know, with these huge pillars holding up the earth's surface above us.

And then just like, yeah, underground and then five to six floors of, of, uh, shelving holding Kraft cheese and ice [01:23:00] cream and all the, all, basically the nation's food supply, you know, is being held inside these huge, um, artificial, uh, caves and mines in, in, in the, in the American Midwest. But, um, so I could go on for a great detail, but it's, it's a great book and it's exciting and it's also, um, Evidence that even something like refrigeration, um, is going to have architectural implications.

And you can still come back to that spatial question and that architectural question. Um, you know, it really does underlie almost everything. And, um, that's just one major takeaway I would, I would say to anyone listening.

*Evan Troxel:* I will definitely be checking that out. And if you could just say her name and the name of the book one more time, and I will include it in the show notes so people can just click, but

*Geoff Manaugh:* Sure, it's called Frostbite and it's by Nicola Twilley.

*Evan Troxel:* Nice.

*Geoff Manaugh:* I can, I can text it to you as well.

*Evan Troxel:* Okay, sounds good. Um, I will put links to BLDGBLOG on, on there and your Instagram. Is there anywhere else that where

people can follow along with, with what you're working on?

*Geoff Manaugh:* Um, I mean I've been, for now I'd say that's probably good. Uh, you know, I do have an ex slash Twitter account, but I don't really use it, and [01:24:00] um, I've been playing around with SubSack, but it's not really architecturally relevant, ironically. It's just like me randomly writing crap, so uh, you know, I'm not sure I want to institutionalize that yet, but um, but uh, but yeah, I'd say, uh, yeah, Building Vlog and Instagram I think are good, good, good places to go.

*Evan Troxel:* Fantastic. Well, Geoff, thanks so much. This was great catching up with you. I know we went

all over the place with this conversation, but I think, uh, you know, it was well warranted. This was so many fun, interesting things to talk about here. I couldn't not do it. So, and, and congrats on 20 years of BLDGBLOG.

That's incredible.

*Geoff Manaugh:* No, thanks.

*Evan Troxel:* And, uh, if, if you could post a little more often than every six months, I'll just

put in a vote because I love the content that you put on. The, the latest article that you posted right around the 20 year anniversary is absolutely fascinating. Like, it's just, and I don't, we don't need to spoil it.

I would love it if people would actually go to your website and read this article and see the incredible imagery that goes along with it. Um, it's just, it's, it's really fascinating [01:25:00] stuff. And so if you're,

if you're interested in the conversation that we've had today, you will definitely find Geoff's articles just as interesting.

So thanks

so much for hanging out

*Geoff Manaugh:* Yeah, thanks for having me back.

Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine

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David Benjamin and Thomas van Haren join the podcast to talk about the journey of creating sustainable building materials using mycelium, the history of their partnership and the evolution from demonstration projects to scalable solutions, insights on the importance of digital workflows, the challenges and innovations in building facades, and the incredible versatility of mycelium as a materials platform.

We also talk about the potential of mycelium to revolutionize various industries and the urgent need for scalable, carbon-negative solutions in architecture building materials and beyond.

Episode links:* Ecovative website * Autodesk Research website * Autodesk on LinkedIn * Path to Net Zero: Validating New Materials and Strategies for Decarbonization (Autodesk University seminar) * Decarbonize Architecture: Mycelium Fungi as a Building Material (Autodesk University seminar) * Fantastic Fungi documentary (Wikipedia) * Project Phoenix Modular Housing Shows a Sustainable Way Forward (YouTube) * TRXL 159: ‘Project Phoenix, Part 1: Design’, with David Benjamin and Ryan McNulty * TRXL 160: ‘Project Phoenix, Part 2: Prefab Modular’, with David Benjamin and Andrew Meagher

About David Benjamin:Architect David Benjamin leads applied research on Net-Zero Buildings at Autodesk Research. His work combines research and practice, with a focus on an expanded and actionable framework of environmental sustainability. Over the past several years, his team has explored generative design, low-carbon materials, and re-usable design intelligence for the built environment.

About Thomas van Haren:Thomas van Haren is Ecovative’s Chief Operating Officer, where he is responsible for the raw materials and mycelium composites business lines across the United States and Europe. Ecovative is scaling its mycelium technology to provide an alternative for industrial farming and to replace plastics. We harvest delicious bacon without the pig and biofabricate leather without the cow. Thomas graduated from the London School of Economics and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

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We also talk about the potential of mycelium to revolutionize various industries and the urgent need for scalable, carbon-negative solutions in architecture building materials and beyond.

To learn more about David Benjamin and Thomas van Haren, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Ep 66: The Journey and Impact of Evan Troxel in AEC PodcastingI was recently invited to be interviewed on Brand Groupies' AEC Buzzmakers series about my podcasting work. It was a great opportunity to share stories and revisit how my shows came to be.

🎙️Carey Balogh, the host of the Brand Groupies Podcast, has also been on my TRXL podcast. You can find out more about her and her team by listening to that episode here.In this conversation, we talked about:

The evolution of the Archispeak Podcast
Building a community through podcasting
The launch of the TRXL podcast and its impact
The concept behind the Confluence Podcast
The value of networking and personal connections
Podcasting trends
AEC leaders and podcasting
Opportunities afforded through podcasting
Behind the scenes of guest selection on podcasts

‎Brand Groupies: #66: Evan Troxel of TRXL on Apple Podcasts‎Show Brand Groupies, Ep #66: Evan Troxel of TRXL - Jul 23, 2024Apple PodcastsListen on Apple Podcasts

66: Evan Troxel of TRXLListen to this episode from Brand Groupies on Spotify. Evan Troxel is an industry-leading design and technology expert passionate about connecting people. He is a licensed architect in California with over 25 years of architectural design, working on large public projects in K-12 schools, higher-ed, and civic projects for clients. Evan is best known for his podcasts focusing on the AEC industry. He brings his experiences together on the Archispeak, TRXL, and Confluence podcasts. Evan also has experience in architectural education. For over a decade, he was a professor of emerging technologies in the architecture department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona), and Mt San Antonio College (Mt. Sac) in southern California. Evan strives to better the architectural community in meaningful ways.https://www.trxl.cohttps://brandgroupies.comSpotifyListen on Spotify

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David Benjamin and Andrew Meagher join the podcast to talk about prefab modular and the construction of Project Phoenix in the second installment of a three-part series of episodes on the podcast. In this episode, we take a comprehensive look at Factory_OS's modular manufacturing approach to residential construction and its partnership with Autodesk which aims to create sustainable and affordable housing. Today we talk about the role of data-driven design, innovation throughout all stages of design and construction, and the collaborative approach to address housing and climate challenges with this project.

Episode links:* Andrew Meagher on LinkedIn * Autodesk Research website * Autodesk on LinkedIn * Factory_OS website * Factory_OS on LinkedIn * Project Phoenix Modular Housing Shows a Sustainable Way Forward (YouTube) * TRXL 159: ‘Project Phoenix, Part 1: Design’, with David Benjamin and Ryan McNulty

About Andrew Meagher:Though originally from New York, Andrew has spent more than half his life in the Bay Area. His background spans more than thirty five years in the architectural profession. While his early career focused on global retail design and rollout, he has since devoted the last twenty five years to addressing California’s critical housing needs.

Andrew has directed projects across many disciplines, including master planning, mixed use, supportive, affordable, workforce housing, veterans and senior living, and new concept development.

As a founding member of Factory OS and Chief Design Officer Andrew is responsible for the creation of Factory OS’s standardized volumetric designs, specifications and building systems and oversees all architectural & engineering activities. Andrew collaborates intensively with developer design teams, city agencies, non-profits, and community stakeholders through every stage of the process from feasibility through fabrication. He strives to maximize efficiencies that volumetric design affords, while creating thoughtful homes focused on the wellbeing of the resident and which foster environmental stewardship.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this on YouTube:- YouTubeBekijk je favoriete video’s, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.YouTube

Episode Transcript: *160: ‘Project Phoenix, Part 2: Prefab Modular’, with David Benjamin and Andrew Meagher*

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Troxel podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and in this episode, I welcome Andrew Meagher and David Benjamin to the podcast. Andrew is a founding member of Factory OS and their Chief Design Officer. He is responsible for the creation of their standardized volumetric designs. specifications and building systems and oversees all architectural and engineering activities.

As you heard in the last episode, David leads applied research on net zero buildings at Autodesk Research. His work combines research and practice with a focus on expanded and actionable framework of environmental sustainability. Over the past several years, his team has explored generative design, low carbon materials, and and Reusable Design Intelligence for the Built Environment. Today we're talking about Prefab Modular and the construction of Project Phoenix in the second installment of a three [00:01:00] part series of episodes on the podcast.

In this episode, we take a comprehensive look at Factory OS's modular manufacturing approach to residential construction, and its partnership with Autodesk, which aims to create sustainable and affordable housing.

We also talk about the role of data driven design, innovation throughout all stages of design and construction, and the collaborative approach to address housing and climate challenges with this project. We also hint at the next episode in the series regarding the integration of plant based biomaterials in a novel façade panel system.

So before we jump into today's conversation, please do me a couple of favors. As always, if you are enjoying these episodes, please Please subscribe if you aren't already, both to the show on YouTube and in your favorite podcast app to let me know that you're a fan, it really, really helps, and if you're watching on YouTube, please click that like button too, that is a biggie, and if you'd like to get an email when episodes are published with all of the links and other [00:02:00] information about the episode, you can sign up for that at TRXL.co, which is also where you can find every episode of this podcast, including part one in this series.

This was a fantastic conversation with Andrew and David, and I hope that you'll not only find value in it for yourself, but that you'll help add value to the entire profession by sharing it with your network. So now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Andrew Meagher and David Benjamin for part two of the Project Phoenix series.

Evan Troxel: welcome to the podcast officially.

It's great to have you both here to talk about Project Phoenix today.

David Benjamin: It's great to be here.

Andrew Meagher: yeah, thank you for having us, Evan.

Evan Troxel: Well, let's kick this off with where this story begins on the manufacturing side. And so maybe Andrew, you can kick us off and talk about what Factory OS is and the involvement in the [00:03:00] project. I know you're a Key player in this project and, uh, and then I think that'll lead us into discussion about the partnership with Autodesk to make this a reality.

Andrew Meagher: Sure, um, if I can just briefly, Factory OS is a modular, volumetric manufacturing platform. industrialized construction for residential dwellings. And so we'll do everything from workforce housing to affordable to supportive. We've now branched out into student housing and as well down into emergency housing.

Evan Troxel: Nice. And can you give us an idea of your background and what you do at FactoryOS?

Andrew Meagher: I was on the design side before Factory OS, before there was a Factory OS, and I worked on a first modular project with the founders, Rick Holliday and Larry Pace, and the success of that gave everyone the confidence. They had been looking into opening up their own factory prior, but the success of, the successful outcome of that project really reinforced that [00:04:00] opening up their own factory would be the right way to go.

So we, they opened up a factory here on Mare Island in 2018, and they asked me if I would head up the architecture and engineering department. So I've been with the factory since essentially before there was a factory, and I've been in charge of the specifications, of the fabrication drawings, overseeing design of certain components and assemblies and sub assemblies.

I also work with outside architects and our own production team. Consultants that are, we call them friends to the factory. So as we iterate and bring new ideas, we're able to test it and validate it with

our consultants around us. And just to give us an idea of the coverage area, because I know factories, industrialized construction, a lot of times it's, it's regionally based. So give us an idea of the coverage that you guys provide.

So we're, uh, our coverage basically will go down to, say, San Diego up towards Oregon, and we've looked, we've gone as far east as Truckee and Tahoe. [00:05:00] Once we go further east, our trucking costs start to go up. And the local labor starts to go down. So that's been the limiting factor. We've explored work in Arizona, we've explored work in Texas, and each time it's come back that it wouldn't pencil.

Not to say that that won't change in the future, but those are the limits.

Evan Troxel: I'm a recent transplant to Oregon, Southern Oregon, uh, but you also mentioned one of my favorite places in the world, which is where I grew up, which is in Truckee. And uh, one of the things that always stood out to me about Truckee, cause I, I also lived a lot of my life in Southern California, where the winding roads up to the top of the mountain, very steep switchbacks, tight turns. And in Tahoe, it's not like that. It's like wide open freeways. I mean, there's a grade to it, but they just, and so like trucking wise, I can, you know, bringing this back to where, where you were going, like, you, you actually can get stuff to that region because of logistically, you're not having to deal with extreme conditions on the roads.

I mean, obviously in the middle of winter, we just, I think we just read about [00:06:00] this, you know, it was a couple of weeks ago that they had a giant closure up there because of the storms. But for the most part, it's just like a straight shot. It's pretty nice. Well, you actually bring up an interesting point. So, the reason why Modular, uh, Was appropriate in Truckee was not so much that we were bringing down the cost, although we were, it's that we were able to shorten the construction schedule so that they could build before. So they set the foundations right before winter, knew that winter would come, took a pause, and this was all planned.

Andrew Meagher: And then as first in the early spring, the mods were here, ready to go. And then they were able to build the, the project in

about a year.

And you do speak about the, the winding road. So that was one thing that, cause we built our truckie project. It was like our third or fourth out of the gate here at the factory. And one of the things we wanted to confirm is that if we installed the windows here at sea level, that when they went up and over the mountains that, you know, whatever thousand feet that it was, that there wouldn't be a pressure differential that would then affect the Argonne gas and whatnot.

So we worked closely with the manufacturer to make sure that

there wouldn't be any issue and we [00:07:00] were fine. And then from a

Evan Troxel: Because you're going from zero elevation to 70, 200 feet or seven. Yeah. Like Truckee's pretty high up there. So

Andrew Meagher: And then, uh, from a trucking perspective, the logistics were fair. I will say they were fairly straightforward. You know, we, we give our different trucking companies, our location, the destination location, they'll project a route and tell us if any closures need to happen or if there's a escort vehicle or a pilot car or whatnot.

And it was, I would say it was pretty standard for what

we do for most of our product.

Evan Troxel: I'm sure we'll talk more about logistics as we get into this conversation, but I, David, you've been incredibly patient. Thank you so much for the extended intro there. Uh, but I think it, it's great to kind of set. Set a backdrop for the conversation today. So, David, please, uh, introduce, uh, the project from the Autodesk perspective, and I know there was a partnership early on, on the Project Phoenix project.

So maybe you can just tell us a little bit about that.

David Benjamin: Yes. Sounds, sounds good. And, and by the way, I, I always [00:08:00] love, um, hearing Andrew talk about anything, so I'm glad to wait here.

Andrew Meagher: Well, likewise,

David.

David Benjamin: but, uh, so, um, you know, I think Autodesk, um, saw the benefits of, industrialized construction and the work that Factory OS was doing pretty, pretty early on. And Autodesk became an investor in Factory OS, um, several years ago.

And I think there was a kind of shared idea that all of the spirit and practical innovations that Factory OS was doing to make housing more affordable, constructed quicker. In a super scalable way and also sustainable, you know, are things, you know, those are things that shared in the, in the vision between FactoryOS and Autodesk and really trying to demonstrate what's possible to [00:09:00] raise the bar for the entire industry.

Um, then I think probably Andrew, it was about a year and a half or two years ago as the relationship developed and, um, you know, between Autodesk and FactoryOS. Um, we saw the potential opportunity to really test out, um, some new ideas, some ways of pushing the limits of what had been done before to test that out on a real world project that you at Factory OS, um, and your development arm had been, you know, figuring out, you know, that, that we're now calling Phoenix.

And I think that really allowed us to kind of. Supercharged some of our more direct collaboration and work together, you know, and, and I've always learned best by, by doing, you know, project based learning and I, think, this

Andrew Meagher: most do. I have to agree with you. Everyone here at the [00:10:00] factory, we, we learn by doing. And we don't, we

don't hesitate to do.

David Benjamin: yeah, exactly, and you're a great model in that. And so we thought, hey, together, let's, let's actually.

See what we can, we can do together, you know, in this, in this real way, but also I always appreciated Andrew that, that you and, and Larry and others at Factory House thought of Phoenix as an innovation village. It's like a real world place where we're going to try out some of these innovations and we're going to, we're going to see if we can move the needle a little bit.

And, and that's super bold. I mean, you, you know, I've, I've. I've worked as an architect for a while now, and you don't always get the, the project and the client who's willing to say, let's treat this as a, as an innovation. Let's do some things here for the first time that haven't been proven out before.

And so that was especially exciting for me to work with, to work with [00:11:00] you and the team on that.

Andrew Meagher: and I think it was exciting for all of us. I mean, you, you did hit upon something that, uh, Autodesk and Factory OS, our values were aligned, you know, in, in a really substantive, meaningful way about lowering the cost of housing and who we're trying to lower it for. So it isn't just, let's bring down the cost of housing and if it's luxury housing, so be it, like, like we don't, we don't care.

It's, we come from a background of wanting to do affordable, supportive, you know, uh, housing for, and workforce housing. And then also where we could, to be more sustainable. And the Phoenix site was actually acquired, I want to say about a year or so prior to when we actually opened up the factory. So, We had it in mind that it was going to be some sort of modular development.

But at that time, if we made it just a modular development and we were done, we were thrilled. So when along came the introduction to Autodesk and the introduction to [00:12:00] your team, and the idea that we could make it this innovation village and actually have test out ideas amongst ourselves, We were very excited by that.

That was something that was brand new, you know, brought to the, brought to the effort we thought would definitely have a significant and a positive

outcome.

Evan Troxel: The idea of Project Phoenix. Coming to fruition through this kind of, uh, prototype, iterative, but then very real project is a really great story. And at Autodesk University last year, we got to see one of the modules on display along with a lot of other kind of supporting elements, including, you know, technology that, That went into it, but also materials.

Um, and then there was, like I said, a module there that we could walk inside of and actually see the output of the factory that gets shipped to the site. And I love the idea that there's actually, this is where the rubber meets the road, right? This isn't [00:13:00] just something we're talking about doing, but this is something we're actually doing. And putting that on display, I think, as you said, David, to inspire, to raise the bar, to inspire other people to show it can actually be done, but not everybody has a partnership with Autodesk, right? And, and to raise the bar, you, you really do have to take what you're learning as Factory OS and Autodesk and put that on display so that it, it raises the bar.

all boats. And so I'm curious, David, kind of what Autodesk's approach here is when it comes to that, because I know that that that's kind of an ethos of the company as well. And, and, uh, a previous guest on the podcast, Kian Walmsley said, you know, Autodesk likes to take 100, 000 technology and turn it into 10, 000 technology.

It's like some rough numbers, right? And make it available to a lot more people. And so I'm curious, is that if that's the same thinking with industrialized construction.

David Benjamin: Um, yeah, definitely. I mean, so, Um, I think [00:14:00] the, the, the idea is, is always, you know, with the things we're doing research on to try to prove them out, you know, in a kind of tangible way as the, the first time doing it, but always with an idea to, could this be generalizable, you know, to many other buildings, to many other projects, um, and, and even to, to many other, you know, Parts of the world and types of, you know, design professionals and engineering professionals, construction professionals.

Um, so, so I think this, this project and our work together, you know, followed that, that same general path. Um, I want to maybe take a quick step back and say that, um, you know, the, the, this project, like some of our other research has aimed to, like, think about some of the most, um, The biggest challenges, the hardest things to solve, um, but [00:15:00] also demonstrate them practically.

And one category of this, I think, was the housing crisis. And, Andrew, you're always so eloquent in describing the details of the housing crisis in California. Another aspect was the climate crisis. And that's something that, for me and my team, we've been working quite a bit on over the years. And so Um, I can describe a, a, a little bit more about some of the generalizable insights that we, and tools that we tried to create on, on this project, but I think it's helpful to understand that, that context.

Um, maybe, Yeah,

Andrew Meagher: Yeah, so, I mean, that is actually one of the motivators behind, The factory and why we felt we now is the time. There's a housing crisis that's been building in California for probably 30 or 40 years, depending on who you ask and, and, and how we got there. Right. So we've had a significant population growth.

So that's a factor, [00:16:00] but we also put policies in our way. that blocked and slowed down the ability to build housing. And I'm talking just from a planning department decision, let alone building code and title 24. And all these, all of these things are good, uh, to have in place. You want to have energy efficient buildings and whatnot, but they drive the cost up.

And then with fluctuating interest rates, you, you have fewer and fewer who are willing to take the risk to actually build. Then you couple that across the whole country. I think the number is about, there's a shortfall of 7 million homes in the U. S. at this moment, and I think, and you could, depending on who you, ask, you know, at least a shortfall of two to two and a half million homes in California alone.

So we're not going to conventionally build our way out of that problem. The, the, you can't legislate and say, okay, we're going to take off the guard rails and go ahead. Everybody just stick build until we're done. with industrialized construction, that's going to be one of the mechanisms, [00:17:00] one of the ways where we can start to have an impact.

It won't be the only way, but if we can start to build, and we are doing this now, two and a half to three homes a day out of the factory, scalable up to four to six homes at, uh, sorry, Two, two and a half to three mods a day, which is six dwelling units a day. So we, we're, we'll be able to do six, currently we can do six.

We can get up to eight or ten very easily within a, a day shift in just adding some tech, uh, some technology. Then comes in standardization of our specifications, standardization of our assemblies and sub assemblies, and truly that did take us a number of years to get there, to really find out. what works from an acceptable standpoint in the marketplace to what is a fast build on the factory floor to what is an optimization of the materials that we have coming in.

And now we're at a point in every six months our company is It's different because we're constantly [00:18:00] evolving and improving, bringing on new expertise and working with Autodesk on software that will, you know, help give guidance to that. And it's, those are the kinds of advancements

that are needed.

David Benjamin: Yeah, and it's

Evan Troxel: I'm going to steal some, I want to steal some words from you. I heard you say this before too, like, like Andrew spoke to the scale of what needs to get built 7 million homes and, and stealing from you with, we have to do that with zero carbon, right? So I would love it for you to, to jump into that side of it as well.

Yeah.

David Benjamin: um. We've got these different axes of the problem. So we've got the, the housing crisis and the climate crisis. And I'll, I'll talk a little bit from my perspective about the climate crisis in AEC in just a sec, but also I'm, I'm just thinking now we also have these components or this axis of like the physical innovation that we need and the digital innovation that we need.

And so this project kind of brought together all of those things, [00:19:00] you know, across, across those different axes, um, you know, with obviously FactoryOS being, doing all of this incredible stuff with the, the physical innovation, um, figuring out how to get that assembly line going and get all of the efficiencies of the factory built housing.

solve all the details, do the production, get the supply chains right. But then there's also this data layer and there's the digital layer. And we worked on that together in this project, another area where we have a kind of shared vision. Um, but back to the, the climate crisis. I mean, I've just been thinking for a number of years now about this kind of impossible set of numbers, uh, you know, which starts with You know, the very real and urgent goal of reducing global average temperature rise to 1.

5 degrees Celsius. I mean, that's what, when you hear people talk about science based [00:20:00] commitments and the Paris Climate Agreement and the United Nations, we're talking about 1. 5 degrees. Okay, so to get to 1. 5 degrees, we need to reduce carbon emissions. By about half by 2030 and basically eliminate them entirely by 2050.

Okay, so that's, that's a challenge in itself. Then at the same time, in exactly those same, about 30 years, you know, that we need to get to net zero, we're expected to double the built environment, take all the flower area you have today. and double it. I mean, it sounds crazy, but it's partly because of population growth and urbanization.

Some of the same things that are, that you mentioned, Andrew, that are driving a housing crisis. Um, and it, it basically translates to the world needing to create a New York City's worth of buildings every month, you know, this month, next month, the month after, [00:21:00] or another way to look at it, creating, you know, building, 13, 000 buildings every day.

So today, 13, 000, tomorrow, 13, 000, the next day, another 13, 000. So how can we possibly, uh, quickly get to net zero and at the same time, quickly, you know, build this many buildings. It's, It's, it's a huge challenge and what, what it, what it really means to me is we can't get there by incremental improvements.

We can't take the way we're doing things now. This is my version of what you say, Andrew, about stick build. You know, we can't just take the way we're doing things now, which we could say is the same as stick build, and just incrementally make it better 5 percent a year or some years we get 10%. We just don't have enough time to do that and still hit our marks.

So we need really radical transformations [00:22:00] in our physical world, in our digital world, in the way we're approaching this, in the speed of construction, in the cost of construction, in the carbon footprint of construction. We need reductions of carbon by like half. We need to be making stuff that's half the carbon emissions of traditional, and eventually Getting to zero or negative.

And, and so that's the kind of ethos that, that me and my team brought in. And that, you know, again, we found kindred spirits in, in the factory OS team of saying like, Hey, can we, can we really try to go for those goals

Andrew Meagher: And I think, David, the other thing, though, that was also key to all of us was the idea of habitability and that you're truly creating homes and communities and your designs are going into existing environments. So, it's one thing to say, okay, we've got to house this many people, we're going to build umpty dumpty buildings, they're going to be this tall, and we're going to shove them in there, and we're going to be done, and we're going to claim victory.

You know, that's a nightmare. That's a nightmare scenario. So [00:23:00] now, how do you then say, okay, we're going to do these other goals while hopefully improving habitability, making it better for people, knowing that they're going into sites that are a lot more challenging acoustically, environmentally, uh, you know, from a configuration standpoint, these aren't greenfield site opportunities.

A lot of these are either in urban areas, We're close to urban areas. And so we're pulling all of that challenge together. So what about daylighting? What about acoustics? What about views to the street, to the neighborhood, to, um, connections to it? Maybe if there's a park or a courtyard. So now we're going to do that.

We're going to look at cost. We're going to look at carbon and we're going to look at speed. If you took the best brains that the industry had to have, that is months worth of drawing, and iterating, and rejecting, and guessing, and presenting, and then [00:24:00] hoping that people believe you, and so, working with Autodesk, week after week, we would Turn out, you know, options, and they'd say, if we had software that looked like this and could computationally compare these things, analyze them very quickly, are we headed in the right direction?

And so that's what our collaboration was really about. So, you know, builders on our side who could give a thumbs up and thumbs down, expertise on their side from software and carbon analysis, and really start to create something

that could be shared at scale.

David Benjamin: Yeah. And to get back to one of your questions, Evan, like, so what, what What is, um, how do, how do we scale up some of the software side? You know, um, we really wanted to do those, those exact things that you were describing, Andrew, which is sometimes I describe it as like, um, you know, it's important in, in almost any project.

So this is the generalizable part to [00:25:00] be able to simultaneously look at things like operational carbon, embodied carbon. But also cost and also livability, which is a huge category. Each one has subcategories, but managing that complexity is difficult. That's one place where computers can come in and, and really help us.

There are many constraints of a site. There are many goals and sub goals for different projects, including these carbon cost and livability. How do you, you know, rapidly explore a lot of design space? And come out with designs that are, that are achieving these outcomes that, that you and the state, the whole stakeholder team has wanted that.

That's more or less true for housing. And this was true for Phoenix, but it's also true for other building types. And it's true, you know, in India as well as it's true in, in California. So we, we learned a lot from the specific [00:26:00] project, but then ma, you know, are aiming to make that very generalizable. To many other projects, even beyond housing and even beyond California.

Evan Troxel: And you guys are really speaking to a process change or a workflow change on so many different levels. Uh, we, when we look at the traditional practice of architecture and engineering firms and then handing off to construction and different delivery methods, a lot of times those are kind of trustless, uh, in those processes, right?

Because it's like we were, we're avoiding all of this risk by just, just looking at the things in our blinders, right here, what's right in front of us. And we're going to hand, we're going to throw that over the fence pretty much literally to have somebody else look at it and take it to the next level.

Or maybe there's a little bit of back and forth through a very contentious process of submittals and RFIs and change orders. And, you know, we, we've all been there and, and, and experienced that. But you're talking about having. Key players at the table at the same [00:27:00] time, early on the project, with a common set of goals, right, which is those outcomes, this kind of outcome based design that you're really going for, I think is a key driver for that, right?

It's because you're, you're looking at the end, and then you're trying to figure out how you're going to get there together. To, to achieve all those benefits and you have a lot of that logic kind of hard coded into the analysis engine, if you will, um, as you're kind of iterating through different design options and, and weights of, because Like you said, it's kind of hard to even maybe put metrics on quote unquote livability, right?

And so you said there's several subcategories in there, which I assume all kind of get different weights and you're kind of making adjustments and saying, because it's all a game of trade offs along the way. We know that, right? And so there's cost, there's carbon, there's livability, there's, there's all, there's the site, there's the environment.

Uh, right, there's all these different things kind of playing a big [00:28:00] game of tug of war, uh, to, because you can't, you can optimize as much as you can optimize for all of those factors happening all at the same time. And to your point, Andrew, like that, the traditional way of doing that takes a very long time to do for a very small number of options, right?

And so when you're layering in the Autodesk Research side of things and Autodesk Forma. and there's other players in the market on the feasibility side as well who are doing a really great job with this. But, but there's, there's this kind of new way of working. It's a new workflow. And I'm just curious from your point of view, Andrew, adopting that workflow, like seeing the benefits of it now that you've gone through it, adopting it is hard enough, but then actually committing to it and going through it.

Can you just talk about the benefits of what you saw happen throughout that process? Because I think part of inspiring the next versions of this for other people to pick this up. You also need to talk about that side of it [00:29:00] because it's not just like, Oh, just flip on the computer and it does. It's not that easy, right?

You actually have to make a lot of adjustments to your organization to even adopt these new ways of working.

Andrew Meagher: Yeah, and so a couple of things, at least. First, if there's an output, you want to know that you can trust it. And so that was one of the things working with Autodesk and us as a factory, and this context is important, is that if you went out and tried to do that on a stick built project, you were analyzing it as a, as a one off.

Mm hmm. And your data input is very difficult to get. It's nearly impossible because nobody tracks it. But at the factory here, we know absolutely every single product that is coming into the factory, the crew that is required to build it, and then what our waste is, our leftover, and what we do with that.

So when we create a volume, or when we were doing these different options and studying it, Autodesk was able to take our Revit models that truly are fabrication [00:30:00] drawings to a very high LOD. Every single stud is accounted for. Every single floor joist, every single sheet of drywall. So, and a waste factor.

So that output is of a high fidelity. So now we've got that level of certainty, we can then start to use the software and iterate and then have outcomes. and Larry Pace's construction experience. He could look at a simple, look at one of the sites, you know, have an L shaped building and five smaller buildings or five stories or four stories or what have you, and he will be able to say, okay, what did you say the construction cost was going to be on this?

All right, hold on. Let me come back. Yep. You're close. Nope. You're off. Something's wrong with your model. So we were able to iterate in that regard. What's we love about it. But I think any user. would benefit from is you have a higher degree of certainty and as a designer to have that kind of power where you're taking out some of your own guesswork and hand wringing because you're [00:31:00] hoping something's right and that when you go to present to a planning department or to a neighborhood group, those neighborhood groups, it's really, we live in a very contentious, difficult environment.

And so you, Historically, you'd go and you'd present and you'd say, well, it's going to bring daylight and we're going to have a park and we're going to improve acoustics and people, you're going to do a shadow study.

Evan Troxel: It's all going to be brilliant. Everything's going to be perfect,

Andrew Meagher: and, and people have to believe you. And I can tell you, having been through those presentations, most don't and it's really difficult.

So now to have a tool where it's objective and you can present it and you say, this is the data. that we found, and this is what we understand we can do. That is a game changing, level raising, uh, approach, and I, I think that's where the strength of all, but, but besides having real world data, if you're a developer, knowing, you know, hey, this is what my habitability is going to look like, and the reason why habitability is important, not just for the community, but if [00:32:00] you have your occupants that want to live there longer.

That improves your proforma from a rental standpoint and people who live there longer then create a community because they get to know their neighbors. And so it's a self fulfilling building prospect. So from a developer, from an investor, from a neighbor, stakeholder, to a planning department giving approval, to the architect doing the design.

These tools are hopefully used in the right manner, are going to be

very powerful and exciting.

Evan Troxel: Well, there's a lot of baggage in this side of the building industry, right? We've all, everybody knows about the quote unquote projects because of everybody can point at a bad example of construction that has turned into a really terrible part of the city, right? And, and these buildings end up getting torn down because they, they, to speak to your kind of long term renters and.

becoming a community, like that didn't happen. That actually happened in the worst ways possible. It became, became a terrible place to [00:33:00] be compounding on that. You're talking about these underserved areas where these projects are going to go. And I don't mean projects in the quotes anymore. I just mean like new projects, right?

And we're talking about leftover area that's between the tracks and the freeway. That is really hard to build on because of all of the environmental constraints, the noise, the, the pollution. Um, and so now we're, we have to figure out ways to build great developments in these underserved and difficult, challenging sites.

And, and the only way you're going to be able to do that is to reassure people through ICANN, through that objective data story that you're talking about. So, so David, I, I'm going to throw this over to you. Like, where's the data coming from that's driving these analysis? And, and because I think part of it is, we also have to reassure the design teams that are going to be using this, that yeah, it actually is trustworthy.

Where's that coming from and why can't, why can they trust it?

David Benjamin: Yeah, I mean, and those were great, [00:34:00] great questions. And, um, but, but I want to first return to something that, that, um, that you were saying, Andrew, it makes me think that, you know, we also shared this vision for, for this project, you know, from the beginning and through our, you know, various collaborations and work together, that the technology, um, is not going to be a magic button.

It's not just going to do everything for you, that the best technology is going to augment your human creativity and intuition. Um, it's going to automate some things, but it's going to free up your time to do other things. It's going to be interactive. So it's going to allow you to, you know, tweak the building a little bit this way and see what the results are, or see if, if you, you know, make that L shaped building.

you know, a right angle, how much sound does it let around the outside corner versus, you know, uh, you know, uh, a lesser [00:35:00] angle. And so we want it to be a very kind of interactive process. And, and, and that's partly the direction that a lot of Autodesk software has been going and that we worked on in this, this project, which is giving you like almost real time feedback.

on anything you're doing on a number of different metrics. Um, also allowing you to compare multiple metrics at the same time. So to see if I'm making a change, not only what is my score for the amount of noise reduction I'm getting, but also what is the carbon score? What is the cost score? What is the, you know, energy footprint of this new design?

So seeing all of those things at once. in a kind of dashboard in kind of real time. That's part of the vision that I think we shared there, allowing you and your team to do the work more quickly, more creatively, deliver housing that's not [00:36:00] cookie cutter, that's not, you know, recognizably second rate as a housing

Andrew Meagher: Right. I don't think any of our expectations or goals were we'd have this sort of wheel of decision making and that you just slide the levers around. And then when you were done, you got a product and then all you had to do was go build it. It was definitely a tool for evaluating different options at a sophisticated level within the input saying, okay, this, this gets us so far, but we know these other things.

And we're going to change the geometry, work on the facade, work on the volume of the building and setbacks and whatnot at a more granular design

level.

David Benjamin: Yeah. And then, sorry, Evan, I didn't fully answer your question yet, but the data, um, comes from different places for different things. So, you know, for, say, daylight, that's based on algorithms that have kind of been vetted over the years. And, you know, people are pretty confident about those. Um, noise has been a little more difficult, but we've been kind of building, [00:37:00] uh, you know, the algorithms around that and validating with, uh, Physical tests and things like that to get that, you know, uh, on par where you can trust the, you know, results coming out of that real time simulation.

But there's another level of data that I think is really important. And this is another thing that we explored, Andrew, for this project, you know, back to when you said, you know, you're already a factory and a shop and developers that, you know, these modules down to every, you know, stud. In the module, you know everything and you have data for that.

You have these really detailed Revit models. Um, one thing that we worked on together was what if in the very early stage of design, when you're just looking at a site and you're trying to figure out what can fit there. What if instead of the typical thing in software, you have to start with the kind of generic box and you're [00:38:00] extruding some shapes and, you know, maybe bending some angles and, um, and then later you might have to say, how do I fill that in with my, the things that I'm actually building?

So instead of that, could you, from the very beginning, say, I know what my building blocks are. I have, you know, unit type A, unit type B, unit type C, and I'm making my project out of these, you know, building blocks. So anything I start drawing is going to be composed of those building blocks. That's another level of kind of design intelligence informed by some versions of AI that allow for a quicker, more relevant type of early stage design.

In addition, something we experimented with was saying, Andrew, you not only have these, you know, different types of mods, and we're going to compose everything out of those types of mods, because we know you're never going to make something that's not out of those mods. [00:39:00] Um, but also, you know some types of designs that have worked well in the past.

And those are made of, you know, of certain types of mods composed with different adjacencies and rules of how high you can go and which ones go next to each other, which ones go on the corner, et cetera, which ones, you know, are single loaded, double loaded corridors, et cetera. So rather than, and you know, this has been a previous version that I myself have worked on in the past, try to encode all of those rules.

That's possible. And that could be really powerful, but it's pretty time consuming to like, you know, The yellow mod always has to go, you know, on the edge, you know, the purple mod has to go next to, or

Evan Troxel: And you have to think of all the exceptions, right? You have to think of all the

David Benjamin: yeah, and you allow

Evan Troxel: coding all that in is hard.

David Benjamin: so it's hard to code it in, but, um, and, and kind of no surprise because of where technology is headed.

Now you can take a few example [00:40:00] designs that have a bunch of logic built into that, even though that's not named or. Algorithmically programmed. We just take some example designs and then basically train a version of AI to generate new designs that are like those designs that you've created. So it's, it's like a lot of the generative AI.

It's learning patterns based on data. And then the system can start creating designs that are more like, you know, the factory OS way to do things. And we think that's a really interesting and powerful direction that not only are we going to compose your designs out of your building blocks, but we can compose your designs in the way that you tend to compose them before.

So we're not just making random,

Andrew Meagher: But building on the

David Benjamin: know, assignments, but we're building

on the successes.

of what's happened before. So these are way, and it's a long answer to your question, Evan, but that's [00:41:00] another type of data that we're looking at using more and more, which is. Past successes as data that we can use specifically for this type of project based on what we know you're working on.

And again, that was very specific for Factory OS, but that can be generalized too. Every type of project, every design firm has some of their past successes. And so can we, you know, create software that learns from those successes and creates designs more and more like that.

Evan Troxel: That's an important point because one of the things that you are, you're, you're not starting from scratch. You're not starting from a blank page. And maybe, Andrew, you can talk about factory OSes. Uh, like, like how many different modules you've, you've gone from your catalog. Let's talk about your catalog and maybe where that's been over the years, because that's, uh, it's again, it's a very important point because you can then take this very strict set of, this is our inventory and use [00:42:00] that as the basic planning blocks instead of saying they're just generic cubes.

Andrew Meagher: So, you know, our factory, we opened in, um, May of 2018 and we had four projects that came in. We had a commitment with Google. Four different architects, four different structural engineers, four different MEP. Every one of them coming to us saying, we, we know modular. And so as we started to build those projects, everyone had a different detail, a different assembly, sub assembly, configuration of what they thought was a good build.

And. Most of the time I would say that was true, but the inconsistency that we were hit with made it almost impossible for us to get any, any meaningful data out of that. It truly took two and a half to three years of working with people and taking baby steps, learning from, I'll say, and learning from the marketplace what it wanted.

Although I will say that, you know, Rick Holiday [00:43:00] came with 40 years of development and I've got 25 years worth of architecture design in the multifamily space. So we weren't ignorant on day one, but trying to then land on something that was truly going to be a marketable unit that you could then turn around and bring back to a client and say, will this work for you?

That was when it started to present that really in 2020. And we gained a little bit of traction, but we were still seeing architects coming to us with pre designed projects. And they'd say here, turn it, make it modular friendly, make this. And that really only worked so well. 2022, 2021, 2022, we actually, cause we do our own developments.

We had a number of projects built that clients could now walk in and see. And go, okay, yeah, I do want this. This will work. This is a construction document. If you will level, it's a product, it's a product with a price and we understand everything, every [00:44:00] aspect in it, and it's in Revit. So now we're able to, we go back to the marketplace and we have a couple of dwelling units.

We have about 27 different types of dwelling units that vary from, um, an efficiency dwelling unit to a, uh, studio, uh, urban one, we call it a borrowed light one. A true one, a two, and a three, and then we have some iterations with it's a three bed, two bath, that kind of thing. So we have all of these dwelling units, productized, we know everything about it.

On a day one, we can start the conversation right there, and then they can react. And they can come back and say, well you know what, if those urban ones, which are small, if you made them four inches wider, We would get better usage of the site and they'd be more habitable. Tell us how feasible is that?

Well, now we have all of our, our, our trust framing, our joists, our cast iron. I mean, this is a little boring stuff, but it's, it's [00:45:00] very impactful. And we can come back and sometimes a matter of hours. Now, even used to take a week or two. We're now down to hours and coming back and saying, yep, four inches wider.

It works. This is what you get. This is where we can put it. There is, you know, the cost change is minimal. Um, you know, we can look at our plywood sheathing from floor framing and ceiling framing, et cetera. We can, we have all of those metrics and analysis. So you're not just stuck with an acceptance of a day one product.

There are, you can, you can make them wider, you can make them longer, you know, there are things that you can do to adjust them. Uh, and there are rules, there are parameters to that, where if, you know, certain increase in width, it doesn't work. So we're worried that the catalog and the productization and the conversation is a lot more sophisticated and we're just seeing now we have a, we have a, a catalog unit.

Let's say our, our efficiency dwelling unit. We're on project number eight and it's just people like, yep, I want that. Our, we had a mod on the floor, our, um. [00:46:00] Urban One dwelling unit. We truly had, it was in production. We had a developer come in with their team and we said, here, give you a tour of the factory floor.

They stood in it and they said, this is, this is exactly what we want. We said, okay. And we had materials boards in the conference room like a week or two later. And they said, yep, materials are approved. That's just a, it's a whole different level of conversation, meaningful conversation that you're able to have, uh, with all the

different stakeholders and developers.

Evan Troxel: You're really talking about, you know, what, what I think would be classified as informed design, right? It's like you're in your factory is optimized for producing this catalog of modular, you know, volumetric, modular. buildings. And so that then goes into the software, into the rules, into the constraints, with the additional layers now of analysis, environmental noise, and all, daylighting, and carbon, and all these things.

And now [00:47:00] we can optimize it for the site. I wonder if we could just transition back to the actual Project Phoenix site now, Andrew, and you could just kind of tell everybody about it. Because I think one of the things here that, that's important about this story is. And so we're, we're in the process, even though we got to kind of experience some elements of this project before they're actually going to the site at Autodesk University on the expo floor, which was, which was great because it makes it feel real.

But this project isn't, isn't, isn't finished yet. Built yet. You haven't even started construction on it as far as I'm, as I understand it. So maybe you can just talk about the site, like the size of it and what some of the constraints actually are. And then we can maybe wrap up, which is talking about how, how the actual design came together on that site with your pre made these, this catalog of modules, plus the software and the analysis and the back and forth with the city, because another important part of this story [00:48:00] is how you are convincing.

The jurisdiction that, that's gonna oversee this, that like they can trust what you guys are, are proposing to them as well.

Andrew Meagher: So, They said we required the site. About a year before there was a factory. And so I, that was on the developer side. So I left the architecture side, went on the developer side before I then headed up the A& E department. So we, we were in the development office and I was, there I was drawing my little blue boxes next to the orange boxes and coming up with five, six, seven schemes.

Printing them out, Larry Pace pricing them, us getting Charles Salter involved, who's an acoustic consultant, and him opining on some of the configurations, and then us trying to, like, did we fit in enough cars, and that whole thing, back and forth, back and forth. Then there was a pause, because we were really then pivoting to focus on actually opening up the factory and getting that running.

Then, uh, We, we started to re engage, we actually had a couple of different architects look at it from a, you know, more sophisticated design [00:49:00] perspective, and then we involved MBH, and then we involved Autodesk, or, you know, that whole partnership started, and then all of a sudden, we were looking at schemes and options that we could not realize in any other manner.

And. Really arriving. And, you know, there were hundreds of schemes narrowed down to, I want to say maybe a dozen, then narrowed down to six. And then we landed on the one that we all agreed was in the right direction. And each one of those was having feedback from all of us is like, Oh, we want to make this adjustment for this reason where, you know, eventually we're going to want to add a roof deck here or not, or, you know, more.

Uh, balconies at grade, that whole thing. And so we, we went back and forth before we arrived at something. We said, yeah, this is truly going to work because one of our other goals is we have a, a smaller project or smaller effort product. It's 11 dwelling units. It's our most cost effective. It's a three story [00:50:00] project, um, that meets all the building code requirements and really does optimize for habitability while it, uh, uh, minimizes waste.

So we're not just. providing mods, we're able to provide a whole entire structure. We call it Moonshot, our whole, a whole entire building where we understand the concrete footing all the way up, all of those different costs. And if we put those on the site, what does that do to the site? And are we still going to achieve the unit count and the unit mix that we're after?

And the answer is with Autodesk's help and MBH's input and everyone's input from uh, Team standpoint, we were able, Tori arrive at a design where we said, that's what we want to build. And so that's

where we're at right today.

Evan Troxel: And how big is that build going to be? Like how many units? What is, what is the makeup of this

Andrew Meagher: So I, I really ought to know my metrics on this. I'm probably gonna be off by a little bit because I'm, it, I think we're at about [00:51:00] 225 to 250 dwelling units. And I, the, the site I'm gonna have to say is probably in the range. I wanna say it's about. 10 acres, but I could be off. It could be a little bit larger than that.

To me, it's, I don't, I don't look at things in terms of square foot anymore. Like we're, we're so focused on these, these other goals of habitability and community and carbon sequestration. Those kinds of metrics are, are immaterial,

you know, in our day to day conversation.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it just helps to kind of tell the story though, right, of, of the context of, of what you're talking about here, because you, you are going to be manufacturing these modules that are not going to be standalone little dwelling units, right? You, you're building large buildings, like you said, footing to parapet, there's multiple stories, there's lots of adjacencies, there's a lot of things to consider.

Andrew Meagher: So the, the, I'll call it the, well, on the West side, um, We've introduced this bar, and it's a double bar, and it's, uh, five stories, and [00:52:00] so that'll, that'll create the acoustic buffer that will not only work for the site, but will also work for the adjacent neighborhood, the immediate adjacent neighborhood, because there's a, there is a freeway, and there are bar, an elevated, um, rapid transit, um, So that, that acoustics just comes right over day and night.

Uh, so that double bar will work as that buffer. It will also, the orientation also does maximize for daylight to, you know, come across the balance of the site. So the, our smaller three story structures that I'm talking about, of which there are 10, those are not just sitting in the shadow. So we were able to orient those, give a street frontage and a setback, and then work towards having that setback mirror what was happening across the street with the existing homes, so that there really is a language to the street, and not just a

language of our site.

Evan Troxel: And there's another aspect to projects of this scale for sure, and it probably applies to just about any project, but the, the benefits or the impact on the community that [00:53:00] is surrounding it are real, right? And so there's, there's a beyond the property line aspect. And so when you're talking to the AHJ about doing this project there, how, how much of that came into the conversation as well?

Because you're going to

Andrew Meagher: It was, it was, yeah, it's, it was 90%. That's all they, you know, and rightfully so, right? 90 percent of the conversation is exactly that. And if I, if I lived there, that I would be exact asking the exact same questions. It's, it's right to do. You're telling me you're bringing in, you know, 250 homes.

Well, What's my day going to look like?

Evan Troxel: What's, that going to do to

Andrew Meagher: right. What's it going to do to my parking? What's it going to do to the neighborhood? Are you urbanizing it? Are you strengthening it? You know, and also on one of the side streets, there's existing, um, industrial buildings and there's a trapeze school in one of them. There's a maker space in another.

And so rather than just have the residential turn the corner, On the ground floor, we're, we're having maker space, so we're really trying to reflect [00:54:00] and, and work with the adjacent community there, and, and strengthen that, so it's not just a residential dwelling, residential community, because that's what we want to do.

It's trying to be contextual and strengthen everything that's around us. And that's, and that's what all of, all of the conversation is,

revolves around that.

Evan Troxel: And, and maybe David, we can, we can begin to wrap up here, but I, I'm curious from your point of view, uh, going back to the outcome based design and the goals that you set and where the project stands now in relation to those goals, is it meeting your goals? Is it exceeding your goals? Where, where are you seeing that from the research and the optimization and the metric side of things?

Um, uh,

David Benjamin: Um, that's a good question. I mean, in, in general, we have learned so much from this project and including Andrew from, from you and your great insights and, and care about what makes a [00:55:00] good place to live and what makes a good neighbor, what, what will make Phoenix a good neighbor to the other residents of the community?

Um, I was thinking, Andrew, I've heard you say before, like, Every six or nine months, the, the factory is different you've you cause you're always learning and in a way I think we've, um, we've adopted a little bit of that mentality as well. We're continuously learning and I think now Autodesk is in a position to have its software reflect that more, more fluidly than it used to.

So for example, Autodesk Forma has updates all the time. You know, it doesn't need to ship a new CD, you know, that you, you know, update the version in order to do that. So that software is always learning. The analysis is, is always getting better. New features are, are being tweaked and, and added. Um, and [00:56:00] you know, taking a step back things, the, the, the project has been a great success, I think, for us in.

living through the real world frictions of how to take some of the ideas and innovations, especially in the digital world and see how they can actually work out on this real world project. What are some of the things, um, you know, that are maybe too complicated that we thought weren't too complicated?

What are some of the things, um, that we didn't take into account when we started? you know, imagined how this would be used. You know, who are some of the players who, who don't like it or are even maybe sometimes threatened by the new technology or the new ways of doing things? Um, we learned from, from all of that.

So in that sense, in the, in the sense of this project, we wanted to learn from it and we wanted to get better from it. It's been a huge success. Um, I wanted to mention a [00:57:00] couple of other things because, you know, The project as a whole operated on so many levels for, for us, and I think for, for everyone. So, we were certainly interested in improving and applying our outcome based approach.

design software early in the process. How can we make things more efficient, more interactive, give the right data to all the different stakeholders, like you were describing, Andrew and Evan, you were talking about from the community board to all the different people on the design and engineering team and, and that software, you know, is basically at its best, giving everyone just more information to make better decisions.

It's not really. doing things totally for us. It's not replacing people, but it's give, it's basically a good platform for a more inclusive and informed discussion about how the project should be.

Andrew Meagher: Right. It's almost like if you're, if you say, Oh, here, we're going to market a product and here the product is [00:58:00] going to eliminate architects and take the headache out. And you're going to, you know, have this, you know, dollars based outcome as a, as a developer, you'd be completely misunderstanding what the effort is.

And, you know, come back to the very beginning of this, of our conversation. The daunting task that we have in the next 30 years about carbon and population and habitability and sites. This is these, this is tools and information. It's there. More people are going to be using this. It's not going to be taking

away work.

David Benjamin: Yeah, right. Then there's, there's no shortage of, of work to do. That's definitely true. Um, but I, I just wanted to, you know, we've talked a lot about that. Early stage design. And that's been a huge part of our collaboration and work together and something important for Phoenix and important for a lot of other projects around the world.

Um, but we also work together on, on some other things like, you know, how does the data flow? We talked about how it started with, you already had all of this data, [00:59:00] these Revit models for what you knew you were going to build. And then we flowed that into the early stage conceptual design, and then we work together on the right, you know, uh, versions of the, of the conceptual design and schematic design, and then that can flow back and did start to flow back into the more detailed design, including things like facade.

And then that also is starting to flow into stuff on the. on the construction floor, like tracking things, um, you know, looking at, um, you know, any discrepancies, identifying them early, um, you know, basically logging everything. And, and so that's another thing that we wanted to test out and learn from this project is, you know, for this project and for you as FactoryOS, you're, you're really inspiring and unique way to have.

that whole ecosystem there, right, right there on the same [01:00:00] project, right? Like, you, you know, everything about the project from the earliest stages and most general stages to the nuts and bolts and the construction. And so it was a great way for us to track that data flow across the project and, and learn from that.

Um, also, I, I just wanted to mention, and this is, A little bit software, a little bit, you know, the, the physical world, but it also speaks, I think, to the scalability. Yeah, I wanted to return to this, um, 12 unit, um, building that you're kind of

optimizing in a number of ways. And that I think is, is super scalable.

Um, but returning to the idea of the demonstration project or the kind of innovation village, one of the things that, that came up early on from, from factory OS, and we were so thrilled to hear this was let's use this project to go even a little deeper on [01:01:00] that 12 unit building. Let's, you know, we know we're going to have a few of those 12 unit buildings on this site, in addition to the bar building, as you said, but let's take three of those 12 unit buildings.

and do like a real world physical test of, um, as an experiment. So it's as if, you know, a biologist might make three Petri dishes and one is like the control and one has, you know, a slight change and one has another slight change and you're comparing them. In this project, we are having the opportunity through the vision of Factory OS to say, let's build that 12 unit building three times, mainly the same, but changing a couple of things and monitor, you know, what's, what's the better way to do it?

And that version of continuous learning and experimentation, I think was so inspiring. We dug into some of those details. We looked at which things are better for. Embodied carbon and operational [01:02:00] carbon and, and cost and livability in terms of maybe a passive house inspired version or a naturally ventilated version and not just thinking about it in, in theory, but literally, you know, building it in reality and testing it.

And that was also another inspiring thing that we learned from

Andrew Meagher: and to say, you know, that exercise, the, the level of information that went in and the output, we were talking not just about, um, fresh air, but the actual sizes of the windows and the sizes of the windows as they get larger impacted by an acoustic, you know, implication. And if you have a breezeway. Or you don't have a breezeway.

And if you have a breezeway, what that does to the building envelope and the thermal performance and the operational carbon, and what if you have different HVAC systems, so to have three different projects that we're able to digitally test and then build [01:03:00] and then validate and learn, and if we got something right, bring it to the next and truly iterate, uh, very unique opportunity for

all of us,

David Benjamin: Yeah. And, and again, it's. And I think there was, again, a great synergy because, you know, on the factory OS side, you wanted to continuously improve and learn about that 12 unit building. And on the Autodesk side, we wanted to test out our software, you know, beyond just like you're saying, Andrew, beyond just the conceptual design and the kind of stacking of boxes, but like, let's dig in and really understand how the size of the window impacts the comfort in that unit.

And, you know, if we have, you know, two layers of insulation or sound attenuation, what's, what's going to be the impact and how much, how many more, you know, materials do we need to do some of these things and what's the impact on the carbon footprint? So we really dug in in detail too, [01:04:00] and saw that we can get this dual benefit of the software digital world and the, you know, physical made world.

Evan Troxel: And you have this feedback loop built into your system that I think is, thank you for bringing all that up, David, because that, that is a, I think a lot of architects on the design team would, would look at that as a luxury to have a build side team who is so interested in continuous improvement, right? I think there's so many, uh, There's so much baggage in our industry, which is like, this is the way we've always done it.

What do you mean there's a new way to do it? And you're, you said some, I think, scary words, Andrew. Our, our factory is, is different every six to nine months. Projects in architecture world take years to do. And I think architects love a challenge. on their client's behalf, but it's very rare that they're willing to look at their own processes and their own business [01:05:00] models and the evolution that I think projects like this naturally That needs to be part of the conversation as well, because this is a new way of working.

We talked about process change earlier. This is a major process change, and at the same time, we have to address the current challenges of what's going on in the world right now, right? We have to address the shortages, we have to address the environmental challenges, and, and so, in order to do that, these things need to happen at a much more faster pace at a much larger scale.

And so maybe final question slash topic of conversation, but I'm curious because you guys are both coming at this from a different angle, which is, what do you think about business model changes in AEC when it comes to learning about new ways to work, new ways to address these challenges and how important is that?

And there's going to be a lot of, laggards in this field, right? Who are just gonna watch from the [01:06:00] sidelines for probably decades, right? And not make any changes. But for the ones who really want to address this challenge, who are very interested in making change happen, I'm curious what you think about, you know, advice you can give, lessons that you've already learned, um, what are some of the things, I know David, again, I'm gonna steal from something I heard from you before, which was, which was like, we don't, architects want to come in and their unique vision and the unique design challenge that they're willing to, that they want to solve in a very special way.

We're not talking about that necessarily with this kind of delivery and at the speed and at the scale, like, of course, there's still going to be elements that are special and design and really important. Like design is also function, right? It's not just the aesthetics. Uh, you talk about livability a lot, right?

So all of that, I think, still plays into this. But. But at this, at the scale that this needs to be addressed with existing building, building, uh, business models that are, are going to be kind of, you know, we're, we're going [01:07:00] to, we're going to hang onto those as long as we possibly can. Like, just talk about the mindset shift.

Talk about the, the opportunity here and the challenge.

Andrew Meagher: So I can speak to that pretty thoroughly, I think, in that I've been with the factory since we started and what I'm seeing from an industry perspective is number one, you don't come to the factory unless you already have that innovative mindset. You don't come reluctantly, you come with enthusiasm and validation.

And I'm talking about, you know, from the developer side, developers looking at this. Getting a tour of the factory and going, okay, this is what we want to do. Shortens my construction schedule, brings down my costs. I like the level of spec and finish. They get their architect involved in, I'm happy to say that most of the, gosh, if not all of them that we, that we architects that we work with are excited by the prospect and they're excited about engaging because one of the things we don't do, for example, is take away control.

We're there to [01:08:00] assist and we're there to really get the developer and the architect. the building that they want to have. And so, you know, how, how can we use our tools to get there? Um, So, there's a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of excitement, and the tools are getting easier and more intuitive to use. So, you know, younger architects are absolutely embracing this.

We're able to even build smaller and smaller projects than we ever thought. 50 mods used to be our lower limit of to what we could do in the factory before it just blew us up. Then we got that down, that number was then became 35. We now have two projects. There are mods using catalog, uh, elements in catalog studios that we're interfacing with outside architects and developers and owners and really coming up with inspiring architecture.

So it's, it's been, that hasn't been our roadblock.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

David Benjamin: I would just, yeah, to build on that, [01:09:00] say, um, I, I think there's, there's actually great opportunity here. So, one of the ways is that I, I think probably many architects know a version of this statistic and probably complain about it that, you know, a huge proportion of buildings that get made Um, don't involve hiring an architecture firm. Um, and so all of a sudden, here's a moment and a need and some technology that could allow for architecture firms to start claiming a little more of that proportion of projects that don't normally, You know, involve hiring an architecture firm. So rather than looking at the way things have been done, always been done and complaining about [01:10:00] and fighting over those 5 percent of buildings that are always going to hire an architecture firm, um, and competing with each other and being proprietary and closed and cold up, you know, hold off in your own world, you know, why not, you know, use this kind of reusable design intelligence, the things you already know, leveraged by some new technology and software, and start making yourself valuable to that 95 percent of, of buildings that wouldn't, wouldn't normally, you know, hire an architect.

I think that's a huge opportunity. It doesn't mean a diminishment in value or creativity. I think it's, it could be many things. And so it's. I think that's a great, a great place to go for, for, for new business models and new opportunities for architecture

Andrew Meagher: actually, even if I can speak a little bit more to it, we've all been there where you do a great design and then the, you know, [01:11:00] general contractor comes along and says, you can't afford it. And so then it gets VE'd and then you design it again, and then it might get VE'd. And then during construction, the subcontractor says, Oh, we can't do it that way.

And whatever it is. And so every step of the way is this fear and fairly real that what you envisioned, isn't going to be the final product. With what we're able to do now to having that higher degree of certainty, earlier on means if you have a design idea, it is going to make it across the finish line.

And rather than designing something that never gets built or designing something that you have to not go down that block anymore, because you, you can't, you can't, you can't look at it because it, your, your vision was never realized. We're, we're bringing a lot higher degree of certainty to bringing a

vision to fruition.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, that's a, that's a fantastic point. I've been through that VE process many times and it is painful, [01:12:00] absolutely painful. And to avoid that, right, which I think you're speaking to, to have the certainty up front in the data. And, you know, you, you can quantify these things in a much, Architects have, have rarely been in a position to be able to do that effectively.

A lot of times there, there may be one person on staff. There's probably an outside consultant. And then of course, there's a different spreadsheet, which lives in the contractor's world, which is, it's opaque, right? We don't know what's really driving those things. And so again, all of these kind of speak to the distrust in the system, but for you, for us to be able to have these.

That reassurance earlier on, I think really does kind of, it enhances the quality of the entire project, not just in the outcome, but also in the, the process that we go through to get there. And it isn't, there isn't that fear at every step of the way that this, this is going to get hacked. Right.

Andrew Meagher: You know, I,

yeah, go ahead, David.

David Benjamin: well, I just, um, speaking about potential for, for value [01:13:00] engineering, um, I wanted to, I wanted to just bring up one other quick thing. One of my favorite parts of the project where I, I learned so much, I think, from. From you, Andrew, and from Factory OS, which was about the facade. So the facade, I think, is, is an area where, you know, a lot of architects focus creative energy for good reason.

Um, often there's a lot of value engineering. And we, we add this, um, approach where, Andrew, I learned from you about the, the challenge of, you know, uh, building in a modular way. but then making the facade. And then together we, we explored some other kind of creative opportunities. So I wonder if you, if we could, Evan, if it's okay, just cover that really quickly.

Cause it's a great, another great example of like how we're doing a lot, but there's still so much to be done. And then [01:14:00] here, here was another area

Andrew Meagher: right. This was an area that I, this was on the mod that was in Las Vegas. This is one of the things that I think we're all so proud of is, A key facet, right? We build the mod, we build the volume here in the factory, it ships to site, and you've shortened the construction schedule. That's fantastic.

Once the mods are there, they all have to be stitched together with plywood and metal straps and hold down plates. Then you have to put a layer of dense glass sheathing on the building envelope, tying that all together from a fire perspective. Then you have to put waterproofing on it, and then you have to have your facade go over that.

All of that, your whole modular, innovative effort. Well, the day the last mod is set, all of that innovation comes practically to a screeching halt and you're back to a conventional construction technology iteration with all the risks and challenges that go with that, from weather delays and scaffolding that has to go up and the scaffolding is there so you can't do the landscape in parallel, so everything slows down.

And it was clear to us, [01:15:00] if we could get a facade panel integrated into the mod here in the factory. Or a facade panel that was designed in conjunction with the mods. So after the mods were set, this then came right on the heels of it. And if it could perform some or all of those tasks, could it do this structural stitching?

Could it provide fireproofing? Could it improve acoustics? Could it reduce the waterproofing? If we could do those things, where. actually bringing down the carbon footprint, right? We're not just VEing where, right, it's, it's V, end result. Yes. It's VE if you want to look at, you know, yeah, it's value adding.

Right. So we're, we're, you know, so that's the Holy grail. And we presented that to David Benjamin and his team. And we said, that's what we see. And so he initiated the, the team initiated this collaborative process that really has evolved over the last several years of what might that need to look like?

What, what are its properties? And so we're very [01:16:00] much in the throes of that, but mission accomplished. This is just our iterative. That's how we are. We crawl, walk, run, right? We're very conservative that way. We don't want to just leap to the end and be this great company with promising everything. So step one is we're going to make a panel and we're going to treat it like a rain screen.

And can we get it on the, building and can it perform just, um, you know, the, the minimal work that a facade panel needs to do. And can it do it in an interesting and aesthetically pleasing manner? And we, we did that. Like we could, you could, you could do a building and put this panel on it and it would work.

But that's for us as step one, we have all these other goals that we now know that we have data and testing that we, you know, the next year we'll be improving

upon that. And, that's been, I just, that's been, that's when we opened the factory, this

was not in our horizon. It wasn't there. this is something that came. Did I, did I?

Evan Troxel: one wasn't on the, [01:17:00] wasn't on the bingo

card. Yeah.

David Benjamin: yeah. And, and it was just, it was so influential. Fun to work on that aspect, you know, with, with you, Andrew, um, it evolved over time and we were all kind of experimenting with new ideas, like, but new big picture ideas, but also down to the detailing of the attachments and what were the sizes and how are they going to work.

And, um, but, but to me, you know, maybe to come full circle, it was a small step, but I think a good example in. Not just improving through efficiency, but improving through a new way of doing things. So, you know, my paraphrasing of what Andrew taught me, it was like, you know, normally, you know, you do, you have all these benefits from the prefabricated modular construction, but then you get to the site and you're back to traditional construction for, for a number of reasons.

And could we create a new [01:18:00] system? In this case, like. Basically, 38 ft long panel that has all these five layers of performance, uh, that, that is, are needed for any facade, but also has a very low carbon score because it involves, um, some basically plant based material that has absorbed carbon as it, as it grew, um, and that can have some aesthetics to it.

So you get a totally new. system installed in a new way that helps you with the cost because you can install it really quickly or in the factory. Um, it helps with the carbon because you have this new biomaterial layer. Um, and it also unlocks some new possibilities for aesthetics. so we're not just in the game of like, you know, trade, trade a little bit here, lose a little bit there or incremental, you know, 5 percent efficiency. We're exploring a new system, that might have some [01:19:00] advantages across the board. And reusable innovation from this project. Also obviously driven by a lot of data.

simulation analysis. And that's, you know, part of our, our interest over here at

Andrew Meagher: And that's, that's actually also why other vendors and stakeholders, HUD and whatnot, are interested in working with us at the factory, because you can actually get, if you do it on site in a conventional build, you have a data point of one. And then you can cross your fingers and hope that that was a good data point and that it becomes replicable.

When you do it here, we're able to actually study and, you know, using some of the software from Autodesk is, is this HVAC system better than that and why? And what about the operational costs? What about if we reconfigure how the cast iron works in the floor framing? So, just like all of that, now we have this facade panel that we're able to iterate on and truly study and build.

It's one thing to draw. It's completely another [01:20:00] thing to build. And so to have that confidence moving forward is just

critical.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. And for the audience who's listening, who wants to hear more about that panel system that David was speaking about, uh, the facade system, we're going to have another episode. Discussing that more in depth, which is going to be fantastic. I'm really looking forward to that, but I wanted to say thank you to you both for talking so in depth about this project and sharing what your experience has been over the last few years.

And I'm looking forward to this project, actually breaking ground and getting built and seeing it in action and seeing what we learn through that process as well. That the kind of continuous learning. Aspect of this project and what you all have gone through and then telling that story and sharing the details of it I think is absolutely fantastic and it speaks to kind of reaching the goals or trying to reach the goals of Sharing this and inspiring [01:21:00] others to do the same so that we can meet the challenges that are right here in front of us in a meaningful way because We're not going to do it the conventional way.

It's not going to work. So thank you both so much for spending the time with me today. I really appreciate it.

Andrew Meagher: Well, Evan, thank you for, yeah. Thank you for having us. And David, good to see you.

David Benjamin: Always great to talk to you.

Andrew.

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David Benjamin and Ryan McNulty join the podcast to talk about the integration of architecture and technology in creating a 300-unit affordable housing development in the Bay Area called Project Phoenix.

The project involves a unique collaboration between MBH Architects, Factory OS, and Autodesk, and how they leveraged generative design and real-time analytics software tools. Our conversation also highlights the efficiencies gained through modular construction, the challenges of incorporating new technology in design and construction, and potential implications for the AEC industry.

Episode links:* Ryan McNulty on LinkedIn * Autodesk Research website * MBH Architects website * MBH Architects on LinkedIn * Factory_OS website * Project Phoenix Modular Housing Shows a Sustainable Way Forward (YouTube)

About Ryan McNulty:Ryan McNulty, Principal MBH Architects has an innate ability to unify project stakeholders to create successful projects with meaning and respect to local context. Ryan is known for his keen thirty-thousand-foot view of projects while closely managing every detail. This holistic design approach informs the decision-making process and allows effective communication at every stage, making him an asset to MBH’s broad array of project types — from workspace and labs, to multi-family and hospitality projects.

Ryan brings deep experience with complex structures, managing client goals, community hearings, and stakeholder coordination. He is currently principal-in-charge of a large commercial project in Los Angeles, as well as a confidential residential development in New York City.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

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BAC Talks 2024: Future Digital Technologies in Architecture: AI, Immersive, and BIM 2.0BAC Talks 2024: Future Digital Technologies in Architecture: AI, Immersive, and BIM 2.0In this session moderated by Anthony Frausto-Robledo, B.Arch′96, AIA, LEED AP, Founder and Publisher, Architosh.com, and Evan Troxel, NCARB, Founder and Prod…YouTubeIn this session moderated by Anthony Frausto-Robledo, B.Arch'96, AIA, LEED AP, Founder and Publisher of Architosh.com, and your truly, four expert panelists discuss three areas of technology destined to change the future of digital practice. They highlight both pedagogical and practice challenges, confront aspects that appear broken, and offer perspectives for an improved future in the field of architecture and design.

Featured Speakers:

Jason Arndt, RA, LEED AP, Founding Principal, Zephyr Architects, Adjunct Professor, BAC
Dr. Mahesh Daas, President and ACSA Distinguished Professor, BAC
Randy Deutsch, FAIA, LEED AP, Clinical Associate Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Architecture
Nirva Fereshetian, Principal, CIO, CBT Architects

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AR for Construction with SitelinkJesse Vander Does and Adrian Hatch of Sitelink join the Confluence podcast to talk about their work in the construction tech industry.

Sitelink is developing a location-aware augmented reality (AR) BIM viewer for iOS devices. This tool helps general contractors and field workers access and interact with information rich building information models in real-world construction environments.

Today we go behind the scenes of the current development of their app and cover the history, challenges, and future outlook of AR technology in construction, the importance of real-time data, and technology adoption on job sites.

We also talk about how Sitelink is making BIM more intuitive and accessible, as well as their recent developments in model viewing and AR capabilities ultimately bridging the gap between design and construction to minimize rework and improve communication on job sites.

Episode Links* Adrian on LinkedIn * Jesse on LinkedIn * Sitelink website * Sitelink on LinkedIn

Watch this episode on YouTubeConfluence S2E2 - AR for Construction with SitelinkJesse Vander Does and Adrian Hatch of Sitelink join the show to talk about their work in the construction tech industry.Sitelink is developing a location-awa…YouTubeSubscribe to the podcast on YouTubeListen to this episode

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Ep 10: Evan Troxel on ArchitectureHost Aurora Meneghello and I talked about what it's like to work in architecture, how common it is to embark on a professional journey and then to find out it's different from what we expected, his embrace of technology, and how everyone is now their own media company.

Podcast Episode Ten: Evan Troxel on ArchitectureEvan Troxel, co host of Archispeak, joins me on The Repurpose Your Purpose Podcast to talk about architecture, technology, and podcasting.Repurpose your Purposeaurora

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Ep 543: The Value of an Architect with Cormac Phalen & Evan Troxel of ArchispeakIn a thought-provoking podcast episode, Enoch Sears delves into the intricacies of running a successful firm with Cormac Phalen & Evan Troxel of Archispeak. They touch upon the importance of setting boundaries and shifting mindsets, hinting at transformative strategies for enhancing productivity and profitability. Through engaging anecdotes and insightful discussions, they explore the role of marketing and selling in elevating architectural practices. The conversation emphasizes the potential for architects to command higher fees by mastering these essential skills. Furthermore, the podcast guests share inspiring stories of individuals who have overcome challenges to achieve remarkable success in the industry.

543: The Value of an Architect with Cormac Phalen & Evan Troxel of ArchispeakIn a thought-provoking podcast episode, Enoch Sears delves into the intricacies of running a successful firm with Cormac Phalen & Evan Troxel of Archispeak.…YouTube

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Andy Robert and Mercedes Carricuiry join the podcast to talk about their focus on technology, parametric architecture, and BIM, the transformative 'a-ha moments' that defined their company /slantis, their mission, the importance of collaboration, knowledge management, company culture, and their ambitious goal of changing the architectural industry for the better. We also chat about obstacles they’ve faced, especially the industry's entrenched hourly billing systems, and the need for innovation and better project management.

Episode links:* Andy on LinkedIn * Andy on Instagram * Andy on Twitter * Mercedes on LinkedIn * Mercedes on Instagram * Mercedes on Twitter * Slantis website * Slantis on LinkedIn * Slantis on Instagram * Slantis on Twitter * Adhocracy (Wikipedia)

About Andy Robert:Andy Robert is a professional architect from ORT University in Uruguay. She lived in Germany and pursued graduate studies in Dessau, where the former Bauhaus was located.

Today she is CEO of /slantis, co-founded in 2016 with her lifelong friend Mercedes Carriquiry.

Very energetic, curious, and entrepreneurial, she is actively involved in events that advocate for women as leaders.

She’s Beltrán and Jaime’s mum, a vegan and a life-long learner.

About Mercedes Carricuiry:Mercedes Carriquiry is a licensed architect and entrepreneur specializing in innovation and technology. She received her degree from the Faculty of Architecture UDELAR in Uruguay and also studied at the ENSAG in Grenoble, France. Additionally, she graduated in digital fabrication from MIT Fabacademy.

After working at Jean Nouvel's studio in Paris and leading multiple developments in Montevideo, she co-founded /slantis in 2016 with her lifelong friend Andy.

When she's not working, she enjoys art, skating, and spending time with her family.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

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Bringing AI to the Synthesis Intranet PlatformThe first episode of Season 2 of the Confluence podcast is now live! Chris Parsons of Knowledge Architecture comes back on the Confluence podcast to discuss bringing AI to their Synthesis intranet platform.

He takes us behind the scenes showing various functionalities including activity streams, document libraries, and project directories, with a focus on the upcoming integration of AI into Synthesis’ search and video transcriptions.

Chris also shows advancements in next-generation search, vector search, and future LMS capabilities. We also explore AI's impact on firm-wide knowledge capture, improved search relevance, and the creation of AEC-specific models through what Knowledge Architecture calls “Community AI”.

Episode Links* Christopher Parsons on LinkedIn * Knowledge Architecture website * Knowledge Architecture on LinkedIn * Knowledge Architecture on Twitter * Confluence podcast S1E7 - Overhauling Knowledge Architecture’s Synthesis v6 with Chris Parsons (YouTube) * Synthesis roadmap - Bringing AI to Synthesis * Synthesis intranet platform * KA Connect Talk Archive * Perplexity AI * Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom by Dorothy Leonard (Amazon) * The 3-Click Rule for Navigation Is False (full article) * Stop Counting Clicks: The 3 Click Rule is Nonsense (short YouTube video)

Watch this episode on YouTubeConfluence S2E1 - Bringing AI to the Synthesis Intranet PlatformChristopher Parsons of Knowledge Architecture joins the show to talk about In this episode of the Confluence podcast, Chris Parsons of Knowledge Architecture…YouTubeSubscribe to the podcast on YouTubeListen to this episode

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Krzysztof Jędrzejewski joins the podcast to talk about his career transition from traditional architecture to technology. He shares his Eastern European roots, educational background, and early work experiences in Poland and Denmark, including his involvement in groundbreaking projects like the Mercedes Museum. He talks about a crucial interview that propelled him towards tech in architecture and led him to work with Reope and now Autodesk Forma.

The conversation covers benefits of cloud-based software solutions, advanced tools like Grasshopper, Dynamo, and Ladybug, and the role of computational tools, AI in early-stage design, the importance of integrations with other AEC tools like TestFit and Veras in Autodesk Forma, and more.

To learn more about Krzysztof Jędrzejewski, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Shane Burger joins the podcast to talk about current and potential future impacts of AI and automation on architectural practice, the shift from perpetual to per-user licensing in AEC project delivery software, license management difficulties, enhancing productivity and improving project delivery while maintaining a human-centric approach, reevaluating business models towards valuing outcomes and performance, rethinking workflows, balancing technological advancements and the essence of human intelligence and empathy, and more.

Episode links:* Shane’s website * Shane on LinkedIn * Shane on X/Twitter * Woods Bagot website * Woods Bagot on LinkedIn * Woods Bagot on Instagram * Shane’s Twitter/X thread about software licensing * TRXL 068: ‘A Wealth of Abandoned Ideas’, with Shane Burger * Australia Introduces Workers’ ‘Right to Disconnect’ (New York Times) * Miro collaboration software * OpenAI’s Sora * Roam Research * Society of Mind (Wikipedia) * Combinatorial Creativity and the Myth of Originality by Maria Popova * Teaching scientific creativity through philosophy of science by Rasmus Jaksland (whitepaper) * Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity by Maria Popova * TRXL 131: ‘It’s Prompting Us’, with Benjamin Guler

About Shane Burger:Shane is an internationally recognized leader in the advanced use of technology in design and experience for the built environment. As a Principal at Woods Bagot, he directs a vision centered on technical innovation and leads a global team dedicated to researching, developing and applying new models of design and delivery to projects. He has lectured widely on a range of topics including design computation, BIM, digital fabrication, building performance, VR/AR, Smart Buildings, and digital culture and experience.

Starting in the early 2000’s, he was an early advocate and active developer of design computation methodologies in the AEC industry. During this time, his built work at Grimshaw Architects focused on the design of arts and cultural institutions, and used an array of computational processes to synthesize geometry, analysis, and material fabrication. He also served for 8 years as a director of the design computation and education non-profit Smartgeometry, firmly positioning it at the intersections of art, design, technology, and the modern human experience. At Smartgeometry, he promoted the emergence of a new paradigm for digital designers and craftsman where mathematics and algorithms are as natural as pen and paper.

Watch this episode on YouTube:156: ‘Why Are We Doing This in the First Place?’, with Shane BurgerShane Burger joins the podcast to talk about current and potential future impacts of AI and automation on architectural practice, the shift from perpetual to…YouTube

Episode Transcript Member 155: ‘Why Are We Doing This in the First Place?’, with Shane Burger

[00:00:00]

*Evan Troxel:* Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode, I welcome Shane Burger back to the podcast. Uh, Shane is an internationally recognized leader in the advanced use of technology in design and experience for the built environment. And as a Principal at Woods Bagot, he directs a vision centered on technical innovation and leads a global team dedicated to researching, developing, and applying new models of design and delivery to projects.

He has lectured widely on a range of topics, including design computation, BIM. Digital fabrication, building performance, VR, and AR smart buildings and digital culture and experience.

Starting in the early two thousands, he was an early advocate and active developer of design computation methodologies in the AEC industry. Uh,

During that time, his built work at Grimshaw architects focused on the design of arts and cultural institutions. And used an array of computational processes [00:01:00] to synthesize geometry analysis and material fabrication. He also served for eight years as a director of the design computation and education non-profit smart geometry, firmly positioning it at the intersection of art design technology and the modern human experience. At smart geometry, he promoted the emergence of a new paradigm for digital designers and craftsmen where mathematics and algorithms are as natural as pen and paper.

In this episode, you'll hear that before I had the chance to formally welcome Shane back to the show, we were chatting about what we were going to talk about, and it was so good I just had to leave it in. So the setup here for Shane's launching point is a tweet thread. He posted about software licensing models in AEC, which I've linked to in the show notes. So anyway, if you're wondering why it sounds like I didn't welcome him to the show, like I usually do with my guests. Now you are prepared for the cold [00:02:00] open.

Today we talk about current and potential future impacts of AI and automation on architectural practice. The shift from perpetual to per user licensing in AEC project delivery software. License management difficulties

enhancing productivity and improving project delivery while maintaining a human centric approach re-evaluating business models towards valuing outcomes and performance, rethinking workflows, balancing technological advancements, and the essence of human intelligence and empathy. And more.

This once again was a fantastic conversation with Shane and I hope you'll not only find value in it for yourself, but that you'll help add value to the profession by sharing it with your network.

I'd love it. If you both subscribed to the podcast and to the YouTube channel or whichever is your preference for consuming the episodes, you can find all of the links from the conversation in the show notes at trxl.co, where you can. Also sign up to get an [00:03:00] email from me Each time new episodes are released with those show notes and links within.

So now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Shane Berger.

*Shane Burger:* There's been more than one tweet thread I've put out there related to some frustrations that I've

had, um, with how the software industry deals with users, deals with pricing and things like that.

Um, I, I think, you know, to give a little bit of context to what the, where, what led to this and where this conversation basically came from is that, um, um, I have found that a lot of the software companies have been pricing their software based upon how they measure its use, what they consider to be valuable from a profit perspective, which I don't blame them because they, they're a profit making company.

They wouldn't exist if they weren't making a profit. Um, but what ends up, we run into an issue is that when these things butt heads with, um, [00:04:00] how we actually operate as a company. So some of the examples would be, there is a company that we have been. Uh, working with, and I will say things have gotten better and resolved better out of this, but there's a company I've been working with, uh, from an infrastructure perspective to build out a whole visualization analytics platform that we've been working on for a good, probably two or three years now, and unfortunately, they switched over to a per user based pricing system.

Uh, now that per user based pricing system was something that works well for other industries where. If someone's going to be using this particular platform, it's their full time job. They're going to be on it all the time,

and it will be what they do for 8 hours a day, 365 days a year, right? And for that, I would expect to be paying 5 to 10 thousand dollars a year per user for that type of thing, because it is, it makes up the totality of your job.

However, in other industries like ours, This is a platform that we would only use on an occasional basis. Um, it's something that is [00:05:00] most suited towards early concept and schematic design, which means from a phase perspective, you're only going to be using it for the first few months of what might be 12 to 18 to 24 month long project.

Um, so therefore, if you're going to be charging on a per user basis, Uh, for that type of thing, we are paying what is full price as if someone who's using 365 days a year for something that would actually be used off and on for a few months and perhaps only by a few users. And even within that set, it might only be that, you know, someone like me might jump into it a few days.

So I'm paying basically the same price at that point. And what happens then is when you start scaling that up across the practice, we are looking at something that was going to cost us you know, half to three quarters of a million dollars a year

for something that was of occasional use. So that sort of mismatch between the pricing model and what our industry does and how we operate was a, was a frustration.

Now, luckily in this sort of case, the conversations with this company, they understood that [00:06:00] better. And after a while, they were able to change the model that actually better accounted for how much the tool is actually being used. So a good example for me about this is the difference between per user pricing and consumption pricing.

Consumption pricing is, Um, so as opposed to per user pricing where you pay like 5, 000 per year for that user, consumption based pricing is if I use it a lot, I pay more. If I use it very little, I pay

*Evan Troxel:* yeah, it's like a utility, right? Or it's like putting gas in your

car. It's, it's, it's, yeah.

*Shane Burger:* I tend to prefer consumption based pricing, especially for an industry like ours where, you know, Besides the core tools of Rhino and Revit, where we have our staff using them all the time, Um, a lot of the other tools are occasional. You're going to use them a few days in a week, a few hours in a day, or even less than that.

So paying the exact same price, if it was your full time job versus if it's an occasional thing, it doesn't work out as well. So we've been trying to suggest when we're speaking with a lot of vendors about [00:07:00] something closer to a consumption based pricing as a utility, as you said, or, um, and we've done this with, uh, a couple of other companies as well.

Uh, we buy the licenses, they watch our use for three to six months, and they come back to us and say, okay, well you have, in our case, 800 users in the system. However, only 300 actually use it. on a very regular basis. So we're not going to make it hard for you to add users, but we're going to charge you 300 users.

And then we'll come back a year from now and we'll top it up if we need to. So that sort of pricing model works a lot better for larger companies where we don't want to have to spend a lot of money to manage the users. We don't have to hire people full time to manage those users. Um, at the same time, I feel it right sizes it based upon the kind of company and the size of the company and how much you're using it.

*Evan Troxel:* Okay. So I'm going to welcome you back to the podcast officially. I'm

still putting, I'm, that is still going to be in the episode right

there. We're just going to have jumped right into it. So welcome back. It's great to see you [00:08:00] again. I'm glad we got to see each other at AU and make this happen.

And you've been on a whirlwind, uh, tour of speaking gigs.

I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what I'm going to say. And you've been presenting a lot of topics around, um, Digital practice and design technology and how firms work. And this subject is near and dear to my heart. I want to give the tech side of our industry a look behind the curtain of what it's actually like to. work in a firm, manage operations, people, users, licenses, IT, digital technology, design technology, all these things. So this is, this is a great place to kick off this episode. And you said it's good for big firms. I think it's good for small firms too, because it's even worse in a small firm. you have way more roles.

Combined into a single person's daily, you know, set of tools that they're going to be using. They're going to be managing the project and designing the project and going to

construction administration. In a larger firm, [00:09:00] you do have more disparate roles for all of those things. But it still totally makes sense what you're saying because our projects last years,

we don't do the same thing day in, day out. I don't need a visualization license when I'm, or maybe I do nowadays, but I didn't, used to need a visualization license in certain phases of design. and so as an example, now, now I think we, we tend to use those quite more often in, in many more stages of design. So maybe that's the worst example I could have chosen at the, at this, at this moment.

But I think it's, it's. It's interesting. You said you're having these conversations with developers. How is it being received? And, and obviously you gave an example of where it's kind of working and you do this. annual reconciliation of what's actually been happening because you can measure all that.

Um, but, but how is it being received?

Because the, the per user, the named user license model, we've seen some big companies move back to that, like SketchUp. Recently, as, as

an example, you know, within the last few years moved back to [00:10:00] that model. And it was kind of shocking to firms who were like, we might have a designer jump in and jump out of SketchUp for a small portion of a project, and then they don't need it for quite a while.

And I don't want to pay for it the whole time. It's expensive. And we can't spend a lot of money on all the tools. It just doesn't work for our budgets. Right. So how are they receiving this message?

*Shane Burger:* I'd say it's, it's a bit hot and cold. It depends on the company. There's been some that we've spoken to. I would actually say the companies we've spoken to that are not as much in our industry. So the Miro's of the world and others who are doing things with us, but are not just a core AEC tool.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah.

*Shane Burger:* Actually you're treating it quite well because it's, it's a bit of discovery for them. They're like, Oh, we didn't realize that we didn't know that's how you use it. And that's great. So it's been an open conversation and we've been very transparent and said, Hey, we'd love to show you what we do with it to help you out, to better understand what you can do to help our industry.

I'm having mixed luck, arguably with, uh, those who are closer [00:11:00] to the AEC industry. Um, You know, there are a few companies out there that have made that transition to the named users where, um, their answer and response, and I'm going to deliberately stay away from naming names in these cases, but, um, they would, they would basically say back to us, Okay, but this is what we're doing.

And that's kind of been their response. And it's frustrating because in some of these cases, the perpetual license model, Especially the one that allowed you to put the licenses into a queue and then anybody in the company can use them wherever we want

is the closest version to a consumption model without going to a consumption model because we would be watching after our license counts.

We've got our own systems internally able to actually track how we're using these licenses over time. So we'd be able to look at and say, you know what? We've got 150 licenses. We've been hitting 145 consistently and that number is going up. Let's top it off with another 10 and we buy another 10 so that we never run out because [00:12:00] larger company like us, you don't want to run out.

You start getting emails and text messages from people.

Um, so that model worked well for us. Um, but it also probably wasn't. an area of, uh, increased profitability for those who are selling the licenses. So I think a lot of the companies who changed to a named license model looked at that and said, well, here's a way that we can increase profits by selling more licenses, just by switching to a named user model.

And, uh, frustratingly it's often sold as something that they think we would like. And I think in my case, it's, it's often. I've said, I understand how you want that, but this is absolutely not something that we actually want. Um, and we've had an increasing number of companies switch over to that sort of model, which now means that I have to start pricing it very differently, uh, as to how we do this.

I don't want to be restricting the amount of people who use the licenses, um, but by going to a named license model, it forces me to either restrict it, to cap it at, say, 50 or 100 or [00:13:00] whatever we have, and then we have to internally shuffle licenses around, or we have to manage. buying new licenses every few months to just top it up and keep going that direction.

Um, it doesn't reflect the realities of how a business like ours actually operates.

*Evan Troxel:* And the managerial aspect of that, just to open the window to give people an idea of what that is like, this is a big deal. Like just to have the staff in place to constantly be monitoring and managing and potentially purchasing and getting approvals to do all this. It's a nightmare. It's a literal nightmare

with all the different software.

And, and just, so paint that picture. What does it actually look like for you guys to have to deal with that?

*Shane Burger:* I think the first thing is if I think about it from a user perspective, um, I've got a job I've got to do. I, I'm working on a project. I need to either access a particular file or do a piece of work. Got a deadline coming up in three days. Um, and I try to open the piece software and I don't have access to it.

What am I going to do for that afternoon? [00:14:00] So from a user perspective, it's incredibly frustrating because then they have to put in an IT support ticket or text somebody that they know who might be able to help them out. Um, usually that involves including a principal on the chat. So hoping that the principal can weigh in on it and say, please let us get that,

make it happen, right?

Um, in some cases that principal will bypass us and purchase it with a company card, which is something we don't want to have happen. Because whenever that happens, we start ending up with licenses just spread and

*Evan Troxel:* Just

*Shane Burger:* proliferating, right? And we don't, and all of a sudden we'll get a message from some company we've never heard of saying, are you going to renew this?

It becomes difficult to manage. Um, It's the ad hoc license purchases and spreading around with different accounts and everything is just a significant amount of work to manage just from a logistics point of view. How do you actually deal with that? Um, and then when it gets to, say, the I. T. staff. they'll get it and they'll ask the question, well, what do they need it for?

Um, [00:15:00] is this actually necessary? So a judgment's call has system start to come into play. You know, they've been maybe told that we're supposed to cap it at 50 licenses. So we either need to contact someone else in the company and say, do you need your license anymore? Do we look at our dashboards and see who hasn't used it in the last 60 to 90 days and say, we're going to remove it for that user.

That's not a good experience because they may need it next week. So we ended up having to shuffle licenses around and have a lot of. Uncomfortable conversations with staff who are rightly frustrated, who don't want to have to deal with this sort of thing. Um, then when it comes to the process of, you know, when we do need to make a judgment call, there's a lot of back and forth conversations.

Can you use the free version if it's commercially viable? uh, someone else on your team already has a license. There's all these things that come into play when you have to deal with a per user license or you're capped in some sort of frustrating way. All of this creates an experience, I think, for the end user.

That is, uh, understandable frustration towards the technology teams. But those technology [00:16:00] teams have a hand tied behind their back, either by the licensing system, by the software vendor, or perhaps from a budget perspective. But then, arguably, the staff also has a sort of bad taste in their mouth, perhaps even towards the vendor who put this situation in play in the first place.

And we'll have to communicate with those staff and say, listen, we're doing what we can, but the way that the vendor has the system set up, it's not easy to manage users. There's one vendor that we work with where, um, We actually have to, if a staff member was to leave the company or stop using the software, they, before they uninstall the software or leave the company, they have to, disconnect the license from the license manager system in the software.

So, say you're leaving the company, I'm going to have to go up to you and say, please launch this program, log into here, disconnect your license, and move onward. Say their computer crashes and they have to rebuild the computer. That license is lost for a year and we've had that happen enough times. It's not to say our computers [00:17:00] crash all the time, but it happens.

Thousand person company, it happens. Um, there's lots of circumstances that actually prevent you from being able to do that. Because there's no central management interface, I have the email address of the person I have to shoot an email off to to get them to add licenses to top us up, because I can say, this user, uh, Either is no longer at the company, um, or, uh, they had an issue with their computer.

So you see two versions, two licenses. They don't, they just have one. That's a lot of headaches that nobody should have to deal with. And it creates a sort of bad experience for everybody that's involved. Whereas very simple changes to how these licensee systems work, give people the opportunity to use the tools.

They don't have to ask for permission. They don't have to fight to, you know, have one person release their license if someone else can use it. Um, I don't understand why any company would want to prevent people from using their software by actually making additional headaches from a management perspective.

*Evan Troxel:* There's so much in there [00:18:00] and I'm glad you brought up the staff leaving aspect to it because turnover happens and it happens quite often in architecture firms. I mean, they staff up, they staff down. There's

certain firms that do that a lot. There's other firms that try to hang on to people as long as possible and maybe it's less of an issue. But other things in life happen too

things change all the time or just getting new computers or whatever, right? And, and so. There's, there's so much nuance to this and I think what it all comes back to is like not caring about the actual users and it's

more about looking like it, it, it's going to be more efficient because maybe, maybe that's the expectation is that it is going to be more efficient, but it's more efficient for the vendor.

It's not more efficient for the firm itself to do all this. And, and who actually is monitoring email. Like a hawk all the time, because that's the expectation too, right? If I send in a support ticket that I need this thing right now, the expectation is [00:19:00] I need this thing right now.

And if you're in a 1000 person firm, that's not going to happen either.

Right. And so like the, the, just the queuing times that are going to happen because of this. Uh, predicament. And, and I want to, I just want to double down on what you said. Maybe the, the staff gets a bad taste in their mouth towards the vendor. I think that is less the case than getting a bad taste in your mouth about your own IT department, your

own DT department,

because they're the ones telling you, no, you can't get into all the nuance of why this is happening like this, that it's actually the vendor that's forcing us to do it this way. And again, I think it's about the vendor not caring about the actual end user. of the software by creating these systems. And so, uh, it does suck to hear that they're, receiving this in a cold way for, you know, for the most part.

*Shane Burger:* I have, um, I even had a conversation just over the last two days with, um, A company that provides, uh, generative AI image creation services, [00:20:00] uh, uh, services that doesn't offer an enterprise approach. So their answer was, well, just set up individual accounts for every single person. Well, we've got between 75 to 90 people in the company who are playing around with these things, and that is now 75 to 90 people, individual accounts linked to my Work Amex card.

And just, that's not how this is going to work. So, you know, and I've, I've had this with lots of different companies that you could create the most amazing piece of software in the world. People could absolutely love the features. If you make it a nightmare for IT and design technology staff to manage this system, I'm likely just going to say no because we don't want to put ourselves in the position of being the people that's having to tell staff, no, you can't have it because the licensing is preventing us from doing this in this way.

Um, It makes it really hard for a company like ours ultimately to be able to manage this type of stuff. staff members shouldn't have to even know anything about licensing systems.

They should not have to care.[00:21:00]

They just want to do their job. Right. They just want to do their jobs. They want to be able to open what they need, and get access to what they want, and use it. And then they shouldn't have to be doing, Oh, I have to release my license, or Who do I need to talk to whether we've hit our quota in the studio for such and such license.

That should never be a conversation for them. And I, and ideally then you should make the lives of the technology staff and the company easier such that we're not having to then explain that or have to be the bad guys to tell people no in that situation because you've made the whole situation more difficult.

So I do very much steer away from a company that's going to increase our management overhead. if we have to start adding staff, whose entire job is to just managing users and data in these systems. You start building up enough of that, it gets to be incredibly frustrating and difficult to deal with.

Yeah.

*Evan Troxel:* weird version of the consumption slash prepaid, you know, it's weird, right? You don't want to have a staff member like running out of [00:22:00] tokens. Right when they're in the,

on a deadline, for example. So that's not a good solution either.

*Shane Burger:* Yeah, I, well, tokens for a few cases is, yeah, buying them in advance and topping them up versus, true consumption systems, just, you're going to pay for it after you've actually used it.

I, I would say there's some there's some difficult parts about, um, consumption systems. It's harder to budget for them.

But budgeting and restricting should not be the same thing. You don't budget in advance and then stop people from using things. A budget should be an estimate of where you think you're going to go. In any consumption based system, you should be able to watch the analytics to see you ultimately where they get to.

The other frustrating thing about token based systems is, I'm generally not a fan of abstract, currencies in order to to pay for these things.

How much is that? One token is a 1. 90 US dollars. Like, what does that actually mean? And what does it mean to consume those tokens?

Again, this seems to be adding a layer of abstraction to something where in the gray [00:23:00] areas and the gaps in between, it will inevitably be more profitable for the software company versus just paying for actual consumption.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah. Like just defining the value and how much it costs to achieve that value, I think is a reckoning that really needs to happen and, I guess we could continue to flog this, but do you want to. Talk about who, who's doing this right. Like, you don't, we don't want to name who's doing it wrong, but is there anybody

that like springs to the, to mind that, that you are enjoying their licensing model that you want to give a shout out to?

Yeah.

*Shane Burger:* to what happened for us with Miro, and Miro was a case of where it started off on a per user basis, um, and it was going down the direction of the named user approach, but then what we were able to show them is, uh, first of all, they gave us some room. They said, All right, we're gonna do a quarterly update top up agreement with you. You have a certain number of licenses, and every quarter we're gonna have a conversation to look at your use. And we [00:24:00] won't restrict with how many users you have, but we're going to look at it. Ultimately, we end up signing a three year agreement with them based upon that sort of model, but it's a yearly kind of update.

The thing I appreciate about them was, they, uh, used the data to inform the decision. They looked at how we were actually using their tool, frequency at which people were using it, how they were using it, even down to the point of understanding the difference between Uh, what a viewer license was versus a creator license, someone who's actually making boards and editing them versus who's just looking at them.

They had the backend analytics to actually answer that question to which they were like, Oh, Okay, yes, you do want to have all 1, 000 people in. They listened to us when we said, we don't want, have to have one IT staff member sitting in there constantly adding and removing people all the time. And I, we did it for a few months to show them what the effort looked like and how it was kind of ridiculous that this was happening.

Even to the point of pointing out to them that even our [00:25:00] CEO and some of our global design leadership were viewer staff, which weren't really counting as full licenses, but they were going to get paid. Pulled out of the cutoff because of the frequency at which they did what was called, I think, a paid action or something.

They were mostly viewers engaging in design reviews, not creating their own boards. So we explained to them, you're putting us in a scenario where, um, arguably if we follow our rules, our design leadership would not always be given full licenses. They understood what that meant. And they came back to us and said, all right, here's a pricing model that we're going to put together for you.

That is, um, based upon. how much you actually use the tools. So we're going to open it up. we'll use single sign on, allow you to add all the users that you need in the system, but what you're going to pay for is people who are actively using it. And that was a, that ended up working out a lot better.

I would say though, that that is likely a scenario that's only going to work for a large company because it does require a direct engagement with a sales representative to be part of reviewing and kind of a customer success manager sort [00:26:00] of system. So that's something that I think you would definitely need is it would benefit from being a larger company to be able to negotiate that sort of relationship with them.

I have been finding there's other companies out there that do similar types of models. Well, we haven't done it yet, but our work with Atlassian, my team uses JIRA. The IT team uses JIRA as well. We have increasing numbers of people in our operations team using it. When we pass a certain threshold, they do the same type of thing.

We haven't really passed that threshold, but the conversations have gone really well with that. Um, there are other companies out there that I think do a relatively good job of it, even if I have some of my frustrations. I do fundamentally like Autodesk's model it's a token based system.

However, it is a consumption based system and there are things I like about how they do it and it puts us in a position where it does right size it based upon how much we actually use the tool. Now, granted, it's, you know, it's not, recorded hourly. It's if you use it during the day, you pay for the whole day's worth.

I can maybe understand that sort of [00:27:00] scenario, but I do appreciate their approach on that because that is closer to actually paying for our real use. Um, other companies like McNeel have kept to the traditional perpetual license model. Um, and in that sort of case, we, I think we own something like 150, 160 licenses and it covers our whole company globally that actually use it.

Our peak use period is pretty much when we get to New York City evenings and West Coast afternoons and Australian mornings. I think that's typically our peak use or a little bit further when China starts to come online, but we have purchased it based upon that amount and we're able to watch. Using their analytics to see when we're peaking up to that particular level.

So that's the traditional older style perpetual license model, but it works really well and we keep buying licenses and nobody loses their chance at a license. There's other companies that have done perpetual license models though, that have not provided analytics. So one in particular, I won't mention, but around some visualization tools we've run into [00:28:00] where, uh, it is a perpetual license model, which is great, But they don't provide any insight into how much we're actually using.

And we're having trouble internally recording how much it's actually used because it's a plugin to a tool. So it's not easy to actually get insight into it. So that's one of those ones where we have run into issues where, um, we don't end up topping up licenses until we run out and someone starts talking to us about it.

But we also don't know if we can downscale licenses. Visualization market is really competitive. There's lots of competing tools. We have people trying more than once. We might actually be able to. shift the balance of licenses between them. But unfortunately we don't have enough insights into how much is actually being used.

*Evan Troxel:* And you can deploy kind of insight machines on your side of the

pond as well. Right. But again, more to manage, more to watch, more to track, a lot more conversations with users.

*Shane Burger:* Right. a lot of these companies have their own tools. Sometimes they will allow you access to those analytics. Um, so that is, uh, [00:29:00] that is great. A good example, actually, also on the positive side is, um, the company Avail that makes the Revit content management system, which is our preferred choice for a system.

Um, they have provided us with, um, Uh, Power BI. I think it's Power BI. I could be wrong. But dashboards that gives us insight into the actual use. There are another company that also has given us open access or unlimited access, but we top it up every year. We have conversation with them to say, this is how much we're using and how much we pay.

So they watch what our numbers are, and they provide access to all the analytics for us to actually understand, is it being effective? Is that good for us? It's something I would like to see more of from other companies. So either access, they either provide the dashboards or give us access to dashboards to pull data in.

If those aren't the case, we end up having to use some of our own tools. So we're in the process now of consolidating our tracking systems on all of our various tools. And that's everything from commercially purchased software, where they sometimes provide analytics [00:30:00] to platforms, which we have no analytics and we're having to.

You know, use systems built into Windows to be able to keep an eye on how much people are using the tool, down to some of our own tools, um, that, uh, are plugins, automation tools, so we can track how much people are using them.

Really, for us, it's, it's a combination of, um, Wanting to know, are we investing our money in the right place?

Do we need to buy more licenses so people don't run out, but also ensuring we're providing the right balance of support. So if we start seeing significant amount of use in one tool versus another, it might highlight to us to say, we should be investing more energy and keeping that up to date. If it's a tool we've built, maybe providing updates to it, but also making sure we can support the users.

So our analytics work is going to become pretty important, I think, over the next six months to try to pull all those dashboards together.

*Evan Troxel:* That was a really nice unplanned, unscripted, high five to Avail, who's also sponsoring this

*Shane Burger:* Oh yeah, there you go. That's great. Now it's, um, I appreciate [00:31:00] when. Companies, uh, understand the needs of what an architecture practice is looking for and do something that suits and balances without it is how, how those companies operate. Avail's been one of them. There's, as I said, Miro, not from our industry has learned and has helped with it.

There's others that are out there that I'm probably not remembering at this moment, but, um, I do appreciate when it's a, uh, a more reasonable conversation about, uh, how the tool is actually being used.

*Evan Troxel:* I feel like that's more of a partnership, like they, they have a genuine interest in the value you're deriving from their tool to do your work, right? It's not

just to have this relationship with them. Like you're not buying their software just so that you get to talk to each other, right? you're employing it for a purpose.

And if they're genuinely interested in what people are getting out of that and what you're doing with it, that partnership, I think does lead to the kind of relationship that you're talking about rather than the other way around. Yeah,

*Shane Burger:* I think we've had some [00:32:00] successes with that. We've had some frustrations. I think that most of the frustrations have occurred when this is a company that provides the same software to multiple parts of your industry that may be used in different ways.

So an example would be a software that is used by contractors and architects. Well, which one do you price it for?

Do you price it based on what the contractor is going to look for, which they tend to have, um, you know, uh, a larger ability to spend money on software than an architecture practice, or what the architecture practice is, is going for?

And when we have imbalances or differences like that, we usually run into some, uh, differences of opinion about how we should price it.

*Evan Troxel:* And in contrast to manufacturing where you're making widgets or you have an assembly line where somebody does a specific thing day after day to your point much earlier in the conversation. This is not that this is your we're An architecture firm is not a company that makes the same, the same person makes the same thing day

after day after day.

It just doesn't work like that. Project teams disband, come back together in a different amalgamation to tackle a new [00:33:00] project at a different phase in a different part of the world with all these differences amongst multiple years throughout the phases of a project. And, and that I think is something that is difficult. I don't know if it's unique about architecture, but it's definitely different than, like when Miro comes to you and they're working with somebody like GE, let's say, who's making jet engines. Like, that's going to be very different from what an architecture firm does, right? So really interesting to me to hear that they were interested in finding that out and not just sticking to like, this is how we do it, which is the answer that you also showed as a contrasting answer.

It's like, Nope, this is how we're doing it. Um, and not willing to listen, not willing to maybe care about what the users actually need. And so just, just maybe to wrap this part of the conversation up, um. Have you actually gone through, and I assume the answer is yes, but I want to hear it from you, to just say, okay, that tool's gone.

Like we can't use that tool, at least [00:34:00] until we come back and revisit it at some other time.

*Shane Burger:* yes, it's hard to do. And I, I would say I'm not

*Evan Troxel:* People love their tools, man.

*Shane Burger:* They, they do and I get it and I understand because it's, it's, it's what you've been using for years or a decade or more and it is the, it's the instrument that you are used to expressing the work that you're doing. Um, you're efficient at it.

It's like learning any instrument. Um, you know, you're going to say, Nope, you're not going to play violin anymore. Here's a trumpet. I, you know, when am I supposed to do that? I, I have lost my ability to. you know, to execute on the work that I'm used to doing. So it's disruptive, uh, for what is already a stressful, high pace sort of profession.

When you are removing people's access to the tools and systems that they're using, that they're used to using to do their job, it's a significant stress. It's a high level of frustration. Um, But yeah, we've had situations where we've had to basically say, well, we no longer use this particular tool. I'd say it's [00:35:00] more common that we limited its use.

So, you know, one of the modeling tools that we've limited use on is a case of where we have selected particular sectors or subsets or studios that have access to it because It may be necessary based on the market that they're working in that particular region. It's the most common tool that people used to share models back and forth.

So, okay, I get that. Or, um, there's a particular set of features or workflows that are essential for this and they need to use it quickly for this work. It's short, you know, a short turnaround sort of work and it is the most effective one to do that. I get that. I understand it. that desire to have an individual choice of the tools that you use runs up against not just things from a cost perspective, but also from a collaboration perspective. Uh, if we don't try to unify around a small set of tools, when you start sharing projects from studio to studio, it becomes next to impossible to actually be effective on that.

So if one person is using a completely different tool, Then everybody else is, then that [00:36:00] person is kind of separated from how the rest of the group is actually going to operate. And you have immediately some built in inefficiencies.

*Evan Troxel:* And people say, Oh, just, just export your 3d model. And you lose something every single time you lose

stuff every time that happens. Right. That's, that's the biggest downside to that. So,

*Shane Burger:* It's not just that you've lost things from a. technology standpoint, it's lost from a workflow standpoint. You have now decoupled the work of one person in the team from the rest of the team.

Um, it effectively just turns into, okay, I see what you have over there. I'm going to look at that while I'm working on what is our main tool that we work within.

And when you decouple those sort of processes, uh, in delivery, you have inherent inefficiencies even beyond, um, issues of file formats.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah, for sure. I want to shift now to maybe the future of the profession, but I want to kind of couch that, at least get into it with tools. And so you mentioned AI earlier, right? And

so we're we're seeing changes happen. We're seeing disruption happening. And you also [00:37:00] talked about kind of the limiting factors of licensing for enterprise and things like that.

But let's start to talk about AI and the future of the profession as a, as a lead in, because obviously the future of the profession. does not equal AI, right? So I want to talk about that in a, in a bigger scale, um, but in a way to get there. Let's just talk about kind of the emergence of AI and what that's meant at Woods Bagot and, and for you and your teams,

*Shane Burger:* Yeah, I think, um, we've been keeping an eye on what were the potential opportunities for us for many years now, but it wasn't until, and this is probably the same for a lot of architecture practices,

um, tools like mid journey and stable diffusion and DALL-E coming out in combination with chat GPT. And I think for us, it was initially catching up to what the conversations that everybody was having around those tools where we think they would be a value to the practice, where we think there are some concerns and limitations for each of them, but at the same time, actually trying to project forward.

Well, what's next after this? [00:38:00] We didn't want to be in a position where we're always running to catch up. And every three months there's something new. Uh, when I presented to our shareholders conference just two weeks ago, I ran a two hour afternoon workshop on AI and architecture and design. Um, wasn't just two hours of presentation, but a lot of back and forth and debate and discussion about what this means for us as a practice and, and how does this fit with our, our credo, how we approach our work.

Um, one of the key things to point out was that just the week before, it was when OpenAI's Sora, Came out the video creation tool.

Uh, not something I had in my presentation, but of course I added it right in there and just basically explained to everybody these sort of innovations are happening on a regular basis.

So what are the fundamental trends? What are some of the things that sit underneath this that gives you a sense of what direction these things might actually be going? Um, and that was where we kind of ended on a series of topics that should be discussed. Um, and we should be considering how they affect our practice.

One of the [00:39:00] biggest and first ones is the fundamental change about how we access knowledge. And we started asking questions of, we've got 150, 160 years of practice, 18 studios around the globe, multiple sectors, a thousand people. What happens when you have access to that kind of information in the context, in a context relevant way, uh, to answer things that you need to know, you know, what happens in this sort of scenarios?

And that became, beyond the excitement, I think, about the image creation, which we can talk about and get into, I got more interested into what it means to tap into and harness knowledge, not just within our practice, but within potentially the broader industry. Yeah.

*Evan Troxel:* that we had a conversation on the podcast. What you were, we were talking about second brain, Roam Research, right? The interconnectedness potential of notes. Like just

talking about like, where do you take your notes?

Where do you take your notes? How do you, how do you. link between notes. Is there a way to get [00:40:00] insight out of then all the notes you've taken, right? And now you're talking about that at scale. You're talking

about that in an organization and it's a very, it's, it's the same conversation, but it's just at a way larger scale.

And so I'm, I'm interested in, hearing it from, from that side, but I'm also interested in hearing about like the pursuit of creativity as well, because

I think that's kind of the existential Crisis that we see going on in firms as well. Not only from a, like, where does creativity come from?

Is it going to take our jobs, but also ethics, governance, things like that too. Right. There, there's a lot going on here in, in the whole

AI sphere, but, but let's, let's continue to go down the, the knowledge side of the graph. And, and I I'm curious to hear what, what you guys have come up with. Mm hmm.

*Shane Burger:* Yeah. So, um, we have a set of documents in the company called design intelligence documents. I may or may not have talked about them in the previous podcast. It's effectively a, an overview of all the major decisions around a project. Um, it's a way that [00:41:00] if you're a new member of the team or want to know about what happened on a previous project and go back, you'll say, well, this is the site.

This is the client. This is what they asked for. Here's some of the early concept designs. This is how we got to where we were, the decisions that we made, the major concepts behind this. Um, and one of the questions that I started asking when things like ChatGPT came out was, Alright, well, they are large language models trained on the internet, so yes, they speak English and understand English, and they can work with us that way.

Um, what happens when we can train it on a particular subset of documents and ask questions of those documents? And this is something that I had seen others do. You know, a year or so ago, come out and say, well, what happens when I feed my favorite book into a chat engine? And now I can basically have a conversation with the book.

Ask things about it, query it, and have it bring up information for me. So we thought, why not try this out? So we actually used some of OpenAI's tools via our Microsoft kind of enterprise agreement to [00:42:00] build a version of a chatbot that was a design intelligence knowledge chatbot. We just vetted 50 of them to start off with.

We had to do some work. I would say that it's not the easiest thing in the world. You can't just put any formatted document into a system like this. And I think we realize that sometimes our documents are more, uh, human readable than machine readable. So there's some differences with how it would be good to, to put into these systems to, to deal with potential hallucinations, but we fed 50 into this and we're able to ask questions like, you know, tell me about, uh, any of the projects that have, uh, timber structures.

What are common characteristics or what were the core concepts behind them? And we started thinking about this to say, okay, well, if I'm wanting to know, if I, if I'm guessing that someone within our practice or some project has encountered the problem that I'm encountering on my project right now, what's the best way for me to find that information?

Uh, a standard search will pick up. topic [00:43:00] names, uh, maybe even headings of particular chapters, but not really dig into the insights that are within these documents. It also won't be able to draw correlations between a concept in this project and a concept over here. Um, and often we found that while we create these documents, we've got something like you know, 300 or 400 of these now, um, if not more, um, usually it's just principles and people who worked on the projects who actually are aware that they exist and not even knowing, however, unless they worked on it, the insights that sit within them.

So for us, this became a potential rich opportunity for us to train up a knowledge bot that would be able to Um, understand the history of our projects, and that could come in play in a few different places. One would be for business development. So for chasing after new work, we're having to answer to an RFP.

Um, I, rather than just going to my standard five projects I know that had a strong sustainability, story along with them, I now have access to all the projects that have that information, and I can [00:44:00] query them, and it will bring them up, and perhaps even help me author content. for listening. Not always the best authoring of the content, but it's going to surface things and insights that I may not have gotten unless I had actually read all 300 to 400 of those and internalized all the knowledge within.

It might help during project design, during concepts. putting in queries, asking questions of this. Um, it might even help in later phases, especially when we're getting down into some material selections and later decisions, what projects have used this material. So we then started to extend this to say, well, how about not just design intelligence documents?

What about some of our technical guidance material? Best practices for Revit, our global standards, so that when you're in Revit, you've got a little chat bot, you can ask it a question. Um, maybe it's the second coming of Microsoft Clippy, I don't know,

but it's some version of that, right? And then it went further to say, and this is where we, we haven't gotten here yet, but we started to talk about it.

Um, why can't we be querying our library of, [00:45:00] uh, BIM models in our system? Why can't we create something that's able to crawl through that and ask questions of all of our projects?

Um, and be able to bring certain project metrics out or different things about the execution of that work. So, this is where we saw the very beginnings of saying, All right, we've seen some companies teach or GPT like system.

on a particular subset of documents. There's one, for example, in scientific journals. There's a few, there are up codes has done this obviously for code review in North America. What can we do when we do that? And then what are the next logical steps? Well, it need not necessarily be documents. What if it's other kinds of information that we have, for example, model content.

So that's one example where that initial insight led us down the path into multiple potential opportunities for creating, basically surfacing context relevant knowledge about our work.

*Evan Troxel:* I think that's what's so interesting about it is like, once you start going in a direction, [00:46:00] light bulbs start turning on,

you're like, Oh, what if we try this? Or, and I find like really surprising results when I try something like I'll feed it images and just say, transcribe these. And it,

*Shane Burger:* Yeah.

*Evan Troxel:* I didn't know if it could do that or not.

Right.

But it can, it turns out and, or, or I'll just feed it a webpage that I didn't, and I said, pull all the names. Cause I, I have pictures. Like when we were at AU, we took a picture. I put it, it's Evan and Shane. Here's a link to our previous episode. And I just grabbed that whole page and I said, just make me a list of all the names on this page.

I didn't tell it what to do. What format those names are

in, and it just made a list. And I'm, I'm surprised by that because like that would have taken me a lot of copying and pasting and a lot of time to do, but with a simple prompt, it's just like, pull all the names out.

Boom. There, there they are. I'm, I'm so happy that that worked.

And I think that's what's kind of fun about this. It's kind of like when you learned how to start 3D modeling. It's like, I don't know how to build all the geometry. I'm just going to try [00:47:00] something and see if it works. And if it works, it's great. And if it doesn't, okay, I'll try something else. It's a lot like building a piece of code or something, right?

You're just constantly. Trying things and just being curious about it, I think is one of the best positions to be in because Then it's really non committal, right? You don't have to worry about it performing Explicitly so that you get the outcome you're looking for But of course that will happen over time because you will get actually get good at it,

*Shane Burger:* I think we're in a spot where the technology is quite advanced and can get super detailed in certain areas, but we haven't really looked at what the broader potentialities across our practice is. It's very easy to look right in front of you and say, well, yes, we want to have a chat bot that looks at our projects.

And yes, we want to be able to do lots of image creation. And at some point, maybe it'll become model creation. I can see those sorts of things. Um, but the issue with this is that this is. I was about to say immature. I mean, it's been, you know, it's been talked about since the [00:48:00] late fifties. So, you know, it's not immature,

but

um,

it's early days for these types of things.

Um, I think every practice needs to be in a position of experimentation. And I think they need to be in a spot where the experimentation is happening broadly across the practice. One of the things that we've discussed with our company is to, to have a group of people, sort of a catalyst for conversations about AI and the broad potential application on their projects.

But then that group is supported by those who can take a deep dive from a technology and implementation perspective. So if someone sees an opportunity with a client to say, All right, well, we have a bunch of data from the client about their, um, about their workplace. We want to work with that information to then drive some auto layout features.

Okay, they have the idea, they have the potential application on our project, but they don't necessarily have the, the technology muscle or the infrastructure or systems to then really take a deep dive to implement that system. So what I think we [00:49:00] need to be doing as an industry is allowing that experimentation, especially at the face of projects, but then giving significant muscle and support behind those people.

They themselves shouldn't be on off alone doing this, but there should be people who are then back within the kind of core of the company who are looking at these opportunities. Some software developers within that group who are building out these systems and supporting them, maybe data scientists or data analysts, some combination of this group, um, who then also looks at what that person's doing and that person and that person and says, well, her work over there actually has an interesting overtone to the work that he's doing over there.

So here's something now, some commonality. And now this suggests we should be building systems that connect these together. We're in a spot with AI where. If you're just looking for the solutions that are right in front of your face, by the time you implement them, the industry would have already gone three or four iterations down the road,

right? So you need to be in a spot where, yes, you are [00:50:00] doing those. That's just to keep up with the Joneses. I think you also need to have some experimentation within your practice to be asking the big questions. How is this relevant for us? It's not just about automating things. It's not just going to speed things up, but where does it provide increased value to your practice?

Um, and not just in a generic way to architecture and interiors or urban design in general, but specifically how you do your work. How does this fit to how you work? So there needs to be conversations at a, at a technical implementation standpoint. But also from a strategic and vision standpoint, what does this mean for my company based on all those experiments that I'm seeing out there?

*Evan Troxel:* And I think what's interesting about the tools that we're seeing is you mentioned up codes, you mentioned your design intelligence chat bot, right? You've got these really specific tools and that's how they work, right? We've,

*Shane Burger:* Yeah.

*Evan Troxel:* that's exactly how they work. They're super specific, but now we're starting to see like this idea of an AI agent that then [00:51:00] connects these APIs together so that This one can go talk to that one and bring information back and they can talk to a third one and they can all connect and kind of huddle and bring back information that pulls a little bit out of each one of them. And to do what you're talking about, like you, you basically described your AI team of, of what

would be a firm's AI team. They have to have that big picture. They have to be tied into the business side and talking about strategies and the culture of the firm and what the. the. values of the firm and the specific roles and tasks that people have to do on a day to day basis and start to link up what problems and challenges do we actually have and then pick the right tools for the job. But have a really great understanding of all the tools on offer, and going back to like the budgeting and the user license thing, I think this is, it's making things actually way more complicated because we're seeing a boom in all of these tools, right? Just AI tools alone, if you just [00:52:00] kept it in that bucket.

There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them all of a sudden, and they're all going straight to the users. They're not going through the traditional channels of how you would implement technology in a firm, if I worked at a firm and they didn't offer access to open AI, like I, I would go get my own license of it

so that I could play around with it, but because I can, because open AI is talking directly to me or making me able to do that, so Talk about a nightmare for a firm, right?

Like to go back to our earlier and budgeting and figuring out like crystal balling, how much we're going to spend in different categories over the year. There's, it's, it's just a big, giant guess, right? Like we don't know what tools we're going to be using because we don't even know the projects we're going to have this year.

Right. So

I think there's always going to be some of the usual suspects that of course, we're going to use this and that on this project because we always use this and that, but there's all these other things now too, that. are proving to be incredibly [00:53:00] useful or we're experimenting, right? We're trying to find that out if they're going to be useful or not.

And then we have to keep our fingers on the pulse constantly over time because they're also changing and updating and they're pivoting quickly as well. We see that happening all the time. So from a DT, IT perspective, bigger nightmare, bigger team, like what do you have to do to actually keep abreast of what's going on?

*Shane Burger:* Right. I, I mean, unfortunately it does end up needing to have a bigger team to cover this amount of, of, um, Spread between different tools that are out there.

I mean, we don't, you know, the, the work happening on, uh, image diffusion is mostly, mostly myself with another member of my team who have been experimenting with it for, you know, a good year or more.

Um, but even then there's a number of the tools that we haven't had a chance to, to properly try out or really to push ourselves through. Um, I can think of at least three, three, [00:54:00] diffusion right now. Um, at some point we'd like to get it to one would be the ideal scenario. Um, and we're talking with companies about, uh, which one we end up going with.

Um, but there's, you know, strong preferences and experience with each of these. And every two months, another one comes out with a different model or a new feature and they leapfrog each other. And everybody rightly and understandably has preferences as to which one that they like to work with. But as a company, we need to, at some point.

What is the primary tool that we're going to be using when it comes to the chatbots you add on top of this, and this is arguably so in the image section to the concerns about intellectual property. They all have different rules about what information that you could submit to them that won't be training their model.

I've appreciated that. Things like, uh, you know, the, the chatbot, the copilots that Microsoft is releasing based upon chat GPT 4, uh, do have protections for a company like ours if you have an enterprise agreement. Uh, [00:55:00] things that you submit into it will not be going to train the model. Uh, so I do appreciate that that sort of thing is happening.

But, um, a lot of this is going direct to the consumers, direct to the staff. They're experimenting with this at home. They've got, you know, the apps on their phone that they're popping in queries and stuff. Don't blame them. It's like it's right in front of them. It's easy to use. Sometimes it's completely free.

But we have to be very aware that if there's project information, Or staff information that are going into these systems, we have to start thinking about, uh, privacy rights, intellectual property, copyright, all those types of things have to come into play. So, unfortunately, um, just around the time as we started creating some forms that would help us better understand the full list of things we need to consider for new platforms, there was a huge explosion of the amount of those platforms of which we need to answer those same questions.

So, it's getting harder to manage that significant increase that's out there. I really do appreciate, though, the significant competition that's out there. I [00:56:00] think a lot of these companies started off by saying, Well, we know how to do this with AI, so let's find the market that will work with it. And now they're starting to get feedback from customers like ourselves, who are saying, Hey, that's cool and all, but we really needed to do this, this, and this.

Um, a good example, just with the, the image tools, is, uh, the first versions that were out there were, Very much a, um, we know how to create this sort of technology, throw it out there, see what people are doing with it. Now, the next sets of features that are showing up are based upon feedback that people are giving it.

We've given similar types of feedback to AI tools that have been built into Rhino and Revit. Saying, Hey, that's great, but it actually would help everybody if you, you know, if it understood the materials that it was looking at, or the three dimensionality of the object in order to inform the image creation.

So, um, I, at one point, I'm excited.

I love seeing all the new tools. I love seeing the companies leapfrog over each other. I love seeing all the innovation. Um, but then if I, I put [00:57:00] my, my, um, IT, you know, management sort of hat back on my head again, I start getting scared of the amount of things that we have to cover at the same time.

And again, we don't want to be in a spot where we're telling people no, but as a company that has clients with confidential information and there's issues of intellectual property ownership. And there's costs associated with all of that, as well as buying licenses. Um, we have to be on the conservative side.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah There's a subject that I've been kind of knocking around in my head, which is unrelated So we're gonna take a turn here but I'm curious what your feedback would be on it because I you know if we talk about the future of the profession one one of the things that We are mired in, and we're not alone.

This is, this seems to be everybody is this idea of like pseudo productivity. it's very hard to measure productivity in architecture. And, and now we're talking about tools that we're encouraging people to play with from a creative sense, [00:58:00] but also from an efficiency sense. We've seen tools come along in the past that have promised efficiency and productivity, but it really hasn't led to that, right?

Like our main production pipeline has enabled us to put more into projects, but it hasn't really enabled us to spend less time doing that, but email, Slack, Teams, Zoom, that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about pseudoproductivity. And when we're talking about a thousand people at a firm who spend a lot of time in email and in tracking all of the, and in conversations, and what's your general sense about how much time people spend doing that versus actually doing the job?

Because what, what I kind of feel like a reckoning that needs to happen is. Actual valuable output of architecture. And that doesn't even necessarily mean creating drawings, right? That is a. a thing that we have to do to get the [00:59:00] permits to build the building to satisfy the contract documents. And something that Clifton Harness said on a podcast a long time ago was like, if you want to really change architecture, change the OAC agreement, right?

Like actually go to the root of where a lot of this is. And that's where the big fundamental changes. And I feel like we've been boiling the frog with email and with, it's like, okay, this is just the way that it is, but everybody is spending an Unending amount of time being on call for anybody who dips into your inbox. unwelcomed, right? It's never, it's never like the other way around. It's not like you invited them in. No, they just dumped something onto your to do list for today. What's your sense in a firm like yours? That big, I mean, it's just got to be an enormous, like, you probably don't even want to know, but at the same time, like this is the stuff that people are actually doing every day.

And you want to say, we're architects, we're building, we're designing the world of the future. Right. And, and at the same time we're doing email and we're on Slack all day long.

*Shane Burger:* Yeah, I, [01:00:00] I, some of this is probably predating me by a number of years. Although I think when I started into, uh, started working for architecture practices, I started doing my first internships in the late nineties. And I would see this at this point as well, because not, not You know, not everybody in the in the practice at that point had an email address associated with material.

As an intern, I didn't have an email address. So people came up to talk to me and I did what I was told to do. Um, and as part of that, The teams were structured in a way, were more formally structured to have people who are kind of document and communication controllers. So they were basically holding back the floodgates of the information that was coming from clients and consultants who were there in charge of communicating the material that was out there.

Even when I started off at Grimshaw, my job as a job captain was I was primarily responsible for dealing with Issuing the updated drawing sets for backgrounds to our consultants to work with, receiving their information, coordinating, making sure that [01:01:00] was all set. No one else in the team got involved in that conversation.

Um, if there were particular flows of communication coming in, they had a particular person that they were associated with. Uh, at some point, it started turning into, uh, why don't we just create a, uh, project number email address? Everything goes through that. Well then everybody has access to that. And then after a while it becomes, no, just everybody gets all the emails.

That's too much work to deal with the project control email.

*Evan Troxel:* And this was back in the

days when email was pop, right? And so

it was like, if, if one person logged into that email address, they were the only person going to download that email because it was going to get deleted off the server. We weren't even dealing with IMAP at that point.

*Shane Burger:* right. And so this was, this is a case of where, um, we had limitations with the technology, but they, in a way, weren't too far off from how we were kind of managing projects and controlling those projects. Um, we now have, uh, project management systems. We use A Connects for a lot of our work. People, we use all sorts of things that the contractors bring to the table.

Um, But we [01:02:00] haven't necessarily picked up, you know, returned too much of the idea of document control or particular flows of communication

because, um, email made it, uh, effectively democratized access to communication and access to information. So then it meant, well, why don't I just go and ask the person that I know has the answer rather than going through, I would like the answer to my question, so I'm going to email you, Evan, like you're the person I know that has it, doesn't matter if you're not the, you know, don't have time to answer this right, I'm going to ask you or I'm going to text you in Teams.

Right? When we opened up the flood of communication to be as ubiquitous across the entire project team, um, we lost control of the moments at which we can keep ourselves separated from that. And, and you end up having this sort of constant multitasking where there's always communications happening, um, about a project that's interrupting my workflow and what I'm doing.

I tend to be a person that works with headphones on because I get easily distracted, and I cut out everything I possibly can. We can because I'll shut off notifications. I'll shut off everything because it's [01:03:00] too easy to just say, Oh, there's a little drip feed of things that are going on. I think it's it's beyond just our profession.

It's just made it very easy to be distracted about these things. The other thing about this, though, is that even when we attend meetings, especially post pandemic. We're distracted. Um, not telling on anybody in particular, and I'm sure this is the case across every architecture practice. But when you walk through a studio and people are on video conferences with others, they have other programs that are up.

They're doing drawing sets, they're doing other work.

*Evan Troxel:* Totally.

*Shane Burger:* Only half their attention is in the meeting at that point. They're catching up other things, because they're busy. They've been handed way too many things to do, and there's no separation between what you, you know, what you're doing. Um, how you communicate and when you work in these things, so it's a divided attention, so it's a, it's a, it's a constant issue about distractions in terms of communications and these things have not provided greater value to the work that they've done, we've done, it's just made us a lot, a lot busier, um, I have mixed [01:04:00] feelings about automation, about how we use automation and what the point of automation is, but ultimately for me, the, the real point around automation is, I'll back up for a second and then hopefully this isn't necessarily changing topics, but, um, automation for me, uh, you could say, uh, it's the client that benefits from automation.

Well, if that's the case, then, you know, the client should have to pay less money for your project because you were able to automate, you know, a third of your construction document set. So I'm going to pay you less money for that. Okay, that's not necessarily going to benefit us. If I go and say, okay, it should be the owners and shareholders that benefit from this.

All right. Um, fine, that's possible, right? So we still charge the client the same amount of money, but we get increased profit from that side. The third option would be to say, it's the staff who benefit from automation. And the reason why I focus on that is because ultimately, any tool that we use, I want it to create, A better quality [01:05:00] of experience, a better value of experience for the people sitting at their desks.

If we can automate away something that was a mundane or repetitive tasks and giving them agency to then choose what they do in replacement of that, whether it's investing in the project in a different way, or God forbid, going to home to have dinner with their family, right? Like, or not working a weekend and getting good sleep.

All of those things. Significantly benefit their life and their project, um, their experience working for you, which is better for, you know, talent retention. Um, they then contribute better to the project. They're well rested. They've appreciated the work that they've done. They haven't had to sit there for eight hours working on a door schedule, which they think is of low value to what they think they could provide to a project.

Which then means, The project is higher quality, delivered more efficiently, so the shareholders of the company and principals benefit from that, and ultimately the client benefits from it as well. So, the, because they get a higher quality project, [01:06:00] uh, or product out of that work. So for me, If I look at any selection of tool that we're purchasing, anything that promises greater efficiencies, um, better, you know, um, better communication, speeding things up, automating things, or a tool that we built, the question I keep coming back to every single time is, Is it creating a better quality experience for the staff who are actively working on the project?

If it's not doing that, then it's less likely we're going to go that sort of direction. That's my measure, is, uh, will people actually, not just necessarily that they need to enjoy it, but will it give them more agency over their time, and give them an ability to provide greater value to the work that they do in the studios?

*Evan Troxel:* My fear is that, and I don't think that that is disconnected from, from the topic at all. I think it's right, it's right in, right in there. It's just a different way of looking at it. Because I don't think anybody goes to work and says they're planning on doing a bad job. And I think

that's [01:07:00] why BIM has led us down the path that we're on, which is, it's, it enabled us to put more data into the project.

And, and there is a thinking that more data is higher quality. It's a

better project. It hasn't taken away how much time it takes to do it. And in some cases, in many cases, it actually takes more time to do it the right way. And so that's my fear is that like. Tools will be sold under the guise of efficiency, productivity, um, deeper, higher quality work, but we will be spending more time because it's additive.

Like all of these other communication tools that are swimming around us and distracting us and we're forced to use them because my supervisor sent me an email and now I have to respond to it, um, even though I wasn't planning on doing that today. Because I need this software license back to the earlier part in our, in

our conversation.

Like there's all of these things pulling at us and, and they're all additive. Like there, there's never part of the conversation [01:08:00] is like, okay, what do I deprioritize now? because there's this new thing on my plate all of a sudden. And so that, that's where my fear is. And I, I, I love how you kind of bring it back to quality.

My fear is that it's just more quality. It's just more. And, and

that, because I, we, we've seen this before. Um, I think that there's like a reckoning that needs to happen at the highest levels of leadership in a company, which, which says like, we have to change the way we work. We have to, we have to be productive in the right ways with the kind of output.

Like, why do we exist? We do not exist to process email. We do not

exist to be on call for everyone all the time. And you're a global company. You have workers in Australia. There's a new bill that just passed the Senate. They are the right to disconnect. Have you seen this?

*Shane Burger:* I heard about it briefly, but yeah,

*Evan Troxel:* I mean, the idea of it is, is kind of insane and also totally expected, right?

It's

like, I don't have to answer emails or text messages after work hours. And, and what's [01:09:00] crazy is, is like, we're, we're, we're at that point. Architecture has been at this point forever, right? So this is nothing new for architecture, but it's, it's like, After hours is when I actually get work done because I'm so distracted all day long,

right? So, I mean, you have a, you have an Australian studio, right? And, and so I, I don't know if this affects you guys or not. I'm sure it does in some ways, but it's like, it's, it's, this is kind of a, again, like a boiling the frog, like this is just the way it is and we expect it. And, and I also feel like a reckoning needs to happen to say like, no, we're, We do creative, world changing work.

We are creators of the built environment. That's why we exist. And people hire us because Woods Bagot is going to come up with ideas that we've never dreamed of. And, and that's why we chose to, and, and it's like, Yeah, but you, we're spending most of our time processing email and replying to Slack messages,

*Shane Burger:* and to go back to a little bit of the AI conversation, a lot of that stuff is the, is the sort of [01:10:00] material that I would rather we focus more energy on as an industry to automate or to deal with to get that stuff away. I mean, number one, I have to say, we have always have to ask the question, are we spending time developing automation tools for processes we should never do in the first place?

That's always the first thing, Right.

Should you even be doing that? But for the things that we're doing, are there better ways of us actually providing access to the answers to the question, getting you to the outcomes that you're actually looking for. It's not just that you say you need this big report.

What's the outcome you're looking for? I can probably provide that in a better way,

or I can build in systems or work with tools to help me kind of achieve that sort of goal. Instead, we've gotten excited about, uh, uh, interjecting AI into the creative work. The thing that we, a lot of us love and value and that we think we provide additional value to.

What I'm really appreciating about these conversations that we're having within our practice right now is, uh, in addition to looking at what we automate and where there's [01:11:00] inefficiencies and problems and, you know, any of our processes that we think we can be better at and do better at, we're also asking some real questions.

What is the human intelligence value? Where do we combine it? an AI and an HI or human intelligence component. And what does this help us revalue about what we, as designers, as architects, interior designers, urban designers, consultants, um, uh, value about our work? What, what's unique about what we provide to our clients.

So it's actually turned into a really. Interesting, empathetic conversation, you know, how does empathy come back into it? Understanding what others are thinking, how others are working. I think, I think we're going to get to this point where, um, my reference for this is, uh, the, uh, MIT researcher, Marvin Minsky's concept of society of the mind.

We're going to get to this point. We're going to have. a collection of AIs around us, this sort of society of the mind of AIs that help us automate portions of our processes and the work that we do. [01:12:00] Um, but my hope is that the end result of that is we become much more empathetic designers and people out of that, because we can get rid of more and more of these things that are less necessary for our work and actually bring those qualities, those uniquely human qualities, to the How we design, how we work with our partners here in the studio, how we work with our partners outside, and how we work with our clients.

So I, I think it's, we've hit this real point of tension of where our industry feels like it's not as efficient as it could be, but we're overloaded with things that we think aren't of as great value. I would hope it brings about real questions about what outcomes we're looking for, but also what value we bring to the table.

*Evan Troxel:* there's a lot there. And you talked earlier about kind of automating away, maybe potentially having to do less, but, but having a higher quality, more valuable experience as well as. I'm curious what you think about the idea [01:13:00] with when AI gets involved in the creative process.

So you just talked about kind of augmenting people, kind of co designing human intelligence, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence. I don't know. There's a lot of ways we could

play with those words. But what kinds of things are you seeing there that, you know, You said you're playing with this.

You've got a couple other people in the, in the firm playing with this. What potentials are you seeing here and what potential impact do you see it having on the architectural profession? Right.

*Shane Burger:* So I think the way that I this came up in a conversation with our principals a few weeks ago, and I gave a presentation or global studio just last week about this. We're asking the question. Can AI's be creative? Um, and a lot of this came back to we. presented to the group. What is machine learning?

How does it work? You know, statistical model, uh, that effectively generative AI is just an upgraded version of autocomplete. That seems like I'm dismissing it, but it's actually, that's an incredibly powerful concept. [01:14:00] So it led to discussions about where it can make mistakes, things that can and cannot do.

Um, for example, uh, it doesn't have a mental model of the world. It doesn't have a, a concept of mind, of, um, of how other people think. I know you as a human, so I look at you and I can make some assumptions about your method of judgment and your reasoning that gives me trust in what you're doing. And we can also speak a certain language with each other and understand that there's some similarities in the sort of backgrounds.

But the things that we're looking at were, um, I talked about three different kinds of creativity, um, and I'm blanking on the author that this came from at the moment. Don't have my notes in front of me, but, um, one was called combinatorial creativity. Another was exploratory creativity. And then there's transformational creativity and combinatorial creativity.

Actually, I'll hit the second first. Exploratory creativity is taking the context of a single style and exploring all the potential opportunities that sit within it. Um, and I've seen some examples of this out here when I looked at presentations, for [01:15:00] example, by um, Patrik Schumacher for Zaha Hadid's office.

They were showing how they fed in, Images of Zaha Hadid's work into DALL-E and explored all the potential opportunities that were sitting within that by giving just different descriptions. Um, at one point I can see how maybe that would yield some new and interesting ideas. However, I had to back up for a moment and think to myself.

Those are not Zaha Hadid projects. Those are professional photographs of Zaha Hadid projects. You are not pulling out of them the sort of essences that are really possible with these types of things. it's not that you want to mimic a style. You actually, through looking at the work of other people, want to get your head into the thinking of the artist and architect that created it.

And this system is not permitting you to do that. Um, uh, it is stopping you at a certain point. So that really frustrated me to see that. So then I started to think, okay, well, hold on. There's other methods that are out there. And that's when I get into combinatorial creativity. So with [01:16:00] combinatorial creativity, there might be, ways at which I mash up two styles with each other.

You see this all the time. Um, I saw some great work from some, um, architecture professors at university that were looking at skyscrapers and designs influenced by billowing fabric, and it was gorgeous. It was amazing. And it, it, the ideas that started to pop up for you because it was combining something you knew, maybe it was something that you didn't know.

So it's opening up the wide array of possibilities. And in those sorts of cases, we were also, uh, In our practice, looking at the opportunities for narrative to influence that, so we'd almost tell a story or we describe an experience and see what images and things would come up. And it wouldn't be architecture, but it would be something evocative of a concept, something that got you excited and got you thinking.

So never something you would show a client except maybe if it was like a mood board. It's not architecture. It's a feeling. It's a mood. And there might be. Colors, textures, shapes, things that pop up that [01:17:00] are representative of that mood, that influence your thinking. So that was a spot where we had some level of excitement, but then we get to the third level of creativity, which is transformational creativity.

And that is honestly where you take core concepts that might exist in other professions. Um, it might be, um, allegory. It might be, um, meaning that's derived from particular historic contexts, things that are beyond what you can see just within an image, um, shapes and colors and textures and, and types of movement that have particular kinds of meaning combined with what we experience with our, our bodies.

You know, our, our cognition is embodied cognition. So we have a different kind of experience. That is where transformational creativity comes into play because you've got to take things from other disciplines. That are abstract concepts and apply it to your work. Um, that might be taken from music or dance.

It might be taken from a scientific context or a historic event that happened on the site. [01:18:00] That is where I've seen a lot more interesting innovations and architectures that get to that level of transformational creativity. Those are the things that move our cultural needle ahead, right? Culture is not stagnant.

Language is not stagnant. Style is not stagnant. Those transformational moments really move things forward. We don't get that out of an A. I. system because it's based upon the particular two dimensional representation of what we have seen in the past. So I think what we need to understand is that there are absolutely possibilities to explore ideas and extend our thinking and how we approach work.

But we have to absolutely understand what those limitations are. Um, those, I almost, you know, the way that I've referred to it with our, our staff is, um, Treat it like it's a, uh, junior member of your team that comes from, you know, you know, didn't go to school with you, went to some other sort of school, has crazy, whacked out ideas that they're throwing under the table, and one out of every 50 is going to be worth looking at and [01:19:00] considering.

They're not realistic, they're not the answer, but they create a new space to explore. They prompt your thinking, they get something happening, and that's a value, but it's not the answer. It's not a solution, it's a, it's a space to explore.

*Evan Troxel:* I did an episode with Ben Guler from Evolve Lab, and they make the rendering application Veras, which is an AI rendering

application for Rhino, and Revit, and Vectorworks, and now Forma, um, and ArchiCAD, and SketchUp. So the, the, the idea that, that we talked about in there was that it's prompting us, and that's why

I bring it up. It's, it's like, it is a feedback loop, right? And so one out of 50 isn't bad when you're in the design exploration,

*Shane Burger:* Yeah.

*Evan Troxel:* Because I mean, that's, this is what designers do. Like, it's all a training model. We are

constantly taking input from all over the place, filing it away. You don't know when you're going to use it. And then the opportunity presents itself. You and creativity doesn't happen when you want it to. It just

happens, right? We can't explain that, but [01:20:00] it's like, we're connecting dots. That's what we do as designers. I love talking to you about this, Shane, because, and maybe this is, That's a total aside, but I think it is so important for somebody in your position to come from the practice side. I think that is so key because the things that you're talking about and, and then you get into implementation and licensing and, and

application and all of these things, but, but you're coming at it from a really pure place of like the pursuit of our craft.

And that to me is so important. And there's, there's a lot of people out there. Like you, who are in positions, and I just think like it is a huge advantage for firms to have somebody come from that perspective or that approach or that way of thinking about it, because It's about architecture, and you're constantly

bringing it back to architecture. You're not just trying to solve this very narrow problem. Sometimes that may be a narrow solution to a much larger [01:21:00] piece of the puzzle, um, but you're looking at it puzzle scale, right? And, and I think that that's, that's really cool. It's really interesting to think about the hit rate. of, of interesting things. And that,

that, but that's what creativity is. Like it's, it's funny that people want to throw up a red flag and be like, it makes mistakes.

It's like, okay, I make mistakes, you make mistakes, we all make mistakes. And sometimes

the mistakes lead to unexpected outcomes, surprising things that all of a sudden that's a new path that wasn't available to us before.

Like Bob Ross, the painter said, happy little accidents, right? It's

totally true when it comes to creativity.

*Shane Burger:* there's an aspect of cultural transformation that comes out of mistakes. There was a debate that we had about six months ago, a playful debate that I was organized in as part of the World City Conference. And it was a two teams pitted against each other around the role of the architect in urban design in a city.

And one group, not necessarily that they actually agreed with this perspective, but three people were picked to be, yes, it's [01:22:00] AI is going to replace the architect. I was on the, no, AI isn't going to replace the architect side. One of the arguments that we made was, this presentation was in New York City, um, a, a, an AI would want to create a city that was hyper efficient, you know, as pure and as clean and as simple as possible,

but it would become,

*Evan Troxel:* gotta start over. You can't, you can't make a New York City.

*Shane Burger:* Right.

It would be completely devoid of culture. It wouldn't have any depth. It wouldn't have meaning. There are all sorts of happy accidents, to quote Bob Ross, that have happened in the urban planning of New York City. Now, granted, a lot weren't happy accidents. They were very angry accidents in terms of, um, you know, bulldozing over portions of the Bronx and Brooklyn and disadvantaged neighborhoods.

But there were other things that happened that were in the gaps, in the gray areas, in the mistakes, in the overlaps, in the oddities. Um, it's in the movement from one neighborhood to another, encountering one cultural group butting up against another cultural group. Things that an AI would want to make more efficient and organized and [01:23:00] more productive with a different, completely different set of goals, where we have actually appreciated those accidents and differences and what happens in a temporal quality over time, what changes over time.

Those cultural changes do, uh, are things that, um, do happen in those gray spaces and I think we as humans are very good at operating them. We're also very good at, because we're not a black box, people can have a, again, a theory mind about what others are thinking about. We can work with each other and make our way through these changes and make compromises and come up with solutions together.

Um, those again are some of these unique qualities as humans we have. Uh, and I, I also just keep coming back to, there's, you know, there's multiple types of intelligence that humans have. And those are the things that we have to end up bringing to the table. I do, AI will absolutely be part of our work. Um, Um, and it will be in multiple aspects of our work going forward, but we have to come back and ask the question.

Why are we doing this in the first place? What's the role of our practice? What's the role of our profession in the industry? Um, what's our role in [01:24:00] society and how we interface with the people who are ultimately going to inhabit the spaces that we create? And it's their experience that we should be aiming for.

So if there is a way for AI to help provide a more positive experience for them by helping us do some of our work. By maybe automating portions of work so we can focus on that end user in the end, then absolutely we should do it. And my hope would be anybody leading strategy in a technology practice has to look at it from that kind of perspective because that's ultimately your goal.

It's not just to save money on your next contract with a large software vendor. We have to do that. Yes. But in the end, the reason why you were there. It's to ultimately help the designers in that practice create transformational experiences for the people who live out in the built environment. That's, that's your goal.

If you help them get there, then you're successful.

*Evan Troxel:* I kind of want to end the episode right there, but I get, I'm not going to, I want to just say

that like it's through failure that learning happens, right?

[01:25:00] And you cannot learn without failure. You're just going to be regurgitating the same old crap. I mean, that's one of my concerns with AI is that we're just going to keep regurgitating the same crap because it was trained on the internet and there's a lot of crap.

There's a lot of garbage in and garbage out. So I, I'm, I'm concerned about that. But, but the idea of. The imperfections in New York City, to your example, like there's something also to be said about it, that it is exactly perfect in all of its imperfections, right?

There's something amazing and beautiful.

And there's these moments. that could have never, you could have never planned for those, right? And, and there's something really special about that. And that is what makes it incredibly human. Like to get back to the whole, why we do what we do part of this, it's, it's for the people and to create experiences and to make their lives better so that they can better contribute back to society and their community and their families and all these things like architecture elevates. The built environment, and it has the ability to do that. We literally, it's so weird that this has come up three times in this episode, but we [01:26:00] literally can change the world, right? And we're concerned about so many things, the, the environmental impact. And there, there's just so many layers to that, the building code and health, safety and welfare and the human experience and all of these things that it's, it's just an incredible profession to work within. And at the same time, like we're so run down. By all of this stuff that happens on the day-to-day basis on the distractions, doing so much email, worrying about licensing and like all that's just getting in the way of

us doing the thing that we're supposed to be doing, that we actually can contribute to the world.

And, uh, I mean, this has been a wonderful conversation to have with you. I, I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us today.

I'm really enjoying where things are going right now in the industry. And I, I really appreciate that at least for us in our practice, but this is happening lots of places is the buzz around AI has focused the attention back on human experience and what we do as [01:27:00] architects and what our role is.

*Shane Burger:* And I, I, in a way, I think people wanted that to happen when BIM came along and it didn't.

*Evan Troxel:* Mm hmm.

*Shane Burger:* BIM kind of kicked the can down the road. It automated some things for us, but it didn't necessarily, uh, necessarily increase the Maybe the quality of what was being delivered or the value which we are providing society, if anything, it kind of pointed towards how dependent we are on technology to actually deliver on parts of our work, all those additional drawing sets that we now had to create.

Um, this is actually starting to ask the question, what is our value? What are we supposed to be providing? Um, I don't agree with some of the heads of technology companies who seem to think that on five years, Architects are gonna disappear. It's, they don't understand what we actually provide. But I do think we as an industry have to step up and advocate for ourselves, but also really point out, you know, uh, where there are opportunities to use AI to then provide that kind of unique human value that we do, uh, provide to the built in built environment.[01:28:00]

*Evan Troxel:* I guess this prompts me to ask you, you know, maybe, maybe a final question, but at Woods Bagot, or maybe just in your head, have you started to think about changes in business model that are going to need to happen?

*Shane Burger:* Yeah, I think, uh. A few things that have come up for us as we've been asking, okay, if we're, if it's no longer just fee for services, we're not just counting the amount of hours that we're doing for the work and it's not going to be the model of, uh, oh, the fee for that project is, well, I know it's going to take this many drawing sets.

So, okay, that thick of a drawing set costs this amount of money, right? Those sort of models have to continue to disappear. It's not where our value is. They were an easy way for us. Maybe it's similar to what we said at the previous conversation, uh, at the beginning about licensing. It's the easiest way for us to just have an answer of how much to charge, but it's not the value we're actually providing to the end product.

Um, some of the things that come up, um, have more to do with, uh, building performance. So, are there performance incentives? I know Phil Bernstein has talked [01:29:00] about this, a handful of others. If your building performs 10 or 20 percent better than the metric. On particular metrics that were agreed upon in advance with the client, is there an incentive for us that we, you know, get more money associated out of that?

Um, some of this comes down to then proving that through evidence based design. So we've had increased amount of conversations about both, Environmental and building performance, but also social performance, getting into the social sciences and understanding how our spaces are performing and showing that value to clients.

Um, it has caused us to talk a lot more about what our value is and how we might be. partnering with our clients to effectively get paid for what value we're actually bringing to them, their end product, where they want to have an amazing space for their employees or for the public or whatever it is. Um, I don't know that I necessarily have an answer, but it's something we're absolutely like very actively looking after right now.

And there's some real questions as to whether It might be a multitude of answers, depending on the kind of service and the kind of sector [01:30:00] that we're working with. What works for retail might be different from workplace and might be different from residential versus transport.

*Evan Troxel:* But your leadership is open to having those conversations. And it's not like, this is definitely something that just keeps, the can keeps getting kicked down the road. Right. It's like, maybe someday we'll have to think about that. it's literally happening right now where the

value proposition has to be stated for what, where we add value to the process.

And I like what you're talking about, extending that into building performance over time. You talked about the temporal nature of like that projects don't stop when we, The occupancy happens, right? It continues. And therefore I think there is a huge opportunity for us to continue to have a relationship with a client to ensure that that happens because the prototypical nature of buildings is just that, like we, you have to prove it. once the

building is built, so this starts to lead into ideas about having a real research arm of a company as well, because you can't just ask dumb [01:31:00] questions. You're gonna get dumb answers at the end, and, and truly taking the time to understand. Empathetically, like what clients are experiencing in spaces.

Cause if, if you just send a form over the fence, they're just going to check boxes, they're, they're going to take the least path of resistance to get that form done because they're just being forced to do it, but actually sitting with those users, experiencing space, talking about operations, maintenance of facilities, all of these things that happen after occupancy is where now you're shifting the conversation to a later phase of service and relationship with clients potentially as well.

*Shane Burger:* we've had good luck with those conversations with a lot of repeat clients, clients that we've done lots of work for. That's definitely happened in workplace, um, and, uh, some of our retail work. Um, but increasingly having those conversations with new clients coming in to say, you know, we don't, we're not just there to build you one space.

Um, we'd like to have an ongoing relationship with you. And our goal is through things like post occupancy analysis, [01:32:00] through building and spatial simulation, all these things is to Uh, take, um, critical insights and turn them into thoughtful outputs. So the answers that we're providing, the directions that we're providing are based upon data and our constant learning of our work as we go from project to project.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah.

And that's where this feedback loop with your GPT and your design intelligence could really benefit your firm over time, because you're, if you're continually putting in high quality insights and things you're pulling from clients of projects, and that is generating the feedback loop for what's coming next. You could really see this stepping up over time.

*Shane Burger:* Absolutely. Yeah.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah. Well, again, Shane, thank you so much for taking the time. This has been a fantastic conversation. I'll put links to where everybody can follow you online in the show notes. And, uh, I appreciate it, man. It's been fun.

*Shane Burger:* Hey. Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate you reaching out to me again.

*Evan Troxel:* All right. Until next time,

[01:33:00]

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The Evolution of TonicDMReg Prentice, founder of TonicDM, joins Randall Stevens to discuss the development and evolution of Tonic. Tonic is a cloud-based solution for smart, simple project information management (PIM).

Reg shares his journey from working with Frank Gehry and dabbling in amateur coding, to developing a project management web app called iShare at Gehry's office, which laid the groundwork for TonicDM.

The conversation touches on early experiences with software development, the principles of keeping technology simple and intuitive, and the importance of user feedback in shaping software features.

Reg and Randall get into the features and philosophies driving TonicDM, focusing on ease of use, automation, and the significance of supporting a customer's needs without unnecessary complexities. Additionally, they explore the backend aspects of software development, such as data import facilitation for new customers, data residency preferences, and the future directions TonicDM is heading towards in response to evolving market demands.

Episode Links* TonicDM website * Reg Prentice on LinkedIn

Watch this episode on YouTubeConfluence S1E12 - The Evolution of TonicDMIn this Confluence podcast episode, host Randall Stephens talks with Reg Prentice from TonicDM to discuss the development and evolution of architectural, eng…YouTubeSubscribe on YouTubeListen to this episode

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AJ Lightheart and Jon Matalucci join the podcast to talk about how they have worked together during the process of developing and testing the Autodesk Workshop XR platform which aims to evolve how professionals in architecture, engineering, and construction industries collaborate by using extended reality (XR) environments.

Today we talk about the benefits of immersive VR experiences for project visualization and coordination, and how such tools foster enhanced decision-making and empathy in design processes.

Additionally, we talk about the practical aspects of adopting XR technologies in firms, including hardware recommendations and strategies for wider organizational implementation.

This episode not only highlights Workshop XR's potential to democratize design processes but also emphasizes the ongoing evolution of digital practice in creating efficient, sustainable, and highly collaborative project environments in the early phases of the design process, which also leads to the opportunity for professional development and mentorship of design professionals along their career path.

Episode links:* AJ on LinkedIn * Jon on LinkedIn * Autodesk Workshop XR website * Autodesk Workshop XR on LinkedIn * Autodesk Workshop XR YouTube channel * Stantec website * Stantec on LinkedIn * Autodesk Workshop XR: Stantec Finds New Flow with XR (YouTube) * Workshop XR November 2023 press release: Autodesk Workshop XR Delivers Immersive Design Review Experience for the AEC Industry * Evan’s thoughts on Workshop XR: Autodesk Workshop XR: Stepping into the Future of Design Collaboration and AEC Knowledge Transfer * TRXL 106: ‘Aligning Ambitious Ideas’, with Gabe Paez * TRXL 020: ‘The Hard Part’, with Shane Scranton * TRXL 094: ‘Reinventing the Wheel’, with Johan Hanegraaf * Brazil (1985 film) * Harry Tuttle, Heating Engineer (YouTube)

About AJ Lightheart:AJ has been an emerging technology leader in the AEC industry for the past 14 years. As a trusted advisor for SMB to ENR top 500 companies, AJ has consistently found a passion for connecting technology to a practical ROI. Outside of work, AJ loves trying new craft beers and trying to keep up with his boys.

About Jon Matalucci:Jon is a versatile design professional with expertise in failure modes and effects analysis, risk management, and lean process improvement methodologies. He holds certification in risk assessment methodologies from Sandia National Laboratories for critical infrastructure applications. Jon has experience designing and manufacturing recreational watercraft, delivering over 1 kilometer of vessels for export to 5 different countries.

Currently, Jon serves as a Building Information Modeling/Virtual Design and Construction Manager within the Buildings division of Stantec, in support of healthcare and science and technology projects. Stantec is a community of more than 28,000 employees working across over 400 locations throughout 6 continents.

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Episode Transcript 155: ‘Shortening the Feedback Loop’, with AJ Lightheart and Jon Matalucci

*Evan Troxel:* [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode. I welcome AJ Lightheart and Jon Matalucci.

AJ has been an emerging technology leader in the AEC industry for the past 14 years and as a trusted advisor for small and medium-sized businesses to Engineering News Record top 500 companies AJ has consistently found a passion for connecting technology to a practical return on investment. He currently serves as the Senior Product Specialist in the Extended Reality group at Autodesk.

Jon Matalucci is a design professional with expertise in failure modes and effects analysis, risk management, and lean process improvement methodologies. He holds certification in risk assessment methodologies from Sandia National Laboratories for critical infrastructure applications. He has experience designing and manufacturing, recreational watercraft delivering over one kilometer of vessels for export to five different [00:01:00] countries.

Currently Jon serves as a Building Information Modeling and Virtual Design and Construction Manager within the buildings division of Stantec in support of healthcare and science and technology projects.

For scale, Stantec has more than 28,000 employees working across over 400 locations throughout six continents. It's staggering.

In this episode, we discuss how AJ and Jon have worked together through the process of developing and testing the Autodesk Workshop XR platform, released late last year, which aims to evolve, how professionals in architecture, engineering, and construction industries collaborate by using extended reality environments.

Today, we talk about the benefits of immersive VR experiences for project visualization and coordination. And how such tools foster enhanced decision making and empathy in the design process. Additionally, we talk about the practical aspects of adopting XR technologies in firms, including hardware, recommendations and [00:02:00] strategies for wider organizational implementation.

This episode, not only highlights Workshop XRs potential to democratize design processes, but also emphasizes the ongoing evolution of digital practice in creating efficient, sustainable, and highly collaborative project environments in the early phases of the design process, which also leads to the opportunity for professional development and mentorship of design professionals along their career path.

And my ask of you before we jump into today's conversation, please do me a favor. If you are a regular listener and are enjoying these episodes, please push that subscribe button, both on YouTube and in your preferred podcast app, to let me know that you're a fan of the show and to automatically get notified when new episodes come out. The full show notes and transcript can be found at trxl.co, where you can also subscribe to get them sent to you via email each time a new episode is released.

[00:03:00] And so now without further ado, I bring you AJ Lightheart and Jon Matalucci.

I am joined today by AJ Lightheart and Jon Matalucci and Jon and I used to work together, so full disclosure up front here that we have a friendship that already exists. And so it's great to have you on the show. AJ, this is our first time meeting and, I'm excited to Learn more about you and what you're working on.

So, welcome to the show, both of you.

*AJ Lightheart:* Thank you.

*Jon Matalucci:* Thank you.

*Evan Troxel:* so Jon, long time listener, first time caller, is that

*Jon Matalucci:* right?

That was my line.

*Evan Troxel:* Great. Well, so AJ, you're at Autodesk. Jon, you're at Stantec. You guys have been working together on what was kind of a new ish announcement back in November. We first learned about Autodesk's Workshop XR. And you guys have been, uh, Doing a lot of work on this, uh, kind of [00:04:00] behind the scenes. And I only became aware, Jon, that you were working on this when I saw your name and a quote and some images.

I think it was actually in a, in a video that was ultimately published on YouTube, uh, and I'll put links to all those in the show notes, but you were in some of the press release material for Workshop XR and I was like. Jon Matalucci. There's only one Jon Matalucci,

*Jon Matalucci:* I recognize the forehead, right? Right. Right.

*Evan Troxel:* it was, it was absolutely awesome to see you there because I know that we've had a lot of digital practice, technology implementation, uh, conversations over the years. Um, we've also been working a long time on the whole idea of meeting in the model, which is exactly where this is led. And back in the day, it was Iris VR's Prospect for us when we were working on this.

And then AJ just gave me a quick rundown on the history where the Wild acquired Prospect from Shane Scranton, who has been on the show. I'll put a link to that. episode in the show notes. [00:05:00] Gabe Paez of The Wild, CEO and founder, He's been on the show as well. So I'll put a link to that in the episode too. And so now here we are, November, 2023 Workshop XR is announced. I wrote a blog post about it that went out in my newsletter, but I haven't had a chance to really talk about it on the show and at Autodesk University, I got to go through the Workshop XR experience and see Gabe there and kind of touch base.

So I, I have had that, that experience myself, and I would love it if, before we get into the whole XR, AR VR, I guess all encompassing XR side of things. AJ, let's hear your story and, and I, I would love it if you could kind of give us an idea of how long you've been working in the XR side of things and, and how that began for you and, and why it matters.

*AJ Lightheart:* yeah, No, again, thank you for allowing me to be a part of this conversation. So, um, first off I'm based out of Vancouver, Washington. Um, so North Northwest, like [00:06:00] yourself, Evan. Uh, I've been around XR coming up on six years now. My whole career has spanned the architecture, engineering, construction industry around technology in some ways, a lot of things in life, you kind of just, into something, uh, not with a focused plan and intention.

That's definitely was the case for me with the wild, um, you know, moving from my former, uh, role, accounting project management for this industry. I wanted to stay in the industry. I wanted to stay in the Northwest and having a small kind of tech community in the greater Portland, Oregon area, had some connections to Gabe and, uh, some other members of the team.

And one thing led to another where I was able to be like the ninth employee. Um, prior to that, I had no experience with XR whatsoever. I'd never been in a headset, maybe other than maybe at a friend's house once, uh, in the evening. But I think that proved to be advantageous for me because I came in from a [00:07:00] very practical workflow mindset of what is the real value this is going to be creating in day to day processes for, for firms.

You know, how can you get past the cool factor, the sizzle and spice? which XR definitely brings to the table, but it's starting to have more, when the rubber meets the road, why should someone care? Why should an organization like Stantec or others actually think about deploying this consistently? So it's been a very fun journey over the last six years of just seeing how the industry and just our, I'd say our world, our culture is starting to embrace this more and not feeling like Sci fi, pie in the sky, but really a mechanism to democratize the design process.

And I think in its purest form, take what can be very complex topics. That is the work that this industry does and break it down to a very digestible level. So that anyone can understand, feel like their voices are being heard [00:08:00] and ensure we're getting that alignment earlier in the process. So that continues to be my shining light of what's always, exciting, going into these environments with people for the first time and seeing them have that light bulb moment of, Oh, now I understand how this can help us move our processes in a positive direction.

*Evan Troxel:* I always, I love that, light bulb moment myself, watching other people experience that for the first time, especially because they have an idea about what VR is like, and because they're watching it on a screen. And a lot of times, I mean, that never tells the story, right? Watching it on, watching someone else's experience on the screen is not experiencing VR in any way.

And so when they actually get in there and they have that moment, it's like, whoa. And I, I think. What I want to experience what I want to do in this podcast is talk about There's, there's a difference between that first experience and kind of understanding and then where the rubber actually meets the road, the actual practical [00:09:00] application of it in the design process.

And I, I, this is the perfect group of people to talk about that. So, Jon, give us an idea of where you're coming from. Tell us all about, um, boat manufacturing and logistics. And, uh, you've, you've had a really cool history and now you're at, you're at Stantec. I want you to kind of tell the story of, you've been and how you've gotten to where you are.

*Jon Matalucci:* well maybe I'll start with just the lens of kind of the outside experience. you know, child of the seventies, uh, was gifted, uh, an, uh, Sawyer Viewmaster. It was a model F, you know, the Bakelite. Um, and, uh, it was a really cool one that had the light, um, which my friends didn't have. And I think that the first experience was a 6 million man.

And I know it sounds strange, but, uh, it wasn't, you know, the, the world, um, world fair. Um, you know, it wasn't, The Grand Canyon, it was this, uh, you know, assemblage, um, models, characters, figurines. And, [00:10:00] um, the, the, the tweening was quite jarring, you know, you go from slide to slide. Um, but your brain could fill in the gaps.

And, uh, I spent hours on that thing. Must have, must have blown through a lot of batteries. Um, and then there's a big pause, right? Um, then I learned how to take that, um, calibration, that we understand as space, the understanding of how big things are.

And I kind of had to force it into plan, section, elevation, and scale drawing.

And this was back, you know, at some point there was output on vellum and mylar, hope I'm not dating myself too much. But, but, at some point it became a building, but you weren't really a part of that. There was this design intent and this fabrication piece, and, and the communication of what we were trying to do didn't really actualize until you did the walkthroughs, right, until you were out, out in the field.

Um, and, so for, you know, for years I kept thinking, something's wrong, I don't quite, I can't live in that plan, the plan brings me no joy. [00:11:00] Uh, and I tried, I tried to live in section and that wasn't enough. Um, so eventually I just gave up and, and left and joined the circus. Uh, I went into boat building. Um, because I wanted to get from the let's sketch to let's make.

I wanted to have a really, really rapid pace for that development cycle. You know, two years, three years on a hospital project, it's a long time. Uh, and You know, you tend to forget where you were and where the decisions were made and the continuity. If it's difficult for us, and we do it all the time, imagine what it's like for the users, or for the owners, or for the facility managers that follow along with that project.

Um, so, trying to shorten that feedback loop, uh, and, uh, bring everyone into a space where, uh, it's neutral. The calibration's innate. Um, we understand space, we touch door handles and things like that. Um, And there's a layer of, of, of data. So this is, this was the big key for me, the big [00:12:00] jumping off point. We have a lot of work outside of the model environment that tends to live outside of the model environment.

And as a result, those, those, uh, that bifurcation and those separate, uh, separate streams, the, the value's in two buckets. The reality on a project is that all of the intellectual capital, all of the value, lives in that model until the project opens. Until it becomes a thing that can be occupied and used.

Um, however we all have different levels of access to that data. And the, the, the Hard part, and when you're trying to make decisions, it's ensuring that the right data is in front of the people who need to make the decisions. And I can't discern that, and my teammates can't discern that. So you, you, you try to build a better sandbox, right?

This is where the construction cloud jumps in. It's how do we, how do we get document sharing? How do we get information sharing? Um, in a format where more people can access it. And, uh, that's Where would you rather make decisions? On a floor [00:13:00] plan or in an XR space? Uh, I guess it's pretty obvious, at least it was for me.

*Evan Troxel:* I love how you just framed that. That was, man. Okay. So number one, Jon, Jon is brilliant. Jon thinks very hard about things and the way that you kind of weaved a story from your early childhood to bringing it all together at the end there was, Really well done. Amazing. So now we have to zoom back out because I think Jon, the thing that we're going to get into with you is where the rubber meets the road, actual practical implementation, adoption, how hard that actually is in a firm of any size.

Let alone Stantec size, because this is the thing that we've always had, had a struggle with, which is like, Back in our day, it was actually getting someone to walk 10 feet to get into the VR station, and now, you don't even have to walk 10 feet, and it's still hard to get people.

into VR, but I love how you framed it. Where would you rather make decisions? I think that is, that is a really insightful [00:14:00] comment that I want to come back to. Before we get there, AJ, can you just give us an overview of WorkshopXR for people who are not familiar with what it is? The name even, people may not be familiar with The Wild, they may not be familiar with Prospect, and Iris VR, and the history and everything.

just frame what we're actually talking about here, what the offering is currently, uh, because I think that's going to really set the stage of, of getting to the implementation side.

*AJ Lightheart:* Yeah, Yeah.

you know, I'll start with the name itself. Um, the name was very strategically chosen. Uh, when you think of a workshop, You think of multiple applications, not just a one trick pony. And that really is kind of a re education that we're continuing to try to evangelize for the industry, that this is not something that gets used in just one small minute part of the design workflow, but can really span the totality.

And that really continues to be one of our charter. We want it to be the go to spot where peers are coming together just to bounce [00:15:00] ideas off of each other, maybe even rather than hopping on Zoom or Teams. For that matter, we want it to be the spot where you're meeting with your other subs and industry partners, where you're meeting with your customers at key milestones.

I think, Gabe, when I joined you in the past, let's talk about the concept of virtualizing transportation. Can we meet in an environment like this versus hopping on a plane or a train, still have the same output, but minimizing our carbon footprint, so having a good sustainability factor. So the name is very much a key element of this whole branded story, no doubt about it.

And, you know, it's been so advantageous that we had two, uh, and still two of the leading products on the market in The Wild and Prospect because it gave us a multiple year test pool, if you will, to really identify how are people using this, but what are the biggest stop gaps? Preventing more deployment and consistent usage.

And that really helps shape our kind of strategy and roadmap as it relates to, to [00:16:00] Workshop. You know, one of the biggest ones being the whole concept of, this is more just my own personal analysis of the industry itself, is we need to stop thinking about things in terms of files. And usually disconnected files and start thinking about things in terms of data connected data to a platform accommodated platform environment, which in our case in our world is the Autodesk Construction Cloud, ACC Jon hinted at

that.

So a key, key part of Workshop is that it is just a part of what is now becoming the common ecosystem that a lot of the industry is embracing around ACC. So that can be just a window into your ACC data, a workflow versus this separate product and rogue experience that always feels like it is out in its own world and how do we connect that virtual world back to the real one.

So, key, key foundational piece of, of Workshop is that bi directionality and just what you have in ACC is what you have in Workshop. And I shouldn't even say what you have in [00:17:00] Workshop because it's just a part. of the Autodesk Construction Cloud. So, if people take nothing else away from this in terms of Workshop, it would be that.

But the same token too. Jon was having, Jon, sorry to put you on the spot here, Jon was having IT and firewall issues getting into our recording here today. And just some simple things of the fact that it's going to work with one's SSO and credentials. They don't need to have a separate login and password.

It's something that IT has already approved if they're working with the likes of other Autodesk products. That it's going to be handling larger data sets with more democratized, available, stand alone hardware and headsets like a MetaQuest 3 or a MetaQuest Pro. Uh, so you're not having to have the biggest, baddest laptops and hardware in the world.

It's like a rocket ship ready to take off. So opening up the pool to a wider audience of users. We want XR to be more spontaneous, something that can be like, let's just hop in, and it seems like no different than let's hop into Revit, or let's hop [00:18:00] into, to ACC, and not this grand event that has to get planned out, you know, weeks in advance, all this model optimization and prep time, but something that can just help move the conversation forward at a faster clip, so that spontaneity and quick access is a key aspect that we're developing a workshop around.

*Evan Troxel:* And I think it's, it's important to say now that, Not every project is in ACC, especially in the beginning, right? And so, just, just for the audience's sake, The Wild and Prospect are still a thing, right? because early in design is when I would have been using it as a designer, and my project isn't in Revit yet, it's not on ACC yet.

It might just be on my desktop, it might just be in, it might even be in a cloud model. But I did have to export it, so there were barriers, like you just spoke to the barriers. I had to make the model so that it was ideal to be a VR model that I could then go experience. But, and so there were some barriers there, which is I think a lot of times why, [00:19:00] Jon, we had trouble getting people to get into the VR station was because there was a process that you had to go through of optimization or whatever.

it wasn't difficult, but it was, it wasn't trivial either, Uh, I think it was still more of a behavior problem than a, than a tech problem at that point, right? So, um, just, just maybe AJ, if you could just verify where we're at with what's available and when they apply to different phases of design, as far as the products go.

*AJ Lightheart:* Yeah, The Wild and Prospect are still viable, available options to the industry. And I've always thought about the, uh, I'll break it into kind of the flow of the, the, uh, the workflow. The wild definitely thrives on the front end. For some firms supporting their charrette, their iterative kind of war room type of, of elements.

It brings a dynamic of being able to interact with geometry, bringing in other forms of communication that we use in this industry, 2D assets, video content. Yeah. So a lot of firms use it very heavily in their bid and their proposal process or the whole [00:20:00] concept of like a virtual job trailer or virtual war room, if you will.

*Evan Troxel:* Mm hmm.

*AJ Lightheart:* I'd say once a project starts to get to like the 30, 40 percent mark, that's oftentimes where we've seen the baton get handed from The Wild to Prospect, where we are trying to do more of just the walkthroughs, identify issues, coordination.

exactly. And one of our goals with Workshop going forward is, it's too simple to say, Let's just take the best of The Wild and Prospect.

There's an element of that, like let's validate again how these firms have been using it. But we feel there's so much more there than just saying, Let's meld these two together and here's Workshop at XR. Certainly the ACC piece is a big part of that. But I think too, it's just the repeatability of the workflow.

Again, not having to import, export. Connect here, connect there, just the, the flow of it, while it's not a sexy sizzle and spice [00:21:00] feature, if you will, we believe and I believe that that, if we can nail that and do that very well, that that is going to make this a much more consistent daily driver for firms and how they're thinking about and leveraging these technologies.

*Evan Troxel:* Let's just broach the subject of adoption. And Jon, I would love to get your take on this because maybe to get there, let's talk about what the objections we've seen over the years. And from your perspective, you tell me, because you've lived this much more so than I have, but over the years, we've seen this go from, okay, it's, it's an interesting thing.

It's it's, or maybe people see it as a. a distraction from the real work of, of PDFs, right? Which is still true to, to some extent that that is the actual deliverable. But, there's definitely a value in the coordination in multiple people being in the same virtual environment at the same time, making decisions together, kind of to, to AJ's point, war room or big room concept, you know, when it comes to BIM coordination.

And so, you know, [00:22:00] Talk about the kinds of things that you've seen over the years and maybe how it's starting to change or has changed in the adoption side of things.

*Jon Matalucci:* Let's talk about the client facing piece of this, because I'd like to roll it back from that. You put a headset on a client, I just experienced this recently, and the first question was can I see the ocean from the roof? And I thought, you know, yes, um, that's going to take my team another month. Or you can wait 18 months and you'll actually be able to touch the door handles too.

Right? It was this understanding that he wanted to be wowed in television, ready player one kind of experience. And, um, There wasn't the right time for that. I mean, there are tools that operate that way. There are experiences that can be provided. Usually they go into marketing material. Um, they become press releases and things like that.

Um, what I wanted for him at that moment was for him to get excited about the roof deck and about the [00:23:00] spaces that were important to him, but how they related, where we were in the project life cycle, and then get those decisions out so we could accelerate and get him into his building faster. And I think my greatest takeaway is that the visualization as a vignette, kind of conceptually, it means to accelerate.

It's a means to, it's a velocity more than a speed. There's a vector piece that's really important. Um, AJ alluded to the alignment. Um, I think coordination should start at the very beginning. Uh, we, we, we tend to create, for lack of a better word, risk silos, right? There's the design intent risk silo, the constructor risk silo, and the owner risk silo.

And getting everyone to play in the same sandbox, that alone is a challenge. Um, and then to get them to agree as to a sequence of decisions. Um, and, and, you know, sorry, but that's my job. A full time gig now, right, is trying to, trying to bridge those sandboxes and, um, uh, get the [00:24:00] integration process rolling.

If I can have something that, uh, is always on, right, that you can just put on, I don't have to be asked to output sheets. Um, I don't have to, you know, spend time kind of, uh, looking at views or scenes. It's just on. And you go in and you find what's important to you. And better yet, if I have the time to come with you, then I can see that.

Um, I don't have to ask the questions. You can ask the questions. And, um, things accelerate. I think that, so that's the iterative part, tends to go away. You have that alignment early. So from an adoption standpoint, you have to see that. You have to kind of experience that to be able to assign value to it.

Um, the. I started with the Rift S, uh, which had the long cable and, I mean, I still love the thing. It's sitting on my desk and at some point I'm going to have to change the connector so that I can use it with my, kind of, future proof it for my other devices. Um, and it was prohibitive. Uh, [00:25:00] you felt awkward.

Uh, and then, you know, instantly, this is the, the kind of the VR challenge, instantly it takes whatever space you're in and makes it junk space, right? So it's a, it's a solo experience. I'm gonna bring out Koolhaas with that. Um, and it's even stranger when you're doing it with somebody else next to you, right?

Because you can see the avatar, you know physically they're, they're adjacent to you, but you're not really connected. Um, and so, uh, So, the adoption piece is I don't want to look silly. I don't recognize the controllers. It doesn't look like my mouse. Um, so some of the things you'll say, Do you remember when we had single monitor, single head video cards?

Do you remember when you got the second monitor? Like how amazing that process was? So this is the third monitor and mouse. It's no different. It's just going to open it all up for you. Um, and you just kind of stand back. So, uh, users, they'll have that experience. Uh, on the, on the owner's side, [00:26:00] when I say users, excuse me, I'm referring to the future users of these spaces.

Um, and then, uh, the ownership team, they tend to invest. So we've sent them, uh, I don't want to say the budget dust, but the headsets are really low cost. Um, certainly lower cost when you compare it to the number of hours it takes to do the other things that you would be doing if you weren't sending a headset.

So we just send them off, um, to clients with some connectivity issues. Uh, and to manage, and then allow them to, uh, navigate at their own pace. Uh, they're part of the same production cycle that we typically have with our, with our output. Um, so again, everybody having access to everything is, it's, it's beneficial.

Uh, in terms of, it's the start that's the difficult part. Um, when, when somebody has used it on a project and they've rolled it out and they've seen the benefit, it's, The next is when, when do I get 10? When do I get 50? So, in an organization, we are 28, 000 souls. Um, and, [00:27:00] right, it's, we're, we're, we're, I don't, I don't want to talk about my company in the, in the light, but the perception is we're the Borg.

Right, and I'm, I'm like you, you know, one of 28, 000. Um, but that's not, absolutely not the, not how we operate internally. Um, So when I put in a request for an unusual, um, piece of technology, or for, for a teammate, there's a person at the other end of that that walks me through it and helps me make that decision.

So, you know, Evan, when I was working with you, uh, Digital Practice, I think you sent me my first Rift S to use, uh, Chris Grant. Um, similar process now, I now have the opportunity inside this organization. Somebody says, Wow. you know, what is that? What's going on? I said, well, let me send you a headset, take a, take a look at it.

So there are the onesies and twosies. And where it's, it's great, I have little pockets, right? And I can probably pull up a spreadsheet and show you where they all are in the company. I don't want to get to that spot. I, I would like one on every single desk. Uh, I think, I think we're at that [00:28:00] stage. As I walk around and I go from office to office, and we're, we're, uh, Plenty of offices to choose from as an organization.

Every desk has at least two monitors, and I thought, well, that's it, right? That, it's no more sophisticated than that. In fact, the headsets in many cases are cheaper than some of the monitors we have sitting around on the desk. Um, so, that, that's the rollout question. How do you, how do you get the hardware into the hands and do the hardware management on, on the backside?

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah, there's an IT component to it, right? Which

is, and, and it may not be strictly IT, but there's definitely a hand holding that needs, or a handshake at least, that needs to happen for that first time. But hopefully, I mean, with, uh, with advances in connectivity into the model now, where it really is, maybe a push of a button to get in there, it does become just easier.

to your point, Jon, a third monitor, which is a fully immersive experiential monitor, which is incredibly different. And going back to where you started out, where you give a little bit of [00:29:00] your background, the disconnection in scale, like scale drawings versus real world experience. I can't tell you how many times I walked onto a job site for the first time after having been quote unquote immersed in my 3d model on a 2d screen, not in VR back in the day, right?

Totally disconnected from the scale, even though I really thought I understood that building. Even though I had placed people in there so I could understand the size of the thing. When I walked out on the real site It was completely mind blowingly different. It was like, Whoa, this is huge. This is bigger than I, it was always bigger than I thought.

And I always thought, we've got to find a way to bridge that gap back to the earliest stages of decision making and the design when it comes to scale, because these spaces are about people. That's why they exist, right? And so, If we're overbuilding, we need to know that. If we're underbuilding, we need to know that.

And we need to understand the way that the affects the space. We need to know the way that shade and shadow affect the space. [00:30:00] And to not be fully immersed in it, to be looking at drawings, like architects are trained to do that, and it still doesn't make sense 100 percent of the time. And to effectively bridge that gap with technology is an incredible experience.

And for people who haven't experienced it themselves. You actually can't have an opinion about this. Like you, you have to try it yourself. And to go back to the barriers part, I mean, there's plenty of people who don't want to mess up their hair. Right? They don't want to mess up their makeup.

They, they have, it's like, these are real things. These are real world objections that we have to deal with all the time. And I can tell you, we had an experience where we brought clients in for a job that we were going after and we wanted to give them an experience of the design process, which included VR.

And the design process that they could go through if they chose us, right? That was kind of a part of a differentiator, kind of an exercise. And It took one person to make it okay for everybody [00:31:00] else in that room. And I think that is something that people need to know when they go into situations like this.

Like if you're going to lead a virtual tour, you need to have the person who is excited about it. Go first to basically give permission even though it's not explicit to everyone else in the room Because that just makes it easier. It's somebody they already know it's somebody they already trust and if you can find the Person to go in there and and have fun with it to poke their head through walls to levitate To have fun, to do all the things that you want to do the first time you experience something in VR.

It really does make a difference for everybody else in the room. it breaks the ice. It just lowers the barrier to entry, which is I don't want to mess up my hair in front of strangers. I don't want to mess up my makeup. I don't want to look like a fool. I don't want somebody pulling the chair out from under me.

I don't want people making faces at me when I have the headset on because i'm disconnected from them visually. [00:32:00] It really matters. And I just want to put that out there. Like as a, as an architect who constantly studied my client's body language, it was incredibly important for me to be in the room with them when they did it.

So Jon, you talked about mailing these out. That's scary thought to me. I want to be there. I want to be there because I want to, I want to. I want to help them and I, and I also want to get that visual feedback of their body language of what they're experiencing, how they're reacting to a space. and the other thing that I, I'll just bring up that I think is worth pointing out, um, because I'm sure this has only gotten more and more, more better, is, is, When, when I would take the headset back off or when a client would take the headset back off, they were completely bored with the space that they were in all of a sudden, because they had just experienced something entirely new.

And even if the graphics weren't photo real, like you said it earlier, Jon, our brains fill in the gap and it makes it okay. It doesn't matter if it's just flat shaded. It doesn't need like. Obviously, these things have [00:33:00] all helped bridge the gap. Ambient occlusion, textures, lighting, all of those things. But at the same time, like, they're not actually required.

our brains allow a lower fidelity of the model, because the experience is so much better than trying to read plans, sections, elevations, and even renderings. Right? And so, I, I just want to get all that out there, because these are the things that I've experienced. I know, Jon, these are things you've experienced.

AJ, I would love to hear kind of feedback that you've been getting from people as you're doing the hard work of bringing these technologies to more and more people, right? Actually during the design process to make better buildings. And I would love to hear kind of the adoption story from your side of things and what you're being, what you're seeing still with objections.

I'm sure they still exist, right? Um, go, go for it. Jump in.

Yeah.

*AJ Lightheart:* to travel the world, uh, but it stayed in my office. Uh, so I feel so thankful for that. Doesn't even feel like work [00:34:00] most days, but there still are certainly hurdles as it relates to these technologies. But something that I consistently harken back to, and then I've heard multiple times when meeting with organizations is we don't want to be doing 2D work in a 3D world.

Um, and I've been very surprised to see that the individuals that you think might be the most apprehensive and abrasive to going into these environments are much more open minded to it than ever before. And I think there's a number of things that are creating that. One, you know, subconsciously or consciously, we're more exposed to this hard, I'm gonna say hardware, headset, specifically in this case, more than ever before, right?

If you watched. At the time of this recording, it's a few days out from, from the Super Bowl. Uh, Vision Pro commercials on there. If you watch anything on TV, you see the MetaQuest commercials out there. It's been like the number one holiday gift over the last handful of years. So I think just that [00:35:00] exposure itself.

And then the connection that's being started made like, Oh wow, we could actually start to use this. I mean, we work in space. We work in communicating spatial intent and spatial understanding. That just, that open mindedness, that door is starting to become more and more. So that in itself, just more providers, more credibility from these big name brands putting their name in the hat, is making this a more consistent conversation that people are like, Okay, we should give this, give this a go.

It could add value to us. I also think an adoption standpoint that's proven very helpful, Jon mentioned earlier, it can be hard doing onesie twosie purchases, right? But as these multi device managers, whether it be like ArborXR, ManageXR, now the Quest for Business, allows for a more enterprise deployment at scale and greater security.

It's lowering the hesitation. I think a lot of IT teams have of, well, our people are just going to be playing video games on this, but not doing anything productive. So that's played a big role in helping drive [00:36:00] adoption, uh, forward and moving the needle, uh, in the right direction there. I think it just ultimately is the reality that, and as we've talked about, when we get in there.

There is a sense of scale perception that we can't get through to 2D. So many things that come from my meetings with organizations, it's, I'd say it's the soft clashes or issues. Sightlines, ergonomics, throughput, capacity, ADA compliance, things that really start to stick out like a sore thumb when we're in here.

And that goes back to that whole light bulb moment that people start to, to have. And like, Hey, you should come in and take a look at this. And I don't want to lose sight too, of how important the multi user dynamic is in these environments. Because I think the, the exposure that a lot of the industry has had, if we step back.

6, 7, 8, 9 years ago, it was one person having to go in, as we've talked about, and you know that everyone in that room is like, sitting and [00:37:00] staring directly, you can feel the eyes coming at you. But now if you have a running mate, it's like, hey, let's two or three of us go in at a time. It's almost like a Batman and Robin and there's a, I think, a strength and a confidence that people have of like, Hey, I'm going in with Jon and Evan.

We're in there together. We're experiencing this together. So one individual doesn't feel ostracized. So I think that multi user dynamic, while it's not necessarily, you know, new as new in the industry and these technologies, But I, I think that gets overlooked oftentimes of how important that is of moving adoption forward and getting more people open minded to trying the experience for the first time.

*Evan Troxel:* I'm glad you brought that up because my, the thing that I was talking about, it was totally a single user at a time experience and the multi user thing, Jon, this takes us back, right? Chris Grant is the one who first said, we're looking forward to being able to meet the model. And then Prospect came, came out with that ability not too long after that.

And it's not like the game changed overnight, but it was a big [00:38:00] deal to be able to have, Anybody, anywhere in the organization jump into a model at the same time to bounce things off each other, to coordinate things, to understand when they were drawing a line in Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, whatever it was, what that meant in 3D space as an experience.

And I think that that is, uh, it's, it's really, uh, can't be understated how important that is. I, I agree with you, doing it by yourself. There is an isolating aspect to it. You can get lost in it and that, and you can have a wonderful experience, but to do it with other people, again, if they're in the same room, if they're in the same office, if they're in different conference rooms, if they're in different offices, if they're in different locations, like every, all of those layers, they have been Like that is, that's, you, you can literally be anywhere and meet in the model when it, when you're meeting in the cloud like this, that is an absolute game changer when it comes to the psychology [00:39:00] of overcoming these different roadblocks of adoption.

I think that's huge as well.

*AJ Lightheart:* going back to something you mentioned earlier, Evan, of you wanting to observe people's body language when you're I do the same thing when I'm in XR with, with people. I'm looking where they're gazing in the model. I'm seeing where they're, while you want to maintain control in this, you don't want to be a herding cats exercise.

You do want to allow some level of freedom of people to navigate in certain areas themselves. And that immediately becomes a conversation that can be had that Realistically would not have come from a 2D environment. Like if Jon's going down this corridor and you're going over here, I have different topics to discuss with you, Evan, versus what I have with Jon, but that would not have happened if we're all isolated, looking at the same thing.

At the same time.

*Evan Troxel:* Right.

Jon, you, you guys have a couple of projects in ACC, right?

*Jon Matalucci:* oh, Just a few. Ha ha, just, just a few. Ha ha.

*Evan Troxel:* just wondering what it, what this means to [00:40:00] your organization. Maybe, maybe there's a real what it means and there's a potential what it means. Um, but, but give us an idea of, of that when it comes to how, how Stantec operates and, and projects and what this could, could possibly do.

*Jon Matalucci:* Sure, I mean, the biggest barrier, um, with anything, it's kind of not mainstream acceptance is procurement. It's always been the case. Um, uh, it's, you know, making a business case, having to transition from, um, Um, what would normally be a project expense to something like a capital expense, right? This is referring to like laptops and monitors.

Um, you know, that was a, that was a battle in of itself. We, we, we, As I mentioned, kind of risk silos. We're broken into a lot of different business centers. Uh, and we have unique reporting structures associated with that. Um, and it's difficult when I approached one of the smaller business centers, you know, Hey, I think you need to get five headsets.

Your teams are asking for it. And they look at the costs and they're like, well, I need a big enough project to do this. [00:41:00] And, you know, an organization like ours, this is the biggest challenge is we have mega projects, mega projects, they, they suck the brain. Power that we have, right? They get the best people.

Um, there's a, a draw with that. Well, you, as you look at the, kind of the standard deviations, um, with our, our, the bulk of the work that we actually do.

it's, it's not the mega projects. All right. Um, and so it's, that's the piece that was probably really key for me was rather than target and say, let's go look at the 20 billion job and we're going to use this tech here.

It's, it's, Can I use it on a TI? Can I, can I, can I demonstrate how it works well on that small TI? And, uh, and it, it was, it was evident. The use cases are there, the, the business cases have been prepared. Um, it's finding ways to, um, to release the work as quickly as possible. So what business doesn't want, um, you know, to accelerate?

we still charge for time, right? I mean, that's our, our, our [00:42:00] primary function. How can you take a fixed fee and go massively parallel with it? Right, how can you, where are the barriers and bottlenecks? For me, the best technology is the one that's invisible. It's just there, right, it works, you turn it on and it's present.

Uh, and, uh, that was, when I was able to demonstrate that, look, we've got four headsets, They're, they're always on, our general contractors are bringing them, um, get on the phone with the trades. Hey, do your kids have them? Can you bring them to the next meeting, right? Oh, and it sounds silly, but that's what it took.

And from, from that point, one experience solving one large change order ish issue, right? Uh, poof, light bulbs and you never want to go back. Um,

*Evan Troxel:* your number one way to convince The people with the purse strings is you just have to buy it yourself and bring it in, give them that experience.

*Jon Matalucci:* I actually did that, Yeah.

I mean, it does, we weren't quite to [00:43:00] that level. And we had, again, as I mentioned, we have pockets of, uh, you?

know, kind of advanced experimentation. Um, people are doing sideloading and we have developers on staff. Uh, it's, but this isn't that side of a problem. We, we need to get the buildings faster.

Uh, and, uh, , this is not a visualization exercise as much as this is a production tool, and AJ and I talk about this a lot.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah, I mean, I think this is a really important piece of information that you're sharing right now. And I would love it if you would, if you have any kind of ideas about the kinds of, uh, uh, positive change in that direction that this is making so that other people can use This is kind of evidence of, or at least directions to look in to say, when they're trying to convince somebody, when they're making the argument for this kind of technology to somebody who is hesitant or whatever, like, like give some advice here.

What, what are the kinds of things they should be looking at [00:44:00] when they're formulating that argument to make?

*Jon Matalucci:* Yeah. It's a simple understanding that our deliverable is not a set of drawings, right. It's a, it's a building that, and the more, the more that becomes integrated, uh, the more it's easy to understand that constructability is not a review. Right. Constructability is all of it. All the way through, right? So, early coordination, as early as possible.

Um, and by, by, by stating things in those terms as production tools, now I can, I can, I can bring in my junior staff and my senior staff into the same space. Right now, that exchange in most firms is via PDF. You produce a document for me, I sketch over the top of it, I send it back, and we don't even have to communicate, it's just an email back and forth, or maybe it's a session somewhere.

There is no knowledge transfer in that process. I'm going to misunderstand by looking at a single frame of reference, usually a deprecated document. The minute I hit print, that document's [00:45:00] old. make?

a decision, gonna hand it off to a teammate who's gonna execute it. crutch, ladder, or bridge, right?

Those are the three things we typically are in our career. And, um, the PDF process, that's crutch. and the bridge piece is the invisible technology that I was referring to. Uh, it just happens organically. So, if you can set up pairings.

It's typically what we do. We've got the senior staff and junior staff, um, sharing that space, um, and then stand back. So, uh, you know, AJ was mentioning the, the directive or the facilitation piece of this, um, herding cats happens, right? But going back to that massively parallel opportunity, it's, it's, you create the environment and then you stand back.

You just allow it to go. And what better environment, not an office environment, better environment is the one that you're working collectively to build together.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah, this doesn't happen enough. And staff [00:46:00] are often chained to their desk and not able to go out to the site to see how things go together. If you know, they're, obviously that's happening all the time, but your job is to sit there and click the mouse faster, right? So there's not enough time in the development process once you're in a firm to get out and do that.

And usually that senior project architect. person that you're talking about their schedule so full, they don't have time for active mentoring. Right. And, and so it may happen. It may not happen when everybody was remote. It happened a lot less than it does when it's in an office, right? Because a lot of times an emerging, you know, a new graduate, somebody who's green can just sponge up what's happening in the office by just overhearing it that happened.

Very little when everybody was remote, unless there were office hours on zoom or, you know, open comms happening, um, which I don't think happened that often. [00:47:00] So I think this is a conversation that you and I had, Jon, this is something I wrote about in my blog post when XR came out was the opportunity for knowledge transfer is what I'm most excited about here because you can get two people together in a model talking about architecture.

it's a fully immersive experience. You can point at things, you can talk about those things, you can highlight those things, and you can really talk about how this is all going together before it actually goes together, which is an amazing time to do that. It's, it's better than lessons learned.

It's, it's like lessons in progress. And that's a way better time for those to happen too. Like why wait? For the project to turn out badly to talk about the things that we should have done like, but this is, this is an amazing opportunity and they don't have to be in the same location to do it. They just have to have the willingness and the time to get together and agree to do that.

I think that that is a, that's a big, big, big deal that should not be [00:48:00] understated. And it's a huge opportunity for the future of this profession to be in a better place than it is right now.

*AJ Lightheart:* yeah, It's a lot easier to make, uh, changes to a 3D model than concrete. right? So there's also the dynamic of minimizing and Jon can do that. RFIs, change orders, and. It's the most wasteful industry in the world, so if we can start to do that coordination, these conversations earlier, it can have an only positive impact on that downstream as well.

*Evan Troxel:* Right. Right. Well, okay, so AJ, let's talk about the real experience and, and Jon, I'd jump in at any time here.

I would love it if you guys could bounce this between yourselves as you talk about this. Give people an idea about what they actually experience inside of WorkshopXR. I've, I've had the experience myself, but only a very short amount of time, but give people an idea of, What it's like to meet in a model.

What does it look like? What kind of data do we have access to? Do I understand where other people are standing around me in air quotes, spatially? I know that all of these things play a [00:49:00] part in it, and that's what kind of makes this feel kind of magical is that these pieces really are coming together.

But I would love it if you could paint a picture on an audio podcast of what this looks like when you're actually experiencing it. What are the kinds of things that people experience?

*AJ Lightheart:* yeah, and uh, for all of you when you're listening to this podcast, you'll see the, kind of, the bio pictures that Jon and I did is the, our avatars in Workshop XR. So, you know, feeling like you are representing yourself, XR environment I think is important. It gives a level of confidence for individuals, but you're welcomed with a very nice kind of boardroom type of setting.

Nice sky drop. Always want your work to be the center point of attention on the main table or stage. Different chairs slotted around so we can look at the dollhouse view before we hop down in at one to one scale. I can know when people are looking at me. You'll see the avatars. You'll see their mouths moving, see their [00:50:00] eye, eye contact.

So even in the virtual sense, I think, you know, talking to people and knowing where their gaze is at is equally important. No different than in real life. So we replicate that very nicely. But when you're going down into, to the environment, so much of it is, as we've talked about, you know, spatial awareness and, and intent, but

how do we document?

How do we again, bridge this virtual experience back to the real world in our larger ecosystem and, and workflows? So, we have a very nice issue tracking, uh, aspect in Workshop XR, allows us to, you know, flag it, add additional color, and we know that instantaneously this whole concept of always on and live, is going right back to our common data environment from a documentation workflow standpoint.

So even if someone that wasn't part of this session, they'll know what came out of it, what potential actions that need to come from it. So it always is allowing us to kind of keep an ongoing dialogue and conversation of moving the design [00:51:00] forward in the way that we want to. But Jon, certainly you being a power user of these environments, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as well.

*Jon Matalucci:* Yeah,

so people ask, here's your title, Jon, you're the BIM VDC manager, whatever that means, what do you do? And the answer is always continuous onboarding. Right, and that's, that's a full time gig, is getting everybody to play nicely in the sandbox and hopefully play in the same sandbox. The thing I loved about Workshop in that first experience was that it was immediately recognizable.

It was everything I had already been doing. Just in there. Um, and there was no, uh, there was no gap. The tools were present, the experience was present. The files, being able to browse just outside of my environment to see other content and bring that content. I mean, I can't really speak to features. Uh, yeah.

Sorry, aj. Right. Give, gimme the look. . I know. A little look. Um, but it, there, there, it's, that's amazing, right? As, as a worker, that's amazing. Um, as a teammate, um, [00:52:00] uh, just knowing that when I, when I, uh, instruct a team or recommend to a team that we have a, a workflow in place. Uh, workflow process that they can follow, that it's, it's the one they already know.

Um, and, and that experience will continue. So, there is no on ramp, there is no on boarding necessary for this, it's plug and go.

*Evan Troxel:* I love how you frame it as continuous onboarding. It's so true. And, and AJ mentioned the flow of experience kind of going from the bird's eye scale model, sitting on the table in the boardroom and then jumping into the model. So Jon, I would love to hear from, from your perspective, how important is that experience for onboarding and making sense of something that's immersive like this because I think, I think that's where this matters.

*Jon Matalucci:* Yeah. Right, uh, uh, So there's the film Brazil, uh, with, um, Harry Tuttle, Harry Tuttle, Heating Engineer, I don't know if you've seen the movie Brazil. And I'm sorry for obscure movies, uh, [00:53:00] movie references, Robert De Niro, Right. And it's kind of propelling down out of the sky, um, you know, bouncing above the ceiling.

That's the traditional VR experience, Right. All of a sudden you're just like, Whoa, it's all on, all at once. So, you know, the, the initial, uh, uh, dojo slash workshop, that initial experience is very good for, for level setting, kind of managing expectations, um, collecting thoughts and, and working on alignment.

We're not there, you know, explicitly to, to chit chat, right? We've got a job to do. We're there to execute work. So the alignment piece happens early, um, and the understanding is there. And then people at their own pace, right? They, they bungee jump in like Harry Tuttle, as I mentioned. Um, Yeah.

but fully prepared, um, as a facilitator, you know, the ability to gather is still present.

Um, and that's kind of key if, uh, you know, a lot of people to, um, venture off, look at things that they, maybe this is the first time, maybe this was [00:54:00] the first meeting they had a chance to get in. Right. acclimation piece. Um, and then, you know, having that structure on the back end. Um, being able to walk them through the issues that they created outside of the model environment, create some new ones while we're inside the model environment.

Um, and that continuity, I think the, the headset on off becomes less of an issue. I think, uh, I, I didn't rub my head clean by moving my headset on and off, but it is, um, every five minutes, Right.

If I've, I've got a question and I'm, can't see it quite right, I'll just pop it on. Um, I don't, There's that, the processing piece is not a lag, and I, I can't talk about this in terms of pockets of experience.

Um, Evan, I can't really stress the, the, the, the wonderful aspect of this just not being in the way. Um, and, you know, A. J. knows the, the, you know, Gabe, uh, and Derek, and, and the team. Sam, these amazingly [00:55:00] talented folks at Autodesk. Um, Have, have given us a Sawzall, a torque wrench, right, and a blowtorch. Um, and it's up to, it's up to us what we want to do with it.

And I think that, that's the excitement piece is okay, that the tech is going to get out of the way. And the project becomes the focus.

*Evan Troxel:* There's two different user groups that I keep bouncing back and forth in my brain because I've gone through this experience. There's the internal users, the day to day decision makers, the people who are working on the project, and then there's kind of this presentation aspect of the owner and client side.

And that could also be decision making for sure. But, but I am separating these two groups because I think. What I was talking about when you start at the bird's eye and then, you know, the scale model on the table and then jump into it is really, really, really important for both of those groups for their first time, for sure.

It's inherently architectural to do that. We've been through the times when we have scale [00:56:00] models. We have 3D printed or we have handmade. physical models sitting on the table, and we hold them up, and we look into those spaces, and we experience it in that way. It's a great way to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital, to replicate that experience inside VR, because, and I think this is where it starts to get really important for the, the client and owner side of, of the experiences, I get to look wherever I want, right?

This is not a curated presentation of just the views that I want the client to see, which totally makes sense in an architectural presentation process, right? We're talking about this, so we're only going to look here, is a very good way to get decisions made about certain things, right? We're talking about.

How the space feels. we're not talking about the color of the walls. We're talking, we're not talking about the textures and materials. We're talking about light. We're talking about progression of space. And so I might curate my views based [00:57:00] on the conversation that I need to have with them.

VR is a little different, right? We put people in a space and they can wander off and they can look around and they can drive. Which I think is incredibly empowering for their experience of the design process to feel like there's ownership over the decisions that are being made, much more so than ever before, right?

Of course people were making decisions on paper, plans and sections. There is a, there is an enormous difference when people are making decisions based on subconscious emotions, and that is a very difficult place for us to get. In 2d paper as architects is a very difficult place to get. Sometimes people are making decisions and we don't understand why they're making those decisions and they don't either.

but it still matters, right? And I think this is where a tool like this, and more and more tools are like this. It's not just VR. They're real time rendering. There's tools that are coming [00:58:00] into the pipeline way earlier than they ever have before, and they help us make decisions and drive those decisions along the way, rather than just being an output at the end, which is what PDFs are, right?

Like that, those are documentation of the decisions. They aren't, you know, They aren't the experience of making those decisions. And so I think what's super interesting to watch, uh, I talked to a lot of different people in a lot of different aspects of the field, finding a way to tap into that emotional subconscious decision making I don't know why they like something, but they like it or they don't, they have a reaction and that helps me. Make a better experience for them along the way, include them in the process, and it's a better outcome because they know exactly what they're getting, they get to experience it much earlier.

And I think all of these kind of help make the argument of this particular type of technology adoption in firms and why it should matter, because it's not just about the bottom line. It may help us [00:59:00] get there faster, but it isn't something that is a, it's not just about the bottom line. Getting there faster and being more efficient.

It's about connecting with people. And that's why we do architecture for people, right? So I feel like tools like these, I sound like a VR evangelist. Like I, I don't have a firm based on doing VR, but I really feel like there's opportunities here that people, because it's not the traditional workflow, it's not the way we've always done it.

There's an inherent kind of bias or barriers or however you hurdles, however you want to say it there, because. What do you mean there's a new way to do it? Why, how is it better? Why is it better? It's some, at some level it's a little bit intangible and you just have to watch people do it or you have to do it yourself.

*AJ Lightheart:* Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, uh, there is a level to your point there, Evan, of openness and even vulnerability to, to a degree, right. Um, that does create a human to human connectedness, even though we're in a virtual environment, but I think that pervades the rest of the design process and how we're communicating, [01:00:00] interacting with other people.

And I can't take credit for this statement, but it's something that one of my customers shared with me years ago, but it was really stuck with me that. These purist forms, these technologies are really just an empathy engine. Where all parties can better articulate and advocate for project priorities.

And if they can do that, if they can accomplish it, if they can impart that feeling of, I'm a part of this, my voice matters, and people are taking and fully understanding what I'm saying, we can leave crystal clear that Evan knows what I mean, I know what he means, we go back to the real world, then that's a raving success of what these technologies can do for the industry as a whole.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah. So we've talked about the Quest headsets, and let's just talk about what it works on, um, right now, because that is actually what matters, is what it, what it works on right now, and then we can, we can talk about how, how people can get, get into this.

*AJ Lightheart:* Sure, yeah, I mean, currently within Workshop, and we work really close with Meta throughout the development of Workshop, is supporting the [01:01:00] Quest 2, the Quest 3, and the Quest Pro. I personally consider the Quest 3 my daily driver, in terms of a headset. Um, And surprisingly it does have higher resolution and the latest processor in compared to the Quest Pro.

And, and I don't want to lose sight of the fact that in terms of, you know, raw cost, it's about half of what the Quest Pro is. And I think that, and I'm not saying, Going against the Quest Pro, but I think one of the biggest challenges we've talked about here is availability of hardware, and I think it's much more in a firm's best interest to go out and buy three or four versus one, because via one, you're still kind of in the same moot point challenge of how do we actually get people in there, and it's one person at a time, and that whole ostracized feeling.

So I think the Quest 3 is the best bang for a buck of the industry as a whole. I should say too that, you know, as a team, we have to be very mindful and very much connoisseurs of the industry as a whole and hardware. Undoubtedly, the whole world has heard about what Apple's doing at this point and, you know, other, uh, [01:02:00] players are putting their name in the hat.

And as we start to assess how the industry is embracing this hardware, that helps us from a development standpoint to determine what else we should support in, in, in the future. Uh, so we're open minded on branching out outside of Quest line in, uh, the upcoming. So that's the hardware, hardware side.

In terms of availability, the best thing for people to do, we can put it right into the show notes, Evan, is to get people to sign up for our waitlist, which is going to be turning into trial access, uh, here, here, shortcoming, you know, uh, Workshop XR is, you know, still very much in its early infancy and development stages.

We're hitting some key milestones that are really getting us Uh, much more comfortable of starting to open up more first user access and more commercially available. Uh, but the best thing that people can do right now is sign up for the, for the wait list, which will turn into trial access for them upcoming.

*Evan Troxel:* Jon, do you have a preference on the headset? I, I know one of the other differentiators is weight, right, with the, the 3 versus the Pro. I think the 3 is a little bit [01:03:00] lighter weight as well, so maybe you could wear it longer, a little more comfortably, but I would love to hear your thoughts on, on hardware.

*Jon Matalucci:* yeah, well, it's making sure that the backstrap, um, works, right, uh, cause out of the box, uh, they, Meta didn't do a great job, um, I can say that publicly, uh, but so, having a little counterbalance, whether it's an extra battery pack, uh, some extra padding on the headpiece, um, I get very, uh, animated, uh, sometimes I'll do my, um, meeting sessions out in my backyard, right, walking in the grass, uh, so having straps, um, Uh, is great, as opposed to just the angle dongle that makes, so you're not, you know, uh, Flinging your expensive, uh, hand controllers across the yard.

Um, but from a price point standpoint, you know, I would much rather have nine co workers in that space, or five co workers and four random people that I want to find their opinions. Um, so, you know, from my perspective, the more people you can get into that environment, the better. [01:04:00] Um, and the price point where Meta has the Quest 3 right now is perfect.

*Evan Troxel:* And AJ, you mentioned earlier that there is kind of an enterprise, um, deployment system in place, which is the first time I've heard that. So that's great to be aware of as well. So when it does come to kind of making the case for deployment and IT and control and, and all of those things, can you expand on that just a little bit more to give people an idea of what that involves?

*AJ Lightheart:* Yeah, I see some very consistent multi device MDM, uh, providers that are customer base is, is using, you know,

Quest for Business. Uh, just kind of recently, I believe at AU as well, uh, kind of announced what they're going to be doing and came to market. Yeah. But there's ArborXR, ManageXR. The simple way of saying it is, it minimizes having to do the onesie twosie purchases And, have it almost be more of a consumer grade without the extra level of enterprise security and administrative oversight.

So you'll have a, with [01:05:00] one of these MDMs, you have an administrative console where you see all the different headset units. where it's deployed to, have complete control over what's installed on that headset, have it connect back to your kind of other IT firewall and SSL pieces. So it just takes out a lot of the bottlenecks that, you know, Jon has spoken to and experienced and probably been in the bane of his existence for years now at this point, of how to get it into a hands of a wider audience in a segment of your peers.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah. And, lastly, just thinking about this from a earlier in the design stage, you don't have to, obviously get on the wait list and do all those things for Workshop XR, but there are other experiences and tools that you can use now. Jon, are you guys using those at Stantec as well?

Are you using Prospect? Are you using The Wild?

*Jon Matalucci:* we are, we are in fact a Prospect in, in its current state because of the, uh, the wait list. Uh, that's my daily driver. Um, and I, we do all of our projects, uh, in [01:06:00] that platform currently. And then the early design stages, of course, the charettes are done in The Wild. Um, and not to make this kind of Autodesk centric, but there are a lot of other utilities that are out there.

Um, I use, uh, Arkio on a regular basis. They all have different kind of. Uh, entry points as to what, what utility they can provide. I would guess for, for the, the typical listener, um, don't let your entry, uh, stop you, right? Make your decision to whatever solves your immediate problem, because I, as Autodesk knows, we will all eventually, right, um, become familiar with all of the tools.

*Evan Troxel:* Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Arkio. Johan's been on the show as well. And I mean, that's a great experience to actually be able to model in VR. You can do that with other people involved. It's multiplayer, if you want to say it like that, um, which is, you know, it's not just meeting in the model, but multiple people can actually be We'll be playing in there and designing in there and doing real work in there as well.

So there's a lot of really great [01:07:00] stuff going on around this space in the new AR, VR, XR ecosystem. And what it brings to us as designers of the built environment I think is incredibly exciting. Thank you both so much for taking the time to share your story, share the story of how this is being implemented in a real world scenario, even if it is at a 28, 000 person firm, which is mind blowing to me.

Uh, I know it's not just architecture, it's a lot of things, but it's still a big, a big, uh, thing. organization. So thank you, you both for, for sharing that. And I'll have links to everything that we've talked about in the show notes to connect with you both on, on LinkedIn, or if people have questions, I'm hoping you can, um, continue to be as helpful as you have here with, with the audience.

And, and I look forward to our next conversation. This has been fantastic.

*Jon Matalucci:* I don't think your listeners know how impactful, uh, you were as a digital practice lead, um, it's There were a few of us that, that, um, had that [01:08:00] opportunity, uh, to study under you. I would love to have been one of your students.

Uh, and certainly you've had a huge impact on the industry kind of outside of that. Um, but, you know, thank you, Evan, for giving us a chance to kind of think, um, talk, uh, bounce the ball off the wall, and, um, you know, kind of embrace, uh, what was coming. Um, that can't be understated, uh, and, you know, I think you deserve a lot of credit for that. Thank you

*Evan Troxel:* Thank you so much, Jon. I, that means a lot. And, uh, again, I, I love, every opportunity that we've had to talk together and, uh, I just love the way that you think and the way that you string words together. It's always an amazing, amazing conversation. So thank you once again for, for what you just said, but also for just who you are.

Uh, it's been, it's been fantastic and I'm glad we have this opportunity to put all this together and, and, and then obviously record it and put it out there for everybody else to get the benefit of. So, uh, Anyway, that's it. Thanks guys.

*AJ Lightheart:* Thanks, [01:09:00] everyone.

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Today we talk about the benefits of immersive VR experiences for project visualization and coordination, and how such tools foster enhanced decision-making and empathy in design processes.

Additionally, we talk about the practical aspects of adopting XR technologies in firms, including hardware recommendations and strategies for wider organizational implementation.

To learn more about AJ Lightheart and Jon Matalucci, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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View Details

Jim Walker joins the podcast to talk about the systemic problems plaguing the construction industry and the parallels in architecture and engineering.

Jim brings over 20 years of experience in general contracting and project management across North America from sweeping floors at construction sites to working for major firms like PCL and EllisDon.

Our conversation highlights the industry's evolution towards digital transformation, increasing complexity and, yet in many ways, inefficiency. But more importantly, we discuss the concept of construction being 'sick', the adversarial nature of traditional contract models, toxic work environments, health issues among workers, the value of the blue collar work and the trades, pros and cons of different project delivery models, risk and reward, and more.

Overall, the episode encapsulates a critical analysis of the construction industry's challenges and potential paths forward through innovation and systemic change.

Episode links:* Jim on LinkedIn * EllisDon website * EllisDon on LinkedIn * Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B Crawford (Amazon) * TRXL 149: ‘The Power of Curiosity and Continuous Learning’, with Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough

About Jim Walker:Jim started in construction the day after he received his driver's license, and comes from a construction family. His first exposure was in the ICI sector and began working in construction as a superintendent back in the days when the first priority in site set up was where to get a phone line connection for a fax machine.

After working in the family business for 9 years he made the move to PCL to work on large, complex projects. There, Jim learned a great deal about construction leadership, project set-up, and organization, as well as having the opportunity to work with change consultants. From there he began viewing construction as a system, and not a series of tasks linked together through contract, and it was through this lens that shaped his focus to the systemic issues plaguing the industry.

Jim left PCL after almost 15 years to join EllisDon, a Canadian competitor, to take on the challenge of opening a new office in the province of Quebec.
Having participated in Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) projects in the past, he’s seen what this contract model can do to solve the root causes of many of the issues construction struggles with. Since then he’s also taken the opportunity to join the board of the Integrated Project Delivery Alliance in Canada.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this episode on YouTube:154: ‘Construction is Sick’, with Jim WalkerJim Walker joins the podcast to talk about the systemic problems plaguing the construction industry and the parallels in architecture and engineering.Jim bri…YouTube

Episode Transctipt: 154: ‘Construction is Sick’, with Jim Walker

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode, Jim Walker of EllisDon joins me to illuminate and discuss the systemic problems plaguing the construction industry, and of course, construction isn't alone, but we'll get more into that in today's conversation as well. Jim brings over 20 years of experience in general contracting and project management across North America.

From his early beginnings sweeping floors at construction sites to working for major firms like PCL and EllisDon. Our conversation highlights the industry's evolution towards digital transformation, increasing complexity, and yet in many ways inefficiency, but more importantly, we discussed the concept of construction being sick, the adversarial nature of traditional contract models. Toxic work environments, health issues among workers, the value of blue collar work in [00:01:00] the trades. Pros and cons of different project delivery models, risk and reward, and more.

Overall this episode encapsulates a critical analysis of the construction industry's challenges and potential path forward through innovation and systemic change. So now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Jim Walker.

Evan Troxel: Jim, welcome To the podcast. Great to see you again. It's been a little bit since we hung out last, but, uh, we've met up at a couple of AUs at the, what is it? The Yardbird and that, that's kind of our, our gathering

Evan Troxel: spot our, yeah, that's watering hole. Our watering hole to have some, food and some drinks. And last time we were there, you said something that has stuck with me when we were kind of, we weren't even outlining this show, we were just talking about the industry and you said "construction is sick" and I am [00:02:00] really intrigued to kind of get into that today with you because you are on the C side of AEC but obviously you're involved in, in all of it.

Evan Troxel: But before we talk about why or how construction is sick, tell me about you, tell, tell the audience about where you're coming from, what your trajectory has been and, and where you're at in the industry

today.

Jim Walker: Yeah, sure. So, um, my name is Jim Walker as, as you'd mentioned. Um, I'm currently working for a general contracting firm. we're making a, push to open a presence here in the province of Quebec in Canada. I started in construction basically when I could walk, like I'm from a family of, uh, general contractors, and so I've been on job sites, you know, like my first experience on a construction site was I got my driver's license three months after my birthday, and then summer vacation happened in high school, and it was okay, you're going down the 401 to, uh, sweep floors on a, on a job site, so, you know, Like at 16 years old, I was getting exposed to construction.

So I started as a superintendent working in the family business for close to nine years. Um, and then, [00:03:00] uh, sort of just my father was nearing retirement age. My brother and I just weren't old enough to take over a construction company at that point or experienced enough. So, he closed down his business.

His clientele was all retiring as well and, uh, went to work for a large general contracting firm, uh, North America wide called, uh, PCL. I'm sure lots of people have heard that, that name. So worked at PCL for for almost 15 years. and then two years ago, joined, uh, going on my third year here now, I joined a company called EllisDon, so more of a Canadian based, uh, general contracting firm. in that time, so that's almost, it's over 20 years that I've been in, around, working through construction. Like I've seen many sides of the business.

You know, I've been on the, million dollar and less size projects. I've been on the You know, approaching a billion dollar size projects. I've been around the industry as it's sort of gone

through this, we could call it a digital transformation, even though it's not quite yet a digital transformation and seeing sort of the industry change from when, you know, like your first priority when you [00:04:00] set up your job site was where do you put your trailer?

And then where do you connect your physical phone line and your fax machine? Because that's an important link to the outside world to

now where like, you don't even consider that. like, You just. You need power and then, uh, you know, you hotspot off your phone to set up, set up the job site. So I've seen sort of things go from being very unconnected to a very connected, um, construction site, you know, in a construction environment.

And, you know, the promise through all the years was that as things get more connected, they're supposed to get easier and faster. And kind of what I'm seeing is that

things are just

Evan Troxel: my

head.

Jim Walker: yeah, things are just getting harder and more difficult and people seem to argue more. And, you know, like.

I lament for the good old days where like, you know, two people could arrive on a site in the morning, come up with a plan and then execute, well, maybe not that morning, but execute on a plan that they had made together.

That was sort of informal, but it was very efficient and then arrive at the end of the day or at the end of the project and, and realize what they set out to do and walk away. [00:05:00] And, you know, the work was done with good quality. The work was done, um, according to the intent and the drawings and the plans and specs that the project team was given.

And then it was. Okay, let's leverage this relationship and move on to the next one and keep having fun at this.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And so, you're talking about some symptoms that we see on the outside, right? You, you, you see it, you live it, probably every day, all day long. But the underlying sickness, I think, is what we want to get into today, because, and, and, and, it's not a surprise. Uh, so, the, the clickbait

headline, construction is sick.

Jim Walker: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: It's not surprising because we see the symptoms. We see people talking about the symptoms. We talk about labor shortages, supply chain issues. Like these are, again, I think

very surfacy kind of symptoms, but you have some particular insight. into like what's really going on. And because I think those really are just at the surface and we, we do need to dig deeper so that [00:06:00] people understand the, the depth of the issues here, the depths of the challenge, the depths of the problem. So

let's get into it, I'm excited to have this conversation because it is really going to, I think, take it to a deeper level for the audience of this show to understand what's really going on. at the handoff point from design to construction, right? And what happens at that point? And what are we dealing with?

Because I think what this will ultimately do is help, I would hope, us on the design side of that. Make some adjustments to make that, make that easier, make that better. And I know we can't affect all of it, right? Because there's some very serious issues that you're going to get into here, but maybe some of it can be addressed by taking a cross section through all of AEC and, and really understanding the underlying issues here,

because we've got our

own problems too, that we're dealing with that are, there [00:07:00] is sickness in architecture as well, but let's talk about construction. What are the systematic issues in the construction industry that, that are really underlying and

like, give us a place to start

this

conversation.

Jim Walker: yeah. So, I mean, system, that word right there is probably the best place to start, right? And a lot of times I find that we view our industry in sort of silos. Like you have the design, you have the execution,

and then close out. And there's no sort of. understanding of the interrelation between all of those.

We try, you know, we sort of orbit around the answer, but we never get right down into the meat. And that, like, that root cause causes all these other things. You know, you talked one there about, um, labour shortage. Like to me, labour shortage is tied to this, the, the the sickness that we create in the industry.

Um, where, where we sort of kicked off our conversation last time we were talking, right, was about. Um, walking the floor at, um, at Autodesk and we were sort of looking at all of these vendors that are [00:08:00] promising, like, to make it so that the plumber doesn't install the pipe in the wrong spot. And, you know, I gotta say, like, when I, when I hear that as, like, the pitch, it sort of, like, closes me down right away because I can tell you there's, the plumber doesn't

install the pipe in the wrong spot.

If you trace it back to the root cause, there's a, um, Are there a misunderstanding of where the pipe should have been? There was a conflict in some documents somewhere. There was maybe a misunderstanding on what the client wanted, and there was a change of the documents somewhere down the road, which caused a misalignment.

But like, to solve, to solve where the plumber puts the pipe is solving the problem at the wrong point in the system. Like, you have to go further upstream in order to really, right, have a valuable

solution to it. But it doesn't stop there, because the sickness then becomes, it's like, You know, you have all of these people that go to work in the construction industry every day, and, and nobody, like, I honestly believe nobody's getting up in the morning thinking to themselves, Oh, today I'm going to do a bad job.

Like, everybody's getting up in the morning thinking they're going to do

a [00:09:00] good job, but that alignment of what it defines a good job is, is different. And so those differences in alignment create this tension and this toxicity on a construction site, and it's, and it's not just on the construction site, it's in the offices that support the construction project.

that it also happens. And so what is the sickness? Well, you know, we're talking about like higher instances of heart disease, like I'm sure, you know, the smoking construction worker stereotype, um, like you don't have other industries that have that same sort of, you know, uh, stereotype associated with it, right?

But that, that there are a lot of smokers, there's a lot of

alcoholism and substance abuse, like the majority of fentanyl deaths in North America are associated with people in the construction industry.

Evan Troxel: Wow.

Jim Walker: Suicide,

uh, like, all of these, like, really big health problems that make our people sick, I believe, are all associated with the environment that we put people to work on in a construction site.

It's uncollaborative, it's toxic, it's argumentative. You know, and it's part of, like, you know, going from when you just had the fax machine, and if [00:10:00] you were going to write a letter to somebody, you had to, like, type it out, then print it, proofread it, write a cover letter for the fax, and then fax it to someone.

Versus, you know what, that's just too much of a pain. I'm just going to call the person and air my grievances and sort it out. But now like you can create these emails that you can sit down, write it out in a, in a fury, send it off. Then somebody else responds and it's just the cycle of like, well, you did this and you did this.

Yeah. Piling up. And then

what happens at the end of the day, like where does that tension and stress where, where does it all go? Well, in some instances it goes into,

you know, escape through the form of substances and.

um,

Evan Troxel: Coping

mechanisms, right?

Jim Walker: Yeah,

exactly.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, those root issues are really interesting because you brought back kind of the imagery in my mind of what was it like maybe in the 70s on a construction site. We see these old construction site photos with the guys on the skyscraper beams as

the steel, primary steels going up in New York City. And I just, I think about that kind of [00:11:00] imagery still to this day, even though, you know, we're going through this quote unquote digital transformation, right, of the construction site. And so, like. Is it just because old habits die hard? Is it really because of the old? older generations in the construction industry who really like embodied that kind of, that

kind of visual that I'm thinking of and it's proliferating on, because I can tell you that's what's happened a lot in architecture, right?

Which is like, no, you're going to sit at your drafting board for 12 plus, maybe 16 hours a day, because you have to dedicate your life to architecture and the studio environment that we went to school in, everything revolved around the designs. Studio, everything played second fiddle to the design studio.

The design studio was always the most important thing in your entire life. In fact, you need to give up the rest of your life for these five years while you're in school because it's so important and it's it's training grounds for [00:12:00] what it's going to be like. And

I'm using my podcasting air quotes here of what it's gonna be when you actually get into the industry.

And in many cases it is because we're. Pre programmed to believe it is like that and then the previous generations are operating like that as well and have Expectations that you have to do it the same way that they did, right? You're gonna have to pay your dues You have to go through the same struggles and trials and tribulations that they did you have to work your way up the ladder?

And it takes a lot of time and there's no immediate like Metrics of, of measuring any of that so you know where you are in the system. And so I'm, I'm just, I could go on and on obviously about this and, and I imagine you have a version of

that in construction.

Jim Walker: Oh yeah, absolutely. Right. Like you have to, you have to, you know, if you're a superintendent and even to some extent, like, you know, the project manager, like you have to, you have to do your time in the field. And I think that, doing your time in the field is important because you have to, especially from the general contracting sphere, like you have to [00:13:00] understand what you're planning and what you're trying to set out to build, which is I'm sure the same, you know, for, for in the architectural field, like you have to have a, an understanding of how to draw things, how to bring them together and coordinate them. Um, like I, I'm not an architect, right? So like, uh, maybe I'm, I'm speaking out of turn here, but like, you know, that when you're not physically drawing something and similar to, if you're not like picking something up and learning with your hands, as well as your eyes, as well as reading, like it, You don't, you don't sink into the information as much.

Sometimes it feels like it. So in this age of like digitization, like we're not coordinating with shop drawings as much as we used to. And I think it's also a function of like architects time is being squeezed so much in this race to the bottom, right? Like you don't take the time. Does the door frame work with the tile that's going to go on the wall to create the reveal that is intended?

Or does it mess up the, the elevator lobbies, the entire height of it? Of a 30 floor. Office tower, right? Like just because that, that, [00:14:00] that understanding of the shop drawing of the elevator throat, the elevator doorframe throat wasn't understood. I, I drew it onto dry, it's digital. I

got it there. Like I pulled the icons down and I made it work and I

sent it out. That's right.

And then the

plumber installed the pipe in the wrong spot because it sticks out of the wall now. Well, no, it's just, we didn't take the time to understand what everybody needed and where where everybody's. Uh, needs were, let's say, for lack of a better term, when it came to coordinating the details and making sure tolerances lined up and things aligned.

Evan Troxel: squeeze. Right. The architect's time is getting squeezed. And I would actually position it that, or posit that we are incentivized to spend less time on everything. And I'm coming at this from a large term, large firm perspective, because that's my experience when I was working in design and production there, it was like, go faster, go faster, go faster, right?

And go faster means do

[00:15:00] less. That's actually what it means, right? So to your point about lack of coordination and understanding and understanding the weight of a material or how to materials actually go together, not just Taking a Revit detail component and slapping it up against another Revit detail component and saying, that's how they

go together because it's not right.

Like, that's just a graphic representation of what you want the outcome to be. It's not necessarily how it works. Right? And when you, when you talked about the importance of, you know, superintendents and project managers on construction sites, having site time, having experience on construction projects to get. to those levels. It's the same thing for architecture, but we spend literally close to zero time out on the site. There are a few people who do construction administration who go to the site meetings, right, and, and work through those issues. The digital process, the phone, the email, whatever, is sending problems back to the production team to solve in drawing format. [00:16:00] And really those two things don't ever meet in the middle. The production teams don't get to go to the site and actually learn what the lines they're drawing mean when it comes

to, um, In the real world, physical world getting built, they don't have the time. And because the incentive again, isn't there like, okay, now the firm's got to pay for your time, got to pay for your mileage, right.

To do that. Who knows how far away from the borders of a firm are expanding because competition is getting more and more fierce all the time. And so they're trying to cover more area. And that just means the projects are farther away. And now we've got to spend even more time to go do that. So we're going to, what are we going to do?

We're going to send less people. We're going to send one person once a week to the. construction meeting, right? So,

um,

Jim Walker: With no, with no mentoring, with no sort of like,

Evan Troxel: because yeah, you can't send two people. You can't send the person who, who's been there, done that along with the new person who's learning it on the way. It's a, and, and I think what's interesting about all this is we just expect it to still work, right? Like the expectation [00:17:00] is that people are getting mentored. It's that they are gaining experience and what they're, they are gaining experience. through failure because they have to as they learn things on the way. But often that failure is like, those are the very expensive mistakes. And it's happening too late in the process rather than this proactive relationship building mentoring process.

No, it's like, no, we're going to

learn by mistakes.

Jim Walker: And it'd be de do be defensive when we do make mistakes And both. Like, look, at, let me be very clear here, Evan, right? Like, yeah, I'm not trying to

make hay on, on architects here by in this conversation. And I hope that that's very clear. Like, I I understand there's challenges in, in the architecture and engineering spheres as there as well as the, the building spheres.

Like I'm not, all that to say, I'm not trying to to just point fingers

Evan Troxel: We've all got

Jim Walker: have

our challenges. Yeah, yeah,

exactly. Um, .But yeah, like, right, like there's if, you make a mistake and somebody's there to support you through that mistake or, parties are there to support you through that.

Look, I, [00:18:00] get it. Like mistakes happen. Let's work together and, make this thing better. Versus you made this better, now you're going to have to pay. Well, no, I didn't make, or sorry, you made a mistake. Now you're going to have to pay. Well, no, hang on. I didn't make the mistake if I go back through my emails, you made the mistake.

And so now we're like. Focused on going through emails, generating waste for the construction system instead of focusing on solutions and generating value for the construction system as a system, you know, and and it's sort of like the

notion, go slow to go fast, like take your time in design and, and, you know, and this ties into the contract model of the construction project, take your time to understand the design, take your time to understand the needs of the client.

Avoid those RFIs and those SIs through the construction process because those are waste and if you drill down into the root cause of RFIs and SIs, I'm, willing to go toe to toe that if there wasn't an argument, if there wasn't a change in scope, every SI can be drilled [00:19:00] down into a root cause if we didn't just spend enough time at the beginning of the project.

And when I say we, I don't mean architecture and engineers, I mean everybody involved in the construction process. Client,

consultant, builder. sub trade, um, Inspector, everybody didn't spend enough time in that front end. We don't, maybe we don't have enough time, but if we don't have enough time, then we have to realize that like this waste that we're generating is part of it.

And when we sit through these, these presentations at, at, um, You know, some of these events that you and I cross paths at, and they show that same graph where everybody else's efficiencies going up and constructions is going down. Well, let's not sit there and go, hmm, interesting, like, we know why.

Evan Troxel: Can you, just before we move on,

define RFI and SI for

those that don't know what those terms

mean.

Jim Walker: Yeah, so, um, I know the term is different in some other jurisdictions, but sort of in the building sphere that I work in, like RFI is a request for information. but And [00:20:00] SI is a site instruction and you can have, you know, different terms to contemplate

a change. Uh, you know, there's all kinds of different terms that can be used interchangeably, but it's basically like we had a set of documents.

We're changing those documents because something has changed and we're building something different now.

And I used to

Evan Troxel: way to,

Jim Walker: Go

Evan Troxel: I was just going to say another, another acronym for RFI that I've heard recently, which I think still

applies, is Room for

Improvement.

It's like, you could have made the document, you, you could have answered, and many times the answer is already in the documents, and so maybe that's outside of this conversation, but it's like, the information that I need isn't there, right?

And so I'm requesting information at the same time, like, next time. Now you, now you know, like what should, what I needed, and, and again, sometimes it already is in there and people just don't know where to look, but, um, sometimes the information is not

there, and we have to be honest about

that too.

Jim Walker: Think of the data that's being generated in RFIs, right? Like if you take a large architectural firm, like how many RFIs have they been asked? [00:21:00] How many of those RFIs are the same, but yet

every construction project, like, okay, we got these 10 RFIs. These are what we gotta ask. Right? But, okay, well

why are we asking the RFI? Why isn't this being corrected at the outset?

And you could probably drill in deeper into the data if you really had a good data set. Let's go from the perspective of the builder. Like, if I work with this architectural firm, I know that these details are going to be poorly coordinated. I know that these are the RFIs that are going to need to be asked.

because these are always the, misses that

this house, design house always makes. All right. you know, and I'm sure with architects, you could say the same thing. Okay, with this builder, we know they're going to come at us with this RFI, and we know they're going to miss these things when we go and we do our, our sign off inspections at the end.

So, why not use that data

at the front end of the, construction system to say, okay guys, have we captured all this? Because we know working together, we always have these problems.

Evan Troxel: Well, I'll tell you why, Jim, right? We know this too. We know the answer to that, which is, it's a, it's going to be a different team. It's going to, the team makeup is going to be different on the next project [00:22:00] because of

availability in the design firm of those individuals on different projects. Um, there's turnover.

on projects as well, right, in the, in the offices, um, and then nobody has the time again, we keep coming back to time, but to actually implement those lessons learned on the next project, because we're looking at the next project and the old project is done and out the door, it's in the archives. Moving on, now we're going to do the next one. And That, that is a huge problem is that like, okay, we do learn through failure. We do learn through these challenges. We do come up with the solutions and yet they do not get implemented back into the process. The feedback loop

itself is also broken in most circumstances, in most

instances across the

industry.

Yeah.

Jim Walker: And this is my hope to where technology can really help the industry. It's not in making sure the plumber installs the pipe in the right spot. It's like, what are [00:23:00] the 10 questions that we always ask on every project over a billion dollars? Like, let's, let's solve those for every project going forward.

And then like, boom, we've just made the system more efficient. And, and yeah, you're right. We don't have enough people to look at those every single project. Let's solve them once and for all. Because there are things that repeat and every. whoever's listening who's from like a building side, like, you know what I'm, you know what I'm talking about.

Like you always have, I pick on doorframes, but you always have doorframe throat size RFIs that get asked on, on big projects. Cause it's always like a mess. It's, you know, you have two or three different

disciplines coming together right there at a doorframe and it's, it's always a tough spot. But, you know, going back to like, Not having, you know, going further back then in this, this thing that we don't have enough people in the industry.

Like there's not enough people to do the work. It's, it's like, well, we, we did it to ourselves. I mean, you've been in this industry, um, as long as I have, right?

Evan Troxel: you can see the gray

hair. [00:24:00]

Jim Walker: there you go. But, but people started talking about labor shortage like 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Oh, the baby boomers are all going to retire.

It's going to be a huge labor crunch. And what did we do? Oh, we need to put more people into into, We need to get more kids in trade schools and vocational schools and support the, the trades Well, instead high schools cut all the trade programs. But that's not addressing the root cause still. Like the root cause is an image issue that the construction industry has.

Like if. I'm sure, you know, you have. friends who have children who have nothing to do with construction. And if you ask them, Hey, why don't you encourage your, your six year old child to pick up a trade and go into the trades that I'm, uh, I'm willing to tell you they would, they would say no. And

Evan Troxel: It's about as popular as going into the military, I would think, right? It's, it's one of those things where it's, it's just not the kind of job that, that people aspire to because parents and teachers have basically programmed everybody to aspire to going and, actually, going and working

in a cubicle [00:25:00] in an office.

Jim Walker: that's right.

Evan Troxel: becoming a knowledge worker, which actually means sitting in a seven by seven cubicle for eight or nine or 10 hours a day, every day, commuting to that job, right? And, and it's, it's, it's kind of crazy. I, I, I just recently had an interview with Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough from Autodesk, who runs the technology center, which they do a lot of R and D and hands on stuff at.

The Pier 9 in San Francisco. And it's really like where the rubber meets the road. Like Autodesk makes software, right? And they have a research department. But they also are highly invested in making real things at these technology

centers. There's one in Boston, there's one in San Francisco. And the, the book came up, it's all, I'll reiterate it here, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but it's called Shop Classes Soulcraft by Matthew B.

Crawford. It's, it's a, and a fantastic book about the value of creativity. Hands on work. Uh, and so he, he kind of makes the [00:26:00] distinctions between knowledge workers and tradesmen, right? As an example of, but, but the satisfaction that comes out of actually working with your hands is lost on several generations, right?

And because you have to be a knowledge worker, you have to work at a think tank, you have to have a job in finance, or you have to. Become an architect and sit at a desk, sit behind a computer and stare at

glowing screens for

20 hours a day,

Jim Walker: God forbid.

Evan Troxel: hours a day,

like we're doing right now. But, but that, so, so I'm glad you brought it back to the image problem, because I think that this is one of the main problems that we have.

And what's funny is people who are in the industry who are trying to attack technology. Attract talent, not attack talent. We're trying to attract talent, aren't actually doing

anything about it, they're just complaining about it, right? And so what are they actually doing to attract? What stories are they telling? What are they showing the [00:27:00] young people of the next generation? about what's attractive about coming and working and doing this kind of work. Instead, it's like, we throw our hands up and it's like, I don't know what we're going to do. I guess we can't do anything. I guess we're just going to have to figure out better ways, right?

That the answer is offsite construction or it's prefab or it's modular. And it's like, no,

That's

that, those are, those

are just layers on top of the problem. Like the real.

the real problem is the image problem. I think that you're talking about, and we have to figure out ways and it applies to architecture too.

That's why I say we, because leadership and architecture firms have the same challenge, right? It's, they have to be a model of what. the vision of what somebody could be is. And so you need representation, you need equity, you need all those things. So every person out there can see a version of themselves and where they could go with that and what they could do with that and what the challenges are that they could be solving and how it can change the world. And yet, leadership. [00:28:00] Has a hard time with that, I think, in

many, many

cases.

Jim Walker: Yeah, like, so you go back to, you know, you can put all the trade schools in the high schools you want. You can put all the funding for college courses that you want, but if parents aren't going to encourage their kids to go into construction in some form, like you're just not going to have an uptick and people using those resources that are there.

And what's the, what's the image that any parent who isn't associated with the construction industry has? of a plumber or a form worker or an electrician. Well, it's that, that, that stereotype, which doesn't really belong in our industry because the reality is, you know, from the trade side, like what, what, well, even construction as a whole, as an industry, like what industries are left in the world where if somebody has an entrepreneurial spirit and they really want to go it alone, can with a relatively small budget, go and start making a company on their own and then grow that company, if they really have the drive and the desire.[00:29:00]

To go and build it into something and they can build it into something which can be, you know, as I'm sure you're aware, like very profitable. Like that, that seven by seven cubicle, like working in finance, like you're not going to go and start your own finance firm on Wall Street, working on the weekends and doing odd jobs after hours.

Like it's it's not going to happen, but like in construction, you can, you can do that. And we need to be encouraging that we need to be showing people, Hey, like, look at this is that, that stereotype you had. is not how it actually is, but the only way we're going to do that is by actually changing the industry to pivot away from that.

And when the statistics keep coming back that, you know, there's more deaths that are more overdoses from fentanyl than any other industry in North America. Well,

we'll get, let's start there. But why, why is that happening?

Evan Troxel: Building on top of another interview that I recently did, which I think comes out before this one too. So it's probably safe to talk about it here, which is, is the idea that every [00:30:00] company is actually a media company in addition to what they do, whether they're leveraging that or not is up to them.

Right? And so the going back to this idea of image and and Telling the story about what you can do as a contractor, a tradesperson, whatever, whatever, however you would slot into that isn't happening at scale. And so what's happening then is we're allowing somebody else to tell our story and that's probably not correct.

That story that's getting out there is The story of the plumber is about

the plumber's crack, right? It's not, it's not

about the, they're they're making 150 an hour, right? On the weekend, because somebody has an emergency and the only person that can solve that

emergency is a licensed plumber, right.

And so it's like, how do, how do contractors tell the story?

How do architects tell the story about what. The vision is of what you could do with those skills and with, with that [00:31:00] information, with that knowledge, with that wisdom of having done it to better society, to change the world, right? To go back, like, to the highest level. We could actually, you can actually do those things.

Do you have to aspire to those levels? No, you don't. You can literally, like you said, be working on the weekends, doing bathroom remodels, right? And making an impact in your community for your neighbors or for, for your clients. It has to start somewhere and those. Those stories need to be told from the source, not from somebody else's idea of what that is.

Like, architects have failed at this forever, right? We

let HGTV tell our story.

Jim Walker: Yep.

Evan Troxel: Of what design is. And now we complain that every client wants their project in eight hours, right? Or they want it because they saw it, that they thought it could happen in a week because

HGTV told them so, right? We're letting somebody else tell our story because we take no responsibility over being the [00:32:00] media of our own profession.

And I think every, that I just want to throw this in here because I think this is an important part. We have to take that responsibility of telling our own story, especially those who really champion and have a passion for the thing that they're doing there. Granted, there are a lot of people who work in AEC who are miserable and they should not be the ones telling the story.

There's a misalignment like they probably shouldn't even be in the industry or they should be working for a different company or they should be starting their own company and cutting the misery part out of it. That could mean leaving. all together, right? But let the people who are passionate, I mean, this is something that I've been doing for 12 years now on ArcaSpeak podcast with my co host Cormac Phelan, right?

Like, we want to see the industry get better and we're telling the stories inside the industry, maybe not outside of the industry. I don't think we have too many listeners who come from general public to learn about architecture from us. because we're not, we talk about insider industry stuff, what [00:33:00] people should be looking out for, what's great about it, what should you be avoiding. That's appreciated at the student level for sure, because students go to their teachers and their academic teachers who are career academics, and they're like, don't work in offices. They don't know what it's actually like. So they're getting a version of what architecture is from them. And now what they're getting is a version of that from people who have actually done it. And that's been incredibly rewarding for me to hear people give me that feedback, but also it's great for them because it's, it's a look, it's a slice, it's a lens into the reality of what it's like to work in the profession. Are contractors doing that?

Jim Walker: No, I don't think so. I think, you know, like there's the same TLC shows about construction, which, uh,

Evan Troxel: Yes.

Jim Walker: they don't really

speak to the, to the, you know, like the, the, the reality of what the industry is like and, uh, how dynamic and exciting. And, and, you know, every day you go to it, like, it's funny, [00:34:00] right? Like young people come to construction and I'll often tell them, right?

Like a lot of people are very change averse. But you have this weird culture and, I don't mean weird, you have this different culture of people in construction that sort of gravitate to this industry that have an allergy to things not changing. You know, if you put people on a construction site and it's the same at the end of the day as when you went in in the morning, like, People start getting, Oh, this, this isn't good.

Like there should be changed, you know, tell somebody that, Hey, look at this construction project's going to be like

two and a half, maybe three years long. Like once you hit that three year mark, people start like breaking out in hives and like,

are you sure there isn't something else? Like I need, I need,

change. I need evolution. I need to work at one end of the city. And then the other, like I, sort of need that, that comfort in that chaos that, that happens, that excitement in that chaos, and I use the term chaos loosely, but like, that, that chaos and a little bit of the unknown that happens and having to plan it and figure it out and work, work together and bring, you know, group A together to solve this problem.

And then group B [00:35:00] together to, to plan out the next, the next step. And then group C to make sure that group A and B can work together properly, right? Like there's this evolution and this looseness of structure that, that a lot of people really enjoy. And yeah, that, that I don't think there's I don't know how you would really capture that in a, in a TV show for 30 minutes.

Well, 22 minutes of runtime less commercials, but yeah, it's a tough challenge. But I think that, you know, the people that are talking about like trade schools and vocation schools and, and, you know, like, um, putting funding into that stuff also have to be looking at, well, what are ways that we can solve the image problem in construction.

And I think the image problem in construction comes from the toxic workplace we create, which is in a. affect the cause of the contract that everybody is brought together under? And that to

me is that the root cause, is that the solution to the core problem of the toxic culture that we have in construction, which is what is making [00:36:00] everybody sick, which is what is driving people away, which is what is driving inefficiency and lack of collaboration, and a lot of the the core issues stem out from from that one spot.

Evan Troxel: But they say like attracts like. And so I would also, you know, in addition to what you just said about driving out, there is also an attraction. To likeness, right? And so people who thrive on those toxic environments are attracted to come in and proliferate them. Right. And the feedback loop continues when it comes to that, which doesn't get us to a better place.

I've seen this happen so many times in architecture offices where there will be somebody in a leadership position or a senior position who is the. definitely a toxic person. How do you know? Because everybody

talks about it behind their back, right?

Jim Walker: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: People find ways to get off projects with those people.

They say, I will never work with that person. And instead of the company addressing that behavior issue [00:37:00] or that person as a problem and getting rid of them, they just shuffle people around and they avoid that as long as possible. And that toxicity proliferates as long as it possibly can, because nobody wants to have a confrontational, uh, meeting to address the, the, the root issue. And so on the other flip side of that is there will be people who. gravitate toward that and they will learn from that and they will become that person as well because it does get results of its own kind that somebody is think thinks is good for them right to move up the corporate ladder to look good on a project to make their career go into a what seems to look like a good place and so I I think that you're right on there is that like it is

driving out the good people, or, or it's never attracting them in the first place, but it's also building more people like that, which, which just [00:38:00] makes this

problem last

even

longer.

Jim Walker: So you said a couple of things there that I agree with, right? Like, I mean, yes, bad managers, but I mean, bad managers can occur in any industry. I don't think that's a unique problem

to, uh, to the, the AEC

industry, but like attracts like, I think is, is key there. Like everybody that comes to work in construction in the morning.

And again, I think I said this before, but I honestly believe it. Honestly believes they've come to work today to do a good job. And I believe that you surround yourself and you know, we're surrounded by people in the industry that, that want to do a good job. The problem is, is how do you define what a good job is?

And, you know, to an architect on a construction project, it's, it's looking after the best interests of x, y, z architecture. Second thing is to realize a product for their client. So you look at a general contractor, you know. like, number one is to, to maintain the life of the general contracting firm. And number two is to realize a product for the client.

And then the same thing all the way down [00:39:00] the chain, the plumber, it's to look after the, call it XYZ plumbing is number one. And then number two is to do the work that was contracted and provide a product you're being paid for. But the problem is, is that priority number one in all those instances is different for everybody.

It's always look after your own. your own fortress first and then the project is second. And, you know, one of the things that we had talked about, um, a couple of months ago was like, how can you change that in the contract? And, you know, a couple of years ago I happened upon, um, the IPD contract model and I'd executed, uh, uh, I've executed projects in the IPD contract model and the key way to simply look at an IPD project is you take everybody's definition of what a good job is and you align it centrally on success of the project.

Because without success of the project, you do not have success of the company. You do not have success of the individual and you cannot have one party succeed where another fails. So all of a sudden you have everybody then saying, wow, okay, I got to [00:40:00] work together. We got to leverage everybody's mind in this room to be as, as efficient, productive, collaborative as possible and profitable as possible.

to make sure we all do a good job at the end of the day.

And,

Evan Troxel: So define IDP. So just so everybody knows what, what that IPD, sorry, I always do that. Tell, tell everybody what that acronym means. And, and then, because it is also different than design build, and maybe we can talk a little bit

about the differentiation there, but I think we're seeing a lot more projects doing IPD and doing design build for, for reasons that,

that are based on the things that

you just said,

Jim Walker: Yeah. I, IPD is a integrated project delivery. So the, at its core is, um, there's a shared profit pool, which is shared amongst the parties that sign onto the IPD contract. In Canada, it's a CCDC30. There's some other contract models as well, but you have a shared profit. pool, which is always at risk. So, you know, you go back to the, example of [00:41:00] the SIs being generated.

A lot of times when there's an SI or, a site instruction or a request for information generated in the, the construction component of a, the, the construction system, that's, I mean, it's associated with cost. Um, architect issues, a site instruction, general contractor prices, the site instruction, it's a yes or no.

And there's an additional cost of the contract depending on the contract model and in IPD,

There is an S. Or a

credit

True, true. Yeah, you're 100 percent right. In the IPD model, is if there is an extra cost to the project, it comes out of that. Pool of profit that sits there in, uh, you know, there's gates to release it through.

That's a, you know, getting into the technicalities, but there's gates to release profit throughout the job, but it comes out of that centralized profit pool. So instead of, you know, the knee jerk reaction on the builder side to be, Oh, drawings aren't right, issue an RFI, it's drawings aren't right. But what can we do as

a team to solve this problem with no cost

and no time impact to [00:42:00] keep things

moving on and still realize the vision of the client.

Because if you don't. Realize the, the, the value definitions and the value statements at the end of the job that you created at the start of the job, well, then there's a cost impact there. So it's not like you're trying to short circuit the client and deliver a less than optimal product. You still have to deliver the optimal product.

The thing is now you're, you're leveraging everybody's brain power on site to to be as efficient as possible and as as profitable as possible and work together as a truly as a team

Evan Troxel: You're all on the same team. I was going to say, yeah, you're all on the same team, and it doesn't incentivize this kind of pitting people against each other, which is the, the traditional method of design bid build, right? And, and it's interesting, the whole design bid build delivery mechanism, right?

Which is. As architects, we compete to typically it's going to be based on lowest fee to do the project, which means we're going to spend the least number of hours. Right? And you, you

mentioned the words earlier, race [00:43:00] to the bottom, right? This is it. And, and then we put that project out to bid. We take the lowest bidder.

Right? And that lowest bidder is often looking for

holes in the documentation as much as they can, because they need to make up for it, because they really can't do it at the low bid that they provided. And it's like designed to fail is another way that I would say it, right? It's, it's, How can a person, an entity, uh, an owner think that that's going to come to the best outcome?

And yet, like, we have to do it in many circumstances. If it's public projects, if it's a school, I mean, it's because you're using the public's resources. to build said project, and therefore we want to make sure we're getting the best deal. But is it really the best deal? Right? When it's actually causing these much larger issues, like on paper, you can see how people would think that this is the best deal. But in reality, it's actually creating these toxic environments, pitting these silos against each other to [00:44:00] fight the whole way through. And are you really going to get a great project when there's just this constant battle the whole time? Is that, is war The answer, right? It's like, because that's kind of what it is.

A lot of times it's rare and it does happen that you do have good relationships through that process.

Um,

but it

is rare.

Jim Walker: Well, you definitely can. It's just the, the IPD contract model. So it contracts those relationships into the, into the construction system. You know, take like, let's walk through an example and you know, it's something that repeats on, on every big job. Let's say you're building some kind of a, theater or something where acoustic walls are very important.

So you have very, very important top of wall sealant details, things like that. But in the construction, what's the first

thing that happens? Well, you'll either have like a, a ductwork trade or a plumbing trade come through and they'll slap all of their ductwork up in the ceiling. And just, you know, first I did it, I'm done.

I'm

out

Evan Troxel: Done and out, right? That's the goal, right? Is to

be there earlier than somebody else because the, the problems

ripple down. They don't

ripple up,

Jim Walker: So what happened? Yeah. So what happens [00:45:00] now? Well, now your drywall trade is forced to try to work around massive ducts that a lot of times, you know, we're in corridors right up against walls where your sound. Your STC rating. Yeah, right.

Is also important and they're trying to seal the tops of walls and create, still create a good product for the client and the end user at the end of the day.

Only the system you're using has like put all of these sticks in the wheels of that system to, to realize that.

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Jim Walker: So, so what happens then while

you come through and you start trying to do your sound testing and, and, you know, across walls and like, everything's failing. Well, it's, yeah, it's failing because it couldn't get up to the top of the.

The wall to seal. it. 'cause the duct work was there first. Yeah. But he was really fast. Why weren't you that fast? Yeah. But , so what, what the

experience, yeah, the experience in the IPD environment then, is that your, your h like in this particular example would be your HVAC trade and your drywaller in your SubT trade meeting.

They go away after the meeting and they talk amongst themselves. Hey look. I want to be as quick as possible. Do you think I could do this component of the work? So do you think I could frame the [00:46:00] wall and just do five feet of the drywall at the top, seal it, and then you come through afterwards and do all your ductwork? that leaves me weeks afterwards to do board tape, sand, all that other stuff.

And I can take my time to do my work properly. You unencumbered access, unencumbered access to do your work, so you're as efficient as possible. Together, we don't have to come back and do rework. We deliver a better product for the client. Together, we're And everybody's happy. And we did it in less time than we originally scheduled because we were scheduling under traditional contract model delivery, you know, delivery models, where our metrics are quite inefficient and according to the graph that we always get presented in the conferences that we go to, construction efficiency is tailing off.

So, you know, it, it, it just works so much better. And then what happens at the end of the day? Well, everybody feels great because they went in, they get, did a good job that day. everybody worked together, it was really rewarding

Evan Troxel: They're ready to show up the

next day, right?

Jim Walker: right. And instead instead of hitting the bottle, or,

yeah, instead of going to [00:47:00] the pub for pints after work, or, you know, like, hitting the bottle, you know what, I went for a walk.

I went and watched the waves roll in on the beach, because I was really happy and satisfied. And then the health benefits come along with that, and then all of a sudden we don't have all of this other, Stuff associated with their industry. And then maybe parents start seeing that, Hey, you know what?

Construction's actually a really great place to send my kids, uh, to encourage them to, to go for their, for their careers. And then all of a sudden this labor shortage that we were talking about starts going away. I know I'm talking about, you know, like utopian, uh, blue sky, but, but what if, right? Like, like,

Evan Troxel: I

thumbed through Instagram quite often and I see, have you seen these videos where people, it's, it's a guy like, you know, he's, he's just Cut out the background and he's, he's wearing his hard hat and his safety vest and his, his eyeglasses and he's, he's watching like

terrible shit go down,

Jim Walker: yeah,

Evan Troxel: OSHA problems. It's like the guy on the ladder slipping off this and falling off that and the pouring this into [00:48:00] that that shouldn't go there. And it's just like one thing after another. And like, again, we're letting somebody else. It's, it's a meme, right, but, but that is, those funny

videos stick with people. And so when I've got a kid and I'm like, they, and if they show an interest in something, and that's my mental image of what it looks like to work in construction is like major,

major fails, right?

Jim Walker: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: And, and so I, but I think about the reality of, I, I love to build myself, I love to make things, and I have a shop and I've got a lot of tools that I should do a better job at justifying my ownership of them. But it's, it's one of those things where you're, you have a new challenge. You have the opportunity of having a new challenge every day. And I think people who like to solve puzzles. Construction's a great place to go do that, and you get to go to different locations, and you get to be outdoors, and you get to do all kinds of things that are very different than going and working in a factory or working [00:49:00] in an office, and I think there's a lot of really great people there. pieces to this that could be talked about and kind of going back to this image and then marrying that to this IPD process, I think is very interesting potential, right? To actually tell those stories. I think we tell those stories to potential clients. Right? Because we want to show them that there is a better way of working, or there is a different way of working.

Uh, and there are advantages to getting the teams all at the same table and incentivizing them with the same profit pool, so that they work together instead of adversarially. Right? And so, we, we tell those two clients because we think that there's a higher chance that we might get commission if they buy into that as well. But what are we doing beyond? The potential clients, what are we doing to actually get this information out into the world at large to start to change perceptions about AEC and what it's like [00:50:00] to deliver projects that do take

literally years to do, right? And then these are the biggest projects on the planet, and they're difficult.

They're extremely nuanced. There's different challenges every day. Just because you solved it here doesn't mean it's going to work over there on the next project. And, and. But I think that's also attractive, right? And so it's like starting to tell those stories. I know there's people out there who are doing this.

There's like Tyler Campbell. I see his posts on LinkedIn all the time, Construction Brothers podcast. He's doing a lot of media work for these companies, but I mean, this is the kind of thing that I think needs a lot of help and it needs people like you who are passionate about the construction industry to come on a podcast like this. and talk about it, about how it could be better. How it, what is the vision of what it could be and why that's something worth pursuing. Um, but man, like the call to

action here is we

need a

lot

more of that.

Jim Walker: Yeah, there's groups that

are, looking to do that. You know, Hanson Wade has a conference called Advancing IPD, um, and that, you know, [00:51:00] that's, they, have a couple of different ones in the U. S. In Canada,

like I'm a board member of the, Integrated Project Delivery Alliance, who is a non for profit group whose sole mission is just educating the industry on, on IPD and IPD in Canada.

There is, you know, especially in the province of Quebec, uh, in the past two years, there's really been sort of a, uh, I'm going to call it a groundswell, but that might be a little premature, but there's a bit of a groundswell among the client side, the public client side, to find a different way to do projects.

And I know that, you know, our, our department of national defense, um, saw a systemic issue with the delivery of their projects that, you know, they were over budget and over cost and looked for a different way to, to deliver those projects and and was the first. Uh, first organization in Canada to execute a CCDC 30 contract.

CCDC is, um, like our documents, uh, Canadian Construction Documents Corporation, or center that [00:52:00] generates a lot of their standard contract models and things like that. Um, so yeah, it was like a pretty big step on the side of the, client. Um, you know, it's interesting too about like the, um, the, um, um, the, The IPD contract model is when you're executing the project, like the metrics that you use to judge success sort of change, um, you know, as traditional contract model.

We're constantly using like rear looking, um, metrics that occurred in

the past that don't help you predict really if a problem is going to occur. Um, same thing sort of like with safety, right? With near misses, like, um, a lot of times near misses are considered a forward looking indicator if there's going to be a bigger problem, but really a near miss for anybody that doesn't know what near miss is, like a, an accident that almost happened.

It's, it's severe enough to take note, but nobody actually, no property was damaged and nobody got hurt. So for example, you know, um, somebody walking along A worker walking along a grade level and then something falls off of an upper floor and lands, say a hammer or a [00:53:00] wrench, lands beside them. Um, it didn't break anything, it didn't hurt anybody, but it's still significant enough that we stand up and we take notice and we try to, to make changes to, to what we're doing so that something really severe doesn't actually happen.

Um, and can, and you know, the other thing about like, if construction is sick, like there's all, you know, besides mining, construction is the most dangerous industry to work in. So, one of the metrics that you start measuring in, in an IPD project is like, do you feel like we were being collaborative this week? I mean, you ask these questions after every, every meeting that involves, you know, your trades people, your foreman, your, your, even your architects, your, your engineers as a group.

Like, do you feel we were collaborating? Do you feel like we were collaborating? Um, we upheld the values we set out to do. Do you feel like, and it's a lot of like feeling, do you feel these things? Do you feel bought in still to the purpose? And I first got turned on to this, even before IPD, this construction as a system, when I was doing some work at [00:54:00] a past employer with a company out of the UK called Vanguard, um, and it was started by a gentleman named John Seddon, who said like any organization, look at what they're delivering in terms of a system.

That's so. What we were trying to do is if, you know, when you walk out on a site, ask any worker, what is the purpose of this project we're working on now? And the more times that workers could easily articulate what was the purpose of what we were doing today, the less instances of safety you would have, the less instances of quality, uh, you know, non conformities would you have?

And you would overall have a more, uh, efficient and cleaner job site. Because when people are

bought into a central purpose, They automatically take more care in what they're doing, and that could be take more care in being safe, take more care in delivering quality. And you see it all the time, right?

Like the military has mission statements like, you know people that are on, in the US Navy like they're on an aircraft carrier, like they wear the hats with the silhouette of the ship and then [00:55:00] the I don't know if it's a serial number or whatever of the, of the boat that they're on, but there's a pride and association with that boat, with that military unit, like this is known, this is stuff that organizations already do.

And so like,

you know, for our line of work, like I'm really big on project teams, like, Hey, like take the time, create a mission statement for your project. What do you mean a mission statement for my project? Yeah. Like take the time to encourage your team. To participate and do that, and then when you go out on site, like, Hey, do you know the mission statement of this, of this project?

Yes. It's to, you know, deliver quality for, I dunno, the University of McGill in this sound stage that we're building, which is only one little room in, in a big building retrofit, but still everybody working there knows what the purpose is. They're all bought into it. And I'm, I'm guaranteeing you if you, you, you study those metrics across every project going on in North America, the ones where people know the purpose.

You have less safety incidents and you have better quality at the end of the day and probably a more efficient project. And [00:56:00] then if you really get granular into the data, like I bet you there's less requests for information, less site instructions. And, and it even goes back to, you know, ask your consultants.

Like, do you know what the purpose of this project is? And the more people answer yes and articulate it, the more of those inefficiencies and wastes trend down. And that's, that's what we need.

Evan Troxel: And you're talking about pride of ownership, right? You talked about the ship and the hat, right? The silhouette, and it's like the association and

the, it becomes part of your identity, right? As, as you wear that. outward facing garment, right? Happened to be a hat, right? But it's like pride of ownership in your contribution to making the thing a reality. And I saw this comment on a YouTube video, um, for somebody who's doing some education about the upcoming solar eclipse of all things. And the comment was, thank you so much for spent, taking the time to make something for people that you will never meet. I thought that was so interesting.

And that's what you're talking about with construction [00:57:00] too, right?

You're making a product for people who you will likely never meet, but you, the thing that you're contributing to will affect them and it can affect them negatively, or it can affect them positively, right? And it's that kind of bigger picture thinking, I think that actually is what drives me and my passion for architecture is that architecture can change the world.

It can change the way people interact with space. It can change their behavior and therefore their contribution back to society, right? In a positive way or a negative way. And of course, my goal would be that it always affects them in a positive way. How is that going to happen? By truly understanding number one, like how that could happen, but number two, by delivering a great product. So that they are taken care of, and so that it does the things they need it to do, or it drives them to aspire to do what they do even better, because they're in a place that lifts them up, right? [00:58:00] To, to deliver that to somebody else, right? If it's patients, or if it's children, or coming into a school, right?

It's like, you can have a learning environment that is actually conducive to learning, or you can have something that's much more like a prison cell, right? Those are two

viable options for a school classroom. We've seen examples of both of those, right? And, and so I, I, going back to, like, just the overall image, and the buy in, and the ownership that could be created, that there's so much potential here. How do we leverage that? How do we tell those stories to attract people to that so that we start getting more of that in these industries? That's, that to me is really the, the, crux of the question

here, and who's willing

to do that?

Jim Walker: well, we have, we have to figure it out, right? Like, we're, we're running out of time to figure it out. Like, you look at, so just speaking specifically for Canada, but I'm willing to say that the, the the U S is in the same boat and probably all of the Western world for that, for that matter. Like, [00:59:00] we need, we don't have enough hospitals to, for our populations.

We don't have enough homes for our populations. We don't have enough, um, you know, military infrastructure for populations. We don't have enough power generation. for, for our, for our populations. We have a climate crisis that, you know, needs these things solved. And what are we doing to really leverage the, scarce resource of people that we have to realize those projects and get those things built?

Like right now we're doing the same thing we've been doing, which has been driving the efficiency graph I keep, I keep banging on it, but driving that efficiency graph further into the ground. So. Like, yeah, great. Like, let's all complain about it or let's, you know, it's, what's the expression? It's better to, light a candle than, curse the dark.

Like, so let's start lighting some candles. Let's start lighting some fires under people and get moving on something. Like start taking action, start working together instead of using our talents to work against each other. Cause really that's what we're doing in, in a traditional contract model is we're using everybody's [01:00:00] expertise to, to work against each other and then build a, build a project in the end.

And I'm speaking, you know, in, in. exaggerations, obviously, but some, some days it kind of feels like that.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, yeah, and I like how you, you, you point to potential solutions with IPD and even design build right where it creates an environment, uh, for positive outcomes. And that's a choice that these companies can choose to participate in or not. Like you could actually make the decision that we are only going to pursue these kinds of

projects that have this delivery mechanism.

Jim Walker: Hmm.

Evan Troxel: Because they lead to better outcomes. And then you can be known for a company that creates better outcomes because of the systems that you've put in place to get there, but you don't have to participate in design bid build anymore. You just, you don't have to, right? It's up to you. Nobody's, nobody's making you do that.

Right. And so I think that there are ways to start to create. The cultures that you're talking about that are less about de risking, right, but, [01:01:00] but shared risk going in together and, and changing the narrative around adversarial, no trust relationships between silos, right? And going into a model where we're all on the same team. These, there are ways to get, it's not like there's no hope, right? There are absolutely ways to do this. And on top of that, we have to find ways to tell these stories. to young, impressionable people who are open to doing something different than maybe even what their parents are telling them is an acceptable vocation or profession to go into. Uh, I, I think that there are definitely, and it's not, you know, totally generalizing there, right, with the parent thing. But, but it, overall, it's, it's, we feel it, we see it, we keep seeing the, the reports on shortages for labor, for construction, but also for the architectural

industry as well.

Yeah.

Jim Walker: Every aspect of it.

Evan Troxel: Right. Yeah. So I don't know if there's anything else that we're missing here, but I feel like this was a really, [01:02:00] productive conversation because bringing something to light that maybe not everybody knew was such a big issue is the construction industry has some sickness. And so does the architecture industry as well. And, and figuring out ways to, I mean, the people listening to the show are, are probably already in the industry, but this might be a good one to share. Yeah. out with colleagues and with other people to understand the, how big this problem actually is that the challenges that are in front of us, because like, no one else is going to solve this for us. It's up to us to take the responsibility to do that. I think this is where disruption is kind of a scary thing, right? Because you could have people coming from the outside and just saying, uh, you're doing it wrong. Here's a better way to

do it. And just eat our

lunch for, you know, that would, I would rather, uh, be part of the solution than just. saying, Hey, there's a problem over here and I don't know what to do about it. So this, this to me has been a productive conversation

and a good [01:03:00] message

to get out.

Jim Walker: Yeah. I really, I really appreciate you, you having me on and participating in this and you know, like I just, want to be really clear, right? Like I'm, my criticisms of, of our industry, they come from a place of like, I've been, I've been in this my whole life, right?

So I'm, I'm not, I'm not from the outside looking in, like I believe in what we're doing and I want to see it improve.

And, uh, there's, a lane, there's a, path we, can do it. And if we work together, we'll get there.

Evan Troxel: Being critical is absolutely important because you want it to get better. That's the whole point of what we call in architecture, a crit. is to make the project better. We, we do critiques and we critique the work. It's not about the people as much. We want people to have a good time and good morale and, and, and enjoy what they're doing and even have a passion and a fire for it.

But the goal is so that the thing gets better, right? And we see the problems and you're here helping to put those on display, but then also attempt to get [01:04:00] us moving in a solution

orientation.

Jim Walker: Oh yeah, And you know, if you want to, without, trying to sound too alarmist, right? Like our, Grandchildren and future generations are depending on us to start figuring these things out.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I think that's an important. Perspective to have is, it's not just about this project. It's not just about this week or this year. You're

setting the stage for what's to come. Right. And we should have that bigger picture view of where things are headed because like, yeah, maybe it isn't your problem. in 20 years.

It's your problem now though, right? And, and you are contributing to the solution or the problem wherever you're at right now. And, and so I would hope that message like yours today on this show is really about being a part of the solution from wherever you are that, you know, the whole idea of 360 degree of leadership, right?

You don't have to be a quote unquote, leader to lead. Uh, leadership is not appointed to you. It [01:05:00] is, is a skill that you can develop from. Any position that you're in and, and it is a constant battle, maybe not the right

word, but it is a constant project to, to be looking at

that And leading from wherever you

are.

So,

Jim Walker: and I believe we have the best and brightest minds right. In this industry that are capable of doing it. And once we, start working together, we'll get there.

Mm hmm.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well Jim, this has been a great conversation. I'll put links to where people can find you and connect with you, and I just wanted to say thank you because I think it was five years

ago. I mean, you were still at PCL when you first reached out to me at au, I think just LinkedIn or something, said, Hey, want to want to grab a beer?

Let's chat. And I, that was awesome. I mean, it's been, it's been great. So I, I appreciate you and everything that you've

brought to this

conversation today.

Jim Walker: Yeah, use well. Thanks. Thanks for having the platform to be able to spread the, gospel

Evan Troxel: Awesome. Well, until the next au uh, let's go ride bikes at the, at the next one. And, [01:06:00] uh, I learned that Jim's a fellow mountain biker and we're gonna have some fun, uh, au in San

Diego this year. I hope so. That'll be, that'll be

Jim Walker: Yeah, can't

Evan Troxel: All right. See you then.

Jim Walker: See ya.

View Details

In this episode of Archispeak, my friend Michael Ermann of Amber Book and Virginia Tech joins Cormac and me as we tackle the topic of architectural internships – both for those seeking and for the firms providing them.

View Details

Susan Young joins the podcast to talk about the art of persuasive communication and storytelling, particularly in leadership roles within the AEC industry. We discuss the importance of not only building but reading the room, asking quality questions, and practicing deep listening. The conversation also explores how being fully present and curious can lead to more effective interactions and projects.

Susan underscores the two key traits of superior leaders: confidence and excellent communication skills, emphasizing that these are skills that can be learned and honed. The conversation highlights the role of soft skills in conveying knowledge effectively, stating that it doesn't matter what you know if you can't communicate and articulate it to others.

We further discuss the crucial role of making a strong first impression, owning the fact that you're a media production company via social media and the internet, and understanding the art of the headline to hook your audience. The episode wraps up with a discussion on a people-centric approach to talking about tech and tools in firms, highlighting that we relate most to the human to human (H2H) stories.

Episode links:* Susan on LinkedIn * AECamplify.com * Susan on Twitter/X * Susan on Instagram

About Susan Young:Susan Young is an award-winning communicator and AEC keynote speaker. She has worked with architecture, engineering, and construction firms for 23 years.

Susan teaches clear, confident communication that wins trust, respect, and clients. Her experience as a radio news reporter and anchor brings a unique skill set to AEC. She has interviewed everyone from homeless people to presidents.

In addition, Susan was Deputy Director of the Governor's Office of Radio & TV for New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman. With live and virtual programs, Susan teaches deep listening, curiosity, storytelling, and concise communication. Her strategies include brain science that empowers business development teams to close more bids.

Susan has been honored as “Entrepreneur of the Year.” Her favorite achievement is being one of the ‘Top 75 Badass Women on Twitter.’

Susan and her husband have two grown children. They live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this episode on YouTube:153: ‘Emotional Archaeology’, with Susan YoungSusan Young joins the podcast to talk about the art of persuasive communication and storytelling, particularly in leadership roles within the AEC industry. W…YouTube

Episode Transcript: 153: ‘Emotional Archaeology’, with Susan Young
[00:00:00]

Evan Troxel: Joining me today is Susan Young. Susan, welcome to the podcast.
Susan Young: Thank you, Evan.
Evan Troxel: I am very happy to have you on the show because this is a little bit different of a topic, but it's something that's very near and dear to me as a self proclaimed, I guess, communicator. this is just one thing that I've noticed throughout the years of my job is to communicate.
And I found that when I was working in a firm as a designer, when I was working with stakeholders and clients on projects, it was like finding the best way to communicate with them, finding the best way to tell a story, finding the best way to connect with them. And I know that this is really what You're all about as well.
So, uh, I think this is a valuable [00:01:00] topic for this audience. A lot of times Architects people in technology are more I'll say I'm just guessing here fact check me on the introverted side of the scale and we tend to go into our Tunnel and, and do our things. We're serious doers. Right? And oftentimes there's a disconnection from the other side of that, which is connecting with people, getting the right information, landing in a positive way so that you get the most out of those interactions.
Anyway, I've said way too much already. Maybe you can, you can, uh, tell us a story about how you've gotten to where you are and, and what your backstory actually
is.
Susan Young: Sure. No, I appreciate that. And, uh, love being here today with you. Uh, everyone's got a story. So here's my story. Um. I didn't talk till I was four years old, uh, was born in Brooklyn and my parents thought I was deaf. They took me to the doctor and the doctor said, no, she's absolutely fine. She just doesn't [00:02:00] need to talk. They were like, well, what does that mean? You know? And then, and uh, they said, well, what does she do when she's hungry? And they said, well, she goes over to the refrigerator and bangs on the door. I didn't need any words. So eventually, of
course, I started to talk
and,
Evan Troxel: You were efficient.
You were just efficient. This is, this is the
thing.
Susan Young: pretty direct. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. And, um, so. I, what is, you know, what does a child like this do when you don't talk to your four years old? I go off to college and major in mass communication and, uh,
Evan Troxel: course.
Susan Young: first, first week on campus in Connecticut. I found the campus radio station and I was hooked. I was always a strong writer. And, uh, enjoyed writing, but, uh, you know, I was also very into music, so I DJ'd, and then started doing news, and, uh, just fell in love with that, and so it was always interesting, and curious, and changing, it wasn't, though, same day, That's the Rolling Stones singing
Satisfaction, you know, so
everything was, TROXL is
different, which was exciting to me. I was always curious. My sisters, [00:03:00] both my sisters got on their report cards, Talks Too Much in class. I got Roams Around the Hallways. I always thought that there was something better than that third grade class. You know, that I
was curious. I wanted
to find out what
was going on,
That insatiable curiosity really helped me to build my career and so I graduated from college and I went back to New Jersey and worked in uh, radio news as an on air news reporter and news director and anchor for 10 years, interviewing everyone from homeless people to presidents, asking questions, deep listening, interviewing everyone from, like I say, homeless
people to presidents, and
winning
awards along the
way.
Uh, and what I discovered was that, um, all I had to do was ask good questions and be curious. And so that really helped fuel my career and, uh, ran Governor Christy Whitman's Office of Radio and Television at the State Capitol, worked for a non profit for a year, and then I realized, this is now 2000, [00:04:00] that I've sat through hundreds and hundreds of presentations at town hall meetings, at protests and, you know, government meetings, hearings, that engineers, architects that were, most were, um, painful, a few were persuasive and I thought they really need some communication help those PAP slides and all that information and looking at the shoes and the no, you know, gestures and inflection and all that. So I opened up my business in 2000. It's called Get In Front Communications and been working with architects, engineers and construction pros on how to be more effective at communication. How to become more curious and use those deep listening skills, not to be self serving, but to be able to be an emotional archaeologist. And go in there with an invisible shovel and ask good questions. And so that you're able to notice things that other [00:05:00] people don't notice. And pay attention in a very different way. And have a very subtle level of self confidence without being arrogant or pushy or anything like that, obnoxious. And in the end It's about being a confident communicator and being proficient in not only being able to build a room, but knowing
how to read the room.
Evan Troxel: I want to go back to, you just said, like, some very simple words, but I think they have, uh, there's more here, which is asking good questions. Can you define what that means? Because I think that, it's like, yeah, no, we hear that all the time, right? For good communicators, ask good questions.
Good interviewers, ask good questions. But what's it, what, just if you could put some words to what that actually means to you.
Susan Young: Yeah, I think it's really about when we listen deeply, we ask quality questions to get quality information. If you're not getting the information that you [00:06:00] want from whoever, a vendor, from a client, from a prospect, from your child or a partner, then the onus is on you, not them, so that you ask better questions.
So, it depends on the flow and the It's a natural evolution of a conversation, and so it really is about paying sharp attention to what people are saying and not planning ahead and being distracted in your mind because we're all bombarded with so much, you know, messaging and I have to go here, I have to go there.
We're not fully present. When you notice that somebody said something and you're paying attention and you're sharp and you're on the ball, you're able to follow up with a question that's not scripted, that's not in a cookie cutter template, that's not sounding robotic. And so you ask a question, say, hmm, that's interesting, because you're curious. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? [00:07:00] So, one of the questions that I've taught people to, you know, when I do coaching and everything with, with AEC folks, is you ask the question, what else What else? What else? What else is going on here? What else is this story about? What else is happening behind the scenes
that I don't know about?
What else can I do to help solve this problem? And so you ask yourself, what else? What else? What else? There's gold here. And I, as an emotional archaeologist with that invisible shovel, come in and, no pain, we pull the questions and the information out of people by asking quality questions. And it's easy and it's magical.
Evan Troxel: I'm sitting here with the pregnant pause because I feel like that's one of those fears that people have in these situations is to not allow space. And that is one [00:08:00] of the reasons why people are always thinking ahead of what's next. Where are we going? What's the next thing that I need to check off my list of?
Things that I prepared for with this meeting with this presentation, whatever it is, and have to keep it going because we don't want to lose their attention, right? The fear is losing their attention or going down a rabbit hole or getting caught off guard or any of those things. when what you're, you're proposing basically the opposite, which is we're going to go explore together and we don't know where that's going.
We have not prepared for that. Right? And, and, and relying on our expertise to guide what we actually need to get out of this presentation or conversation or whatever it may be. There, there are some innate fears in these, uh, instances that happen, right? So I would love to hear from you. Like what, uh, What kinds of things have you seen come out of that?
Because there's that real fear, but [00:09:00] at the same time, you said, there's gold there, right? And so, how do we overcome those fears to allow those explorations to actually happen?
Susan Young: It's really about trusting yourself and being fully present and in the moment. And one of my first coaches from Philadelphia told me years ago. Be fully present. And remember, this is, you know, before social media and all of the
bombardment of
messages and
distractions that we have, the noise in the world.
Right.
She said to me, wherever your feet are, So right now, I'm with you, Evan, in this conversation on this podcast, and I'm not worried or thinking about, Oh, I gotta mail that, you know, FedEx has to be returned, or, you know, I have to get gas in the car, or there's some noise down the, down the, you know, in the other room. I'm here with you right now. That's it. Everything is perfect. And so once we [00:10:00] start to drift, and it's really about self awareness, you catch yourself mentally drifting. And you know when people aren't really paying attention. You can tell. So, you notice these things. And you start to trust yourself and you tell yourself a different story.
Now, I'm a storyteller by trade for 40 years, working in radio, interviewing, you know, thousands of people. And what I realized is that our communication is an inside job. So whatever story you're telling yourself in here, I'm not a good communicator. I'm an empath. I'm an introvert. I'm not a good driver. I don't look good in red.
Whatever, you know, whatever that story is, that narrative, that self doubt, first, we have to address that story. you can go into the marketplace and feel much more confident and comfortable. Because you trust yourself. You can't go into a meeting, or a presentation, or a BD networking event, what have you, [00:11:00] if you don't believe you. Because there are, there's two basic laws of marketing, Evan. One, people have to know you exist, and two, is they have to believe you. But the third one is where I focus, it's on the believability factor. Do you believe you? Because if you don't believe you, nobody
else will.
And
Evan Troxel: like a lot of times that's talking points, right? We're regurgitating the thing that we've been preparing to talk about, and it comes across exactly as you just said, which is it comes across with some amount of disbelief. And it's just because, like, I'm saying this because I'm supposed to say this.
It's not that I have truly embodied it, that I've really thought through the future implications of what I'm telling you right now. And. We're going up in AEC, we're going into a scenario or a relationship that is going to take years, right? It's going to take years. And if, if I can't connect with [00:12:00] you now, and I can't have that connection of belief that you're talking about now, what makes me think that this relationship is going to last years?
Because it actually is, right? It needs to, it needs to be something that we can do together for multiple years. And I find that that is. I absolutely believe what you're saying because there have been so many times when your team doesn't get chosen because you don't connect with them because they're not picking the firm, they're picking the people who are right there in the room because those are the people they're going to have to work with for the next number of years.
Susan Young: Exactly. Yeah. And when, you know, you, you can, it's all in the preparation and when you trust yourself and you're able to have that deeper connection and that rapport, like you say, you know, that you're going to have to work together. How do you click with people? How do you read people? How do you know you listen? You have those deep listening skills. You ask good questions. [00:13:00] You're fully present. You have, You need to have that trust in your head so that you
know you belong there, you
know
that what differentiates your firm from another. And people pick up on this and, uh, you know, I'm trained in NLP and Neuro Linguistic Programming.
So it's brain science and how we bridge communication gaps and how we have different communication modalities. And how do we, you know, cut down on the miscommunication and really connect on a deeper level because you are like the people that you're talking with. So it's, you know, a combination of psychology and brain science and communication and confidence and all of that bundled into
me.
Evan Troxel: Yeah,
Susan Young: what, that's what I teach. I mean, it's, that's my jam and it's
all about storytelling.
Evan Troxel: I'm really curious to get your Take on this because I've seen it work both ways. Um, I've been on the receiving side of coaching when it comes to, uh, [00:14:00] going after a project where it was a really important project and so it was deemed very important to have the team firing on all cylinders. Very prepared ahead of time, who's going to say what, when they're going to say it, how they're going to say it, what are they doing with their hands when they say it, how much is memorized, how much is just off the cuff, and it's pretty overwhelming, I think, for most of the people on the team to go through a process like that, and at the same time, it's, it's really useful, um, but it's not necessarily natural for those people, and so then, then the other side of that is, I don't want to prepare, and I think we're talking more about the confident people who have done this a lot, who have the experience, who just say, like, do not force me to prepare.
It will only screw up who I actually am and how that interaction is going to go, because they are confident in being able to navigate the situation in real time, right? And, and we see people scoff at both of those. [00:15:00] We see people scoff at the people who say, There's no way I'm preparing and then you've brought up the word a couple times already today of Preparedness right and and knowing who you are and knowing the situation So I'm just curious what your take is on all that because there there's we've we've seen it all and I think it probably depends on personality type and the people involved but but if just kind of talking about those two different sides of Of this teeter-totter here.
The, the people who are saying, no way, don't, don't make me prepare. I'll, I'll, I'll actually do worse if you make me prepare. I'm better in the moment. Then there's the people who are saying, prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare until you, you just know this like the back of your hand, and, and we're gonna go in and hit all these talking points.
Susan Young: Yeah, I think it really comes down to bringing, you know, narrowing that gap because when people are prepared, they might be prepared, but they're not, they don't, really know the depth [00:16:00] of the people that they're interacting with. So I say that it's either a hot mess at, I say, you know, if your BD meeting is a hot mess or went off the rails and the car ride back to the office is, you know, hellish and Do you want a beautifully choreographed, graceful dance? Doesn't that feel so much better? Where it's not rehearsed to the point where it seems and feels rehearsed and stuffy and, you know, I can't
express myself, I can't.
You know, we have to
think on our feet. But we also have to know the other people, our colleagues and the people on the team, the sellers and the doers, of how are they going to interact, how, who's going to answer certain questions, not every question, because you
can't plan all that.
I
mean, that's a
natural flow of a conversation. So you want to be able to be, like I say, trained to. Think on your feet and to be sharp and to pick up on these [00:17:00] little nuances. I would say notice the nuances and then, you know, if you have the, the leader of your team, for instance, the, the, say that the head of the BD, you know, presentation
and the others on the
team are able to keep an eye on them and look for those verbal and nonverbal cues and clues, like something very subtle that nobody else would notice, but you know, don't, don't say anything, let it land. Or, I've got this, Kyle's going to jump in in a moment, but first I just want to mention that the survey shows that, bang, bang, bang.
So, we're feeding off one another instead of, you know, stepping on each other's words and interrupting and not knowing what to say and this person was supposed to say that and that was supposed to say It doesn't work that way.
Like I say, it can be a beautifully choreographed dance when You trust yourself and you trust the others as you prepare for the presentation. Not on the [00:18:00] way to the meeting, but, you know, a day or two before. That's what I coach on. There's, you know, there's so many things and little details that make such a huge difference and it's not overwhelming.
It just becomes, oh, this is the way we do it. It's, it's a checklist almost.
Well,
Evan Troxel: There's so many people on, so my experience, I guess I should back up a little bit before I get into this, is in a larger firm context, and there are a lot of people doing really specific roles, and it's pretty well delineated, and then there's smaller firms where you just, you do it all, right, and so these are very different things.
What you just said makes me think of is that there are people who do BD, like, that's what they do, and they are very good at it. They're the rainmakers, as they say, in the, in the office, right? And the, to your point, Like, they're good, they have skills in that, because they don't have to do everything. They don't have to do payroll, and they don't have to do design, and they don't have to do project [00:19:00] architecting, and they don't have to do detailing, and all those things.
And then there's, you know, the one to ten person firms where you do a lot more, you have to cover a lot more of the roles and responsibilities of an office. And I'm just wondering how you Cultivate those skills in those kinds of scenarios where it's not your full time role to do that exactly. What, what do you give people advice in doing to start to cultivate those kinds of
skills?
Susan Young: it's interesting because everybody today is in marketing and nobody signed up for it
in AEC, right?
Evan Troxel: What do you mean by that? I, I, I read, I read something about that with you and, and, and I think that I, I agree. Like I said, I'm a commu, my job is communications. I didn't sign up to be a communicator. I, I was a designer. Like that's what I did. And then I found out the psychology aspect of it, and I found out the selling aspect of it, and I found out the listening aspect of it.
So I'm really curious what you mean when you say [00:20:00] everybody's in marketing. What do you mean by that?
Susan Young: Yeah, it's, it's that the, you know, the, the doers, the sellers are the ones who are, you know, they go into the meetings and schmooze and they're friendly and they're, they're, you know, likable and they know how to close the deal. And of course, now we have the doers who have, who are being required, who didn't, Want to go to, you know, they're not marketers, they're not outgoing, probably, or friendly, or know the sales and all of that, and the soft skills. And so they're being forced into these conference rooms and these presentations, kicking and screaming, and it's like, well, wait a minute. If we don't train them and show them how to do it, to reinvent themselves. I mean, that's what I had to do. I worked in radio. Okay. I, if, if somebody would have told me 24 years ago that I'd be doing this, I would have laughed in their face. Okay. I'm like, I'd rather sit home in a
closet by myself.
Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.
Susan Young: You know, I don't know gestures. I don't know facial expression. Everything was the voice, the voice, the, the, the [00:21:00] words, let the words. And so I had, you know, now I, you know, speeches that, you know, it, it. You know, built conferences and for, for construction and at the steel conferences and it's, my sisters are like, what, you, can you
imagine I was a quiet one?
Evan Troxel: Is this the same Susan we grew up with? It's not the same Susan. Yeah.
Susan Young: It's not, it's not the, yeah, all of a sudden I found my words and a lot of them. Um, so it really is about that you can reinvent yourself. Um, but you have to know how, and you have to be willing, you have to want to say, you know what, I want to do better, I want to, and all the AUC folks I talk to, they want to have a bigger impact. They want to make a difference in their communities. They want to feel that trust and that sense of belonging, and this is the foundational part of it. This is the foundation is that I have discovered superior leaders have two qualities, two traits. [00:22:00] They are confident. And they're excellent communicators. And these are things that people can learn. You could be proficient in technology like you are with, you know, BIM and modeling and PIM and LEAD and everything like that and Revit. But the key here is that if you're not proficient and with people and how to interact and have those soft skills and those easy conversations, it doesn't matter what you know if you can't communicate and articulate
it to somebody else.
Yeah,
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah. I really resonate with that. Even thinking about the purpose of the technology is to document communication and to communicate for a step that's coming. In the future, right? Whether it's building, occupying, like what, how do we synthesize ideas into a real physical building in the end? And it's through this kind of documentation and technical process, but it is still [00:23:00] about communication.
Like that's the real underlying purpose of it all. And I think that that's really interesting when you talk about leadership, because again, like going back in my own experience. And maybe this is a Gen X thing even, I don't know, like, I don't know, for some reason that just popped into my head right now is I've always seen myself as kind of the bridge, right, between the Millennials and the Boomers, right, and my job is to translate both directions because that's where I am and that's That's, that's my generation.
We are the, the, the bridge builders between these, these generations. And they also call us like the forgotten generation, right? Because it's like, we have the leaders who were in my, in my instance, it was always the, the boomers, right? Who were the leaders in firms because they were the seniority. They'd been there the longest and.
they don't speak the same language. And so my job very much became communicating and building consensus [00:24:00] in the office and outside of the office. And I found the inside the office part to be the most, I don't know, unexpected. I didn't think I was going to have to do that. Right. But the psychology, the politics, there's the timelines, the deadlines, all of these things that we have to navigate together and get people on the same page and build a consensus around our Uh, the communication that has to happen there and the nuance and the understanding of it all.
I think just being in that environment really does kind of, that is our boot camp for going outside of the office. It's, it's actually not that different outside of the office that it is inside the office, but I think people still see those two things very differently. Hmm.
Susan Young: I think that when we talk about, you know, the. The documentation and the, the, the, you know, information management, especially in AEC, is that what about the human factor? We have to communicate with human beings, [00:25:00] and what, no matter what generation you're in, I mean, the, the folks who are the, you know, the emerging leaders today, and because of, you know, COVID, and because of technology, for whatever reason, or whatever excuse, or whatever you want to say, or believe, doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is, is that you have to be able to pick up the phone. you you can't communicate with memes, and TikTok, and, and, you know, they, that's where they, And you know, it's, it's a good thing. It's a bad thing, but that's where they are. And so we, as the older generation, the boomers here, speaking for myself is that we have to work with them and train them and show them.
I mean, I just did a webinar recently. I'll give you this example of emerging leaders in, uh, construction and real estate. There were 25 people on this, on this program, and they all sent me the pre homework that said, I have no idea. where I'm supposed to network, who my ideal clients are, [00:26:00] what their concerns are, how am I supposed to follow up? They've been there for two years and they're asking me who their ideal client is? I'm like, shame on you, not shame on you, shame on your boss, shame on the leadership
for not providing the training and the information and the, I mean, studies show time and time again that this, these, you know, the Gen X, Gen Y, the millennial, they want to learn. Those are one of the things that, that attract them to, um, you know, companies and careers. They
want career growth.
And so when we look at it, you see at the turnover and the talent acquisition. You provide this for them and they'll stick around. They just don't know it. They didn't learn it in engineering school. And their leaders didn't learn it in engineering school, because it's not taught there. So it's, it's available, but you have to make time for it and make the commitment to it. Um, you know, saying, I don't know it [00:27:00] and I did a training back in 2015. Well, a lot's changed since 2015. You know, it's like the dinosaur age. So, are you keeping up with it? And are you setting the pace in the example for emerging leaders who are going to eventually step into the next level and become the management and move up the scale? How do they communicate? How do they get along with others? Are their noses buried in the phone? Can they pick up the the phone and actually, you know, use it to call somebody and, you know, untwist a miscommunication or a message that would take 17 threads on an email, but resolve it in 12 seconds on the phone
because you can ask a
question. You get to hear somebody's voice. You interact with them. That's the deep relationship and connection that we
talked about a few minutes ago.
Evan Troxel: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Can we go back a little bit and talk about a definition, and maybe you can lay this out in more [00:28:00] detail? You said seller doer, and I think that is very much a marketing term. We hear it inside of offices a lot as a model that is more appropriate potentially than other models. So maybe you can lay out kind of the landscape of, of what that means.
And then what are the alternatives and why seller doer is important.
Susan Young: Well, you know, in AEC, that's what it is. As I, as I mentioned earlier, that the, the, the, sellers are the marketing people, the schmoozers who are, you know, friendly, outgoing, uh, who know sales, how to close the deal, how to network effectively, um, how to ask the right questions. And this, you know, what I teach is about, you know, it's not about emotional intelligence.
It's not about Toastmasters. It's not about active listening. It's a higher level of communication. And so those are the, the sellers. And the doers are the people who are out on the construction site, you know, the superintendents, the PMs, the estimators, and so there's that [00:29:00] gap that they don't
Jive together.
You know, they don't
speak the same language. They don't, they just don't function. And a lot of it is the, you know, AEC is left brain. It's logical. It's scientific. It's, it's numbers. It's analytical. And, you know, it is creative, of course, as you come from architecture that, you know, there is, you know, the right side of the brain is the, Uh, you know, creative and, and all that, but we really look for the emotional part, and that's what sales is all about, and that's how we're able to connect emotionally with people when we have that human factor, H2H, human to human. You know, we talk a lot in business about storytelling. And people were like, well, how do you use a story in business? How do I introduce myself? How do I tell my story? Like
when we opened up
and talked
about, you
know, not speaking until I was four years old. Well, it's all about the story and how do you deliver it? But you have to [00:30:00] believe
that you have a story.
So what is the place for that? And how is it relevant to your client or prospect? In a meeting that's not self serving, that you feel comfortable sharing so you have the right words, in the right order, at the right time, for the right people. That's human to human communication.
Because storytelling is not going out of style anytime soon. It's been around for 2, 000 years. You know, hieroglyphics on the cave with the cavemen and the fireside chats with President Roosevelt in the, in the 40s, during World War II, people were sitting by the radio, that's all they had. And now, you know, with social.
So, communication is not going out of
style anytime soon.
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Susan Young: the key is, is, are you going to commit to learning it, or are you going to sit and complain and say, Wow, somebody else won the bid. Why? Because you copied and pasted your crap from last year.
Evan Troxel: There's the [00:31:00] title of the episode right there.
I I find it really interesting. Something I just heard, uh, and it resonated with me was that you have about six minutes when you're giving a presentation before you will start to just lose people. They'll start falling off. R rapidly at that point. Um, as far as, it's kind of related to attention span, although I think attention spans are potentially way, way, way shorter than that.
But in a, in a new scenario, right? I'm going to this presentation, I'm going to this meeting. Um, you definitely have somebody's attention for the first. Six minutes is the number that I was given, and I think that that's really important to put out there because you talked about copying and pasting the same crap as last year in your presentation, and you also mentioned earlier on slides with just loads of information, right?
When I think about it. an engineer, or I think about a building product manufacturer [00:32:00] coming into the office and giving a presentation on their process or their product or whatever it is, and it's just loaded with data, and I can do one of two things. I can listen to you, or I can read the slide, and I tend to look at a screen if it's on, right?
Like, that's just my I think that's a lot of people's. If there's a screen on in a bar that's playing a game, even if you don't like sports, you're kind of watching the game because you're just drawn to it. It's like you're drawn to watch the fire in the fireplace, right? It's like this flickering light is, it is, and it's in our DNA to look at that kind of a thing.
And, and if you don't engage with those people in the first six minutes, if you don't get an interaction to happen, like they're gone, they're checking their email. How many times have you checked your phone? During this meeting, right? It's like it happens all the time with people. I'm curious what you have seen in that regard, because we go into these scenarios where we have to present and we have to tick all these boxes off and we have to get from here to [00:33:00] there, and we have to keep it moving and we're trying to keep people's attention and at the same time, we're not engaging with them.
We're just. spewing rote communication. It's the same crap that we presented the last time, for example. Right? So what, what do you think about all that? And that number even, I mean, maybe it's even
less,
I don't
know.
Susan Young: yeah, the number is, is, uh, you know, six minutes would
be, is scary to me.
Um, we've got to get them, humans, according to research, have the attention span of a goldfish, which is
8. 5 seconds.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah.
Susan Young: Okay, so, there's that, and we also have to understand and learn, how do adults learn? So, when you have that You know, and this is what I coach.
I'm giving
away a lot of gems here.
Okay, this
is, this
is, you know, I hope people are, you know, taking notes or what have you, but it really comes down to the, you know, and we've done this in trainings where they, they'll show us a slide deck that they used, uh, the architecture firm, uh, specifically [00:34:00] what I'm thinking of, and it opens up with, you know, their team and their history.
Nobody cares. Nobody cares. And that's where my radio, people say, well, why would, why would we hire a radio, you know, a, a broadcaster and somebody who, you know, has this interesting background, but what do you know about our industry? I'll tell you what I know. Is that if you don't grab their attention, just like a news story, at the beginning, they're going to click somewhere else.
They're going to check out, like you said, they're going to check their phone, they're going to be distracted. How do you use your words to paint the picture and to keep them engaged, which means they're thinking, they're feeling, they're reacting. And they're involved so that you're mesmerizing that they are hanging on the edge of their seats.
Of course, they're going to pay attention. You've got, you've got them. Every word that's dripping off your tongue is magic. [00:35:00] Okay,
so
Evan Troxel: You got, you got me interested with all those words right there. I thought, I, I find this as even more difficult in this. We're doing this remotely right now, right? You're on the East coast. I'm on the West coast. I'm looking at you through a screen. We're not in the same room together. There is a body language barrier.
I'm only seeing a part of you, right? You're only seeing a part of me. And I'm curious how you coach people through that because we live in a hybrid world now also, right? And how do you engage with people through this method of communication when you can't be in the same room as them? We've seen firms borders expand.
Where are they competing for work, right? And a lot of times this digital communication comes in as well. So, I'm wondering Where you go with that.
Susan Young: yeah, you know, there's a whole different psychology and set for, you know, zoom overload. And that disconnection, you know, that, that disconnect that we've had because of COVID and because of the way [00:36:00] technology is now, um, that, you know, people do need to learn how to use their body language. And, um, you know, it's like doing a speech in public, you know, at a, at a conference or a meeting and people
hide behind the podium.
Evan Troxel: Mm
Susan Young: And so you're just a talking head,
but in the end, you are the message. So when you're able to, as I said, I worked in radio, I didn't need to use
gestures and all of this, and
then I had to learn,
okay, how do I use my body like, you know, improv, right? I'm sneaking around the corner, I jumped out from the tree, and all of a sudden, you know, all of that, so, it feels awkward or uncomfortable, but we want to be able to connect and understand how people communicate online when you only have, so, you know, when I'm speaking in, in live, you know, at an event, is that I never stand behind a podium.
Never.
And
I, I teach people because you're hiding because
you don't trust yourself.
Evan Troxel: Hmm.
Susan Young: are the message, everything. The way you look, the way you show up, the way you [00:37:00] move, the way you use your voice, the way you behave. So, even though it's here, you still have some personality back here, in the background, and it's looking at the camera and not worrying, Oh, is my hair okay over here?
Or did I, did something fall over there? Am I distracted? Um, it's about really being, like I say, centered, and wherever my feet are my head is and not being distracted, but it is a
whole different animal
Evan Troxel: The digital version of hiding behind the podium is hiding behind the slideshow, right? Sharing your screen is you, you are minimized. The content is the focus at that point and I find that to be the biggest crutch that people will also use, right? It's, I get to hide behind and read the slides and nobody wants to sit on the other end and receive that.
They want to be engaged with, they want it, they, they want it so [00:38:00] badly to be part of the conversation and interacting and engaging. And you have put up a barrier. You have put the podium between you and them when you do that. When you, when you click, I'm going to share my screen now. And then there's this awkward fumbling of actually sharing the screen.
Right. And I've done a ton of work doesn't get exposed on this podcast because this is a mostly audio podcast and we're mostly just talking, but I, I can, I can draw on my screen, I can communicate with you as, as an architect, let me turn that off so that. My face isn't covered up, but I can communicate as an architect with something that a skill that I have that you probably don't have, right, is just live sketching as an example to engage with people, to communicate ideas that is.
It's fun. It's, um, people love to watch other people sketch. They just do because they probably can't sketch, right? I mean, it's just one of those things that is interesting because it's something that I don't know how to [00:39:00] do and they do. But there's ways to control the communication digitally where I can pop up another computer over me, but then I can bring it right back so that we're talking and we're not looking at that thing while I hide in the corner.
Right? And so I think there's a lot of aspects when it comes to digital communication that we need to be thinking more like broadcasters. We need to be thinking more like newscasters. Like you said earlier, everybody's in marketing. I think everybody's in communications as well, right? Everybody's a media business as well as a marketing business.
I'm curious what, what your thoughts are
on that.
Susan Young: Yeah, that's the thing is that we all have the platform and that's where you know when we when social really took off with Facebook and
you know at the beginning
was that All of a sudden, everyone had an opinion. You know, I remember my dad, like, you know, growing up in the, you know, in the 70s, and my dad's so mild mannered and easygoing, but he would, you know, watch the, again, we were really into the news, so we would watch the TV news, and every once in a while, he'd yell back [00:40:00] at Peter Jennings, or,
You know, Dan Rather,
and he was, but it was a one way conversation.
It was very stilted.
Now,
if you don't like that Hertz kept
you waiting for your rental car
in Florida,
Evan Troxel: going
Susan Young: you can just go on your phone and say Hertz sucks
or whoever, you know, or Hertz was great, you know, they got me
my car fixed right away.
So you have an opinion. And so now everyone's saying what they think. So everyone is in media. Everyone's got the same platform. You can go online and Reach 9 million people with something goes viral and I'll share this quick story with you This is this is just came to my mind. And again, this is the nuance of how a conversation flows Why we don't have talking points today. Is that You remember this story the miracle on the Hudson
where the American Airlines
captain Sully the
plane crashed on the Hudson,
right?
155 people in New York in the harbor on the wing of the plane in January. Well, I interviewed [00:41:00] the gentleman who took the picture that went viral. So this was about 15 years ago, I believe that happened. And so the person who took the picture, I interviewed him for my blog. His name is Yanis Kroons. And what happened was he was on a ferry between New York and New Jersey going to a business meeting. And Twitter had, News always breaks first on Twitter
because it's the fastest,
and that's where a lot of
reporters and journalists hang out. So, there's people on the boat, and they're watching this, you know, plane land on the Hudson River, and people are, so they're, you know, now the ferry that Giannis is on is going to help people, and so people are starting to take pictures. But, remember, phones were very different back then. So, he says, well, if they're taking pictures, I guess I should take some pictures too.
So, he goes over to the railing and take some pictures. The only difference between him and the other passengers on the ferry with him was that [00:42:00] he tweeted to his
200 followers
because he knew how to use the technology. Wow, look at this I'm on a ferry in the Hudson River and this just happened reporters couldn't get there They're in the middle of the water. All of a sudden, citizen journalism is born. Because people depended, because he had the platform, and he knew how to use it.
The others didn't know how to use it. So the 200 followers he had on Twitter said, Holy crap, look at this! And they tweeted it, and it went viral, and of course, you know, that's, that's the story.
So, how do you use technology? How do you know what to do, when to do it? and how it's going to affect other people. We all have the platform. We can all learn. We can all learn this communication. We can learn how to use Zoom. We can learn how to sketch. We can learn how to do podcast interviews. We can learn how to do, you know, better jobs at being more effective communicators in BD meetings.
You can [00:43:00] learn how to change your oil on a YouTube video, or install a dishwasher, or tie a
tie.
Evan Troxel: Absolutely everything. Yeah.
Susan Young: it. Yep.
Evan Troxel: Right. I, I think it's also important to say that you need to learn how to use it before you actually need to use it. Right. Because if he didn't have 200 followers, zero people would've seen that image and it would not have gone viral. And so a lot of times we see a EC late to adopt things because there are a lot of people who are saying, maybe not in this audience.
Who would say, I guess, uh, to what you just said. Well, of course I could just throw that picture on Twitter myself. Two, not if you don't have any follow. It doesn't matter if you don't have any followers. Right? And so you actually have to be doing the thing. before you need to be doing the thing, right?
Because if you don't, no one will see it. No one will get it. Like, like for me to interview you today, I had to do 150 episodes of a podcast, right? That's just the number that it happened to be for this to work, right? [00:44:00] It can't be like, this is my first podcast. I can't just sit down with you and record my Zoom meeting.
It could have been, but it wouldn't be what it is if I hadn't been practicing this for the last 12 years in my case, right? I've been podcasting for that long. This podcast hasn't been going for that long. Like I haven't only done 120 episodes of Troxel in 12 years, but my other podcast, ArcaSpeak, I did another one called PeopleVerse.
I have another one called Confluence, and I have Troxel. And all of that cumulative effort and commitment to show up and to publish and to do all the things that go along with that, make this a thing that People pay attention to, and you can't just show up one day and expect people to pay attention to it.
And something that you said earlier, I think, really rings true with me. I also saw, I think it was a YouTube short, in this instance, of Casey Neistat saying, Nobody cares about [00:45:00] you. Nobody. And this is Casey Neistat. I mean, how many, 12 million followers, maybe, on YouTube? Something like that. Nobody cares about you.
And I think that that is something that you have to continue to bring to everything that you do and say, like, how do I get it so that people do care about it when I publish an episode? How do I get to the point? Because it's not, this is the, the overnight success that took 10 years in the making, right?
That's how it, That's how these things often go. And so, when you're talking about journalism, when you're talking about broadcasting, and interviewing, and asking good questions, that only happens by doing it, and doing it, and doing it, and refining it, and getting better at it. And, and, having that control over your brain to say, Oh, I'm starting to get distracted.
How do I pull myself back into this conversation? Right? So because you're the one maybe leading it. And, and so, I don't know, I I'm kind of rambling at this point because I, but I do feel [00:46:00] like all of this stuff is part of the soup that makes a successful communications platform. Like I was saying earlier, we're all a media platform.
Some of us are choosing to. Be that, right? Some of us, even, even though we may not feel like it, we, we are, or we could be,
Susan Young: Yeah, I think people are hiding, some people are hiding behind it, and other people are, you know, all over it to
the, you know, ad nauseum
where it's like, I can't
follow this person anymore, but I really love, you know, I wanted to go back to what you mentioned, Evan, about, um, you know, how are people, uh, You know, really communicating with one another so that when you have, you know, when you're talking about yourself and it's self serving, it's like, no, I, you know, I always say I'm from Brooklyn.
I know a lot of four letter words and one of them is flip, flip your communication. It's not about you. Nobody cares about you. It's [00:47:00] always about them. So it's about BS. Be the solution. Be relevant.
Be the
solution.
Evan Troxel: getting some new, some new vocabulary
today.
Susan Young: I'm telling you, it's speaking in soundbites. Punchy, short, easy to understand, memorable. But talk about them. And again, it comes back to being in a busy newsroom, chaotic, during morning drive in the most competitive media market in the country. Like you said, you don't get this way overnight. I didn't cut my teeth at some you know, Iowa, you know, Farm Station.
I was in New York, New Jersey, and Philly, the
most competitive market.
And so, when people would call and pitch us stories, you know, I'd answer the phone, you know, you'd bark, news, you know, East Coast thing, and they'd start telling me about a story, and I'm thinking, who cares? Who cares? Why should I cover your story?
Why should
I pay attention to this?
And that's exactly what happens in
those BD meetings.
Who cares? Why are [00:48:00] you
telling me about the 50 year old history of your company with the person who works in, in the accounting office? I don't care.
Fix my problem.
Now I'll pay attention. That's the difference. That's the clincher. When you are relevant and you have higher level conversations, you'll get return calls and emails from the decision makers. People say, I didn't know what to do. They didn't answer me. They didn't tell me why we didn't get the bid.
That's your job,
why you didn't
get the bid. Don't ask them for three months that they're scratching your head saying, I wonder why we didn't get the bid and keep emailing people. It's like, no, it doesn't work that way. You have to be the solution. You have to be relevant. You have to step up and refine your skills so that people will notice you and pay attention. It's not the other
way around.
Evan Troxel: It's kind of the art of the headline, right? The art of the clickbait headline. Some of my favorite people are copywriters, because they have it, they just come at it differently. And I think [00:49:00] oftentimes, I appreciate a copywriter, and I'm kind of using that title generically, I guess, right now, because I'm actually thinking of specific individuals who call themselves that.
And I think it's important that they come at what If, if they're, if they're helping me come up with a title for something, or an outline for something, or maybe even just a communication about something that I've already done, they're coming at it from a very different angle than I would have, because I'm very in the weeds, and I'm very much like, well, it's this and this and this, and they're like, no, it's It's this and they flip it like you just said they flip it right and and and they come up with something catchy and interesting that I could never have come up with and I'm wondering from a collaborative standpoint right when we're when we're talking about these people who are going out and doing BD and the teams that they have behind them and marketing and So How important is that?
I mean, or how do you get to be [00:50:00] like that yourself? I think like, like for me, it would be, I would watch a lot of comedy potentially, right? To get ideas. I would watch a lot of news. I would pay attention to the way people write headlines. I would look on YouTube. How do people design thumbnails? What do they title their videos, right?
There's, there's all, what kinds of images do they put in there? Because those are the kinds of things that are, I mean, obviously like the feedback. is, is right there. How many likes, how many shares do these things have? And a lot of times it has to do with what is in that first six seconds or what is the thumbnail look like, or what is the title of the video or whatever.
I'm, I'm interesting from your, your standpoint. If I don't have those skills myself, who do I look at for inspiration? How important is
that?
Susan Young: Yeah, I mean, and that's exactly, that's exactly what I coach and teach on because the only piece of content that's guaranteed to be read. is the headline or the subject line of an email. So if you see, you know, a magazine cover in the supermarket [00:51:00] checkout lane, and it says, Seven Ways, you know, to Healthy Cooking, and you're really into that, you're going to
keep reading the article.
You want to
open it up, or, you know, you're sitting in the chair, clicking away, and you see somebody, Oh, wow, they have a healthy cooking show. I want to see that. Or you're going to click. That's
it.
So how are you
going to get people to pay attention? You're going to be relevant to them in those first magical few words. So that's where the editing and the writing comes in, where people say to me, How do you know what to include and what to leave out? And I say, cut the crap. Get rid of the irrelevant words, the empty words. Longer
doesn't mean better,
it just means
it's longer.
And, you know, TLDR, too long, didn't read.
Nobody's got the attention span. Nobody's got the interest to try to figure out what you're trying to say. So it goes back to what you mentioned, to what I said at the beginning. What else, what else, what else? What else is this story about? What else is
this firm
[00:52:00] about? Are you paying attention to the Twists, turns, and trends in the industry from the morning that you went into the meeting so that you know exactly what's happening.
Not that you went on their website or their blog or checked their LinkedIn three days ago or a week ago and you didn't know that X happened.
Well then shame on you.
He had time to watch The Bachelor. He had time to check your email 40 times or go on Facebook or whatever you're going to do,
right? The
goal here,
I mean, no nonsense stuff here. To be a person of excellence. People
will notice that. Those
decision makers are
going to be impressed. They're going to stop and say, wow, this person's sharp. This is who I want to work with. These are the people that are. You've got it going on here. Otherwise, you blend into the crowd. How are you going to differentiate yourself and stand out? You be a person of excellence, and you're relevant. You're the solution. B. S. Be the solution. Help them solve their problems. [00:53:00] and they will come to you time and time again.
Exactly.
Evan Troxel: have two stories from one client that I would share to kind of confirm what you just said, which was number one was it was a very small interview. It was me, a project manager from our side. I was a designer. He was a project manager. We would be the ones delivering the project and two people on the client side.
And I think I'm just guessing here. I guess I would have to ask, but what clinched it in the meeting for us to get the project was when I asked them, what else? It was that it was, I've looked at your website. I see what you're about, but I know this isn't the whole story. Tell me what's not on the website.
Tell me about you, all the things that are not on the website. And they went into this whole story about sustainability, their transportation company, how they're transforming their bus line into electric [00:54:00] vehicles, they have a local, like the first in the region, in the LA area, of this outdoor bus recharging station.
None of that was on their website probably just yet. It just wasn't there yet, right? But it was one of those things where I showed an interest in who they were. I asked about them, and it wasn't even them personally, it was them, the organization, and it was the things that, you know, nobody can make their website update fast enough, right, for all the cool stories that are out there, and I, therefore, how would I know, right, so all I had to do was say, what's not, what is not represented on your website that I should know about you.
So anyway, we got the project, that was story number one. The second part was I was at a board meeting where we had, um, supplied several design options, which is what architects do, right? We have to give at least three options. That's the magic number for some reason. And we had these different options that, that [00:55:00] built on those stories that he told me during the initial interview.
And it was like, we're going And it was a very simple project. It was a facade replacement where a certain piece of the building was aged out and the structure behind it was rusting and whatever. And these pieces were going to fall off and hurt somebody. And so they thought, well we're just going to put something back up there that looks just like what we're taking off.
And based on what they had told me, I went in with design ideas that were like about what they were about. And these things showed sustainability and transportation, and it really brought kind of the fundamentals of their organization to the facade of the building. And it was a thing they could point at and tell people a story about, right?
And one of the board members said, I appreciate the architects so much in this that we chose them because they said what if. They were the ones brave enough to come to us and say, What if it was something more? What if [00:56:00] it could be something else? And they said, We would have never done that ourselves. And so they hired us because we were the ones saying, What if?
And architects are amazing at that, right? Like that, The true architecture is really about finding solutions that Mere mortals cannot think of themselves. Right. and, and, to me, I think those are two kind of, they, they confirm what you're talking about. Where it was that feedback that I got in the moment that, that now makes that such a memorable project.
Otherwise, it could have just been a very like rudimentary. Yep. We could have put the same thing up that they took down and Yep, it paid the bills and we did the thing and moved on to the next one. Or it can be a story that I'm telling today that happened 15 years ago because it was so impactful because I asked the open ended questions.
What else is not a yes or no answer?
Susan Young: It's, it's not how or why, you know, or what those are dead
ended questions. You
know, [00:57:00] we want
we want to get information like we talked about earlier, quality questions. And so having that, you know, attention to detail and knowing that you want to stand out and saying, you know, what else, what else, what else, and then going in there confident and strong and believing. that this is the right story for them, and knowing how to craft it and
structure it, beautiful.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, yeah. Well, I feel like we're wrapping up here, and I want to make sure that everybody can find you online. I will put links to what you're about to say in the show notes, so people don't have to remember them. They can just go to the show notes and click those links, but Susan, I mean And, and also, if I'm missing anything here, if there's anything else that you wanted to put out there, I, I'm not trying to cut us off, but I feel like we're, we're kind of, we've brought it back to the beginning, right, when going back to, you, you did it, you, you, you tied the bow around the what else, and, and, and tied the end to the beginning, so, what are we missing?
If we're not missing anything, I would love to hear, uh, just where people can contact you, [00:58:00] connect with you, find you online.
Susan Young: Yeah, I think that the, the, the key here is, is that when AEC tech is talking about technology and all the file documentation and
the file management
and
Evan Troxel: the
how, yeah.
Susan Young: and all that, it's not the process. It's, we need to focus on the people. Because the process, who's behind the process? It's a human being. And so, that's
the missing link
from all the dashboards and everything else is the soft skills. And that's where people are saying, we don't know what to do. But for 10 years we've been saying that. It's like the illusion of confusion. And I've been called out on that too by
one of my coaches.
Um, you know, it's
like you do know where to start. But you have to start. And so, yeah, you have projects that need to get out the door. And you also need to train people, [00:59:00] these emerging leaders, to be able to step up to the next level. So, that's the, the coaching and the, the programs, the online and the keynotes and the speeches and trainings that I do.
It's all at aecamplify. com. And. I'm on LinkedIn, bopping around the air, we do a newsletter three days a week,
Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
and, uh, would welcome, you know, conversations, just love talking to people and
I'm curious, so,
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Susan Young: that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Evan Troxel: Well, I'll, I'll go back to where we began as well. And I, this is a very important subject to me at least. I mean, people can decide for themselves whether they think it's important or not. Um, but I do believe that the data is there , if you wanna look at the data. Um, and just to reinforce your point, I think a lot of times clients don't care how you do the thing.
They just want the thing. Right? They don't care about the tools, is what I mean by that. They do want a good relationship. They do want to care about something. And that care happens through this emotional connection and [01:00:00] relationship with the actual people who do the job. Who are actually listening to them and turning that thing that was just an idea And that is the magic of what we can do in architecture, right?
And to take them through that process and include them in it so that it's participatory and they're contributing and they really feel ownership over it. Because when the project is delivered, and I think this even goes back to the stories I just told about the facade replacement project, is the stories live on.
People who come to visit that place tell the stories that we went through to get there. And that to me is extremely satisfying because I know that those ideas are in good hands, right? They want to tell people about those stories because it builds a connection between them as well. Like now they know some insider information that nobody else knows because it's not on a plaque, it's not on a billboard, it's not in a video, it's not on a podcast, right?
[01:01:00] It's, it's impossible to find. You actually have to talk to somebody to get that information. And I think that, that is also what kind of adds to how important it is to, to figure out the ways to build the skills, to become the communicators, to land the ideas so that you can tell these kinds of stories about your work, which then people will say, I want a story like that.
I want to be part of a story like that. So I'm going to choose them to help me make that happen, right? Because are you going to get a building or are you going to get architecture? Are you going to get an experience, right? They're not the same things. They're not the same things, right? So thank you so much for taking the time to do this today.
And again, cover this very important topic, at least to me and to you, I think. So, um, this, this has been a fun conversation. Thank you.
Susan Young: I so enjoyed our time together. Thank you,
Evan. [01:02:00]

View Details

Kean Walmsley joins the podcast to talk about his background both in computing and in his career journey leading to and while at Autodesk. We also talk about the development and applications of the VASA (voxel-based architectural space analysis) toolkit for Dynamo, the impact of AR and XR in the AEC industry, the significance of real-time feedback during the design process, and much more.

Episode links:* Kean on LinkedIn * Kean on Twitter/X * Kean on Instagram * Autodesk Research * Kean’s blog - Through the Interface * Kean’s Floppy Fridays on YouTube * VASA on Kean’s blog * Kean’s 2023 Autodesk University class - Channeling Minecraft to Analyze Architectural Spaces with VASA and Dynamo * Shaan Hurley’s blog - Between the Lines * Commodore 64 (Wikipedia) * TRS-80 (Wikipedia) * Commodore PET (Wikipedia) * Autocad history (Wikipedia) * Related episode: TRXL 106: ‘Aligning Ambitious Ideas’, with Gabe Paez

About Kean Walmsley:Kean is a Software Architect & Senior Manager focused on the research area of human-centric building design. He has previously worked on projects exploring the integration of IoT data with BIM (Digital Twins) using Autodesk Platform Services, as well as Generative Design in the AEC space. He has worked in various roles—and in various countries—during his career at Autodesk, including building and managing teams of software developers in Europe, the Americas, and Asia/Pacific. Kean engages regularly with Autodesk’s developer and computational design communities, providing technical content and insights into technology evolution.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter/X

Watch this episode on YouTube:152: ‘Left to My Own Devices’, with Kean WalmsleyKean Walmsley joins the podcast to talk about his background both in computing and in his career journey leading to and while at Autodesk. We also talk about…YouTube

Episode Transcript: Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the TRXL podcast I'm Evan Troxel and once again, if you are a regular listener and are enjoying these episodes, please subscribe Please subscribe on both YouTube and in your preferred podcast app to let me know that you're a fan of the show being a subscriber Which is completely free directly influences two things which are my ability to attract sponsors that help keep the show going and My ability to attract high profile guests, which is great for you and our industry

so if you haven't subscribed, I encourage you to do so. As I mentioned, it's free and it's a great way to support what I'm doing here. Your support is incredibly valuable for the sustainability of the show, and I deeply appreciate it. In this episode, I welcome Kean Walmsley. Kean is a software architect and senior manager focused on the research area of human centric building design. in this episode, [00:01:00] we discuss Kean's background, both in computing and his career journey at Autodesk, where he's a well known figure because of, well, his work there and because of his long running blog at keanw.com and his talks and contributions at various AEC tech conferences, including Autodesk University, where I recently caught up with him. We also talk about the development and applications of the VASA toolkit for Dynamo. The impact of AR and XR in the AEC industry, the significance of real time feedback during the design process, and so much more.

Of course, this was a fantastic conversation with Kean and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And so now without further ado, I bring you Kean Walmsley.

â€‹

Evan Troxel: I'm joined today by Kean Walmsley, and I am very happy to have you on the show, [00:02:00] and I've been following you for a long time. I, stalking, lurking, I don't know what the right word is, but, uh, you have a great blog, and obviously you've been with Autodesk for, for quite a while. And you just recently attended the hackathon that happened in, in Zurich. Maybe, before we jump into your story, how was that for you? And, and what, what kind of things did you see there?

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, I mean, it was fun. I always loved the AEC hackathon events. You know, it's just amazing to see people come together and trying to solve the industry problems. Um, I. I was only really there on the Friday. Um, I already had a kind of personal commitments during the weekend. So I just came in for the Friday talks.

It were mostly around open source technologies, um, and then the kickoff of, of the hackathon itself. Uh, but I found it very interesting. It was really a, you know, I actually was kind of surprised at the number of people that I knew there and had the chance to catch up with some sort of unexpected. Folk, uh, that I'd, that I've met over the years.

Um, and also some people [00:03:00] that I've been in contact with but had never met in person. So it was very good. Yeah. But, you know, short and sweet, I was only, you know, I was only there for, well, I was there for five hours or something, but still, it was not for the full weekend.

Evan Troxel: It's great that you're just close to that. I mean, that's the limiting factor, I think, so often for hackathons, right? Because they are so great in person. You want to be collaborating closely with your teammates on the hacks. I mean, remote is one thing when it comes to that, but you being within a couple of hours of Zurich is incredible. And reading your bio, you've been all over. The world, it sounds like. And so I'm really interested in your story, and I know you, you're in Switzerland now. Correct? And we

saw each other in Vegas at au. Uh, and, and so, so you're traveling a lot maybe, but, but you've also been all over the place with, with what you've been working on and you're trajectory.

So maybe take us [00:04:00] back, tell us a story about what that's what your experience has been.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, no, for sure. I'd be happy to. Um, I don't, you know, just to say though, I don't travel as much as I used to now, which is quite nice. Uh, my, you know, I think COVID was good for that in the sense

that

Evan Troxel: Settling things

Kean Walmsley: yeah. And, and it's picked up, it's certainly picked up of course, since then, but it's not, not as, not as bad as it was before.

Um, but yeah, so my background, I mean, going back far enough, I mean, Um, yeah, maybe we go all the way back, but I mean, I, growing up, I was always interested in computers and, you know, so this was in, in the, you know, I'm born in the, the, I can suppose we can say mid seventies, but early to mid seventies, um, you know, first computers, actually first computer was a TRS 80 model three, um, but also had the, the more sort of, uh, entertainment focused, you know, home PCs, you know, ZX Spectrum, et cetera.

Um, Yeah, just fascinated by [00:05:00] computing technology from an early age, you know, I used to, and actually, you know, the, the memory that I have that kind of made me, because I think back to which sort of, I can see how my early career sort of fed from that in some way was, was like typing in. Lots of programs from magazines, right?

Because that was just the, the, the, and

yeah, just line, you know, character by character, et cetera. And there was, but there was a bug in one that I, you know, the, the, I, I debugged and it was like this moment where I was like, wow, I wasn't yet coding, but I would, I figured out

Evan Troxel: But you

Kean Walmsley: what wasn't working. And that was like this kind of aha moment where I was like, you know, this is, this was really interesting.

Right? And then,

Evan Troxel: I just want to pause because this is such a fun piece of, of your history. My, I started with the Apple IIe. We had Apple 2s and Apple 3s in school, right? But my dad got an Apple 2e and, [00:06:00] and learning kind of basic programming. And he would, he was going through the process of learning it and he would show me and I wasn't very interested.

I was interested, but I wasn't actually doing it, you know, print screen, go to line, you know, and, and just, it was really, really simple stuff. And then I ended up buying my own computer. Which was a Commodore 64 and I bought it at Toys R Us, right? Like that's where they sold the Commodore. That was one of the outlets because back then computer stores were, there maybe was like Newegg computers.

I don't think there was, there wasn't many options back then, right? I'm not even sure where he bought the Apple IIe, but it was, it was like you. Getting a book on programming games, copying it character by character and hoping you didn't mess something up. And if you did, it was like, Oh man, now I have to forensically go back.

And I don't know if it's too different than programming today still, but obviously GPT copilot and things have really changed the game when it comes to

writing code. But, uh, anyway, that, that [00:07:00] was a fun aside because you, when you, you're talking about Atari and, and it's just like, it just brought me back because, uh, that's,

that's, that was our. That's when we came up, came through, started our journey on computing. I mean,

Kean Walmsley: well exactly, yeah, yeah, and yeah, it's a, it's interesting, because even that is. You know, I mean, talk about copilot and things like that, but just like being able to copy and paste text into, you know, from one environment into another was huge instead of like, I mean, so, you know, I'll talk a bit about that as my, my first job in an engineering office, which is kind of interesting, which I'll come back to, but actually on the, on the Commodore 64 side of things, um, that was an awesome machine.

I never had one growing up. But, um, I did kind of discover them a bit during COVID in the sense I, I went online on, on the Swiss version of eBay and, uh, and I managed to pick up a Commodore 64 with 300 floppy disks, um, and a, and a functioning [00:08:00] floppy drive. And so what I,

Evan Troxel: And the drive is enormous, right? The floppy drive is

Kean Walmsley: some, well, it wasn't like a proper, like whatever, 18, it was like five and a quarter, but it was deep.

It was big

Evan Troxel: Yes, yes, that's what I mean. It was like a shoebox size. I mean, and it was a five and a quarter floppy, but it was an enormous physical space. It was like almost as big as the Commodore itself, right? I mean, just

going in the other direction.

yeah,

Kean Walmsley: yeah, exactly. So, so actually I ended up doing a, uh, a little YouTube series on my, on, on my channel called Floppy Fridays, where basically every Friday I'd take some random floppy disks and try and load them and see what happened. And a lot of them were kind of hit or miss, but it kept me. You know, we did, I did 64 episodes during, during the pandemic, you know, cause it felt like a good number.

Right. So, and it's a little, and it was every Friday, including, you know, the holidays. So it was literally, um, yeah, uh, 52 plus the, the remaining 12. Um, but [00:09:00] yeah, by the time I was done, I, you know, it was, I learned a lot about the, the, the platform called the Commodore 64 platform. And it really had a lot of fun, but yeah, that might be something to look at when you have a few, um, You know, boring, bored moments, um, but yeah, my first job in an engineering office was, um, when I was, I guess I must've been 15 or 16, but around that age, I was still at school and they needed somebody and they were paying, they, you know, they're basically, you know, they're paying two pounds an hour or maybe it's four pounds an hour, but it was like a small amount of money.

Uh, you know, back then it was, it seemed huge. Um,

Evan Troxel: everything,

Kean Walmsley: it was, it was freedom. Um, but then can you put a price on that? But it was, um, my first job was to actually take, uh, old, um, engineering calculation programs that were running on a pet machine and type them in. Into a PC because [00:10:00] they just got a number of 386s, Oh, 286s actually then, uh, and they wanted to effectively transfer these basic programs from the, from PetBasic into GWBasic.

So it was a very modest amount of re work needed, but basically it was just data entry. It was just typing. Um, but yeah, it was, that was actually fun because within that drawing office, then. They got AutoCAD, so they got three seats of AutoCAD and they realized that they couldn't really do what they wanted to out of the box with it.

So they had me, you know, take a look at the Autolist manual and figure out how I could actually create some customizations for the drawing office, um, to make them more efficient. You know, it was, it was a, Plastic man, plastic vessel manufacturer that was, uh, effectively creating, you know, pressure vessels, et cetera.

So there was a lot of, you know, 2d, plans [00:11:00] and elevations of, of nozzles and flanges and things like that. So, you know, to go in and essentially clip, um, the nozzle so that it would, uh, you know, join appropriately the, the point on the, you know, on, on, on the roof of this, of this vessel, et cetera.

So yeah, it was really kind of, there's a lot of geometry, uh, you know, a lot of, you know, fun problems figuring out how to do that stuff in Autolisp. Um, they ended up Getting a third party or, you know, an independent package in addition to AutoCAD that would do 2D, um, 2D constraints. And, uh, yeah, so that was around, that was a product called Dimension N.

So it was an early, um, you know, geometric package that allowed you to set up, uh, an overall drawing and then, you know, configure it. And I was really kind of pushing. The boundaries on that package. I was constantly on the phone with the folks, [00:12:00] um, over in Peterborough. So this is about, you know, 35, 40 miles away from where I grew up.

Um, you know, trying to figure out whether what I was doing was the right way to do things and how I could, you know, you know, and, and that actually led over time to me. Getting a job for them as well, so I went in, still, while still at university, I was studying computer science at university at the time, and I went in and helped document, um, one of their, uh, the packages that they were developing.

Um, I also got to, that was actually my first trip to Switzerland for them, I went to the Swiss Railways to demo, um, some software for the Swiss Railways in Lausanne. Um, so that was actually really fun. To do that, even as a student still, uh, you know, and speaking French for them as well, which was also pretty wild to think about back then.

Um, because when I was studying, I guess, you know, in a nutshell, my interests as a young [00:13:00] man with to really to with computers and speaking French. So in, in the UK we have A levels. So we, you know, I think still now, um, but we sort of filter down to a very small set of subjects, even at the age of 16, right?

Um, so I was doing computer science, maths, and French at that point from 16 to 18. And when I went to university, I chose the university really based on. Um, the ability to do an exchange year in France, um, as part of the program. So that was always my goal was to work for a software company in a French speaking country, which I always thought was France at the time, because, you know, why not?

Um, but then I discovered Switzerland and I realized that actually French speaking Switzerland is, is, was the place for me.

Evan Troxel: Wow. How cool.

Kean Walmsley: So, so then, and yeah, and it was really fun because then while I was still at university, I mean, I was [00:14:00] applying for jobs all over the place and it wasn't that I wanted to go into the CAD industry at all.

I mean, I'd had some experience, uh, low, relatively low level experience with, with AutoCAD and with other, other packages, but I was, you know, applying for any sort of computing related job, even some management consulting jobs. I mean, my life would be very different if I'd got one of those. Um, but I ended up, um.

Yeah, I ended up getting a, an email in my fourth, well, I was in my fourth year. So wrapping up my, my, uh, studies in the UK and it was my future boss who mess, you know, emailed me and said, well, I was just speaking to your former boss at this smaller software company. I'm building a team that is, um, going to be essentially a European developer support team.

So we would. Uh, you know, the, the, the people in the team would be answering technical problems. So talking back to the debugging, you know, magazine listings, [00:15:00] but also, um, you know, giving training around our programming interfaces, speaking at conferences and seminars and, um, you know, so there'd be quite a lot of travel, quite a lot of interaction with people.

And by that point, I kind of realized that my destiny was not necessarily to be a heads down coder. Um, just doing, um, development on one feature or even one particular area, um, that I wanted more variety. And I also wanted that human connection. Um, So I was like, sign me up. When can I start kind of thing?

Well, you know, obviously then had to go for an interview. And my first round interview was in the UK in our office in Guilford at the time. So this would have been in July of June or July of 1995. But the second round interview was in Switzerland because that's where he was based. Um, and he told me, um, you know, when we were talking about logistics, he said, don't bring a big suitcase.

And I said, okay, well, I'm only coming [00:16:00] overnight, but I won't. And sure enough, you know, it's because he picked me up from the train station in his little Miata sports car and didn't really have space for me to, to put a big, um, bag in the trunk. And he drove me down, uh, to the Bolak Hotel, which is on the, on the lake front.

And. You know, and that first night before the interview, I was kind of left to my own devices and I remember walking down, um, by the lake, kind of all nervous, nervous energy. And I just sat there and saw this kind of, uh, dry, uh, thunderstorm over the Alps, the other side of the lake. And I just said, Oh, you know, this is, this is where I want to be.

Um, and so I, I, I got the job. In the UK originally, so the job was in the UK, despite the fact that by that point I decided I wanted to be in Switzerland, and it took me maybe two and a half years or two years to convince my boss that he'd be better off, you know, moving me across to [00:17:00] Switzerland.

Evan Troxel: He'd be better off.

Yeah.

Kean Walmsley: Well, maybe that's maybe

that's

Evan Troxel: you would be a better employee if you

Kean Walmsley: Well, that's right. Well, anyway, I was I was really pushing hard. So, um, and that's what happened when I moved to, to Switzerland in, in March, February, March of 1998. And I thought that would probably be it. But then at some point along my journey, um, and by this point I would, I'd switched across to use some slightly different product, you know, working with different products originally when I joined.

Autodesk, it was to support, uh, work Center, which was a document management product which look, which at the time looks a lot like Vault does today. So you can think about Vault as being a, a sort of a, a very different product, but it has very similar principles to Work center. So I was supporting the API to work to work center.

Um, and then I sort of was working with AutoCAD as well. But over the years I ended up doing JS software, doing a lot of work with architectural [00:18:00] desktop, um, which is my first kind of exposure to. Um, AEC software, I suppose, other than AutoCAD. Um, and so yes, by, so then I was, I was working in Switzerland, um, enjoying that a lot.

And then the, an opportunity came up in the team, the same team as the European team, but in the Americas. And actually the manager of the Americas team, uh, was leaving. So I was asked. To, you know, would I be interested in applying? And so I did along with a few other folks, and I ended up, um, getting the position and then, um, yeah, meeting my girlfriend around the same time, which was strange timing.

So this, she, she was also working for Autodesk. Um, uh, she was a student working for Autodesk as a, as a, you know, temp job type thing. Uh, we met and. I started going out and at some point I said, well, I've got this job [00:19:00] in the U S I know we haven't been together very long, but do you want to come? Um, and so she was like, yeah, sure.

Let's try. And so she just came with one backpack ready to leave at any moment should things not work out. And we kind of moved across together.

Evan Troxel: Travel light so you could escape. Yeah. If you need.

Right.

Kean Walmsley: Because you never know. Anyway, so that was early in our relationship, relatively. And it was also a very interesting time to move to the U. S. Um, because it was in the, so it was in, in 2000, in, must have been in the late summer.

Yeah, towards the end of September, October time, actually, in, in year 2000, which you will remember. Very well as the time that George W. Bush got, um, just won the election. Um, so that was kind of very interesting time to move to the Bay Area in particular. Um, and then of course [00:20:00] it was also the tail end of the dot com boom.

So hiring was, was a disaster. You know, I had to build this team. Um. Um, or rebuild this team from people who'd left, et cetera. And so recruiting was really challenging, uh, which was my first taste of, of that particular, uh, challenge overall. And it was, and it set me in good stead for later years, but it was, it was not easy.

And then September the 11th happened, of course. Um, and yeah, things for us went very strange, especially. Being French speakers, even though I'm not, it's not my first language, it is my wife's first language, she's also fluent in English and we mostly speak in English, but, but the, the sort of the, I don't know if you remember, you will remember the whole sort of Freedom Fries thing,

Evan Troxel: Yeah, that's right.

Yup. Yup. I

Kean Walmsley: right, the whole, And it's not like we necessarily felt this sort of, you know, less welcome in the Bay Area, but it [00:21:00] was a strange time to be in the U.

S. generally, I would say. And it kind of made us realize that for us, it wasn't the place that we wanted to start a family. Um, so we, we did get married in the U. S., um, in, November of 2001. So not long after after 9 11, but actually at Autodesk University. So just a few days before, in fact, because we're going to be there anyway

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kean Walmsley: for AU 2001.

And

yeah, we

Evan Troxel: Was that in Vegas?

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, we got married in Vegas by Elvis. Uh, which for us, which is, which for us is, is, is cute and kitsch. Whereas I know, I think for most Americans it's a little trashy, but

Evan Troxel: What's funny is you're like, I don't, I don't think that the U. S. is the place for us to start the family, but we're doing this wedding thing with Elvis.

Kean Walmsley: yes, exactly. Well, it's, it's, it's, yeah, I know that [00:22:00] when you say it like that, it does seem a little bit incongruent. I get it,

Evan Troxel: I

love it. It's a good story, man.

Kean Walmsley: but it's just, it's just how it happened anyway. So we got married, um, and then. At that point, uh, you know, I was kind of putting out the feelers within Autodesk to see whether, um, whether there are opportunities else inside the company that I could, you know, you know, move into, but, but back in Europe effectively.

So, and, and so I was really happy that somebody in our consulting division sort of came to me and said, Oh, you know, I heard you're looking to move back to Europe. Um, Um, and he was like the head of the European consulting team. So I thought, okay, it's perfect. I'm going to get a job in Europe. No problem.

He actually said, well, um, the good news is I've got an opportunity for you that less good news, depending on where you want to be, is that I've now got a global role and I'd really like you to go to India to set up a development [00:23:00] team for my organization.

Evan Troxel: wow,

Kean Walmsley: And well, it is, you know, it came as a little bit of a surprise, um, but at the same time, you know, I said, well, where in India?

And he says, Oh, Bangalore. And I said, well, you know, my mom is actually from Bangalore. I had family in Bangalore, like my grandmother and uncles and aunts. Um, so I was like, you know what? So I talked about it with my wife and they said, well, You know, if you go for two years, normally with these kind of deals, first of all, it's an expat deal.

So the money was attractive. It was actually more than I was getting in the U. S. And the cost would be lower, of course. Um, but they also said normally they'd move me back to the U. S. afterwards. That would be the deal. But I sort of said, well, if you change it so that you can move me anywhere in the world afterwards with no guarantee of a job, but just.

To, to, to, to relocate me, then, yeah. Okay. Maybe we can talk more about it, because our intention is not to come back to the US afterwards.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kean Walmsley: Um, and so that's how that kind of, how it went down. [00:24:00] We, we ended up going to Bangalore in, uh, uh, uh, uh, I think October of 2003 is when we moved pretty much. And so there I was helping set up a team that could deliver consulting projects.

for Autodesk Worldwide from India. So this was kind of the early days of, um, IT offshoring, I suppose, um, you know, there was that, that, that kind of wave that was hitting and there's a big boom around

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Right.

Kean Walmsley: hiring people in much the same way as hiring people in the Bay Area, uh, had been challenging.

Hiring people in Bangalore at that time was super challenging. Um, so that was really quite interesting as

Evan Troxel: Just because there was so much demand at that time. I mean, same thing with the dot com boom. You didn't say bust, you said boom, right? So I

assume it's a, it's a it's a supply and demand issue where, where talent is going to the highest bidder and, [00:25:00] yeah, I can imagine.

Kean Walmsley: Exactly. So it was really that it was like you just, and nobody wanted to come and work for, uh, for, well, at least in the Bay area at the time, like nobody wanted to go and work for a bricks and mortar software company that was founded in the eighties. Everybody wanted

to go and, uh, yeah, pets. com or whatever.

I don't know whatever the thing was at the time. Um, so, you know, in India is slightly different. I mean, Autodesk remained reasonably attractive. Um. Um, you know, uh, target for people who are looking to, to, to get a job, but not, but the same, not really, because it was also quite a, um, flat sort of hierarchy within Autodesk.

It's always been that way in many ways, and one of the things that we found, um, with People coming, wanting to, to, to do a job, you know, work for an employer, a multinational employer, they were looking for much more [00:26:00] hierarchy and the ability to progress, uh, you know, regularly have a job change or, you know, title change, which is not necessarily.

what's important or was what's important inside? Autodesk wasn't really that at all. It's really about, you know, yes, you look at compensation, you look at the work you're doing, but you don't really look at the title that, that somebody's given you. But, so that's where we had to adapt a little bit to the local market and sort of find ways to sort of be attractive as an employer to, to people who wanted to come to us.

Um, the other kind of wrinkle to that whole story in many ways is that we, um. Um, arrived in India and found the, found out that we were expecting our first child. So my wife was pregnant. Um, and I just signed a two year contract to do this job. And we were like, well, what do we do? Do we go back to the UK?

Well, go back to go, [00:27:00] go somewhere else, go back to Switzerland, go to UK, whatever. Um, or do we sort of stay and go all in and have the baby in India? And. I kind of said, well, if you want to have the baby in Europe, we, you know, we can certainly go back and do that. But, um, I did feel this, you know, commitment.

I'd made a commitment for two years and I said, well, I can come back regularly, but we won't be together all the time. That's just, you know, that's not realistic. I can't, at the time, there's no way I could have done the job from Europe. I really needed to be there in Bangalore. So we made the decision to.

Look for an apartment that was really close to the office, within walking distance, so they didn't have to deal with, um, you know, I could come back really quickly if I needed to, um, you know, we looked at hospitals and found one that, that worked for us, and yeah, decided to have the baby in India, which was, which was kind of a big deal, um, and yeah, it was, I mean, I had local support, [00:28:00] of course, with family, so that helped as well, but, yeah.

It was, uh, it was still kind of a challenging period.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Wow.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, it

Evan Troxel: it just sounds like it's going all over the place like you, you literally don't know where you're going to be in two years because of this, you've bounced around already so much in the story. It's, it's incredible.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, I had a clue though. I mean, I knew I wanted to go back to Switzerland afterwards, really.

Evan Troxel: You send another email to it, to your boss and

Kean Walmsley: There you go. By that point, he'd left. So it was a different, well, a different boss at that point. But I was, I was kind of lucky in the sense, well, that's also the good thing about being on a time limited kind of engagement like that is you can set, set an expectation of what your intentions are and look for opportunities back in, back in Europe.

So I, at the time then was able to sort of, yeah. Kind of figure out what the next move would be. And then by the time I was [00:29:00] about to finish the two years, I was kind of in a global role at that point because there had been restructuring. And I was, um, you know, I was in our developer network organization.

We'd actually, I'd actually been part of that all the way through, but we'd been. It was a bit complicated, but we were part of consulting for a time. And so while, you know, the team I had was working on consulting projects, they were also providing developer support. So there was still that kind of continuity.

Um, but yeah, so my boss, and you may have come across Jim Quancy over the years anyway. No, maybe not. Okay. Well, he's, he's the senior director of, of, um. Um, of our developer network inside Autodesk and he's soon to be, soon to be retiring actually, but he, he, um, was the person I was reporting to at the time and I became a senior manager with a worldwide responsibility.

And then moving back to Switzerland was straightforward to, to [00:30:00] justify at that point. Um, so that's what we did. Uh, I moved back in 2006 and I was at that point having managed. A team in the Americas and a team in Asia. I was now managing, you know, 20 to 30 people in a, in a worldwide. So I then had teams, um, all over the place, which was really fun.

Um, so, you know, traveling to Japan and China, et cetera. yeah, so that was the trajectory in terms of my offices that the end, I ended up working in. And then, so by that point I was back in Switzerland and we. You know, I had a couple more kids, um, and so increasingly less likely to, to want to, to carry on traveling really.

So,

um, yeah,

Evan Troxel: That's great. And so you've been, you've did this giant loop around the world

and, and got back to the place where you really felt like this was the, you wanted your roots to be. And that's, and, and [00:31:00] just, just to speak to your last part there, like it's less likely to uproot when you're actually putting those roots in. And it just sounds like a perfect. Place for you. That's, my wife and I were looking for something similar. It was just like we were done with being in la We were just completely done with it. And I, I don't think I've told this story before, but one night it was, we were in the midst of selling our house, listing it, doing the photography, staging everything, you know, and, and doing all the things that you do. And I was just like, you know, wondering, am I actually making the right decision? Just I need to do a check here because I think once you kind of make a choice and then you start getting the snowball gets bigger and bigger and bigger and then it's like you're less likely to do a check and see because because you're already on the path.

And so I. I was like, Oh, I'm going to just, I walked outside at midnight into this beautiful backyard landscape that we had just completed to enjoy. You know, it was right [00:32:00] after COVID. And it was one of those things where it's like, we did this project so that we could enjoy our space in the backyard and built this wonderful deck and a fire pit and outdoor dining and all this.

And I sat there and I was, I just was like contemplating this and. Then I heard the helicopters, and I heard the traffic, and I heard sirens, and I heard the train, and I heard, like, all of these, just the noise pollution alone, it was so convincing to me at that moment that I was absolutely making the right choice, because we hadn't even decided, really, where we were going to end up, but we knew it had to be different than this, and I think, coming up as a designer in architecture, I work with clients throughout the decades who always wanted something that was the complete opposite of what they had.

They didn't know what that was, but they knew it wasn't what they had. And so if they had a room with no windows, they wanted a room that was all glass. If they wanted, if they had a room with a low ceiling, they wanted a really high [00:33:00] ceiling. And that was how I felt in that moment. It was like, I know I don't want this. I knew I wanted to get more connected to nature. I wanted to be close to trails. I wanted clean air. I knew I wanted no noise. I wanted dark skies, all of these things. And so we, we had an idea of where we were going, but it was that moment that like really sealed it for me. And I think that that is such interesting kind of things that we have to also juggle in our professional lives, right?

To is, is the family, the roots, where are you going to put your roots down? And there's all of these. There are parts of us that are a part of that equation and navigating all that, like there's no playbook for any of that. So, I'm appreciative to you for telling this story because I think it is a big part of what everybody deals with.

And even though this is a podcast about tech and AEC, like we have to acknowledge that there's these other things out there and I mean, a big reason why I do this podcast is because when [00:34:00] I was starting a digital practice at a firm that only had IT up to that point, I mean, there was no playbook. And that's why I've done this, right?

It's like to give people the tools to not only just hear about how other people are dealing with things, but how to implement things. But also now, I think I'm very interested in, in broadening the reach of the types of information and stories that we tell on this podcast. To make it more whole. I mean, that to me is, and so I appreciate you telling that story because it was, uh, it was a beautiful story and I'm, I'm, really jealous of where you are.

I mean, I, I've, I've seen the Alps, right? Like I've seen your skiing trips that you've posted a couple of pictures of here and there and it's just, it's an incredible, incredible location and I can see why you were so drawn to it.

Kean Walmsley: yeah. I mean, it was been, it is a lovely place to live and it's, and it has to be said that I, you know, and I, [00:35:00] I got some advice and again from Jim, so Jim Quancy, he gave, gave some interesting advice quite early on in my career and that's, you know, Which I've kind of taken to heart to some degree, but he sort of says, you know, figure out where you want to live in the world and move there, you know, don't worry about work.

Don't worry about whatever else, you know, just, you know, that, that stuff takes care of itself. And I think that's increasingly true now, right.

in in the, in the sort of more online post COVID world that you can find a way. Um,

and that

sort of environment is really

Evan Troxel: the story that you started with, and like, you would get on the phone and you would talk to the software support, right? There was no internet when you were

trying to figure out how to push the limits of the CAD package, right? And now, look where we are, right? Over the, that 25 years, it's absolutely And to your point, I think a lot of times we flip that.

We say we have to have that [00:36:00] figured out before we go or else we can't go. And the advice that was given to you was go and the other stuff will fall into place. I think

that that's a, that's a, a nice perspective to have. And it's, it runs antithetical to what a lot of people think or hear from. from the people they're asking.

Yeah.

Kean Walmsley: yeah, yeah.

So you have no regrets about moving to Oregon?

Evan Troxel: Well, it's only been a year, right?

But, but no, in this year, it's, it's been incredible and incredible from a sense of like, I can't see my neighbors

and not that I, like my wife is much more private than I am. I have a podcast that goes out to a global audience, right? And so, but, but at the same time, It's like we have our space, and we have the dark skies, and we don't have the noise pollution, and we have amazing air quality, and I like to go mountain bike riding, and I have incredible world class trails here, so, um, it's just been, it's been an amazing experience [00:37:00] so far, and I'm proud to call myself an Oregonian, and what's funny is there's a lot of Oregonian, X Californians here.

And so I don't feel too out of place because we thought, you know, what's that going to be like, there's definitely places in the US that are like, go home Californians stop ruining our state. And it's, I would say like 95 percent of the people that I talked to who have been here for a while now came from California.

Kean Walmsley: Oh, really? Interesting.

Evan Troxel: there's a lot of X Californians

here. So,

Kean Walmsley: just within Autodesk, I know a number of people who've, who've, you know, moved up from San Francisco to, or the Bay Area generally to, to, you know, Portland, we have a big office there now, so, and even before then, you know, when we had an office in Tualatin, that was where, Lake Oswego after that, you know, the people would, would often sort of go up there for the quality of life perspective and to just get, you know, a bigger place, but also just be, as you say, connected to nature in that way.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

I've interviewed Gabe Paez, who is out of Portland, who is on the XR team, and obviously [00:38:00] was the founder of The Wild, and, um, and there's actually an Autodesk podcast host he lives here and so

we've gotten together a couple of times too, which is fantastic.

So, uh, it, it is interesting to build, to be able to build your network internationally, but then still find these close relationships happening because of that. that it's just like kind of reversed funnel, right? It's, It's, it's,

really interesting. Eve, one of my old students, when I used to teach at the university in Southern California, lives less than a mile away from me.

He's an architect, right? And it's like, how, how did that happen? I, we, we found each other on Instagram. He posted a photo. I'm like, that looks like this valley. And he's like, it is, where are you? And, and it was, it's just one of those serendipitous things that I find that so interesting how. How those things happen.

I have no idea how they happen, but it's so interesting that they do.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah. No, it's really interesting. I think there is that aspect of the, you know, being connected more [00:39:00] globally of course is just sort of surfacing these local connections that are, that prove to be really valuable that you wouldn't otherwise know, right?

Evan Troxel: So, let's talk about what you're doing now, and, and I know, I got to attend your, uh, class on voxels and Minecraft. Uh, those were kind of the big, the big, uh, topics that, or, or, I'll just say those were the kind of the defining characteristics of, of your talk. You're working a lot with, what I would see is like, you get to play around.

That's what it seems like to me. So you're, you're doing things that are categorized under research, but I think you're, you're having the time of your life playing around. So maybe you can definitely explain it a lot better than I can, but, but I think it's kind of fascinating the types of projects that you get to work on within Autodesk.

So take it from there and tell us kind of what, what's been going on in your world.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, so it's an interesting, and even that's a bit of progression. So sort of, um, you know, back when, and actually it's, it's [00:40:00] interesting. A lot of the explorations that I've done over the years have ended up being driven by the blog, which is, which is, which was interesting. So when, when I first started it, so that was, and actually sort of connects quite well with.

The story of how we ended up in Switzerland and around that time, as I said, I'd become kind of a senior manager within the developer network team and we were exploring ways to, um, grow the developer network and to give people better information. And one of the things that came up in a brainstorming was the idea of starting a developer blog.

You know, so back at that time, I think there was a couple of Autodesk blogs. Maybe Sean Hurley had started Between the Lines and he, another Oregonian. Um, so he, he had started Between the Lines and it was proven to be super successful with our, with our user base and our customers. And so we said, well, we're not sure that there's enough of a.

Uh, a market or interest for us to start a developer blog, but let's look at [00:41:00] starting one that's based on auto, you know, developing with AutoCAD with the, and at the time the NET interface to AutoCAD was under documented and was super interesting and powerful, but there just wasn't enough information about how to use it.

So we said, well, let's, let's try this. And I've actually volunteered to do so because I love to write and I'd already had some. Um, experience of blogging when I was in India, uh, I actually did an internal blog about my living in India and, and the challenges that we had while we were there. That was, I used to get a lot of really fun feedback from the sort of Indian community in the Bay area, particularly used to just laugh at my, uh, uh, fun.

Um, yeah, I actually, that's a bit of an anecdote, but I remember at the time, one of the, one of the fun ones was, um, Um, having to get a birth certificate for my son, uh, our son, who, uh, you know, who, where we, when we wanted to travel for the first time outside of India, um, there was a whole process to follow, um, in order to [00:42:00] get it and you had to go through all these, you know, I mean, it's amazing, uh, dusty offices inside this sort of, you know, old sort of empire, British empire type, uh, building with where we're in, you know, you have to go from one office to the next, um.

Um, and so I created a flow chart sort of describing the process, but then also the shortcuts you could take and how much it cost in the bribes to, to speed up the process each time. I'd have to dig it out. I have it somewhere.

Um, but it was really kind of fun. So it's things like that, that I used to post.

And so I had some experience blogging and then I thought, well, let's, uh. Let's try. And I, and I, and I, so I started blogging in June or July of 2006. Um, it was also for me having become a senior manager, I was feeling a little bit further away from the technology and also from our customers. So for me, it was a good way to reconnect with the community, which has always been really important to me.

Um, and it ended up being quite. [00:43:00] I mean, I think at some point, you know, obviously the whole blogging, the blogosphere from Autodesk blogosphere sort of exploded from 2004. Um, onwards, uh, and I dunno how many blogs there are now, but at one point it was probably the third most visited Autodesk blog. I think it's, it's, it would not be the as as you know, as, as high ranked at this stage because of the shift in content over the years.

And people still do come for a lot of my old content, but as my job has changed, I end up blogging, um, less about technology and how to sort of use our, our products and APIs and more about my. You know, adventures or what I'm up to, um, so, um,

Evan Troxel: have to keep it fresh though. You have to keep it interesting for you. And

Kean Walmsley: yeah, well,

Evan Troxel: if it's, yeah, you, you go through those, through those different shifts in what, what you're interested in putting out there. I used to have a YouTube mountain biking channel. I would love to post more videos to that, but it's one of those things where it's just like, I think that [00:44:00] there is a lot of value in. these little side hustles like this, right?

Whether it's sanctioned by the, the mothership or not,

because it, it It ignites the curiosity in you, which then feeds back into the business ultimately. It makes you an interesting person who also, you know, you have this direct line with an audience. And there's a feedback loop there, which also informs the work that you do.

I think it's a really cool thing. Sorry to derail

Kean Walmsley: no, no, but it's really, it's really, that's a really, you know, insightful comment. I mean, I always felt that, um, you know, having this role and then showing a Kind of a human face to this sort of what you don't want to be considered a big faceless corporation, right? But always has the risk of going in that direction, but sort of showing, you know, giving, uh, some, a connection point for people, right?

I think that that, that is, that was valuable, but it's very true that having that. [00:45:00] Having that kind of unofficial feedback loop with people in out, you know, out in the real world, um, is really valuable, you know, getting that validation or the, the, the, you know, just sort of that, that input can, that can feed into what you're doing is really

Evan Troxel: right?

Kean Walmsley: Um, so, I mean, the blog actually led me to. Exploring all sorts of technologies over the years, such as things like functional programming and, and things that were kind of emerging. The connect, I used to, you know, I connected in the Connect, um, into AutoCAD quite early on when somebody had hacked it. I only remember in 20, oh, hang on 2000, I think it must have been 2008.

When, when the Kinect came out and very early on, somebody created a little DLL that allowed you to get data from it. So I kind of found a way to host that inside AutoCAD so that you could essentially use the Kinect cam, um, you know, sensor as a reality capture device. Um, but also. Allowed, you know, use it to detect gestures so you could, you know, move [00:46:00] your hands through space and draw inside the AutoCAD canvas.

So that was kind of cool. Um, and then, so all sorts of fun experiments like that, um, kind of paved my way to getting more connected with CTO's office. Um, and. I had a really interesting time when Robert Aish joined the company back in the day. So Robert joined, um, to build, uh, at the time we were talking about DSharp, but it became a design script, which is now obviously part of Dynamo.

Um, and this is essentially a language that, uh, that allowed you to, you know, create, you know, designs inside, well, now inside Dynamo. But at the time we were trying to integrate it inside AutoCAD. So over the course of, um, About six weeks, I did a very quick prototype with, with Robert, just to sort of show the potential for having that kind of language integrated inside a tool like AutoCAD.

Um, and [00:47:00] that led to other opportunities. Like I ended up moving into the AutoCAD team for a while as a software architect, um, which was really fun. Uh, again, mostly, yeah, I was a software architect on, on our AutoCAD based verticals that were mostly quite mature. So I, it wasn't like a. Frank, I kind of joke about it now in the sense I was a software architect for a number of products that didn't need a software architect.

So I was mostly, it was mostly about keeping the wheels on the bus when there were changes inside the platform, you know, how, what, how would things happening inside AutoCAD? Changes inside AutoCAD impact these, these vertical products. Um, but it was very interesting. I enjoyed that time and I continued to do my explorations with the blog until eventually in about 2016, I shifted across into research and that became more of my sort of day job as well.

Evan Troxel: I have a, I have a, a selfish question. When did, what year was it that Auto AutoCAD came back to the Mac? Because it, it was on the [00:48:00] Macintosh very early.

And was it, was it released 12 maybe? That it went away? Maybe it was, it was, it was pretty far back because of, it was like a floating point thing. I remember there was just like, Nope, we're not doing that anymore.

And, and, and most people were on PCs at that point

anyway. Right.

Especially in architecture.

Kean Walmsley: I wanna say that the, I, I don't know exactly when AutoCAD. I chose to, you know, when it, when it drops, when the engineering team dropped support for the Mac, but I mean, it might, it probably was a bit before support for DOS was dropped and, and, and it would have been R13 was like the last version of AutoCAD that I remember that, that was on DOS.

And so it would have been R14 was Windows only from then on until, and this is where it gets a bit tricky for me. Um, I can't remember exactly what, I mean, I remember the, the process in 20, I, I'd have to look it up, but I can't remember exactly, but it might have [00:49:00] been around, uh, 2010 or 11, um,

Evan Troxel: I was going to say 2013 was my guess,

Kean Walmsley: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: I don't, I don't know. I don't know.

I honestly, that was just, I don't know why that number sticks out, but I remember when it did, there was, I follow, you know, follow Anthony's blog at Architosh.

com and several people who are obviously always tracking the Mac and AEC and

I've always been one of those people as well, but

it's, uh, that was a big deal.

I mean, and, and it was beautiful. I mean, to have a. Big 27 inch iMac screen or whatever running, uh, a really beautiful looking product AutoCAD that everybody was familiar with on, on the hardware that they wanted to run it on was a, was a big

deal for that to come back.

Kean Walmsley: absolutely. And it was really, I mean, what's interesting about that was that I was more excited about the sort of re architecture work that enabled that and the potential that came off that. And I'll sort of tell you a bit of a, let's do a potted history of the AutoCAD architecture. [00:50:00] But, um, in, so R13 was, so prior to R13, everything was, was, um, yeah, was, was not.

object based, it was, you know, a lot of the code was written in C. Um, It was rewritten, many parts of it were rewritten during the R13 timeframe to make this sort of more flexible object based framework where you could plug in new objects and allow, and, you know, external developers could create their own custom objects that effectively extended the, the AutoCAD, um, Object set and you could create and it enabled all these various, um, vertical applications that came on top of, of AutoCAD and the vertical based products.

So everybody remembers R13 as being the worst release of AutoCAD ever, right? But

for me, for me, it's, it was in many ways, the most impactful, like if we hadn't done it,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kean Walmsley: Autodesk would not exist today. I can say that fairly

Evan Troxel: [00:51:00] Yeah. Yeah.

Kean Walmsley: it enabled everything. Um,

Yeah.

but it just enabled all this, this, this growth, um, into, into new markets, enabled this whole developer, vibrant developer community around the world to, to, you know, to, to flesh out this ecosystem of products that was so, so important to our customers.

Um, so despite the fact it was painful for customers, it was like the, it was, and it might've been executed differently. You could argue that. You know, it shouldn't have been released when it was, it could have taken a bit longer, but it was super important. So that was the, one of the refactors. Another one kind of came around the 2000 timeframe when we went from having, um, single document AutoCAD to having multiple documents loadable.

And so there was a whole kind of encapsulation process that allowed us to have, um, Yeah, to unplug, we even had called it DWG Unplugged at the time, but unplug [00:52:00] the engine that loaded DWG files. Um, although we had to stop because I think we got a cease and desist letter from MTV, if I remember correctly, because they didn't like the

use of that

Evan Troxel: That's, well, yeah,

people would definitely confuse those two things. I

Kean Walmsley: so DWG Unplugged, I know, right? Um, became, became Object DBX. Uh And, and so that

Evan Troxel: I mean, AutoCAD, Eric Clapton. Yeah, I

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, I mean, it's just so, so, so surreal, but you know, I mean, that's where the inspiration came from. So what I can understand what the

concerns might've

Evan Troxel: That was the problem is you, you let that be known that

that inspired you and

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, well, not me personally, but yeah, the product managers anyway.

So they renamed it. Um, but anyway, so that was a really, another important sort of step in the modularization of AutoCAD was, is to have this sort of separate component that could manage DWGs, but then when we went to the Mac, we had. A process that [00:53:00] was what was called at the time, the big split. And this was not just the reading and writing of DWG, but all, almost all the commands that are south of the border in terms of the UX, you know, the UI for it layer would be encapsulated in a way that could be rebuilt across different platforms.

And so this was a really arduous process. And they ended up having to go back, looking at, um, code that, uh. You know, code from AutoCAD that existed prior to becoming Windows centric. Cause as soon as we went Windows centric, all this Win32 crud kind of, you know, Win32 API calls ended up coming into, into the code base.

So they had to kind of purify it essentially and cleanse it from all these, these, um, platform specific API calls. And then, um, but then eventually they ended up with this really beautiful code base that could be rebuilt for the Mac. Um, it could be run headless inside a terminal window. [00:54:00] on, on the server to do operations.

So it's also driving a lot of the Autodesk platform services or Forge capabilities around design automation. And it could end up being sort of built into a package that can be loaded in the browser. So it enabled AutoCAD web as well. So

Evan Troxel: And is that when it made it onto the iPad as well?

Kean Walmsley: I think so, well, I, you know what, I'm not, in terms of the timeline, I think they did have a different version of AutoCAD, they definitely had a different version of AutoCAD that was on iOS and, and, you know, uh, the iPad, um, right now, I imagine that is using the same code base, but I don't actually know for sure what the, what the situation is there, but definitely having this kind of rearchitecture, but definitely having this kind of rearchitecture, Has led to support for all these different platforms.

And then on each platform, they have their platform specific UI, you know, UI capabilities, then call into this core, core code base. Um, so AutoCAD's become this like super resilient, uh, code base over the years [00:55:00] that is, I mean, it's, it's, you know, for me, it's quite miraculous that, that, you know, some code that was written in 1983, uh, is still running.

Inside Chrome or, you know, whatever, onside your,

Evan Troxel: It's incredible to think about how hard it is to change the behavior of the user as well. So you talked about kind of this modularization and the ability to load multiple documents. There's probably still a lot of architects that just draw everything in one file, right?

Like, you've got the plans over here, you've got the elevations, Pulled off of those plans and all the different orientations and you've got sections off to the right and you've got the site plan up and to the left and it's all in one file.

Right?

And, and then they're still operating that way today. I mean, it's like to, to pry those habits out of there. They'll have to, you will have to pry those habits out of their cold dead fingers, right? [00:56:00] Because it's just the way that they do things. And this has always been something that I've. I've been super interested in, which is, how do you, how do you enable adoption of new features, new tools, new paradigms, new platforms, when the way that I do it works for me, I know it, I'm, it's like my, in some ways, your identity is wrapped up in some of those things, because, the cost is too high to spend the time to learn the new way or to spend the money or whatever it is.

We, we, we have so much tied up in our old files that we still need to get access to every once in a while and maybe get something out of or go back and revisit, you know, because our projects take so long, um, man, it's a, it's a. There's a lot of nuance and, and, I don't know, to, to your point, like there's a lot of cruft built up in, that's just inherent in the system that makes it very difficult to move [00:57:00] forward for, for many people.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah. And I mean, I see it myself, um, you know, in my day to day work, you know, I mean, I, you know, tools come online and I consider myself to be reasonably, uh, interested in adopting new. Ways of working and

workflows, but we all have our habits and I totally understand that. So I think in, it's one of those things where you, and there's probably been studies around this, that, you know, I, this is by no means, you know, truth, but it's, but it's the, you know, what I sense is that you kind of have to have this probably order of magnitude improvement in your efficiency to be worth.

Going to that next level, right? It's like you need some significant change. It can't just be, you know, I don't think it

can be half the time. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: heard

10x. It needs to be 10 times better

to get somebody to pay attention. And then that first run [00:58:00] experience needs to be pretty good, right? If it's, if it's a terrible first experience, but it's still 10 times better, I don't think it's going to happen, right?

It's one of those things where There's multiple things that all have to be going in the right direction for it to even be a consideration and it's still easy to kill. I mean, there's, especially early in that journey from one way of doing things to another way of doing things. It's very easy to kill.

Kean Walmsley: yeah, yeah, no, I can, I, that resonates with my feeling as well about this. Um, and you know, and I think that one thing that I'm happy about over the years is that, you know, As least as a company, we have been able to, um, maintain a set of products that work for the people who've been with us since the eighties, right?

So, you know, I think that the AutoCAD team has done a really good job at that. Obviously other products have come online since, and we haven't always kept every product that we've [00:59:00] had, but there is a certain sort of core offering, um, that remains attractive. And, and while having kind of new things come online as well, um.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, but it's, yeah, I mean, AutoCAD still is, people still use it. And I don't, I mean, I, I look, I don't look at it from a user perspective. I look at it more from an, you know, from a, um, an internal architectural perspective, I'm, I'm very impressed with what that team has pulled off over the years. I mean, it's, it's, it's similar in some ways to Microsoft Office and what, what that team has been able to do, which is something quite similar around sort of.

refactoring their code base so that it can run across platforms and then just keeping up to date mobile technology, um, various other, I mean, Microsoft is amazing what they've done with, you know, the sort of 365, uh, co pilot stuff as well and, and how they're integrating AI. Um, it's, it's really an amazing company, but, um, you [01:00:00] know, I, I, I'm anyway, so hats off to the, to the AutoCAD team for that, at least.

Evan Troxel: For sure. So now you're working, the class that I got to attend at AU, you were talking about Minecraft and voxels. And I thought that there was a lot of really interesting opportunities there. Um,

and, and the, the thing that I mentioned after I attended to you, when we caught each other in the hall was this idea of Kind of the intersection of VR, XR, with the work that you're doing as a possibility for wayfinding inside of buildings because the example that you were showing was like path of travel using

voxels to kind of determine path of travel through three dimensional space in a digital environment and mapping a path of travel and then being able to see it in, in space, you know, on the computer. And then I was thinking, Oh man, how great is it to have an AR headset or something where then that [01:01:00] path could be transferred to my eyes and I

could follow it to get somewhere. You know, I could see, I used to do a lot of work with schools and, and if you have a orientation for a student, it's like, where is the office that I need to get to in building 18F that's in some basement. You know, who knows where that is, right? And, and it just seems to me like there's a lot of interesting applications to the research that you're doing there. And, and it's funny because you're tying it back to Minecraft, which I have

a 17 year old who loves Minecraft, loves it. Again, talks about the nuance of Minecraft, and it's lost, completely lost on me because of, I don't, I don't follow it, but At the same time, it's this incredible environment to make things, right?

For, and, and that's what I love about it on his behalf is that he's actually making things on the computer, not just consuming and not just playing. He is doing it through play, which I think is an important aspect, but, [01:02:00] but it's, it's, it's a creation engine, right? And I think that that's what we're doing as architects as well.

We're, we're building these digital environments and, and now you're looking at kind of an intersection of game, play, slash, building environment, right, which is based on cubes, and the work that architects are doing, and, and how those merge. I was really intrigued with your talk, and I would love it if you would kind of take the opportunity to give an overview of what you were talking about

Kean Walmsley: No, absolutely. So, yes, I mean, the, the, the, the class is really around a, um, toolkit that we've built inside Autodesk Research called VASA, which is a, you know, voxel based architectural space analysis. Um, so it's really a, and, and think of it as a. Toolkit, um, and it's inside Dynamo, but we also have sort of, you know, versions that we run separately as well.

Um, where you can take a sort of 3D geometry, break it up into, into cubes and it will analyze, you know, the, this space, [01:03:00] not so many cubes, actually the voxels are often like long and thin for whatever, for reasons, but you can look at the, the, for people who are interested, the, the, my AU talk explains a little bit more about this, um, but effectively, um, this toolkit will break up a building model, allow you to run certain spatial operations to understand how, Well, human centric it is, and I'll talk a little bit about that term, I suppose, what we see that term as well, um, but yes, how, how How easy it is for somebody to get from one place to another, um, how, how much daylight they can get because they happen to have proximity to a window.

Um, what, you know, we can start to, to, to analyze the space and to, to make sense of it and see how well adapted it is for its occupants.

Evan Troxel: And because it's voxels, it's inherently 3D, right? And I think, I just want to put this out there early, is

that a lot of the things that you're talking about, we are traditionally used to looking at in 2D representation, right? Daylight [01:04:00] analyses, views, right? We're talking about isovists and,

and, and path of travel. All of these things are usually on a set of. PDFs or

as imagery that we look at in 2D, but, but the, the bridge that you're building here, here is really taking that into the 3D environment.

Kean Walmsley: yeah, that's right. And actually the original sort of work that was done before VASA was in 2D. So we had a 2D version of it called Space Analysis, and it had those same capabilities. One of the interesting things about Space Analysis is that, and VASA as well, it is really based on this idea of sort of discretizing.

Um, a space, you know, breaking it up either into a grid in 2d or into a, you know, a voxel grid in, in 3d, um, and then, you know, performing operations on those. So there are definitely kind of, you could do the same thing using more. Geometric approaches like ray, [01:05:00] ray, you know, um, so the typically you do ray tracing or ray casting to, to check visibility for an ISOVist, you know, so you draw a line, infinite line in a certain direction, and then you check to see whether it hits anything.

Um, whereas Breaking it up into a grid will allow you to have much more predictable performance for that particular resolution, especially if you're doing repeated operations. So that's one thing that we found with this 2D space analysis package. So it's Reece Goldstein, my colleague in Toronto, who was really the mastermind behind both space analysis and VASA.

Done this work for space analysis. Um, he really wanted to explore the third dimension and to see whether it was possible to do something similar for 3D, which is what led to, led to Vasa. Um, but yes, it having that capability in 3D, um, unable to work on pretty much any, um. model, we, we, you know, we very often just load STL files in to, to, to work with and [01:06:00] test it though.

Obviously we can get the geometry more directly from Revit or Dynamo. Um, but that's, uh, yeah, it just can, can break it up and then you can start to do these analyses. And what's very interesting there is that that resolution slider, um, or that trade off between, uh, accuracy and performance is really. In, you know, it's up to you if you want to do a really coarse voxel model, which is super quick to, to analyze, but the results aren't going to be quite as good because you're, you know, it's, it's the approximation is, is poor, um, then you can, but if you want to dial up the precision and wait a bit longer, because it's going to take a bit longer to calculate, then you can absolutely do that.

So it's that kind of, you have that, that, real freedom to choose what makes most sense. Do you want to just do something very quickly, just to give an indication of how it works, or do you need to take a bit longer and do it with much greater [01:07:00] accuracy? Um, so

Evan Troxel: this kind of visualization tool gives you the ability to really understand three dimensional environments and daylighting as an example, right? If you had, I think you showed a tree in a courtyard and we were looking at maybe where, what rooms I could see it from. And it's not just like in 2D, that would be like a trunk and a, and a canopy line maybe, but, but in 3D, it's the actual shape of the tree, right?

So you can, you can see. What you can see, you can understand what you can see from all these different locations. And you had the example of Path of Travel, and you could actually use it to traverse stairs, for

example, which is very different than what I could understand in 2D.

So I think that that, that's kind of an interesting point about what the voxelization is enabling the designer to do, is just better understand what's happening in their project when it comes to these different kinds of studies.

Kean Walmsley: absolutely. And yeah, so the fact you can go, you can go up and downstairs, [01:08:00] um, because of the, you know, the, the way that the voxels work and you check the adjacency, but it can sort of go up a little bit. So you can actually sort of map how somebody would walk. It, you know, it works a lot less well with elevators, of course, because that's, that's like, you know, that's harder, but you can build in the logic to sort of manage that.

Um, but yeah, so back to your question about the path of travel and sort of connecting with, with. I mean, I absolutely think that, you know, I was always, you know, back when the HoloLens came out, I was quite lucky enough to be able to get one quite early on the first version of the

HoloLens. Um, and I was really intrigued about this, uh, possibility of within, you know, some sort of XR device.

In this case, the HoloLens, you could, you know, you could be. Um, given a path to track, to, to walk through a space. Um, and so at the time I'd sort of, you know, kind of, I, there was no, I hadn't, didn't do any kind of automatic pathfinding, but I just drew the path inside an AutoCAD model, [01:09:00] um, created, uh, the capability inside to AutoCAD to send that across to the HoloLens, um, device.

And then you would literally just see this sort of path snaking through. The space and you would travel, you know, walk along that path. And what was kind of interesting is that because it's right there, even if there was smoke or something in the way, like if there was an accident, you could follow the path anyway, and also had the device we're built in this sort of additional capability because there is this like local scanning done by the HoloLens device.

So it also, I also built in this sort of. It's a fairly rudimentary capability of sort of rerouting locally around obstacles. So if somebody had, you know, something had fallen inside the space and you couldn't get through, it would kind of try and go around it and it would kind of, you know, see whether it could.

So it was kind of, it's kind of interesting for me, it was [01:10:00] absolutely compelling in the sense that if you can imagine this sort of centralized. Path planning capability, maybe using Vassar or something, somewhere, um, on a server in the cloud or wherever. Um, but then, you know, and then having this sort of more local capability to manage, uh, local conditions, uh, I think there's definitely an opportunity to do something around xr, particularly around, you know, emergency egress and uh, you know, yeah.

Emergency services. Uh, I can well imagine. There being some really interesting potential around that in the future. Um, but

Evan Troxel: And just to have this device in my pocket that I could pull out and, and use as an augmented reality device, or maybe it's paired with a, with a headset or something to,

to cue me via voice or, you know, some kind of a cueing system that built into it. Because if you can't see, yeah, maybe you need to hear it [01:11:00] or maybe there's, you know, I could just see, I also can see a lot of applications in emergency situations, but also like in orientation situations when,

Kean Walmsley: right. Yeah,

so, but you know, just to sort of be clear, the, you know, the purpose for building VASA in the first place was much more around just sort of setting the quality of designs and how, once again, sort of using that as a, as a, as a tool for us to assess how. Well suited, um, designs will be for their future occupants.

So that's, which is, which kind of ties into my current main focus in terms of the area of research, which is around human centric building design. So how do we, um, how do we capture the human experience inside the built environment? Uh, you know, we can try and distill it down. We can try and, um, you know, we can try and build.

measures or metrics around how we expect people will experience a space. And how do we give those insights to designer, you know, building designers and architects during the design process [01:12:00] to sort of say, well, these design changes you're making are going to influence the, the wellbeing of the people who eventually use the, the, the space, whether, you know, positively or negatively, uh, and help guide them through that in terms of, you know, is there enough space in here for.

Plants, you know, are there, is there enough space for, you know, socialization between people? Are you going

to, you know, have these interactions between people that are positive and good for their, you know, well, good for the productivity of the company, but good for the, you know, their personal wellbeing as well.

Evan Troxel: And those,

Kean Walmsley: right? So,

Evan Troxel: those kinds of metrics being informed by real people who can have those experiences during the design process to help the designer make decisions during the design process that ultimately serve the purpose. I think that's a huge shift that's happened in AEC technology. Over the last decade or two, right, which is tools that used to be used at the end of a [01:13:00] process are being incorporated earlier and earlier now to help make decisions along the way,

and they're just part of the design process instead of an output at the end. I think that's Thanks. As a designer myself, I feel like the, as these tools come online, it gives the designer superpowers to really show the value of an architect in this case, right? Where I think a lot, a lot of times it's just intuitive. There's things that we've been trained to do. We understand that they will probably work the way that we think they will. And then it's only after. the building is delivered that that hypothesis actually gets tested, right? Every building is a prototype is what a lot of people say, because it really is. It's got a different site It's got different environmental conditions. It's got a different user group. The people who are occupying it are different. It's like all of these things stack up and it really is a hypothesis and you can't test it until it's over. Well, that's not really the case anymore. [01:14:00] If you're willing to include those people. In the design process, which does change the design process, right? And it does change the way we approach. delivering projects, which sometimes is set in stone. You know, it's hard to change those kinds of things because our contracts are structured a certain way and our interactions are on these certain, you know, milestones on a calendar, but this real time feedback mechanism with software and hardware enabled is really incredible if we're willing to harness those things to really I guess just really harness them and affect the outcome in different ways that we've never been able to do before.

I think it's absolutely fascinating. Uh, new tools in the toolbox enabling us to do that.

Kean Walmsley: no, absolutely. And it's really, it is really exciting because I think. And it's kind of, in some ways, it's a bit like what happened with, with software development in the sense we used to, with the waterfall method, we always [01:15:00] used to sort of have these big projects and you deliver it at the end, give it to a customer and say, Hey, what do you think?

And they'd be like, uh, well, not really what I expected.

Um, but now of course, with more, you know, now, I mean, for the last, Yeah. 20, 30 years, I don't even know how long it's been, but you know, effectively using agile processes where you engage much more with the, with the customer along the way. And you iterate,

I mean, it's a little bit harder when you're talking about the physical environment, but things like XR, things like, you know, getting that participant feedback and allowing them to play a role in the, you know, in the design processes is going to be super valuable.

And I see it just becoming really, really compelling. As technology evolves, yeah,

Evan Troxel: just using it as a method of communicating those ideas to somebody who can understand them in a much. better way than they

can a traditional method of like looking at a 2D plan and not knowing how to read a 2D plan, right?

I can't tell you how many times I've sat with a [01:16:00] client where they, they sign off on something on a 2D plan and then it, it happens in, in 3D or it actually gets built depending on the process.

And they're like, Whoa, that is not what I thought.

That is just because they, they don't speak that language. And these tools are helping us speak their language. I mean, if we're willing to do that, right? And so renderings served that purpose for a long time, but renderings were so curated, right? We're going to do this angle.

We have this field of view. We have perfect materials, perfect lighting, perfect reflections, and the real world is not perfect. And it could change on an hourly basis, the lighting, and it could change air quality and acoustics. And there's so many different things that affect. How somebody experiences something in the real world that we can now potentially plug into these models earlier on and say, this is what we're talking.

This is actually what we're. This is what your experience. This is as close as we can get. To, [01:17:00] to the real world experience before it's done, before we've spent all the money. And it's, that's an incredible process to go through with a client and to let them look around where they wanna look and to experience things and, and watch them experience it.

Actually, I. Be in the room when they're experiencing it because so much is communicated over facial expressions and body language and like you don't send this stuff over email like you sit in the room with them, right? And you experience it with them to get their real time feedback. on many different levels, not just after they've convinced themselves that it will be okay, kind of a thing, right?

It's, uh, that, that just visceral, um, connection that you can have as an architect with a client. I keep going to that because that's my experience and that's what I'm most interested in. But I think that there's, there's an amazing application possibility here for. And to your point, it's early days, right?

Like, this is the convergence of [01:18:00] these different pieces of technology. It's still early days, right? But I think it's an incredibly important piece of research to be doing because it actually makes potential outcomes so much more impactful for the people who actually pay for these services and these

buildings.

Kean Walmsley: yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and it sort of makes me think a little bit, you know, we were talking about XR earlier and, um, the potential for that. I mean, I remember when the first time I used Google Earth VR, right? So you could, it was kind of cool. You, uh. You were kind of like in this, you huge, you weren't, you know, human scale, you were like Godzilla or something

and but you, you know, walking

through a

Evan Troxel: son, my same son, he's also obsessed with Godzilla and we did that. We had the HTC Vive and the, and you know, there was, there was, what was it? Tilt brush and you could draw and you you could

do all this, but then there was Google Earth that you could actually go in and [01:19:00] change the scale of, and he always shrunk it down because he wanted to be Godzilla and he wanted to walk through the streets of San Francisco, right? And it is, that is an amazing experience to be able to have.

Kean Walmsley: was unbelievable. And then you can like grab the sun and drag it through the sky, right to change the time of day. And I'm just sort of thinking back to your point about experiencing something under different conditions. You know, you know, you can, if you, it wasn't in there, but you know, you could maybe just change the weather as well, make it grey and miserable, you know, find a way to, to allow people to experience the building from, in all sorts of different conditions that otherwise they wouldn't, um, and I always, and on a kind of related note, I always felt the real opportunity around XR in a general sense was this, um, This ability to, to, to do things together with people rather than, I mean, the thing is, you know, [01:20:00] again, somewhat incongruent, it's, it's this very isolating technology in many ways, right?

You put this thing on your face and you sit there. But I think the real potential is like. You know, having this shared experience with multiple people, you know, perhaps it could be an architect, you know, leading a family through what it's like to be in their new home and just making design changes on the fly as they give, give input.

Um, you know, but having that kind of shared collaborative experience can all of a sudden take something that is kind of fundamentally. isolating to being something that's really empowering and engaging, um,

and that is, is where I was always very interested by the potential for XR is not this, um, you know, lock me away and let me play, uh, on my own on some video game for, for 10 hours, but more like, how do you, Flip it around and make it this, this compelling, uh, experience.

And I think that is again, what, you know, I'm sure [01:21:00] Gabe and his team is focused on and others as well. And we obviously were seeing all sorts of technology coming out, uh, you know, from Apple and others. It's really exciting.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kean Walmsley: but yeah, I'm, um, yeah, I think there's lots of, lots of reasons to be optimistic that, uh, technology is, is.

Uh, looking to make certain things easier, I would, I would say. Um,

Yeah.

Evan Troxel: So with Vasa, what is, is that available for people to actually give it a try, to use it, to see how it works, and maybe you can explain where people can go to see examples and,

and get the code and, and run it.

Kean Walmsley: I think the probably, so, so it, inside the Dynamo package manager, you can just sort of get it and download it. And I haven't tried it with Forma, but now that there's Dynamo for Forma, you should be able to use it there too. There's probably with Civil 3D as well, not that I've tried that, but, um, definitely Dynamo for Revit.

You can just, um, you know, [01:22:00] download it in the, in the package manager. Um, it's probably worth going, the best source of information for it at the moment is probably my blog. So if you go to keanw.com/vasa, V A S A, then that's, you'll find all the posts that, that I've posted related to that over,

over the years, including, um, some introductory videos from Rhys that really explains exactly what's going on under the hood and, you know, why it works the way it does.

Um, I think that's probably a good, a good place to start.

Evan Troxel: I'll put a link to that in the show notes for the episode, but could you give a kind of super short, truncated version of your class to just explain what, what it's actually like to use it? Because I think we've talked about it and maybe some of the potential use cases, but just give us a foundation of what, what you, the user who might [01:23:00] look at this Toolkit and use

it would experience as they, as they run through it for the first time.

Kean Walmsley: Sure. So, so, so typically, um, I mean, it is some, it's not a, It's worth pointing out that this is not a product as such. It's kind of like a, a library of functions, you know, that exists somewhere in a DLL or whatever, but ultimately in Dynamo, it's surfaced as a set of nodes. So you drag your nodes across into the, into your graph and connect them.

And you'll have some processes where you might take, uh, for example, import an STL file, and it'll create a voxel model. And then from that voxel model, you've got various operations that you can perform to then analyze that, that voxel model. Um, and then ultimately at some point down the line, once you've done your various operations, and these operations can be chained together, right?

In the sense that what's very interesting about VASA is they've got a very unified, [01:24:00] we've got a very unified approach to, um, creating analyses. So whether it's daylight or. Um, visibility or pathfinding, the output of each analysis is actually another voxel model. And so that voxel model could represent the path of voxels that go through a space.

It could represent the shadow that's created by something. Or it could create, you know, decide what you're able to see. But each of those is, because it's this uniform format, the inputs in a voxel model. The output is a voxel model. You can start to chain together these operations in interesting ways. So you could, for example, analyze, uh, a space and do some sort of shortest path analysis, but also figure out not just the shortest path, but the one that has the most sunlight or the one that has the most shade, right?

So you can start to think about how these, these analyses can work together. And then eventually you will have. Um, you know, from your voxel model, [01:25:00] you'll choose to visualize it in some way at some point, so you can turn on, you know, you could overlay the path that was a set, you know, create, uh, found between two points in the, in the overall model, you can then display that voxel model in the context of the original model, for example, so that you could see that path, um, with a certain color going through the 3d environment.

So was that

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I think that, that, well, I think, I think it helps to have the visual as well, but I think, I think if, if somebody sets up their screen and they, they listen to the podcast at the same time, they can, they could figure that out. I think what makes this so interesting, Kean, is that you can then start to think about what parameters you would wanna plug into spaces. to set up different constraints for the analysis engine. And, and I'm just thinking as a designer, like maybe there's a. An energy parameter of like the kinds of spaces and the types of energy or the types of uses that they [01:26:00] would have. And so for this kind of experience, it would choose this kind of a path.

And for a more private or a more quiet experience, it might choose a different path for me to get from here to there. I think that there's a lot of interesting potential, again, to kind of change the, what we put into our models as far as metadata goes. Because it starts to inform the things we're interested in studying along the way throughout the design process that don't necessarily, haven't inherently been in the system before, right?

It's like, I'm sure that there's been some instances of that kind of a thing, you know, like healthcare design with paint color and how it affects mental health. And there's definitely things like that that we could always tag, but now to actually bring that back into kind of an analysis engine. That's, that we can just continually monitor throughout the design process and, and get updates and maybe get, get scorecards back or dashboards, or [01:27:00] just test it against an actual user to say, like, is this, is this, actually working?

Is this

telling us what we think it's telling us? I think that there's some interesting potential there

to tweak the design process for better outcomes.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah. I, I, and I think this, and I dunno if this is really speaking to the same point, but I'm really interested by this idea of sort of following through on design intent and sort of understanding whether it really, you know, it does, is the design go either going to, you know, I, did you anticipate via simulation that this design is gonna meet the design intent, or once it's actually been kind of realized?

Using sensors, using computer vision, doing whatever it, you know, can you show that that design intent was met in the real world? So I think having these sort of feedback loops was, was, you know, is really super interesting. And I think that sort of, um, [01:28:00] capturing that in some way along the way. Uh, because at the moment we don't, right?

We just have, you know, you, you'll model your space, but, and you, you, you, we may be able to infer some intent from the sequence of operations or the way it's been done or, or whatever, but it's not, it's never really made kind of explicit. Um, and that's when we think about in the context of something like ChatGPT, where there's a dialogue, right?

And you're sort of saying, layering in information and you're sort of requesting, um, additional. You know, you've got this sort of history of requests and the intent is kind of there as a dialogue. I think that that's really an interesting way that eventually, over time, we're going to be capturing more of the essence of what is intended, and then being able to come back and, yeah, you know, figure out whether it was met in some way.

Evan Troxel: point of like this human layer of [01:29:00] interaction and the validation that can occur throughout the design process and how that can include the end users or, you know, there's so many layers to, to who the end user might be, but, but actually plugging them into the process of What it takes not only to design this building, but get what they want out of it and make them a part of the design process rather than the traditional black box design process, which is like, I'm going to go work over here in my office and then, and then I will present it to you when I'm ready.

And then I will come back and I will make some changes and I will, but to do that kind of, Out in the Open, right? To do that transparently, with them included, creates a completely different experience for them, along the way, from nothing to the actual building. I think that, that human part of it, those stories are what is going to live on beyond, uh, me working on this project to me working on the next project, [01:30:00] which is a completely different set of users.

Like, those stories get to proliferate and, and again, kind of strengthen the story of what we do as an industry that actually serves people at the very, like, the end of the day, that's what this is all about. Right? And that, to me, these tools give us The ability to do that even better and to

really show the value of what it is that the AEC industry actually delivers when it comes to an architectural experience or, or different types of experiences that must be met.

Like that validation feedback loop that can actually happen throughout the process is, is incredibly important and empowering as a, to, to fulfill the mission of this, this project.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't, did we, were you able to come by our, um, our booth at AU We were in the far end, so we were kind of tucked [01:31:00] away, but we had, um, we had a stand called, um, From Steps to Stories.

Evan Troxel: Okay.

Kean Walmsley: this is, it's actually, um, a project that we, so we wanted to, to sort of showcase some work we did with, um, an organization in Toronto called the Bentway.

So I don't know if you're familiar with the city with there's a, the Gardner Expressway goes through downtown Toronto and the sort of city of Toronto has redeveloped a lot of parkland space underneath this raised expressway and sort of repurposing it to make more of a, this sort of engaging community space.

Um, so, well. We've been talking to the Bentway for many years and we saw this opportunity to sort of go in and try and effectively capture the human experience in this space.

So we kind of looked a little bit. You know, funny, but, you know, basically took a construction helmet, put a 360, uh, uh, GoPro, 360 degree GoPro video camera, um, on top, we had a [01:32:00] boom with a selfie camera facing, pointing back at the person's face so we could start to get, you know, capture their experience.

That well, they, what was, what their, what was on their face, not necessarily what they were feeling, but it'd give you some clues. Right? Um, as well as a number of other sensors, environmental sensors. We had the GPS from the, the GoPro as well, but we also gave them a, a smartphone. And every so often we'd ping them with a timer and say, what now?

You need to enter how you're feeling. And we sort of wanted to capture also this qualitative data alongside the quantitative data so that we could really kind of get a sense for, well, first of all. Could we have guessed how they were feeling based on what we could see from their face or other factors, you know, there's some, some connection there, um, or, you know, and even, you know, anyway, you can imagine other sort of types of sensor as well, like with, with wearable smartwatches and, you know, the, whether it's, you know, heart rate variability,

Did I get that right?

Or, [01:33:00] or, you know, galvanic skin response, or who knows what sort of things you could do to indicate stress levels and things. Anyway, we didn't do all that. We just sort of used visual feedback and then asked, asked them how they were feeling. But we aggregated this, this huge data set into, effectively into a, um, a, an experience where people could go in and navigate this data.

So we used, uh, computer vision. On the video to sort of do what we call a segmentation of the scene. So you could kind of, we could color all the cars, one color, we could color all the trees, another color. So, and then you could actually sort of, sort of look at this, uh, map of the, the number of objects at each stage.

So you could have kind of scrubbed through and say, well, I want to find this. I want to look at this. Um, and this is part of the experience for this particular occupant, um, participant, because they seem to see a lot of trees at that point. I'm curious where they are.

Um, so you could really kind of enable people to explore this data in a really, [01:34:00] um, compelling user interface that kind of included qualitative, um, And, you know, even, even you could see little speech bubbles with what they were saying at that particular moment because they were talking as well into the, into the smartphone.

Um, but again, this way of, uh, so we created this is sort of very interactive, um, exhibit where we had, well, the first one in Toronto, we had like six. 50 or 55 or 65 inch screens, you know, placed vertically, but next to each other. And that was this huge visualization of the space, and you controlled it with a smaller touch screen that would effectively change everything on on those screens.

And at AU, we didn't have as much space so we just had three screens, and then the smaller touch screen controlling them. Um, but it was a way for people to kind of relive the experience of being in that space or to, or to get insights into how people, how people experience this, but in, you know, we tried to get a diverse set of people, some [01:35:00] who knew the Bentway, some who didn't, um, and then, you know, basically we capture that data in order to, uh, at some point in the future, you can imagine that data being very useful for, When redeveloping another area underneath the Bentway or elsewhere.

Um, and, you know, so that was kind of the AU exhibit, but it's really like, it's, you know, looking at ways to, um, involve people in the process of sort of understanding how the built environment functions for them. Um, and, and surfacing that in some way. With the potential of it influencing the design process.

So yeah, I think that kind of speaks to a little bit to what you were talking about. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: I think that's fascinating. I, I guess maybe we can, we can wrap up. I have, this particular point has really led me to want to ask you this last question, which is, how important [01:36:00] That is the research arm of Autodesk. I mean, to you, but also like thinking of it big picture, because what I'm what I'm looking to get insight out of is how important is it for Thank you very an AEC firm to have their own version of this as well and what kinds of things, like you probably have a bigger budget than most AEC firms for, for R& D, but R& D is something that I think should be happening in all of AEC and I don't, it's not, right?

I mean, like it's happening in the large firms for sure. Um, the budget number is probably still too small. How important is it? Like, what, I'm sure it's driving value, but I would love to hear it from you. Why, why you think this is so important and what people can, could get out of doing R& D.

Kean Walmsley: Yeah, so I think I think there is value in having you know, the loud it's it's interesting. I mean, [01:37:00] Going back far enough, I mean, Autodesk was always a fast follower, right? In terms of our business strategy, it was not necessarily to be the first to break ground or to do something significant. It was to, how can we democratize exist, you know, not existing technology, but take, you know, stuff that's like a hundred grand and make it available for 10 grand or, you know, that same sort of order of magnitude reduction in cost.

Um, So it was always about that democratization aspect. And so, I think really that shifted. When, you know, under Carl Bass and Jeff Kowalski was CTO back in the day. And they really sort of, you know, Jeff made the decision to sort of build out this research function. We'd, we'd acquired Alias, um, in Toronto.

So we already had this core of researchers

that, you know, served as the kind of seed for us to build out this, this, this larger organization. Um, I think it is, it's, it's hard for me to put, uh, I don't know [01:38:00] like a number on how valuable it is, but I think that it's really important for large, I think it's really important for small companies that large companies like Autodesk are doing this work

Evan Troxel: hmm. Mm

Kean Walmsley: because I just don't think they have the scope to do it

Evan Troxel: You're doing it on their

Kean Walmsley: essentially create, you know, yeah, I mean, I know, I don't want to, it sounds funny to say that, but at some level, yes, I mean, I think it's, it's, it's the big players, of course, they have their own bespoke.

and capabilities and possibly don't have the incentives in place to actually make that better for the industry as a whole, whereas, you know, or it's a self interest, but yes, I mean, we have that interest to sort of extend our, our tool set to sort of enable these emerging workflows that otherwise would not be possible for, um.

For smaller companies. So I, you know, I, [01:39:00] I think, I think it's important, you know, I, I do think that, that, um, we, I, so I, I don't necessarily think that investing heavily as a small company in some very So the esoteric research type thing that may or may not pay dividends. I don't think smaller companies have the sort of risk tolerance to do that in quite this way.

So I w I wouldn't always recommend it. I think that in a general sense, so, I mean, and I would sort of separate this idea of research in the sense that we're looking at from having some programming capability in house, right. Which I think is increasingly valuable for everybody. You know, I, everybody in the industry, I think if you don't have, you know, why not everybody, but, you know, I think that it's becoming more important for people to have some fluency with customization and [01:40:00] programming technologies.

And increasingly it'll extend to the use of AI and having fluency around, around that as well. I think those are the things that are really going to allow you to allow smaller companies to stay competitive and Um, do, do, do more with less, I guess, in that sense. So I think it is,

yeah,

I think that's important.

Um, yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

I appreciate that because it isn't available to everybody, not everybody has the resources or the budget, you know, resources could include people or hardware or software or time, right, to chase after that stuff, but it, so, so I appreciate you adding the perspective that the work that you're doing at some level is on behalf of Those who are, don't have those resources and, and so that, that's a really important point to make.

I appreciate that this has been a fun conversation. We've gone all over the place and [01:41:00] we've traveled the world. We traveled through time and it has been. It's been really fun to have and I appreciate you taking the time to tell your story and the story of what you're working on today at Autodesk. And it's, it's been great.

I hope people. Uh, enjoy it as much as I did. So I'll put links to everywhere. People can find you on the internet, on LinkedIn, your website, your blog, the tools that you're working on with Vasa and, uh, and your course at AU. I think it would be great for people to catch up on that as well. Is there anywhere else that you want to point people toward?

Kean Walmsley: no, not off the top of my head, but you know, if people want to click connect on LinkedIn or, you know, on, on. Um, you know, I don't post quite as much on X, um, as, as I might once have, uh, but I do still, you know, all my blog content goes out, goes out through, um, through LinkedIn and Twitter or X, uh, as well.

Uh, but yes, I mean, I'd just love to hear from people, um, you know, reach [01:42:00] out, um, and get in touch and thank you for. Thank you for inviting me. It was a very pleasant surprise and, uh, you know, I love what you do and it's been, you know, it's been a pleasure coming on. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: I look forward to, hopefully we can do this again in the future.

Kean Walmsley: I hope so.

Evan Troxel: All right. Talk to you soon.

Kean Walmsley: Thanks, Evan.

View Details

Roderick Bates and Kam Star join the podcast to talk about the integration of AI and real-time data into architectural design processes. In this episode we explore how these technologies can enhance workflows, beyond just visualization tools, for informed decision-making on energy use and building performance. They also discuss their new partnership with the Illuminating Engineering Society (aka IES), an organization specializing in all-things lighting, to enhance their tool’s capabilities and steer it in a new direction.

Episode links:* Roderick on LinkedIn * Kam on LinkedIn * Chaos website * Chaos on LinkedIn * Chaos on Twitter * Chaos on Instagram * The Future of Architectural Visualization report by Chaos and Architizer * Enscape roadmap * Enscape in development: Building Performance Open Beta * Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) website

About Roderick Bates:Roderick Bates is the Director of Corporate Development at Chaos. Throughout his career, Roderick sought out and developed solutions to environmental challenges related to the design, construction, and operations of buildings. At Chaos, his responsibilities include tracking industry and market trends, strategic partnerships, and M&A, with the global objective of empowering Chaos customers.

About Kam Star:Kam Star is the Chief Product Officer at Chaos, overseeing product strategy and direction. He is a trained architect and holds a PhD in computer science and psychology. He has a long track record of successfully leveraging artificial intelligence and simulations in AEC, M&E and Fintech. Before joining Chaos, Kam was Vice President of Product Portfolio at SS&C Blue Prism, a global leader in automation software, Chief Product Officer of PlayGen, Head of Visualisation at international architecture firm RMJM, and Graphics supervisor at the BBC. He is a visionary product-focused leader with over 25-years of experience in growing businesses from startups to global enterprises.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * YouTube * Twitter

Watch this episode on YouTube:151: ‘The Zoo That’s in the Room’, with Roderick Bates and Kam StarRoderick Bates and Kam Star join the podcast to talk about the integration of AI and real-time data into architectural design processes. In this episode we e…YouTube

Episode Transcript: 151: ‘The Zoo That’s in the Room’, with Roderick Bates and Kam Star

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. If you are a regular listener and are enjoying these episodes, please subscribe both on YouTube and in your preferred podcast app, to let me know that you're a fan of the show, being a subscriber, which is completely free directly influences my ability to attract sponsors that help keep this show going.

And my ability to attract the guests that you want to hear from.

My goal is to deliver quality episodes that provide value to you and our industry. So if you haven't subscribed, I encourage you to do so. As I mentioned, it's free. And it's a great way to support TRXL and for those of you who are in a position to support my work directly, you can become a member.

To learn more about the perks of membership and to join simply click on the join us button at [00:01:00] trxl.co.

Your support is incredibly valuable for the sustainability of this show. And I deeply appreciate it. In this episode, I welcome Roderick Bates back to the podcast for the third time. And this time we are joined by his colleague Kam Star Roderick is the Director of Corporate Development and Kam is the Chief Product Officer at Chaos. In this episode, we have a casual and candid conversation about what's going on in the visualization space in AEC. How AI and spatial computing is and will be affecting the profession, and what's on the horizon at Chaos Enscape

We also explore how real time technologies can enhance workflows beyond just visualization tools for informed decision-making on energy use and building performance. We also discuss their new partnership with the illuminating Engineering Society also known as IES to enhance their tool's capabilities, and steer it in a new [00:02:00] direction.

This was a fantastic conversation with Roderick and Kam and I hope you'll not only find value in it for yourself, but that you'll help add value to the profession at large, by sharing it with your network. So without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Roderick Bates and Kam Star

Kam Star: honestly, I, I don't, I don't understand how people say it goes faster as you get older because that, that is not my experience. Like, oh boy, the things, like, it's not that the days are long, but there's a lot going on.

And even if I was to summarize like, what, what happened in the last four weeks, it feels like it's a whole year's worth of work stuff.

So, yeah, I don't,

Roderick Bates: Oh,

Kam Star: maybe, maybe it's because, I don't know, maybe people say it goes faster when you, you know, oh, you know, the days go slow, the years go fast. No, everything goes really slowly. [00:03:00] Whatcha talking about, you know, it's just, I don't know.

Evan Troxel: What what made sense to me was when I heard it explained like this, it was, uh, okay, so when you're, when you're 16, right? A year is a 16th of your life. And now I'm 49, so a year is a 49th, right? And so, and so just that compression right there is what Why it feels like it goes so fast because

the older you get,

it's a smaller

Kam Star: like a good, that sounds like a good story, Evan, but I'm sorry. There's absolutely no truth in it whatsoever.

I think what you'll find is it depends on how much you learn and what new experiences you have, because, you know, at your age, you could spend this year. Traveling the world and seeing a different city every single day,

or you could be 16 and be stuck in a, in a

in, you know, in a, in somewhere experiencing the same thing. You cannot tell me that, oh, that felt like a much longer time. No, it's the number of new experiences that you have, uh, on a kind [00:04:00] of a, you know, in, in one year, how much, how many new experiences do you have?

How many new things do you learn? How many new th things do you think about or do you see if those are reduced? And when you are 16, there's an awful lot out there in the world which you haven't heard or seen, and everything seems

new. And so your experience of the world is that, oh my god, so much happened. And maybe, you know, maybe you, you know, if you're my age 49, about to be 50, like, uh, it could feel like, well. I didn't learn anything last year. Now that's definitely not true for me, uh, because, you know, I'm, I'm ferocious when it comes to, to, to, to reading and picking up new things and whether it's a language or a topic or whatever. Um, and actually as I get older, I do that even more and more and more. I read, I've read more books every year than I'd done the previous year. It's like, it's, you know, not quite hitting the exponential 'cause it's not possible humanly.

Um, but, you know, I think, I think that's what it comes down to. It's, it's, it's not the number, and I know, [00:05:00] I know exactly what you're saying, but it's not that, it's how many new experiences did you have?

And certainly at 16 you are bound to have many more experiences. For the first time, uh, whereas it's kind of hard to get to our age and have a brand new, like, uh, you know, eating food that you'd never had before or come across a new, you know, scientific or political, historic, cultural, some new idea that you'd never heard of before. So it becomes harder to live that kind of a life of new insights and untrodden paths.

Roderick Bates: What I think is unique about you though Kam, is that for most people, they get into that sort of that repetitious groove. Then there's the reduced anticipation of what's next or the uncertainty. And so that's part of where you're like, oh, that year went by in a blink because of, of what exactly what you're describing.

Whereas when you're young and and foolish and whatnot, everything is these experiences that, that seem to be so massively consuming and [00:06:00] emotionally consuming as well. You know, you get to my age or our age and, and things are kind of like, eh, you know, the emotional ups and downs really start to compress to some degree.

And I think that's part of like with my kids, like say, when's Christmas coming? It is truly anticipated for months. Whereas for me, the Christmas anticipation is,

uh,

Evan Troxel: Right?

Roderick Bates: it's pretty modest. And so as a result, you know, it's like, because you don't, you don't have all that thinking about it, it seems to go by faster, but you, it's the opposite effect, which I think is, is quite interesting that for you, like, you know, the more you have going on, at least on your end, regardless of anticipation or not, it makes it feel longer.

Whereas for me, the busyness and all of that, in fact would make it feel faster. Like my weeks go by short because I can't complete everything

Evan Troxel: Right yeah. It's like when you're young, you have your whole life ahead of you. My, my, my youngest is 17 and he's constantly kicking the can down the road for ev It doesn't matter what it is. It could be putting the plate [00:07:00] into the dishwasher, or it could be a, a bigger, like getting a driver's license.

Roderick Bates: So you're telling me I got 10 more years of, of this to look forward to, huh?

Evan Troxel: Yeah. So, so he's always like, yeah, I got plenty of time to do that. And now look at us. We're like, we we're out of time. We, we I

gotta cram it all in. I gotta live five lives at the same time because I gotta, I want to do it all.

And,

Roderick Bates: yeah, you gotta learn fly fishing. You gotta do the road trip.

You know, you, you, gotta master the next, uh, task or read the next book.

Evan Troxel: All right. Right. Yeah, I, I think that there's something to all of this, that, that is playing into it.

Well, maybe we can just kick this off and I can

welcome you

both to the show. It's great to see you again, Roderick. This is, third time around the, the TRXL,

Roderick Bates: people are gonna start getting bored of me.

Evan Troxel: solar system.

Never. Never. And, and Kam, welcome to the podcast for the first time.

It's great to have you both here today.

Kam Star: Great.

Evan Troxel: So,

Kam Star: here.

Evan Troxel: we got to catch up a little bit at Autodesk University at the Chaos Enscape booth, and you were both gracious to kind of share [00:08:00] things that are going on in, in the world of architectural visualization. There's a lot.

going on at, at Chaos. I recently spoke with Petr Mitev, uh, who you both know well and obviously have had some nice conversations with, with Dan Monaghan as well, and this is just a little, another opportunity to share what's going on. Before we go there, because I'm really interested in what you guys are seeing. You're, you're super tied into. A cross section of a EC that I think is a lot of people are interested in hearing about. We're seeing so much happen right now, uh, especially in the AI side of things, but the visualization landscape is changing. Right. And, uh, I'm, I'm interested to talk about that, but before we do, and, and maybe Kam will kick off with you, just give us an idea of where you've been, what you're working on, what [00:09:00] makes this problem interesting to you. Why, why are you operating in this space?

Kam Star: Mm-Hmm. Sure. Um, you know, I started early, uh, I've been into 3D since before 3D. That's how it feels. I was playing around, kicking around, making, uh, little 3D simulations on a graphic scalor in the eighties. Uh, you know, and then in the nineties, uh, even late eighties, getting into the Omega a and, and, and playing around with that.

And, um, for my sins, I studied architecture, which, uh, you know, is the kind of, uh, forces you to think about space, forces you to think about design the intersection, and how to, how to really effectively communicate it. Not to just your, you know, end client, but to everyone else who's, who's engaged in that process and how to better help folks understand what your intention is, what the outcome would be. Um, [00:10:00] I, um, I only remembered this just a very short while ago that actually my master thesis in, in, in the mid nineties and that's the 1990s, uh, was, uh, the title of my thesis was Artificial Intelligence in the Built Environment.

Um, and, and I went and dug it up. It's still, you know, printed in, uh, Sheffield University and, and, and it was just like, oh my God, I really thought we would have AI in the built environment in the nineties. Wow. Where is the AI in the built environment? Um, and, uh, of course the last few years it's been a huge ex explore explosion of that. But, you know, my journey was, um, through architecture, then architectural visualization, uh, and really where I was face to face with people who were drawing perspectives and coloring it in with watercolors. And I sat with some of them and they would kind of [00:11:00] look and go, oh, this computer stuff, no one's, you know, it is never gonna be as, as interesting as what we do. Um, but actually that, that beKame one of the most effective ways to, uh, and, and I don't mean to belittle this because it's a really important thing to sell buildings, to sell them to customers, to sell them, to planning people, to sell them, to potential, uh, folks who would, who would have to live with it. Um, after quite a few years of that, about four years of that, i, I, I just. Felt there's gotta be more. And I wanted to start to apply gaming technology into this space. So I ended up late twenties setting up a company, uh, uh, that was focused on the use of gaming technology outside of pure entertainment. So actually the very first project that we did was a, was a large scale visualization of a very large, um, I wanna say very large.

It was a very large site of 2000 buildings. Uh, and, and we [00:12:00] used gaming technology to not just visualize it, but to, to let you drive around it in a kind of a GTA style with a little map. So you could kind of go around and, and have little missions to find various buildings on this enormous site, which has normally about 120,000 people on it.

But you can imagine it's just

huge.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kam Star: Um, that kind of got. Into this whole idea of gaming and gaming tech used for communicating concepts, ideas, whether they are about history or whether they're about science or they're about health, or they're about finance or politics, really applying this kind of simulation thinking, but then always coming back to gaming technology.

And why gaming technology? Well, frankly, for up until quite recently, that's where you found the best realtime 3D.

That's where you found, you know, [00:13:00] the, the, uh, and the, the, the mechanisms of gaming, uh, lend themselves well. They kind of require, not lend themselves well, but they require like the best, the highest fidelity the technology can kind of bring to bear and on a, on a, on a consumer level, accessible level. Um, so I've got, I, I'll go completely enthralled into that and um, Over the years that kind of grew into, Ooh. What about ai? Um, now I've always had a real keen interest on people, um, from a behavioral perspective. I'm a kind of an armchair behavioral economic economist. Um, I ended up doing a PhD around, um, competition, collaboration and, and groups of people, teams up with people working together and personalities and, and how you could best use things like gamification or framing to get people to work really well together. Um, and that kind of led into [00:14:00] the, this space of affective ai. And can, can computers decide, give you a better understanding of, um, how you are feeling than maybe an expert? it turns out really surprisingly, computers can be trained or a computer model can be trained to. Recognize emotion better than any other human can. Why? Because that computer model can contain tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of hours of training, whereas the human would only have a lifetime

of training. Um, and that was really fascinating. It's really interesting in how you bring that to life, how you visualize that. And then life took a little bit of a change and I faceted a little bit of a change.

So I helped grow an automation company, um, for a few years. And, and after that, actually chaos Kame along, but I had got a knock on the door, [00:15:00] said, Hey, you know, we're doing 3D. I said, well, what kind of 3D Yeah, architectural visualization I kinda looked at and went, oh, that's what I was doing 20 years ago. Um, it's, uh, what's happening in this space. And the more I looked, um, the more it was clear that this space is going through probably one of the biggest revolutions that it has done since it started. Uh, from using computers to visualize. And the reason, and I don't say that lightly, um, the, the, the really step change in software like scape, and of course Vera has been around for, what, 25 years now. Uh, but you know, something like scape comes along and it, and it democratizes visualization. and, and and I, again, that's not said lightly. This is the idea of something that was really specialist. You really had to have, go and trained, understood, learn the software, figure out how, you know, to light things, how to apply materials, how to set all of that. [00:16:00] And suddenly, hey, I'm, I've just, I'm just doing my design in SketchUp, or I'm just doing my design in, in, in Revit or, or what have you. And I can get something that is good enough that looks pretty damn good.

This, this stuff looks really good

and, and, and that

Roderick Bates: Nevermind the, the technical side of even setting up the deployments to render

Kam Star: Right.

Roderick Bates: a good V-Ray scene.

Evan Troxel: right?

Kam Star: Real time, right? 60 frames a second. Um, and of course in the last two years finally AI is getting some airtime. Um, for those who've been very close to it for very many years, we've been kind of watching it and maybe involved in some ways, but it's that kind of a nature of the exponential. You know, two years ago we get the first inklings of GPT and people are like, ah, that's never gonna replace somebody who can write a good sentence. You sure? I think, do you know, do you know how exponential works? 'cause [00:17:00] that looked like 5%. But that'll be another 10 years before it's any good. Yeah. But you don't understand this is not a linear progression.

This is exponential. And, and, and we we're starting to see that. Even more and more so with, with the rise of the la large language models, but then applying that in the, and, and seeing that in the visualization domain. It's, it's getting to the point where anybody should be able to visualize whatever they've got in their head. Um, and that's the kind of expectation, but that's also the challenge of what was in your head, because is what you're seeing on the screen Kame out of a latent space of, uh, a stability or a mid journey? Is that what you really had in mind? Or is that just what you're seeing out of, end of a prompt and you kind of

say to yourself, yeah, yeah, that's what I had in mind. And I think that's, that's,

that's that's the real challenge, right?

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Roderick Bates: But that's the challenge for us too, right? It's, it's threading that needle between those two pieces. How do [00:18:00] we as a company ride that exponential curve, uh, or exponential growth and or alternatively, how do we avoid becoming cast to the wayside and becoming like the, the telephone switchboard operators of your right?

I mean, that's the, the challenge that we have. And I think what's great about having someone like him here who's been tracking this industry for so long is that it puts us in a position to sort of ride the lightning, so to speak here as opposed to, uh, becoming a, a dinosaur. And it's really put us into a much more proactive position, thank goodness, because it frankly will be an industry that will be fundamentally different in a few years.

Kam Star: We, we, we

owe

Evan Troxel: to think about how fast this has come on, and I mean. Real-time rendering isn't that old, and you're already talking about it, like it could be thrown to the wayside. And because new technologies have come along and that, that timeframe just keeps getting shorter and shorter and shorter of what is the, the, the next wave, [00:19:00] uh, that, that's coming.

That's, it's very interesting to see that happen at play out during our lifetimes

Roderick Bates: And I, I think that's the question too. Like I say, is it cast to the wayside or has this become a combination of the two?

Right. Sort of this, this Borg, if you will, half human, uh, half AI type

interface. And I think from our perspective, that gets to what Kam was talking about, where there's the real opportunity there is like, is this exactly what you intended?

You know, there's no way that a machine can infer intent necessarily, right? It's just, you know, that's, that's in the mind of the designer. But at the same time, there's so many things that we're seeing that AI does faster,

just faster, um, and it has all that experience. So how do you combine those two pieces effectively?

To help our users get to where they want their visualization, they want as faster or as quickly as possible. And I think that's really the angle that that we're taking with this, is that it's the combination of those two forces that has the best opportunity for success as opposed to [00:20:00] complete supplanting.

Although I do think there will be a lot of, of replacement of things that are, say very low quality or tools that are very crude and things like that. And then why not just go for a full AI

solution if it's better?

Evan Troxel: mm-Hmm.

Kam Star: And the expectation keeps rising, you know, the expectation of variety, the exp expectation of, of insight. Um, one of the things that we saw pretty much out of the gate where instability and, and, and, and, uh, mid journey were in the early phases, and I don't think they're in their late phases, by the way. I we're still in the relative early phases, but, you know, a year ago, the, the, those who were, uh, blazing a trail in this space were already using these tools for ideation. They were already using them to generate. A whole variety of very interesting looking things, some of which you definitely would never be able or maybe never would want to build.

Uh, but you know, [00:21:00] they would defy gravity, uh, or, you know, just the, the pure laws of physics or usability. Um, and, and, and as we, we are seeing more and more focused effort in this space from the use of generalized tools to more specifically, specifically trained tools that, you know, you, you could take a, a, a latent space, an image generation, and then train it on a particular, um, artist or a particular architect or a particular designer's works. Um, and if, depending on how deep you go, you could get to the point where you could then say, okay, now apply it to this shape. Now apply it to this design where this kind of a design style transfer. And we we're starting to see that, um. I, I was playing today, uh, with a, with a video video remix that is open source, that's just been released. It's on hugging face. You can kind of play [00:22:00] with it, uh, where you can put in an input video. Um, and that could be anything that you like. And then you can put in a prompt, um, and it will take that video and it will then reimagine that video with your prompt. So I took, uh, the, the, one of the, um, samples that it has is a wolf that's kind of looking, it's a real wolf out in the wilderness that's looking around, and you can just put in a prawn sheep and it turns the wolf into a sheep, but the sheep is still outside.

It's still in the same environment, it has the same lighting, the sheep is looking around. So you just replace the subject. Um, I think that's it. This, this creates an enormous opportunity for even further democratization. It's then, and I don't mean just for the users that we have today, but for great many new people to be able to experiment. Um, not just with visuals, [00:23:00] but you know, crossing this chasm that we have right now, we've, we've got words that can be wordsmith. We've got images that can be image smith, I dunno if that's a word, but, you know, generated images. We've got video being generated. There are a few startups and few, you know, on the, on the very edges who are now creating 3D. Because when it comes down to, and that's, that's again, that's all okay. Um, in terms of something that's beautiful to look at. But if you are a designer and you, you work with the real world. with real physics and real materials that need to be joined together and things that actually need to work there, there is something more than just the pure latent space. The generative space. Something more that needs to be added into these models. It's not that it's not coming, it's not that people haven't thought it. Um, it's certainly on, you know, the, the, the, the sharpest minds who [00:24:00] are working in this space are fully aware that the models to come will not only be able to generate images for you, but they'll also have a deep understanding of the physical world and how things work in the physical world and how reality actually operates. Um,

haven't

Roderick Bates: doesn't have to be complicated, right? I mean, we're talking about things like water management in the case of buildings, right? You know, ,

um, structural loads. I mean, these are things that they're not, at least in the context of buildings, terribly complicated.

I mean, there's a limited number of parameters that have to be taken into consideration.

Evan Troxel: And those have been solved time and time again. Right? Like the, the engineering side of it that you're referencing there, it, it has a set of rules. And I think that was something in architecture that we were always kind of aware of tangentially, which was, you know, that Kam, to go back to one of your points earlier, it's like, this is never gonna take over the, the job of a creative.

Right. And now, like the things that we're seeing come out of it are absolutely creative in ways that we didn't expect. [00:25:00] and and I think, you know, one of the, one of the big I don't wanna call it a lie, but one of the things that we believed was like the engineering problems were solvable by automation. A lot more so than the creative problems being solved through systems like this.

I mean, AI is not automation, but it's, it's also not too far divorce from automation. Like, you can, you can tie those things together. I think it's really interesting to see this come and you chaos. Inscape is concerned about its future, uh, developing products that are used by people. professionals are too, right?

Like we're, we're, we're also concerned about it uprooting what we do, what we deliver. I think one of the things that, I had a long conversation yesterday about the new era of spatial computing that is, you know, uh, branded

by Apple and.

and it's now landing and the the headsets are, are going to become a lot more, I don't know, there's just gonna be a lot more of them out there. [00:26:00] The way that people are going to spend more time in these environments and creating these digital environments is going to then inform the physical world once again. Right? People are gonna come out of these headsets and absolutely be disappointed in the office that they are sitting in, right? They, they are.

I've, I've already experienced that many years ago, being inside of my designs in a VR headset and then coming back out into my office and it's like, well, it was better in there and it wasn't perfect. It wasn't even photorealistic, but it was good enough to really make me feel like I was there and, and that is going to inform the physical world in substantial ways.

I think. Like we're going to go into these environments that are going to be created and they're gonna be augmented with tools and AI and all of these things. Like maybe we define the base and then it fills in details and we're gonna come back out and be like. I wanna do something like that here, because it's just like what Covid did to the office.

Like, I don't have [00:27:00] a gym in my house. It was at the office. Now I want a gym in my house, right? Because this is where I'm spending my time. I don't think it's gonna be unlike that with the influence that it's gonna have and the impact it's gonna have back on the physical world. And, and so to see this technology develop and especially at the pace that it's developing, I think it's going to start, it's, it's gonna create new opportunities that have never existed.

We, we will be spending more time designing digital environments just for digital environment's sake, just to go there, call it escapism, call it the design

challenge

Roderick Bates: you're saying that, um, rumors of the Metaverse demise were greatly exaggerated

Evan Troxel: I

Kam Star: We can see it, you can

see it in,

Evan Troxel: I think you could speak to that

Kam Star: We could see it in the way our kids, um, you know, um, and if you have kids of a certain age, they are probably really engaged with Minecraft

or with one of the other world building

things, and they invite their

Roderick Bates: And they're playing with people. Like for my kids, they have, uh, [00:28:00] family members, you know, all over the place

and they play with them. I think roadblocks is sort of their preferred platform mostly. 'cause it's the easiest one to collaborate with, although it's not necessarily their preferred platform to play in.

Uh, but it's easiest one to play together and, and

Evan Troxel: Mm mm-Hmm.

Roderick Bates: sort of like their, the neighborhood sandbox,

so to speak, which is pretty wild Fortnite as they get older. Um, similar functionality. So what is it for the office?

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

Roderick Bates: I mean, if the kids can spend hours in Fortnite, I'm assuming there's an office that I wouldn't mind spending hours and,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

And I

Kam Star: do you think,

do you think in 10 years time we will, we won't be asked to prepare a PowerPoint presentation or that we won't be asking somebody to, to put together a set of slides? I really hope. I really hope

Evan Troxel: hope so. Yeah.

Roderick Bates: Well, it's,

Kam Star: nothing against

Roderick Bates: with our customers though,

Kam Star: presentation, but it's just like, come on, there's gotta be a better

Roderick Bates: We have, uh, we have a customer. It's a fairly large construction firm, and I was talking to them about how they use our software just to get a better sense of how that [00:29:00] particular market segment, um, utilizes visualization and you knows a lot of the things you'd expect. Um, you know, they have a little bit of a, a business that actually designs buildings, so they have to respond, but they also do logistics and testing.

Can we drive trucks around or fit behind certain equipment? But the one that really caught my attention is they actually used, uh, the scape software to visualize data. So if they had an RFP response and it was like a, a really boring graph or something like that, or some type of like a, a Gantt chart or something, instead of just putting it in the RFP, they would have a link.

The person would scan it and then they would go to an immersive view of the data. And they said, it really doesn't help the data communication all that much. It's the same data, but we found that people actually looked at it once we did this. Whereas before, they'd just be like, eh,

you know, next

Evan Troxel: of the same. Yeah. Yeah.

Because it's not the same. And I, I, I find that being, that's a really intriguing thing that's, that's happening. One of the, the things that I was reading about, uh, just, just yesterday, I think, is [00:30:00] that on the, on the Apple Vision Pro, there's a Disney Plus app, and the Disney Plus app lets you watch a Star Wars movie. In a Star Wars setting, so you can actually be sitting in Luke's land speeder and watching Star Wars and, and it's like, I've seen that move before. Right? I, I've, I've watched it many times, but I've never watched it like that. And I, I feel like there's going to be a lot of, and people might say, well, you know, it's just novelty.

It's like, well, and that's okay. Right. I, I feel

this is

Roderick Bates: has value. I mean, people go to a bar

to watch the game.

Evan Troxel: Right,

Roderick Bates: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: right. It's, it's gonna be a thing where there's gonna be new layers of fun. You know? It won't be a dirty word. It'll be like, no, it's, that's, that's why I go, that's why I participate. That's why I'm here is 'cause I wanna have fun doing it.

Because you've found a creative way to communicate these ideas. To me, I think that there is, there's so much untapped potential

Roderick Bates: Well, I guess the gamification you're talking about, Kam, you know, can we make all of this more [00:31:00] engaging,

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Roderick Bates: not

Kam Star: much, how much engagement is too much engagement though, because, uh,

you know, as, as, as, uh, at some point engagement becomes passe because, and I'm starting to see that a little bit just in the AI news space, you know, like, Hey look, we can do this. And literally five minutes later, ah, yeah, we can do that. Uh, what else have you got?

You know? And then a day later we can do this. Yeah, I was, I was, this week on Monday, I was talking to, um, our head of ai, uh, Jan Ring, who's just an awesome guy. And, you know, we were, we were having a bit of a debate, not too dissimilar to right now, we were talking about the, the, we were talking about the vision of five-year vision and the kind of, where is this space going?

Especially well in that conversation it was about, about VFX space and and making movies. And, and I was saying to Dan, you know, there's, there's this trajectory [00:32:00] that that basically means that most of what we consider is, is a workflow Right now. It's kind of, oh wow, you're still doing it like that you know, kind of, that's, wow. Do you really have to put ink in your, you know, in your quill pen to, to write? That's, um, that's interesting.

Um, because, you know,

Evan Troxel: say that. I, this is not an ad, but yeah, I've, I've got my bottle of ink right here

Kam Star: there you go. there you go. And

Roderick Bates: Only for the best ideas.

Kam Star: for the best.

Evan Troxel: that's

a bottle of ideas right there. Yeah.

Kam Star: Amazing. I like that. That's good. That's, that's spot on. And, and lo and behold, we were having this debate around control. 'cause one of the things that a lot of our customers tell us is, I want to have control. I want to be able to specify

exactly the thing that I want.

And just for, for the machine. For my copilot to not just take the plane and take it to some [00:33:00] place I didn't want to go to just take care of the boring bits

the bits that it's kind of going a bit flat or I'm just gonna get tired and, you know, and, and, and I don't even necessarily want it to take me to a land I'd never known before. I kind of want to go where I want to go and I want my copilot to be there to help me.

And, and we were having this debate about a, a a a startup that's kind of doing ideas to video and Oh, well, yes, temporarily, not entirely as consistent it should be. You know, and that's by, by that I mean, you know, over a period of 15 seconds, the character can change a little bit.

The background can change a little bit. It's a bit different. Um, and, and, and I, I don't really have control on which direction this thing is going 'cause it's just generating something and, uh. Quite literally the next day. So this had that conversation on the Monday, on Tuesday, there was a announcement by this particular company saying, now you can control like how things are moving. Like, [00:34:00] and, and you can control these things and decide what the trajectory within on, you know, on screen is. And I'm sending this to Dan and saying, Dan, you know, the thing that we talked about on Monday looks like they've solved it. And literally today we were having a conversation. Is it, is, it is. No.

Yesterday we were having a conversation, so like a day after. And it, for both of us, it's, it's already like, yeah, we can do that now, but yeah. But what we really need, right? And,

Roderick Bates: Yeah. That goalpost keeps moving,

Kam Star: it?

keeps moving. But what seems, what, what, what, what you gotta remember when you look at this space is whatever it is that you think it's not doing, don't say it can't do it, it just can't do

Evan Troxel: it's

just

Kam Star: And there's someone working on it right now so

that it can. And it, and it will because there's no, there's no magic in being able to represent thinking, okay, maybe. Maybe that's a big thing. I'm not talking about consciousness here. I'm think I'm [00:35:00] talking about kind of focused thinking around something, the kind of cogni cog cognition. So I'll leave consciousness to philosophers, just cognition, just thinking about something. There's no magic anymore in being able to systematize that because at the end of the day, what is our cognitive process? Our cognitive process is, is, can be described. It's not that dissimilar to what happens, you know, in the, in, in a, in the brains of a, um, a creature that lived several hundred million years ago.

We,

our brain physiology is still pretty much the same as the squid, you know, and, and, and it's not that different, of course, it's far more complex and it has many other aspects playing into it. Um, you know, one of the interesting things that I, I believe will probably, uh, win the Nobel Prize, hopefully I'll see it in my life, uh, is a, is an incredible piece of research, [00:36:00] um, that has, has been carried out for, for, for a number of decades, which was just published last year at the end of last year in, in nature, where these researchers were very keen to understand the human brain and the nature of neurons. And many of us who are not in biology, including me. we kind of think, well, yeah, neurons, you know, these things that, synapses and connections and that's what it is.

Um, well it turns out the human brain has, and this is what the research had published, they wanted to know how many different types of neuron are there in the human brain. And if you'd asked me before this, I would've gone, what do you mean it's just a neuron, right? It turns out

that, you know, the average human brain has 3000 different kinds of neurons, and we don't actually know what,

what, why are they different and how they all do. But we have 3000 different kinds of neurons that operate differently. Um, and it's almost like these neurons, you [00:37:00] could kind of think of them as different appendages. Like we thought we had five fingers. It turns out we have 3000 different fingers. Um, and and not only that, what was really interesting about that was that the, um, the portion of the types of neurons that you have. Are as unique to you as your face and your fingerprint.

So maybe I have 2% more of this kind of neuron and you know, one, 2% less than that. And this, these will have any huge impact on the way that we think and we feel and we experience the world, what we take in, what we can then produce. Um, and I'm sure that that at some point our systems and our mechanisms can be sophisticated enough to start to really model even some of those nuances of how these neurons can work.

And again, this is not science fiction. There is some, some [00:38:00] work in this space. New ways to think about neural networks, um, and new topologies. Get, get us close to this horrible feeling that the machine is alive. And you know, we, we are now in the domain of the conscious machines, uh,

Roderick Bates: But maybe short of just being alive, that brings up some, one of the aspects of a lot of the AI tools that are out there is that they're, they're one flavor. They're one . Set of neuron types or maybe one proportion of neurons, and that's it. And it's like, you know, you don't get your version of these. And it gets to that idea of the training set.

People want to be able to get the machine to think the way they want it to think in some way, shape, or form, right? They want to train it so that sort of, it's in their image maybe, or what have you.

Uh, and it seems like that's a, a pretty fertile ground. And we actually got a lot of comments along those lines.

Kam, at Autodesk University, we presented some of our concepts. People like, we like this, but we wanna [00:39:00] make it ours.

Um, and frankly, we get to some degree, the same feedback on our easier to use software scape. So people say, you know, like, great visualizations, but if I go into an interview and the last firm used scape and I'm using scape, sometimes people say, Hey, I, I saw that person before.

Or, you know, the, the way it looks, the style, the sort of. It's similar.

Um, and, and the mind picks that up and they wanna make, create something that's their own. So even though they're using a tool, they still want the individuality out of it.

Evan Troxel: Well, I mean that is the final of democratized tools is that everybody has the same tools and therefore

they

Roderick Bates: Next thing you know, we're all wearing overalls and

eating the same food. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: we're all, we're all wearing black Nikes and

Roderick Bates: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: we're

Roderick Bates: that's right. Drinking Kool-Aid.

Evan Troxel: Well, Roderick, you, you mentioned, you brought it up, uh, we maybe, uh, prematurely announced the death of the Metaverse before it was time. Uh, where, [00:40:00] where, are we with that? Because the last time that you and I talked on the podcast, it was really about tools, workflows, putting things into the metaverse, and, and now again, a new hardware is coming out where the interaction with digital space is, is going to change. And it's not like Apple's the first one there. Obviously there's been a lot going on there, but I do think that they're gonna, uh, they're going to present it very differently to people and it's gonna

Roderick Bates: And they're not gonna call it the metaverse,

Evan Troxel: They,

they haven't yet. Right. Uh, and, and so and so where, where are we with, with that?

I'm sure that you're still tracking that with your, your background

Roderick Bates: For sure I'm tracking it and it's also still contentious. I know that Kam and I have different opinions on this, which is good, right. You know, you want to have some of that productive friction around it. But when I look at the, the larger industry, I mean, there's one thing that's obvious is no one's saying metaverse anymore.

It's become a dirty word. Uh, if you look at the price of like a plot of land and, um, to central land, I think it's gone from like 9,000 down to a couple [00:41:00] hundred dollars or something like that for a plot of land. Like, you know, if it was peaked down. So, um, clearly the, the people I've spoken the technical problems though, that I, I felt at the time were inhibiting some of the aspects of the metaverse was still there.

You know, it still takes a lot of computational power to. Support an environment like that. Um, and that hasn't changed. And so what do you have in a metaverse? Well, you, you have a place of, visually speaking just isn't as compelling as it should be.

You know, compared to a video game environment, it's pretty flat.

Um, well, who wants to spend time there? Right. You know, it's like going into an office with fluorescent lights in a, a stained drop ceiling. I mean, it's just no fun at all. So there's that aspect of it that I think still hasn't changed. But what we are seeing though is places that maybe aren't metaverse by name but are metaverse by experience are continuing to grow.

Uh, one of them is, um, I. As I mentioned earlier, Roblox, it's seen actually pretty tremendous growth. Um, you know, we're talking, I think it's something like 70 million users, active [00:42:00] users or something like that. I mean, it's pretty phenomenal when you think about it, but it, what has it done? Well, it's, it's captured a particular segment of the market, you know, kids, um, it's made a very safe place for them to play.

Um, allows for interaction and it's. Appropriately dynamic, which I think for a lot of people is exactly what they want. So that one, I'd say, yeah, it's, it's still functioning and functioning really well and it, it's vital. Um, but we're also seeing something else and it's, I wouldn't say it's a strong trend at this point, but we're starting to see more and more, um, sort of immersive shopping type experiences that are coming up.

Um, something that we saw recently, a Crate and Barrel has a immersive store. Macy's has one. So maybe a little bit more of like a video game. And we've talked to a lot of companies in this space and some that are in 3D commerce, and they're saying, they're hearing from, a lot of people are asking about, Hey, how can I get an immersive store?

So it's not just scanning a grid of products, but it's something that's more interactive in the sense that perhaps, um, you're actually [00:43:00] going into it. And what's interesting about that is that so far it's not necessarily a, a. Big money making commerce play. It's almost more of a marketing play. It's a little bit of a, of a unique opportunity.

But just like you were saying with Vision Pro, a lot of people are saying, you know, is that gonna be the technology that proves the catalyst? You know, is it gonna be kind of like that iPhone moment that takes smartphones from something that's kind of neat? Um, and maybe some people have palm pilots and things like that, or you know, handheld devices to something that's truly ubiquitous.

Maybe, maybe not. But um, I think for a lot of people they say, well, will commerce be exactly the same in the sense that we're going through those grids of products five years from now? Most people say probably not. No. They're gonna have something that's more dynamic. That's an increased conversion rates.

Evan Troxel: I think the, the

Kam Star: you say, I think maybe you and I are. Not entirely on the same page, because I heard all of this 15 years ago on second [00:44:00] Life I saw all of these same stories. I heard them all exactly almost verbatim. Like, you know, hey, this, this company McKinsey's got a thing and BA's got a thing and Nike's got a store and you know, McDonald's has got a store and you can go.

And the the reality of it is, nah. And I don't think that what we've got right now is it either. And the the, and the reason you you mentioned is, is computation is true, but the, the, as long as I have to wear something that's like heavier than these glasses, more intrusive, like literally this is probably the, the, the limit or maybe a little bit thicker than this, but that's about it. Uh, and, and do not remove me from reality, you know, so, and right now we're not there yet. Even the latest Apple headset is this giant thing that I have to stick on my head,

Roderick Bates: Oh, it's still big man.

So that's the question. Do you think it's the technology or concept, right, that's holding it back? I mean, if it's the concept, right, that's never gonna change. Um, [00:45:00] but on the flip side, if it's the technology. . Then obviously people are pushing in that direction. Is it here today? No.

Would it be here in several years? Well, honestly, that's, it's a little bit like fusion, right? You know that really lightweight wearables, immersive tech is always, uh, the next thing.

Kam Star: It's making it easier and easier. I mean, honestly I can see, and I dunno, maybe of, some of the views and listeners have, have seen the rabbit one, that the launch of this new way to be able to interact with software and with interfaces and the idea of going from a large language model to a large action model where you can ask it to do stuff for you. And, and I watched the whole um, rabbit one presentation and the entire time I was thinking Why can't just, that can't, why can't that just be an app on my phone? Like, you know,

why do I need to have a device come on, I can just have my phone be that, that I can just, just converse with it in a natural language, [00:46:00] in a conversation, um, and get what I want.

And, and I think that is, that is a much 'cause for me, maybe I'm a dinosaur, but, uh, you know, for every time the VR thing is comes up and it's just like the world is going to be in virtual reality. Hell, it was 1997 and I was working on VR ML and uh, you'd have to be probably as old as me or maybe older to

remember VR

Evan Troxel: I'm raise my hand, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Kam Star: And vr. RML in 1997 was supposed to trans transform

the shopping experience into a web front end where you entered the shop and you went around and you could see the stuff. It looked crap compared to what we've got today. We were to do it today, it would look so much better. But I still feel that, think there's something there around in terms of is it a technology thing?

I think it's, it is partially a technology thing, but in the same, in the same way as [00:47:00] when information and access to these things to music beKame so be ubiquitous that you could just download any MP three or you could just pay a subscription to Spotify or iTunes and just listen to absolutely any artist pretty much within limits, right? Whenever you want. The thing that was then valuable is actually going to the concert. It's the real physical experience of actually experiencing it. That's what beKame valuable

in music. Right. You know, that, that the phys Yeah, exactly.

The physicality beKame

valuable. And I, and I wonder if in if in this space we are still, we, we, we need to be thinking about this too. You know, I'm, I'm amazed that the bookshops in Central London, that, you know, one of the highest, at least in Europe, I don't know about the US or Japan, but in terms of, uh, per square foot, um, rent, these, these numbers are eye watering, right? They're just like, [00:48:00] what you pay,

how much for rent? That's how much, you know, whole house costs, um, you know, per, per square foot. Uh, but these bookshops are filled with people. People want to go to the bookshop. Yeah, of course they can go to Amazon. Of course they've got that Kindle. Of course, they can consume media, uh, in a, in whilst they're laying on their bed, right. But they don't, they they go and walk into the bookshop 'cause they want to be there.

They wanna pick up the book physically and amazingly physical books sold more, at least in the UK last year than have ever before in the history of selling books in this country.

Evan Troxel: But are they just, but are they just a showroom for Amazon? Right.

Kam Star: well, yeah, yeah, of course there is that you, you always

Evan Troxel: stores are,

Kam Star: kind of going, oh, I can buy it for 50 p cheaper here. So

Evan Troxel: well, yeah.

Everything's getting more

expensive.

Roderick Bates: things to unpack there though. Um, you know, one I think is people's desire to have the, the physical, right? I mean, at the end of the end of the day, we are living in the real world and people, I think there is a. A desire for that authentic [00:49:00] interaction. Fundamentally, like it is, it is more desirable.

It's like telling someone you went on vacation and it turned out that you, you bought a, um, a slide tour to go to the Azores just isn't gonna be the same as actually going there. So there's no doubt about it, right? There's a value in that authenticity, smelling things, you know, feeling them and, and maybe the ups and downs that go along with those sort of things as well.

But the other side of it too is it's not just about, uh, some of the technologies actually are really, are well developed. Um, like it doesn't have to be a VR experience, you know, people aren't playing Fortnite or entering robots

and, um,

Evan Troxel: In vr.

Roderick Bates: in vr, right?

It's a traditional screen experience. So in some ways, you know, maybe the technology's it's there, um, and what we're seeing is what we're seeing.

And maybe a improvement in immersion isn't gonna move the needle in any way. I.

Kam Star: I wonder

Evan Troxel: I think it,

Kam Star: sorry. Go ahead.

Evan Troxel: I was just gonna say at some level I think you get to walk away from that screen. Right. I, you would walk away [00:50:00] from a headset too. But, but I think there is kind of like a, a nice, it's like a compartment of my life. It isn't my life and I like to turn it on when I want to feel that and I can turn it off when I need to do something else. I think that there's, there's something else there that's not just about experiencing something all the time.

Roderick Bates: I agree with that, although you always hear about phone addiction and things like that, that people have. So, um, and I guess in those, an addiction obviously implies that people would rather turn it off if they had

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

I, I,

I kind of see the opposite. yeah.

Just to go back to something you said earlier, Kam, one of the reasons that, that the R one, the rabbit R one, can't be an app is because that's a gatekeeper for them. I mean, you basically have to ask for, for permission to make something cool from the two big gatekeepers on the planet.

Right. And, and for you to only be able to deliver what they want to deliver. They're at, they, they're under the thumb of somebody else. And that, that's just something that I heard the founders say. It's like, I, I, I'm swinging for the fences because [00:51:00] I can, in this way. I can't if I do it through them.

Kam Star: Uh, no, I, yeah, I, I can completely understand that by the, and, you know, I'm, that I, I saw it. I thought that, but I also thought, well, Samsung is gonna be doing this,

There's gonna be devices if, you know, LG is gonna be doing this, all those guys. I wanna go back to the question of authenticity, because I think it, um, it, for me, when I think about the future of designers and the future of creators, um, there is something, and I know it's not, it's not directly related to the, the space of vr, but for me, this is something about design, communicating, design, understanding design, being able to create something that your customer, your client, really wants. And, and I'm, whilst it's feasible. Somebody could automate the entire process of maybe designing a building. Um, I, I'm really doubtful whether that would ever come to fruition [00:52:00] in the way that people pretend that it would.

Um,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Kam Star: because there's something more just giving somebody the ability to write a prompt and have the full set of drawings, uh, and, and the, you know, the building schedule or if it's a, if it's a product, you know, all of the kind of specifications are ready to go and to be printed and and assembled. Um, there's something here about the role of the designer is as, as, not just a conductor, but, I'm struggling to find the right word, but the person, the individual who navigates the design space for you at or with you to arrive at the thing that you actually really want. To tease out and think about it in the process of designing a house for someone. Sure. Maybe at some point I could ask a prompt and say, I've got a land that is this meter or, or here's a aerial photograph. [00:53:00] Create me something. But I, I can't see that being, and maybe, again, I'm showing my age right now. I can't imagine why that would be better than sitting with an architect or sitting with a designer explaining to them the feeling that I want, explaining to them what the things that are really important to me. I. Going through a process, and maybe that process is augmented with ai, and certainly this is some of the tools that we're creating, right, to help you get there faster as a co-pilot. But for the role of the designer, for the creator, they are the conduit. Um, and perhaps they're not always necessarily the original originator, but they're the ones who make sense of what it is the customer wants, the client wants and helps to, to then bring that to bear, um, in, in a design, you know, of course with assistance, which to me is a, again, goes back to this idea of authenticity. Um, like, um, the, another way that I've thought about it is, [00:54:00] um, any fool can, can go and buy a load of clothes and, and stick it on someone, but, you know, not everyone can, can, can actually put together a really good outfit, you know, and, and, and that

Roderick Bates: A really good outfit is one that maybe breaks the rules a little bit too.

Kam Star: right.

Roderick Bates: Um,

I think part of what

Evan Troxel: a lot of architecture is breaking the rules. Right. Like that that's the whole, the, the, the, the building code is something that we are constantly navigating and finding workarounds

Roderick Bates: one ever takes a sitting down. Um, in

the, in the design process. Everything's, everything's negotiated.

And I think what you're describing is almost a bit of a therapist Kam. Right. You know, they're, they're listening to, they're interpreting. Right. And then they're also helping you navigate what are gonna be inherently a series of compromises.

You know, everyone goes in with a BMW, uh, aspiration and a and a Pontiac budget. It's just, there's always an, a mismatch between the

two. And your job is to help them [00:55:00] navigate those. But the other thing that I always thought of when I was in, in practice is that people really should enjoy this process.

'cause the, this might be the most money they'll ever spend on anything,

ever. And, well, yeah, they should have fun. This shouldn't be like pulling teeth or going to the dentist or something like that. This should be something where in fact, they, they enjoy this process 'cause they were paying a lot of money for it.

Evan Troxel: Absolutely. I, I, I agree with, with what you're talking about here because, and I, I guess my question for you both is, do you see a point in time, maybe the near future, uh, where there's a huge backlash against a lot of this AI generated stuff, and, and it's like there's gonna be a push back to authenticity or a stamp or something that says like, this is a hundred percent organic

Roderick Bates: That's what I was saying. It sounds like USDA organic

and you know, I think that there would be, right. I think there's some value in craft. It's like you can buy a knife that's probably just as well [00:56:00] made out of a factory as one that's made by hand. But people are absolutely willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a handmade knife.

Evan Troxel: That's funny that you say that. I just watched a, a YouTube video of a, of a guy who makes $200 knives basically by hand, and, and he's, he blacksmiths it from the beginning to the end, and it's like, yeah, you can buy the $20 one on Amazon. Absolutely you can. It won't fit your hand like this one fits your hand.

It won't, it won't go into the sheath the way this one snaps into the sheath. It won't, it won't hold its edge as long as this one will hold its edge. And there's so many little decisions that were made along the way that were gained through wisdom and experience and, and application of technique over years and years of craft to establish the outcome of this process like there is in a The $20 version on Amazon, and, and it's like once somebody buys that knife, they're never gonna want to use another [00:57:00] kind of knife again.

Roderick Bates: But what

Evan Troxel: not to say that people will want to build another building and work with

an architect again. I

Roderick Bates: that's right for some people once is enough.

But what about when it's indistinguishable? I think that's a little bit of the

challenge too. Uh, when, and I think I still feel like there's an inherent value in craft. I mean, you can buy,

get a print of all sorts of paintings, but there's a, people absolutely value the original.

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

Roderick Bates: Um, it's the same thing with cars. You know, you can get a reproduction Cobra, um, Shelby Cobra, and it's gonna be worth a heck of a lot less than the real deal.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah.

Roderick Bates: And in fact, it might be better than the original.

Evan Troxel: I, I just see that the, there's going to be a kind of an organization of, or a bifurcation of spaces online and in the real world where it's like. Only organic. Right. It's, it's just, this is done by hand. This is, these are things that have been thought of by people. They're not. It's, it's interesting, right?

Because you, you can see communities like the Amish community is an example of this. Not that they totally shun [00:58:00] technology. They, but they study it intensely and then

they only accept technologies that reinforce their values and don't, don't break up the values that they've established as a community.

Those are the ones that stick. Right? And I could see that similarly happening in this space where it's like we, and I think it's really gonna ha show up a lot this year because of the, you know, the elections are coming, we're, we're seeing so much generated content, right. That it's just gonna be like, what's real?

I can't even tell anymore. It's so good. I can't tell if somebody really

Roderick Bates: Yeah. That's, that's terrifying in some ways, right. You know? And so what is your, your best option in that case? I mean, think of, you know, fraud and whatnot as well. Um, it is, it's needless to say, absolutely disconcerting, but I still also think you can't turn your back on on these tools. I mean, they're, they're gonna be there no matter what.

Um, and what we're trying to do is, is, like I was saying before, we're trying to thread that needle and say, okay, how do we take these [00:59:00] tools to help you? become better, a better artist. You know, it's like, okay, we're not trying to replace the crafts of making the knife, we're just trying to help give them, like, say, um, a fan that automatically blows on the, on the, uh, the coals.

You know? So replacing say hand, hand blown bellows or something like that, you know, it's, that's that sort of thing where that's

what we think is Yeah, exactly. crank it in a way. Right?

It's, and if we can do that, then we think that's the ideal compromise. That's the balance that we want to achieve. 'cause then you get the human creativity and maybe the human flaws.

You get the, uh, the nuance of the artist. You get all of that intent and that inspiration, but you get it, um, in a way that people aren't having to waste that inspiration doing things that can be automated. And I

think that's what can happen right now.

Kam Star: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: let's talk about this. Maybe this is the third act of our conversation, which is what, what in which ways is that, do you have a vision for that manifesting? And [01:00:00] I'd love for you guys to talk about whatever you're willing to talk about when it comes to products or ideas or explorations or research, but, but what are those, in those co-piloting kind of things that you're looking at that make sense in expanding or, you know, really diving deeper into the visualization space?

Kam Star: we've, um, tried to, to put at a high level, kind of define three main domains that we're focusing on. And I know three sounded like a lot, but then again, there's a lot of things you could do. Um, the. And these in, in no particular order. But, you know, the first one we're gonna talk about is, is around assets and assets.

You know, creating assets and capturing assets. takes a long time to create an a, a, a very unique asset that be that a, a material or be that a, a particular chair or a table or a, [01:01:00] some kind of a scene or something like that, that you want to, you wanna generate, um, you know, modeling that takes a lot of effort. Creating a material that looks really realistic, that looks as realistic as the real thing. This is what, you know, some of our software is best known for. You use V Rave because you want to have photorealism,

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

Kam Star: guess what? You, you, you can't just, just, just, start rendering because, well, what about the material? You know? And, and,

Roderick Bates: and there's a ton of materials

Kam Star: a ton of materials but you know, the, the, the, complexity of a material take what looks like a, oh, that's just wood. Oh, that's just a flaw. That's just a, you know, parquet floor. Well, if you were gonna create that so it looks photorealistic, you might have 20 or 30 layers. It's not just a texture. It's the ity, it's the bums, it's the interplay of all the different things. It's the idiosyncrasies of the, the, the, the tiling. It's the fact that you,

Roderick Bates: Yeah. How it go butts up against [01:02:00] the edge of the wall properly, so it looks natural. Yeah, it's.

Kam Star: absolutely all of that. Um, and that takes a huge amount of effort where really, as a designer, I just wanted a really good looking wood in the way that, that I was thinking. I don't wanna spend two or three or four hours even as a professional having to create this, 'cause this is just the floor. And of course it needs to look right. But I wanted to focus on the space. Um. So some of the work that we are doing is, is actually very much aligned and we've got a project which is, should be launched this year, um, which is around giving you that ability to be able to create materials just through conversation. But the outcome is not, is not a, is not an image, uh, it's not a black box. You actually get the full material with all its layers, with all its settings. So if you want it a little bit browner, a little bit darker here, a little bit

more, you know,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Roderick Bates: Yeah.[01:03:00]

Kam Star: can tweak it. You can

tweak it to get it exactly where you want, but it'll do 90% of the heavy lifting for you.

Roderick Bates: Yeah, I mean, it's indistinguishable from material that you could have created manually,

if you will, taken hours

Evan Troxel: I was thinking Roderick, when you said there's, there's so many materials. I'm like, yeah. And none of them are right. Right.

Roderick Bates: Yeah. Well, and that's

the part of

where you think of, you know, the conversation, right? And that's the idea. It's like, no, just just a little bit this, a little bit that, and all of a sudden you, it, you're iteration loop is near instantaneous.

Evan Troxel: right?

Kam Star: So that's, that's, that's one of the, one of the spaces. And of course there are others who are working at kind of creating 3D models and things like that. And I think, I think that's also quite interesting. But for us, the thing that our customers were asking for is, can you please cut down the amount of time it takes us to create the material that I want?

To your

point, because the library, Yeah. I don't want that.

But

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

Kam Star: you could start with that and I can then explain

how I want that changed [01:04:00] and evolved. Which is the, you know, the, the, the, the next, the next iteration of this project is you don't even have to start from scratch. You start from something and then you converse to refine it.

and, and augment it. And then you still get back something that you can still control and, and, you know, very fine tune, um, accurately control, um, the, the, and that's, there's, there's a, there's a whole bunch of things in there, but that's, that's one that we, we will be, uh, releasing this year. Another one that we are working on, or rather another space that we're working on generally is what we called, um, intelligent scene or intelligent scene understanding or being able to understand scenes.

Basically providing the use software that can understand the scene that you're creating. Now, why would we wanna do that? Well. [01:05:00] There's quite a few things. If the machine could understand what it is that you're trying to do, or at least you could say to it, Hey, um, this is, this is a kitchen, right? Um, lay out the furniture for me. So it could, it could then in a, you know, kind of a smart way populate the scene for you. And that may come from a set of, um, assets you already have. Or you may, it may be generated, but it, you know, in the first instance we're going with the assets that we there is in the library. So if you wanna set up the kitchen, um, well I've designed the kitchen, but it's gonna put a table in there. It's gonna put a bowl on the table, it's gonna put fruit, you know, in, in the bowl it's gonna put cups and things, it's gonna make it look lived in. And so all of that set dressing, all of that designed to Help you breathe life into that space is done for you. But again, it's, that's not an image. [01:06:00] It's the 3D content.

So then if, you know, the chair's not quite where I want it to be

or this is not exactly where I want, but it, it does all of that heavy lifting of, here we go, we've set it up for you. Do you want this setup or this setup? Okay, I'll start with this setup and then I tweak it. So, and, and that's kinda one application which we're working on in that space though, if once the system can understand, or at least your intent, well, with intelligence and understanding, you could do lighting. Um, create a particular mood. Hey, it takes, you know, you have to be, people go to university and spend years trying to figure out exactly what the perfect lighting is. And I don't mean just for rendering. I mean, back in the real world, you know, lighting design is a, is a thing. It takes a lot of

effort.

Roderick Bates: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kam Star: why why couldn't I say, Hey, I want this kind of a mood and, and for it to, to create me a whole set of different potential options for [01:07:00] me to choose from. Um, and, and then to refine. So again, the outcome is, the outcome is not just a picture on the screen, but actually is your lighting setup. Uh, and now I can refine it. Um.

Roderick Bates: And there's a lot of interest within that of saying, well, can I replicate a particular style of a visual artist or a particular firm that has great renderings and

things like that? So there's an interesting angle that that can go. I mean, there's no one perfect lighting solution, but I think there's a really great way of, in that case, maybe not just, um, improving workflows, making it e um, faster for someone to get to the conclusion, but also even giving someone who, as Kam was saying, it takes a, has a real mastery and actually making that mastery accessible to people that, that simply just wouldn't know how to manipulate the.

Absolute myriad of options that you have, and a pretty sophisticated piece of visualization software like Vray to achieve those, you know, perfect levels of lighting.

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

Kam Star: And you could [01:08:00] also apply it on something that it, we all need to do. And yet, you know, I kind of, it's, it's a, it's fear. Like, you know, hey, anyone can hold Kamera, but can anyone frame a shot? Just the, you know, just having that composition, having the eye to be able to create that composition is what we have.

Professional photographers who spend years experimenting with the perfect framing, with the perfect moment at the perfect angle to capture the, the essence of what it is that they're trying to communicate. And somehow we just expect people to be able to go, yeah, you just put a Kamera in the scene and you just point it at what you want. Um, why, why is that the best outcome? And, and actually I would argue unless the person is, is, is, has some level of skill in being able to pick the right depth of field, pick the right app, you know, not, not the right aperture, but the right lens size, the right. You, you, it's gonna be hit and miss, but why can't that be [01:09:00] something that could be supported and which is another, another project that we're working on to just help you set up Kameras and set up shots in a way that, that deliver interesting composition, um, and Again, make it easier for you to communicate just what you can see. 'cause we can all see, and we can all go, well, that, that looks like a good shot. But really, you know, it takes a real, real specialist

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Kam Star: Yeah, so, so that there's a whole load in there terms

of projects and ideas and things that we're working on. And the third kind of category for us is, and this kind of goes a little bit back to the rabbit one, um, you know, internally we, we, it's for us is intuitive interfaces or intuitive collaborative interfaces. What do we mean by intuitive? I mean, I don't have to remember which screen I have to go to and [01:10:00] which option I have to pick in order to do the thing that I want. I should just be able to intuitively say, uh, I wanna modify this thing or help me do this thing. And there, there, there is an expectation, and this is generally the trajectory is you'll be able to talk to your software in a way that is much more intuitive than navigating a, a, a, a, a very complex menu system. Um, even if it's a simple menu system in order to do something, sometimes we underestimate how much time you're spending just clicking to get to the right thing so that you can then, oh, you know, play with it in order to, you know, that there's a huge amount of time that that takes

and, and an intuitive interface should allow you to just say, Hey, I'm trying to do this. And either it just brings up this, the, the right screen, or ideally it kind of does it for you and just [01:11:00] brings you up the, the only points of control

that, that you need. Um,

Evan Troxel: it's contextual.

in that way. Yeah. It's like recommending, uh, or, or even learning from how things you've done in the past and saying, okay, I've seen this pattern before. Here's probably what's coming next, kind of a thing.

Kam Star: That, That, that, that, is, that would be absolutely amazing to, to, for, to, to, to have the kind of, the history of the way that you interact and to be able to preempt you in a way that doesn't feel, um, intrusive, actually feels quite helpful.

Um, and, and that's, you know, again, we see some of that in the way that maybe if you use the Google Gmail suite is now kind of predicting the next few words that you're gonna say.

So you can just press

tab. Right.

Um, or, or if you tend to respond in the same way. I. And a message comes through, one of the options is the way you talk. Um, but apply that into the, the kind of, into, into the [01:12:00] software, into the interface. And of course that's, those are kind of more application oriented. Um, and that's not to say just using machine learning to improve the visual fidelity, the, the level of noise that you might have in a, on a thing or, you know, and everything around it. Um, we continuously go back to our roots, which is to focus on the workflow. To focus on the workflow. I identified, identified bottlenecks, identify friction points, things that are the works of a specialist. And you know, this year we'll be doing some, we'll bring out some amazing capabilities that allow you to visualize what. Your building does in the real world when it comes to energy use, um, and, and comfort and lighting and all of those [01:13:00] factors at design time in real time. How much carbon is my building using as I'm designing it in real time?

Evan Troxel: Right.

Yeah.

Kam Star: and, and, and these, these are, again, go back to kind of the workflow and the way that, that, what happens today, it's laborious. You design something as an architect, you have to then give it to somebody else to go and analyze it for you. And maybe they'll come back to you two weeks later and give you a number and you have to guess how I'm gonna be able to improve that number. You have no dial that, that, that you can see in real time. If I just turn this building a little bit more or extend this, sunshade it a little bit more, or, or angle this or shorten this, this is the impact I'm gonna have immediate

Roderick Bates: Yeah, I, nevermind communicating that data to those that aren't trained in the field, you know, how do you show a person a, like, I don't know, a chart that represents this energy performance data, and they're saying, I've never seen this before. What does it mean? You know? So

Evan Troxel: I mean, and that kind of information is [01:14:00] so useful. Uh, I mean, it seems like a lot of these things that you're talking about, Kam and, and Roderick go back to helping me as a designer sell design. And there's some designers who are allergic to that concept of, of framing, but at the same, that's what it actually is, right?

And to link data to decisions that were made during the design process because, uh, everybody's been through a really bad VE process. right? It's like, let's delete those sunshades off the building because they're expensive. And it's like, well, actually they're linked to the energy model and the way that the building performs is only possible because of those.

So that's off the table. Right?

And for me

be able

Roderick Bates: need all these pieces at once though, right? You

know, you need how it looks. Um, and you need to know the, the impact on glare and can I actually

experience the glare? 'cause if I show someone sort of a rainbow projection, they'll be like, well, I don't really know. But if you put 'em, say like they look at a view and they can see that every computer's completely washed out and no one's gonna be able to see [01:15:00] anything from eight to 1130 in the morning, then that's a very different deal.

And you can also bring into that a, um, energy intensity and a comfort analysis that's spatially relevant and viewable within a rendering. You know, you have a pretty powerful argument there

Evan Troxel: You do. And, and when that client or that contractor or whoever it is who's questioning says, wow, you thought about that? Like, yep.

That's what we do. That's why you paid us to do this, because we thought about all of that stuff. And if I have a, a copilot helping me along the way that is kind of tallying these things and giving me feedback, like I'm watching the RPM gauge and the speedometer and the oil pressure and when I'm driving, like that

to me is

is.

super valuable.

I think that that's a, it's, it sounds incredible

Roderick Bates: Oh, I we're really excited about this one, honestly. And, uh, it's something that one of the challenges that just like with visualization is that you need to have real quality to it. For it to have value. [01:16:00]

You just can't have telling someone, this is what your energy performance is. That's not backed up by

Uh, a very powerful analysis engine. The proper inputs and things like that, it's meaningless. So one of the things that we're particularly excited about is for that initiative that we partner with an outside entity called IES outta Scotland, and they have a great reputation in the industry. And so we're able to really combine sort of two cla best in class technologies, us and the visualization side.

Um, and then their, them with the, um, the building performance side and then bringing 'em together in a way that maintains our ease of use, um, and our mechanisms for visual communication with sort of their, their computational power when it comes to the building performance analysis. It's a really nice combination.

Evan Troxel: when I saw you demo that. or I don't, I don't know how it's gonna work its way into one when it finally gets released, but when, when I saw that I am particularly interested in it, in the same way that I was interested in what [01:17:00] real-time rendering did to, I. Give designers the ability to use a tool, a new tool to make decisions in their already normal process.

Right? Because if I have the visual fidelity, I understand light and shade and shadow in real time as I'm modeling and making

decisions about heights of walls, locations of things, how big is the aperture for the window to go outside? And I can see the impact of that and, and use that as a tool rather than at the end of a process, which you and I have talked about before,

Roderick, right? Which is, this was a deliverable at the end of a process. Now it's actually front loaded and I'm using it to help me make decisions. The energy part of that is, this is a big deal, right? To be able to use that tool in real time as I'm designing to give me feedback

when it, when it comes to understanding, building performance. And I never thought that would come through a visualization tool, but it makes total sense because that's how, that's the language I speak [01:18:00] is very visual, right?

Roderick Bates: what we figured, right? It's, it's the same language. People speak. Well, I will say that most, we actually went to a lot of different potential technology partners and, and asked them about potentially partner on this. And we were told by all of 'em until we got to is, uh, that this wasn't possible.

Um, so that's how you know you're onto something good when it comes to innovation.

Uh, that's when people say, nah, I can't be done. Sorry. Um, too hard. And so I think what's fun about this one is that, um, we are aligning sort of philosophically with . Um, the, our intent as a software, you know, maintaining that ease of use and what that does all of a sudden is it greatly expands the accessibility of, of the energy performance.

So Kam said, you know, maybe wait two weeks to get back your building performance model. As I can assure you, it's a heck of a lot longer than that usually. And that's the, the beauty of something like this is now we're making it just like with rendering, where you used to have to send it out to potentially a outside specialist firm.

Um,

maybe it was just so complicated. You only did it once for a phase, [01:19:00] you know, for like sort of the, the big thing to get the donors on board, if you will, for the project or something like that. You know, now you can do it iteratively and all of a sudden that changes, right? It changes the nature of what visualization means in design is that it's actually a tool for all the little decisions you have to make as opposed to just sort of a, a big fade of complete.

And same thing with building performance, you know, now it's not just like, well, that's where we landed.

Tough deal.

Evan Troxel: now, let's justify it.

Roderick Bates: Yeah, exactly

Evan Troxel: Pros, justification.

I, I mean, I, and really it takes, it takes tools like this. I think there would be people who will be nervous about this because, um, it, it, to our point earlier about it, democratizing it and it just becomes table stakes. Everybody's gotta do this in this regard.

That's, this is a really huge benefit for the entire industry to get tools like this informing the design as they go along. I don't have to send it out. I don't have to wait two weeks. I get the feedback immediately. I know if that decision is good or bad immediately, and we can move forward [01:20:00] and use that tool to make our buildings better immediately.

I think that that is the kind of thing that, that . Shouldn't scare anybody. And the democratization of tools like this is really gonna help the industry move forward in meaningful ways very quickly.

Roderick Bates: But we don't want to. Just like with ai, right? We don't want to take away people's jobs, um, here, right? We wanna preserve certain knowledge that aspects of the industry have. Um, and engineers in particular, you know, they're incredibly knowledgeable. The great thing about partnering with IES is that they have an outstanding engineering grade analysis tool.

And so we use the same engine

as they use in their tool. Um, and we also use the same inputs. We just happen to package them up into template files that are sort of presorted, if you will, um, with . A more limited array of manipulation for a particular context. But what's really fascinating is it opens up a particularly unique workflow where an [01:21:00] engineer that's using the IES sort of professional grade software, the I-E-S-V-E software, can actually create one of these template files for the project that they're doing for their sort of certification level analysis.

And they can actually share that with the architect as an input for the analysis that they're performing in real time and scape. And so all of a sudden now it opens up an opportunity where your building performance analysis and scape can happen in real time at the same fidelity and using the same assumptions and inputs and things like that as the engineering level model, which that's never happened before.

And

I think what's great about that is it preserves the expertise of the engineer, um, but brings that same level of quality of real time to the architect.

Evan Troxel: And it, and

it gives that engineer when it ends up back on their desk later, some assurance that it's gonna be

Roderick Bates: Well, it's more than some assurance, right? You know, it's

yeah.

Evan Troxel: [01:22:00] right? Exactly.

Roderick Bates: Yeah.

Kam Star: And this is, this is, this is so, um, it, it may, maybe it's implied in our conversation. Uh, but this is so much more than just justifying our design. This is our imperative to make sure that we build

a world that uses less energy. That, that

we, we address the, the, the real, uh, it's more than an elephant, right?

It's the entire zoo that's in the room, which is, which is climate change and the, the, the impact of, of the, uh, greenhouse gases that, that are having on our planet and will continue to do so, certainly for the remainder of my life. Um, and, and whatever it is that we can do to address this in, in, in, as, as in as many ways as possible. Um, and having tools like this will are certainly going to have a huge impact on being able to Make better decisions,

not just for the, not just for the, design, for the, for the architect, but for the planet. And I know that

sounds really [01:23:00] grandiose, but really that is what it is, right?

And, and it

Evan Troxel: Making better decisions sooner only helps the process. Like making a great decision late in the game that has to undo or redo a bunch of stuff is not, it's cost a lot of money to do that,

right? And so,

Roderick Bates: but the, but how do you make those decisions, right? It's not just the data, it's how that data is presented, how that story is told. And what's great is that scape is already used to tell that visual story and that we're one of the key components we'll be launching with is that visual story. One of those visual stories you can tell now is not just how it looks in a purely aesthetic term, but within that same environment, how it performs.

Uh, so you can see in a building, you know, the same rendered view, say, you know, where are your energy hotspots?

You know, where are my problem areas? Where are things great? Where are people comfortable? Where are they uncomfortable? Um, it makes it a much easier to essentially sell, because at the end of the day, someone's writing a check for all of this

Evan Troxel: right.

Roderick Bates: and Right.

And if they don't understand the data, they don't understand the story that you're telling [01:24:00] them. Then how are you gonna get them to, to go along with a certain decision that you're trying to advocate?

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up about that because the, the, the data presentation is one thing, but the, the way it's, it can be communicated and, and ultimately understood

is where the rubber meets the road, right? Because if, if you can't build it, it doesn't count, right? , it's

just paper architecture. And, and the point here is to build better buildings. And so

I, I'm surprised to see tools like this coming from a visualization company and, and, uh, I shouldn't be surprised because of the people I'm talking to because you, you're thinking much bigger about the problem and the challenges than, than we've ever experienced before.

I know that there's, there's a lot of people in our industry who are wicked smart and, and doing the, the same caliber type of thing that you're doing. I'm, I'm really excited to see that coming from you and I,

it's coming from an unexpected place, but I'm, I'm happy that it's coming at all.

Roderick Bates: I think it's coming from the place that had the hardest problem to solve. , which was that visual side, you know, how do you tell the [01:25:00] story with this data? Um, there's a lot of, of, there's a lot of different tools out there and, and energy analysis. And the biggest difference among them is sort of a, the, the, well it's the calculation engine, obviously, but it's also, um, how complex or like what kind of user interface you might have.

I mean, some of them are just spreadsheets, right. you

know, some of them are,

Evan Troxel: It's like flying at 7 47. Yeah.

Roderick Bates: exactly. So I think that what we are, what, why it's coming from a company like us and why I think it had to is that we just brought this imperative of ease of use and visual communication

that you just wouldn't see from sort of a, um, an engineering, um, energy model first company.

Kam Star: And, you know, our, our, our, driving force is, you know, to, to really focus on workflow and, and to democratize, you know, make things that are for specialist as easy to use for designers so that, so that they can really [01:26:00] leverage it in their decision making process and, and to focus on the workflow. And this is this, of course, it's, it's easy to say, well now we know, of course it's obvious, but this is, this is the approach.

Look at the workflow. And identify elements of friction, identify pieces where you think, oh, well that's a real specialist. To Rod's earlier point, I have to send this off for someone to do the visualization.

I have to send it off to someone to calculate this piece

I have to send.

Evan Troxel: talk about loss of

Kam Star: that,

Evan Troxel: right?

Kam Star: every time we hear that and we see that the kind of ears prick up, hang on a minute, can this be made so that you can, you can flex it as a part of your design experience.

I mean, you know, and it's, um, maybe this is, maybe this is, this is because, and I, and I know, I mean, mean the company of friends, but you know, maybe this is the architect in me, uh, kind of looking at our profession over the last [01:27:00] decades and, and, and maybe longer. And seeing how it went from the architect who Um, had complete control over that ev every component, the, the structure, the design, the, the every piece to it becoming compartmentalized into a series of very narrowly defined disciplines. So the architect is now no longer in charge of the structure, in charge of the services, in charge of the lighting, in charge of the material?

No, no. It's just no longer, you know, it's kind of, and then, and then they're looking back at technology and going, hang on, can we just bring some of this back into the design so that we can really flex what a building looks like, feels like? Um, and, and perhaps even how it's built as we're designing, as we're thinking about the design itself. Um, that that'll be an awesome outcome. Just, just then, you know, uh, I'm, I, I'm not making [01:28:00] apologies, but that would be a great thing as an architect, seeing tools that really help somebody make better decisions from the multifaceted angle that we have historically have meant to have,

and, you know, uh,

should

Evan Troxel: it's a cohesive solution,

right? It's not just Yeah. A a a bunch of parts that have been stuck together because, so, I mean, if, if you have that, you know, we, we've used the term all over, you know, for decades and decades about the master builder, but this idea of somebody who is the orchestrator. And that could be a team of a small team of people, or it could be a person, but it's, it's that kind of thinking to bring the level of craft of really making sure all those puzzle pieces fit together. Exactly like how

they, they intend.

Roderick Bates: And maybe to bring it down to the sad reality too, of calling back some fee because that's the other side of it that's, that's, that's been hurting, uh,

Evan Troxel: worth something. Right, right. Well, gentlemen, I appreciate you sharing these visions with [01:29:00] us and sharing a bit of the roadmap of, of things that are to come and maybe some unexpected things that are, that are gonna be coming. Uh, I, I appreciate you taking that time to spend with and, and elaborate on the things that we were talking about at Autodesk University with the audience here, because we didn't get to record that one.

So that's the whole point of, of doing this is to, to bring it to a wider audience. And, and it's been fantastic hanging out with you guys today. I, I'm gonna provide links to everywhere that people can find you, so they can connect with you online, uh, on LinkedIn to your website, places like that, where they can find out more

Roderick Bates: And chaos. Next of course, um, is chaos.com/next is the particular website where you'll find a lot of our AI initiatives.

Evan Troxel: Nice. Nice. All right. Well that'll go in the show notes as well. So Kim and Roderick, thank you so much for spending time with me today. It's been great.

Kam Star: So much.

Roderick Bates: Oh, our pleasure.

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Veras, the AI-Powered Rendering ToolBenjamin Guler of EvolveLab joins the Confluence podcast to talk about Veras, the AI rendering tool for Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Vectorworks, and most recently Autodesk Forma that is used for creating stunning architectural diffusion-based visualizations.

Ben takes us behind the scenes to give us a glimpse into its unique features, its development process, and the team's ambition to further innovate it.

Episode Sponsor🚀*Chaos
For a limited time, get a 20% discount on Fixed and Floating Annual License of Enscape. Head to https://chaos-enscape.com and use code RES24 at checkout to supercharge your design workflow.Episode Links Ben on LinkedIn * Ben on Twitter * EvolveLab website * EvolveLab forums * EvolveLab on LinkedIn * EvolveLab on Twitter * EvolveLab on Instagram * Confluence NYC event details * Brooks’ Law * Ben on TRXL 131: ‘It’s Prompting Us’, with Benjamin Guler

Watch this episode on YouTubeConfluence S1E11 - Veras, the AI-Powered Rendering ToolBenjamin Guler of EvolveLab joins the show to talk about Veras, the AI rendering tool for Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Vectorworks, and most recently Autodesk For…YouTubeSubscribe on YouTubeListen to this episode

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Timothy Halvorson joins the podcast to talk about the challenges of technology implementation in firms. He shares his experiences in both traditional and tech-focused roles in the AEC industry, and underlines the importance of understanding people, processes, and the potential of technology. We also touch upon the struggle of change in firms, the evolving role of a BIM manager, the role of AI in creativity and efficiency, the importance of automating low level tasks, the role of standards in a firm, the shift to cloud-based software, and the complexity of modern software. Timothy also introduces his new venture, 7fold.io, aimed at bridging the gap between academia and commercial practice, providing tailored solutions and strategies to people and firms interested in digital transformation.

Episode links:* Timothy on LinkedIn * Timothy’s YouTube channel * 7Fold website * 7Fold on LinkedIn * 7Fold on Instagram

About Timothy Halvorson:Timothy is an expert technologist in the AEC industry, trained in architecture since starting practice in 2013. His passion is to unlock designer's creative potential, expression, and efficiency through harnessing the best tools available in the market today. His daily obsession is to catalyze innovation in the hearts & minds of curious creatives like you all listening!

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Twitter * Threads * Mastodon * Email

Watch this episode on YouTube:150: ‘Embracing Change’, with Timothy HalvorsonTimothy Halvorson joins the podcast to talk about the challenges of technology implementation in firms. He shares his experiences in both traditional and tec…YouTube

Episode Transcript: 150: ‘Embracing Change’, with Timothy Halvorson
Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. And before we get into this episode, if you're a regular listener and are enjoying them, please use the subscribe button on both YouTube and in your preferred podcast app to let me know, you're a fan of the show. Your subscription is incredibly valuable in supporting my efforts. And I genuinely hope that you find these conversations that are published here, enriching for yourself and valuable for the AEC industry, being a subscriber, which is completely free. Directly influences two things.
My ability to attract sponsors that help keep the show going and my ability to attract high profile guests, which is great for you. My goal is to deliver quality episodes, to provide value to you and the industry as a whole. So if you haven't subscribed, I encourage you to do so. As I mentioned, it's free and a great way [00:01:00] to support TRXL okay today.
I welcome Timothy Halvorson to the podcast. Timothy is an expert technologist in the AEC industry, trained in architecture since starting practice in 2013. His passion is to unlock designers, creative potential expression, and efficiency through harnessing the best tools available in the market today.
His daily obsession is to catalyze innovation in the hearts and minds of curious creatives. Like you, who are listening to this. In this episode, we discussed the challenges of technology implementation in firms and Timothy shares his experiences in both traditional and tech focused roles in the AEC industry and underlines the importance of understanding people, processes, and the potential of technology we touch upon the struggle of change in firms, the evolving role of a BIM manager. The role of AI and creativity and efficiency, the importance of automating low-level tasks, the role of standards in a firm. The shift to cloud-based [00:02:00] software and the complexity of modern software. Timothy also introduces his new venture 7fold aimed at bridging the gap between academia and commercial practice, providing tailored solutions and strategies to people in firms, interested in digital transformation. This was a fantastic conversation with Tim and I hope you'll not only find value in it for yourself, but that you'll help add value to the profession by sharing it with your network. I've been working on getting more representation from the practice side on the podcast. And I believe it's an important point of view to highlight in this conversation of tech and AEC.
So without further ado, I bring you Timothy Halvorson.

Evan Troxel: I am joined today by Timothy Halvorson.
Welcome to the podcast. great to have you.
Timothy Halvorson: Thanks for having me, Evan. It's great to be here.
Evan Troxel: I'm very interested in our conversation today because I've been [00:03:00] wanting to get solid representation on the show of people who have
been working in the practice of architecture and getting that perspective because the audience, I think, is pretty well distributed across the industry in a EC, but also I think mostly on the tech side and mostly in
the delivery of technology side. And then there's this whole audience of people who are like, yeah, yeah, I've experienced that. Me too, uh, who have been working in it, but
I've been a little. Behind on getting those kinds of people on the podcast to actually get those conversations, more exposure. And I've
lived it. You've lived it
and I'm excited to have this conversation
today.
Timothy Halvorson: me too. Let's get into it. I'm so excited.
Evan Troxel: Well, let's talk about you first and you journey and, and how you've gotten to where you are in the practice side
of architecture.
Timothy Halvorson: Yeah, so I guess a little back background story. So [00:04:00] I, uh, grew up in Minnesota, but I went to school in North Dakota State. Shout out bison, uh, was got my master's degree there, so it was a four plus one degree, and then did two internships, BWBR in St. Paul, and then HGA down in Rochester, Minnesota, got exposure to the Mayo Clinic, et cetera.
And then jumped full time into professional practice, traditional architecture out at HDR in San Francisco. Um, and that was, saw everything from concept to completion. Um, you know, got on some inter interesting international projects doing healthcare hospital expansions. And from day one really. Was doing both Revit, rhino and Grasshopper in conjunction.
So it wasn't just Revit or just Rhino. Uh, our school definitely emphasized that and so hit the ground running. Um, what's interesting is in the mix, you know, challenges with thesis, I sort of struggled my way through learning Grasshopper. And right, in 2015, starting my professional career, I also published 24 videos in two months on a YouTube channel.
[00:05:00] Sort of made the videos I wish somebody had given me. And that's prompted my whole content education journey, um, kind of in parallel to traditional practice. And, you know, lots of interesting projects we can dive deeper on. But I had an opportunity to work, uh, doing some standardization on a certain account for a healthcare, uh, system, doing a lot of Kita parts, deep Revit family work, et cetera.
Um, standardizing data room, data sheets, et cetera. And then saw a couple projects through construction administration. Fast forward to present day. I did a year working on, uh, the construction side of the business. That was kinda my first exposure with a team of 15 to 16 computational designers doing deep, uh, light gauge, ornamental steel, uh, fabrication, all in rhino grasshopper.
And then, you know, so saw that kind of model based delivery connection so you could actually, you know, we were the razor's edge in the model and then tolerance to assemble it and build it was from the, the other teams downstream. [00:06:00] So that was really impactful to see how to collaborate in that, that way.
Um, and then once, uh, you know, COVID hit 2020, uh, sort of automated my way out of a job there. Then, um, got the opportunity to go to Gensler as a dedicated design technologist. So back on the design side of the equation. And was in the southwest region. So I served 850 designers, a thousand people in six offices, and got exposed to, you know, 20 to 24 practice area types.
And so that really opened up all the different, just getting exposure to the different types of design, all the challenges with schedule, you know, teams. And then trying to mix in, um, how do we, you know, get more building science simulations, you know, sustainability, that kind of simulation we woven into the process.
So I spent about half my time for two years really going deep on the simulation software and again, navigating how to introduce that and integrate it to the design [00:07:00] process without being overly disruptive to how people exist worked. So we can definitely dive deeper on that as well. And, uh, so now I'll just wrap up with sevenfold.
That's my, my own business trying to bring to the industry, uh, you know, consulting services to help drive digital transformation. And self-paced courses to upskill, uh, everybody. That's the goal.
Evan Troxel: Nice. I'm particularly interested in the implementation part because you, like you said, you came from kind of this
background doing ornamental metal steel fabrication where you're working with a
really specific part of the industry and really like becoming an expert in that. And then
you're moving into design and design technology and design technology implementation and try, like you said, not trying not
to disrupt the way people were working and, and there's this weird balance working in a firm of trying
to navigate [00:08:00] that, right?
Because I think. So we met at the Confluence conference in Orange County. Right. And this, and, and the, the topics that were being talked about there were ai it's, it's very cutting edge, you know,
leading edge stuff, topics and excitement in a EC around these. And then there's the actual practice side, which is having to potentially change the way they work to use these new tools.
And that is disruptive when everybody's focus is
on the project deadline.
And that has never changed. Right. And so that the, the, the difference between innovation and adoption
is only getting bigger and bigger because more and more technology is being
developed and released all the time.
Timothy Halvorson: mm-Hmm
Evan Troxel: Our attention spans are getting shorter, and yet the, the goal of the practitioner has, has never changed, which is, I just have to deliver this project.
And it's. it's. It is disruptive when, and, and I
[00:09:00] think there's a, a fatigue around that in firms for, for a majority of people. In firms. Not everybody. 'cause there's certain
people who are just wired in a firm to constantly be looking at
and trying new things and that's how they operate. But for the most part, it's not like that at all.
And they just
see it as like, seriously, another one. Right? Are you kidding me? Why is there even a new version
of whatever program every single year? Can we just have a break? Right?
And can we just like, settle in and deliver on what we already know how to do really
well? And so there's this battle that's raging inside firms and you've worked in one of the largest firms and I'm really curious to hear your experience from that side of things because how, how do you balance. Bringing in new ways of working that are potentially way better, way more efficient, way more data rich, which
has its own [00:10:00] implications as we
move down the pipeline. Right. Versus this like, stop, just stop. I don't need another way to do this. Or I don't need a new way to do this because my deadline is Friday.
Right? So I would love to,
I just spit out a lot there. But I know you've lived this and you've lived this in much more recent history than I even have, and because I know how hard it was from a leadership standpoint to get teams to adopt technology, but you're working much more boots
on the ground in the firm. What, what are your experiences there? Because I, what I really want
to get outta this conversation is I want technology providers to really, truly understand what it's like to work in a firm. Because a lot of times they're coming at it from the
outside. They may have a history of working in a EC. Most of them don't maybe.
Uh, and, and
so just what is it actually like from an implementation and usage standpoint on a day to day of
the life of an architect?[00:11:00]
Timothy Halvorson: Yeah. Small question. I mean,
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Small que just, just pick, just if you could just answer that really quickly,
Timothy Halvorson: Yeah.
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Timothy Halvorson: Um,
Evan Troxel: complex and it's nuanced, so, so I think you could pick anywhere to start off and let's, let's
jump into this conversation.
Timothy Halvorson: I'll start here. It's, you know, how do you get into a design technology role? You know, I get asked that question a lot. Well, you sort of, people with interest, curiosity, that knack for 1% better.
They have that investigative curious mind. They get better and better at the tools and next thing you know, they're sort of, okay, you're a really good doer of using the tools, but are now we're gonna throw you into leadership, which is people not tools
Evan Troxel: skillset. Yeah.
Timothy Halvorson: And I think that's the inherent challenge is navigating the internal psychology and emotions around change, which gets right back into change management, you know?
And so it's not just. Technology and change. It's, it's the broader, you know, everyone's struggling with this. And so [00:12:00] I was surprised how much time I thought about how people learn and how people think and how that's different than myself. So there's never a waste of time, uh, when you deeply understand the people that you're trying to serve, how they wanna work, not how you prefer to work.
And if you're trying to impose something on them, eventually it's gonna kick back. And so having, you know. In terms of technology providers. And that's part of my job was actually, if I'm talking to the principal in charge, I would teach technology in terms of managing client's expectations. If it's talking to a design manager, I'm talking in terms of staff scope, fee and schedule.
Uh, if I'm talking to a design director, it's design intent and expression. What's the vision? And if it's someone doing the modeling effort, it's the buttons and the workflows and the small sized bite sized deliverables. So in a weird way, I was operating like a project manager, but like specific to the workflows of technology to get to a deliverable.[00:13:00]
And that was one thing that we can come back to maybe if you want, but it's, it's enhancing that kind of managing up conversation from the people who are boots on the ground, as you mentioned, doing the work, giving them the language so that they can set better expectations and not burn out. But we can circle back on that.
Um, in terms of just being on the inside though, you know, the pace of change has to slow down. You're, you're completely right. Um. You know, just when we sort of had it all figured out in humming 2023 hit and AI was sort of publicly released, even though people who were in the inside knew AI was sort of brimming, they just decided, okay, this is the year it's all coming out.
And you know, being architects, we go with the shiny object syndrome. And I've heard that when I was in San Francisco for four years, talked to enough startups and there's this quick kind of spike of adoption and then people realize, how do I actually use this? And what is the actual ROI? And I think that's the pros and cons of architects.
They're sort of really, we're really quick to pick something up new, but then, [00:14:00] you know, it's sort of getting excited about the emotion, the possibility, and assuming that it immediately makes an impact towards differentiating my practice from everybody else. And that's really what I, I've been trying to nurture is the value-based conversation.
So it's not just picking up the latest tool, going faster and more efficient. It's saying, how does this extend and enhance my or our firm's unique creative voice? And so when it comes to data, I started to pick up this term, you know, data informed or design led, data informed. I used to talk about data driven design, which sort of assumes that the data is one, making all the decisions and the designers sort of put in the backseat, which is a fallacy in my mind.
You know, we need to get better about understanding the data we're given and how that relates to our decision making. So how am I allowing that to inform my process? Which, [00:15:00] you know, some things are subjective, some things are objective, and I think people who are very technically oriented want the data to, to decide everything for them.
That's a mistake. Um, I see that with, in my mind when I hear, I think of like the in quotes, you know, true engineering mind, which sort of says I'm gonna build the perfect product and people should just know it works and it's the best because of all the things happening out of the hood. And yet the first user shows up and they can't even get past the user interface 'cause it's so cryptic, right?
So there's that line to walk, like it may be beautifully bundled from the person who made it, but you know, how usable is it? How intuitive is it? So there's always that line to walk again on how people's people navigate visuals and, you know, the whole UX psychology. Um, but I, I found just cultivating the conversation, you know, I call it creating the mental model.
We, we do with digital models all the time. But if I can't [00:16:00] imagine where I'm going, what I'm trying to achieve, it's not trying to be deterministic with your approach, but it's saying. We need to go in this direction and these are the important pieces, right? Am I measuring my carbon footprint or am I trying to balance the budget time and schedule or, you know, all these factors we have to deal with.
So the, the, the fundamental nature is that architects are getting pulled in every direction more than ever before. I personally see the opportunity if we wanted to as architects to return more design build scope, where it's kind of done all in-house end to end if they wanted to. Um, the technology's there, which could simplify the process.
Um, 'cause then you have less people involved or less, less room for playing telephone, you know, or the opposite where you actually have a true seamless model to model exchange. And we do fully embrace digital twin technology, and that is the source of truth. And [00:17:00] we understand the implications of. Really robust, high quality, fully vetted data that composes our models, you know, and I think both can exist in the design world today.
So,
Evan Troxel: The problem is people, Timothy, the problem
is people right there, right? Because like,
and and you've experienced this, right? Like you have this vision of what the true potential of the digital
twin, uh, ecosystem
throughout the entire process could be. And then once again, I'm just gonna probably end up, keep coming back to this, which, which is my incentive
is to hit the deadline on Friday. And so therefore I take shortcuts to make sure that happens because my job, my bonus, my
salary actually depends on that. It actually depends on not implementation and like true precision in the process and making sure that this data is useful later on for somebody else, for me, for the client. Because like, honestly, the thing that [00:18:00] actually matters is we have to deliver the
project on time, on budget,
right?
So
Timothy Halvorson: I can come back to that. I
Evan Troxel: that is hard. It is hard because you can't, it's hard to enforce, especially in a big firm. I mean, and I guess that's kind of
another thing I would love to hear about from your experience is how, how do you get people on board? How, how did you sell that vision? Because I think it is kind of a selling at some point.
Like it's, you're doing marketing and promotion of a process within a firm for a better outcome. Um, because it does go in opposition to the incentives of, right. My,
my how it affects
me as a person who does the work. If I'm the person who's driving the machine at, at,
at, in the office.
Timothy Halvorson: Yeah, that, that, uh, people are quick to identify people who are trying to drive change and they'll label 'em and put 'em in a box. And so [00:19:00] there is that variable. I swapped out the word sales for persuasion.
Evan Troxel: There you go.
Timothy Halvorson: it people have a
certain connotation with a salesperson
Evan Troxel: Sales is dirty.
Yes. Right.
Timothy Halvorson: It's like these vendors who were trying to get on my calendar just get away.
You know? I don't know. But
Evan Troxel: I think designers
are allergic to the word sales too, even though they're selling design. Right.
So, yeah, I, I agree with what you're
saying
Timothy Halvorson: But that unfortunately that was part of it. I had to get into semantics and be like, okay, this is getting a visceral reaction. This is opening the door to the conversation. And you'd have to read that in real time. Like, I couldn't. Book a meeting and then read it. And I started to learn.
Over time you have enough conversations, you realize the number one question out of everyone's mouth first is, I don't have any time. I don't have time. And in prepping for this conversation, I realized it's not that you don't have time, it's that you're not making time because it's not. And we're such creatives.
I'm like, we should, we love making things. [00:20:00] Why don't we
Evan Troxel: That's a mindset. It is a
mindset. Yeah.
Timothy Halvorson: And, but you see, how am I finding those little slivers of opportunity for the 1%, 5% of my time? I'm making time for coffee, I'm making time for happy hour and making time for chatter with my friends at the office. And if we are more decentralized in hybrid, how am I buying back that time?
Because I'm more productive at home 'cause I'm not as distracted. Why don't I reinvest that in?
Getting more skilled in my technology. Right? So how we reinvest the time we're buying back shouldn't immediate. I, I think we need to have a slice of that that goes to research and development while we're staying profitable.
And I like to joke with people. I made a full-time living, pausing folks when they would say the word just because, so right On the other side of it, there was this sort of, you know, okay, here's the shortcut. The they don't have enough information. They don't have time to, in their mind, to take to research and find the right solution.
Again, write in quotes, because what is best [00:21:00] practice? I mean, it could literally be different on a per practice area basis. And that was something I had to learn. Going from a place that was maybe three, four practice areas to 24 to 26 practice areas. There's very different timelines, very different constraints.
You know, the team's, three people, that's a different animal than someone that's 250 people. And so going global on a 24 hour clock versus everyone's in the office. That's a whole different dynamic, you know? Um, so it's just interesting how we, on one side, the bigger you get, the more you have to enforce communication protocols and points of contact, et cetera.
But I think, you know, really that point, am I making time? And we should have better conversations around what's the priority? What's the trade-offs, how are we, you know, delegating the work amongst the team and not just, okay, this is the work you have to do. It's like people have a vision to the jobs they want to grow into.
So then as long as they're getting that growth path [00:22:00] as part of their work, they'll roll up their sleeves and do the stuff they have to do. You know, they'll make the time for that. And that's what I'm constantly thinking about is how to kind of pair up tutorials and resources and thought processes that break it down to be small enough.
It's not abstract, it's concrete, it's actionable. And it's tied to the latest and best technologies. And that's the goal is being, you know, I'm not trying to sell sevenfold at all, but like the goal is that eventually is helping facilitate that third conversation, which is practice innovation, you know, for the whole industry.
Because people will sort of figure something out and then keep it locked away in their firm. And then the rest of the, you know, rest of the industry maybe suffers 'cause they haven't caught up. And then 10 years go by. I, you know, I, I'm tired of that being the case and I think we need better incubators to research this.
anyway, so lots of thoughts on that. But again, you, you have to get really comfortable sort of recognizing that the same series of questions always come out of people's [00:23:00] mouths. And so you don't just dismiss it and say, well you should do the best technology. 'cause just because it's important and it's the best and it's the latest, it doesn't work.
You have to recognize that there's real constraints So if you can qualify and say, Hey, I'm asking for one hour of your time. We're gonna do this study. This is the outcome you can expect here. You know, I'll train the person, this is who will do it. And then moving forward you can reuse that.
So the time you're investing once can be not spent on the next project. And so you find ways to break it down super small. And then over time you establish that trust and then you don't waste the trust that you build with with people. So then when you recommend something, they actually listen to you. So it's really very relational.
Very relational.
Evan Troxel: I wanna go back to something you said earlier about speaking
different languages depending on who you were talking to and, and I don't think you said it just like that, but Right. It is a different vocabulary or a a point of view that they have. So [00:24:00] somebody in project management is
going to think a certain way and someone in leadership is gonna, they have different things that they're concerned about, so they're gonna think a different way.
And somebody who is in design technology, somebody who is just in project, not
just somebody who is in project delivery, right? They're, they're doing different pieces of the, they're, they're a, a
unique piece of the puzzle that the puzzle needs all the pieces, but you're a bridging the gap between all those pieces potentially when you're talking about training and technology and, and making sure that the data. Is uncorrupted across the, the time, the
timeline, as it touches each one of those people, and in different ways. It's sometimes simultaneously, so sometimes in
parallel, sometimes in serial, and, and it is complex and nuanced, but where did you learn how to speak to different people in different ways? Like where does that, you noticed that, first of all, that it was needed, and then how did you
develop that skill?
Timothy Halvorson: I bought a textbook. No, I'm just [00:25:00] kidding.
Evan Troxel: yeah. Which book. is that? I, I'll write down.
Timothy Halvorson: yeah. Yep. No, my book. No, I'm just kidding. Um, it's funny because I think there's this, you have to give yourself permission to get in there and get messy. Um, I think we have to lay our egos aside, really seek to listen, understand, ask better questions, you know, makes making safe.
It's all these psychology things. Make a safe space to hear somebody and then yeah, you have to work at understanding it. It doesn't just happen. You can't just bump heads and you get it. It's like people have different priorities and so, you know, we all, it's a team sport and I don't want to go off on a team.
I'm a huge sports fan and, uh, you know, former athlete before I got into college. But like, we're playing a team sport. It's not just one architect. We, and we know there's hundreds if not thousands of people that touch our projects from concept two completion and occupancy. And so the more we can appreciate the fact that everyone's bringing something to the table, the more we [00:26:00] can say, okay, where's my, how am I interfacing with that team?
Because not only am I understanding my role, but hopefully it sparks a better conversation on the role I can grow and want to grow into. And so now there's hope and incentives. So I'm, like I mentioned earlier, roll up my sleeves to do the things I have to do because I'm, I'm positioning myself in the direction I wanna take my career.
And people can get really stifled. I think there's a huge attrition problem, which I won't talk too long on, but because they don't feel like they're being invested in, they feel like they're being pigeonholed. And so, you know how to inter, how to interface, how to collaborate. We use this word a lot, but it's actually asking better questions, so I'm getting the right information out, you know?
And so the point is, is it goes all the way back to just. Uh, you know, like it could be as easy as Googling more specific questions so you get more specific answers. So, how do I ask a good question or a good query? You know, now we're [00:27:00] calling it prompt engineering with ai, but okay, if I'm aiming that in an AI engine, that's one source, what if I ask better questions?
Who is subject matter expert at my firm? 'cause they've got 25, 30, 50 years of experience, maybe I'm gonna get a higher quality answer if I approach them right? And so we need to understand where is my source? What is a higher quality source versus a lower quality source? What's a better question versus not a, you know?
And so then over time you start to realize, okay, this person in their functional role. Is caring mostly about scope, fee and schedule. And you can make some general generalizations 'cause they're just operating in that day to day. And then you get, after the operations, you get into the specific personality, uh, and the specific practice area type.
So, you know, people on bigger projects are a bit more rigid and a bit more, you know, kind of train, train master. Everything's on time and budget and everything's clicking along. Smaller projects, it's much more nuanced and go with the flow [00:28:00] and so you just kinda learn over time. It literally just comes with repetition.
Um, I, I wish I could say you could go to a textbook and watch a webinar, but you just have to, you know, I've spent more time studying personal development and psychology with my, with architecture in mind. You know, the craft, the actual doing of the work. But it's really team dynamics and how people think and create.
So the more I studied that, the more it became easier to just navigate this on the fly.
Evan Troxel: I think that's the kind of
thing that leaders need to pay attention to is who are the people who
are doing what you're talking about? Because a lot of times a technical role in a firm.
Doesn't have those skills. The person, not the role, the person who is filling that role oftentimes doesn't have those skills. And then when technology implementation, I mean, enforcement happens, right?
It's, it is not welcomed. There's [00:29:00] no empathy there, there's no, like the things that you're talking about, like being a psychologist and trying to understand
how this is going to land with that person
based on their persona, their role, their incentives, their deadlines, what they actually do on the pro.
Like you're, you're trying to figure all that out
so that your message lands with them is very different than somebody who's just like
the BIM police, right? Who,
Timothy Halvorson: Mm-Hmm.
Evan Troxel: you know what I mean? And, and, and I think a lot of times leaders are not thinking about the role that you're talking about
being really human.
It has to be really relationship driven because. To build trust, to build relationships over time. I, it takes the kind of understanding, and I didn't learn this from a book, I didn't learn it by asking Google questions or chat GPT questions, which is probably a pretty, pretty interesting way to do it. I, I think now you could, you could ask chat GPT for example, [00:30:00] to build personas within a firm and then coach you on how you could come up with questions to, to get what you need outta them.
I think that
there's some pretty interesting potential there. But for me it was by
being in the trenches, by working on projects, by being a designer and having to work with clients and multi-headed stakeholder groups and community involvement and, and just learning how to talk to people. I mean, working in the service industry is a great primer to
when you just have to deal.
Like I
worked in an Apple store for two years.
Timothy Halvorson: mm-Hmm
Evan Troxel: There were people who would come into the Genius Bar and they would be the nicest people ever, because they just wanted help. And they knew if they turned on the charm, they were gonna get better service. And then there were the, the assholes. Right. And it was just like
the, the the geniuses who worked at the Genius
Bar had to be able to deal with all
those and take it in stride and have a thick skin when they needed to so that they didn't piss [00:31:00] off the client.
But,
but you learn that in the trenches and, and, uh, me working my way up through design, I learned how to work with people. I learned how to communicate. I learned how to change my vocabulary like you were talking about earlier,
depending on who I was talking to, to really connect them to what we were doing and not talk
over them or beyond them, because then they're, they're out.
If, if you do that,
they're out. They're, they, their eyes glaze over, they pull out their phone, they start getting distracted by something else intentionally, because I. You're not talking
to them, you're talking at them or over them. Right? And so all of those things are something that leadership should be, these qualities are things
that leadership should be looking for in their technologists because their technologists are driving the
future potential of their company, right?
Because the future potential is largely driven by technology and implementation of it
at the human level within their firms. And so these [00:32:00] things, they're, you have to operate at
that
intersection.
Timothy Halvorson: I totally agree with you. I'm sitting here brimming, like, ah, yes, yes, yes.
one thing I wanted to add is. Technology is like an extension of yourself, right? We invent tools. It's like, I don't
Evan Troxel: Yep.
Timothy Halvorson: the Ironman analogy, but
it's because we couldn't do it with our own hands and feet.
Now we have a pen and paper, okay? That can communicate,
Evan Troxel: I mean, yeah, we're, we're tool makers, tool users because it gives us
leverage in many different ways,
Timothy Halvorson: as old as time, right? And so that's just part of what is the extension of humanity? Well, eventually it turns into our cities and our, all of the things in society, right? Like all the systems, all the building and the means by which I know we always say means and methods, ah, don't touch that word, but yet, but you know, okay, that's for like us constructing the building in reality.
But now we actually have the ability to analyze the before it's when it's in its concept stage, when [00:33:00] it's just forming, we're creating that feedback loop, and it's a different set of means and methods that isn't really tied to all the liability that's downstream, right? So we should be saying, Hey, this opens up a different way of thinking.
That's why I got so excited about it back in college, was you watch a tutorial and all of a sudden you're like, holy crap, that's possible. You try it out and then you just start to riff. It's like you're learning a whole new, you know, instrument. We talked about music when we started, but it's just, there's a way to express myself.
And so yeah, I'll get the efficiency back of producing the deliverable, but better than that, I can really explore different creative avenues. And I think learning, this part should be automated. This part should be delegated to some AI stuff. Here's my creative expression over here, and now you can start to see where those lines are drawn a little bit better.
And to your point, I mean, I'll just, so one more point is the bi I, I've stopped using the word BIM manager because design technology is bigger than bim, right? [00:34:00] Computation vis sustainability, ai, like there's way more buckets that have emerged just in the last five, 10 years, right? And that's the goal, is to be more of a, a guide trusted partner collaborator who understands the nuances of the design process someone else is trying to achieve.
And then pairing up being a curator of what's out there to extend and enhance their creative voice. And so that's really the intent because otherwise, like you said, BIM police, you're running around trying to implement standards all day long in, in this sort of intent of saving time and templates everywhere.
And this is the way Revit should be used and or whatever tool, you know, ArchiCAD. And I just think, you know, eventually we, we will get to a point where we see I don't need to customize this whole piece. I can just accept standards. And then this area over here is where I can really express my creative freedom.
And, you know, I don't think people really have a clear understanding of the trade-offs between, [00:35:00] oh, if I customize this, it's not really buying me any time back, so why am I rethinking it, you know? So, yeah, I'm, I definitely wanted to kind of break that perception of BIM manager. I mean, again, I know there's a role out there.
They've got functional jobs with that. It's just the perception that took a long time to reset at my previous firm was coming alongside people as trusted guides. They wouldn't just kick their problems over the fence to you to come clean up after they're done. 'cause, oh, the model's too heavy or it's moving slow, or it can't publish or print.
It's like, no, it, it's not just health. You know, it's creative opportunity. And so you, you can hit both If, if the door is to save time with doing better BIM standards, okay, great. Use that time, buy it back, and then reinvest in the exciting things that can help make your process even better. So we spent long conversations sorting out how to iron out, how to improve that relationship.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, I like the [00:36:00] way that you're explaining that, it makes a lot of sense to me. And I, the, the idea, I think, and this has been floating around a lot in technology, of focusing on automating the things away that are less valuable so you can spend more time on the more valuable things. And so coming from a, a standpoint of, of doing that implementation in firms, what has that conversation been like for you?
How, how have you convinced people that that is a useful. Thing to pursue, because I think a lot of times we do go back to, we default
to the things we already know. We know how to do those really well. It looks valuable. It's perceived as valuable because I'm checking all the boxes,
right? People say, I'm busy doing this thing and busy is valuable.
How are you doing? How, how's the week going? Oh, so busy. It's just busy, busy, busy. What if it wasn't like that? I mean, that, and, and I think what I'm wondering from your, from your experience is how, [00:37:00] did that conversation go and how, when did you ever see the light bulb turn on where you show somebody something's possible and they're like. Whoa. Okay. I'm, I'm interested in that.
And, and so just, just talk through that because you, you've, you've lived it, you've experienced it. So I, I'm, I'm curious because I know there's a lot of people
really struggling with that, right? Which is no, like people
literally have their hands up go away. I'm not interested because I already know that, like, the way that I do it is perceived as valuable to the person who's signing my timecard or my bonuses attached to that or
whatever. So again, my, my goal is to give technology companies and founders and people who are, are coming at this from the outside and understanding of what it's like where the rubber meets the road. Because you're, you're trying to teach people in the, your firm's process could potentially depend on
the things that we're talking about here, right?
Whereas they're, [00:38:00] they're selling a new tool to try to make that better, but they can't
connect the dots to the actual people who you have to get
to adopt to use it.
Timothy Halvorson: Yeah.
Well, I mean, I can, I can speak from my experience, you know, I'm sure it could be getting evolved in other places, but so with not every firm has maybe the luxury of having dedicated. Design technology leaders at their firm. Right. But when that's there, you know, the, those are the gatekeepers for new vendors to get into firms.
Eventually, even if someone finds it, you know, a designer do not run out and take the firm's logo and stamp it on your website until you have licenses and you've got projects and, alright. So that's my little spiel on that. But I was one of those gatekeepers on a team of people who, in different areas we had different focuses.
So depending on the sort of area, we were able to, we had enough staff that we could focus on different, different types of [00:39:00] tools. Right? It wasn't just one person for all design technology, which was nice. 'cause then you could get deeper on a certain area. Like I was very deep on sustainability tools and simulation software.
So, you know. The next step was then, okay, we've got this bucket of tools. We've got people who know your point of contact internally. We would intentionally mask that, uh, because we didn't want everyone ringing our phone. We wanted to have that room to research, uh, evaluate, do the comparisons, build the ROI right, and then bring it back to leadership for consideration.
And you may have to wait until the next, until certain license agreements are out, because you don't know if they already have a three, five year agreement in place. So that's unfortunate because okay, they may be the perfect fit on every functional need, but they've already got their budgets allocated for these longer commitments.
So I can't really, so that's just a reality. Sometimes with business, they'll negotiate longer term deals. And then, uh, in terms of [00:40:00] evaluation, so getting it used, I mean, there's a lot to persuade people to try it out. You know, a lot of times I. Again, if you had that person who had the high aptitude or the dedicated specialist, they would try to build up a proof of concept.
So I would work with the team, I'd identify the projects, we'd, we'd persuade them that this was valuable to just try this one new tool or this one new approach on a very specific, you know, 12 week engagement or 15 week engagement. And then throughout we'd show them how we were gonna gather feedback and be there to support them and, you know, ensure that they had success no matter how good or not good the tool was, right?
We, they were gonna be successful no matter, no matter what. So giving them that assurance was everything. Now, you know, the challenge was fulfilling that because, okay, you could say everybody in the firm needs this tool, but if you can't win one project, how are you expecting to win every project? And so you really had to sort of land [00:41:00] there.
See it through, take the time necessary to do it really well. Document the process, capture the story, get the, get it in terms of the words from the designers, you know, and then I was one of those people who was also translating the feedback from the designers to functional requirements that the engineers from the toolmaker would then consider as part of the roadmap to improve the software next.
So that relationship was really important, to, you know, give that two-way feedback. And so, it was like client relationship management, you know, certain individuals at the firm had ownership over certain accounts and certain, so I couldn't just reach directly out to certain vendors depending on the relationship.
So that was real. Um, so I realized that the challenge is just finding the right person to talk with. And, but I think the more you can get a proof of concept, even internally, I would take that story and then we would start to use that. As a way to establish precedent and then other people would jump on again.
It was one project at a [00:42:00] time and until certain stuff just took a grind, other things, they were just like wildfire. Everyone just saw the value immediately and overnight. We adopted the tool, but most of the time
getting people to appreciate the value. It was a process and we
Evan Troxel: How did you do that? I mean, like, like how did you So, so
there's the idea of like a lunch and learn, right? Where it's, let's show off what we did on this project. It is not unlike a building product manufacturer coming into the office and buying lunch for the people who are willing to sit through their presentation so that they can learn about a building product that they are 99.9% not gonna use on the project that they're working on right
now.
But it's just putting a seed out there to say, this thing exists. I'm the person you should call if you're ever interested in
using it and creating a connection. Right. And so, so the
expectation I think, is there from both sides. That is correct. Which is the the outsiders coming in and saying, look, here's this [00:43:00] thing, here's what it
does, here's why you should know about it. And also know, also knowing that it's not gonna hit right now, it's not gonna find its feet on
everybody's project who showed up to that room, but just saying, look, this thing exists. The people coming to that presentation are also acknowledging that
they're interest because they're curious and because they want the sandwich, they're gonna show up and they're going to listen and, and just file that away for later because it's not for right now, most likely,
I think that this is not unlike that.
Right. Because it's this one way to, to get, and I'm, I'm going through all of this painstaking process to say like, how does technology even get visible
exposure inside of a firm when. There's definitely the people doing like little r and d here and there on their own time, their own curiosity, going out and searching on YouTube for tutorials on how to use it or talking to somebody that they [00:44:00] know and they do hold onto it because it's like secret sauce.
It's kind of special. It kind of makes them kind of special. And then there's your job, which is finding and identifying the big, the big stuff that can make major changes. And then showing everybody with the potential, how do you get that message out? Right? Because I think I want, again, technologists and technology providers to understand what's actually going on in the firms to get their products visible.
I mean it's,
or their, or a new workflow or
any little
piece of the solution because it's, there's a lot of work
Timothy Halvorson: a good point. Yeah, you're totally right. And, uh, I would say, so I'll try to simplify the process just to a Cliff Notes version. Then we can expand if you want. But, uh, again, like if, if it's a big, if, if you can identify the gatekeepers, uh, you know, I was in a position like that before where you get, you'd evaluate it, you sort of have a [00:45:00] one-on-one, they'd give you a product demo.
You'd say, this is pretty cool. You'd then bring it back to the bigger team within that department and you'd say, okay, is this worth considering, you know, someone who may actually have the purse strings or may have more visibility across the firm to say, yeah, I know a principal is doing this and they have a project upcoming.
So we started to get to a position where we were, again, it took a while to, but the design technology group started to get more optics as partners in the business building process. Like how do we actually turn digital differentiator or technology as something that is a. A differentiator for the practice to, to land the work.
So then we were getting involved with the business development and the pursuit. So if you could start to associate upstream with the right tools and the right tech stack, that then sets the firm apart and maybe 95% of its standard and five research, right? Then you can start to find those [00:46:00] opportunities to pilot the tech sooner and without, 'cause it's sort of rolled up into a pursuit marketing budget.
It's not sort of carved out from the fee that they've pitched on. And then over time that started to see the value and then they would actually set hours into the schedule to have that freedom. You know? So I, I think it's always challenge, but moving upstream and then to your point, like, okay, I do think getting that pre prequalification process is essential because, uh, in my previous experience we were doing our own internal CEUs.
We would actually. Curate our own training content, go get it approved for continuing education and then, you know, show it to the, to the region or to the firm, and, and that would get approved. And so people would prioritize that because they knew we'd taken the time to pre validate or vet what content was being shown.
And so sometimes it was bring a vendor in for half of it. Sometimes it was we [00:47:00] do half, or sometimes we'd get a presentation behind the scenes before we'd bring it publicly to the firm. Again, that's all just internal promotion. Um, so, you know, there's plenty of vendors that we had relationships with.
Again, I'm speaking of my last firm's experience, but you know, I, it is a challenge because it's hard to see, you know, am I talking to the right individual and does that individual know how to take the information I'm giving them back to the right person? I think that's the challenge is again, as mentioned, managing up If I'm a, you know, a user or a modeler, someone who's in the work every day, I've got my desktop up, I've got my research up, I'm sort of always heads down, I'm not doing all the other business development activities. They may be your best advocates because they're using it, but then they can't communicate what they're finding back to the right person.
Um, who then has the actual authority to make a decision on piloting that. [00:48:00] So, you know, that's really what I saw as the process is as long as that point of contact is extremely well known internal to the firm and everybody out there is sort of the extension, the fingers, they're familiar with it, then they know how to create that feedback to get the conversation flowing.
And now you actually have, you know, you have the opportunity to, to present to somebody that can make a decision. So it's a challenge. I'm not gonna say it's not, especially in a, you know, I was at a big firm, it's not like. Everyone's talking between offices. I mean, each office was kind of, I don't know. I mean, sometimes they're connected, sometimes they're on an island under themselves, and it was different on a per office basis.
So yeah, it's a challenge for sure.
Evan Troxel: I think companies, tech providing companies know this. Right. And they're making, I think we've seen
a huge shift into cloud
software, cloud-based software. Right. And that I. Targets the user, right? And so it really does put the onus on the users to try [00:49:00] to create a grassroots effort in a firm. It, it actually enables
them to be able to do that because they don't have to ask for it's
permission necessarily to do something. I'd say that's a big shift, right? Where in the olden days, back when I was, you know, practicing architect and doing design, it was like, um, can I please get this piece of software? I had to actually say, here's the value that it's
gonna deliver to me and my job and our timeline on this project, and it's worth this much. I already know how to use it. I, you don't even have to pay for any training. And that was to speak about the gatekeepers. Right. And now these companies realize that like, wow, it just runs in a tab.
Anybody can use Miro or Arco or whatever, right? And it's like, that's a totally different thing. And so now there is much more potential for grassroots efforts to start. At the same
time to speak to what you were just [00:50:00] speaking about, leadership is completely disconnected from the complexity of modern software and therefore it's like. What do you mean? We need another tool to do that? We already have these tools. We spend a lot of money on these tools. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on Autodesk
and Adobe, just to name two.
Right? Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a
medium size to a large size firm is going to two companies. What do you mean we need more? Like those
things do it all. I was watching, uh, Nicola ER's, uh, presentation at the Arco retooling a EC event,
Timothy Halvorson: Mm-Hmm.
Evan Troxel: and he showed his famous Revit railing graphic that he put
together.
Have you seen this graphic? It's like, it's just the railing tool and it's all the
parameters of the railing tool. Which ones are buried? Three levels deep, two levels deep, one level deep. How? And it, it's a program unto itself.
The railing. Tool in Revit, [00:51:00] just like the stair tool is. It's like a whole app and there's so much complexity to that tool. If you showed that to a, this would be an amazing Lunch and learn, show that to your firm's leadership and say, this is what it takes to drive a railing. Like you see the railing, you have no
idea what it took to make that railing in software to actually control the parameters. Make sure that it gets coordinated with the details and the section cuts and the plan views the elevations, like everything for it to look just right, for all of that to actually work for the spacings to line up to
meet a DA and do all these things because it's a special handrail.
It's not just like a typical
guardrail, right? It's a special handrail and that's, this is what it takes to drive that. I think they would be blown away because it's like, what
do you mean it's just a railing? I. You know, everybody has railings in their projects, but, but this, this, this shows the opportunity for new software to come in and, and
do something better.
For sure. And at [00:52:00] the same time, from the top, we're getting this pushback of, what do you mean you need more tools? Like we already have a tool that does that, so why are you
wasting your time looking at other things? And this is not a conversation
that is going over very well in firms and I, this is what tech
providers are also up against.
Timothy Halvorson: I, yeah, I would say if you want to establish trust, uh, and break in, if you can nurture, be part of the nurturing of that value-based conversation. I feel like tech providers are great at, maybe I'm just speculating here, but going for funding and having that elevator pitch and having 10 slides to get seed funding.
Well, how can you empower the users to have a concise version of the value just like that from their perspective, you know? And then they're, if you help them with that, they'll be your best advocates where it's just an extension of your sales team. 'cause it's internal and to your point, um, I remember it's the build versus buy conundrum.
You [00:53:00] know, I remember just 'cause you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. And started, I remember deep diving on Dynamo and Grasshopper as a grad student way back. And then you get all excited with the possibility of, you know, no constraints and everything's possible and you're all excited.
And then next thing you know, you know, everything is a nail to hit with your hammer, your newfound hammer that you, because, but then the moment you try to show someone all of that, you know, that algorithm, just everything that's happening under the hood, their eyes glaze over and they just dismiss you.
Right? And I've, I remember when I was a younger professional having, why can't we just, and it was from a leader, there's that word, uh, there, use AutoCAD instead of Revit.
Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm
Timothy Halvorson: why can't we? And
they were focusing on the churn and the deliverable, and they had a point, you know, but they wanted to understand why Revit versus AutoCAD, that classic question.
I thought we were already past that point, you know? And [00:54:00] same thing, you know, is it grasshopper versus dynamo? And honestly, who cares, in my opinion, should we buy the tool versus build the tool? And. To your point, it, it feels like that because just the moment you buy the tool, it's like you're not leveraging it.
And that's really where I've made a full-time job out of taking the existing tech stack that was already procured and making the most of it. And
Evan Troxel: Which is a huge, huge, huge investment that that existing test
tech stack is a huge, it's, and like you said, it could be, you could have already bought it for the next
three or five years, right. to
Timothy Halvorson: yeah.
Evan Troxel: a
little even more complex.
Timothy Halvorson: And I, the challenge is, you know, unfortunately, I don't know, I mean it's, it's basically, I would probably still be in architecture if I didn't see such a huge need for this, right? Like having the dedicated job to integrate focus on integration application so you're not just talking in abstract terms.
You know, I mean, that was [00:55:00] everything from publicly available tools to proprietary tools. And it was the same problem. If you can't get real, tangible, practical feedback from users or if they, there's all these little moments where they get stuck,
Evan Troxel: mm-Hmm
Timothy Halvorson: using it
or, you know, do I have permission from my leadership and management to actually use the tool?
So they're worried about doing something wrong. They may be super aptitude, like the best aptitude, best tool, best user interface, and they don't have permission from leadership. So again, they need to be able to serve
Evan Troxel: You have to align all of that. Yeah. You have to get it
all in alignment. It's hard.
Timothy Halvorson: Yeah. And so nurturing that conversation again was like 70% of my time.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's a good
segue to talk about what you're doing now with sevenfold. And to be clear, that's the number seven
and then fold and sevenfold. We'll, we'll
put a link to it in the show notes. Uh, so you can see what Timothy's up to. So you have obviously [00:56:00] recognized that
there is a void in the market. You said it earlier yourself. Not every firm
has a design technologist, a person who understands the nuance of speaking, the different languages of the different
people who are working in the office to connect the dots along the whole production pipeline and make sure we're not
losing data along the way so that we can actually see the, the true potential of what the
technology and the software has to offer throughout the entire process. And there's an aspect of training to that as well. So, I, I just want to hand over the, the mic to you at this point and talk about why you're doing what you're doing and then, and
then what it's all about.
Timothy Halvorson: Yeah. I really appreciate the, the platform and the space, uh, Evan, and this is, I'm glad you're hosting these conversations. It's so needed. I. Um, yeah, so Sevenfold is, it was born outta kinda what we've been talking about. You know, there's two arms to it. There's a Sevenfold Academy, which is self-paced courses that help, you know, [00:57:00] raise, that all ships rise with, you know, the change of technology.
So I'm launching a series of, you know, core practice courses that can help. I'm targeting emerging professionals, zero to seven years of experience, um, to help baseline, and then from there, launch more specialized courses depending on what the need of the market is. But really what we've been getting at is more of the consulting arm.
So how to drive, you know, taking what the trainings provide and then integrating that to the specific firm, uh, requirements, project requirements, accounts, et cetera. And having a true holistic digital transformation strategy, not just. Buying the next cool software and sticking you in the hands of your whizzbang, uh, designer, you know, but really getting that alignment from top to bottom so that the whole firm can move in sync and lockstep.
And it's lining up the client expectations, the fee scope and schedule to the actual capabilities of the software. So, you know, driving that digital [00:58:00] transformation, yes, my background is architecture, but I'm positioning more in that middle space to bridge academia and commercial practice as well as construction and software providers.
So again, I'm mostly serving architecture firms, but I've already been having conversations with folks on the, you know, the material providing side who are trying to provide architects with tools or, you know, it's really just trying to help bridge that digital transformation. So. Um, you know, you'll be seeing courses.
I've got three courses planned for 2024. Um, you know, first a hundred students, they get part of a pilot group, uh, you know, to join me and asked their questions. Not trying to just launch yet another Revit course out there. It's, um, you know, it's, it's, I, I wouldn't be making it if I didn't see the need because it's everything we talked about today.
It's that outcome driven, value driven mindset woven into the capabilities of the tool. And so I hope that, you know, as I continue to partner with other, [00:59:00] uh, trusted tech providers, you know, that's one way they've engaged me as well, is providing technical documentation, developing tutorials, um, helping bridge that into firms.
So a lot of times, and this is my final thought, is, um, you know, the design technology leader inside a firm may be overwhelmed with fixing problems all day long. But then they can't ever get their head above the water and look ahead to research and actually differentiate where the firm's going. So that's another way where I can help mobilize that initiative, give it a spark, and then with the goal of empowering people in the firm to take it forward.
And then you sort of throttle back to just being available on an as needed basis, you know? So I'm really all about empowering, empowering people, not creating any sort of codependent relationship. So that's my goal.
Evan Troxel: I think it's in incredibly important that you
are coming from a practice role because [01:00:00] you understand.
What they're dealing with on a day. You understand the deadlines, you understand the limitations or the possibilities of the technology, probably even more so than they do, right? Because you, you've taken the time to dedicate a huge chunk of your life to becoming, to, to really be having an expertise
in these different platforms. And so you may just know that things exist that they don't, and that could be a huge help immediately. But you also know how to apply it and how
it affects the outcome of the project, which is, again, I think it, this is incredibly important for the tech side to understand of why these people like you need, why, why you need to exist in the marketplace.
Because there are, there's a huge lack of resources in so many firms. Out there. So who is your target audience
for the things that you're working on? I mean, there's all different sizes of firms, there's all different technologies being used already that they, people have, [01:01:00] they've invested hugely in and it's very hard to switch out of.
But
I'm sure you have kind of like a, you, you talk about this initial cohort. Who are you really looking for to,
to become a part of that?
Timothy Halvorson: Yeah. Uh, so I'm, I like to say I'm serving firms in teams of sizes, one to 1000. I've worked on some international projects, very comfortable working on multinational, multi-office projects. Um, but my initial cohort for the academy, that's my long range vision to grow that. So I'm starting with emerging professionals.
That's my term for zero to seven years experience. So everything from students who are in school trying to get that first internship. I want anybody who comes through the Sevenfold Academy to be at the top of the resume stack, um, to be the sought after talents. And then folks who are new to us, software that maybe are bridging from, you know, I dunno, AutoCAD to Revit or SketchUp to Rhino, or Bridging from a new software that's also a perfect group, um, who want the shortcut
to getting high [01:02:00] impact, high value training.
I've been there searching Google and YouTube, um, for partial solutions all over the place. I wanted one place that had sort of the bedrock, uh, and then have the conversation on what we wanna specialize into. So really that's, that's the goal, is to create that one place. Um, you know, and I, if, if it was already out there, I would've, I wouldn't be making it.
So
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Again, I appreciate what you're doing because it gives firms who don't have those dedicated resources an option. Uh, even if they can't dedicate resources to those, they, they probably can afford to have somebody come in and really inject, really pointed high value information and process into
what they're already doing.
Timothy Halvorson: Yeah, and I'll just add, I mean, this is the one call to action. You can go to the sevenfold I website, hit the contact button, request a discovery session, and I've got a menu of things that people have been reaching [01:03:00] out about that I can offer expertise to. But again, the benefit is getting that tailored solution to the needs of your firm.
And I'm, so, if, if it's beyond my scope of expertise, I'll gladly let you know. But, um, you know, I want to create that conversation. And again, the tailored experience is what I specialize at. So.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, fantastic. Well, the website is seven, the number seven fold.io, and that's Timothy's new venture. I'm excited for you, man, and I hope that, uh, this is gonna work out well for you. I think the things that you shared today really do kind of give the peak behind the
curtain of what it's like to deal
Timothy Halvorson: Mm-Hmm
Evan Troxel: with digital technology, design technology, bim technology training.
All of you know what I would consider like a digital practice kind of. This was just a great insight, a window into
what it actually takes in a firm to make that kind of thing happen. It's not a walk in the park. It's incredibly nuanced. There's a lot of audiences within a firm. There's politics,
there's [01:04:00] budgets, there's all these things, there's contracts, there's risk, right?
And these teams are the ambassadors of a lot of these tech companies into the firms. And they have a lot working against them. They also have a lot working for them. You know, if they are like Timothy and they've developed relationships with leadership and they are the kind of people who understand a lot of this nuance, that's a huge benefit.
But at the same time, there's a lot of people out there who don't have
all that as well. And that is, um, I, my goal was to, was to kind of
pull the curtain back. And I wanna do it with more episodes with people in who have had different experiences or in, are different positions in firms. So look for this series of. Practitioners on the Troxel podcast to grow. But
it was great having you here, Timothy, to be the,
to be the first one. So
I'll put links to your LinkedIn and your website on in the show notes, but if there's anywhere else that you wanna
let
people know about, now's your chance.
Timothy Halvorson: That is the place to be. [01:05:00] Sevenfold.Io is the check place to check out, and thanks for having me, Evan. I'm, I'm hopeful, you know, if you wanna have me back, I'd love to be back. This is obviously a deep conversation and looking forward to seeing who wants
to, you know, see where, see where it goes from here.
Thanks again.
Evan Troxel: Great.

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Democratizing 3d Content with FoveaCorey Rubadue of ArchVision joins the show to talk about Fovea, a tool that simplifies the process of translating and sharing 3d content across different 3d platforms and 3d file formats. In other words, it allows users to import data from various sources, process it, and then export it in a format that can be easily used in other applications. This eliminates the need for manual file conversions and reduces the risk of data loss. Fovea also supports a wide range of file formats, making it a versatile tool for 3d content creation and sharing with a user-friendly, simple drag-and-drop interface for people working on a deadline... like you.

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For a limited time, get a 20% discount on Fixed and Floating Annual License of Enscape. Head to https://chaos-enscape.com and use code RES24 at checkout to supercharge your design workflow.Episode Links Corey on LinkedIn * ArchVision website * ArchVision on LinkedIn * ArchVision on Twitter * ArchVision on Instagram

Watch this episode on YouTubeConfluence S1E10 - Democratizing 3d Content with FoveaCorey Rubadue of ArchVision joins the show to talk about Fovea, a tool that simplifies the process of translating and sharing 3d content across different 3d…YouTubeListen to this episodeSubscribe on YouTube

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Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough joins the podcast to talk about the value of hands-on experience in understanding the transition from digital design to physical creation, the importance of making mistakes and learning from them in the iterative process of prototyping, creating and manufacturing, the resident program at the Autodesk Technology Center, the importance of maintaining real relationships with partners, the power of curiosity and continuous learning, and more.

Episode links:* Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B Crawford (Amazon) * Autodesk Technology Centers website * Mary Elizabeth on LinkedIn * Adam Savage’s Tested YouTube channel

About Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough:Mary Elizabeth manages the Technology Center San Francisco and a talented team of Research and Design engineers working within Autodesk Research. She's been with the company for almost a decade and has worn many hats. Her background is in fine art, music and furniture design, and she was an Exhibit Developer at the Exploratorium museum prior to joining the company.

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Twitter * Threads * Mastodon * Email

Watch This on YouTube:149: ‘The Power of Curiosity and Continuous Learning’, with Mary Elizabeth YarbroughMary Elizabeth Yarbrough joins the podcast to talk about the value of hands-on experience in understanding the transition from digital design to physical cre…YouTube

Episode Transcript: 149: ‘The Power of Curiosity and Continuous Learning’, with Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough

[00:00:00] This episode of the TRXL podcast is made possible with support from ArchIT.

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Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. Before we get into today's conversation, if you are a regular listener and enjoy these episodes, please do this community a favor and subscribe both on YouTube and in your [00:01:00] preferred podcast app. Your subscription is incredibly valuable in supporting what we're doing here to create this resource for the AEC industry, being a subscriber, which is completely free, directly influences two things. My ability to attract sponsors that help keep this show going and my ability to attract high-profile guests, which is great for you. My goal is to deliver quality episodes to provide value to you and the industry as a whole.

So if you haven't subscribed, I encourage you to do so. As I mentioned, it's completely free and a great way to support the TRXL podcast In this episode, I welcome Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough. Mary Elizabeth manages the technology center in San Francisco and a talented team of research and design engineers working within Autodesk Research. She's been with the company for almost a decade and has worn many hats. Her background is in fine art, music and furniture [00:02:00] design, she was an exhibit developer at the Exploratorium Museum prior to joining the company. I had the opportunity last summer to go on a guided tour of the Autodesk Technology Center in San Francisco when attending the AIA Conference on architecture. And the tour was led by my guest in this episode and as a maker myself it is a pretty remarkable resource, so I couldn't wait to have this conversation.

Today we discuss topics including the value of hands-on experience in understanding the transition from digital design to physical creation, the importance of making mistakes and learning from them in the iterative process of prototyping, creating, and manufacturing The resident program at the Autodesk Technology Center, the importance of maintaining real relationships with partners, the power of curiosity and continuous learning, and more.

This was a fantastic conversation with Mary Elizabeth. I think you are really going to enjoy it, I hope you'll not only find value in it for yourself, [00:03:00] but that you'll help add value to the profession as a whole by sharing it with your network. And now without further ado, I bring you Mary Elizabeth

Evan Troxel: Mary Elizabeth, welcome to the podcast. It's great

to have you.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: you. It's great to be here.

Evan Troxel: So, we were talking a little bit before we hit record here, uh, about my new digs in Southern Oregon. And one of the things that I have that I didn't have before is a shop.

And one of my favorite books is by Matthew Crawford. It's called Shop Class as Soulcraft. Have you ever, have you heard of that

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Oh, but now I'm excited. Yes.

Evan Troxel: recommendation for you. Yeah. It's about the value of blue collar work and just trade work, um, but working with your hands and, and the value that it can personally bring to you, meaning and value that it could bring to you personally, but also to serve, you know, community and society.

So I'm, I'm really [00:04:00] excited to have this conversation with you today.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Me too. And this really resonates. So yeah.

Evan Troxel: Awesome. Well, my, my shop is not as cool as your shop. I, I know I've got the chance to visit the Autodesk RD facility in San Francisco. Is it Pier nine? Am I, am I

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Is the technology center in San Francisco? Yes.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Technology Center in San Francisco and Wow. What an incredible facility. And you run that facility and, and maybe you, we can just start there and give us an overview of what is encapsulated in that place.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Okay, wonderful. Um, so I work for Autodesk. I'm part of Autodesk Research and I manage the technology center in San Francisco. And I manage a really stellar team of research and design engineers and the shops in San Francisco. We have a CNC shop with additive and a hybrid machine, uh, sorry, subtractive and a hybrid machine.

We have an additive [00:05:00] shop. We have wood and metal for sort of back of house operations and um, electronics. And so the work that we do in these shops, we do, we. Work on Autodesk research projects and we also support, uh, resident community. And what's really important for me as the person who manages these spaces is that they're really inclusive spaces and with PE for people who don't have a lot of experience, um, in with certain workflows, we really wanna empower people to understand the way things are made.

And the reason the techno, one of the reasons the technology centers exist is to validate workflows. from digital to physical. So

it's really one thing to be able to, you know, make a drawing. There's no gravity. You can do some simulations,

but when you get into reality and you're dealing with physical materials, you're actually holding materials or you see the actual scale in [00:06:00] person, um, you have that.

Tactility that you're talking about, you know, getting your hands on things, then

you really start to understand the way things go together. And the shop in San Francisco at the technology in San Francisco is really geared more towards manufacturing. The technology center in, uh, Boston is more geared towards, uh, a EC space.

So you might wanna speak to my colleague Joe at a later podcast because he has a lot of projects he could discuss there. Um, but we're a network of technology centers in the one in San Francisco. We have, uh, we have a Masac machine. We have two Haas machines. We have, uh, FX 20, mark Forge and the Additive Shop.

We have laser cutters, we have consumer prosumer and industrial machines. And, um, the purpose of these spaces is to really, yeah, validate workflows and make sure people make design informed. Sorry. Data informed [00:07:00] decisions for their design so

that they design things more intelligently.

Evan Troxel: Everything that you just talked about is, is like hardware stuff, and obviously there's a huge software component to this as well. When you're talking about data, you're talking about validation. A lot of that can happen. Before you get to physically making, right?

But, but, so, but there's a process there. And obviously Autodesk is, is a software company, right? So I think it's really interesting that Autodesk has invested into this program. And maybe you can just talk about what the residents program is, because I found that to be really interesting as well. You're, you're obviously invest invested in this idea, but then you're actually picking, uh, partners to come in to collaborate with. And I, you know, I, I would love to kind of get into the, the weeds about how all that works with their IP and their

startup and whatever it is. But, but just take, take that and go with it where you

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Okay, so first of all, we work with different resident teams [00:08:00] and we choose them because A, their projects are aligned with certain focus areas. Within Autodesk Research, we choose them because we believe through interviewing them and through their proposals that they're gonna be good members of our community.

And there's a few that I'd love to highlight because they're just

stellar teams. Um, we're not as concerned with whether they're Fusion or Autodesk software users. That's not as important to us as what the project they're doing and how their project might, um, push some research further.

But all residents own their own IP, and if they want to tell stories.

Like where we could help tell their their stories. That's a real win for us. But we stake no claim on the IP of different groups. Um, what they get from being residents is they get training on our equipment. They get access to the resident community. [00:09:00] So there's fellow people working in different domains where maybe they could validate some of their assumptions or test their ideas.

You know, they have a community of people where they, that they can meet with, that they sit with at the desks, and then they have access to the workshops and then they have access to the expertise of all the, uh, research and design engineers who work in there. Um, and it's, uh, uh. Residencies can be a few months, and some have gone on for years because they're really terrific residencies and a lot of these people spin off into other companies.

Sometimes residents meet each other and they're like, we should start a company. You know, like,

or, you know, the combination is

better than, than my piece and your piece. So, um, but we have a range of, um, equipment in our shops, so we're not, uh, manufacturer, um, you know, beholden to only one manufacturer. We are, and we're software [00:10:00] agnostic, so we want to, we want to really in be inclusive of all kinds of workflows 'cause it ultimately makes our machines.

Better, and it makes our fusion software a lot better. So if we understand where gaps and holes are, then we can, you know, bring that back to the Fusion team and give that feedback. And then suddenly we have a new post for a new process that we didn't have before. So what we ultimately want is for people to become fusion users, but sometimes they're not and, or that's not what their training was.

And so, but we don't, we don't turn people away because of that.

Evan Troxel: I think I remember you saying when you led the tour that I was on was that when residents come in, they, they have space that they can dedicate to themselves, but they don't, there's not a requirement to come in and work. Is that correct? 'cause I know there's, there's a lot of big tools that are shared.

There's workspace that's shared, but I assume that there's also some kind of like space that they kind of, it just gets to be theirs because it's nice to go to a shop [00:11:00] and, and have, keep stuff there on the walls or

in the drawers or whatever and not have to worry about that all the time. Can you explain that, like the, the logistics behind that of

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Sure. I should also say that, uh, the technology San Francisco is literally on a pier. So

we're over a body of water that also determines kind of what equipment we're able to have and

what kinds of work we can do. Um, but, and we don't have a lot of storage. We're on this long, narrow, you know, footprints pretty narrow.

So, uh, we don't have a ton of storage. We need to understand what, uh, people's like artifact size or what the work envelope they need for their projects. Some projects are construction scale and we'll then say, Hey, you should apply in Boston. That's a better, that's a better place for you to be.

Um,

Evan Troxel: is a lot larger, right? I, I think I,

heard something like three times larger or something like that.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: It's a lot larger and, and, um, and they're doing different work. They have a lot of, um, robotic construction projects and they

have, you know, we have robots here and some industrial [00:12:00] robots in the robotic space, but that's not a space that's open to. Resident work that's more

for, um, robotics research.

But, uh, as far as residents go, when they, we, we sort of ask them a lot of questions.

What kind of tools and technologies are you interested in using? How often do you think you're gonna come in? Um, do you just want to access to the community that in that way you can just sort of have a hot desk and come in when you want? Um, the model had really changed after Covid, I would say, because we had a lot of people who were, um, working remotely and became really used to working remotely.

And where before we had, you know, the place was bustling with people. So now we have a few shop users who are heavily on machines, um, that we've trained. And so we really trust them. But we don't have, like, you dump, dump your stuff here, you dump your stuff here. We just don't have the real estate. So

we, we have to be really choosy and careful about where stuff is.

Staged or, you know, but it's, it's [00:13:00] all about communication, um, with the residents and us. And so that's, it's, it's just constant dance.

Um, one of the residents I really wanted to highlight with you because, and I think we talked about them when you came for a visit, was FICOs. They're the ones who do the autonomous vessel,

um,

that

Evan Troxel: total sense, right? 'cause you're over the water and, and it's like, I I was hoping you were gonna talk about that one because it's, it's an in intriguing project.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: But I wanna mention them and give them a special shout out because they're such stellar residents. They're such incredible members of our community. They're amazing stewards of the shop. They're super conscientious. They've been mentors to other more junior teams who are doing other projects, who are, you know, really accomplished in their own right.

But the people of FICOs are just so, uh, they're, you're, you know, they just have a ton of experience that they've been able to share. And, um, their project is, uh, this is, they're now on, um, version three, but. The idea is they wanna [00:14:00] take carbon out of our oceans and have us have oceans that are, you know, healthier and safer and better.

And so they have made an autonomous vessel that grows fast growing seaweed on the bottom of it, and they drive it around. It collects a lot of carbon. It ultimately gives itself a haircut on the bottom, and then that becomes a carbon sink that sinks. And it's a carbon sink for that for like a thousand years.

It has.

Evan Troxel: Wow.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Yeah. So it's all about, uh, carbon sequestration. But the, the why I love talking about them is because they're such wonderful researchers and. Uh, shop users who really walk the talk of like, kind of quick and dirty prototypes that are fairly advanced. But, you know, we have this idea, we wanna make an autonomous vessel.

Let's first use a paddleboard, put a [00:15:00] piece of wood under there that's gonna simulate the growth rack for the seaweed that's gonna, and then we're going to ride it around on our paddle board. They're really like, fit too. So, you know, you can just tell they're like, they're very comfortable being on the water, on a paddle board,

you know, and, and then put a bunch of sensors on things.

See how that behaves. Okay, now we're gonna do a stack laminated vessel. We're gonna put it on a c and C router. We're gonna get all the, um, approved chemicals that can be at the pier and coat it with the right, uh, water, safe water, you know, make it watertight. Do all the electronics here. Now we're gonna start driving it around, validate these workflows, get it in the water, find out what's going on, and then, and then now they're doing a 3D printed hole because the version two was so kind of time consuming to make, even though it's

still something they, they put out on the water, but now they're using one of our large scale 3D printers because it's gonna be a lot more efficient to [00:16:00] manufacture that.

And so that's something that, um, the evolution is something that really happens naturally here with our, with our residents because them getting access to these tools and technologies, making things themselves. 'cause we're not a service provider. We will give you all the information you need, but you're gonna make it yourself.

Once they start making things themselves and they see how laborious stuff is, or how expensive it will be or how time consuming it is, then they start doing the calculations of how. Much that will cost to get it manufactured, you know, writ

large. And they want a number of these vessels in the, in the water.

So, uh, the, now they're doing a 3D printed version and it's working beautifully. So this is

just a, I don't know, they're just a wonderful team and it's just so amazing to see their, the evolution of their project.

Evan Troxel: That iterative process that they're going through right there [00:17:00] on display. I, it's gotta be inspiring for others who are, who are also residents there, or thinking about becoming, maybe people doing tours, things like that. Because you do get to see, I remember seeing that the vessels,

when, you know, the different versions of it.

And I think that there was a, I think it was gray, it was a 3D printed hole, it looks like, and give people an idea of the size. I

mean

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: right.

Evan Troxel: yeah, it's, it's about three or four feet long,

if I remember correctly. Yeah. So it's not small, like when you say large scale 3D printing, it's not a desktop 3D printer doing this.

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Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: I think this makes me wanna mention something else just about like how we procure equipment here and how

we, how we get the equipment we have, you know, it's not random. We do a lot of, a lot of validation and user testing through the work of the residents and [00:19:00] Autodesk researchers. And if these machines weren't in use by them and we weren't finding out what's working and what's not, then we wouldn't have the, the same equipment.

they started to use a, a piece of equipment that just wasn't working well and it was having a lot of clogs and, you know, there was just always issues with, with calibration. And so we, we started because, because they were really using the, the whole, um, print bed of that former printer. I. We, we looked into a different technology and so I sent my additive, um, SME to, uh, like a trade show for additive manufacturing.

And she came back and said, Hey, this one looks really interesting. What do you think about this? So we did a bunch of research, talked to them, and then we got this printer. It was one of these things where it was like flat packed and we had to assemble it ourselves. So the [00:20:00] team like really pulled together and I mean, that's really hard work and a

lot of dedication. And now that printer is doing incredible things and now FICOs is printing full scale holes, no problem at all.

And so a lot of the, a lot of the ways we learn about, um, things that work and things that don't work is through these resident projects. It's a really immediate feedback loop for us.

Evan Troxel: One of the projects that I thought was really interesting was, it actually is a EC related, but from a building, kind of dismantling and re recycling standpoint, right? Which was the computer vision. Um, nail puller, screw puller. Like

it would take timber and it would. It would scan the piece of wood and you got, and they would have nails driven it at all different angles and screws and, and they would be bent and they'd be straight and they would be all over the place.

Just like you would find when I, I'm literally doing a remodel project next door to this room. And it's like, I I, if you pull out an old piece of wood, there's a bunch of stuff in there and, and [00:21:00] the recycling doesn't allow for mixed materials like that.

right.

And so the metal all has to be pulled out.

Everything has to be cleaned off the wood. And so maybe you could just explain that project. 'cause I thought it was, when you watch it happen and it's like, wow, that's, this is super, a super cool idea and it's happening right here in front of us.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: It's, yeah, so that team is called Urban Machine, also Incredible. Incredible team of people. Um, my team and, um, the person who runs the resident program got to visit their facility in Oakland, where what you saw was about, I don't know, a 10th of the size or

of the size.

Evan Troxel: this is a small demo unit. Like

not the, not the, yeah.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: and the real demo unit is 80 feet long.

So,

um, what they're doing is taking lumber that is riddled with metal and nails and hardware, and they're, they, because they're [00:22:00] using computer vision x-rays, cameras, uh, they're able to find where the metal is on this piece of wood. Clean it first, like it goes through this sort of like these. Brushes, and it's kind of like this grabber thing that feeds it through, like on a conveyor belt,

and then it starts pulling, like aggressively pulling out these pieces of metal.

And

Evan Troxel: It's

like a robotic pincher kind of

a thing. right.

That that's, it's almost like a CNC where it's, it's on multiple axes. So

it can, it can, it can get to

these different angles.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: And the end effectors that are pulling the, the grippers that are pulling, um, all of the hardware, they're different kind of grippers because a lot of nails are bent, like nothing is perfect. And so it'll do a first pass. It might miss some nails, it'll do a second pass. Ultimately, it will confidently bring every piece of metal out and then it will do a final X-ray, because you, like you said, [00:23:00] you can't use any piece of wood that has any metal in it.

Like people just simply won't

allow

it, you know, to be sold. So, uh, what they're doing is they're, I mean, some of this. Wood is old growth redwood, you know, it's

old timber, it's beautiful wood that you can't even get anymore. And so

they're reclaiming it and putting it back into the, the economy so that you

can, so builders can choose from this.

And also, this is really preferable, uh, timber for a lot of people. But yeah, what you saw was a very scaled down modular version. The demo was just as impressive as the big one, you know, it was just incredible to see what they were doing. But they bring that around to show people what's possible and then, but yeah, they're on version three now and they're, they're, they're getting a lot of business.

People are really, are really

excited about it.

Evan Troxel: I can imagine that's a, that's a huge deal because [00:24:00] how I'm lucky enough to live near several. Lumber yards that sell reclaimed lumber and just to go look at it, like, it doesn't even compare to

the, the stuff that's being sold on the shelves of the big

box heart retailer. Right. It's not even close.

And if you wanna find something with character, like what's really cool is it's actually enabling this to happen.

Right. Because otherwise this is a, a very manual process. And, and you said it aggressively kind of grabs all these things and, and rips 'em out of there. But it's also like, it's not, it's not chop hacking away at it to actually make that happen.

It's, it's, it's so precise in the way that

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Yeah,

the finesse is kind of remarkable. And the, how the wood looks afterwards, it's not all torn up. It's not,

I mean, yeah, sure. You'll probably have to, you know, run it through the joiner planter, you know, like you'll, you'll have to

process it, but you're not losing, you're not losing lumber. And, you know, some of the [00:25:00] grain on that wood that we saw on when we went to their facility, I just could not believe it.

You just

don't see lumber like this.

Evan Troxel: it's a neat problem to go after, and it would, it to me, it like, I, I would be interested to know like, where'd that idea come from? What, what were they doing that led to that idea? And they're like, we'll take this and we'll solve this problem. I, I, I find that being a, an interesting story in this.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: I am sure that story is out there, so I would hate to get this wrong, but I will say for people like FICOs and Urban Machine, it usually has to do with them seeing like there's a problem and it's

affecting like not just me, but the world writ

large. And I, we have ideas and let's just try this out and see if we can make this happen.

Evan Troxel: So

when, when someone like that applies to be in your residency are, do they already have a prototype or, or like what is the starting point that they're coming to you with saying, here's why we need your help to [00:26:00] push this forward?

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: yeah, I would say generally nowadays because of how, uh. My team and the, the, the team, like the work that we're focused on within Autodesk Research, I would say yes, we favor projects that are, um, you know, kind of well thought out, maybe even if they don't yet have a physical prototype. They've really done a lot of engineering of, uh, or pre-thought about how something will be manufactured or engineered.

That's, uh, really important. Um, but like Kit Switch is another team I wanted to talk to you about. They're the ones who do that sort of turnkey solution for, um, like kitchens that have like the whole range built in. It's basically they're making these modules that have everything you need to have a kitchen unit.

Um, and they had a. Fully formed idea in their [00:27:00] minds and on paper about how they wanted it to work. And they had a lot of, um, mechanical engineering experience, but didn't have the hands-on experience in the workshop. And they seem

like a really good group to come in. And sure enough, they were, and they are.

And um, but they learned a lot of hands-on, uh, manufacturing techniques here. And so they had a lot of, like, their drawings had all the hit, hit all the marks, had everything they really needed. And they were thinking about things in all the right ways, but they didn't have that practical, physical understanding of how are these materials gonna come together?

How long does

this actually take? What tools and techniques should I actually be applying? Is this C and c? Is this hand work? Is this, you know, if I'm

farming this out, how do I talk about this so that I'm using the right lingo for. Various, you know, vendors. So they were a great example of someone who had a really strong [00:28:00] proposal but didn't necessarily have the physical output yet.

But then they, from the work they did here, now they're, now they have a physical module to to show.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I, there's a, there's a big disconnect all in, across many industries, right? Where the, the, the designing and the, the documentation doesn't take into account the years of experience and all of the practical stuff and material knowledge and tolerances and, you know, there's a disconnect there. And, and we see it in architecture, especially with students, right?

Because of course, they don't have that real

world experience. But I think the problem with, even in architecture, just to get a little bit esoteric here, off the, off the topic, is it just. There aren't a lot of opportunities to get out and, and look at it, go on a site visit, especially during every stage of the construction process, right?

There are all the different trades. Like, you'd be lucky to get out as a, as an intern on one [00:29:00] project site in the summer because no, you've gotta get in and you've gotta operate that computer and you've gotta get those drawings done. And so there, it's really difficult. So I think what's interesting about a place like this is that it really puts all of that together under one roof, plus the expertise that they can tap into of the people who are there, the other teams that are there, what's worked for you, what doesn't work for you.

Like, what am I not, what should I ask? What are the questions I should be asking as I embark on this project? Because those are the kinds of things that, like, you just can't get in, in the vacuum of just designing in the software, right? It's just, it's just not there. That connection isn't there.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Yeah, I, I fully agree. I'm definitely myself a hands-on learner and it's one thing to read things, it's one thing to study a diagram. It's really a different thing to. Hold a block of material or to hear the sound of a cutter doing a facing pass or you know, like it's, it's [00:30:00] really different to hear the vibration or feel the vibration of a machine and then understand, oh okay.

Yeah. This is a really physical, visceral experience. And then I think it also gives you empathy for what it takes to manufacture things. I think

it gives you a lot more respect of

what it takes to make, like, even like the blue jeans we're wearing, you know, I remember doing a sewing class once and I was like, oh my gosh, so much goes into one pair of jeans.

We had to make a pair of jeans and it was a really hard project and uh, and you know, they had to like be jeans. They couldn't be like avant garde, flotation, denim moment, you know, like it was had to be

actual jeans.

Evan Troxel: Real jeans work like org

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Yeah. Work jeans and um, and. Yeah, it gave me a really big appreciation of what went into things and the things we kind of take for granted.

And I think there's a

lot that's taken for granted about, you know, [00:31:00] all these everyday objects we use and, um,

Evan Troxel: and

the cost even of the tools, let alone the

experience to actually use them. But I think, you know, one thing that I see a lot of people complain about how much it costs for a plumber to come

do something or just to, or, or to create, like you're talking about, to create something and not realizing that that CNC machine is a quarter million dollars,

right.

Like it's. This is, this is not simple stuff. This is not a circular saw that you can buy at Home Depot. Right? Like, it, it's, that's the kind of things we're talking about. And, and, and then to manufacture things at scale to really take that to, from the prototype level of one to three to a thousand or 10,000 or a hundred thousand, I mean, just, just thinking about

my iPhone right here,

right.

Uh, there, there are millions of these and the tolerance is incredible and just what it takes to get to that point. And, uh, just to, just to reinforce what you're saying about just kind of the, this under-appreciation for what it actually takes to make [00:32:00] real things,

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how did you get to hear, I mean, I would love to hear a bit of your backstory to understand like where you're coming from and, and why you've landed in this place and, and why you care about it so much.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: I, um, was in school for furniture design and I've always been an artist and I was, I did an internship, um, at, uh, the Exploratorium, which is a hands-on science museum. And I was a good welder at the time because I was making a lot of, um, metal furniture that didn't necessarily even seem like furniture, but you would sit on it or it would like, you'd be like, oh, my body's meant to do this.

Like it was. And, but because of that experience with in Metal, I got put on, I, I started volunteering at the Exploratorium and I got put on a lot of sort of metal projects that were happening there. So I was working under an exhibit developer and then he'd be like, I [00:35:00] need you to machine this, or I need you to weld this, or, you know, I'd come in one day a week.

And then I was also working at a restaurant at the time, you know, I was like putting myself through grad school and, um, the time came where I could like, probably make a lot more money, you know, working at the restaurant, which was a great group of people. Or I could make no money and work at the Exploratorium, but probably learn a ton.

And I chose to do that. Um, and I really kind of feel like I grew up there. I worked with an incredible group of people from like, I feel like people who worked for previously worked for NASA and nascar, like the, the, the breadth of

work and

expertise.

Evan Troxel: nascar. Yeah,

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: The breadth of expertise there was really pretty remarkable.

And,

um, and it was very mission driven. We were, it was all about, uh, national Science Foundation funded grants that were making a difference in people's lives. And the shop was very close [00:36:00] to the audience. So, um, at, at the time when I started, I was working at the Palace of Fine Arts, and, I don't know, I just really cut my teeth there, got a lot of machine experience, um, got to develop exhibits and realized I really love solving problems through making things.

And, you know, the Exploratorium was pretty scrappy at times, but also we'd get these big budgets and we could make these exhibits that, you know, needed to withstand a lot of abuse from, well-intentioned, but pretty, um, aggressive. Uh, like my, my target audience was always like. 13 or 14-year-old boy who's like going to a science museum and has a hammer.

You know, like, how

is this thing gonna withstand

a hundred?

Evan Troxel: I know exactly what, uh, yeah. It's

like this thing has to last 50 years with, with a bunch of 13 year olds, uh,

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: yeah.

And

Evan Troxel: it every day.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: yeah.

And so it really helped me understand too, like what [00:37:00] is attractive to me about, um, experiences that I'm expected to do something. And so I really learned how to sort of distill down things, uh, where there wasn't a lot of reading everything you were gonna do made sense of why it was where.

And you know, we did a ton of visitor testing, a ton of validation, um, and a ton of like, exploration on surfaces and things had to be safe. And, you know, you couldn't have something where you poke your eye out or you know, like all these like basic considerations. But that led me to. Um, I don't know. Yeah, I, I worked there for a very, very long time and at the time where, um, the technology center, which was then Pier Nine, um, just called Pier nine, my friend worked here and she was like, do you know any women who know how to teach like wood class and

welding and [00:38:00] metal? And I was

Evan Troxel: she, asking that rhetorically

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: no. She

was like, really flummoxed. And I mean, it's fair because I

had a full-time

job.

I'm like, woman, you're looking at her. And so, and I, at the time, I worked four, 10 hour days there. And so I had a Friday where I could do that. And so I just sort of dipped my toe over here and then I realized, oh my gosh, I have more energy after a eight hour day on a Friday than I do.

Like, something is really

magical about this place and I love teaching. And so I, I, um. It's like a long, long story short, I basically had an opportunity to leave the Exploratorium in a way that was a great way to leave. Like I could do a volunteer layoff and it was good for the whole organization. And so I was able to leave on a high note.

And also someone else was able to stay in a, that was really a valuable member as well. And, um, and then I started working [00:39:00] here, um, as just an instructor and I was just teaching people how to use various tools in the, in the wooden metal shop mainly. And then over time, you know, I, I became like the lead of the instructors and then I started taking over certain other things.

And then when, um, the person before me left, then I, you know, I was doing a lot of the things already, so I kind of understood, I, I, I sort of like really understood how things were working here. And so I started managing this place as well. Um, and I will say like when this. Place started out, it was the premier makerspace of the city.

And, you know, maker spaces were really big. And the, the mission was just so different than what it is now. And now I would say we're a really incredible showcase of like, for small and medium scale manufacturing, uh, businesses who wanna understand like, okay, so how, how do we [00:40:00] safely bring data in? How do we use robotics without making it scary for people or for them to not feel like their jobs are being threatened?

Like, how do we, can you prove this out for us? Like, basically we're the proving ground. And I think that's what I wish I said a little earlier in our, the introduction. You know, like just we de-risk a lot of things because we try things out here. We, we show how it can be done, we show where the pitfalls are, where, uh, workflows can be made more seamless or make easier and, and.

We do that by using the workshops and, and so we've divested of a lot of the sort of makey equipment over the years. Plus, you know, once equipment gets old, it's no longer as shiny and new and effective. And so, uh, right after COVID, when we were coming out of COD, we did a huge shop refresh. So we brought in a lot of equipment that really reflects more the state of the art of, [00:41:00] um, manufacturing facilities.

Evan Troxel: I, I,

I really wanted.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: That was a really long answer.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. How, how you got to where you are. Absolutely. And, and I, it seems like a perfect fit. I, I would love to talk a little bit about the research aspect of this, because that really seems to underlie all of it. It's not just learning how to use equipment or how to bridge the gap between design and manufacturing, but there's this kind of test improve, test, improve, uh, ask the ask questions, use data to make decisions. Can you talk about that layer of it? Because when, when I go down to my shop, like, okay, what I'm, what I'm making is likely a prototype, but all of architecture is a

prototype. Like every building is a prototype, right? So that I don't think about it from a research standpoint when I approach a problem. And I think that is just something I would love to hear more about.

From your perspective of why, why is that the basis of the way you operate? Obviously you're using this to inform your software and how it [00:42:00] communicates with machines and all this, but I'm sure it's, it's much more than that.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Well, so there's a lot of different groups within Autodesk. Of course, it's a very big company, but the umbrella I'm under is Autodesk Research. And some of the projects I can't really talk a lot about in detail because they're Horizon projects. Five or 10 years out, there's research papers that are being written or, you know, there's all this research that's being done on these various projects that will, you'll, you'll see it in, in a few years.

And, but the, the technology centers help support the work of that research because we are the. The physical spaces where we can prove some things out. But there's, there's explorations in centralization of vessels. There's, uh, there's a lot of material studies for, um, architecture. There's, there's things that are being done where there's sort of small experiments [00:43:00] happening, small scale experiments happening, and then partnerships with larger companies who can really help scale up and take some of these, um, these hypotheses.

And then, you know, we're, we're doing a lot of the work here. And then once we validate those, uh, those tests, then we

can get them manufactured, um, at a larger scale. Um, you are gonna talk, I think, a lot in depth about, uh, project Phoenix and the collaboration with factory oss. So that's,

that's one sort of research project that was pretty under wraps.

Um. And now it's, it's much more public. But that's

sort of where we are now in research. There's a lot of different focus areas, um, you know, adaptive robotics, doing complicated assemblies with, with computer vision, with machine learning. but the,

Evan Troxel: come from a maker background [00:44:00] and you

don't, do you come from, you have a research background

or is this something you picked up along the way? Because it does seem to be like the way you're explaining it is like that that is a thread that, that hits every single project that comes in because the, the whole idea of prototyping, validation, validation of ideas before prototyping, testing, iteration is all based on kind of this research mentality,

which it, yeah.

So, and I don't, I don't think that happens in a EC as much. Right. And so that I, I'm interested in hearing about this because on the manufacturing world, which you're much more focused on at this facility. That seems to just be the way it's done, at least the way that you're, everybody that comes through your place is approaching projects versus us.

It's like, I think a EC is much more interested in doing it the way we've always done it than it is about researching and iterating and finding new ways to do things. Obviously there's a

small percentage of

people in a EC who are interested, but for the majority of us, no, it's, it's like, no, this is tried and true.

This is best practices. This

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: [00:45:00] And This

is gonna be faster. Yeah,

exactly. Like we, it'll take forever if we do it this other way, but

Evan Troxel: We can't learn anything new because we can't spend the time to do that.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: it's too expensive. Yeah.

But he, the problem is, as we all know, like the planet is finite, you know, the resources that

the earth has are finite. And so we have to figure out different ways to do the things we've done for

years and years and years. And there are some of these research focus areas that are geared towards sustainability and material, um, materials in construction.

Um, so yeah, there's, there's there's some teams working in the a EC space that are really trying to do things differently than how they've always been done, but. It's interesting 'cause not until you said what you said. I've never thought of myself as a researcher, but yeah, I had to do tons of research before I developed an exhibit.

I had to know what I was talking about. I was

at a science museum, you know, and like here, yeah, you have to do [00:46:00] tons of research before you can, whether it's, you know, figuring out a workflow or it's understanding the material properties of, you know, understanding how machines work, understanding how this group's gonna work with this group.

Like, there's a ton of research that's involved and so, yeah, I think I'm in the right place here. This makes a lot of

sense.

Evan Troxel: So has that changed your approach over time? Do. 'cause it sounds like you weren't always like that and now, and now you, you are. Right.

And so I, I don't know. I that's, that's the question is where is, has this changed your approach? Because like my wife is a, is a researcher, she wants to, she has analysis paralysis right?

To, to that extent where it's like, well, we could do this or this, or this, or this or this. And I'm like, let's just pick one and try it. And so I'm much more of a prototyper

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: mm-Hmm.

Evan Troxel: jumping right in. And obviously, I mean, I, I would love to hear kind of your experience with that and maybe how that's, what are the benefits of those changes over time, if that's really what's happened?

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Well, I do, I manage a team and we have to get things done. And so I think I sort [00:47:00] of straddle both because I, um,

I have my eye on

what the

deadline is and what needs to happen. And so at some point you have to put the pencil down and you have to actually stop theorizing and start practicing. And my advice to the team I manage and to myself when I'm listening to myself is stop thinking, start doing,

and.

It's through making mistakes where I I, you know, it's great to make mistakes. The mistakes teach you so much. You learn so much more

than when things go perfectly.

It's

not good to make the same mistake again and again.

No, we wanna, we wanna avoid that, but those mistakes are hard won and that sort of builds that tacit knowledge that becomes so valuable when you're working in, in the workshop and with other people.

And it, that experience becomes so valuable. That knowledge becomes so valuable when you're sharing what you know [00:48:00] to other, you know, to fellow researchers who maybe aren't getting their hands dirty. And it's all valuable. What every person is contributing is really valuable. But when there's a physical artifact, I say, get to the materials sooner.

And no, don't prototype it full scale. Don't prototype in the most expensive materials there are. Really distill. What's the, what are you trying to find out? Because. If you are just going on assumptions and researching, researching, researching. Sometimes there's just a fear of like, okay, I'm going in the shop.

I'm gonna make some mistakes. It's gonna be a disaster. But like, that disaster suddenly like six hours passed and you're like, oh my gosh, I just learned a lot.

Never do that again. Gonna do more of that. You know, like,

Evan Troxel: Totally.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: so I, I, because I come from this world where I think I could be in my head a lot, but also on, I had a lot of, uh, I, I have a lot of deadlines all the time and that, you know, [00:49:00] juggling multiple projects, you can't just only have one baby.

You have to have a few irons in the fire because inevitably they're not all gonna work out and you have to sort of. Be able to pivot. And sometimes, you know, you'll do one process, it takes time to either cure or it's printing, or it's centering, or it's doing some process where you have to pivot and change gears and do another thing.

Or you can't just sand a piece of whatever it is, you know, for 10 hours you need to break things up because you'll either go crazy or you know, you just, your brain can't

do that.

So I think I like to encourage people to be nimble and flexible. And also like the, the, the targets change. You know, you can't be so stuck on certain outcomes.

And sometimes, and I think this is the beauty of research and the research that's [00:50:00] happening here, sometimes you make these discoveries and it changes the course of what. The research becomes, and

I think that's a really powerful thing that's happening here, is that people are really attuned to these small discoveries that could change the course.

Yeah.

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Evan Troxel: The, one of the, the big messages at Autodesk University this year was the design and make platform. And obviously this is what we're talking about here, like where the rubber meets the road. This is, it's actually happening. And I think one of the big question marks, especially in the a EC sphere was like, what do you mean design and make? Because there is a [00:52:00] disconnection between design and make and, and the feedback loop is difficult at best, uh, when it comes to that because there aren't a lot of design builders. There's a lot of architecture design and, and design firms. But there's a handoff in that process when it goes to a contractor to actually build the thing. And then there's not a lot of incentive to share at

least perceived incentive, uh, to share that information, which obviously would benefit the whole process, right? Because if you can take the stuff that happens from the hands-on experience and apply it in the design process, then it makes the implementation process much more smooth. So. That's obviously what's happening here, right, is you've created this feedback loop and you are actually making good on this design and make, you know, marketing term as it as it is, but it, but it's also kind of an ethos, and so maybe you can just talk about that at, at Autodesk and what that means to you.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Um, one example I can think [00:53:00] of or that you've gotten me thinking of is relationships that we have with equipment manufacturers. Um, I think a lot of people assume that, you know, company like us, we buy a piece of equipment, we write the check and we say, okay, bye. Thanks. And maybe there's a technician that comes out.

Yeah. It it, they come out, they. Commission the machine. We sign a paperwork and then we're done.

But the relationship, uh, that we have with certain equipment manufacturers are so critical and

are so important to the ecosystem and how we, um, how we get our work done. And I really credit my boss, Adam Allard, with instilling this in me and the my colleagues, um, where this is not just a one and done deal.

Like we, we need to, they need to be accountable and we need to be accountable to them. These are relationships that we wanna have [00:54:00] over the long term. So we need to have a really good rapport with them. And. Really authentic rapport and be able to flag when things aren't going well and to celebrate the winds.

And with Mazak we have this, um, incredible five axis machine that you saw on the, when you were here last year. Um, it's a hybrid machine, so it's the first of its kind on the west coast, which is a big deal for us. And it's the third of his kind in private hands. They have one of these at Oak Ridge National Labs who we have a, you know, relationship with and talk to a lot.

But with Mazak, what we really wanted with bringing this machine on and what they were curious and interested in is having a machine that people could see and see showcased when we're giving tours or people come by or we do these interesting projects for Autodesk Research. And so. Our relationship is so strong with them [00:55:00] because we meet with them on a biweekly cadence and we report out on these are the things that are going really well.

These are the things we need some help with. Um, this is the post that fusion needs in order to make this better, that then we could, everyone can use it. Who's doing five axis machining or Hotwire deposition? So like we have a number of people on the call from different parts of the company who are making Maize X product better and Maize X's making our software better.

So it's, it's, uh, I, it, it wouldn't happen without these real relationships or like, Hey, something's going on. Okay, check this. Like we, we have them on speed dial and they can just talk to us like they're, they're great partners because we, we have real relationships with them. So,

um,

Evan Troxel: you're actually using that, that equipment, like

it's actually in use in your facility. It's not like you're hearing this stuff thir, you know, secondhand from your users who are just using your software, who have that machine [00:56:00] if they're lucky enough to have that machine. But it's like really hands-on kind of feedback loop that

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Yeah, that's right. And I think what's very cool about this space as well is that, you know, I can say the thing, same thing about Haw or about Haas or about Mark Forged, you know, it's, we're not just focused on one group or

one vendor or Yeah. We, um, it's, it's a, it's part of an ecosystem when we're telling a bigger story and when we have winds and the machine is, is doing great things, we're gonna feature that.

So that's a win for them because it's, you know, it's like good press for them, but we're not telling stories we don't believe in. And for me, and, you know, managing this space, it's really important. Like the, the health of my team is really critical to me. So I don't want someone who's constantly having to manage.

Fixing something that's always broken, like that's not a good machine, that's not a good story to me. So,

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: you know, I, I, I'm [00:57:00] constantly seeking out the things that are gonna work better. Of course, all equipment needs love, but, you know, I want the equipment that, um, you know, you give it some love and then it really sings for a while.

Like that. That's what I, that's what I'm after.

Evan Troxel: I think you just, you just titled this episode right there. This All machines Need Love. So, so where does this come from in Autodesk? Do you know the story about, about where, because obviously you know this, this whole, the investment and the actual r and d or not the, the technology centers that, that, that you have, they really matter to Autodesk obviously, or it wouldn't, but, but it's gotten to this point and there's a history there.

Do you know what that story is? Can you share that?

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: I think the technology center in San Francisco really grew out of the former CEO, Carl Bass's love of making things. And

he wanted a place where, and I think he really [00:58:00] understood, uh, the great value of being able to take, you know, 3D to or, or 3D drawing to 3D object, you know, like to, like the virtual, to the real.

And so I,

I think it. Started from there. He's no longer, you know, the CEO and the, the we've, we've really sort of changed as a, as a company. But I, I wouldn't like, I don't wanna give you the wrong answer, so I don't know, but I know that that's when I came on and I remember being like, whoa, that's the CEO of Autodesk just on the lathe making a baseball bat.

You know,

Evan Troxel: yeah.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: incredible. Or

he's making a go-kart with, for his son in the, you know, like, what, what's,

this is amazing. He really love and he has an incredible shop of his own now. And, you know, he's doing amazing things and, uh, but, but I think that he really understood the importance [00:59:00] of like software to reality.

And I think that's

Evan Troxel: to physical, right? Yeah, like

the actual,

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Digital to physical. Do I work here? Right?

Yeah.

Evan Troxel: well, there's a, there's a saying in architecture that is, if it, if it doesn't get built, it doesn't count.

Right.

And so, I mean, that makes sense. I

think because it's, it's like there's a difference between real architecture that actually people actually inhabit. And, and that's why we do it, is for those people versus paper architecture, right? And so bridging the gap between digital and physical is a real hurdle to get over.

And that can be, that, that is the difference of what makes a firm a firm that, that does real architecture versus a,

a paper architecture firm. Right. So for you, and getting back to that, when I brought up very early on in the conversation that book

the Shop as Soulcraft like, and it, because it really talks about the value of this work and the meaning. I'm, I'm just interested from your perspective [01:00:00] as we wrap up here, like what. What is the value to you? And obviously you're running this amazing facility, you've got an amazing team, you're on a mission, you are all on the same wavelength and purpose when it comes to that, and again, this is kind of where the rubber meets the road between design and make and and, and all of that.

So what does that mean to you to physically be making things and helping other people make things for the physical world?

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: For me, it's a very empowering place to be because there, there's a lot of insight that comes from seeing something that's digital or digitally rendered, and then actually getting it to be something that's. Physical, that's something that has heft and weight and is cold or [01:01:00] warm to the touch or soft or sharp.

You know, there's, it's one thing to draw a radius, it's another to be so glad that radius is there. 'cause now you don't have a cut, you know, because the

the, the edge is so sharp.

Um, there's, there's a, I, I don't know. There's, I think there's just this full body experience of, it's, it's amazing to be able to create these things with digital tools.

Like, I don't, we can do so much because of that, but the, there's so much that goes into between that drawing. There's so much understanding that goes into, you know, from from CAD to cam. Like the human is the person that's instructing how you get from. You know, you, you desire this plane and so what, what in mill are you gonna use to get there?

And what's the RPM and is there coolant? Like, there's all [01:02:00] of this stuff that then when you

get on the actual machine, you're like, oh wow, that's a lot of cooling. I can barely see what's going on. Or, oh, that's really fast. Or, oh, there's chatter that's really dangerous. Like, you start becoming way more attuned to what's going on in the world and like the, the things you take for granted.

Um, because you know, if you're curious you might say like, I wonder how they manufactured that, or, ah, look, there's a seam line. There was that, was that, you know, mold, like, was that machine? Like, you know, I look at my iPhone all the time, I'm like, that's ingenious. Like,

how did they get there? So,

uh, I don't know.

There's something just constantly rewarding about being in a space where you can. Validate assumptions in a physically, I, I, I just think

that's, and it's, it's always, I'm a hands-on kind of learner in person, so that's, it's, it's my happy place personally, but yeah.

Evan Troxel: It's interesting to see it [01:03:00] happening at such a, I mean, it's obviously a very expensive facility. The

equipment that you have in there is very, but this does trickle down over time to people like me, right, where I've gotta shop and I want, I want to have, I want to be in control of being able to make my own things. Part of that's just because of the way I am wired. Part of that is like, there's nobody else around here who can do what I

want. 'cause they don't have that

vision or the tools to make that vision or the time to invest, to learn software, to make that thing. I just met a guy the other day who's a welder, who bought his own CNC machine because he bought a historic house from 1902 and he's gonna put in a spiral staircase and he wants to actually carve with this CNC machine, the ballusters that, that go up this.

And it's gonna be very intricate. And like, what's really interesting to me is that he's, it's a historic house. He wants to make it. Look and feel historic, and he is using completely modern tools to do that. But, but most [01:04:00] importantly, like he, it's just his, he's in control of all of it, right? Like there would be value in having a true crafts person come

in and carve all those the way that they're originally carved.

And I'm not trying to play that down at all, but, but this is something that like every night he's gonna make two of these things for the next few weeks, right? And he's gonna go through prototypes and he's gonna test it, and he's gonna try different mounting

styles and he's gonna try different wood. And he is gonna learn all about different bits and radii and all, all of these things as he's doing this and come out the other end with a huge value and purpose behind it all.

I think that, that, it's, it, again, I, I keep going back to this book, but it really talks about these ideas of the value of doing this kind of work. and again, we live in a world that's very disconnected from that entire process and I'm, I'm just happy to see places like the one that you're running, enabling. A different way of working to actually manifest things from digital to physical in the real world [01:05:00] for amazing purposes. And the, and the way that these companies come to you with proposals and they, they want to be a resident in your facility to, to do bigger things that make a bigger impact, but, but through actually making real things that, that, that do that, it's not just software running on a server somewhere.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: I'm thinking about the Mazak again, where,

suppose you have a, a casting and it breaks and they don't make this casting anymore. It's from an old piece of equipment, but it needs to have this precision part to it so that something goes through it and there's no way to really chuck it up on a big, you know, or, or it would take too long to try to put it on a, a manual mill or lathe or whatever you needed.

So with the hot wire deposition machine, you could. Basically, you know, build up on this casting and get a near net shape. So it's almost what you want. And then you can machine it. So you're doing this additive and then subtractive in the same work envelope, and then your casting [01:06:00] is as good as new and, and so you're not, I don't know, your machine isn't just taking up space in the landfill or just being scrapped for parts.

You're actually, you

know, it's, it's, there's this idea that we can like, use these technologies so that we can like, you know, rebuild things that just

need a little bit of, you know, a

little

kick, a little help.

Evan Troxel: You can't get any

anymore. Anywhere. Yeah. There's no old, new, old stock. There's, or

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: And that's the power of being able to, to design all these things.

And then the more you know about, you know, like if you don't know something exists, you can't think in those ways. And so I think a lot of what the technology centers do is have this equipment and these resident projects kind of showcase.

Use cases that maybe research isn't aware of or thinking of. And it so it, it helps inform the research they're doing. So it's, it's, it's a

great proving ground and testing ground and you know, mistakes are made. And also there's a lot of [01:07:00] successes that come out of, look what I learned from this mistake.

You know, like, this is,

Evan Troxel: And then sharing that

out. yeah,

That, that, that is an incredibly valuable process and, and place to be. So I, I'm, I'm looking through my questions and I think you have answered everything that I wanted to talk about. Is there anything I, that we're forgetting here?

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: I don't think so. This has been, I was so nervous, Evan. So this has been so nice. Thank you for being such a great host and conversation partner. This is awesome.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

I, I appreciate you coming on the show. Is there anything that you've made recently or, or that really stands out to you and it doesn't have to be recent, that, that you're really proud of, that you feel like is, is kind of indicative of? Because you've inspired me to like, get into my shop. I, I actually had to run power to my shop about 300 feet and

that was step one I got there.

Now I need to actually get in there and lay it out. Like it's a, it's a design process that I'm about to embark on. And, and there's gonna be a lot of failures. [01:08:00] Like, one of my favorite YouTube channels right recently is watching Adam Savage's Tested because he just redid his shop. He's probably right down the

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: But it's like, it's just this incredible place to make things for the physical world. And I'm, I'm just re-inspired and, and by talking to you I am Is there anything for, on your, on your side that, that you've made or that, that, that just really

shows off what, what's possible?

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: well, I, I just wanna give a shout out to. Constantly learning things. So I wanted to get more five axis machining experience. I have a person downstairs who can help me with certain things, but I ended up taking a class that a friend of mine was teaching and I was just like, nerd, nerd, you know, studying all the time.

Like every time I

was, soon, as soon as I'd go home, I'd be like, okay, I'm gonna try this. And I was, you know, there was tests and there was machine time and I made this, um, hammer that was, [01:09:00] uh, in many parts using a lot of different machines and, uh, a lot of the machines we had here. So I was very familiar with a lot of the workflows, but that felt really good to, I don't know, sometimes, you know, you wonder, can I still learn things?

And, you know, you can, but like, it, it was really, it was really, uh, comforting to know that, yeah, I was, my curiosity led to. Follow through of something that

was, you know, it was challenging at times. So I think I just wanna give a plug for like constantly be challenging yourself and, and, and, yeah, I felt very proud of, of doing something like that and um, it makes me just wanna get on fusion more and play around more and,

Evan Troxel: There's this idea that I'm playing with right now as a topic, uh, for a, for a future talk, but it's the, the importance of a side hustle and, and you said the word curiosity there and I think a side hustle's kind of taken on a, it's kind of a, you [01:10:00] know, it's, people don't like to to talk about side hustles because it means more work in a lot of people's interpretation of it.

Right. And, and we need enriching experiences outside of work because I think the thing that you were just talking about actually informs. Approach. It informs projects, it informs your experience and how you talk to people and it's brought inspiration maybe back to your job. And there is this kind of feedback loop

between our, the parts that make us up, right?

So there's like work life, home life, but hobby, life, side hustle, whatever you want to call it, right? Where that curiosity, can I even still learn things? Right. That's a great question to kind of, again, go into the proving grounds and and see that you actually can, because it reinforces who you are, but also it enriches the other parts of your life.

And anything, anything back, if I throw that out,

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Well, yeah. No.

Evan Troxel: what do you think?

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: I mean, definitely I have, I have a studio outside of work that I go [01:11:00] to, and that's, you know, how I spend my time when I'm not at work. I also really understand the value of like, rest and,

you

know, reading and, you know, music and there's, there's, but I, I think that what's so interesting when you, you, you maybe have this side project you wanna do or something that's gonna be, oh gosh, it's gonna take a long time.

Or, I don't actually know how to do that. But for me, at least when I start that process, it's so energizing and then suddenly I'm like, I can't get to sleep. But it's not because I'm stressed, it's because I'm trying to work out problems. And I'm like, oh my gosh, it feels so good to have that part of my brain flexing.

You know, like, so,

and then you start, you know, someone comes with something at work and. Of course there's something that they're working on that then sort of gets you to think about something else that you're working on, and then

you can have this conversation. Yeah, so I think it's like super generative and really productive and a, a really positive thing.

So [01:12:00] I, I, I believe in a side hustle and I believe that you should keep your, keep your brain active in other things. And, um, I think it can only lead to good things. I also really believe in rest, you know, and like, you know, sometimes you just gotta quit and you just gotta re recharge. I think that that's important to do too, because it's all

you, you know, you have one body, you have finite resources, so.

Evan Troxel: You're lucky you get to work with some incredibly talented people, some of the smartest people, I'm sure, and that. Is I, I'm lucky as well. I get to talk to people like you. I get to have people on the show who talk about what they're passionate about, what their purpose is, and all of those things, uh, is just, it's inspirational to me.

So thank you so much for

taking the time to have this conversation today, and I'll have links to where people can connect with what you're doing and, and you on LinkedIn as well in the show notes for this episode. And

is there anything else that, that you wanna point people toward that they [01:13:00] should know about when it comes to Autodesk Research?

And besides maybe just the basic web links, is there anything

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Yeah, no, I will, um, give you the links to the mach, to the, uh, teams that we talked about so

people can do a little more research

if they

Evan Troxel: Fantastic. All right. Well thank you and I hope to talk to you again.

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough: Thanks so much, Evan. Bye.

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Building IMEG’s AI-AssistantSteve Germano of IMEG joins the show to talk about developing an in-house AI assistant named Meg, which functions as a conversational chatbot and search engine for company data running within Microsoft Teams.

We talk about the goals and capabilities of the first release and how the dev team is considering adding workflows to Meg's capabilities. We also discuss the platform they have chosen to build on, what the biggest challenges have been getting to this point, early feedback from staff and leadership, what the potential ROI on a project like this is, and more.

Episode Sponsor🚀*Chaos Enscape
Enscape is soon launching something special that will make your 3D workflow the best 3D workflow for a special price. In the meantime, you can experience it for yourself for free at https://chaos-enscape.com/trial-14 or simply by Googling “try Enscape”.Episode Links Steve on LinkedIn * Steve on Twitter * IMEG website * IMEG on LinkedIn * IMEG on Twitter

Watch this episode on YouTubeConfluence S1E9 - Building IMEG’s AI AssistantSteve Germano of IMEG joins the show to talk about developing an in-house AI assistant named Meg, which functions as a conversational chatbot and search engi…YouTubeListen to this episodeSubscribe on YouTube

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Petr Mitev joins the podcast to talk about his journey from working in architecture to focusing on technology in the AEC industry, his move to Germany as his role has evolved at Enscape, some of his philosophy about AI and its potential for architects, the democratization of tools and the superpowers they provide to users, and the release of Enscape for the Mac.

About Petr Mitev:Petr thrives on diverse problems and solving them through an agile and experimental application of technology. He’s currently working with Chaos as the Vice President of Solutions for Designers to create software products and technologies that empower and improve the design and delivery of the built environment. Although his education was in traditional design & Architecture, his work with the Research Group at KieranTimberlake and his experience as the Head of Application Development and Design Computation at NBBJ allowed him to merge his background in formal design with his passion for empowering technology. Petr’s main focus now is leveraging his product experience and knowledge of the AECO industry to create solutions that effectively improve the environment and answer the most pressing questions faced today as builders of tomorrow.

Links:* Petr on LinkedIn * Petr on Twitter * Enscape website * Enscape for Mac * Chaos website * Chaos on LinkedIn * Chaos on Twitter * Chaos on Instagram

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Twitter * Threads * Mastodon * Email

Watch this on YouTube:148: ‘Universal Language’, with Petr MitevPetr Mitev joins the podcast to talk about his journey from working in architecture to focusing on technology in the AEC industry, his move to Germany as his…YouTube

Episode Transcript: TRXL Member 148: ‘Universal Language’, with Petr Mitev
Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. Before we begin, if you are a regular listener and enjoy these episodes, please use the subscribe button on YouTube and in your preferred podcast app, to let me know that you're a fan of the show. Your subscription is incredibly valuable in supporting my efforts.
And I genuinely hope that you're finding the conversations published here, enriching for yourself and valuable for the AEC industry. Being a subscriber, which is completely free, directly influences two things. My ability to attract sponsors and help keep the show going. And my ability to attract high profile guests, which is great for you.
My goal is to provide value to you and the industry as a whole. So if you haven't subscribed, I encourage you to do so. As I mentioned, it is completely free and a great way to [00:01:00] support the show.
Okay. In this episode, I welcome Petr Mitev back to the podcast. Petr is the vice president of solutions for designers at Chaos Enscape. In this episode, we discuss his journey from working in architecture to focusing on technology in the AEC industry, his move to Germany as his role has evolved at Enscape some of his philosophy about AI and its potential for architects, the democratization of tools and the super powers they provide to users and the release of Enscape for the Mac, which I am really happy to see because I love working on my Mac. And I'm particularly excited that Enscape is indeed working in Rhino version eight on the Mac.
Can't believe I'm saying those words all at the same time with the latest preview release of Enscape. I don't even think that this is currently an option in the windows version of Rhino eight, much too many users dismay, [00:02:00] but it only seems fair to me as a Mac user who has waited oh, so long for these apps to come to the Mac. I say that jokingly, of course, or maybe not.
Anyway, I've read on the Enscape forums that support for version eight of rhino on windows, maybe coming in mid February. Anyway, this was a fantastic conversation with Petr and I hope you'll not only find value in it for yourself, but that you'll help add value to the profession by sharing it with your network. And now without further ado, I bring you Petr Mitev. .

Evan Troxel: Well, Petr, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you.
Petr Mitev: Yeah, thank you for having me again. I'm excited.
Evan Troxel: it's been, uh, let's see. It was end of March, 2021 that we last talked. I'm checking my notes here. So it's been a couple of years almost. I mean, a lot has happened and, and I was looking back through the show notes for that episode. [00:03:00] And just to remind myself about what we talked about, and then we've seen each other in person a couple of times since then at various trade shows, but You were, let's see, in that episode, you talked about leaving practice, going to work in tech.
You were going to move overseas, and Enscape 3. 0 had just come out, right? So, that was kind of, that was the state of the, of, of Petr's union back then. So, where, what, what's happened? Catch us up over the last couple years.
Petr Mitev: Yeah, sure thing. I mean, it, it feels like just yesterday we had that conversation, but it's, it's crazy to hear that date come out of your mouth because it really was that, that long ago. Uh, so what's, what's the state of the union today? Well, uh, Enscape 4. 0 is about to come out, which is another really, really big milestone for us.
It's, it's something that we've been working towards for, for a long time. It's exciting that we get to bring our, our, our product to a lot of people that, I mean, before just haven't had a [00:04:00] chance to interact with it, namely, namely the Mac users. Um, so that's been really, really special. And on my side of things, I mean, I did, I did complete the move to overseas.
I get to, I actually live about 15 minutes from headquarters. I'm just walking, really. I don't even drive or need to ride a bike. So that's super exciting just to be able to interact with everybody super frequently. And of course, being here also allows me to. Fly to our other offices, you know, Sophia Copenhagen.
So, uh, very exciting to be surrounded by a lot of really, really passionate and very cool people. Like that's, that's really the best part of, of chaos now that we're together. And, um, I dunno, I'm looking forward to a lot more of that.
Evan Troxel: So, the chaos Acquisition merger happened since we've talked last as well officially on the podcast and It seems like a really nice compliment and maybe you could talk a little bit about that just to set up What why did that happen catch us up on that part of the story as well?
Petr Mitev: Yeah, sure thing. So [00:05:00] it was a merger between Chaos and Enscape. And like you said, uh, completely complimentary, not just from a product perspective, but I think also from a, from a people perspective. I mean, uh, historically people have always. Ask me before the merger, I mean, you know, like, what, what are you going to do about a VRay or Corona?
And my answer was maybe not the one they wanted to hear, but my answer was always like, I'm not even competing with those people. We're doing completely different things, uh, which is perfectly fine. And, and we are, you know, they've, they've historically always focused on, Uh, super high quality, you know, things that are ready to be put into, uh, an Avengers movie or a Star Wars movie, Game of Thrones, right?
Just the absolute bleeding edge of, of graphics and technology, which is awesome. Uh, but it's, it's, you know, for, for some people it's, it's, uh, not accessible just because it, it requires such a huge body of knowledge to, to use. Whereas our priority, uh, at Enscape has always been. To actually serve the other side of the [00:06:00] industry is the people that don't have time to learn this immense body of knowledge, whether it's an architect, interior designer, landscape designer, doesn't matter.
But, you know, people whose day to day job is building buildings or parks or infrastructure. So, yeah, it's been completely complimentary from, from that side of things. There's very little, um, conflict or overlap, whatever you want to call it between the different products. And, and honestly, the only other exciting part that I want to highlight is.
It's the people, uh, because we work on different things, but we're all very motivated and everybody's, uh, super positive and, and they're, they're thinking about the right things. You know, we, we don't get distracted by, um, some of these other kind of little niggling problems that I think plague bigger organizations.
So it's, yeah, it's been awesome and we've got a lot to figure out still. Don't get me wrong. This is never an easy process, but it's, I think it's one absolutely worth doing and I'm super glad we did it.
Evan Troxel: It seems like there are the kinds of Mergers and acquisitions where we've seen this happen play out [00:07:00] in AEC tech plenty of times with a big company buying a small company and just making it go away, right? And then there's what, what we're seeing here, which is like no pump. money into that product line so that it can grow and meet more users where they are.
And I think, you know, one thing that you brought up in that was, was that when I think about V Ray, when I think about the high end visualization products, and I think about operating that product. I think about somebody sitting behind a cockpit dashboard, right? I, I, that's what I, I visualize that. It's like, there are so many switches and so many variables, and you have to know what all of those different, it's a very different vocabulary than what an architect is trained.
under and so it's like you've got diffuse this and you've got specular that and you've got normals and you've got all these you've got all these global illumination variables and you know you've got all this bounce number and it's like [00:08:00] to to an architect none of that makes sense unless you really do a deep dive and become a specialist and V Ray already had a foothold definitely in the architectural in the AEC space.
in high end visualization. But that meant there were very few users in firms who actually knew how to use it. A lot of times they came from a visual effects background or were now moving into architecture, um, and, and vice versa. I've also seen People who are working in visualization at firms go on to work at high end visual of visualization houses that take that even farther, right?
Like Jason Addy at Neoscape has been on the podcast before and a couple of the other Neoscape guys too where they're doing super high end. Stuff where it's like they're doing that to win work at the highest level. They're helping firms win work at the highest level. And then there's firms who have that one or two visualization specialists if they're lucky to have that [00:09:00] position.
And Enscape was like everybody else who actually just needed to pump out high quality enough and super high quality images. day to day basis. And I think one thing that, you know, Roderick Bates has been on the show before, you've been on the show before, and I know this topic has come up with other people as well, which is, now we're using the tools.
as a design aid. We're using it to make decisions along the way. Now it's not the end of the process, which it used to be. Anytime it was V Ray, it was the end of the process, right? It was, because it had to be. It was so technical. And now we're using it way earlier along the path of design to help make decisions along the way because we've also seen the shift to basically renderings are free now.
Right? It's like, it's like with, with BIM, drawings became quote unquote free because we had, we built the model, we automatically got the sections, we got the plans, we got the RCPs, all those things. And now with real time rendering It's [00:10:00] like, we're always visualizing in 3D. We're always visualizing in a shaded, beautiful environment with a tool like this.
It really helps just crank out images, and we're constantly, because as an architect, clients were always asking for rent, updated renderings, and it was like, no, you only get those at the end of DD. That was when you got them, because that was when the design had settled down enough for us to spend the time to do it.
And now, wanted to give them more renderings. We would have, as a designer, I want my building to always be evolving. I want the imagery of that. And, and I couldn't even provide that to myself, let alone to them. Right. So now it's free. And so the landscape has really shifted over the last, I don't know, five or.
Plus years, but man, what a difference it's it's so, so that. That merger really does make sense. And for Enscape to grow in the way that it's grown and provide the tools to designers that it does, it's just been one of those things that's been really fun to [00:11:00] watch because people really enjoy using that tool.
It's not a tool that they feel like, They tolerate and they have to put up with using, like they really enjoy using it, they want to spend their time there and because of that they're plugging it in earlier and earlier and earlier and using it to make design decisions along the way. I, I'm curious what you think about all that.
Petr Mitev: I think that's, that's really, really spot on. And honestly, when I, when I talk about, uh, Enscape, whether it's internally or externally, the, the positioning that we always aim for is that it's exactly that it's, it's a design tool. I mean, if, of course, if you want to use that to generate some, uh, renderings for a presentation, you know, we're not here to stop you doing that.
But when we, when we think about. You know, what we call a product strategy or product principles when we, uh, basically build the foundation that allows us to decide and prioritize on features at the heart of it is, is being a design tool and helping people reach a decision, you know, and, and the quote that people have heard me, uh, Um, you [00:12:00] know, parrot around the office like a broken record is that Enscape is supposed to enable design decisions, not design artifacts, right?
And design artifact meaning a pretty picture, a pretty video. Again, it's not to say that you can't and shouldn't do that. Absolutely. But, uh, when we think about really prioritizing things and, and it's a hard thing, right? Because we have no shortage of, of options to build. Things that people want, but we have to make tough decisions and say, Hey, we're gonna do this, but we're not gonna do that.
And when it comes to those tough decisions, that's always what we think about is prioritizing the decision making process and making sure that we put in things that help that process. And yeah. Are there a ton of. Things we could do to make it prettier and more realistic. Absolutely, yes, but then again, we're also lucky enough that we've got a lot of other things in the portfolio that can do that, frankly, better.
And it's our job then to connect those workflows and to make that as easy as possible. But absolutely, we want to enable design decisions. That's, that's the [00:13:00] absolute goal of the product.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. And you come from a background in practice, so you know what it's like. You were on the tech side, and you were, when, when you were working in the practice, can you, do you, like, think back, and what was it actually like back then versus the kind of ideal scenario now?
Petr Mitev: Yeah, it was, it was quite different. I mean, I was, I was very lucky that I, my, my education, my master's and my bachelor's were set up a little bit differently in, in the sense that, you know, we got to, basically it was alternating one semester of, of studies and one semester of, uh, professional practice, which was super challenging, but it also exposed me from a very, very early point to practice.
And I got to see that evolve over, uh, Oh jeez, it's hard, it's hard to say that it's over a decade now, like I feel old, um,
but
Evan Troxel: You're hurting me. You're hurting me even worse by saying that.
Petr Mitev: Oh no, uh, let's stray away from that, but
Evan Troxel: Ten whole years.
Petr Mitev: [00:14:00] It's, it's been a heck of a, but look, even in 10 years, it's been a heck of an evolution. I, I remember my first job, I was, I was drawing 2D in AutoCAD and you know what? That was more than good enough. But, um, when I think about what could have been right, I mean, I look at how people are working today when I talk to clients and it's, it's, it's so different.
I mean, as soon as. You move a window or, or delete a wall, you can absolutely in literally in real time, show your client the implications of that, uh, show your coworkers, make a decision and ideally make a better decision, right? And again, I contrast to that, to that first job where I was just living in AutoCAD and I had no idea what it meant if you delete, you know, a set of lines that comprise a window.
Um. What does it mean to the actual space? The quality, the experience, right? The, the natural light there. There's so many criteria that, um, you can try and interrogate in your head. And if you're a really good and experienced architect, maybe you're successful. But me, I was a complete [00:15:00] beginner and a junior back then I was still learning.
Uh, that was way beyond my, my computational means of, of my head to, to analyze that and to make the best decision possible. So, um, it's, it's come a long way and it's, it's exciting. And it's exciting when I hear people that actually use the tool, talk about it too, because it's always one thing when we plan in house, but then to hear real stories about real projects that, that really live that, um, it's super inspiring, honestly, and it helps us know whether we're on the right track or not.
Evan Troxel: So, I'm thinking as you're speaking about deleting walls or what do the lines mean? I mean, that's been a big shift, I think, when you think about people who operate. BIM, like we had CAD operators, now we have BIM operators. And back, back in the day, when we drew graphite on paper, or then switched to CAD, there was still this, this big leap that we had to make, which was, what does this line mean?
What does it [00:16:00] represent? Why are we drawing it? I think that that gap has shortened quite a bit. in moving into 3D modeling as a basis of the design. And then we derive all of the elevations and the plans and the sections from that. Because we can look at it in 3D and understand it. But I would love it if you could explain, I mean let's do a mini word based workshop right here.
We're not showing anything, but I would love it if you could explain kind of what a design process could be like when you incorporate real time rendering into that. And I'm just kind of thinking of Moving walls around while having this synced 3D rendered window up and actually, you know, moving the sun around while it's happening and understanding what's going on with the light in that room.
Maybe you can just paint a picture for somebody.
Petr Mitev: yeah, I think the, I certainly can, and what I'll say is that I think it also looks a little bit different based on the phase of design that you're on. So, you know, in the earliest stages, we're, we're thinking here, pre design or schematic design. I think [00:17:00] the, the real power is that it, it, it lets you move very quickly.
I mean, those are the shortest and the cheapest phases, right? So it means that we, we typically don't have a lot of time to spend there. Which is unfortunate because a lot of the big moves and the big decisions also kind of get made there. I mean, the form, the massing that you build at that stage is nine times out of ten what ends up being the final thing, or at least close enough.
So, in those stages, I think it allows you to very quickly test a lot of different options. Because you can basically be playing around and just periodically take a screenshot, you know, at the end. Show all that to your coworkers or your client and you've evaluated a lot more options. And then, like you said, you also have a lot of different data points available to you, right?
You could play with the sun. You can play with the natural surroundings. You can interrogate this design from a lot of different perspectives that before, um, would have taken so much time. I mean, you know, imagine [00:18:00] what, uh, doing sun studies without. Um, real time rendering or, or some kind of graphical computational means it's, uh, it's just not something you can do for a lot of options.
Um, and then I think as you, as you move and add more detail, or again, talking, I don't know, uh, design development, construction documents, then I think it also allows you to think more critically about the, the layers of specificity that you're, you're putting on a project. You know, if it's a flooring material, wall material, whatever it might be, glazing.
Uh, again, I think it, it lets you have a much more accurate picture of what that thing's going to look like when it's actually put up on site, because I remember when I was working at, uh, Cure in Timberlake in, in Philadelphia, we used to do a lot of physical mock ups in order to have that sureness and that security.
That this thing is going to look like the way we intended to when it's built. Right. And, and that's a great process. Don't get me wrong. I'm, I'm not bashing the process, but it's also very expensive and [00:19:00] time consuming, which makes it prohibitive for a lot of projects. And that's unfortunate where with real time rendering.
Okay. You're not going to be a hundred percent photo real, but you're going to be close enough that you can have a lot more certainty when you go in front of a client or an engineer or whoever it might be in terms of a stakeholder and say, Hey, this is what it's going to look like when we actually spend money on real materials and physical labor to install this thing.
So, um, it's, I don't know, for me, workflow completely. If, if people do use it as a, as a design tool, which more and more are. Um, it gives you a lot more power, I think, as, as the designer and the, the, the master builder of, of the project gives you a lot more, uh, confidence as well.
Evan Troxel: There's a couple of different things that I, I want to just zero in on here. And one of those things is, yeah, you can move around your project and you can look at sun angles and the things that. You would typically do, even with traditional rendering, rendering being, you know, 3D [00:20:00] rendering, uh, where it's like, yeah, move the camera around, change the angle, change the field of view, move the sun, get the shadows where you want them, even if it's not the right side of the building.
You know, a lot of times when we did visualization, we did that because we wanted to show off that side of the building and it would just look really bad if it was dark in the shadow, right? But now, it's like It's so easy just to move the sun by using keyboard shortcuts. As you're looking at a scene to get that right where you want, you can actually move the sun along its path and you can position your project wherever it is in the world to get realistic, but then you can just move it around and actually study it.
But I think what's so interesting about real time rendering is actually that you can have that window up When you're building the model as well, and you're getting near real time, if not real time, depending on the hardware, and maybe you can I'm going to elaborate on this a little bit, but updates as you are moving walls around, as you are extruding walls, as you are making openings bigger or [00:21:00] smaller.
And so, kind of really just zeroing in on this, making decisions during design. Because you're getting that visual feedback, it's not like you're just still building the model in plan view or in section view, and then you're looking at it, or then you're going to go explore it, but you can actually be in a space, you could set your camera down in a space, and then you can go over to this view over here, and whatever tool you're using, I'll be, you know, it could be Revit, it could be SketchUp, it could be Rhino, it could be whatever, whatever.
And you can actually move that wall and watch the implications in real time of what that's doing to the space. I mean, is, is that, am I painting an accurate picture there?
Petr Mitev: Yeah, very accurate. Very accurate. And it's, it's, I guess, I don't, for, for me, it's, it's hard to really Verbalize and quantify the impact for somebody that hasn't worked in the field. I think for those of us that have worked in design field, we can imagine the power that that gives you, but, you know, for people that haven't been involved in that process, I think it's kind of hard to [00:22:00] quantify how important that is.
Because there are so many different factors, you know, and when I give talks here and there, especially to crowds that. are not using this kind of technology. The example I always use is, is moving around, uh, something as simple as a window or changing its size, right? Because I mean, on one hand there's the aesthetic criteria, right?
Like how does this look, which very important, very valid. But you can really dive deeper and deeper into that, that simple or seemingly simple question and say, okay, well, if I make the windows smaller, what does that also mean for my electrical lighting? Do I need to introduce more electrical lighting? Do those fixtures clog up the ceiling?
Does that mean the engineers have to come up with a new electrical plan? So, and, and these seemingly small and simple things really snowball into complex things, potentially expensive things. And, and the, the power of real time rendering is that you can. You can, uh, really evaluate those a lot quicker and engage other people, right?
Because it's never a solo process. We, we know that [00:23:00] architecture is not a solo process and, and it, it helps you communicate to people, which again, may or may not have your training and your background, but the beauty of a picture is it's kind of like a universal language. Anybody can look at that and say, okay, well, I understand what you mean.
Uh, because if you just saw the show them a 2d plate or a section, I mean, you know how it goes with people that aren't trained the way that we are. They're like, uh, It's tough for them to engage. It's completely, completely makes sense.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, I think, uh, . So, okay. So you keep opening up like different pathways for me to go down. Um, the, I'll just tell a quick little story before I get to the, the other point because I, I do want to talk about, uh, the client's reaction or the potential in, in the process right there, and which I've, I've also talked about, I think with Roderick, uh, Bates on the podcast before, but, but before we get there, I just wanted, I was teaching a.
course at Cal Poly with on emerging technology and this week's curriculum was about real time rendering and we had talked about [00:24:00] Enscape because I had some visualization pros come in and show what you can do with VR, what you can do with rendering and it was kind of the state of the art of where things were headed and I think at that time the students were all, this is maybe 2017, 2018, 2018.
Everybody was, was very much embedded in whatever their professors knew, right? And so their professors knew Rhino and V Ray. That's what they were saying. You all should be using this. Imagine telling a student you need to learn V Ray in the last two weeks of the course, right? It would just be Like the renderings would probably look bad and, and it would just be completely overwhelming on top of an already un overwhelming task to just finish your design by the, the end of the, the quarter at that point.
Right. So I introduced realtime rendering to them, and it was Inscape at that point as well. And so I don't know what version it was, it was probably in the twos or whatever, but it was like, this was one of those things where. [00:25:00] It was literally weeks away from the end of the course, and I had students come up at the end and they say, I, I learned Enscape, and, and just to give people an idea, if they're not using this technology, What it's like to actually pick up a new tool, because oftentimes that can feel overwhelming.
That can feel like what those students felt when their teachers told them, their professors said, use V Ray. It would just be like, what? No, right? We're not doing that. Or, I only know this way, which was another tool that I've used, and I know how difficult that and time consuming that is. If you could just, maybe, before we jump into the other part about clients, talk about, What is the learning curve for a tool like this?
Because my students picked it up in literally a couple of weeks, and they were doing their final presentations in it.
Petr Mitev: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, that's great to hear. I mean, we, we like to, one of our product principles again, and one of our product philosophies is to try and flatten that learning curve as much as possible. I mean, [00:26:00] the, and it all kind of starts with, with the first experience, right? The first point of contact. So one thing that we really try to, Um, prioritize is the experience when you first hit that render button, because right out of, out of the box, it should look good enough.
We, we, we shouldn't expect people to, to invest a lot of time and energy. And out of the box, I think if, if today, anybody listening, if you just download the software, download a free trial version and just click render, I think you would be more than pleasantly surprised about how, how good it looks. And, you know, it sounds simple enough, but it's actually quite complex.
And our, our engineers. Uh, work with our, with our customer support folks closely, and they spend a lot of time on this to, to fine tune those settings that are most likely to work out of the box because every project's different and we've learned that the hard way, right? But, um, it's, it's important to make sure that out of the box.
It's gonna, it's gonna meet your needs. And of course, if you want to invest more time in and get better and better results, you absolutely [00:27:00] can. And, and we encourage that. We've got a lot of learning resources, but, um, the learning curve should be. I mean, ideally non existent because again, uh, you and I that have been in professional practice, we know that there's enough things going on in your day, in your week, in your month that you, most of us don't have the luxury of time or resources to invest in learning something completely new.
So this kind of has to be, um, it almost has to come for free with the work that we're already getting paid to do because. You know, at least in, in, in the United States where most of my professional practices, you get paid for, for drawings, you don't get paid for renderings, you need to do them to facilitate the process of getting the drawings, but realistically, an architect gets paid for drawings and, you know, with a couple of firms that I've worked at, we've done this, uh, profitability analysis in terms of measuring billings, And kind of doing, doing a correlation with what people are spending their time on.
And guess what? Big surprise. Uh, when people spend more time in the tools that actually [00:28:00] generate drawings, the projects and the firms are more profitable. The more time they spend in things like PowerPoint or Photoshop, uh, the margins are, are smaller. And it, it, it has broad implications, not just for the bottom line of the business owner, but also for, for the wellbeing of, of the people that work there and, and the projects that they work on.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, it, I remember, I've used a lot of rendering tools over the years and kind of dating myself, right? It was like first 3D studio in DOS and it was like FormZ, RenderZone, Electric Image, uh, Cinema V Ray, Maxwell Render, never once When you fired up that rendering engine, did it look good immediately?
Never once. And the difference between an amateur and a pro was that. You knew if you got a good looking image, right when you fired it up, a pro was behind the wheel. Either they had done all of the work over probably months if not years to set up a template for that file so that as soon as [00:29:00] you hit the first render, it looked decent, right?
But man, what, what a difference. And, and so I think. Like there's value in that. There's that just the speed in which you can spin up this kind of a value add to your practice is Basically non existent, like there's no, there's no time frame in which you just hit render and boom, it's, it's, it looks decent.
It looks good enough. It's something that you would not be embarrassed to put in front of a client. And, and it's just amazing to watch that transformation happen over the last decade in visualization and bring those tools to mere mortals. And I'm pointing it myself, like, uh, any, any architect who needs to show.
What's going on in that, in the project while it's still being figured out in the computer, um, is, it's kind of a godsend to, to people like us who are just like, no, I don't want to spe Learn how to fly the jet. I just [00:30:00] don't. I don't have time to learn how to fly the jet. So I just want to push this button and and there is value in that and it costs money.
It cost like that. It's not free and it shouldn't be free. I know Enscape's prices have gone up over the years and it's gotten more complicated. But but the value and so maybe you can just speak to this like how do you guys talk about the value? Well, I mean, I think we've probably already covered a lot of it.
Is there anything else that, that you really point at and say, like, what's that worth? Because I think, I think architects are cheap. I think, and I've said that on this podcast before, architects are cheap. They don't want to pay for more tools, right? And so a lot of times they're going to try to bundle these all into one application.
So whether that's SketchUp with just its free. You know, Shaded Views, or Revit with its free Shaded Views, or Rhino, which has kind of upped the game with the latest version by building in the Cycles renderer. It's way better than it used to be, but it's still more flying the jet than not. And so Why would somebody spend [00:31:00] the money to, in addition to their package that they need to get the job done, which you just spoke to, they've got to do the drawings, right?
We've got to do all this stuff. Why spend the money on an additional package? Why Enscape, even?
Petr Mitev: yeah, no, it's, it's a really good question. And honestly, it's, it's a, it's a very responsible question that I think every owner of a professional practice should, should ask themselves, because, um, again, from experience, the, the margins at an architecture practice are not high. The fees are, um, I mean, no, I agree with you.
I think architects have been unfortunately underpricing themselves for a long time, but that's, you know, that could be a whole nother two hour discussion. I think
the, the, the reason why, uh, somebody should invest in something higher quality is, is honestly just, I think, directly proportional to, to, to how they see.
They're standard of care for their clients, you know, and, um, when I was in practice, I wanted to give my clients the best, [00:32:00] the best that I could write the best within my skill set within my abilities, whatever, because, you know, we're also, we're not doing this just for the clients, right? I mean, we're building permanent things on the face of the planet that we all inhabit, and it's worth it that these spaces are good.
I mean, I I forget exactly what the number is, but we spend, as humans, something like 97. 8 percent of our time indoors.
Evan Troxel: Jeez.
Petr Mitev: significant, right? So, I mean, me as an architect, I would rather think that we want to make the best spaces that we could, that we can. If not just for us, for future generations, because these are going to be on the planet for a very long time.
So, why should somebody spend a time, the time and the resources on a good design tool is simply to make better design. And, and to make better design decisions, because I think with, with more information and being able to generate that information a lot quicker and more effectively, then, then that leads to better design.
[00:33:00] So for me, that's really the, the main thing is, is as architects, we all want to make better buildings and these tools help us do that. You can also look at it from a kind of a little bit of a colder or detached point of view, which is simply. To look at the business case. I mean, uh, the time that you would spend to, um, create something compelling for a client or for a presentation, um, is not insignificant if you're not using some kind of, of solution, whether it's real time or not.
But, um, I mean, and in billable hours are, are, I mean, there are the way that you measure an architect's business and value prepositions. So, um, it's very How do I say? Easy is maybe the best word. It's a very easy way to introduce efficiency. In your business, um, from the perspective of a business owner and I, I know it's only an economic perspective, but it's, it's not insignificant, you know, because, um, dollars and cents translate to hours and minutes and hours and minutes that could be invested in, in, [00:34:00] in other things, in, in catching things that might lead to a RFI in the field or a change order or something.
And, and for me, these are the things that architects should be spending their time on because that's where our experience in education, um. makes us valuable. It's not in, in, in making, um, you know, PowerPoint presentations,
Evan Troxel: Yeah, I think a lot of times firms hire interns or emerging professionals and they'll do the visualization because they speak computer language. You know, I say that in a very dumb way, but it's like they're tech. They're the tech people. They're the ones who can prepare the images and they will, then the seniors will art direct, right?
And they'll stand over the shoulder and say, no, a little bit to the left, no, a little bit to the right. Move this up. Move. And, and so I think that So there's, there's that kind of mentality, but I think now the tools have gotten so good and so easy to use if you have the appropriate hardware to run it on to take away the pain of, of running it on an [00:35:00] underpowered machine that anybody, like literally anybody can do this.
And I think that is, is one of the big shifts that we've seen in the evolution of bringing real time rendering to the masses in a much, much bigger scale way, which I assume could only happen with the Enscape merger, or sorry, with the Chaos merger, because that is what's really Yeah. Okay, number one, these products are already out there.
They know how to get a product into AEC at scale. They're, they have the resources for a team to build better tools, and maybe you can just speak. to that a little bit and tell me if that's, if my, my inclination is true there, because it seems to me like because they're complimentary, because there's name recognition out there, there's already trust and relationships in the field when it comes to tool providers for visualization with a group like Chaos to [00:36:00] bring that, you know, Enscape along under that umbrella and really help get it out there.
Has that been significant for Enscape to get into the market in a much better way?
Petr Mitev: there's definitely a lot of things that we've been able to, um, share with one another. Um, uh, and, and, and we can look at this in a lot of different ways. I mean, um, there's of course the opportunity to, um, share technology, right? Which is maybe kind of the, the low hanging fruit. I'll give you Very direct example are, um, we have these procedural clouds in Enscape, which are, well, they're procedural, right?
So they're, they're, they're generated, uh, through an algorithm. You, you don't need to, um, use images or HDRs basically to, to create the scene. And, um, guess what? It turns out that's actually quite exciting for, for film studios, AKA clients of V Ray Advantage. Um, because now they don't have to spend all this time when they shoot a scene and then kind of be Paint, painting in quotes, uh, the [00:37:00] shadows that match these clouds on the actual characters in the scene, because the procedurally generated clouds basically allow you to pull that data and dynamically computationally apply these shadows to, um, to the characters in the scene.
So that's, that's, uh, I think an example of an exchange in the other way. Um, there's been many examples in, in, in, in our direction as well. Not just from a technology standpoint, but from a client standpoint as well. Um, we're able to, I think, yeah, uh, tell our stories to, to clients that previously would not have known either brand, um, and see if they find value in the solutions, which is, which is awesome.
And, and ultimately it's, I think it's about just sharing. Um, you know, share knowledge, experience, um, about how to, to be more effective, right? Because ultimately the goal is to solve real problems for real people. It doesn't matter if they're 3d artists or architects, but as, as a company, you know, as a portfolio of products, we need to make sure that what we're building is solving product, uh, solving problems for, [00:38:00] for real people out there doing, doing real work.
So, um, it's been a great opportunity to share knowledge, I think back and forth. Honestly, there, there's a lot more that, that we can and should and will do. Right. Um, but that's also, like you said, that's one of the benefits of, of having that exposure and, you know, along the way, we also. Acquired a couple of other companies, Selindo, AXIS, um, those bring in a wealth of knowledge from totally different industries.
I mean, Selindo's got the e commerce, um, and furniture side of the business, uh, very well, um, under comprehension. AXIS is, um, They, they really know kind of the, the animation system, the, the state of the art scanning technology for, for people. And again, completely different clients, completely different use cases a lot of the times.
And when we're all together under one, um, entity, we can share that knowledge and experience a lot more and we can work towards a common goal and be faster and more effective at it rather than, you know, trying to pursue the same things alone, [00:39:00] basically.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, let's talk about your audience, because for the longest time, Enscape was not available to a segment of that audience. I don't know how big that audience was, but I, I'm, the Macintosh is near and dear to me. I, I am a tried and true Mac user, and so for the longest time, Enscape was not available to me, but now it is.
So this is another thing that's happened since the last time that we've talked, and I know it has not been the easiest road for you to travel, but I know that this has been something that you've been working really hard on. And so maybe, like, let's just get into that part of the conversation. You can kick us off with Like, what, what that journey has been like since you originally decided to bring Enscape to Mac users, and why you, why you would even go there.
Petr Mitev: Yeah, yeah, that's a, it's, it's, it's a heck of a story. I'll tell you that. Um, maybe I'll start with the why. I mean, why, why do we [00:40:00] want to do it? You know, one of these other phrases that I always repeat like a bit of a broken record internally and externally is that our goal is to democratize this technology to people, to projects, because again, kind of like I mentioned earlier, I mean, the goal is to design better buildings, and we want to make sure that everybody has access to that.
This shouldn't be this like exclusive thing that. You know, the top 1 percent of, of, of architecture firms can, can access. It should be something that anybody and everybody can access. So, you know, we always do this exercise of looking at what are the limiting factors that might prevent somebody from being able to, um, leverage that, that power and yeah, one of them, maybe one of the biggest ones is, is operating system.
So Mac, we identified. Um, honestly, pretty early, I think I had joined shortly after our, our, um, our CEO, Christian Lange, and these discussions were kind of going on, but, but that was something that we identified right off the bat and we didn't have, [00:41:00] um, and of course you can never have like perfect numbers of how many people are using this or not using this, but, uh, we had some assumptions and we decided those are, um, Are worth pursuing and pursue them?
We did. And I think, yeah, it, it's, it's been of a bumpy road. Uh, definitely. I mean, we, we don't regret doing it, of course, because we can reach so many people. But, you know, in, in the beginning we started with this. We started with good intentions and we started with something which was very ambitious, uh, the goal of basically building this thing in parallel to Windows, uh, to
the Windows version and not slowing down the Windows development, which although ambitious, um, and although we had good intentions, it didn't fully work out for us.
We had, um, begun working with an external
partner who was, uh, supposed to take that project and, you know, unfortunately the, um, well, the world underwent some changes, uh, let's put it that way. Economic conditions were, were ebbing and flowing. Uh, at [00:42:00] a certain point, the war in Ukraine started, which affected our partner and, you know, at, at a certain point, we had to make the, the tough decision that due to these challenges, we just need to bring this project, um, in house and, and, and do it a different way.
So we did that and it cost us, I think, some time, but I think that the value that we get in return is something, um, much better and something that's going to allow us to, So basically what we did is rather than, uh, going with the strategy of having these two separate code bases, uh, we came up with a way to have one code base that basically works across the platforms.
And what that means. It's that now after 4. 0, of course, whatever feature we build for windows or for Mac, it's going to be there for everybody. So we build one feature once and, you know, in, in kind of the strategy that we were pursuing before, we would have had to build everything twice, of course. I mean, that's twice the time, twice the people, and it, it, it would have [00:43:00] slowed us down in the longterm.
So. Um, we're, we're really excited to, to bring this thing to, to the market. We're excited to see what the reception is going to be like from the customers. I mean, the, the Mac version that's out there already is seeing some really, really, um, heavy usage for, for a product that's so new. Um, and, and we're excited by that, of course, but we know that the full impact is going to come when we release 4.
0, which is going to have, um, feature parity with our Windows version. And it's, you know, it's going to be the one version kind of for the future. And we're going to, that's the foundation on top of which we'll build the subsequent version. So we're, we're really excited to reach, um, all these new users that are, that are on the Mac platform.
Evan Troxel: And is it now working with Rhino? Rhino
Petr Mitev: So, I believe that's scheduled to release actually tomorrow, on Wednesday the 17th, yes.
Evan Troxel: Well, maybe that's something we could talk about then, too, is So, Enscape is a plugin renderer for several different packages, right? And [00:44:00] so it works on Windows. It works in Revit and Rhino and SketchUp. Am I missing anything there? Are those the main, the main players?
Petr Mitev: ArchiCAD, which are a bit more popular here on this side of the ocean, but yeah.
Evan Troxel: And with small firm architects in the U S I imagine a lot of. People who want to get into BIM don't want to get into full expensive BIM
Petr Mitev: Sure,
yeah, yeah.
Evan Troxel: ArchiCAD. Uh, so there are quite a few small firm architects that I'm aware of using Vectorworks for sure. And so that totally makes sense.
Um, and so, yeah, to your point though, I think it is a much bigger market on, on that side of, of the world. But, um, On the Mac side, we have, we don't have Revit, right, but we have ArchiCAD, and we have Vectorworks, and we have Rhino, and we have SketchUp. And so, maybe talk about how that works, and, and what, what it's like to actually use that.
So, so you, you get, you buy Enscape as a, as [00:45:00] a plugin renderer, and then it just automatically installs plugins for whatever host packages you already have on your machine.
Petr Mitev: That's exactly it, right? So with one Enscape license, you get access to both operating systems, uh, Mac and Windows, and you also get access to all of the CAD plugins that we currently support. So we, I mean, we, we try to make it as easy as possible and, and, you know, not create this confusing process where people have to basically do research and figure out, okay, what do I buy?
What do I not buy? What do I need? What do I not need? So you buy once and it works everywhere. That's the goal and yes, like you said, the only thing that's been missing so far is the, is the Rhino support on Mac, uh, but with our preview release tomorrow on the 17th, that should be out there and yes, there, there will be a subsequent kind of a, a full release, but as you know, as, as you know, and some of our, some of your listeners already know, we, we regularly upload preview releases, um, which kind of give a sneak peek and early access to some [00:46:00] of the features that we're working on.
Yeah,
Evan Troxel: will have passed for sure. So, when you say the 17th, you're talking about January 17th. That, where, so, Rhino 8 support. So Rhino previously worked, uh, Rhino 7 and Enscape worked well together on Windows. Uh, there was no Rhino support on the Mac for Enscape yet.
And so with version eight of Rhino coming out where McNeil's going through a similar thing is what you talked about, right? Which was, was assimilating the code base so that when a feature comes out on, on Windows, it also comes out on Mac at the same time. There's a lot of companies going through this.
And is that, has that really been predicated on the release of Apple Silicon? Is that really where this is coming from? Because this was Apple kind of. Basically forced everybody to move in a different direction when it came to graphics, right? With the, with the Metal instead of, with the Metal APIs instead of OpenGL.
I know that there's been a lot of consternation about that as well, but it also was an [00:47:00] opportunity to say like, Okay, this is a modern graphics system that we are, we can now actually bet on, right? Because I think that was something that, that was always a question mark when it came to developing tools.
For the Mac, not just architectural tools, right, but graphics intensive tools on the Mac was like how long is OpenGL gonna last on the Mac because they're not showing a lot of love for it and that changed a while ago, right, where they, where they completely stopped their love for OpenGL and moved into this new direction.
Was that a big impetus to actually go or was it just like, okay, green light, we need to move in this direction now because they're, they're serious about it.
Petr Mitev: I, I honestly think for us it was, um, let, let's call it a, there were a couple of things that coincided, um, and, and actually weren't necessarily intended to, to so perfectly coincide. So, um, historically Enscape was based on OpenGL, but at one point we kind of. Uh, you know, we, [00:48:00] our engineers, when I say we, our engineers, uh, the smart people looked at this and they said, you know, this, this, this doesn't really have a future.
We, we want to move to, to a new graphics API. And what they did was they chose Vulkan, which conveniently allows us. to run on, uh, Mac as well. And we, it, how do I say it? It doesn't, it doesn't mean we have to write native, uh, metal code. Luckily, um, it, it uses a framework and I'm, I'm kind of, I'm blanking on the name right now, unfortunately, but basically it, it allows the.
Um, the, the software to work on, on Mac as well, not native metal, but, um, good enough, you know, when we did our performance tests, it was about what we expected, uh, initially we, we, we kind of had a little bit of concern that maybe, um, through this, um, through this added step that we would degrade performance a little bit, but it was what we expected.
It was in line with what Apple put out as. Um, expectations when we're comparing M [00:49:00] chips to, you know, NVIDIA GPUs. So that aligned nicely for us. And the last thing that aligned nicely for us was, and this was actually kind of our, our big bottleneck was actually the UI framework, right? Because historically as a windows only product.
Um, Enscape was built with, uh, WPF, Windows Presentation Forms, and the W, the Windows being the key word there. That only works on Windows. And the first time we looked at this project, there wasn't anything that we saw as, as fully fit and ready to, Um, work as a cross platform UI, right? And after that kind of delay happened with working with external partners and these economic conditions, um, there were other things out there that we could use.
And what we're using now is, is a framework called Avalonia, which allows us to, um, yeah, have a cross platform UI. And so these things kind of came together nicely. Um, not, not originally planned. Like the Vulcan decision wasn't solely because we want to get on Mac. It was simply a, um, you know, we, we got to get rid of [00:50:00] technical debt kind of decision.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. Interesting. And, and so how long has that process been for you guys? How painfully long has that process been for you guys?
Petr Mitev: It's been very long. I mean, I, I think we started the discussions when I, when I first joined the company, which was around September, October of 2020. I forget exactly when we kicked off the project, but I mean, you know, I've been with the company roughly around three years, so it's, it's. Been roughly around that much, right?
Um, again, uh, Longer than, than we intended, absolutely, but I, I think that the solution that we're gonna get out of it is gonna be a better version than what we envisioned three years ago and, and for me the, the quality is the more, more important thing.
Evan Troxel: yeah, that's great. Okay, so let's talk about you, and I want to talk about this three years, and the shift that, you know, the decision that you made, all of the regrets that you, you now have, I can clearly see it on your face. Tell me about that for you, like, what was that like? So you, you said you have a [00:51:00] master's and a bachelor's in architecture, and you were working in architecture.
a large firm and you were on the technology side. I don't know how, if, if you got into the practice side at all, I mean, fill us in on those details, but then making the decision to move. Out of, you know, out of the profession into a more peripheral technology provider side of the profession still, still related to AEC for sure, but, you know, in that I make the distinction of working in the profession to working on the profession, the things that you're working on, the thing, the tools that you're trying to bring to.
Make AEC better, to make, to help firms succeed at their goals, I think is, is a valuable decision that a lot of architects not only have made, but, but should continue to make because when we're working in firms, it's so isolated. It's so much just about that one firm. There's a lot of protection. There's a lot of barriers around what's going on in that firm.
And there's not a lot of sharing, although I think I [00:52:00] do see trends in the other direction. I, I see more sharing happening now than, than ever before. But talk about what that's been like for you. Because I, I wonder, you know, I, I know that there's people who have made that decision and they like to hear how other people have done it, but there's people considering making that decision too.
And so what, what's your experience been like?
Petr Mitev: Yeah. I'll, I'll, well, it's, it's been a, definitely a lengthy experience that I'll try and be brief, but informative. I think when, when I was done with my graduate degree, I was very lucky to, to, to get a position offered at, at Karen Timberlake, uh, which has always been kind of one of my, um, you know, shining stars, my, my idols, my heroes in the profession.
Right. So it was like this, this very special moment that I was, that had a chance to work there. And when I started there, I was, Um, I was, I was a staff architect. I, I wasn't really having anything to do with the technology side, but, um, again, Kieran Timberlake very, being the special practice that it is, was, uh, also filled with a lot of [00:53:00] very uniquely talented people.
And they had a dedicated research group, um, with a lot of very, very bright and interested folks that were working on all of these, you know, uh, crazy cool projects. And over time. Um, I, I kind of got, got, got sucked into that, you know, I was, it all started with the problem that I was doing for the University of Washington, actually, we were, we were trying to comply with these local regulations.
Um, I couldn't make it work, I couldn't make it work, so I, I basically buckled down and, and spent some long nights to try and, uh, build this, uh, Python based tool to, to help me optimize, uh, a zoning algorithm to see if we can do it and to finally, you know, put this to rest because, you know, after spending countless nights playing with Excel formulas, I, at one point I realized, hey, you know, I didn't, I spent seven years in architecture school to fiddle, uh, in Excel.
I want to make buildings and make good spaces for people. Right. So, and that was really the starting point. And, and afterwards, again, I w I was lucky that [00:54:00] I had an opportunity to, to work directly in the research team. And I had a lot of, uh, people that supported me along the way. Um, I think they're, they're still at KT, Christopher Connock, um, he's the director of design computation there, Billy Faircloth, she's a partner in the, the director of research.
Um, they, they supported me and supported my curiosity and always. Put projects in front of me that, that would help me grow. And over time, then I think I, it was more of a personal thing, but I wanted to move back closer to my family and, um, and my wife's family in Columbus, Ohio. Um, which is when I started working at NBBJ and again, I was very lucky.
I had some fantastic mentors. Mark Seep, uh, was, was working there at the time. I think he's with Gensler now. Um, yeah, Paul Odsley, our CTO and, and Nate Holland, who was at the time the director of, of, of, um, innovation. So, um, Yeah, and that was a completely different scale of project, right? It was very different, very different [00:55:00] clients, very different opportunities, global team, and it helped me learn more and more.
And at that point, I think I was focused really full time on the technology side of things. And I guess over time, what I what I realized is that, um, I'm, I'm more effective in this role. I mean, there's a lot of people that are better architects than I am, but I am a really good supporter of those people because I understand the problems.
I understand their needs and basically by teaching myself, um, you know, software development, I could articulately respond to those needs in a way that somebody without that industry knowledge. Um, couldn't really, and then basically to bring this all to a close, the pandemic kicked off, there was, you know, economic turmoil everywhere.
And for some reason I made, uh, the, the seemingly crazy decision to leave a very stable job in a firm with 75 years of history to join this, uh, what I thought at the time was basically, uh, a small startup on the other side of the world, but, um, [00:56:00] uh, yeah, uh, it was also a good time because the Enscape was transitioning, the two founders were stepping down, uh, Enscape had hired a new CEO, Christian Lang, um, who turned out, uh, Also, again, to be a fantastic mentor and a fantastic teacher who always put the right opportunities in front of me to, to learn more and challenge myself.
And, and I think looking back on those three years, I have absolutely zero regrets, actually exactly the opposite because there's so much that I've learned along the way, and I really do think that in this role, I can support the profession a lot better than I could, um, just as an architect, because again, there's simply a lot.
Uh, of people that are better at me, uh, in, in design. Um, but I can support them and I'm, I would love to do that. I love doing that. That's what, that's why I'm here.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, yeah. I, I appreciate you telling that story because I think that is something that people want to hear and it isn't always the Cinderella version that you just painted because I think it really has worked out really well. I mean, you've just found a really [00:57:00] great fit and it doesn't always work like that.
But when it does, I do feel like it is an opportunity to serve the profession in a very, in a great way. That the profession really needs, whether the profession sees it or not, whether they understand it from that direction or not, like, we really need more people working on it at a larger scale, like stepping back and surveying the whole.
What's going on? And what are the issues that, what are the problems that need to be solved? What are the tools that need to be made that can apply to a lot bigger of an audience than just one team or one firm? Um, I mean, we've seen it in technology, right? Every firm. For the most part is making very similar tools to solve very similar problems, right?
And they're doing that on their own, and it never gets beyond that, or it gets deprecated or forgotten. You know, uh, I'm, I'm thinking [00:58:00] of, of some, some articles that have been written on, on LinkedIn about technical debt and, uh, tools that have been lost and forgotten about and no longer supported. And every firm deals with this, and they're not set up to deal with that because it's a.
Uh, and so it is kind of an interesting shift that we're seeing because technology has enabled people to move just outside of the traditional role of an architect to work in other ways that, that serve the entire profession. So you've now moved. You've moved your family over there and, and you're working for, you know, out of, out of that office, what, what has that shift been like?
And, and what has that opportunity been like? Because again, like, you know, if you're, it's very hard to find a firm that you can even work remotely for in the US. And if you do, you're going to maybe move to another state. I mean, if you don't, you're going to move to a, [00:59:00] maybe a different state or, you know, practices are very, you know, regionally based to.
Moving across the country and working for a software company that, that serves, you know, international clients,
Petr Mitev: yeah, it's been a, it's been a, well, it's been a good experience, right? But, but definitely not easy. I mean, moving to another country is never easy. Um, I should know cause I did it once upon a time moving to the U. S. I think that was 1999 or so. Um, and it's never easy. It wasn't easy then. It's not easy now.
I have the bit of advantage. Um. Um, that I've worked in Germany before, uh, as an architect, of course, but, um, so, you know, I think a lot of the things weren't so alien to me as they are to other people. And I was also quite lucky in that sense. I am, I mean, I, I was born a European citizen, so I, I didn't have all this other kind of legal and bureaucratic stuff to deal with and moving over here.
But, you know, picking up your life and going somewhere else is, is never easy. [01:00:00] But, again, I, looking at it today, I think it's, it's absolutely worth it because this is where, um, this is where my team is, this is where the bulk of, of Chaos is, Enscape is entirely located here in Karlsruhe. Um, the biggest office of, of chaos is in, is in my hometown, which is Sofia, Bulgaria.
And, yeah, we've got offices in Prague and, and Denmark, um, all over the place. But it, it's all here on this side of the ocean because, you know, it, it got to be, it got to a point where when I was working remotely, I was basically flying across the ocean once or twice a month. And that round trip was, I mean, it wasn't just killing me, but it was also really affecting my, my productivity.
So, um. Yeah, I, I think it's absolutely the right decision. It's, it's nice to be so close to the people and to be able to support them much better than I can, you know, several time zones away. So it's, and, and it's great too that I had that opportunity, right? Because Christian Lang and, and our board could have simply said, yeah, man, sorry, it's, it's cheaper for us if you stay over there.
Um, but, but they did everything in their power to, [01:01:00] to help me do this. And, and I think, yeah, if, if I was to ask them today, I, I don't think they would regret it either.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, yeah, that's cool. I mean, it's really interesting to hear how you've kind of done this big circle, right? You've gone from living in Europe, moving to America in 99, going through the process of school and working in medium and large sized firms and then moving back out of tech and then moving back to close to home, right?
I mean, I think that that's that's really a neat journey. So I appreciate you sharing that. I think it's it's It's interesting to hear other people's experiences and perspectives and, and you, you've never been the guy who doesn't share his opinion. Like you, you've, you're an outspoken guy and, and I appreciate that.
You're, you're, I do miss the beard. I mean, I think, I think I took you a little more seriously when you had the beard, but I don't know if it fits in it, in, in Germany. Thank you for having
Petr Mitev: I got to blend in a little bit. Come on. I got to blend in.[01:02:00]
Evan Troxel: is there anything that we're missing in this conversation that you really feel like the audience needs to hear about?
What am I missing?
Petr Mitev: Um, Oh, missing. I, I don't know. I mean, there, there's so many topics that one could get into. Um, I mean, I, I think we had a lot of interesting points in, in kind of the, the different, the span of time between their last conversation and now I'm looking ahead to the next version of Enscape kind of what's next for us as a portfolio.
Um, we talked about the product positioning. which I think is very, very important and something we're going to continue focusing on, especially now that we're part of a bigger group. Um, I, I don't know. I, I can't think of anything that's, uh, really burning and, and could really add a lot.
Evan Troxel: Well, we're, we're definitely steering clear so far. I'm opening the crack of the door a little bit here about, about AI and visualization. Like, this has been,
everybody's watching this. Um, any, any kind of parting thoughts on that? Because [01:03:00] I, This, this, we could open the floodgates and, and go down the road of, of this, but, but I don't know if that's appropriate right now, but I am interested from your perspective, um, what, what's interesting to you about where visualization is heading with a little bit of a, a tinkling, a twinkling of, of AI, you know, just, just it's looming or all around us.
Petr Mitev: Yeah, it's, it's a hot topic, right? And, and I think, um, everybody's talking about it with good reason. I'll, I think in, in the briefest of terms, what I can say from my perspective is, I actually like to quote our, um, our chief product officer, Cam Star, um, who's, who's been a super, super great addition to our team.
I think his one year anniversary is coming up now. It feels like he just joined yesterday, but he's a great guy. And the sentence that he uses is, uh, when it comes to AI is that, you know, we don't want to replace the artist. We want to make a better paintbrush. And you know, we've got a lot of exciting things that we're developing internally right now.
Nothing's ready for, for a public [01:04:00] showcase, but. It's always with that perspective. It's like, I don't want to take the artist, an artist here is a metaphor, right? An architect, a designer, whatever. It's not about eliminating their power of creativity or taking agency away from them. Um, it's about identifying these tasks that are, um, difficult or time consuming or, or simply not worth the time of an architect.
Because kind of like I mentioned before, our, our biggest value, our experience, our training is in, is in making. Buildings that are, you know, legally compliant, that are good for the people living in them and that are beautiful as well, right? So, um, when it comes to visualization workflow, there's no shortage of, of tasks we can identify that we could, um, really speed up with, with something like AI.
So that's really our, our philosophy for, for looking at this is maximize, retain. creative agency for the people wielding these tools, uh, but make these tools, uh, basically powerful enough to allow them to still express themselves, but [01:05:00] maybe in a quicker or a more effective way. Um, and, and as a company, I think that's, that's, that's the philosophy that, um, we embody and that that's one that I personally agree with as well.
Um, I know there's a lot of other projects here and there across the, the broad tech industry, um, that are kind of thinking in a different direction and that's, that's just. Not what we want to do. It's yeah, not a focus.
Evan Troxel: I feel like Enscape did that. It gave what I would consider superpowers to people who have definitely lived through the transition of the old way of doing it to the, you know, the new way of doing it, where a tool, when a tool can do that, like it, it reinvigorates the user in a way that is kind of indescribable.
It's like, You actually feel like you have superpowers. And when it, I mean, that's what humans are, they use tools for leverage to accomplish a task, right? And software is an absolutely incredible tool to be able to do that. And as architects, uh, [01:06:00] it, it is important to embrace tools that can give you superpowers because everybody else is getting, like, you're, you're talking about democratizing tools for that.
That means available to anyone and everyone at the. It's table stakes. It becomes table stakes, right? These no longer are menu items that a client chooses to pay for, like they are part of the process now. As soon as it becomes like a decision making tool along the way, and you really leverage it for that, you realize The power of that, and it's like, no, this is just how we work now.
This is no longer an add on that comes at some point in the process. And the most successful tools, in my mind, are the ones that give you those superpowers as early as possible. And you get to differentiate yourself through that in the beginning, but only for a short amount of time. Because the whole idea behind democratizing tools is that everybody is eventually going to.
Adopt those. And so [01:07:00] you have kind of a first mover advantage sometimes, you know, when, when you pick the right thing at the right time. I think AI is kind of like that right now, right? There are people who are feeling like they've got the superpowers and they're able to use those. And I think as we see all these tools converge in many different ways, right?
We're seeing it happen all over the place. That's where. That's kind of like a sweet spot for a lot of people. And so it's, it's, it's always fun to kind of keep our eyes on what's going on out there and watching what companies like Enscape are doing with that. I'm at AU going to the booth, talking with Cam and Roderick and Dan, and there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of neat stuff going on at Enscape.
I'm really, I'm excited about what you guys are working on. And I think, you know, it's like picking and choosing the right ways to implement these. into these, the tools that you already make are, it's a really smart way to move forward. So I'm excited to see where this [01:08:00] goes, um, from, from the Enscape perspective.
And, uh, I just appreciate you taking the time to hang out and tell that story today. Tell your story a little bit more. And, uh, and thank you for bringing Enscape to the Mac. I think I'm very excited about that as well.
Petr Mitev: Oh, we're excited as well. Yeah, and hopefully a lot of, a lot of other people are going to be excited. So, we're very much looking forward to it. Um, happening, happening soon. The sooner the better, honestly. It couldn't come soon enough. It's going to be a huge milestone for us internally as well. Uh, we'll be sure to celebrate in some, some way, but, um, yeah, also thank you for, for the invites.
Always nice to be able to, uh, connect with, with the community that I was a little bit closer to before. But, um, yeah, these days I'm, I'm a little bit, uh, yeah, uh, outside of, outside of the circle as it were. But, um, yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to share some stories with, with everybody that they might not, uh, get otherwise.
Evan Troxel: All right. Well, hopefully we'll talk again and it won't be two years away and, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking about [01:09:00] what's, what's new at Enscape. So thanks very much, Petr, for taking the time today. Appreciate it.
Petr Mitev: Thank you.

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Ep 547: Architects and Change: How to Develop an Innovation Plan for Your Architecture Firm

Join Mark and Evan as they explore the evolving landscape of the architectural profession in the face of technological advancements. In this enlightening conversation, Evan draws from his extensive experience in both practice and education to shed light on the imperative for architects to embrace change and cultivate a culture of innovation within their firms.

Architects and Change: How to Develop an Innovation Plan for Your Architecture FirmEvan Troxel and Mark explore the pivotal role of technology in architecture, urging firms to embrace innovation for continued relevance. Evan emphasizes the importance of leadership in driving change and encourages architects to integrate human skills with advancing technologies to thrive in the evolving industry.EntreArchitect // Small Firm Entrepreneur ArchitectsSarah RoweThis was a great conversation with one of my favorite people. We talked about technology adoption, change management strategies, leadership, digital transformation, and more. I think you'll enjoy this one.

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I don't post all of my other podcast episodes here, but this one covers some AEC tech.

🎉 In this episode we start off by acknowledging the 12th birthday of the Archispeak podcast. Our first episode titled “That Ah-ha Moment” was published on February 3, 2013 and we don’t recommend listening to it!

Then we explore the potential of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in architectural practices and talk about how these technologies could revolutionize the way architects work. We cover real-time rendering, immersive experiences of building designs, and enhanced client presentations. We also touch on the need for privacy and security considerations regarding the usage and licensing of digital assets. Lastly, we hypothesize how different it would be to start a practice today when it comes to choosing a toolset that would heavily rely on these technologies.

Listen, watch, and get the show notes on the Archispeak website.

324 - Archispeak Turns 12 — ArchispeakIn this episode we acknowledge the podcast’s 12th anniversary. We then jump into exploring the potential of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in architectural practices and talk about how these technologies could revolutionize the way architects work now that the Apple Vision Pro is ouArchispeak#324 - Archispeak Turns 12

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About this Episode:John Manoochehri joins the podcast to talk about how the intersection of design, architecture and engineering, game engines, and new hardware are changing the landscape and potential impact of spatial computing and digital environments for the authors and creators of these environments in the AEC industry. We address it from a cataloging, usage and licensing perspective, and talk about how creative industries are leading the way in exploring the potential of this medium. We also talk about how this tech is opening up new possibilities in fields like entertainment, productivity, and mental health, and how it also challenges our understanding of what good design means as it pushes beyond the experience of physical environments. And finally we chat about the intersection of digital and physical design and how a feedback loop could lead to shifts in the design of physical spaces based on people’s experiences in digital environments.

About John Manoochehri:John Manoochehri is an architect and environmental scientist based in Stockholm and San Francisco.

He has a diploma in architecture from the graduate school of architecture in Stockholm, at KKH, and has taught technical courses and design studios at Master’s level at the Stockholm undergraduate architecture and planning schools, at KTH.

His sustainable design company Resource Vision has been on design teams with BIG, White, Strategisk Arkiekter, and other major Scandinavian offices, working on some of the largest projects in Swedish history, including Kiruna city move. He has written an architectural design method handbook with Kjellander + Sjöberg Architects, and contributed technical advice to modular housing fabricators. He founded the Resource Talks podcast to investigate sustainable architecture and modern environmental science and policy.

He started an architectural design technology company, Last Meter®, with the support of the Swedish Real Estate Federation, to enable the integration of service-based consumption into the spatial and financial models of modern real estate, to facilitate the adoption of circular consumption models at scale.

The Futureperfect Talks podcast, sponsored by Epic Games, is an exploration in the rapid evolution of spatial technology for design, construction, visualization and optimization of the built environment.

Treasury was founded in 2022, by him together Zaha Hadid Architects, and Spaceform, a visualization platform backed by BIG, Thomas Heatherwick Studio, UNStudio and more, asa registry and discovery system for the world’s most valuable spatial assets - architectural design, film scenes and sets, real estate, world monuments, experiential art, nature scans, and other spatial content.
Treasury protects and distributes the work of spatial creators - architects, real estate owners, artists, engineers, and reality capture professionals - in the era of spatial computing and generative AI.

Previously, he worked at the United Nations Environment Program in Geneva, where he wrote UNEP’s policy framework on sustainable urban consumption, ‘Consumption Opportunities’. He wrote the World Wide Fund for Nature’s global handbook on sustainable cities, ‘Urban Solutions’, integrating the UN Sustainable Development Goals framework with the WWF Urban Solutions model.

He has a degree from the University of Oxford and lives in Stockholm and San Francisco.

Links:* John on LinkedIn * John on Twitter/X * John on Instagram * Treasury website * Treasury on LinkedIn * Treasury on Instagram * Evan on John’s FUTURE PERFECT TALKS podcast - Ep. 9: Architecture & Cities, Podcasts & Media

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Twitter * Threads * Mastodon * Email

Watch this on YouTube:147: ‘The Era of Spatial Computing’, with John ManoochehriJohn Manoochehri joins the podcast to talk about how the intersection of design, architecture and engineering, game engines, and new hardware are changing th…YouTube

Episode Transcript: *147: ‘The Era of Spatial Computing’, with John Manoochehri*

[00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel, and if it's your first time here, welcome. I know there's a lot of new listeners and watchers out there, and if you are a regular listener and are enjoying these episodes please tap that subscribe button on YouTube and in your preferred podcast app. Your subscription is incredibly valuable in supporting my efforts, and I genuinely hope you find the conversations published here enriching for yourself and valuable for the AEC industry.

Evan Troxel: Let me tell you why being a subscriber matters. We live in a world of metrics and subscriber numbers directly influence two things. My ability to attract sponsors that help keep this show going and my ability to attract high-profile guests, which is great for you. My goal is to deliver [00:01:00] quality episodes to provide value to you and the industry as a whole.

Interestingly, just this week, uh, the YouTube side of my analytics show that about eighty-eight percent of viewers aren't subscribed to my channel. I have no clue about the podcasting side of things as far as those metrics go, but it's probably similar. So if you haven't subscribed, I encourage you to do so.

It's completely free and it's a great way to support TRXL and remember, since this is a numbers game to some extent. Please do me a favor and subscribe in both places on YouTube and in your favorite podcast app. And finally, for those of you in the audience who are in a position to support my work directly, there are two more ways that you can do so.

You can make a donation at trxl.co/donate or consider becoming a member. To learn more about the perks of membership. And to join, simply click on one of the [00:02:00] subscribe buttons at Trxl.co. Your support is crucial for the sustainability of the show whether you are listening to the ad-supported versions, or a member, making a donation, whatever it is, I deeply appreciate you.

Okay. The release of this episode coincides with two things. The first is the release of Apple's Vision Pro headset, a new computing platform for, among other things, authoring and experiencing immersive AR and VR environments. And the second is the public announcement of Treasury, of which my guest today is the founder of.

Treasury is the premier spatial asset hub for digital environment creators and builders. It protects and distributes the world's most valuable digital spatial assets and environments, which I think architects and others in AEC are quite possibly the best authors of. I'm not sure the mindset is there [00:03:00] yet, but the digital spatial assets that are created throughout the design process to make the world's most valuable physical environments is the topic of today's conversation, so I welcome John Manoochehri to the podcast today to talk about it. In this episode, we discuss the potential of spatial computing and digital environments in the AEC industry from a cataloging, usage, and licensing perspective as more and more of these types of devices come online. How creative industries are leading the way in exploring the potential of this medium, how this tech is opening up new possibilities in fields like entertainment, productivity, and mental health, and how it also challenges our understanding of what good design means as it pushes beyond the experience of physical environments. And finally, we talk about the intersection of digital and physical design and how a feedback loop could lead to [00:04:00] shifts in the design of physical spaces based on people's experiences in digital environments. I always enjoy talking with John, and I hope you'll not only find value in this conversation for yourself but that you'll help add value to your colleagues and peers by sharing this episode with your network. so now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with John Manoochehri.I.

Evan Troxel: John, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here,

John Manoochehri: Thank you, Evan. This is a great privilege. Um, everybody in architecture and technology knows the platform that you've created, so it's a privilege to join the ranks of, um, of the, uh, alumni of the podcast.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it's been a long time coming. I think we've been talking for a couple of years. Uh, I mean, you were doing Future Perfect Talks,

which I was on that at one point amongst many other esteemed colleagues in

AEC,[00:05:00]

and, uh, and that was when you were, you were doing a different startup at that time called Last Meter.

maybe you can give us, just provide a, history of your trajectory in AEC, you've gotten to where you are before we jump into the real topic of today's conversation.

John Manoochehri: I think to give, uh, a, an honest assessment of how I got here, right. It probably, I, it, it is, is useful to be honest about how I think and, and I and I, and how I've sort of like pursued a career. I guess that I'm probably just too lazy, um, to go about things the normal way. And, you know, get qualified and go and do a thing, go to a thing.

Um, and, and I think also maybe just a bit too, uh, sort of curious in a rebellious way that we are the polite way of setting up, just in very generic terms, how we got to this situation and how, um, I'm doing what I'm doing. I think without going into too much detail, [00:06:00] I think it probably also has to do with quite a complicated family background.

Um, which, you know, I don't need to share too much here, but neither parents, neither my parents went to university. My father is, you know, um, kind of a criminal and so forth. And so for me to like find my way into kind of like a conventional career, uh, or a conventional educational path was a little bit harder than I think it is for, for, for, has been for some people.

Um, so that's probably another aspect of it, but I, I think the correct way of thinking about it is I'm, um, sort of lazy and, uh, refuse to play by, you know, the normal rules and then regret it many years later and think, shit, I should have done that very boring qualification.

Um, but I, but I do think that there is something else also going on.

And, and this is where I'm, I'm relatively proud, which is that having sort of, sort of refused to kind of go through conventional roots to things. Um, I am very much a completist and sort of some kind of perfectionist. And certainly I'm super, super [00:07:00] interested in understanding things, what I would say properly in the old fashioned way.

Meaning not just because everyone says that it makes sense, but there seems there needs to be some sort of, you know, systematic insights involved. I think that's helped me a lot and I think it will certainly help me going forward. It may not help my businesses, they may all just go wrong, but sort of intellectually and professionally, I think that has been very useful as, as I'll sort of try to unfold.

So that's all the sort of sort of pompous framing to give myself any number of exits when people start saying this guy really shouldn't be doing the things that he's doing. Um, but long story short, I I, I got my bachelor's degree just to kind of medium length version of getting, getting into where, where we're at and where we're, we're going in this conversation at the University of Oxford.

And I basically was so arrogant about, you know, not wanting to study a conventional career path, thinking I could just work all that out later. 'cause at school it wasn't particularly difficult, um, ultimately to get, you know, higher grades. I was wasn't, and very curious and sort of like, [00:08:00] uh, fundamentally about how cognition works, right?

And

that's, that's one of the things that ends up being actually quite useful nowadays that LMSs and so forth are coming into the frame. If people

talk about a GI, my bachelor's degree is in, um, uh, Sanskrit and um, uh, basically I specialize in sort of Buddhist. Theories of cognition. Uh, 'cause it just fascinated me and I thought, who needs a fucking career?

I'm just gonna go and study shit. That's fascinating to me.

And, and, um, and so I went to the university, which has the oldest chair in, uh, Sanskrit Department of Sanskrit in, in the western world. It had a chair of Sanskrit, uh, since before it had a mathematics, uh, uh, chair. And, um, it was, it, it wasn't perhaps as philosophically interesting as I would've liked.

Um, it didn't help me advance as some kind of Buddhist, which part of me wanted to do, but it did make me a good linguist and it made me a very good, I think, sort of classical scholar, right? 'cause if you study San great, it's, it's ruthlessly systematic in a way that essentially almost no disciplines have really matched up [00:09:00] to.

Um, and because I do a lot of stuff all the time, right? I'm essentially working on things all the time. I had been in the university essentially doing structured sort of sustainability and environmental advocacy. So I was the chair of the University of the University Student Environment Committee. I was in the university, the entire university's environment committee.

I was doing all sorts of sort of extracurricular activities in environmental science and managed to kind of juujitsu all of that into a job that the United Nations Environment Program, where I worked in the European office of the UN environment program in Geneva for basically four years and wrote their book.

And it's sort of disgusting the young age on sustainable urban consumption.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

John Manoochehri: And um, I was very proud of that because actually what that meant that I had to do was get very good at, um, sort of economics and policy and become economics and policy professional. They didn't know, by the way. And then this is kind of hilarious to share this 'cause I've almost never told anybody this stuff.

When I went to work at [00:10:00] UNAP in Geneva, they didn't know I didn't have an economics degree. So I was sitting in my underpants at 2:00 AM you know, reading economic papers, um, so that I could write the books they were asking me. But that sort of set the foundation, I think the tone for kind of the stuff I'm interested in, which is basically if you take the the physical world.

How do you examine it from the perspective of resources? Right? And that basically sets up everything that I've done since then,

because I realized, oh, this is a puzzle that is so interesting to me and it's so multi-dimensional that I'll never not be interested in this. And, um, pretty, pretty proud of that really, because I, I, I do think that if we look at architecture, architectural design, technology, uh, manufacturing, architectural teaching, um, it doesn't really take the issue very seriously.

And so I'm pretty sure that there's contributions i, I, I could make, uh, if, you know, if I get better at doing business and, and sort of actual design rather than just talking. But, um, I think there are, there are things to be said. Let's put that in a way that's less flattering to me. [00:11:00] There are things to be said and done in architectural design and technology and education that aren't yet done

to take seriously the issue of what is the relationship between the built environment and, uh, natural resources.

And so that, that, that whole puzzle started off, I was, I mean this, uh, this is blowing my own trumpet, but I'm pretty ha happy about it. It's the book I wrote for Nette many years ago. Is actually the most cited book on, uh, uh, a sort of consumption policy in a recent sort of 40 year review of, of consumption, uh, review of the last 40 years of consumption policy.

So that encourages me to think that it was something good about what I did then, even though I was a kind of absolute absurdly under qualified, pre over presumptuous sort of person. But I think that it evidence is that what I'm, what I'm sort of trying to say about myself in complimentary is I try and think very systematically

about things.

And so what I then realized is that I didn't wanna work in policy, right? Because actually my brain doesn't, is probably a bit too active for policymaking. [00:12:00] And I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do, but I did want to say stuck to those themes. And so did some sort of consulting around in, you know, d different aspects of, of environmental science and sustainability.

And ended up in Sweden, where long story short, I, um, I, I worked in Sweden for the, for the, uh, what's called the Stockham Environment Institute, which is quite like a, uh, sort of prominent environmental science and policy institute, um, that, that actually gave rise to, to one of the. It was, it was one of a career stepping stone to one of the main guys in, in sustainability right now, Johan Strom.

So I worked briefly with Johan Strom, um, at, at Stockholm Environment Institute, and, uh, and much of other people on different sort of sustainability topics rooted to some extent in consumption, but that's a pretty broad area. So it ended up being transport and, you know, climate and various other things.

And in the end, I sort of thought that this got to be a more creative and directly impactful way to express interests in sort of the, [00:13:00] the, the large scale physics of environmental sustainability. And so, not really knew what I was doing. I, I took a, um, a post-professional diploma in architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture in, um, Sweden.

Um, in Stockholm, there are two architecture schools. There's the old architecture school that was attached to the, is attached and was attached to the art school, to the Royal College of Art. And historically the undergraduate architecture was there and the postgraduate architecture, uh, was also there.

And then there is now the new architecture school at the Royal Institute of Technology. Also called KTH, the undergraduate architecture is now there. So I took a post-professional architecture course in the graduate school that's still in the, uh, in the art school. And then, um, uh, got a scholarship to carry on doing that there and sort of, sort of bleeding into the architecture profession, essentially taking my particular flavor of environmental sustainability, uh, research and policy [00:14:00] and so forth.

And, um, uh, and sort of injecting it more and more into architectural design. Um, around about this time has started a PhD on, on, um, on, uh, um, around the sort of the, the, the special areas of, uh, of um, uh, consumption theory that I'd worked out underneath my unit work, uh, with Tim Jackson in the uk who's, you know, arguably the kind of foremost, um, consumption researcher in the uk.

He's recently written together with others, a quite a, um, a sort of, uh, I would say controversial article in nature, which we'll come back to probably the end of this podcast, about the future of sustainability and degrowth and so forth, which I don't really agree with and probably 'cause I don't really agree with the sort of trend lines of this thought and probably 'cause I was basically just exploding with half-assed ideas that I would need more years than he could offer me as a supervisor to kind of organize. I didn't finish my, my PhD with him. . And [00:15:00] so that was in the background of me, the same time taking a small step into architecture via the, let's say the graduate architecture school of the Royal, um, uh, college of Art in Sweden. But what happened then was actually pretty interesting and probably if I had had, I don't wanna sort of, you know, have a sort of bullshit sub-story, but if I'd had probably a better family background, I would've probably done this much quicker and better than I did.

I quite quickly got involved in the actual practice of architecture. So I was like, you know, picking off little lectures to say, well, you know, you think about consumption of resources in this way in terms of the built environment and had these hideous sort of PowerPoint style lectures. Um, and then gradually got pulled into both architectural teaching.

So I started teaching. Um, uh, master's of Courses at the Architecture school. The, the, the main architecture school in Stockholm at KTH and Drag. Started doing studio courses there, um, and got invited to do, to lead a bunch of courses [00:16:00] at the planning school together with some of the architecture teachers.

'cause there was a pretty clear overlap on the urban design piece of the work at the planning school attached to KTH, the Royal Geotechnology and Stockholm. So that suddenly became a piece of my work, like, you know, teaching architecture urban design at different, you know, both sort of technically and in design terms.

And so that was an engagement with the actual profession. And then I got started getting pulled into as a kind of junior architectural designer with a massively over specified set of knowledge in

environments of sustainability

into larger and larger projects. And so through that, you know, through that little kind of opening, was invited to do a lecture at the Ingles group in Copenhagen, uh, was lecturing at White, which is the largest Nordic Nordic office.

Started getting pulled into Bianca Ingalls projects, you know, got to know Bianca as he was getting famous and got to know, you know, some of the partners and got involved in more of their projects. , and that was actual architectural design work, right? And, and so it was very, very interesting to kind of see [00:17:00] at the reality of the design profession at an extremely high level.

Well,

I mean, it was pretty high level at that point.

It was, you know, this is before Bianca became true supernova in scale terms, but it was

pretty high level stuff. And one of the biggest projects, the biggest project I was involved with, BAK Inger, which is the biggest project in any, in the, in the built design history of Sweden, which is the, the, the, the moving of the city of Kirina.

Uh, my company at that time, design company resource vision was the sustainability, sustainable architecture consultant pooled

into the project with a bunch of other, you know, people. And so at that point, I began to see sort of all of these little pieces kind of unfolding so I could see that, you know, the, the, the core of the profession.

What was interesting about it was not taking these issues seriously, right? To be, to be respectful to bca. They are interested in it, right? They're probably much better at it now, but they were just doing what the clients wanted, which really wasn't that much, right?

Uh, another part of the professional, the more established offices were doing lead [00:18:00] certification, which wasn't and doesn't lead to very much at all.

You know,

3% increment on energy efficiency, and then it all falls away after year two

or post-construction. So I could see that the sustainability wasn't really happening, but also the bigger picture of sustainability, which is the con, the consumption of resources at scale in the built environment and the human infrastructural system, which is not happening, right?

So,

so.

Evan Troxel: when you say that you are not talking about the actual construction process, you're talking about the after, after occupancy process

John Manoochehri: so, so, so, yeah. So I'll, I'll come, I'll just,

I'll say a quick comment on the content, but just me, let me park the sort of the, this, this, you know, silly story of my program. So basically I started working on projects with larger offices around sustainability and see that the bigger issues I, I'll explain, to answer your question, what those bigger issues really are,

were not being dealt with seriously.

And I was like, well, hmm, I don't want to be an idea stunt man for Bianca. So he takes my best ideas and presents 'em as his stuff

or any other office, [00:19:00] right? I mean, it's just, it's just what happens if you are, you know,

you know, consultant, designer on larger offices. There's

no, you know, I was doing it cynically, um, and I didn't want to be involved in.

basically greenwashing. I mean, lead is basically greenwashing and it's absurd. It's not achieving anything close to what it needs to achieve. And so I was, I, I'd realized, wow, I advanced very quickly in a profession and yet I'm not really achieving very much

how frustrating I,

what, what the issues are. Yeah, yeah. Right. But so what the issues are, right. Just to kinda summarize this, 'cause this gets very interesting, and it comes back to the technology piece, which is where we'll land in a, in a second.

Basically, there are two ways of thinking of environmental sustainability in relation to the built environment, right?

And architecture is sort of the anchoring piece of the built environment. It means infrastructure and, um, morphology as well, right? And one is the physics of the stuff, right? So it's, it's the pre-construction process impact on nature and what resources are you choosing? And then it's the actual embodied stuff that you use.

So it's concrete and it's glass and it's steel [00:20:00] and it's, you know, whatever you're using to actually have the standing physical infrastructure. And then it's the, you know, the actual energy and resources of the building and use water and electricity and so forth. And so that's all. And then you can, there's a post-construction start from your lifecycle assessment and whatnot.

And that's one piece of it. The physical embodiment of energy in the preconstruction construction and the use, and then

the disassembly or destruction phase of the built environment. Great. Actually, that is not the main dri, not the main . Uh, story of, of sustainability in relation to the built environment.

And this is where my consumption work starts already kind of becoming, I think very interesting. And this is gonna be the interesting issue that I think comes up in the next 20 years. The real thing that happens in the built environment, and that's already like 30 or 40% of all resources consumed, is the physics

of the built environment. It's how the built environment economically and in terms of its configuration induces or restraints specific [00:21:00] economic consumption patterns. If you design a building with parking spaces, you will have cars

in that building. And so suddenly you have a car-based economy,

right? If you have buildings that are distributed around suburbs.

They will need to have an energy system that cannot rely on combined heat and power or, or district heating, which is a huge cost saver and in sustainability boost to space heating. Right? And so what you discover is that there are, there are all these second order effects that actually end up to being most of the rest of what happens in the economy.

And it's one of the main problems, not just with, you know, the narrative around sustainability and the built environment, but the entire consumption narrative. It's why I don't want to engage with the, um, I don't think, I don't think the, I don't think the policy policy of Tim Jackson and um, and, uh, Jason Hickle and the other Degrowth people are, are credible in the sense that really what's going on that drives consumption of resources at the larger scale isn't [00:22:00] people's behavioral choices.

In practice, once you have bought a home with a carport attached, you will be a driver

and you cannot economically or socially move away from that choice, right? So yes, of course you can ask people to not buy homes with cars

attached, but at some point it becomes deeply sophisticated

and it's no longer a moral choice, right?

So to moralize these issues is a problem. So just to kind of put that back in context.

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

John Manoochehri: I realized this stuff actually, that you look inside projects at the larger scale. I realized this very much in relation to the Kierna project. This is the point when I realized I had to start a company because I created, as part of the, um, Kier City move project with Bianca and his team, a lifestyle system.

I'd already created a lifestyle system concept as part of my, you know, architecture diploma project. Like we should have consumption systems that integrate with the built environment. So you have shared washing machines. It was all pretty crude in my thinking and I realized, wow, this is pretty cool. They said to me, the, the big team [00:23:00] said to me, oh, this is awesome shit.

And I was like, yeah, it is awesome. Shit. Why the fuck don't I own this ? Like the whole consumption system,

you know, it designed into the built environment. 'cause you know, I realize that's gonna be big piece of how, if we take sustainability seriously. Including, obviously carbon emissions, primarily carbon emissions in the, in the next 10 or 20 years, but also other resource flows.

We wanna take this stuff seriously. We will need to use the built environment as massive levers of systemic consumption phenomena. It isn't just personal choices, it's the systemic choices of,

if I buy some clothing, can I get it returned without it going to a fucking landfill?

Right?

If you wanna stop fast fashion, you don't just clamp down a fucking h and m and their supply chains.

Um, you have to enable the, so-called circular economy,

but that the circular thinkers aren't working out. That the circular economy is essentially an infrastructural problem,

infrastructural problems when it comes to consumers or [00:24:00] architectural problems and urban morphology problems, right?

And so once you, once you realize these connections, you go, oh, this is all pretty complicated.

So once I'd done the Kina project with Bianca and I'd created this consumption system involved an app and interventions in the courtyards and in the parking and in, you know, in the, in the logistics system of the whole city, I was like, Hmm, this is gonna happen. I'd like to have my name on it. I'd like to contribute it both analytically, operationally, and the design terms.

And, and then, so I started a company called Last Meter,

which basically . Long story short is an integration, a service integration system,

right? If we assume that all consumption patterns, I buy a thing, an apple, some clothing, a car, an apartment, uh, uh, uh, I, you know, I buy, you know, uh, uh, hobby equipment, skis, fishing rods.

We assume that the, uh, product-based economy is inherently inefficient. This is, this is [00:25:00] going a little bit beyond where we, we wanted to go today, but in terms of the theory of consumption, once you have surplus goods, as modern consumers, which we do, everything moves to a service-based model. It doesn't make any sense to buy a hundred percent of the time availability of a fishing rod.

If you use it for 1% of its

lifetime to your buyer service, access to everything becomes timeshare, right? So this is the service economy, unfolding service economy. Once it becomes structuralized, uh, and operationalized is basically a logistics enterprise. It's a

logistics enterprise of warehousing inventory management and packaging and vehicles going back and forth.

Well, what does that become? That becomes a massive opportunity for commercial and, and residential real estate, because if it turns out to be the case that real estate owners discover that all the consumers coming in don't want to own fishing rods, don't want to own, you know, closets filled with old clothes, don't want to

own, you know, skis and ski boots, right?

So, so that's, that's a transition that we're on top of, right,

is that when services are able to physically, logistically integrate with real estate, [00:26:00] suddenly that will be our model.

Right. Having huge storage areas, the shit we never use is gradually dying. It's totally pointless. And we, we've gone to that point right now with skiing, probably 80% of most casual skiers don't own their own skis.

mean, just, just, you know, I don't precise statistic, but you can see the point that our use intensity of goods is declining as we become more and more configured consumers of goods. And so the service economy arises, but it doesn't work unless the infrastructure, uh, and ultimately the architecture with, and architecture is the, I mean, this is one of my ways of describing architecture.

Architecture is, is the in, is the hu is the human interface of infrastructure. Right?

I mean, not many people use that definition, but not many people in architecture have any good definitions of architecture. So

my first of my sideswipes to architecture, but , but, but one of my main, my main frustrations with architecture having got into it is that the thinking is piss poor, right?

it's systematizing what is going on in the profession as pathetically slight.

And so it's,

Evan Troxel: profession is a, [00:27:00] is a reactive service-based industry, and it's

not a leadership

John Manoochehri: Hmm. Yeah.

is a, it's a service based industry. It's a service based industry. That in practice makes us money by pandering to very powerful people.

It tends to be the case in history. The industry is the power, the powerful people, the ones that have the least systematized theory, 'cause they get away with anything.

Power talks, money talks, and theory isn't needed. But anyway,

um, so the point there is that if, if, if we play that out, the consumption's changing in a surplus, uh, in economy of, of huge consumer surplus to being a service economy, service economies, as they become operationalized, uh, basically structuralized

logistics systems. And that is an opportunity for real estate operators because right now the current situation is that that transition ization of consumption is crashing in literally at the last meter, beyond the last mile of real estate

packages are proliferating in lobbies, which is a fire hazard, right, in terms of regulation.

But it's not just a fire hazard, it's a free gift [00:28:00] to one of the richest men in history.

When I speak to real estate developers and operates and I say, are you happy making Jeff Bezos the world's first trillionaire? I'm like, what do you, what do you mean?

I'm like, why do you think Jeff Be's company is worth one and a half trillion dollars?

Like, I don't know where you're heading with this because you are giving him free retail frontage.

Retail space

has essentially three functions, right? Inventory discovery or inventory inspection. The transaction of fulfillment. You look at goods, you buy the goods, you get the goods.

Now inventory discovery is happening online fulfillment is happening through third party logistics and transactions happening online.

So retails poof is no longer a spatial phenomenon. You can go, you can find reasons to have showrooms and whatnot, and people

wanna be in shops and so forth. But operationally, Amazon said, great, we'll do the imagery discovery. We'll do the, it will do the transaction. You fucking clowns who own real estate, can be our fulfillment partners.

And we'll never pay you a cent.

Not only will Not pay you a cent, we'll make you pay for our shitty lockers to operation, to, [00:29:00]

to optimize our, our poor performance.

Evan Troxel: Right.

John Manoochehri: So when you say that

real estate operators are delivering, you know, um, free gifts, premium real estate. To Jeff Bezos. They go, holy shit.

Tell

me more about this last meter thing.

So I created this company that designs buildings. So you can op, you know, you can, you can, you can optimize for services that the real estate operators choose. You have a, you know, a service marketplace. You have a data system that, you know, wraps all this in efficiency.

Beautiful. Wonderful works. Well, real estate is just too slow

to make this work, right?

It takes too long to get the data. It takes too long to get the, you know, the, the property managers to do the thing, you know, and it, and, and I'm not a good enough entrepreneur. I'm not kind of, not the kind of entrepreneur that does what Travis Lanning did, which is say, you know what?

I'm gonna run the operations.

This theory Right.

Of efficiency that we can opt, you know, the platform, the system can optimize itself, which is what I believe is the case with last meter service integration. Real estate can get value, revenue share from services that [00:30:00] optimizes into the building to facilitate returns and efficient packaging and all sorts of things.

Sales have interesting, you know, services, all that efficiency gain that last me to, uh, uh, make makes clear as an opportunity requires a lot of operational cycling. Right now they need

lock systems, they need data systems, they need management training,

they need all sorts of things. And if I'm not gonna raise a billion dollars just to do all that and

then continue making no money, right?

Which is the way Uber did it,

then I sit there for a few years, which is what I did, but advice me to go, oh, you all wanna play along, but

you basically want me to do all your legwork for you so that you can then make money. Hmm. That is an very expensive capital investment and a huge amount of operational involvement.

Um, not Travis Lannick, um, to goofy and geeky and design oriented for that. Um, and I just don't wanna do it.

So, so last meter right was where I got to after seeing two things. One is that, you know, the sustainability profile of, um. Of, you know, the high end of the built [00:31:00] environment, professions, you know, architecture and infrastructure and so forth.

Were not taking the bigger picture of sustainability seriously, because they weren't cleaning up the, the embodied consumption of resources. And they absolutely couldn't even see the extent to which, you know, architectural morphological, uh, um, considerations were massively inducing or, or, or, um, or restraining transformations in the overall, you know, dynamics of, of, of economic consumption.

And so all that stuff, you know, I, I sort of puzzled out and came to last meter and realized, oh shit, this is, I love it so fascinating. It's so cool, it's making me no money. . And they also don't like working with real estate people that much in the sense that, eh, it doesn't feel very creative or technical, right?

If you're not selling them a package solution where you are the technician and the creator, you're basically waiting for them to do stuff. And that is not. In inherently very interesting.

Um, real estate is the best asset class in history. It will remain that the, [00:32:00] the best asset class in history. So real estate people don't do very much, but

that's, that's what happened is I was sort of sitting there watching last meter kind of flatline, I guess.

I mean, it's partly 'cause I'm just not enough, not good enough of historically have not been a good enough business manager to just sell shit and get to pay for shit. We're trying to explain things rather than just sell stuff, which I think is a, you know, a, a critical flaw for anyone that wants to sell things.

You've just gotta let people, you know, convince themselves that it's awesome. And I has taken, I've taken some time to get good at that or better at that. But in any case, then Covid hits and that was a good time to kind of like puzzle things out. So

I started a podcast that isn't quite the same as the famous TRXL podcast.

What I was trying to do was to kind of investigate the sort of bigger. You know, echo chamber of issues around the work I had done, right? If you take, uh, uh, design technology and you take sustainability issues and you take these broader issues, how do they, how do they all configure? I was trying to find a sort of friendly way of getting into the kind of mind space that I, I'd spent time in.

[00:33:00] I think by that time I'd also realized that I had got good at architectural design technology at every level of the stack, right? So not just like, you know, design tool, but actually conventional technology. Like, you know, just, uh, um, you know, platform technology. I learned a lot about platform technology and, you know, mobile technology and just the standard Silicon Valley stack and how it relates to design technology, which is relat relatively unusual sort of intersection.

So I knew a lot about tech and so I kind of could talk and it become a good technologist. I mean, I can code properly and I can use tools properly, so I could like, like articulate it, but then have an idea world around it. And that's an unusual sort of thing. So I was trying to drive the conversation towards is, as it were, the, the impact implications of this technology.

Confluence between design technology and, you know, the Silicon Valley tech stuff, normal daily technology. And did that for a season and Epic game started sponsoring. They said, look, this, this content is pretty good. We like it. And basically one of the questions I asked. [00:34:00] Some people in the, in the course of that podcast, um, was, uh, um, okay, so if we're gonna build these metaverses, right?

Which the way that they historically been presented, I'm not very interested in like, some kind of social hangout space, like Second Life. I didn't have a lot of interest in that, but I could see that the technology was getting better and better, was gonna continue facilitating that conversation and that vision insofar as anybody, you know, clings to it.

I asked one of the guys, well the guy actually who, who, you know, sort of profiled his, his expertise against the Metaverse Matt Ball, who I think is extremely brilliant human being, he's got a very holistic view of the whole space, where all the assets are gonna come from, well, where all the environments are gonna come from.

And he was like, well, you know, what do you, what do you, what do you mean? I said, well, you can't just make them, you can't just draw a city's worth of assets and then pop up a metaverse. You'd be lagging years every time you wanna do anything. Right.

And, you know, generative content, procedural content's not gonna be nearly good enough, right?

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

John Manoochehri: The game companies, you know, the AA game companies that [00:35:00] do a lot of content development, or the film studios do these huge, have these huge, like many year, you know, arts asset procurement processes, either third party or in-house. And even then the content that they use for their games and moving environments is highly scripted.

Meaning you can't

walk up to a building on Avan and just do what you want with it, right?

It has a specific set of potential interactions and

it's meshed and it's. Fixed with this, with that in mind,

it isn't arbitrary interaction ready, let alone most of it, ready for super high photoreal resolution, real time rendering.

So it's like, if all this technology is, is, is maturing now and we're all supposed to believe that, you know, the, the, these environments are ready for billions of users, where are the environments coming from? The other problem with it isn't just that there is a, you know, a kind of like a, like a bottleneck in terms of quality stuff that's ready to be used.

Everything is owned, right? You know, all the buildings of the world have image rights attached. If you go to the Getty Images website, right? No, not the Getty. If, if you become a contributor to Getty Images,

uh, and then you have [00:36:00] a special website to go to, um, they will show you a, they will, they will make you read and use a very specific set of, um, of legal clearance documents.

And one of them is, is the building writes clearance document and essentially clarifies in black and white terms is that every building in the world is, has copyright attached to it

and you have to respect it. Now, the reason why that hasn't been an issue in building out Metaverse before, 'cause it's done, it has scale before,

if they have, it hasn't been a big enough commercial, uh, you know, uh, issue based on the spatial environment for anybody that owns copyrights in the built world to say, I want my royalty, but it is now about to be that.

And so I realized, oh goodness, if one of the foremost metaverse thinkers. Doesn't reflexively understand that we need a lot of assets that are well developed and ready for, you know, arbitrary, you know, uh, photo real realtime rendered environment creation, offering population, and that we need a lot of licensing attached to shit that is either, you know, real world or has design identity and so forth [00:37:00] attached to it.

Then that could be something interesting. And he got there before me. He asked me, he said, you know, um, he, you know, he said, I would invest in that. And he, and I was like, well, what do you mean invest in what? I just asked you a question about where the asset's coming from. He said, you know, a licensing

pipeline for quality spatial assets.

And I was like, oh, holy shit. I can't believe someone hasn't done this, because it seems like it's the most obvious thing and it's gonna be a massive bottleneck and requirement. So the next thing I did is I, you know, I pinged Sharre at Zaha Hadid, um, who I didn't know before the, the, the, the Future Public podcast.

But he'd been on it and been one of the most, I would say, particular and sober communicators around, you know, different dimensions in design technology. Um, I said. Is Zaha being asked for assets for, um, special environment by special environment builders? And he said it's thought of. Yeah, I mean, we, we, you know, we are being asked for a, currently we're in a project with PUBG.

PBG is the, you know, the, the kind of the original M-O-R-P-G [00:38:00] like battle royal game and they have seasonal maps and they were designing, you know, some, some buildings for that. But it was an incredibly complicated procurement process. So I said, would you like to license your back catalog and any part of what you've created where you have, you know, you know, sign off and the developers of they own part of the, of the rights wanna play along.

And he said, lemme check with Patrick Schumacher. And Patrick Schumacher messaged back within 45 minutes saying, yes, we're all in. We wanna do this thing. Now that happens to be the case, that it happens to be the case that Patrick is very interested in metaverse as a whole proposition.

And so that sort of sat with, you know, in line with things.

But there's more to it than that, which I, which I'll, which I'll come to. This was just an ex massively long-winded way of saying there is a way to get from a, from working on environmental science and policy to, um, digital spatial environments and asset licensing. Um, and I

explained it so

Evan Troxel: part.

You

John Manoochehri: well. Yeah, no, I left that out because I don't wanna be in the soundbites.[00:39:00]

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a really intriguing path, John. I can't, uh, no. Nobody would ever see that path moving forward. And it's, uh, it's, it's interesting at the very end that you, you said there is a path

John Manoochehri: So I, so I think the thing is, the thing is, you know, is that I can, I can find it for me, this is what, where I'm somewhat proud, right? It's obviously frustrating that I'd love to be making more money and, and sort of pushing grand, grander things forward. But I realize that there are very sort of interesting and large scale problems that don't necessarily have the right treatment yet.

So if we just

take the issue of like, you know, the extent to which the built environment induces consumption patterns and it isn't a moral choice past a certain point

to, to live within a car economy, right?

Um, or to consume a certain way.

And, um, that's something that is probably far too. Under explored in the sustainability debate.

And when you convert into how do we optimize design, you know, in incentivize, you know, [00:40:00] monetize built in built environment and architecture to engage with that. There's tons of opportunities. So there, there, I think there's a credibility line there. It isn't just sort of, sort of um, you know,

rhetorically grabbing random shit.

'cause there are people that do that who I find very annoying.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Well, I I, I find it very interesting the, the change that you've gone through from last meter to what you're doing now

at Treasury and, and so thank you for painting that picture, because I think it does kind of show that there actually was a path there and that it was based on experience and. I mean, good and bad experience like opportunity, but then also the reality of real estate development, the way that these decisions are, like the butterfly effect that are driving how consumption actually works. Um, and I don't think people are necessarily understanding. I mean, you, you said it yourself, right? They don't understand the true cost [00:41:00] of those decisions when they're making 'em, because these things are so much bigger than, and they're

John Manoochehri: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: they're not the normal things we talk about. Even when you go through architectural training, which is probably the most esoteric, you're going to get esoteric when you're gonna, that you're gonna get, when you are in the, a path to architecture and you're still not talking about that stuff.

Right? And it's, it's, it's very interesting to me to see how it's actually playing out at, on the biggest projects in the world. And I, some things have happened since you've gone through this, right? We're now seeing development of mega cities where I would assume there is a lot of this being planned into it.

I don't know to what depth, because I'm not privy to any of that information, right? But we see what's going on with the line. We see what's going on with osa. Like I get their email, I get their newsletters, and they talk about it. We see videos on YouTube every once in a while. But you would assume a lot of this has to get baked in to those fully designed communities for this [00:42:00] to work, right?

Because I mean, if I could boil down what you were saying to the most basic sense of something that I talk about all the time is. No matter how big your house is, you're gonna fill it with stuff no matter how big your house like. And so to your point, if you have a carport, you're gonna put a car in it.

Right?

So if the design infrastructure, the architecture of the built environment where it's fully designed and, and all the rules have been figured out at the beginning, that seems to me like the only chance that you have to create a community that consumes less based on everything that you're saying.

John Manoochehri: Okay.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. .Yeah. There you go.

John Manoochehri: I mean, I mean, I mean, what, what I, what I would say there

is yes,

Evan Troxel: transform something?

John Manoochehri: yes, yes-ish.

Evan Troxel: something that already exists into what you're It? It's

John Manoochehri: yeah, I would, I would, I would say, I would say yes-ish. I I would, say yes-ish. I mean, I, I think that it, it's definitely easier to package up [00:43:00] new ideas in new build, right?

And, and it's definitely interesting if you have, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, which, which,

um, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia has and is

wielding in the line and in neon, uh, which is, I mean, it's a whole separate question, but

it's by far the most dominant project in the, in the built design professions right now.

Everybody is ending up there,

right?

For better or for worse. Um, I, I think that just, just, I just, just, uh, uh, straightforwardly, I think that there needs to be more cycles of conversation,

right? This is where, you know, if I had been, as I say, I think a little bit more confident. About this stuff. And they

probably recruited more, uh, sort of collaborators institutionally and otherwise.

A bit earlier on, I think there would've been more, um, opportunity to kind of like, uh, uh, I don't wanna say spread the word, but like, but it evolved the conversation around these things. Because right now, as as

simple as it seems to say that the built environment, economic patterns and those economic patterns define consumption behaviors materially and aspirationally.

And [00:44:00] if you, you know, blend these to a bit, you can get real estate that has an additional value incentive by embedding services and taking revenue and optimizing design around all that stuff is not very complicated to explain, but it isn't really happening.

Right. And, and I think it's not just, you know, I think the built the built design professions, I mean, this is part of my frustration.

So the second job at architecture, the built design professions are just not good at articulating, you know, I would say serious conversations. They're very fixated and I think very sort of speculative

technical things. I mean, the aesthetics aspect is fine. People just wanna talk about aesthetics, that's fine.

But talking about, you know, the role of, you know, the built environment in sustainability or in, you know, health or, you know, social inclusion is in general, I don't think it's all that seriousness and that the good technical stuff isn't very close to the prac to

practice. Right. And I'd love that to change.

And I think that, um, how that changes, I don't know, I just think it just will take time.

Right. In the same way that the, you know, the climate conversations take time for these things to become actual priorities and

regulated issues. So for example, like in Sweden, I'll give you a little vignette of how I think these things change.

And it may not be the case that it's [00:45:00] the same trajectory of change as the big projects just do it in Stockholm. Right now, the planning rules essentially as a baseline say that, you know, new residential apartments must have roughly 1.5, uh, sorry, 1.2 parking spaces per two person apartments matter. That that's the, there's sort of parking minimum baseline.

But if the development has a, uh, a, a, a a, a binding legal agreement with a is, and this is in the planning policy, credible mobility provider, then they can sync that to 9.4 vehicles right?

Evan Troxel: Mm

John Manoochehri: Per two person apartment. So that's a regulatory intervention

that isn't quite the same as um, sort of just fiat regulations.

Not the same as government, you know, investment in public, public transit. But it's something that I think's gonna be very influential 'cause

developers start seeing holy shit, if we find our way into a relationship with somebody doing transport, they haven't really found a way into a collaboration with the mobility providers, the sort of the, the tech providers.

'cause they're just too fucking chaotic and. [00:46:00] Self-obsessed. Um, uh, so it tends to be with much more boring car sharing

companies, which is more, less, less exciting and less flexible. But it's, but it's, there's, there's a trajectory there where I think through a number of cycles where developers start seeing different things and they, you know, developers start seeing my projects again and again and again.

I feel like there's a ton of different projects with developers in Sweden. They're like, we, yeah, we, we couldn't do that until we had better access to better services that we could really rely on. We don't wanna experiment with our new development. Right. So I would say yes-ish. That's what I mean when I say, you know, the line of neon probably will be good to, to articulate some of these kinds of things, but if the debate isn't that evolved, it may not really land.

The other thing is actually, I think you have to be careful, and this is one of the fascinating things about the, about, about the built environment, is that you really do wanna make sure that. Change is allowed, right? If you look at the big projects that have very visionary sort of intent, so go back one generation before, uh, neon on the line to sda, for example.

Arguably too much of the [00:47:00] thinking was baked in, right? So if one partner falls away or one use

case fails, then a whole chunk of the city doesn't work anymore,

right? So you've got a whole, you know, a solar farm, you've got your educational campus and you've got, you know, a transit system and the transit system broke, just doesn't work or whatever.

I think that's one of the, so, and, and they, you know, and so, and so I think that the, the idea that it's either, you know, the trillion dollars will fix it or it doesn't, it's not possible.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

John Manoochehri: I'd say, so essentially iterating these things

and having more and more sophisticated arguments by, by the way, I, I, I'm not when I say this.

I do think that your, your, um, your podcast, but also like your voice and network and kind of conversational, um, uh, network, like your voice, your network, and the way that you conduct conversations, which is grounded in architectural practice and architectural sort of educational discipline, but is very constructively, forensically, promiscuous in other domains.

It is the kind of thing we need.

I really do think so. Right. I think it does bring in more voices and it does pull architecture out into more sort of [00:48:00] structured commentary and

engagement issues.

Evan Troxel: So I, we've been burying the lead here, John. I think we need to get back to technology and what you're doing now. So let's talk about treasury, because I, one of the thing, like I said, I didn't, I didn't see the through line from last meter to treasury, but now through your experiences that you outlined with BIG and with Zaha, talking to these different groups, talking with people at Epic, um, I can see how the puzzle was at least formulated.

Um,

now there's a lot of work to put it, all of that pieces of the puzzle in the right place. So let, let's, I mean, because one of the other key components here that we haven't talked about really yet is just what Apple is branded as the era of spatial computing, right? Um, we, we've, we've been using VR headsets and AR headsets for quite a while now, but now seem to be on the cusp of something. And by the time this episode comes out, people will actually have these in their hands, like literally just a few days before this [00:49:00] comes out. People who are willing to spend the money for it, of course. But, but we, we are on this Cusp of something different. And I, I'm particularly excited about it as an architect, I feel like this is where we are going to have a potentially huge contribution to make. And so now that we're talking about spatial computing, digital environments beyond the metaverse, right? Uh, we're talking about something the next evolution of that. I don't even know what what we call it yet, but, but talk, talk through that because the puzzle pieces are starting to fall into place even more so than, than what you had outlined a few minutes ago about where,

where the, the genesis of these ideas came from.

John Manoochehri: yeah. Thank you. So, um, so, I mean, basically when I realized that there was this opportunity to create a licensing platform from like spatial

digital environment creators or whatever, sought out to digital environment, um, you know, builders and, and users of assets.

And I asked Za who wanted to be involved three months after that, [00:50:00] we had a very, very high value venture capital round with Google, with one of our investors. 'cause it's not a complicated idea,

right? And, and, and so the last meeting still exists, but one of the reasons why I didn't, you know, move forward faster is because I hadn't taken on, you know, the, the, the, the, the ruthless entrepreneurial insight, I think was once articulated by the, you know, the director of the CEO of PepsiCo, which is, if you cannot articulate your business idea on the back of a business card, it cannot be implemented

Evan Troxel: Hmm mm-Hmm.

John Manoochehri: And that's kind of helpful to me because it is very simple. People need spatial digital spatial environments at scale, which are well designed and well licensed, and we can do that. So that idea landed. We've got venture capital money incredibly quickly. A good valuation. Um, Zaha became one of the founding partners.

Tons of interest immediately from across the profession was pulled in. Um, I'll park that piece of the story kind of practically and go back to more of the sort of conceptual or the market framing piece for a second. And then, and then pick up, [00:51:00] you know, the, the actual, you know, the, the, the pragmatics of treasury and what we did and, and where we're at right now.

But let's talk about spatial computing. I mean, when I started, you know, the Future Perfect podcast, as, as I mentioned, I myself am not very weighted to the idea. In fact, I'm rather antagonistic the idea that what people wanna do is spend a lot of time in digital virtual places, right? So this idea of the Metaverse as an alternative or parallel world, whether something that's temporary and entirely, you know, the a, uh, um, uh, speculative or an actual, you know, analog of the existing world in some way.

I don't think there's a lot of, you know, um, fundamental rationale for that. We, we can talk about more about that maybe later. But just in general, I don't think that's the most important thing. What I do think is happening is that, um, and we, and we've written this, basically we've written a, um, what we call a spatial computational thesis, which lays out this specific point that I'm about to make, is that a lot of con technologies converging that have a spatial [00:52:00] character.

All right. If you take that perspective, rather than saying, oh, wow, there's a product we can create, which allows people to exist in some kind of avatar eyes, alternative or parallel world. If you, if you park that idea for a second and say, well, we, how would that be possible? What is it that will facilitate a metaverse type conversation?

And what you can do is kind of break down the technologies that allow that to, to be a possibility or a product, you know, endpoint for anybody, individuals or corporations. And it gets very fascinating. You can say, well, you know, mapping and earth sensing is, is having a huge renaissance. You know, CAD and d like architectural design tools, route to design tools are having their own, you know, I don't say renaissance, but there is innovation going on there.

And , you this is, this is, this is what we know. How, how fast it's moving is a whole separate question. Um, uh, reality capture, how we pulling information about the world and visualize it rendering of, of, of digital environments, um, uh, technical form factors [00:53:00] to view things,

uh, mobile phones, headsets and so forth.

Um, there, there, there's a lot of dimensions, like slices of technology that are all evolving faster and faster. And then if you put AI onto all of them, you know, you start having, you know, like, you know, reality capture with, you know, interpolated models like nerfs and you have, you know, you know, training data sets that we never had before that can be, you know, you know, trained up to generate, you know, very different way from rule bound, procedural design, much more

kind of statistical based, corporate based, um, uh, machine learning generation.

All of that is what we call the space technology conversions.

'cause what it doesn't do, I think, is represent a single product outcome, which

is one other reason why I'm not really that interested in the, in the sort of social VR type metaverse, which is not only do I not think that users really want it, but I just don't think it's the, the single or the natural outcome of all the space technology

stuff that's maturing.

At the same time, the space technology convergence, as far as I can see is [00:54:00] it's like an infrastructural layer on top of the internet society and economy, right? And, and, and so people can say, oh, well there's a metaverse. And that's kind of what, you know, the, you know, the, the, the space technology revolution, the spatial technology, you know, um, uh, infrastructure, um, you know, convergence represents.

To say that spatial computational spatial technology convergence and evolution repre, you know, represents or ends up in the metaverse. It's like saying internet technology, emergence and universality ends up in cyberspace,

right? The, the metaverse is really a word as far as I can tell, just to capture a few

ideas, and it's been productized by a few people.

And that's fair enough. You know, when the internet was premier a thing, people talk about cyberspace to get a sense or a flavor or something, but it hasn't been the case that, you know, as the internet evolved, we went somewhere, the opposite happened. The internet came to us and then disappeared because it became everything.

And

the same is, I think, gonna be true with for, for spatial computing and metaverse. We won't go to the metaverse, spatial computing hast come to us, gonna be part of everything, right? And

the same way that if you have, when you are walking around your life today, you don't think [00:55:00] I'm gonna turn the internet on and off,

I'm gonna go into the internet, right?

It's just everyone, a little

piece here and there, Right.

And, and so that's what we mean by infrastructural layer, right? Is there's gonna be a tiny bit of visualization and a tiny bit of reality capture and a tiny bit of ar and a tiny bit of, you know. And so if you have. That perspective that, that rather than me ization like a product premise of alternative realities and authorized people, um, is coming outta space technology.

The, the, the opportunity space is, is really vast and it's really fascinating. Right? And one of the things I've learned, this has been for me, I think the biggest of my personal epiphanies, I would say is, and again, probably something I should've if I'd had a , a better upbringing, is I would've seen technology in a pure sense, uh, as an opportunity to kind of, you know, evolve into, but for, for myself and for society, because it really is true and this sort of blends in the end, you know, blasts me to sustainability stuff with, um, with, uh, you know, [00:56:00] uh, space computation and visualization stuff.

If you, if you have, um, those technology at your, at, at your disposal, designing the world efficiently

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

John Manoochehri: a lot easier,

right? If you want to create infrastructurally optimized built environments, uh, that induce the correct consumption patterns, what do you wanna model that at scale with vast number of, number ones of variables.

You wanna model

your logistics systems and you know, how they cascade down to, you know, the last meter of service integration in residential worlds, and you wanna do that across countless directions. So there is a convergence and, and I think it's exciting to see how, um, if you take, I think, the approach that you take, right?

Because, you know, I think you have. As always a very sober but deeply curious approach to, um, these technology approaches, which is, well, let's not assume that there's a product outcome that we can preempt. Let's not assume there's an app or a commercial application of this stuff that we should assume is the correct way forward.[00:57:00]

So many opportunities there, and all we have to do with treasury, right? And this is why it's great, and I'm very happy to be involved with it. And I think I've learned at least one lesson as some kind of entrepreneur is keep it simple, stupid. If we can be a provider of assets, spatial assets, digital environments that, as I say are well developed and well licensed into a world of expanding spatial computing, seems like there's a business there,

right?

And so initially, you know, I, when I first sort of shared what the, you know, the way, you know, I set up this, the, the, the treasury kind of concept in my conversation with Matt Ball, um, that's a like stylized version of actually what happened is because it became very clear in conversation with. And Patrick and Nelson at Zaha.

That's, you know, the design leadership, basically the design and design technology leadership of the company. Um, and many other offices we're speaking to and now countless other creators that, um, they themselves understood that this was not about populating a specific [00:58:00] product endpoint with cool environments.

This was about making sure that as any of these space technologies mature, that good quality content that's well licensed can be the backbone of it. Right.

I, I, I'm very proud of the fact that it should be more, that it isn't more complicated to explain the business model. I make it more complicated 'cause I'm a idiot, as I've said.

the basis of it is simple and that is probably why it will work,

because it, it will, it forces me to be simple and not

obfuscate.

Evan Troxel: yeah, I mean the, the big difference between quote unquote content and the kinds of things that you're talking about, licensing is that these word, they have gone through the design process to serve people. These

are for people. That's what architecture's all about, right? The architecture is for people, and the digital representations that help us get to the final build takes all of that into account through various ways, right?

Through actual design, [00:59:00] right?

Through, uh, stakeholder meetings and what

people actually need. And, and so I think, you know, and, and there's a lot of other things. There's, there's simulation, there's

analysis, there's all these other things that kind of vet and make sure that the, these things are going to work when they're actually built. And we get the benefit of that in the digital version as well. And so there is potential value there for another use. Right. And so I guess the question is, and and I, I've already kind of, sort of started to answer this, right, but why should architects, why should firms be thinking about this as there there is value attached to the, this part of the process that, that they're not thinking about anymore because they're already onto the next project?

John Manoochehri: I think there's a number of reasons, right? Why, why practicing architects and architecture offices should engage with this. And it, it is not quite the same reason for all offices, right? If you

are a super premium architect type office, or you are the custodian [01:00:00] of what we call, um, uh, uh, classic architecture, right?

We, in our categorization of what we call the supply classes of spatial assets, there's premium architecture, which is kind of architect stuff where there's

a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, financial premium attached to the design, name, design, outcome, uh, or classic architecture, whether, so essentially architects who go on the history books, right?

If you're not in those categories, and 99% of architects are. And there's no, there's no, there's no reason, there's nothing wrong with that. Obviously. It's the reality of the world, their reasons for being involved in, in, uh, spatial computation and to, you know, to, to, to, to get the assets into treasury, um, uh, would be slightly different.

So I'm just gonna explain briefly the treasury sort of business and technical model. And then, and then kind of unpack from that, the, the argument, you

know, the different arguments for different kinds of architects, but basically treasury, you know, it, it thankfully is pretty simple. Has, you know, it's a two-sided model.

We have, so-called, you know, spatial asset creators and digital environment builders. And in the, in the [01:01:00] creator side of our product stack, we have what's called the registry. And the registry is where anybody has created a spatial asset, can register it for a variety of purposes. You can register it to have it in an archive for private use.

You can register it so you can fingerprint it using our fingerprinting technology, which we have developed with Zahar and will continue to develop with an open source group, which is now about to be launched, um, where basically it captures what we call the morphological signature of your asset.

And you can use it for licensing distribution, right?

So you can use it for, you know, sorting and archiving fingerprinting and what we call syndication, which is basically wide distribution through multiple channels and marketplaces, including treasury's own marketplace. That's not complicated, right? So those are the three things that the registry essentially does.

There's some other things that does. On the demand side of the model, we have what we call a discovery engine, which is essentially like a sexy marketplace to

show preview models of assets. You can choose if you are a developer of an Apple [01:02:00] headset app, or you are a movie maker that wants a location, or you are a real estate developer that wants to, you know, showcase your own project in a, in a marketing app or whatever.

There's countless use cases where digital environ builders, you know, um, will want to select assets and look at licensing

and choose technical characteristics. So Discovery Engine helps with that and it enables that. And we have a bunch of bells and whistles attached to, essentially it's like a marketplace for cool through the assets.

You'd look at it and you'd think it looks like TurboSquid or 3D Sketch five, but it isn't actually the same in any way. It's much more technically advanced, in some ways simpler than others, and it legally is massively more sophisticated. But it basically is a marketplace that can be attached to additional marketplace.

We can attach our discovery engine and our syndication model to Epic Games marketplace, which is ongoing. Or Rob Robots marketplace, which is ongoing and you know, Minecraft marketplace is which ongoing. That's the general idea. Now your question as to why, um. Uh, what we would call creators, right?

Specifically architects would want to be attached to this [01:03:00] does differ if, um, they are what we call premium or, you know, the foundations that run classic architecture or the world's conventional architects, generally speaking, I don't think it's correct to say, right? Just to put this in pragmatic terms, that if you design an office building, right, as an, as a standard successful architectural, you know, firm of let's say 10 people, that there'll be an enormous amount of interest to license the design of that for a movie set,

right? Maybe someone want to do it, right?

But o on the average, there's so many, you know, office buildings in the world that the fact that someone would want to license yours, how, as attractive as it may be, um, and as functions it may be, is relatively low, right? So we can't assume that the majority of architects will be in the business of IP licensing, right?

Uh, and, and, and so what they would want to do is basically, um, protect, uh, their work, uh, from, um, uh, direct copying by other architects, right? So what they're trying to protect there isn't, as it were, the style ip, it's just the [01:04:00] design work they've done. If the models are out there, they would want to fingerprint their work.

So if another architect wanted to design of this building, just didn't wanna do the work, right, they would want to have their work protected from, as it were, commercial copying rather than I, uh, IP piracy, right? So there is an argument for, for fingerprinting that work and preventing it from being copied, but it's not quite the same as as, as kind of.

Retaining design ip, which is what the premium architects are very concerned about. They're very concerned about that, about their signature designs being used in movie sets or in advertising campaigns. Right? And so if we differentiate those two, strictly speaking, they are both ip. The one is sexy IP one is pragmatic, like legwork, you know, uh, you know, shoe leather ip.

Um, and so different like segments of their profession have different reasons to protect their designs.

Now, the copyright of these things is, it needs a little bit of kind of tweaking into regulatory terms. It's, there are some complexities that I think need to be ironed out in terms of exactly who owns the copyright for different aspects of the design.

You know, the CAD [01:05:00] drawings versus the BIM models versus the rendering 2D renderings versus

the 3D realtime renderings. But essentially it's a copyright exercise. And so the premium architects wanna pr, you know, protect sexy design, ICON's and pragmatic architecture just pr prevent their work from being ripped off, right?

But, but, and so that's the sort of the core of it and translate that into money, right? Where we think they will . We know there's some money. We think there could be a vast amount of money. Well, why we have venture backing and while we're getting more is because when it comes to creating assets for premium digital environments, there's a lot of money in having a well-designed and sexy environment for the staging Taylor Swift's concert.

Right?

And you know, the Taylor Swift or any artist will want to license a beautiful, exciting, uh, uh, spatial design, right? Uh, and that's tons of money. Bianca Bianca's, uh, you know, west Fifth Seventh building via, has already been in a movie movie without

being licensed [01:06:00] properly, right? Well, if they had the actual asset, they could use it, you know, all sorts of, you know, photo real quality asset.

They could do all sorts of stuff with it. And they, you know, B would paid a solid fee. They have access to the building. Durst Corporation will not let 'em have access to,

which is the developers of the building. I'm not sure if they still own it. And so you can see that there's a premium licensing piece that is hugely incentivized for, you know, um, uh, premium architects.

But pragmatically also, it's the case that if you are an architecture office, right? And you do want to, to, if you have got a contract, you know, a contract to develop, you know, a whole like blocks worth of buildings, maybe you don't wanna design all of it. Maybe you

don't wanna redesign all of the office buildings.

Maybe you don't wanna redesign the school. Maybe you can do a search for a specific programmatic and typological specifics and license that model. So there is an IP market, whether it will make millions of dollars or tens of thousands, I don't know. Right. But I think there's a pragmatic piece there. And so you take the, the core technical commercial proposition, which is kind of IP licensing, both in terms of sector stuff and pragmatic stuff.

You can see that [01:07:00] any, uh, proper registry of assets is a good idea. What we would like to see basically is a very sensible starting point, which is that people use treasury registry. As a comparatively means free or a cheap tool to just archive stuff,

right? Even if you don't wanna do any licensing, get your assets in, use it as a way to sort your, your, your historical work and actually get it to a form where you, on, on, on a, on a, you know, web gl, web-based viewing basis can see what you've done.

E even just in terms of archiving, you

know, offices of any level of, you know, of, of prominence. Haven't got actual, you know, you know, sort of, you know, real time rendered models. And we think that's very useful for its purposes, internal purposes,

sales purposes, research purposes. So the big kind of, the big value kick is, is IP licensing of premium, sexy, uh, IP and pragmatic quality design ip.

And then, you know, archiving, you know, is the, is the, um, [01:08:00] there's the sort of bread and butter stuff, but there's one other piece. And just to kind of finish this piece where the value proposition for architecture, which is what comes next in the design profession, right? Who gets to design the digital environments

that you know, that Taylor Swift wants?

Because the, the next generation of design will not be ones where it says, great. We'll do the staging here on the stage, the real world concert, and we'll have a, you know, fascinating fantastical staging concept in format. They'll sit there and say, that's design. A stage that is a hybrid design proposition

that has the same iconic character in a digital environment as it has in the real world,

right? And, and that becomes a vast opportunity out for architectural offices because no one in the world of digital environment creation right now can do that.

The people can create fantastic environments that don't have to stand up, right? And

don't have, you know, sanitation or HVAC or MEP, right? But having that hybrid, you know, opportunity, I think is gonna be one of the largest pieces of the operationalization of [01:09:00] spatial competition as an opportunity.

And architects are right now, the only people that can do that. So that is a huge thing, is that the workflow, the, the, the, um, the uh, um, the, the financial opportunity isn't just licensing ip, it's just design work. It's

designing for these hybrid use cases. And what that leads to is basically back to the archiving piece.

Because if your workflow does not include a terminus where every piece of work is pragmatically available in a digitally renderable form, you are not in that game.

You don't get to sell your work out to people that need digital spatial environments. You are in another world. And, and a lot of architects still think that's the thing.

We don't wanna be involved in the digital world. And, and what we are trying to say to 'em is the digital world is the physical world just haven't merged much yet.

So let's start with archiving. Let's evolve the workflows and let's see what's out there.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, because things are, they really are about to change as far as people's personal experience with digital environments. Right? Right now it's very 2D screen. I've got [01:10:00] several screens sitting in front of me right now, and the way that I interact with those is through various instruments on my desk.

Sometimes it's my finger, but it could be a, a pencil, it could be a track pad, it could be a keyboard, it could be a mouse when it, it could be something that sits in your hand, but it's, it's a 2D experience, not a 3D immersive experience. And okay, not everybody can afford a $500 or a thousand dollars or a $3,500 headset, but these, it literally is like, these are the covered wagon days of, of this. And it, it won't be long until everybody is going to have these and, and are they gonna be using it all the time? To your point? Probably not. Especially in the form factor that they are right now. Right. It's just not gonna be comfortable for that long. But I've been in VR experiences where I'm disappointed when I come out of them. It literally is, it literally is better in there. It's better in that building that I designed than it is in this room that I'm actually sitting in and. [01:11:00] Enough people have that experience, they're going to recognize the power of being in, for all intents and purposes, is a very real space, no matter how real it actually is or not.

If it, if it does exist in the planet or not, it's still going to be so compelling to them that it's going to change their perception about why they would want to participate in things like that. And yeah, the Apple headset's 3,500 bucks, but this is the very first one. And it's basically developer hardware at this point.

Right. And it's for

the people who want to get in early and figure this out now, because when the cheap ones come out, when the affordable ones, I should say, come out, it's it's going to be, they, they want to be ready for that, right? And so I, I really do feel like because architects are so good at understanding what it takes to design space for people. the same use case, like you said, it's, there's, there's some [01:12:00] weird disconnection between the digital world and the physical world. And you're saying that no, they're actually together. Right? so I, I think that's absolutely true, and architects are going to be the ones to bridge the gap. It's not, it's not the tech.

It's going to be the experiences that people have. And we take our jobs really seriously. We have to obey the code. We have to actually solve real problems for people. There is going to be an additional layer of just full on fun that can happen. And, and I think that is gonna be a huge driver as well for people when, you know, a, a lot of the use case around meta is for collaborative work environments.

And I know Apple is talking about that a lot too. But it's literally, I think the, the thing that's really gonna lead to the breakthroughs is the, is the entertainment side of things. It is just the pure joy of things that people are going to experience when they're, when they're using these technologies.

John Manoochehri: I think you are right. And, um, so, you know, for, for, for the, um, [01:13:00] but partly 'cause I think it's an, it's, it's, it's a sort of honest way of, of explaining myself and the work that I've done and the work that I'm doing. And I think that knowing a fair few of the people who listen to this podcast, I would kind of was kind of, is kind of almost all of whom I, I've not met, um, uh, in person.

I I would like 'em to have a sense of , kind of what kind of person work, work I've already been doing and what, what I'm involved with. But now thank you for the queue. I'm gonna switch into sort of, kind of pitching mode,

Evan Troxel: Okay.

John Manoochehri: rough on explaining mode because I, because I, because I think that the opportunity for creativity and for experiential kind of, uh, you know, value is very, very considerable.

It's not really pitching by this kind of like, you know, expansive,

like floppy thinking about. And I think that, um, I just don't think people realize how good this stuff is,

right? If, if we take matters, um, uh, like Metaverse stuff, everyone was shitting on them,

right? And they've been shitting on 'em for years.

Oh my god. [01:14:00] Reality labs have been spending $10 billion a year. What the hell are they doing with their money? Well, what they've been doing there with their money is building an infrastructure that is public, right? Which has been stress tested every month, you know. Pathetic numbers of users, 10,000, you know, here and there, but it's incrementing and you know, putting headsets are co coming on and off and, you know, the servers are spinning up and technology is happening and it's always stress testing.

Anyone else is doing, basically. I mean, obviously Fortnite other platform comes to doing it, but in a slightly different way, Metro is stress testing a global scale infrastructure for billions of people and quantity developing technology. And so when you saw, you know, late last year that they did actually have Photoreal avatars, right?

You, you, you could see that, you know, the, the podcast between Lex Friedman and

Mark Zuckerberg, you know, was an instantiation of a post, you know, uncanny valley photo wheel avatar that they're gonna put on these environments.

And it's just, it's light. It's night and day, right?

The moment that business have the opportunity and users have the business to have photoreal avatars, they will use them, right?[01:15:00]

Well, I mean, in our case, we think that's great because they'll suddenly need photoreal environments, which they currently don't have on Meta Horizon. But the point is, there's lots of technology that's popping up in terms of its prominence and people don't know that it's there and it's ready. If we take Apple, for example, apple headset.

Already is offering Photoreal avatar experience

for FaceTime, right? I don't think it's as good as the meta offering, but that is gonna be a competitive dynamic. And so people don't think that every piece of the story we've presented so far in terms of experiential, like value, let alone wow factor, which I'm coming to at one second, is about to be very, very credible and con compelling.

I just think we're not looking closely and I don't want it to work, right? But it is working. And so if you take that point that the technology is reaching this, you know, sort of maturity, there's a takeoff point. I, I, don't think it's just the case to kind of expand on, on what you said, the entertainment's gonna be a great piece of this whole thing.

Actually, entertainment's gonna be the thing if we take entertainment in, in all of [01:16:00] its forms. You know, game, movies, uh, art,

uh, creative technology,

uh, uh, sports. Sports, but I mean particularly creative technologies. I, I, uh, creative industries, conventionally creative industries. Uh, that piece of entertainment, I think.

But to some extent also, the other pieces of entertainment will be the things that drive technology forward, right? Uh, I, I, I, I think if we take like artists for example, and movie makers there, the amount of, um, um, sort of, uh, iteration that will happen for art and, and movie making narrative, uh, you know, uh, long form movie making to kind of embrace this medium, the amount of iteration that will require, that will feed back from the technology to the experience and so forth

is, is vast, right?

And I think, um, that is going gonna be one of the most interesting things to see how creators don't just as it were, embrace a new medium, is how they lead a new medium to its maturity and every

other in instantiation of it.

[01:17:00] I think, you know, things like, um, you know, sport as it were, i I that are, I would say by, by their nature less creative and core intent, they would probably, they will probably reinforce the infrastructural aspect.

Like how does it work, you know, to be concurrent for a billion users with, you know, minimal, uh, latency and still be photoreal and so forth, and what, you know, what is, what is tele presence or, you know, photoreal, you know, avatar presence in those kinds of environments. I mean, that, that, that's more of a technical implication in terms of development.

But just in terms of creative, I think, I think the creative will be the ones that the, the, the most creative applications I think of space technology will be the ones that help us understand what kinds of form factors should we have.

Do we need haptic suits?

Do we need true? Can we have, can we do we need true ar?

Right? Which is where, you know, you have an unencumbered view and you, as it were, project

a digital image into the retina in some way, or across a, you know, interstitial screen. Or can we have what we currently have, which is pass through vr. Like

Apple doesn't really have a true like viewing system, you know, [01:18:00] it requires external cameras and

it fakes the environment with that, with those cameras.

Um, all that stuff. I think creators will be helping us to understand the, the creative industries, including architecture rewards that will probably iterating fastest in terms of what does this do for users? What does it mean in terms of a, you know, experiential payoff and the, the wow fact. What does that mean in terms of, you know, monetization?

What does it mean in terms of consumer loyalty? What does it mean in terms of creative expression? What does it mean in terms of regulation? I, I think maybe the case, I don't wanna make this argue too strong 'cause I, I probably can't make it credibly. I think it's probably true. I think that creative entries probably are the ones when certain kind of technology become available that enable them to become mature so that they are stable for all users.

Right. You know, um, that's probably true, at least for some industries and some, you know, some ocs. But I definitely think it's true now is that, that, that the, that that advanced creative uses, we would, will be once to stabilize the sticky cost effective money generating socially [01:19:00] acceptable uses that then can be, you know, universalized by different applications.

Evan Troxel: Uh, yeah. Yeah. I, I agree. And, and the, so, so one of the, the interesting features that I just read about that's coming with, with the Disney Plus app as an example on the Apple Vision Pro is that you can, you can watch a film, but you are sitting in an environment that of your choosing.

So you could choose to sit in Luke's land speeder while you watch a movie. Like

Star Wars, you can choose to be on Tony Stark's balcony overlooking Manhattan while you watch, you know, Ironman. And I think what's so interesting about that is that, you know, again, it's not just about the experience of watching the mo the movie and being able to look around wherever you want. It's actually about customizability. It's about being in a space that you feel comfortable in or don't feel comfortable in on purpose. You might, you know, I can think about like the way that there's gonna be [01:20:00] genres that that collide with architecture here because it is spatial in nature that we haven't gotten to experience before. And I think that's going to like, to your point about pushing new boundaries when a new platform like this comes out to enable creators to kind of blow our minds with, you know, the hardware manufacturers and the software manufacturers are putting this out there with their best guess. But they're really saying, I wanna see what you people make with this. I wanna see what the, what every, what those artists can actually do with it. Because that's where it actually is going to, I think be extremely interesting.

John Manoochehri: I think, I think so a couple of things there. Um, thank you by the way, for setting this up so beautifully. We, we didn't script this really. Um, and so the audience needs to know that EE that Evan is, is perfectly organically setting up exactly what we're doing, which is, which is really mean for me.

Evan Troxel: great.

John Manoochehri: you the $5 kickback after the show.[01:21:00]

I mean, I, um, so the first point is just the pragmatic one, which is that a lot of experiences, um, uh, well, I mean, all experiences need a, need a digital spatial environment in, in the spatial computing application

universe. But most of them right now don't have that, uh, you know, as a, as a premise,

right? That it's games. Do you need an environment for a game? But people think of something to do in a digital space environment, like a phone call, for example, like a FaceTime call with a, with a Photoreal avatar. Well, you don't really want that to be in a black box, right?

Which is how they presented it. You know, when

they did the, the, demo with Lex Friedman, mark Zuckerberg.

You want an interesting environment, and then the question is, well, what kind of environment do you want it to be in? Likewise, when Apple is presenting, what they appear to think is the primary at least, or the least most stable, incredible use case for Apple vision headset, which is productivity, right?

Just do your work with a gigantic screen that

is in your environment, and then they say, well, you could swap your room or your office for a mountain scene or

a, you know, a forested glad or whatever [01:22:00] our job is to be. Supplying developers with the best environments right?

Of every sort. Right. You know, photo, real nature scans, classical locations, interesting workroom, so forth.

So the, the, the, our business model, we think is clear to explain, very much given exactly what you've described and what is very clearly unfolding. And that is distinct from the metaverse proposition where the environment's fixed.

It's a virtual world, but you just inhabit, you don't choose the environment, right?

So that is one of the big, you know, shifts for us in the narrative is that spatial computation is inherently about chosen environments. More so I think than metaverse narratives as they were. So we think we're well positioned, right? We're saying, as I've said, we wanna supply well designed, well licensed environments for every possible special competing application.

And we'll see, right? Apple developers are not knocking on our door right now 'cause we, no one knows who they fucking are. But , it's coming, becoming clear that the ecosystem of development is, is, is, is, is about to become a real thing. So we want everybody in Apple development to [01:23:00] have Apple in, in the Apple developer ecosystem, to have, uh, a treasury, uh, discovery engine and a, and a treasury registry account.

So they can get their assets in, they can explore

assets they can include in their projects. Um, uh, but that also, you know, sits exactly on the, what we discussed about in terms of the architectural design opportunity. Architects should consider that. They should be the people, essentially the only people that are incredibly designing advance for these things.

Because if you think about it, right, we're gonna cycle through a bunch of crap for the next year or two or three, right? And people

go, why am I sitting. in baseline case a, an AR version of my own messy office. Great.

I'm gonna swap it for an Apple environment. Well, why am I sitting in a forested glade with dripping woodpeckers?

I don't give a shit about that. Can't I find a more interesting product of the environment? So that then becomes a design horizon that has never existed

before. ,Right.

You know, what is it to create a productivity environment, right?

And so, And so, I think it isn't just the case [01:24:00] that we're gonna be licensing out, as I say, legacy stuff.

There are all these use cases that are, that, that are evolving. And guess what, how long will it be before somebody gets designed for them a custom productivity environment for a digital spatial environment?

And it goes, what the fuck is this not in my actual office? This is great.

Can you, can you see how the, you know, the, there's what I mean by iteration, right?

That the creative industries end up being the ones that start pulling all these opportunities forward in a way. So

then what that takes us to is, the second thing, just, just to finish on the this point, is that when you start thinking through that, these digital spatial environments have all sorts of implications for the user experience, right?

And some of it's obviously just pure and same, some of it's, you know, more intimate. When, when you look at that long tail of environments, you start getting into health and education and mental health

and psychedelic experience, psychedelic investigation,

and all of those things. Have been extremely difficult to evolve in design terms because [01:25:00] it's very hard to test

how effective a space environment is for

educational purposes or mental health purposes, or rec, you know, physical recuperation purposes or, you know, any sort of psychedelic religious, spiritual investigation. Guess what, that is very easy to do with

the Photoreal environment. So just, just, just to say, another thing we'll be launching soon is our science project, where we have a bunch of partners in the, uh, professions around human cognition and uh, uh, uh, the spatial cognition domains, but we're work, we're working on exactly that question with, and we're trying to put an architect to say, look, you are well positioned, not just to drive practical use cases and value in these digital spatial, um, in these spatial computation applications, but to, to, to be technical and creative leaders in the non-enterprise, non-commercial, uh, use cases that these technologies, uh, unlock.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I, I'm glad you brought up the, the mental health healthcare [01:26:00] recuperation. I, I do think it applies in, in athletics and things as well where there's going to be, I, it's, it's going to open up a whole new world of research and again, how people who make space who develop space architecture can play a role in that directly is going to be absolutely incredible.

And I, it's funny because there's a lot of projects that we did when I was working as an architect. That never went through. And, and the business unit always said, those are the best pro projects because we got paid to do the design and we didn't have to go through

John Manoochehri: All the pain construction. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: pain, the pain of construction, and the, the, the finger pointing and the lawyers and the litigation and all of the things that happen, um, to, it's a, it's incredible that it actually happens, right?

I, I see it all the time and I'm always in awe that, that we actually get anything built, but you're going to get to [01:27:00] participate and be a leader in the actual good part, right? Which is it. You just deliver the experience, the raw experience to people. And what's gonna happen is it's going to affect the real world.

There are gonna be people who experience these things in the digital world, and it will, when they take the headset off and they're ultimately disappointed by their actual messy office and their actual disaster of a house or whatever it is, and they're gonna be like, oh, I need to upgrade this part of my life now because I just experienced how great it can be over there. And it is gonna, it is gonna come back into the physical and they are going to inform each other, I think, in that way. And that's great for architects.

John Manoochehri: I think you are right. I, I definitely, I think that's correct, and I think, I think that part of it will be just as you, you know, as, as I think we both agree that there's gonna be, you know, hybridization at every level. Not just hybridization of large scale, like, you know, uh, uh, huge entertainment offerings that have a physical and a digital, you know, uh, environmental kind of instantiation.

There's a stage for. Music concert, which is [01:28:00] a digital stage for hundreds of millions of users that are on some kind of virtual environment. But I also think, and this is, you know, a longer conversation, and, uh, but I, I think probably this is the kind of thing that's gonna happen is that what good design actually means is gonna get reimagined a little bit.

Right? The

problem with architecture, uh, in one way, right? I mean, I don't wanna elaborate too much on theory here, but I, it does matter to me quite a lot is that it isn't really, I think delivering much quality, right? One of the reasons I think architecture gets sidetracked into kind of like, you know, just aesthetics, which is essentially pretty speculative.

It's legitimate in far it goes, but people can't really, you know, adjudicate aesthetics very much unless you start going down sort of, you know, stupid classical theories of, you know, aesthetics or whatever. It ends up being relatively relative, right? And fine, you know, people can like what they want, but I think, um, at the end of the day, most users of architecture, which is 99.9% of the world's, you know, historical population, that buildings are just badly

designed, right?

And one of the reasons why they're value designed is that these aren't very amenable to adaptation in real time, [01:29:00] right? And so this has been the kind of chime, this kind of like, you know, this siren song of modularity. Right? How do we create environments that can be adapted and

structures that can be reconfigured and so forth?

And in one of the reasons to keep coming back is because it is the future of all technology, right? If you look at technology that, that we have what we call technology today. I mentioned the two types technology that, that all this is concerned with is the kind of that, what I call the Silicon Valley type stacks that you have, you know, storage and computation and you have, you know, memory and you have networking, and you have, then you have like the, you know, the, the, the, the device universe.

You have desktop, desktop devices and you have, you know, uh, you know, you know the viewing systems and you have, you know, the mobile devices, that's the Silicon Valley stack that's conventional, you know, technology. Um, and then you have specialized spatial computation stuff like in and around that. Now, um, all of that is infinitely modular, right?

No one builds fixed stuff, right? It

pretty much every layer of that can be, you know,

reconfigured only the final form factor [01:30:00] is fixed. Even then, you wanna make that more and more and more flexible, right? And so I think one of the things that will happen isn't just that we have more hybrid designs. You our spatial designs di uh, di digital environmental designs that have, you know, physical environment designs, hybridized, you know, together.

I think that we'll trend, physical design towards a much more modularized system. So

it would be another vector pushing in that era,

in that direction, which has not really worked so far. 'cause if users to your, to, to your point, go, oh, you know, I don't like my office. You know, if the, the real office, my digital office working environment is so great.

Oh, I'd like my, you know, my, my physical office to be like it. And then they go back into the digital office, they go, oh, I'm just gonna change this. I'll change the color, I'll change the, you know, the layout. I'll change the lighting, I'll change, you know, and then they're stuck with a, you know, so, so modularization will become a more of a hot topic, as you know, the physical environmental design and digital environmental design.

I think that's very good. Right? I think that's very good. The way I describe this, again, this is my [01:31:00] third or fourth dig to architecture, and this is probably the biggest dig that I will make on this, uh, that will make public with you, Evan, maybe, maybe some more later, some privately, um, is what I call the, you know, architecture is kind of topped out what I call the, the, the, the, um, the banana phone era, right?

Uh, in the history of telephony, right? Landline phones topped out at a point where technology just wasn't advancing,

right? You had a copper wire, you had a, you know, a, a, magnetic, you know, transceiver, uh, and that was it, right? It was pretty good. Nothing else was going on. So

what happens to, you know, design of telephones?

They're just getting more and more elaborate. So you have, you know. Uh, you know, you know, sort of throwback Baker light phones and Mickey Mouse phones and, you know, all sorts of concepts and, and ultimately you get totally kind of frivolous things like banana phones, right? Things that looks like, you know, there's nothing to do with the experience of technology, right?

And, and that I think is in some ways descriptive of, of where architectural design gone.

We just have frivolous [01:32:00] design concepts because

technically the, the, the experience of buildings not getting better, right? So you have people going to buildings that are incredibly sophisticated tech, I mean like in, in terms of their aesthetic.

And

they're kind of, you know, the, the way that they have been formulated in design terms. Are they better, are they better than walking in the woods? Are they better than, you know, classical designs? Are they better than all sorts? Vern designs. I don't know. Right. But the point is that I, my premise is that one reason why it's relatively easy to critique a lot of the pretensions or the assumptions of value in the aesthetics aspect of architectural design is that the technical aspect of built design is not, it's, when I say technical aspect, I don't mean like construction.

I mean the technical as in spatial configurative, the impact on the user, the opportunity space for the user is not really improving, frankly.

Right. If you take Lucier's design theories for how human habitation should be, we haven't really advanced on that. People were happy to criticize him for it, but we haven't really improved it.

Right.

Um, uh, we're still using [01:33:00] books like Noex, this incredibly ridiculous book of standard designs

to kind of guide us, right.

What everyone, everyone does. Right. That's the point. It's still, it's still

current. So my point is that if we, if, if we, if, and anyone would, and most architects work, 'cause this is why it's, you know, it's a rocketed point.

But I think that the spatial computation, uh, evolution makes this, um, an interesting conversation

if there is actually the opportunity to rethink the experiential potential of design. And one dimension that 'cause of the hybridization of physical spatial environments and digital spatial environments is modularity of environments, right?

Configurative quality and the power and the potential of reconfiguration. I think we're gonna get beyond the Banana Fund era. I think one thing that will happen, the, the, the Banana Point era of architecture, and one thing, the, the one thing that will happen, which probably will horrify a lot of designers, is you may go down the road of standardization of form factors.

We don't talk about form factors in architectural design. We probably should. Right? Talk about typology, which is one of [01:34:00] the most poorly defined words in history, but form factors in, in, in, in silicon technology stack is well-defined,

right?

How is this thing physically configured? And if you look at buildings, residences, you know, I live in San Francisco and I walking around my neighborhood, every single residential building is utterly different

in Cold Valley where I live, which is beautiful and completely absurd.

Every single staircase, every single frontage, every single roof is different. This

is completely absurd because I think, again, incredibly controversial, and I'll be shouted down for this, if anyone even listens this part, um, that probably what will happen if we think through the implications of hybridization, of physical special design and, um, digital special design and the modularization of, of spatial configurations inside physical designs is that we'll get things that look a bit like in typological terms, the equivalent of iPhones will get a lot more exogenous standardization and we'll get a lot more endogenous[01:35:00]

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

John Manoochehri: novelty.

Everybody's phone is different in terms of the wallpaper and the apps and how they

configure the apps and the experiences they have and how much it's on and how much it's off and what it's used for. And that I think is an interesting potential in terms of architecture

is actually the structural aspect of architecture stabilizes to historically what it was, which was a set of vernaculars because that is the efficient way of doing it.

Vernacular architecture is basically deployment of efficient techniques.

No craftsman was just invent something

speculatively. 'cause he'd have to work out how to make the mortar work and cut the brick and, you know, he'd do what they did 'cause they knew how to do it effectively. I think we may trend back to, um, typological and structural, uh, vernaculars or standardized techniques, which is exactly what we do in the rest technology and infinitely speculative and experimental configurations in some other more modular way.

So that's a deeply over, over elaborate way of saying, uh, I think that the potential of digital spectrum environments to unlock whole new dimensions of potential or at least [01:36:00] put additional pressure on, on the evolution of architectural design towards modularity, uh, at least modularized configurations of the experiential, uh, environment, I think is gonna be very interest.

Interesting.

Evan Troxel: I, I agreed. So in order to get there, you're saying the call to action is to basically catalog the existing stock of the models that we have. And so tell us like what that process is like, because the, the, the models are, are complex. They're way more complex than what needs to happen in an experience like this. But how far do you go when, tell me, is this geometry only? Is it geometry and textures? Is there more data attached to it? And and does it need to be redone? Does it need to, can it go in exactly how it is? Like just practically for an architect who's listening to this, who would be interested in creating their catalog, what's that process?

John Manoochehri: Okay, so, so we, so [01:37:00] we're doing this, I think, the correct way, which is we're doing, we're doing everything as best we can step by step to the limit of what is required on either sides of the, of the, as it were, the content

market, right? And so there would be a way, if you thought from abstract, from sort of abstract or pure perspective to say, well, look, we would need to have like, you know, perfectly labeled BIM models and cad underlays

Evan Troxel: These

John Manoochehri: texturing, right?

And, and we would need to have all the licensing clearance for the, you know, the, the subcontractor that did the landscaping and then the rendering contract that did the 2D designs for this display, and then the people that did the boards for that

display, and then the 3D rendering. So there's, there, there are ways in terms of like, you know, uh, um, um, uh, individualization of the asset base inside what we call inside each scene, each piece of licensable content we call a scene.

There's, and there are assets within that.

You could, you could have infinite, you know, requirements to, to set all that up technically and legally. And actually we started that. We thought, well, let's just make sure everyone has the correct [01:38:00] models and the correct licenses before we start licensing stuff out.

That's not the correct way of doing it. The great way of doing it is to get everything in, in some way and to assert copyright and to begin the process of, of effective maturization, right? So

what we're basically saying is all the supply classes that we think are relevant to licensable use cases, which is

Conventional architecture, premium architecture, classic architecture. Um, all buildings currently in the world today. Uh, uh, um, infrastructure and monuments, um, uh, uh, natural environment, art and film. Right? Those are our supply classes. Let's get everything in and let's work it all out. 'cause as far as we're concerned, it's very basic.

All that we do in the, in the first instance, if something does not have a meshed model that we can present as a 3D preview in our web-based viewer,

we say, give us a 2D cutout of your asset. We'll put that into the 3D viewer, which looks

actually okay, and we'll see who, what, and we'll see if anyone's interested [01:39:00] in it.

right?

But what's, what's very helpful in this regard, and it's something that I, one of the main things I've learned about this whole space is how powerful the law is to facilitate, um, value. If you do that thing, if you say,

this really is mine, right?

If you assert your, you know, ownership of your, of your own copyrights, I mean the um.

The, the thing that shocked me was that when we were presenting our business model and our platform to our extremely fancy, expensive lawyers, we have our lawyers Wilson. So we had the same lawyers at Apple, and we're very happy to have them if you have to kind of go through a beauty contest to put they, before they even take you on,

we were showing em our contracts and we, I was sitting in a meeting with the principal, um, with the principal, uh, um, uh, with the senior partner on, on our account.

And, um, uh, he was looking at our, um, content and our kind of contract templates and essentially was saying, I could see his, I could see his face essentially going, there's nothing here that's novel. From my [01:40:00] perspective. I'm like, what? How much technology we have to build before you guys get impressed?

Right.

And the truth is that he realized compromise is very straightforward. If you make it, you own it,

and then the court will work out what that is. Right. Which is magical in some ways. I think it's far too restrictive actually, and we have to work with that we, in a more precise and technical way. But the truth is that, um, copyright is very, very broad and very, very effective in, in protecting

creators. And so what you discover is that, um, rather than having to do a very technical model legally and technically to position the people that own content strongly, uh, as contributors of value into the spatial computation, uh, era, just get it archived. 'cause otherwise, no one's ever gonna know it's yours.

All right?

And so technically speaking, we can only fingerprint things. We can add a morphological to things. The more we have in terms of a sophisticated model. But we can facilitate you as asserting your copyrights, um, uh, immediately that you [01:41:00] archive things in the Treasury registry. And what's interesting is that, and I think a lot of people do some misunderstands when we say we're doing a finger burning project and we've designed a morphological signature that involves, you know, variety of different kinda mathematical and technical ways of, of, you know, uniquely describing, uh, spatial assets.

Um, uh, people think, oh, that's a breakthrough in terms of law. No, it's not a breakthrough in terms of law. This is why, you know, uh, our lawyer at Wilson was, was, was, was exactly right, which is in the end, all that a fig fingerprinting project can do is, is give more guidance to the court to somebody says, you've stolen my stuff, right?

Show me the, show me the, you know, the, the, the, um, uh, show me the, um, the uh, uh, the signature to that suggests that this stuff is, um, uh, uh, owned already. And then the courts will make that decision. There isn't a technical way to adjudicate legally who owns what. So what we can do is facilitate that with a, a signature project.

But the first thing is just to get your copyright

set up, register your stuff. Um, and we, we, that's the job. That's one of the big job is just to make that [01:42:00] machine clear. Um, I would say that, um, uh, the the individualization piece right, is much simpler. People think, right? It isn't a technical process, it's basically just getting assets in.

Thinking through how, you know, people want to protect their assets, which are ones that they think are most likely to be misused. Uh, and then we can position ourselves as custodians of the copyright to, to, to to spatial asset. The, the key point here, right? That, that is actually up, that is arising today.

Um, isn't it sits on the, the principle that people wanna use a registry and archiving system, which is that the main vector of threat, right? Um, uh, is um, is basically, uh, AI training libraries, right? It isn't that there's gonna be individual use cases that come and pick off your stuff. 'cause that stuff

is relatively easy to go against.

uh, and so basically you can find out, you can find out, um, which assets are, um, uh, being pirated by individual users. Pretty straightforward and [01:43:00] it's just very binary in that case. Essentially what you want is a situation where somebody's making money sufficiently you can go and sue them. It's not making money, you're just gonna ignore it.

That's how copyright work works today, right? You

don't sue people that lend each other books or lend each other CDs or play each other Spotify. Um, and, uh. So you go off to monetizable use cases, that's the standard base case of copyright infringement. And it's, you know, that's unfolding in, in, in a, in, in, in, its in the normal way, right?

You can use fingerprinting to protect, you know, access from being uploaded to platforms, but it's still all just standard copyright infringement stuff. The new thing in this, uh, you know, debate is basically massive ingestion of copyrighted content into machine learning, training, training databases, right?

And although a lot of people that have done that are spending a lot of money to kind of claim that this is a fair use or isn't really using, you know, copyrighted material at all, the law is coming out on both sides of that, right? Some,

you know, law is saying, oh, [01:44:00] fair use can be expanded to cover training libraries.

Other law is saying, no, no, you can't take any copyright content into your training library. Our view is creators should get ahead of AI ingestion on a point of principle, don't let anybody get your value for free,

right? No matter what the law says, get ahead of it, right? And so what we're now doing, right?

So this is part of, you know, the announcement that are coming out is going to create is not, and not just saying to them what I've just said to you, which is, Hey, you should archive your stuff for the purpose of just establish a copyright principle and thinking through licensing opportunities and getting your, you know, your inventory of assets together.

And gradually, you know, creating, you know, even just preview models of your whole, you know, portfolio of work. We're not saying to them, make sure your stuff is not stolen at massive scale. Because that's something the treasury can do, is we can go to the platforms as honest brokers and say, Hey, open ai.

Hey, you know, um, you know, uh, whoever else is building, you know, large scale, uh, training models for every category of copyrighted content. Just don't absorb [01:45:00] this stuff.

Whether or not you think it's copywriter, just don't do it on a, be on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, um, a good faith basis. People don't want you to use this stuff, right?

And so if you aren't gonna use this stuff, you will be directly contravening the intentions of the creators. And I think that best practice, good faith exercise is what, in the end will define why archived content, fingerprinted content is protected, right? If you, if you go back to the YouTube case, Google sat there for 10 years.

It's a slightly different argument from open ai, but it sat there for 10 years saying, we don't distribute copyrighted content. We have what's called Safe harbor under Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Right?

Users are all working out themselves. It's all a big mystery to us. We're just a black box and we don't get sued for this.

And then they thought, well, why don't we turn around and become good copyright actors?

Why don't we work in good faith with owners of licenses,

use a copyright ID system and ask users of obviously copyrighted content to pay for it?

[01:46:00] And that is what we think is gonna happen. But that's the second reason why we would encourage, you know, people that own anything that's worth copywriting, whether it's premium architecture, classic architecture, or kind of just standard quality architecture to register their stuff, is that as our fingerprinting model improves, we'll be able to prevent it being, you know, using any platform.

But already right now, we can say on a good faith basis on their behalf for free. Uh, it's not for free, but it's basically, I mean, a fraction of the cost. It would, it, it, it would cost them directly and probably at least a little bit more effective to go to the massive inges of content. Do not ingest as content.

It's not for you whether

or not copyright says you can do it.

Evan Troxel: This is the iTunes two Napster analogy, right? It's like people are all pirating music. They're, they're taking all this music and iTunes, Steve Jobs said, sell all your songs for 99 cents in a digital format, and people will show up, and they will do that because that's what people, they actually want to own their music.

And it, and it was, it was totally true. It was just that thing [01:47:00] did not exist. There was no

alternative to Napster to get digital, a digital format of your music, right? And so

by creating that platform, it just created It, it didn't just create a business, it created a great business, but it created a way for people to do exactly what they wanted to do legally. Right?

John Manoochehri: Yeah, I think so. We think Napster is a very interesting case, right? Napster was the technical technological liberation of content,

which Spotify then, you know, kind of pulled back into the licensed era, right? And we like to think we're that convergence at the same time. But, but, but, but, but what, what we call spatial asset.

Content 3D like environments and buildings, so forth at, at scale has never been released into the world.

There is no, you know, like, you know, content base, um, asset base that you could absorb into a peer-to-peer sharing system like Napster and distribute for free. Right? And

that's why this is an interesting critical moment in time where we would encourage architects not to sit there and say, well, you know, we'll see how this plays out.

'cause [01:48:00] when they start releasing their content, when, when anybody starts releasing content, it's gonna get pulled in,

right? There's no, there's no way you can prevent it from being, you know, pulled into to, you know, to to, to, you know, to training libraries and.

Free distribution system. So the best you can do is get ahead of it, not

just terms of fingerprinting.

'cause fingerprinting never worked for, for individual DRM cases, right? You be very careful about thinking about how you fingerprint digital assets because it doesn't work for dmm co print copying, right? You don't wanna go off individual copying all you wanna do with, you know, with fingerprinting, it's just make sure the platforms can check what is being uploaded at massive scale, right?

Uh, and so they can become your friends in terms of distribution and restriction. But then ultimately it's a question of making sure that, you know, the, the training libraries are being good corporate citizens. They go, you know, you just leak frog all the finger break please and go straight to just be good to creators.

And that's

kind of what we'd like to establish. I do think one of the most important things to come out of this conversation is that cre, creators of spatial content, whether it is, you know, [01:49:00] movie makers, artists, architects, um, and anyone you know, uh, who earns spatial content that is gonna be used to scale, just get used to the idea that you should protect what you own, and that people are coming to rip it off.

And no matter what legal argument they use, it is yours. Inversely, don't be a stick in the mud. Don't just say no to everything.

Right.

I mean, that, that's, that's just to kind of shift a little bit into, into the next part of this conversation, I think, which is that AI is very useful and Generat generative content is gonna be very, you know, powerful.

And at some point, procedural generation feeding violence will get very, very good. I mean, I think we've solid three or four years out from that, but yes, yes. Let's, let's let generative content flourish. But let's make sure that creators are fully protected and encouraged and, you know, elevated in the process.

And I think that if we can be in a situation where not only are we preventing generic ai, uh, uh, asset generators from just stucking in, um, training content, as spatial assets become available [01:50:00] to these machine learning training platforms, um, that we actually have custom trained libraries, custom trained models that can, that on private libraries, that can generate, um, much more authentic, even licensed generative output,

right?

I mean, we haven't, we, we we're not ready to announce exactly what we're doing in this piece yet, but some of our creators have already started training, custom training machine learning models on their digital spatial asset content 3D content. And we are wanting to help them position generative outputs in platforms through license arrangements, through custom generators and so forth.

Now, that's already happening in the 2D image space. Right, that you have, you

know, custom training and licensed generation gen generator output. So what we'd like to do, you know, is to leap from all of the conversation right now and say, look, let's get all the library of spatial digital spatial assets protected both through fingerprinting and through a good faith request.

Do not [01:51:00] ingest like robots dot text

on the internet. Don't suck in my website, don't suck in my content. Um, and inversely to facilitate massively more, uh, uh, aesthetically credible, um, uh, legally, you know, amenable, uh, and financially viable, uh, ai, uh, machine, a ai generators generative content, um, in collaboration with creators and platforms, right?

We don't wanna beat the people that say like the, you know, society of author skills, I think it's called, um, said to Google, don't ingest our books. Google said, we

wanna make a giant shock out of your books. And they said, no, how dare you. Um, and it was just in a Google Books project kind of collapsed because the

authors guild said they don't wanna do it.

And we don't wanna be in that kind of copyright,

you know, cop situation. But we do think it's time to fully assert what the platforms are gradually learning, which is you shouldn't screw creators and

creating trillions of dollars of value. Let's all be pragmatically, let's all be friends [01:52:00] and, and see how this plays out on a constructive basis if we can.

Evan Troxel: Let's talk about the financial side. So you've talked about a marketplace where licensing could happen, but there's also kind of just the, the nuts and bolts of getting content into this. Who pays for that?

how how does that work for creators and and what would they be looking at?

John Manoochehri: Well, so a lot of this is evolving, right? I mean, in sort of, in sort of clumsy, you know, uh, the, the silicon venture times, we are, you know, in, in, in our product market fit finding phase, we have product, we have customers on both sides. We have some narrative that we think is about to become massively more relevant in this conversation.

Definitely as part of that, we don't exactly know the best way of doing it, right? So

I don't think it would be correct to say we have a pricing model or an operationalization model, onboarding model that is stable. Um, I think the best way of thinking of it in very broad brush terms is what we want to happen is that the onboarding of content and what we call the pre-listing or onboarding of content from creators in these different supply classes, architecture, film, and so forth, is.

[01:53:00] Staggeringly easy to get your stuff into the registry in the first instance so that you can do what we call pre-listing. Just get a, a snapshot of it, a 2D image of some sort out onto the marketplace side to what the market signal is. People

wanna license this stuff, whether it's a movie environment or it's a building, or it's a piece of art that has a spatial character, or it's the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the real world in terms of, you know, real, you know, live locations anywhere in the world.

Natural environments, right? I mean, it's, you probably what you are linked to with the podcast is a bunch of demos of the product, so people gonna see roughly what I'm talking about. But essentially the point is that we wanna be very dig content in and be visible in some way. And somebody says, well, I'm kind of interested in this for my

movie or for my Apple Head Vision app, or my, you know, my Metaverse project or my, you know, healthcare app.

We will work out pricing signal and that will then inform exactly who pays for the onboarding, right? [01:54:00] What we do know is that some designers want to be upfront in front of the market.

They want their shit to be ready to go right? And so

they are already paying or they've already done the work 'cause of the way they evolve their workflow many years ago.

Um, to be ready for real-time rendering. So we take the Zaha Hadi, for example. They don't design their, um, architectural, uh, projects in the first instance with BIM Tools. They don't use a EC tools. They use Maya, which is essentially an animation tool,

right? They have meshed content

for extremely high, you know, aesthetic, visual, um, presentation value as the very first piece of software they use for most projects.

So then they cascade it down through Rhino and then, you know, in most cases sort of farm out the BIM ification of it and then the construction, you know, drawings and so forth. But they've already started in a way that is extremely advantageous to modeling out things, to spatial environments and visualization.

And so, um, we expect that their content will be in the registry in a much more visually appealing way than most content in the first instance and many other offices in the same place, right? If you [01:55:00] take the, the movies studios, you know, the movie, the back, the back catalogs of the movie studios we're working with are not only not in some kind of CG form, they're just the celluloid, right?

So there's many stages that we'd go through to

create, to extract digital environment from a Blade Runner set,

right? And which we would like to be doing. Um, that will take some time. But then some movie studios. Already have a ton of CG development, right? The, the biggest ones come out a closed shop like Disney and so forth.

It's largely a closed shop, but some studios have got pieces of their production workflow that have got very good established practices for CG content. So we can just get that stuff up, up and up and ready. But there's

a bunch of stuff that we can put out into the world and uh, hopefully, you know, we can share that announcement very soon for some of that stuff.

And so there, there, the argument is basically let's get everything in, in whatever form can be visualized in a very simple way. Um, it's stabilize whatever licenses. If we had just have one owner of it, partial owner, we can work out the royalties cascade and that you know exactly who owns what over time.

But the signal is gonna be who wants to use it for what? Or they credible partners, what is their [01:56:00] budget and what is the business model that they're attached to, which will liberate over time or budget. And so the financial pieces is straightforward. We want it to be essentially cost effective people to add their assets.

If they spend more money as creators to upgrade ize, mesh their assets, they're definitely gonna be more visually appealing and ready to sell. Right? And a lot of this is gonna be time bound, cost bound. So

they have control if they have assets that are mesh and ready to go. But I think a lot of the market will be a pool market, right?

Oh, that looks interesting. Mesh it, model it. This is my spec. Get it into a USD, this probably count, you know, I need these, you know, you know, this is what we're gonna do in terms of overall environment and render. And so that, and so what we're essentially trying to do there is avoid being a full operationalization partner for every iteration of a model, right?

'cause when we first started this, we was like, oh, well, we're just gonna have to get everything into every format and pipeline before we can license it. No, not true at all. People

see very clearly that if they want the Eiffel Tower property license for their project, they [01:57:00] will not be a version of it that is ready.

Um, in licensing terms or even technical terms, you need to get a custom license set up, which is what we've built a sort of custom licensing system that facilitates the license of choices for creators and a technical output pathway to facilitate what you want for your input pipeline. And that's what we think, you know, the best way, the best, the best opportunity is to get everybody's content in one or two clicks, and then if people have, have more sophisticated content, get them to the front of the queue because it's easiest to show that stuff and let the marketplace itself out, right?

Evan Troxel: And your system, ele enables end users, people who are shopping basically on your site for through the catalog of assets to experience them in some way,

I would

John Manoochehri: Yeah, absolutely. So, so what we call our discovery engine is our own endpoint, right? So it's a kind of sexy, WebGL based viewing system. It looks, as I say, in, in sort of operat, it looks as a, as a kind of product in this broad sense, [01:58:00] a bit like, you know, TurboSquid or, or 3D, sketch five or any kind of asset marketplace, but.

It's way more beautiful , and it has a bunch of very specific characteristics that are focused on premium licensing. Right? We're not trying to pump out very simple, you know, OBJ files,

uh, to people that are just doing hobby projects, right?

These are for projects that. Yeah. So we're trying to create essentially the inverse of that, which is basically people that say, oh, if I had access to a photo world version of this building, I could create a multimillion dollar movie or advertising campaign that would still save me million dollars in, you know, in in CD post production and location costs and, you know, you know, uh, damage to a, damage to a monument.

You know, all these things

that, you know, practical movie,

making, you know, entails, right? And so, so if we have like, you know, that focus, um, the, that, that is our focus and if those are our clients, right? We have to build a product set that facilitates that. So what we should have is discovery engine, which enables you to preview model.

[01:59:00] We have a thing called the deployment engine and a curation tool, an unreal engine. So that if you want to,

once you've pre-selected your assets in the web-based discovery engine, you then start going deeper into a workflow way. If you're gonna spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an asset, you have very, very powerful tools to make those decisions.

Um, and even an unreal engine kind of inspection system to really, you know, get into the details of the model. So, so the demand side, yes, is a marketplace, but it's structured for premium use. Now, we would love it to be the case that obviously individual users and hobby users across all access to this stuff, particularly cheaper versions of things that you should be universalization of access to content, particularly if there's public content, right?

One of the reasons why you want every piece of content properly licensed in the registry is that a lot of content is not for commercial use.

And so you want your IP protector not to make money out of it to, to prevent people from making money out of it. And that's the case, public monuments and so forth.

What you want there though is licensing that prevents not just monetized use, but inappropriate use. So there's a whole other, you know, dimension of, you know, of, [02:00:00] of, of the registry and the, you know, the output side of what you want to happen is that assets are properly licensed so that users can, you know, so you like, you know, hobby users and you know, nonprofit users can have access to models in the platforms that they're working in, um, without having to run the risk of, you know, falling foul of what, you know, licensing and restrictions may end up coming to, to, to pass.

And so we do want there to be a lot of consumerization of assets, particularly for assets that aren't being used for monetary purposes. What that leads to, we, you know, probably haven't got time to go into this too much, but the essential point is that we don't just want to be the marketplace for most use cases of the assets.

Realistically the premium marketplace. In fact, any marketplace deployment is gonna be embedded in somebody's software. Right. We would love to be right. An API integrated in whenever it arrives the filmmaker's version of Unreal Engine, right? Unreal Engine is not very highly specified for filmmakers, but at some point it will, there will be a sort of filmmaker's like, you know, software, you know, set [02:01:00] up for filmmakers so they can choose.

location environments, right? And just be up and running with

a mountain scene and a, you know, you know, a suburb in Paris and you know, the, the pyramids within, you know, minutes, right? And it's all properly licensed and speced with their specific use case, we want to commission adaptations or get a special license.

They can get that. So realistically we want to be the Shopify in marketplace terms of distribution. That's what we call that a syndication system. Not just a

marketplace rather than just the Amazon. Because actually there are so many endpoints where a marketplace dynamic for selecting assets is gonna be advantageous for the creators of the software or the project or the, you know, the, the user experience that we don't wanna get in the way of that, right?

So we do have a discovery engine, form engine and an unreal engine curation tool, but we really wanna be a headless system so that well licensed assets in any form can be distributed and syndicated to whoever wants to look at them and get them into use.

Evan Troxel: And there's gotta be some security slash privacy controls over maybe certain zones [02:02:00] in certain buildings that you just want to be able to, when you license out the building, maybe you're not getting all of the building because the entity that owns that building may not want that stuff to be known. So is there like a, some kind of a on off switch for certain aspects like that?

John Manoochehri: Well, so, so you, so this is getting into the weeds of o asset licensing and, and the market is not really clear yet in this regard. We, we, we've spoken to some architects, um. We've spoken to a ton of very, very highend architects, and I would say 90 outta 20 of them are interested. About 10 of them are ready to do it, and some of the rest are at different stages of caution and time, internal decision making.

But I think it's all gonna happen, right? I think that the cautionary piece is often with architectural offices that aren't interested or in a position to license sexy IP and just make free money outta it. They do have things like stadiums that have, you know,

um, uh, you know, security considerations or they've got, uh, you know, content that is heavily licensed out somebody else, and they think they can't really pull back any royalties to [02:03:00] themselves.

But we take the, the case of security realistically, Ray, um, if we spit out as a, you know, as, as I mentioned, you can split out the market into kind of premium architecture, which is kind of licensing sexy IP and classic architectures is sort of licensing iconic design, and then pre kind of core mainstream ion licensing good design.

That's kind of where the stadiums and so forth often are, unless what they're licensing is the actual engineering work, right. The pragmatics

of what makes that work just. Desh it, right?

Just make it a, you know, a, a, you know, a, a, you know, a uh, a, you know, some, some area that has just no design

specifics, right?

So there's nothing that you are revealing in that sense, because in the digital environment, most of those things aren't needed, right? You don't need the physical structure.

For digital environments. Right.

So and so, So so that's the argument we made, right? To some of these, you know, the, uh, architects that were worried about licensing out designs for Stadium Stadium because there's obviously security considerations for where the structural components are and how you would, you know, [02:04:00] engage with it

if you were a nefarious actor.

Right. But so there, there we think the analogy would be like, you know, Google Street people where you just have black bits, right. You know,

on the, on the, on the, yeah,

exactly. And that, and that, and that makes perfect sense. Right. And so that, that in any case, by the way, like I think that the piece of the mo of this, uh, you know, uh, distribution syndication marketplace model that is likely to move slowest is the relicensing of finished architectural designs, right.

It just seems so antithetical to how architects want to work. Right.

It seems like, I mean, to, because this is gonna kill a lot of the industry , if you fully reusing other people's designs, right?

On a, on a property license basis, which of course should happen and inevitably will happen, but, um, that I think is not gonna move forward very fast.

Right? And so you can redact models and you can do all sorts of things to kind of, you know, avoid distribution of sensitive material. Generally speaking. That I don't think is the main problem. It's actually just coordination of, of the interested parties against a sufficiently sizable financial incentive.[02:05:00]

And then

these things will be solved, but that itself will take time to evolve.

Evan Troxel: But things get leaked out of those institutions too, right? I,

it's not like it's just automatically gonna stay

John Manoochehri: Well, but Right. But so, but, so, yeah, but so back to that point, right? So I think this is one of the interesting things is if people that, I mean, this is one of the arguments we made to the offices that have not yet decided to, you know, to join. But partly is to say, 'cause they have all this, you know, secret content and say, look, someone's gonna get it right?

You just want people in the world who are in your account saying, Hey, you need to take that down. You can't use that version of it. You should have a redacted version, right? You

do want there to be agents out in the market that can facilitate whatever copyright and security controls you want, right? If you wanna do it all on your own, well, that's great, right?

But at some point a lot of the stuff is gonna get out there. That's the nature of digital

content. And so, if there are people who are, I don't say policing, but facilitating best

practice that I think is never, that was in everyone's interest.

Evan Troxel: And that's the point of the fingerprinting. Right. So, yeah. I mean, that makes sense. I,

I guess, uh, you know, I'm trying to think of other [02:06:00] objections that you may be hearing and, and I should just ask you, instead of me trying to come up with what those are, are there other objections that are, that you're, that you're hearing when it comes to this idea?

John Manoochehri: I mean, as I say, so your, your sort of line of questioning is very much, uh, you know, very much matches how we've unfolded the market so far, right? The

first question is, who's gonna pay for me to register my stuff? And we

realize, oh, you know, it, it shouldn't be difficult to register things. So we can't expect that everything is licensed up front.

We can't expect that everything is meshed correctly or presented as a fully licensable asset up front. We're gonna assume that 99% or 95% of content. Today isn't in that case state. So we've simplified that. Um, the, the, the, the other objections do include, right, as you say, the security considerations. I think the, the main thing from the architecture perspective, right, that is a blockage and it isn't really a direct blockage for us, right?

Is that it's uncertainty about what it [02:07:00] means for the overall business,

right? I think that's part of a larger sort of shock mentality. There's so much change going on from so many perspectives, right? People don't really, how, I would say very coherent reasons why they shouldn't be involved in this. 'cause we think this is essentially de-risked, right?

It's actually a risk management thing more than anything

else. But it's like the shock of a new, right? Pretty much every one of our conversations that has terminated in involvement, we've gone through, I couldn't possibly do it. Well, we're gonna do it on these terms. Yes, but, well, we, we've done that, but it's now operationally very, you know, there's lots of work required.

Uh, well, we've done it, but you know, we, we, you know, there are other priorities. So we go through all these stages and then like, you know, then what comes out the end is, why aren't we moving faster? We, we need to get our shit licensed now. ,

Evan Troxel: of

John Manoochehri: we've had that a number of times, right? I mean, if I, if I, because I'm, I'm, I'm keeping names out of the conversation, but specific pathway has happened a number of times, which is

we couldn't do it. we can't get agreements.

It's gonna take a lot of time.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. It

goes from, there's no way. All the way

[02:08:00] to why isn't it done already? Yeah.

John Manoochehri: But, but in our case, it's, you need to be moving faster. And we're like, we, yeah, but you are the one holding us back, right?

So we have to be very polite about that. It's not that it's just a, you know, abstraction. It's like,

you, know, we sit there and we're, yeah.

Evan Troxel: throw something over to the client and it's like, okay, now we'll wait. And then as soon as they send it back, they're like, how come it's not done yet? I mean,

they're,

John Manoochehri: I, I would say, I I would say to put, to, to put a fance, 'cause this is probably where the most, um, durable concerns are from architects specifically as to whether they should bring their assets into a system that isn't just for archiving fingerprinting purposes, but is for licensing purposes. Because

some of the concerns are like, you know, do, do we just use any of this?

Do we need to be fingerprinting? It's very, very cautious. But if we start talking about licensing out the two, I think very credible concerns are, and you know, obviously I'm kind of baking into the, you know, the, the concerns if we, you know, ize with your, we accelerating machine learning absorption of our content, or we're always doing the opposite, preventing ourselves, protecting ourselves from that.[02:09:00]

I think the two most durable questions and concerns are basically, um, can we prevent inappropriate use of our assets once they're being licensed?

And then what does that mean for us in terms of reputation, right? Because, because it's not

quite the same question as what does it mean in terms of work firm?

What are we doing as, you know,

as an industry, where are we making money? That is a concern, but that's more part of like the

shock of the you and who are we hiring and what are we.

Evan Troxel: end up on a virtual porn set or Yeah,

whatever.

John Manoochehri: Right. Exactly. So that's the first thing. And then, and then what does it mean in terms of reputation? How do we present ourselves as a business offering?

Right?

Do we say we're somehow kind of hybrid spatial designers, that we say we're architects? Like that? Those two things are diversions of each other. But I think the first concern is very legitimate. Right? Very, very

legitimate. And I think that, that's why I think I always say that's probably the strongest reason why treasury, um, will be a strong service provider.

Because in the same way that we're saying that, you know, our, our, our offering has become, we didn't expect this to be the thing, but part of offering to creators will be, we will be your bull work against mass absorption. Why machine [02:10:00] learning training libraries. Um, we are in a position to say to, uh, essentially the platforms more of an individual users.

You need to respect creator license terms. Currently that is not the case. Right?

We, we have conversations ongoing with, um, epic games and their marketplace, Roblox and their marketplace, Minecraft and their marketplace, and a lot of other sort of metaverse type marketplacey things that are out there. and almost everyone says, well, look, it's all very well, you know, that you have this sexy spatial content and we would love to get some of it, but of course we couldn't possibly subscribe to custom licensing conditions that these people might want.

I'm like, well, that's kind of an a, a, a oxymoronic position in the sense that you want premium ship that is exclusive and is highly characterized as a value proposition where you, where you wanna treat it like standard licensed

consumer stuff. And that is actually a standoff right now directly between I, well I will not mention when, which one of those marketplaces and any of the creators involved, but it's an ongoing legal question right now because the platform [02:11:00] says, look, we love to license this stuff at scale.

We know what you are offering, that we can make a lot of money outta it for ourselves and for you. And we can get a lot of users adopting this as spatial assets for their, you know, digital environments. But no, we can't, we couldn't possibly restrict, you know, and, and that, that matters a lot because actually if you go back to the, the case of, you know, registering and licensing things that are not for commercial purposes, right?

You discover that there's actually a lot more sensitivity there to, to use case dynamics and use case restrictions than there is even for commercial stuff, right? 'cause, 'cause frankly speaking. You know, ultimately everything to do with porn and sex gets somewhat normalized. And the, and as the liberal society, you know, trends, and certainly it's the case that if an architectural office that is pretty, you know, confident about its own identity, was paid millions of dollars for a porn set for tasteful porn, they go pocket with free money who caress, you know, it's legal,

right? Right. But, but, but that, but, but, but that, but that actually doesn't describe the reason to have in place very well established, restrictive licensing [02:12:00] practices,

because that isn't the worst use case. The worst

use case that imaginable is, let's say the World Trade Center memorial goes into a some point of metaverse environment and people start spending quality experiential time there as they should and will be able to, thanks, as you say, to the quality of these headsets and these experiences.

But guess what? There's somebody there putting extremely noxious, inflammatory, illegal, deeply disturb material in there for whatever

political purpose, right?

That's, that's the reason why we want very carefully structured licensing. It isn't that, you know, people who have fancy shit will be annoyed that somebody's paying them for something that is, you know, a bit,

you know, out, out there.

it, it, it, it's the people that aren't being paid at all

and only stand for social issues or religious issues or, you know,

something that's very sensitive to society

is then in the middle of something that is deeply disturbing and that I think is the most credible and, and, uh, and, and present concern in relation to licensing our content.

[02:13:00] And I would say that would be the piece that will take the longest to solve because it would require the platforms to stand to stand up for custom licensing. Where if

you put the pyramids in, or you put the World Trade Center, trade Center Memorial in, or you put the Holocaust Memorial Land, you have to have extremely tight controls,

legally binding controls over

who could do what there, because everybody is harmed, society is harmed.

The, you know, the original aesthetic and creative and cultural intent of these con of this content. Whole nation states are harmed if that stuff goes wrong.

Right. So this isn't somebody being annoyed that they're being paid by something they don't like. This is something way larger than that, and that isn't, it's one of the main things that isn't being taken seriously in the space, which is that licensing out of public monuments and religious content and cultural ICON's and just private shit, people that they even sell as mean something to them.

You don't want that stuff to be graffiti by somebody you don't like, you know, in a social media context. And I think that is where the most, you know, credible [02:14:00] concern is at scale and is not resolved yet. 'cause the platforms are not ready to sign up to what we would call, um, conditional or, or, or custom licensing.

And then that becomes a question of identity, right? Who wants to be close to risk

and most people don't, so you have to narrow the risk. So it just, just, you know, so you have a sense of, the way we have developed our discovery engine is everything is private. Right. There is a public version of Discovery Engine, which will be visible in some, you know, weeks.

So you can see a very limited set of content, right? But if you want to see everything that we have in the pipeline, um, you need to apply for a discovery engine, be a qualified potential

customer of asset licenses, and they will gradually show you things that are in more and more sensitive stages of licensing.

'cause this is the point, as I say, the, the, the, the, the, the grant concern is who is responsible, who, how do we control, you know, how things are used, which is, well just licensing, but, you know, platforms deciding to allocate liability and restrict users and so forth. [02:15:00] But then you have to put that back to the creator side identities and risks and associations.

So that's helped us a lot actually, is thinking through, um, how to do the business model is to say it's essentially okay, everything that really matters is currently in private view. So we pre quantify the buyers and have a public layer of this. Frankly, I think it will all work itself out, right? I think society is a way less nefarious than all of these arguments would seem to imply, but you have to respect what

people's sensitivities are, right?

We are a custodian of content and I'm happy that we're in that role. I don't like, you know, um, sort of scaremongering and imagining suggesting that, you know, everyone's gonna deface every monument and there'll be enormous numbers of sort of, you know, religious, you know, this is a, so sectarian conflicts coming into the spatial environment, but we have to, you know, set up best practices as we let society get on with this stuff.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, there was, there was something that you said the last [02:16:00] time that we, we spoke about buildings being kind of, or architecture being the base that everything is built on. In society and how everything, it, it ties everything together. Do you remember what that was? I'm, I'm looking 'cause I wrote, I wrote something down about it, but I'm, I'm struggling to find it here.

Here it is. Everything, everything fits on top of the built world is something that you said. And I'm just wondering like when you're, when you're thinking about this particular opportunity and challenge, uh, in an, uh, an industry that is slow to move when it comes to these kinds of things, to just kind of put a, put a period on this to say like how, how much the work that this industry produces matters and how it is going to tie into things they're not dreaming about yet in, in a, in a very short order. I think it, it's, it's gonna be even more the case because people are going to be [02:17:00] longing for new types of experiences. And this is going to be one of the ways in which that happens. And it's all gonna revolve around things that people have already experienced, maybe in different ways, but it's still, there's still a construct here and architects are

very well positioned for that.

John Manoochehri: Hmm. Okay. So, uh, so this, this is the inverse of me kind of like making slide digs at architecture. This is me

sort of trying to, to underpin why architecture is essential

now and it, and always and what it really does. And I think one of the problems with architecture, architecture having being weak in its own theorization is that vaguely speaking, what people understand inside and outside the professionals, what's going on is there's some kind of standoff between aesthetics and engineering, and that's not what's going on.

The

engineering piece of architecture is, is negligible, right? Engineering is largely solved. The technical piece of architecture is not engineering, it is spatial configuration,

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

John Manoochehri: And

so if you want to take architecture seriously, you have to think what is it really doing? Technically it isn't solving engineering.

I mean, [02:18:00] historically all this is blended together. So, so it's a little bit difficult to see architects, were master engineers. Right now, the great architecture of the modern world that truly works rather than just being a static novelty, is, is, is, is are built spaces that are

spatially configured

in ways that are profoundly

Evan Troxel: it's not the framework. It's, it's the void

that

John Manoochehri: Right, and so and so and so and so, if you take spatial configuration, you unpack that. Well, what is spatial configuration as opposed to engineering or aesthetic? Well, what spatial configuring configuration is, is a, is a myriad of fascinating and very specific disciplines, right? If you look at the very little bits of architecture that are properly theorized, right?

So the beginning, so space syntax is not probably theorized, but the beginnings of it are setting up the beginning of theory. When you look at things like, you know, the, so-called J Graph, some of what's going on in architectural design technology around, you know, um, draft theory and topology and so forth starts to get to like the core theory of spectrum configuration, but it's pretty [02:19:00] narrow.

If you look at SoCal circulation diagrams, how do you get in and out and around the building, right? If you look at how that relates to program. Where is the water cooler?

Where is the bathroom? Where is the, you know, the, the buffet? Where is the, you know, the pinging pong table versus where the sight lines are versus where the private areas are versus, you know, this is the actual science of architecture and it's basically intuitive.

It isn't really taught clearly at architecture schools,

and that is now gonna be at a massive premium because everyone's gonna try and fake it and they get it wrong. Right?

You, you go into digital spatial environments right now of any sort, right? All horrendous bullshit doesn't make any sense, right?

Becau, because the very nature of being quasi embodied in a digital spatial environment, right, has an implication. Even

you don't have an actual body,

you have a sense of space that is configurate, that's configured around

your, the affordances of the real human body,

right? And so what you discover is that we're gonna regrow and use science of a spatial configuration for digital [02:20:00] spatial environments that is kindred with and cognate with the science of spatial configuration for physical spatial environments.

But that is gonna be an exploding space of opportunity because you don't have to fucking build anything. You don't have to solve, you know, tectonics or the cost of structures you can read truly speculative and go to the edge, right? So if we take an example, right? If we look at cathedrals, the science, the design of cathedrals, what is it that makes them magical, right?

Well, one of the things that makes magical is how these light,

right? If you go to Notre Dam, right, we're all gonna go back there when it's, when it's, when it's opened again, and you go to any other, like, you know, classical cathedral. The thing that breaks your heart is how light is used and how it, how it, it, it, it

animates space, right. And how it narrates space. And I think that when you, when you realize that one of the main constraints on experimenting with just light, uh, and colored light, but light in general, how light interacts with space has been building things , it's so hard to build things that are [02:21:00] interesting in terms of how they configure light.

That just, that, just that one thing alone is gonna be a whole new universal opportunity. Right? So I genuinely believe, going back to the point about creators and how they will drive, like the, the form factor and the uh, uh, and the experiential value and it iterate, iterate towards universalization of these technologies is we will have cathedrals in digital special environments.

And the people will want to spend a lot of time there.

And what that, and that's just one little tiny slice of spatial configuration. So if you take architecture as a profession that has, I wouldn't say solve, but it's the only profession to attempt to solve on a case by case basis. Um, spatial configuration.

It isn't doing engineering of structure, it's not tectonics. That's, there's a limited piece of architecture.

The aesthetics of it is obviously related, but it's in many, in many cases, particularly today, separate from the spatial configuration aspect, that is the technical work of architecture. And that has such a vastly [02:22:00] expanded scope in spatial technology, spatial competition, and digital spatial environments.

And so if architects want to see a new horizon opportunity and they are interested in what our architecture actually does, rather than just building spaces for money for conventional program, the horizon is

digitally and literally endless.

Evan Troxel: It's interesting that you brought up cathedrals because I, I was in Las Vegas in November for Autodesk University, and I got to go into the sphere a couple of times,

and it's basically a digital environment for a thousand people or however many people can, it can

see. And, uh, you, they, there's a movie that you sit through.

It's, it's an hour long or so, and it's called a Postcard from Earth. And you get to visit various scenes and they, it's not just visual, obviously. There's a huge audio component to this. There's like a 67,000 speakers or something in this inside the sphere. And [02:23:00] then there's also air cannons down at the bottom and they're shooting up.

So, so you are having a multisensory experience with a bunch of people. Um, but what I found most intriguing about that experience was the scale shift that could be achieved. And this is something that happens in VR goggles too. I've been in my own designs inside VR goggles and your sense of space, because it's a one-to-one, uh, scale factor.

It, it feels legitimate. And in that movie we went from being outdoors in a Utah, right? So desert, gorgeous desert environment. It feels expansive. Then we go into a cathedral and it feels like you're in the size of a space of a cathedral and the

light and the shadow and the

stained glass and,

John Manoochehri: mm-Hmm

Evan Troxel: just the acoustics of it, everything. And then you're in a taxi cab. And you can look wherever you wanna look. You

can look around in

this [02:24:00] space, you're, it's not just where the camera points, the camera captured a 360 degree, 60 degree spherical video. And in the cab, I can look to my left, I can look to my right, I can look at the, the, the top of the cab. It felt like I was in that size of a space. And I am in an enormous space. I'm not in VR goggles, but it's not gonna be different when you're in VR goggles. And I think

it is kind of mind blowing as a, as an architect, as a designer of space to see how significant of an impact that can have on somebody's experience. And it's completely digital.

John Manoochehri: hmm.

Evan Troxel: absolutely incredible.

And so, I, I, I guess the reason I wanna tell the story is because I, I really do feel like you are going as an architect, as a designer of the built environment, even in the digital sense, you are going to be able to have impactful

John Manoochehri: Hmm,

Evan Troxel: on people's experiences

in these digital spaces. And

why wouldn't you want to do that too,

in addition [02:25:00] to

the things that you're doing in the real world

analog.

John Manoochehri: you. That's very, very eloquent. I mean, what, what it allows me to do is to kind of like, set up as we're the punchline of our spatial computational thesis. Um, uh, it's essentially this, right? W when we talk about spatial computation in the thesis, we essentially sort of start with this idea that there's this convergence main technologies onto a spatial infrastructure layer on the internet.

And so, you know, spatial computing is to, um, metaverse, as you know, uh, internet is to cyberspace and so forth. So we set up that whole technical premise, but then we, we kind of invite the larger conversation on, on a relatively simple idea, which is that if we want to understand. In very human terms, not in technical terms where we are going with all the spatial computation, particularly once we set up the caution that social VR and these virtual alternative worlds is not likely to be in my, in my view, technically or psychologically.

Or socially, let alone commercially the main event. What else is there? Well, it, we don't know 'cause there's infinite opportunities, but what we think is worth [02:26:00] saying, and this is sort of to some extent framing some of what you are, you've, you've laid out very beautifully, is that if you ask yourself the question, what, you know, what is it that's going on in these digital spatial environments and you want to sort of unpick where, I think with great respect, mark Zuckerberg has made quite a profound mistake.

I, if you ask what's going on, you, you, you start from the Zuckerberg perspective, which is what's going on is technical immersivity. We have a headset, we have a virtual photo reel experience. Holy shit, that's amazing. I'm very immersed in that. But that technical immersivity turns out to be not that interesting.

We don't wanna stay there. We have more and more and more photo environments to explore and somehow we don't stay in there. People have bought the Oculus Pro headset, which is, you know. probably as good as many of the ones that are out there, at least in terms of they can do that. The photo world experiences don't somehow become sticky.

And so what we see in the spatial competition thesis is technical immersivity [02:27:00] isn't quite a red hairy, but it's a bit of a chime in the sense of what

at attaches people to digital spatial content is what we call narrative immersivity.

It's having an identity in a human psychological construct that matters to them,

right?

And so what you, what you, what you can contrast is a digital spatial environment. A digital, a spatial technology that has incredibly low technical immersivity. Let's take Google Maps where all you want is a blue dot on a flat 2D screen. Alright? Now then the technical I emissivity of that is low and the tech and the narrative I immersivity of that is essentially zero.

When you just open a map and you're sitting there going, well, I'm where I'm, if you need to be in a hospital because your friend, partner child is mortally ill, and you've sat out on the map how to get to the hospital, 17 minutes in the car with traffic, that is the only fucking narrative in your life that makes sense.

You are 110% engaged in that narrative.

Fully immersed [02:28:00] and the technical immersivity does not matter to you. In actual fact, were it to be more immersive. You have a fucking set of goggles and ar shit and the other stuff you can get out of the Google Maps like application you would not want it.

'cause it gets in the way of the narrative.

So what you discover is that if you want to take spatial competition seriously, and the whole world of value and experience, understand that the technical i inclusivity aspect can be a distraction from what actually makes humans want to be done. And when you look at that, what you discover is that if you go back in the history of world civilization, it is mistaken to think that technical progress is the only thing that people seek or is determines of all, um, human value.

You know, it wasn't the case that the, you know, the cave dwellers around the Lasko cave needed to wait until the TV and a market economy and, you know, you know,

TV dinners were available before they started putting content on the wall, right? The, the, that was their movie. That was their

tv, presumably, right?[02:29:00]

I mean, they did it for some reason. It's a spatial and it's a spatial piece of content. And the reason why, presumably it is valuable to them or was valuable to them, somehow narratively immersive, we don't quite

know why. Some education, culture, training, religion, whatever it may be. And when you go through the history of content, you discover that, holy shit, we have massive narrative immersion in things that are technically hardly immersive at all.

What's a book?

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm.

John Manoochehri: What's a song

if it isn't massively narrative narratively immersive without any technology. Right. And so if you wanna really reframe the metaverse, and this is what I think should happen, this is how you reclaim the word metaverse. You talk about massive narrative emersion. And this is, as it were, the bigger picture of spatial configuration, right?

Which is if architects are doing anything with their spatial configuration, they're telling stories that matter and they're putting us in those stories.

That's how architecture should be defined, right? Stories that matter with us having a role, right? When we enter the space, suddenly we're in the story.[02:30:00]

That's how cathedrals work.

You're in the space, you in a conversation with God because of the way the light interacts with the space

Evan Troxel: Right, right.

John Manoochehri: And so and so, when you see this space configuration is a way to set up not just the value of the digital space environment, but any human engagement interface. . And you understand the narrative.

Immersivity is what we seek is why we're all taking drugs these days, or people that are bored with tv, right? It's why therapy is happening. It's why we're all spending a lot of time, you know, working out everything that is not consumerism is 'cause somehow the physics of it isn't sufficient for us.

So what are we looking for?

Some kind of narrative emotion, a story in which we have a role that matters to us

in every domain of our life.

And you are absolutely right Evan, that the spatial aspect of that is probably the most powerful because the in the human. Faculty system. The visual [02:31:00] faculty is massively more powerful than any other,

Evan Troxel: Right?

John Manoochehri: and it is the one that binds all the others together.

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm

John Manoochehri: When people hear things, they spatially localize them. Right? I mean, this specific point is why I am so fascinated by this is because if you want to look at human progress, you get back to the visual capabilities of cognition. How visual cognition relates to identity. How spaces and narratives dominate narrative immersivity and role making for people in society.

It is so foundational, right? So back to my Sanskrit stuff. If you want to find a way to talk about cognition in a way that's much more interesting than silly conversations about a GI think about how people instant in space. It's one of the main reasons why the a GI conversations don't make sense is 'cause there isn't a core to the identity of the agent, which is what happens in spatial instantiation.

You have to be somewhere. A GI is in LLM. Census aren't anywhere. So that's why I [02:32:00] don't think they exist. They don't have a spatial instantiation.

Evan Troxel: Mm-Hmm.

John Manoochehri: That's what happens in spatial instantiation.

You are somewhere, and from that comes your, from the narrative immersion in that space or not comes your role and from your role comes your identity and comes your, from your identity comes your role.

Meaningfulness in society at large. So I don't think it is correct to underestimate the power of these things. I think actually what will happen is that breakthroughs in little corners of, I mean spirituality may be too strong, but like psychedelic cognitive experimentation and mental health and education will be the things that tell us in addition, in parallel with, you know, creative experimentation and you know, thinking through the wow factor, how powerful the stuff is.

And I don't think it's accidental. It's not 'cause Zuckerberg tells us to put on a expensive headset or Tim Cook has run out. What iPhones to sell is. 'cause we were always going this direction, is that the visual machinery of cognition is [02:33:00] the most powerful route of human self and social understanding.

And if we invent a technical version to experiment, explore, expand that, and we fill it with technically well configured spaces, basically configuration, which is what architecture can lead. And we evolve around that narrative, narratively, immersive experiences for individuals and groups.

That sounds like interesting progress for

humanity.

Evan Troxel: It does. Yeah. A

John Manoochehri: I mean, not, not, I mean, not, not, least right, because so much of what, what happened there is dematerialized, right? WI don't think what this will lead to is escapism anymore. You know, I mean,

the internet is escapism, but we had, you know, escapism from novels and newspapers and TV and movies and so forth.

Escapism is always part of, you know, our resistance to p pragmatic engagement in that, in the, in the substance of life. I don't think this is gonna be any different from that. People will spend their time, how they spend their time. I think it will bring us to as much as any other medium, like new experiments in, you know, [02:34:00] what, what it means to build out humanity and society.

But I also do think it would cost a lot less in material terms.

But I think there are other ways in the rating, sustainability aspect of treasury. We don't have time for that right now, but I do think, um, dematerializing people's aspirations and consumption patterns is a huge part of it.

They will be able to go to the rainforest without having to fly on a plane and go

through, you know, take a jeep to the logging trails, end up in the rainforest going, I fucking hate it here.

It's hot. I'm being bitten. I've, I've contributed to damaging this place.

I'm sure I'm about to be shocked by somebody. What the fuck am I doing here? It's, is hopeless.

Same for Mount Everest, right? People can experience the world

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

John Manoochehri: narratively without having to do all the physics, nothing. That is gonna be very interesting.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it is. I, that's, uh, I, I'm, I'm glad that we got there. This was a, a beautiful way, I think to kind of wrap up the conversation. Is there anything else that we're missing here? I.

John Manoochehri: I mean, I think, well, so this has been great because this [02:35:00] has been, I think by far the most sort of, um, um, uh, explicit unpacking of the layers of what this is and why are interested in it and we're interested in it and why we want, you know, creators of spatial assets and builds additional environments to be interested in it.

I would say I have to do my job as a, as a, as a, as an entrepreneur and say, I would love people to engage. Right? And, and, and they should tell us what this is going to be because it's a very simple proposition. Let's get content available for use, uh, that respects its potential and it's value. And if you are a designer of spatial content architecture primarily, but also film and reality capture real estate.

If you're building spatial experiences and you want the best stuff technically, creatively or legally, we'd love to have the conversation and, and, and, and, and coming back, right to, to tell, to hear from people how this is massively misguided and will never work right. Is gonna be great. [02:36:00] So feel free to come up with the opposite rather than constructive engagement and onboarding absolute brick bats.

And, um, but for me it's not just, you know, getting this done practically, it's also understanding all these things 'cause it's almost pretty fascinating. So practical engagement is great. Conversation is equally good. Thank you Evan.

Evan Troxel: And people can find you at Treasury Space

John Manoochehri: Yeah, treasury space. And there's a treasury, uh, uh, Twitter account, a treasury LinkedIn account. And then we're just about to, um, boot up the Treasury Instagram account. And, um, I mean, pragmatically, I think, you know, the, the, the things people can do is get their registry account set up, get in the pipeline for that.

If you know, if there's a wait list, we'll help you depending on, you know, what your status is. We'll make it cheap for you or free, depending on your status. If you are building anything, get a discovery engine. We'll give you a initial iteration for free. Just play around with it, break it. But if you just wanna be part of the conversation, we have what we call sessions, [02:37:00] uh, both scientific sessions and, um, general architectural design technology, space technology sessions.

They're all linked from the treasury space homepage and the, and the socials. But particularly for architecture people, they'll be interested in that. I mean, in the next three months, we have the last, the, the, the, the, the continuing three of a four-part series of, um, of uh, uh, a specific session miniseries focused on architecture with Zaha Hadid and guests.

In the next session, we have Zaha and Epic games. In the last session, we have, you know, Zaha Hadid in the form of Patrick Schumacher and the head of technology at Foster and Partners. I mean, this is high-end stuff, right?

And so that would be the place if you in London grab a ticket. 'cause it'll be pretty much sold out.

Um, but there's also happening online to be inside, I would say. A less of a sort of surplus level version of the conversation. More

specifically, what is Zaha doing? What is Foster doing? Who thinks what? And we as treasury can take more of a backseat and facilitate what we think is the [02:38:00] right conversation.

Uh, you know,

we, we want people to be deciding and then we can, you know, uh, um, creators and, and users to decide and we can help, um, you know, on that basis. But join in, in the conversation if you don't wanna be actively involved in, you know, using or, or licensing our assets. And so, treasury sessions, LinkedIn website, and there's other ways to get involved, but those are the main ones.

Evan Troxel: Nice. Well, I'll have links to all of that in the show notes for this episode. And John, this has been, I always love talking to you, John. It's, it's like

listening to a podcast on 1.5 speed when I listen to you, which I, I appreciate, uh, because, uh, I, but, but it's been, it's always a fascinating conversation.

You're a deep thinker, you're a big thinker, and, uh, I, I frankly wish there were more of you out there, so, uh, I appreciate what you're doing.

John Manoochehri: Thank you Evan. It's a delight to speak to you. As, as I mentioned, you're one of the only people who, um, has sufficient grounding in the, in, in the practice. Sufficient grounding, the technology, sufficient, um, sort of interest in the conversation, sufficient reach and credibility into people's, [02:39:00] you know, thought spaces and commercial practices to have these conversations.

Right? So the fact that we wanted to get this done after a a, a fair while of fiddling around with it

is is a delight for me and a, and a privilege. So thank you so much.

Evan Troxel: It was worth the wait. Yeah. So

thank you again, and, uh, I'm sure we'll have you back for a round too sometime.

View Details

About this Episode:Phil Read once again joins the podcast for part 2 of our conversation to talk about his upcoming 2024 AEC Acoustics Best Practice Roundtable event, the importance of saying ‘no’ to maintain personal freedom and creativity, how modern pressures for efficiency and productivity can stifle creativity and personal satisfaction, the impact of technology and media on our ability to enjoy and appreciate music and art, how saying ‘no’ to certain opportunities can open doors to more fulfilling and personally meaningful experiences, and more.

Links:* Phil on LinkedIn * Phil on Twitter * Phil on Instagram * Read | Thomas website * Read | Thomas on LinkedIn * Read | Thomas on Twitter * AEC Acoustics retreat information * AEC Acoustics retreat registration * Meet the Patels trailer (YouTube) * AEC Acoustics – Best Practices Roundtables * Sayings of the Spartans by Plutarch (Amazon) * Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Amazon) * Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Amazon) * Gordian Knot (Wikipedia)

Provide feedback for this episodeConnect with Evan:* Subscribe to the TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Twitter * Threads * Mastodon * Email

Watch this on YouTube:146: ‘The Gordian Knot, Part 2’, with Phil ReadPhil Read joins the podcast to talk about his upcoming 2024 AEC Acoustics Best Practice Roundtable event, the importance of saying ‘no’ to maintain personal…YouTube

Episode Transcript: TRXL Private 146: ‘The Gordian Knot, Part 2’, with Phil Read
[00:00:00]
Evan Troxel: Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. I have a little podcast business here before I introduce my guest. If you're enjoying these episodes, please subscribe to TRXL on YouTube and the audio podcast on your preferred platform.
Your subscription is incredibly valuable in supporting my efforts. So full transparency here. Subscriber numbers directly influence my ability to attract better sponsors and higher profile guests. A large audience makes this podcast more appealing to them, which in turn brings more value to you and your listening experience. So if you haven't subscribed, I encourage you to do so.
It is free. And a great way to support TRXL and remember subscribing on YouTube and in your favorite audio podcast app is equally important. [00:01:00] Besides subscribing, there are two more ways you can support the show. You can now make a one-time donation at TRXL.co/donate or consider becoming a member
To learn more about the perks of membership and to join simply click on one of the subscribe buttons on TRXL.Co. Your support is crucial for the sustainability of this show. And I deeply appreciate it. All right. This episode is a continuation of the last one with Phil Read.
So if you skipped that one. You might want to go back and listen, because this picks up right where we left off. Also, this is the perfect time to remind you that Phil and I recorded this in person in the United lounge of the Denver airport, which makes it a little more special in my mind. And when you hear the dishes clinking in the background, that's why.
Today, we kick things off talking about the upcoming 2024 AEC Acoustics Best Practice Roundtables, which is a conference for subject matter experts, solutions [00:02:00] providers, and decision makers in the built environment. It will be held at Lake Swan Camp in Melrose, Florida at the end of April. The event focuses on discussions without distractions and the best part of every technology conference, I think we could probably all agree is the conversations after the presentations. So that's all they are. There are a few round tables that have already been announced on the website, and I'm happy to announce that I'll be there and I'll be leading one of the round tables to
I've been told that accommodations at lake Swan camp are modest and comfortable. And the camp offers opportunities for a lot of really cool outdoor activities. Meals will be catered by chef Charles Samail, which I can guarantee will not be considered like any camp food you've ever had in any way. And there will be up to four round table sessions per day with open afternoon discussions and informal evening gatherings.
I really can't wait to visit Florida for the first time [00:03:00] and to meet up with a small group of like-purposed people in AEC tech. I've included two links in the show notes for this event. One for you to find out more about it. And one to register.
In this conversation, we also talk about the importance of saying no to maintain personal freedom and creativity. How modern pressures for efficiency and productivity can stifle creativity and personal satisfaction, the impact of technology and media on our ability to enjoy and appreciate music and art. How saying no to certain opportunities can open doors to more fulfilling and personally meaningful experiences. And a whole lot more.
So once again, this was a fantastic conversation. And without further ado, I bring you part two of my conversation with Phil Reed.
Well, let's, kick this second part off after our little break [00:04:00] there. Talk about these retreats. Is that what, how do you characterize them?
Phil Read: Um, another accident, right? It's like, uh, we're coming out of, well, actually we started to go into pandemic, and what I realized,
being
curious, observant, AAC space. They've worked themselves up to a position, their kids are getting older.
They're, they're just incredibly stressed out and they can't leave their job at that point because they're, they probably have a very nice house, very nice, they have all these, they're trappings in a way, and they're just stressed out with, with life changes at that
Evan Troxel: And you alluded to it earlier when you talked about the You are put in that position, when you went to work at this firm, that all of a sudden you had to deal with the people side. And you weren't equipped, necessarily Or, you didn't feel equipped to deal with that part of it. You were much more technically oriented.
I think it's, uh, and you've said this yourself, it's the same for the kind of people that you want to come to these. Because they They [00:05:00] need to hear that from other people. How have they solved it? What are they dealing with? Are you feeling like this
Phil Read: It was
an existential transition from the predictable part of dealing with technology to the unpredictable part of managing kind of people and all of that. And I didn't have a, I mean I could be friendly enough. But I didn't have that skill set, that soft skill set.
And I, I started engaging with a coach probably in late 2019.
Evan Troxel: For
this specific
Phil Read: my specific kind of
edification. And it was also kind of in the back of my mind apparent to me that there was a dozen guys talking to me about the stuff that I was talking to the same coach about. It's like your life is changing.
And the kids are growing up, like, why am I still grinding?
How do I start to decompress?
Evan Troxel: How do I work less?
Phil Read: Yeah, and, uh, and it just finally occurred to me, probably in the spring of 2020, I'm talking to ten people about what I'm talking to you about. [00:06:00] We should just get together somewhere. And, um, he said, what do you mean? I said, well, first of all, I don't want to meet in a hotel. I want to go somewhere, you know,
Evan Troxel: you know, like, kind
Phil Read: amid nature.
And as we started to describe it, he was like, oh, an un conference. I'm in. So. The first year, it's, it's more of a leadership retreat. It's for people who have, the, the accidental thing that happens is we're subject matter experts, and we're really good at what we do, we love what we do, and we get elevated because of what we do to sort of manage people that do that thing, and then we find out we're not necessarily good at managing people, and we're not, we're not good at that emotional investment to manage people.
And so How do we get better at that? And I think ultimately, for me, as I mentioned, you, you really can't, you can control technology, but you can't control people. And so they're unpredictable in that way. Even when technology is unpredictable, you sort of wrangle it out, figure out why the crash is occurring, [00:07:00] or, uh, why something's breaking Revit.
But with people, it's not, it's not
Evan Troxel: not mechanical. Debugging. Just
Phil Read: Oh man, just people that show up two minutes late to a meeting, what that, like, how crazy that makes me, and other people are like, oh yeah, I just, I'm here, it's on, I'm on time, you know, so. The expectation now for myself that I have to remind myself is, do I have a false expectation when I start to feel myself getting stressed?
What's the false expectation? And,
ultimately, I can only control how I respond to what I can't
Evan Troxel: can't
Phil Read: So, uh, Randy Ben is the facilitator, and I, and so we organized. Very ad hoc, let's get together and talk for three days about leadership stresses and, and, uh, self expectations and where you want to get to.
And so that was the fall of 2020, and we just, uh, we just had this year, fall of 2023, that would have been our fourth year.
And it's
about how you show up. [00:08:00] Cause I think if you bring that stress into the room, it's gonna shut down the conversation. And, uh, it's, it's taken a while to get there and I, I still have a ways to go, but I find that a lot of times my stress was elevated because I thought I knew why something was broken.
And I was getting frustrated by that. And usually, what happens is when I have more information, I go, Oh, that's what's going on? Oh, okay, well that's all, we'll figure that out. And then time and time again, if you'll just wait and get the information, then you're like, oh, oh, that's all it is? But getting to that point where you cannot, where you don't, uh, bit flip and just get frustrated right away, because something else has gone sideways.
So, managing my own set of unrealistic expectations, not imposing that. List of self of expectations on other people that have their own lives and their own self perception and their own issues So that's what the leadership retreat [00:09:00] was all about and we had I think we had 29 or 30 register this year at the end There was some meetings.
I think we had 24 total, but we brought a private chef, which is chef Charles amazing guy Because it's at a camp in North Florida, but the idea is that even though the accommodations are modest, we should have great food, great meetings, very good conversations, uh, and so we brought Charles, the chef, Randy Ben is the facilitator, a guy named Jerry Teixeira, who's a fitness expert that focuses on accidentally on executive fitness through body lifting, calisthenics.
So no weights required. And I started doing that was following Jerry and after a couple of years, invited him to kind of like come along to the retreat, just to talk to people. Um, cause when, when we're working as executives and we were traveling. We don't have time for the gym, like a concerted amount of 45 minutes.
And I just found that was just a failure. I was exhausted at the end of the day or at the beginning of the [00:10:00] day, it was just too noisy in the gym. It's too clanky. There's always the music. There's just bright colors.
Evan Troxel: You sound like my wife, yeah. She had a gym membership and it was just like, here's all the reasons I can't go to this gym. And none of it had to do with the actual
Phil Read: and when you're in your late forties or fifties and you're outta shape, it's embarrassing to go to the gym. So I don't want that either. So I started, um, and at the time we were renovating at Old Beach Cottage, so I just started doing body lifting. I was like, well, this is approachable and I can do I could do it anywhere. I've got, I've got a whole day to do it. So top of the hour I'm gonna do each thing. And that was, uh. That was a system that seemed to work. And so for executives who want to get in shape and who don't want to go to the gym and be surrounded by Instagram cameras, it, it's worked for me.
So I brought Jerry along. And I think next year we'll probably have 30 people. And it'll pay for itself. It's, at this point, still kind of meaning versus, it's meaning over money. And then, uh, we're aspiring to do a more of a [00:11:00] technical roundtable retreat this spring. But that hasn't been kind of, all the
Evan Troxel: That's an expansion of this leadership retreat idea.
I think
Phil Read: it's
I think it's in parallel to it because with, with a leadership retreat, it's usually subject matter experts who've been elevated into positions of management. And now they're having to deal with millennials and personalities and budgets. And before they were all just heads down working on their technical wizardry.
How nice is that? You know, it's because no one can touch your technical wizardry. They can't question it. But when you become. More of an elevated figure in your public. It's like in the public figure in a firm. Now you're accountable for people's emotions and HR issues and right? Yeah budgets and
Evan Troxel: And you said it's much more inwardly focused. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this other technical,
Phil Read: yeah, the other thing is more it's it's more subject matter expertise, but it's really for people that it's for people that make business decisions, technical decisions, and even if people that make software. So I'd love to get those [00:12:00] people together. 40, 50 people for three days, two days of round tables, and probably a day off site to kind of decompress and get ready for it.
and Talk
about what we, what we refer to is, you know, every, at every conference, you see a presentation and then you get that speaker in the corner and go, okay, but tell me the truth. If you've got this kind of situation, what do you do? And they go, Oh yeah, that's, that's kind of tricky. I would have you tried this, this, and this.
So it's the conversations after the presentations that seem to be really valuable. So we're just going to do that, and the intent is to have discussion roundtables around various topics for anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half, create a executive summary, which we'll gather together and make available for download later. but to have the conversations that occur after the presentations. And
it's, it's not a one size fits all. We know in this technology space we have to bring in disparate tools from disparate software companies [00:13:00] and figure out how to wrangle them and get them to work together. And if you're just trying to get, if you're just trying to work blind to figure it out, it's too time consuming and expensive.
If you can, if you can talk with someone who's done something kind of similar, it'll probably get you on a better
Evan Troxel: Yeah. It doesn't have to be tool specific
Phil Read: It isn't, Yeah.
I mean, part of it is, but it's like, yeah, three tools specific. Make this work with this and this other thing.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. And it's situational, right?
A lot. A lot of it has to do with, well, this is how I've approached that condition or that situation before, and it doesn't, again, it doesn't have to be software parody specific, but it's like, I've experienced that before, and you have the time and the space in a place like that. To talk to people about that.
Right. You don't have to distill it down into a very descriptive paragraph that you throw into the ether, which is a KAA forum online and hope that somebody can
Phil Read: it. Oh, go and find it.
Evan Troxel: Yeah. It just to
find How much time do people spend on
Phil Read: And you don't know if it's a right answer. I've [00:14:00] searched answers for, for questions and thought, oh, that's a really, and then scroll to the top and go, what? July, 2017. Oh geez.
That's not gonna, if things move so
Evan Troxel: Right.
Phil Read: So, the value of getting together and having a multitude of discussions, and then even conversations after the conversations, because a lot of us will know each other.
So yeah, it's not just for, it's not just for large firms, it's for people that make business decisions, um, budgeting decisions, technical decisions. I would hope, I would aspire that the companies that make the software, softwares that we'll be talking about will be there as well, both to,
both to be part of the lessons learned, and maybe to listen as well, to hear where our stresses
are, and, uh, all be part of that discussion, and good food,
good conversations.
Evan Troxel: that lubricates the, yeah, so, you know, you said earlier one of the, the most valuable pieces of a conference is the, the discussion after the presentation and
Phil Read: it always works in the presentation, right? When you're showing [00:15:00] something off, how to do
a thing. almost always, right.
Evan Troxel: But the, the idea of Networking and building relationships and kind of the, this homecoming of, of professionals that come together at these conferences and get to spend time together is a huge component of what you're talking about.
Phil Read: Yeah.
Evan Troxel: And then it's like, let's change phone, let's exchange phone numbers, let's exchange, and, and, and that lives beyond that meeting.
And that's super important too, it's just to have this network of. peers, colleagues in the industry that you can call and say, am I crazy? Right. Like
Phil Read: Well, and when we show, you know, the presentations at the conferences, if we're lucky, you know, they all come off without a hitch.
But, those of us in the subject matter expert, subject matter expert space, we know where the bullshit is too. We, like, we know where the workarounds are in
Evan Troxel: You're reminding me of this, that, that video they just, that Google just published of their new, of their new AI thing and it's [00:16:00] like, uh, you know, it's this, they, they call it what was a project? I think it's Gemini or something like that.
And, and they show this whole presentation and then at the end, I guess, and in some other channel they said. We, we edit it for clarity. We, we changed a few, and, and it was like,
It
just reminded me of that when you said that, because like, the presentation is one thing, the reality of it is something else, right, and, and I, it was more aspirational than realistic, or, or it take, actually takes longer than we showed it to be, and that, that's fine at some level, if you disclose that, but I think you're right, like the, the bullshit meter, it's like, I know how hard that is.
It is not like
that.
Phil Read: or, yes, you could do it this way, but Then you will never be able to not do it that way. I, I find that technical solutions that are implementable aren't good technical solutions.
Like, it's okay to have something slightly less automated, as long as it's implementable and predictable and flexible. If you create something that's a Gordian knot, and it [00:17:00] only works if you're plugged into it, but the moment you try to show someone else how to do it, it breaks. That's not a good solution.
So, I think we can get together and have discussions around What would you do if it's not exactly, like, what would you do in this kind of scenario? And, and a lot of times I think we just have to choose good technologies. So, and the, and the business leaders that make the decisions to purchase the software, they don't always know.
They see the end product of something and they go, oh, I should buy that. And you go, well, if you buy that, you're also going to have to buy a consultant to run it. Do you want your own team to be able to use it? Because maybe there's a tool that Doesn't do everything that you see there, but it does most of it, and somebody on your team can use it, so having a discussion that's, um, kind of, kind of authentic.
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Phil Read: And you gotta slow down for that, I mean, our events don't have any alcohol, just because it introduces complexity, cause we don't also have lanyards, we don't also have, yeah, we don't have conferences for the most part. [00:18:00] on the bodies of large water, right? This conference is on the body of a freshwater lake, and so I can't afford the complexity of people drinking and sinking,
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Phil Read: to put it lightly, right?
And so, by not having alcohol, it just removes a bit of complexity. Um, it also allows for this spring event, it'll allow for a family friendly environment, if, if, uh, if you want to come, and I think we're sort of saying, age is six to ten. Because if both parents are in the AEC space, it's hard to find, unless you have a relative that lives in the same town, it's hard to find child care.
So we don't just bring them. We've got a counselor who will do counselor led activities in nature and learning for that, for those days. And then in the afternoon and evenings, you can come all to dinner. But we're trying to do it in a way that's cost effective and flexible and enjoyable. And we can't do that at a hotel where we're locked in all day.
So we'll start, probably arrive On a Sunday. On a Monday, we'll have an offsite before, before the two days of round tables [00:19:00] and then those two days round table and leave on a Thursday. Yeah. And keep it very cost effective.
It doesn't have to be expensive if you do it, if you do it right.
Evan Troxel: you do it early. going in my mind is this idea of, I mean, you touched on it a minute ago, but I think it also kind of fits this event, which is like you slow down intentionally, you go slow to go fast.
Picking technology that is not Just whatever the, like you said, if you just look at the marketing material and you think, oh it can do all that Under perfect conditions, right? That's the
Phil Read: right, right. It's like a, it's like a financial performer who says, you know, uh, future conditions may not apply. Yeah, that's right.
Evan Troxel: right, but this idea of Authenticity, slowing down, relationships, coming up for,
Phil Read: Coming up for a bit of air. We don't have, I don't know the value of technology if it makes you have to rush faster, because I don't think we can rush any faster.
I would prefer to let an idea gestate, think about it, meditate on it, [00:20:00] and then make a decision and know that decision is going to run itself through a Revit project, to move a window, to move a door, to move a piece of furniture, to change something. And when you change it, it's kind of downstream implications taken care of.
You know, the old, the old yellow legal pad I used to keep through a set of red lines to write things down. If you change something, you had to then go and find out where that was being represented somewhere else. The freeing of that, well, why would I want to rush around and do five projects in Revit simultaneously if Go slower.
Go slower. Don't Sometimes rushing to do things If you rush to do something three times,
it's not enjoyable. You know, because you've
Evan Troxel: The idea of technology was always to free us to have more time. That was the promise.
Phil Read: Try to turn it off. It's hard.
Evan Troxel: is.
Phil Read: The thing is in my little lizard brain that I've done to try to do it is that. So, grayscale on the
Evan Troxel: so what are we looking at here?
Phil Read: So,
this [00:21:00] is Oh, yeah, that's true. Nobody can see. So, you
can set up I've got an iPhone.
Evan Troxel: Yep.
Phil Read: With accessibility services, you can set up three clicks of the power button to set you into grayscale. And for me
Evan Troxel: That takes away this, like,
Phil Read: Well, after you look at this for a while, and then you look at that
With
all full color, it looks like a bowl of breakfast. It looks like a bowl of Froot Loops. You look at that and go, that's not real food. Why are you subjecting yourself to that? Whereas I can look at the grayscale, and then the rest of the sky vault is what's really
Evan Troxel: interesting.
Phil Read: Um, or if I look at it at night, because I'm still, you know, the phone's there and it's 2 a. m., and I just happen to wake up. If I read the email, I'm not getting full color sparklies in my Brain at 2 a. m. You're right. So I'm just seeing I don't know. I wonder I mean you and I probably both grew up in black and white TV And so the thing is with three channels [00:22:00] in black and white after a while you sort of look up and you look outside You know, yeah, it looks more interesting outside and you would go out and
Evan Troxel: Well, yeah, and now the incentive is to keep you there longer
Phil Read: colors don't exist in nature and so I don't know that Like, our brain loves these colors, they're flavors that don't exist, and so we're so attracted to these sparkly colors.
And so I'm trying to, uh, desensitize myself to getting used to all these bright colors all the time, like, try to keep it
calm.
Evan Troxel: I try to do all
Phil Read: Oh, they're all turned off.
Um, except, I think with, uh, so I typically keep the phone in, uh, do not disturb mode, but certain people can come through. Or if you, I think if you call twice, it might come through.
Yeah. I can't, like even with a watch, it's always tapping you. You gotta turn that
Evan Troxel: Yeah, I have a Garmin watch because I do a lot of outdoor activities and I want to track my cycling tracks and stuff and I had to turn all of the notifications off completely [00:23:00] because It's one thing to have this thing down in my pocket, and I can ignore it, but it, when it's on my wrist too, it was
Phil Read: it's too
tempting
not to ignore
Evan Troxel: it just, it's right there, I can just flip my wrist and look at it, and I felt like, I can never get an Apple Watch, I say that now, but, but the point is, is like, I don't,
Phil Read: you don't want to be annoyed all
Evan Troxel: don't want that,
Phil Read: It's too
nice. But, at the point where you're, you're on a paddle board, and then the phone rings, you're like, I don't want to answer my watch for this, so you have to turn it off.
But then, um, it's hard to turn it off, because I think there's, there's something in the brain from way back, you know, You guys, there's a dinosaur outside! Let's go get it! Like, what are the dinosaurs and dragons in our existence now? It's constantly being kind of pressured to keep up with the news. It's all things we can't do anything about, but we have strong opinions about.
It's like, you have to somehow turn it off. So during pandemic, I had to uninstall Facebook. Uh, I just had to take it off the phone because [00:24:00] it was people that I love annoying me at 6am. So I was like, why am I letting myself be annoyed? I should just not look at it. But it's hard not to look at it because you're going to get a little dopamine hit.
I think they know to figure out what you like and don't like really quickly, so they only serve that up to you. So the things that annoy you or give you pleasure, uh, are the things that constantly are in your,
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Phil Read: in your space. So you just have to turn it off. So that's part of what the leadership retreat does is.
I mean, there's Wi Fi, there's connectivity, you can still get to your email, but we try to put the phone down and try not to, you know, try not to immediately respond to things. Sometimes, actually, even back in the Revit days, I would try to answer a question right away, and then I realized sometimes that there aren't bad questions, but sometimes the questions are a little Unconsidered or maybe a little lazy like the answers out there.
So I started waiting 15 minutes to answer the question or half an hour to answer the question. And then I, before I could respond, [00:25:00] the customer would email and go, Oh, I figured it out. And that gives them the freedom and flexibility of, of going, or either would figure it out and go, I saw this. Is this a good way to, what do you think? Yeah. Instead of just kind of feeding them
Evan Troxel: It also changes the expectation about how available you actually are.
You, and you get to set that expectation to them, right? And, and I think a lot of people are. Inadvertently setting expectations of themselves from other people's
Phil Read: hard not to do it. Like, as a subject matter expert, if a customer, if I wake up at the 2am, and I see an email, and I know that person's in Australia, that's a stressful, they don't, all they need is a URL to show them how to do that, I'll answer the question.
Cause it just keeps them up to speed, but sometimes, you, you can't subsidize, uh, You can't subsidize a lack of discipline, like, sometimes the answers are out there, so you can wait a little bit, but, but,
waiting is hard.
Evan Troxel: hard. But through [00:26:00] experience you learn what, which ones are worth responding to immediately versus over time.
Phil Read: Yeah.
Evan Troxel: I think I, earlier on in your career it's like you want to, you want to show your value, you want to please people, you want, and so you're quick to, but then you build that expectation that you're always available and that you have the answers. Uh. Architects are often in that position, aren't they? Of having to know the answers
Phil Read: Oh, and it's a multitude of things you have to juggle.
Evan Troxel: And not saying, we'll figure that out, or, good question, let me think about that.
Phil Read: think The artist
is afraid if they don't show up and they don't know the answer, that they won't get asked to come along the next
Evan Troxel: come along Feast or famine kind of, it's a, it is kind of a evolutionary lizard
Phil Read: It'll be okay. Yeah, lizard brain.
Yeah,
So I think with the leadership retreat is more inward looking. It's more managing self expectations, management of self and others, and how you show up. The roundtable, um, I don't know, roundtable conference, it's more of discussions
[00:27:00] with peers, and how to come up with an answer that may not be right, but it's on vector.
Evan Troxel: the book. And you, you are going to have multiple tracks at that one,
Phil Read: I think if we have 50, we can't do more than 50 people just to keep it sort of structurally manageable, and then rough math is, well you have, Roundtables of 8, so you can have 6, up to 6 simultaneous discussions, 4 times a day. And then decompress in the afternoon and come back the next day and do it again.
Evan Troxel: you have flexibility maybe to pick different topics as an individual to explore in there? Or is it you pick a track and you're on it?
Phil Read: I don't, I don't know. I think ultimately you do whatever's kind of most interesting and best, but for the first pass, we probably have a list of topics from people to choose from, and it's instead of, we might do a call for topics where people want to facilitate things, but we also might, if we get enough people just reach out to.
To a few people that we know are coming and who are interested in those things and ask them, Would you facilitate this? There's nothing [00:28:00] due at the end of it except for a 1 2 page executive summary. So the
point is there's not, it's not a 40 page technical paper that I would prepare for like an AU presentation in the past.
So it's discussions, and even the facilitator might show up thinking they know the answer, but the answer is often very contextual. So I don't know, like a, in a, if I was, if, if it was real time rendering, how far do round down the rabbit hole, do you want to go? Do you want to use the Unreal engine because you need a certain end product, or is scape gonna be great for most use cases, but you don't get animated objects?
But it's having that discussion. So if we're just subject matter experts, we might know the answers or a, a variety of answers. But if we also have representatives that make the software. business decision makers who have teams that use the software, they can hear all of this honest discussion. Yep, and not making it complex in terms of, there's no software [00:29:00] sales, there's no exhibition, there's no lanyards, and it's, it's, I mean, north central Florida at the beginning of May will be 85 degrees during the day, so it's not too hot, and 65 at night, so it's not too cold, and um, so we'll, and we'll be outdoors a lot.
It's not being locked in a conference hotel for a couple of days. So hopefully that also draws people in because they enjoy that kind of environment.
Evan Troxel: Or if they don't know they enjoy that kind of environment because they're in the cube or in their office so much, it'll give them a different experience of what a conference could
Phil Read: I hope so because we all, you know, those of us who go to these conferences a lot, we enjoy that, we enjoy the high impact artifact of, of the loud music and the And the flashing lights, and then other times we like, I just need to decompress a bit, and so this is more of the decompressed version, or sort of the, we're calling, we're calling it in sort of a metaphor terms, uh, AEC acoustics, cause it's the acoustic [00:30:00] version of the rock and roll event, and uh, or you could say, you know,
BIM unplugged, or AEC unplugged, it's that quieter conversation after the presentation, where you go, okay, tell me the truth, is that really gonna work on this kind of situation?
And if it doesn't, point me in the right direction.
Evan Troxel: And
Phil Read: And, I don't know of any, you know, I don't, there is not a lot of that in the AAC space, and I think as we elevate in our careers, and we get older, and we get more experienced, we need these kinds of conversations. We don't just need technical presentations.
Evan Troxel: presentations. Right. Right. Yeah, I think, uh, introspection, it's still introspection at some level, right? it, it's, It directly what you do at your day job, potentially, right? So, less on the, what you do after hours between, Between work days and more, uh, but still, still at a personal, in a very personal level of talking to other people who are
Phil Read: well, I like, even at au,[00:31:00]
I
know there's 50 people that I really want to see. Yeah. And there's a lot of strangers in the crowd, but I'll go because I'm gonna see something interesting, have an interesting conversation.
But I'm also gonna be able to duck away to Starbucks and have a chat with someone, you know, off the show floor away from the noise. And so there's. There's still value with, with that, but I can't have conversations about all the various technologies that we use because that's their party
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Phil Read: And
that's how it should be.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, yeah. I, I'm interested what you think, so, I guess we'll change subjects here, because I, I want, I'm interested in, I think I read something that you had written about Imagine
Phil Read: Imagine it, why would,
Evan Troxel: Um, but the, but the idea of, of, of, What do you think is the biggest thing holding us back as an, as an industry? Because there's this, if we, if we rewind or step back a little bit and think about the, the, we talked about this a minute ago, the true potential of what it could do. [00:32:00] Um,
Phil Read: You mean in terms of the technology? In terms
Evan Troxel: technology and just the evolution of the practice.
Uh, we spend a lot more time on projects now than I feel like we ever have before because buildings are more complex, the software that we use to draw them and model them is a lot more
Phil Read: Yeah, rightfully complex, I mean it,
Evan Troxel: agencies are more complex to deal with, bureaucracy, organizations are more complex now, we have a lot more positions in organizations to deal with, and the bigger the organization, the more positions there are, and HR, and all, but, but, the thing that really, I guess I'll, I won't bury the lead here, but people are difficult.
And you talked about this with this leadership retreat, like, I don't necessarily
Phil Read: yeah. I'm not difficult. Other people are
Evan Troxel: Yeah, it's always
Phil Read: it's always that,
Evan Troxel: but, but this idea of adoption versus innovation, right? Adoption, I, we've, I, I'm curious to hear what you think about like that, that productivity chart that we've all seen in every, that McKinsey graph that's in everybody's presentation, who's outside [00:33:00] the industry that shows.
Construction being way down here for the last 50 years, and everything else going up like a rocket, and I don't feel that in our industry, but
Phil Read: I think the, I mean, people talk about, okay, I don't want to sound jaded, but there are a lot of technologies that kind of become flash in the pan, and they become buzzwords, and, you know, AI in that sense is a buzzword right now. I think once we realize it's just the carbon based architectural intern, it's not that big of a deal.
I don't know that
we're really held back. I think it's just incredibly complicated logistically. To build buildings. And so it doesn't matter how far you rush ahead during the pandemic. If, uh, so this beach cottage. Which is only a little, it's a little cottage on the coast of North Carolina. Try getting plywood, because the additive to the glue that they use to make plywood isn't available.
So now you have to go, okay, well what else can we work on, because I don't want people leaving the project.[00:34:00]
Evan Troxel: They won't
Phil Read: Yeah, they might be on something else, and then logistics get more complicated. So, I don't know how much faster In a way, how much more efficient we can do it. And there, I was um, well only, you know, this idea that well if we only do pre manufacturing of a building, then it won't, you know, that'll make it hyper efficient because of all the waste that occurs on site.
Contractors are not incentivized to waste. They want to build the building and get off the project just as fast as the owner does. So I don't know that the butterfly flapping his wings in the Uh, Manufacturing Space is gonna solve the problem. Because creating problems that are hyper efficient but inflexible creates other problems. It's, it's a logistics Gordian Knot.
[00:35:00] And, you know, it
Evan Troxel: Yeah, the Gordian
Phil Read: Gordian Knot
of the, the idea that you have this, the, I think it's a Greek, a Greek parable. There's this knot of rope and he's trying to Ask people, how would you know, test their wisdom?
How would you untie this knot? And the king takes a sword and cuts the knot in half.
So the Gordian knot is this. You've gotten to this point of irre recoverable complexity.
I don't know how you could make it less
complex. Maybe at the domestic level. You could make it less complex if you hyper centralized utility.
in the residence where it's, you know, you're connected to utility for houses, right? Electrical production, water, you know, cleaning water, how you, how you treat water, all of that kind of stuff. There's technologies to capture water, to treat water, to treat waste, and kind of centralize all of this from a technical [00:36:00] aspect.
But at the commercial aspect,
how could you? I don't know that there's a way right now. I don't know that we're seeing that. You know, you see the, there's a lot of stuff on, on LinkedIn, uh, you know, the, the hotel in China that gets built in a day. Well, or a hospital, or, or an apartment complex. But do people aspire to live in complex, in, in, in apartment buildings that can be built in a week?
I even would use them, I would, I would, um, if we could, so, so let's go to the extreme of efficiency and imagine a system where the client could want a building today and tomorrow that building would exist. Would we do that? And I don't think we would because on the third day the client would go, you know what?
Market forces have changed and we need more unit B and less unit A. Keep the unit C's about where they were. And now you've done something so quickly that it was inflexible and it couldn't respond to market [00:37:00] demands, which you would have learned had the project.
So
there's just the ability to do things efficiently while still allowing for flexibility is just part of the,
it's, it's part of the design to construction
Evan Troxel: And
just the, the ideal, uh, or the idea behind what the value of design is tends to go away in that equation, right? Because customization, unique things that, you know, my life is different than your life. And I need different things than you do. My family's like this, yours is like that. It's very hard to solve for all of those variables with a common output, right?
And even, even in the example of a hospital in a day, you can't tell me that the design process didn't get a hell of a lot longer.
Phil Read: Oh, or maybe the hospital doesn't accommodate the next medical emergency because it was done quickly, it wasn't flexible.
Like, trying to [00:38:00] predict how something is going to be used is really tough. And in the architecture, in the construction, or let's say in the manufacturing space, most things that are manufactured are able to leave the utility of where they're manufactured. So there's ships and airplanes and
Submarines and cars, they all leave under their own power, whereas buildings, it's hard to do that with buildings, so there's all of this efficiency that occurs, well, allegedly, by building something and then transporting it to the site, but when you do that, you ship a lot of air, on the other hand, and you risk things breaking under transport, and now you have to repair them, as opposed to the present system, which is, get all of the pieces and parts together in bundles as tight as possible, and ship those to the site, And then get people to assemble it.
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Phil Read: So it's still manufacturing. Um, I don't know how we could do it any more efficiently. Then we're doing it now, and certainly other places do it better. Like if you look at construction in [00:39:00] Singapore or construction in Germany, like the way people are showing up to the site, there's head eye protection, ear protection, foot protection.
I see a lot of construction out on the coast. That's maybe not all OSHA compliant people that just, no, no.
Evan Troxel: Southern Oregon, it's like that as
Phil Read: People up on roofs without proper, uh.
Proper safety measures. So, I don't know that we're doing it. I think we're doing it as least inefficiently as possible because
Evan Troxel: I like that.
Phil Read: because economies, because otherwise you're wasting money.
And so it's always measured in terms of are you gonna waste money? And if you try to figure out everything, I think it overwhelms a customer. Even if you could say pick your house, pick your fittings, pick your furnishings. And then we're going to, that's going to get delivered to the site as opposed to the flexibility and the serendipity of going, Oh my gosh, that window from this location and that view, we need to move the window over two feet.
Can you guys reframe that? It's like, yeah, you'll love it.
Evan Troxel: Have [00:40:00] you ever designed like that before? Have you
Phil Read: So on the cottage, I'd never in all of my career. I've never done my own project. And then during the pandemic was able to design my own project for the first time and experienced the serendipity of going, Oh my gosh, that's an incredible opportunity.
We should take advantage of it. And we even had Revit and we had Enscape and I could see where the sun was setting on my birthday. Like all of this stuff was amazing, but then you actually get into the space. And, um,
Evan Troxel: You're always designing, right? You're always
Phil Read: thinking about it. You're inhabiting
Evan Troxel: right. You learn as you go. You, you can't not learn as you go, because you, you see opportunities that weren't, that wasn't, right,
Phil Read: You didn't know it was there. So the builder that I worked with was, uh, one of the builders that I worked with, is an immigrant from El Salvador, amazing guy, Omar Flores.
And he did the kitchen in Charlotte, and he [00:41:00] has very careful attention to detail.
amazing guy to get to know him. So he comes out to the coast and uh, I said, look I don't want to do the walls in gibboard, I want to use half inch maple. for all the walls except for like the wet walls and baths, right? And instead of this, instead of the, the half inch maple ply abutting it, I want to leave a gap and I want the gap to be about a quarter wide like a coin.
So just leave a gap. Next, the first time we start putting these Panels up and Omar comes and goes, Hey, look at this. And he's got a panel up with a quarter in it and a quarter is being pinched by the two panels. And he's got another panel up with a dime and he goes, I think a quarter is too much. I think we should do a dime.
The guy was right.
And
these kinds of things happened all along the way. that I thought I had it figured out, but it wasn't. Or I thought I had it figured out, but old houses settle, and this is like a 30, 40 year old cottage that we were renovating, and so [00:42:00] we had to come up with a method to accommodate.
How the house had settled and yeah, I thought I had it figured out going into it But that was perfect where everything was plumbing square latex. No, we did so it's I call it a reverse crown
Evan Troxel: Okay.
Phil Read: We put a strip of ply at the top Where the ceiling was to take up right and then a strip of ply at the bottom same material and then three strips centered and The ply would attach to that.
So at that point we were no longer dependent on the locations of the studs to place the plywood so things could be lined up nicely. And the other artifact was that reverse crown creates an art rail. So,
um,
Evan Troxel: things wherever you
Phil Read: I don't have
Evan Troxel: to
Phil Read: I'm not putting a screw in the
wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so you get these art cables and you hang things with that.
yeah,
Evan Troxel: yeah, you can't patch that very easily. . Yeah. It's no
Phil Read: And Omar was always looking for opportunities. Like, he would [00:43:00] get the metaphor of how we want to be careful about how things align and where they align. And then he would go, I know what you're trying to do here, but what if we do this? And I'll go, oh my gosh, Omar, that's amazing.
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Phil Read: So, yeah, I thought I had it figured out, and even then, yep, just be ahead of the design.
There's a, there, the, we were able to add a third level that didn't exist because we added decks to the south side that didn't exist, and a deeper deck on the north side that did, it was only like seven feet, and when we did that I realized it creates a greater roof volume, so instead of storage, it's now the executive level.
And, I think it was on a FaceTime call to Justine over video, kind of, it's like the sun sets and I'm up on the roof and she goes, Oh, this is a really nice view, we should have another deck up here. And I thought, oh no, no, no, we don't need another
Evan Troxel: deck. We've
Phil Read: We got all these decks out of the house. So, but, I said, okay, well what if we just take the center structural bay and just make a smaller deck, so it's like 10 feet wide.
Evan Troxel: The crow's nest,
Phil Read: Yeah, and it's, we call it, uh, yeah, Executive Lounge, [00:44:00] and from that level, you can't see it from the street, and you get up there, and you can see the sunrise and sunset, and, um, it was an accident that I hadn't designed going in, because I thought, we've got level, we've got enough decks, but that area, that's a, a nice reveal at the top, and it was all, it was all the serendipity of going slow.
It was being able to take advantage of that opportunity, whereas if you design it somewhere else, and it comes, and it gets plonked down on the site, you just, it's, You don't have time to take advantage of those happy
Evan Troxel: and being involved in that process is a key piece. Right.
Phil Read: incredibly stressful and I hated it.
but at
Evan Troxel: the same time, that wouldn't have happened if you didn't.
Phil Read: No, it would have been more stressful. I lived in the house during reconstruction. The alternative was coming on Friday and realize plugs are all
wrong
place and this is five, five inches off. But what does it matter? It's only five inches. I would have been mental.
But living in it was stressful, but that was the, that was the lesser bad way to do it.
Evan Troxel: Yeah,[00:45:00]
Phil Read: And then also going to sleep and thinking about what happened has to be done the next day and kind of just playing the mental math, not even doing it in Revit. Just like, think about it, think about it, think about it, and then do it.
Evan Troxel: Right. Measure three times, cut once. I've done a kitchen like that, and I live there at the same time too, so I was cooking in the garage on the camp stove while we were remodeling the kitchen, or cooking on the barbecue outside, or whatever.
But building a soffit over this really weirdly shaped Kitchen island that I did because I tore out a bunch of walls put a stainless looking stainless steel It was steel that I just spun to look like stainless and then clear coated it to hold up a beam that took the place Of those walls and then I had this island that kind of like jogged around that so they were separate and And then I was like, huh?
Well, I want to build a soffit over this And I didn't draw any of this. I mocked it up with furring strips
Phil Read: as
Evan Troxel: as I went and [00:46:00] I would, Nope, this needs to be a little bit wider here, a little bit narrow here. I'm going to cut this off here and just treating it like a study model, in the real space, at full scale, in the moment and making those decisions then, afforded design and, I don't know, it was It was an incredible freeing way to work as an architect who was trained to, like, figure it all out ahead of time, right?
Phil Read: Yeah, under the punishment of being liable for things that you have to have, you have to so much foreknowledge of how something's going to work. How stressful is that? So I, I don't know how.
Evan Troxel: How do you get back to that master builder? Like, that's, that's kind of what you're talking about, right? Because a, a, a sheet set for, I don't know, like, pick a Frank Lloyd Wright project, right?
Like, uh But Unity Temple, it was like 11 sheets.
Phil Read: A lot of stuff is figured out in the moment by someone who knows. And I don't know that we have to get to master builder. I think it's a nice metaphor, but I don't know that Frank Wright actually ever wanted to work construction. He hired the right
Evan Troxel: he [00:47:00] wanted to be out there and he wanted to tell people how to do it though.
Right? Because,
Phil Read: And that part of it, of being able to have the conversation?
Evan Troxel: is how he
Phil Read: the person building it is focused on, does it function to such an extreme detail that sometimes, well why don't we just move that over a couple of inches, well why would you do that?
Because of this? Oh, that'll look great. So someone who's thinking about, you know, the macro to micro,
Evan Troxel: for
Phil Read: I
don't know that we have the freedom to do that on commercial projects. It's, it's, it, that's, what, what did, what did they ask, uh, when they started the dome in uh, Florence Brunelleschi's dome in, in that book?
They started the proportion of the cathedral not knowing how they were going to build the dome That's an expensive mistake Because once those proportions are set everything else is derived and the response was well when it's time God will help us figure it out I don't know that we could build football stadiums like that.
Oh It's a yeah, [00:48:00] we'll figure out that Ruth. We'll figure out the truss truss trusses later Yeah, God will help us figure it out. No, you'll go to prison
Um,
so I, I don't know that we can do it any more any more efficiently,
Evan Troxel: hard,
Phil Read: which makes it hard, but I think what we can learn to do is when the contractor is yelling the F word on a, on a Monday morning and you're a part of that conversation, you learn to detach and not. Take it personal and that helps the contractor sit down or settle down because even though that's that's first thing out That's that's just a language modifier when things aren't going right
Evan Troxel: going
Phil Read: you can get wound up and
get frustrated And then that's not fun
Evan Troxel: learn
Phil Read: But if you you can if you can learn a proper method of quiet confidence that gives a client confidence go Yeah, we're this is gonna happen
Evan Troxel: And this is kind of an ethos of that leadership conference, right? It's like learning how [00:49:00] to react in situations where you're not in control, or just, just being able to control your reaction is a, is a key component to leadership.
Phil Read: It doesn't mean you know the right answer. Yeah. There's uh, uh, Marcus Aurelius meditations, which were his, just his private. Journals of Stoicism that weren't meant to be for public consumption, but after he passed, they were published.
I still refer to them regularly. I still, I'll just, I just keep it there all the time and I'll read a couple pages and put it back down again. Because he was, yeah, his experiences from being a Roman general to being effectively the, the Caesar. Um, and having to deal with annoying people that were always trying to come and get an angle.
Like he just talks about it in such modern terms of people annoying him all the time and things are annoying him and he can't manage and predict things. Um, and I, I think maybe earlier in my career, I was more of the mindset that if I could just predict what could possibly go wrong, it would [00:50:00] help me relax because I had figured it out ahead of time.
And then you realize it's just too complex. It's better just to let it go and engage a team of smart people who might not do it the way you do it, but Hey, if it doesn't work out, we'll do it a different way. And that's the, um,
that's a better way to approach it. It's hard as a subject matter expert to do that, because to your point, you want to rush and give the answer
quickly.
But after a while, things are too complex, and you just have to find the right people to work with, and it's more interesting.
Evan Troxel: with. And
What is something that you've either added to your life, or removed, that has had a huge impact?
Phil Read: It's usually taking away. it's usually being in a position of being able to
More and more and more say no to things that aren't interesting, and I used to do, uh, I used to do investment, um, I used to do a lot more, uh, investment advising for technology companies, and the hourly rate, [00:51:00] compared to what I would have made in an hour when I was in architecture school working for a civil firm, was like a multitude more per hour, but I say no to it now, because it's not worth it.
I'd rather, um, No, who is it? Uh, I look at it this way. Anytime you're going to spend time doing something, imagine you had to pay your hourly rate to do it.
And if you wouldn't, then don't do it. So, I don't watch TV anymore. That's probably something that I've just, except, uh, I, I, I will indulge in South Park and Rick and Morty.
Uh, there may be a couple of things, but it's deliberate. I don't just turn it on for the noise.
I turn off the TV. I probably don't have music playing in the background.
By choice, it's
a lot more quiet.
Evan Troxel: me
Phil Read: And, uh, it took me a long time to get comfortable in that kind of space because you end up getting in your own head and you end up
thinking about uncomfortable things because you're not distracted, but on the long term, I think it's better.
[00:52:00] So what I've taken out is, I don't watch TV, I read a lot more books, I don't listen to music, I don't watch the news anymore. And that was just a series of, probably in the last 10 years, the news was just irrecoverably.
And now that I've, you know, when you're in airports and places where you have to watch screens, you notice, I notice now that in, on these, like, particularly in news, there's always a background that's moving, it's hyper color, uh, the way that American news channels present news, uh, once you turn the TV down, watch the eyebrows of the presenters, and it's, it's very exaggerated.
The eyebrows are always moving, the facial effect is always moving.
Evan Troxel: yeah.
Phil Read: Yeah, and I think that's part of the way to attract your attention, uh, you know, from emergency through commercial break to the next emergency. And then I realize I just can't do anything about that. And I think it's, I think actually it's overwhelming our sense of empathy.
So [00:53:00] as humans, we're empathetic people and we understand, you know, death and tragedy and all of this, but it's just constant now that you're, you just, and so what it does is I think it overwhelms our sense of empathy that we feel that we have to do something about it, but we really can't. But it's happening in our living room, why aren't you doing something about it?
And so it's hijacking our empathy. And so turning off the news, Still, I still skim the news, but I skim the headlines. Turning off the news, turning off the radio, turning off the TV, And just trying to be in a more quiet place.
even
though it's uncomfortable, Um, I still haven't, I, I, I talked with Randy last time about this at the leadership retreat, Because he always asks, he asks, Are you happy?
And I always say, Randy, happiness is indulgent. We have to get our shit done. Who, who gets happiness? And, uh, yeah, Omar, the guy I was working with, uh, the builder, I asked him what he, what he aspired for his [00:54:00] daughters to do when they got older, and I was thinking, like, lawyer, you know, architect, engineer, what kind of, what do you want them to do?
And he said, I want them to be happy. So I haven't nutted that out, Evan, this idea of being
Evan Troxel: I haven't nutted
Phil Read: I think sometimes We just have to find something to sustain us between periods of
Evan Troxel: greed. Yeah, you
Phil Read: Yeah, you know, as we get older and you have friends that pass and you have
Evan Troxel: that pass. Things that you
Phil Read: you have things that you can't control.
So kind of just, we just have to.
Evan Troxel: just have to quietly
Phil Read: we just have to quietly find something to sustain us between periods of tragedy. And maybe that's my best happiness, kind of. It's the small things. Um, the thing that I aspire to now would be a good meal with
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Phil Read: That's like
whether
I do the cooking less, I probably eat out a lot less because during [00:55:00] pandemic, you're sort of learning to cook everything's online.
You want to cook amazing steak? Wow.
Evan Troxel: it's there.
Phil Read: It's there. Amazing chicken, like amazing whatever you want to cook. There's amazing recipes. And so being able to have an artifact where you're actually preparing a meal with friends is, um, that's an uncommon pleasure. So those kind of quieter, quieter moments, instead of just going to a restaurant, standing in line, getting your table, getting your drink order, kids next to you, like rolling his truck through his vegetables, he's got a car at the table, it's all that noise, and then an hour later you've eaten and you've tipped and you've had dessert, and you're I don't know if I was actually able to relax, so meals with friends, quiet,
and uh, quiet is probably, as we were talking before, quiet's probably a luxury,
Evan Troxel: luxury. Nowadays.
Phil Read: I think about it in terms of, you know, it used to, not that long ago, people would have been able to just exist without a lot of noise. Because music was something that you had to go and listen to [00:56:00] live, or you either had to play. There was no recordings, but now we can have recordings of conversations, recordings of theater productions, it's television, radio.
I don't know that we're evolved yet for all of this constant, um, constant hum.
Evan Troxel: I was just watching this, uh, recorded live stream of one of my favorite YouTubers yesterday. His name's Rick Beato, and he's a musician, he's a producer, music producer. And he has a series on his channel called What Makes This Song Great, where he breaks down all the tracks, and he's a Theorist.
He, he's a theorist. He knows music, and he can tell you why that song is great from a technical point of view, but it's not what the artist was thinking when they made that song. Right? And so you, he's, he's weaving these together and sh letting you hear things that you have never heard in a song before, that you will never.
Not here the next time you hear that song [00:57:00] and the live stream was on 90s music. So this is my thing, right? I I this is when I my coming of age was, you know during the 90s and it was very much a time when Especially as he went through this playlist that he literally made in like five minutes and there it was probably 60 or 70 songs on it that he just threw into a playlist and started playing them and saying This one this one this one.
These were all great songs And at some point, music stopped being that good, and I'm just generalizing right now,
Phil Read: No, I don't think you're
being
Evan Troxel: could pick any, you could pick any decade, probably, and especially when you, when it was formative for you, like that's your decade, right? Um, but,
Phil Read: I would add it's, it became less when they stopped playing their own instruments when it became a performance
and they weren't playing their own
Evan Troxel: Well, he
Phil Read: when it kind of
Evan Troxel: he asked the question, he said, when did we stop listening to music with our ears?
Phil Read: Mm-Hmm.[00:58:00]
Evan Troxel: And I thought that was so insightful, right? And you said the screens aren't going away.
Phil Read: Right.
Evan Troxel: We, the news Music is a video, it's a production, it's a performance, it's, it's, it's visual and audio, right? It's like, I thought that was just so insightful and it was, and it was a live chat because it was a live stream and people are throwing on there like what, it was autotune, it was the, it was people not playing their own instruments, it was producers writing songs for artists that were then performing those, it was the phone, it was the iPod, it was Napster, it was, and there was a lot of things that all I think play into this idea of being overwhelmed by media, um, and not actually, like, like, you remember the good old days of list, having listening rooms, and having listening parties, and listening to your hi fi, and putting on your, your headphones, and just, like, my dad sitting in a room listening to a record play.
The [00:59:00] whole thing, all the way through.
Phil Read: I don't know
that It's interesting.
and I think those recordings.
I don't think they're music. I Think the music is the experience and so when you I grew up around Athens, Georgia in the 80s and 90s So going to downtown Athens scrubbing through the flagpole picking Probably going to the Downstairs, which was a little club at that time, or going to the Rockfish Palace and seeing a band.
As a matter of fact, one of Rick's, uh, one of his presentations is talking about a guy named Rob Aldridge. If you go back and find that, cause Rob and he had, they had a band called Holly Faith. And he was an extraordinary songwriter and musician. They never quite got the trajectory, but um, beautiful songwriting. But you would go and see it, and I remember driving down, getting something to eat, standing in line, getting into the club. You feel the music, you anticipate it, where now it, it's [01:00:00] not, that's like it's so immediate. It's, it's a recording, it's something that you hear, it's not something that you feel. And so I'm a big advocate of going to see live music.
If you ever get a, I don't know if it will come to Medford, um, the best live performance I've seen in a long time was the Book of Mormon on
Evan Troxel: Oh wow.
Phil Read: Amazing production.
Evan Troxel: Yeah.
Phil Read: I can listen to it. Uh, on CD. It's, it's the recording, but it's not like the experience of it. Oh my gosh. Amazing. Live music. And so we should, you know, as a best practice, get back to more of that.
It's hard now. I mean, the big, you know, the performers that you aspire to go and see, it's, can be thousands of dollars for a ticket. But live music in small towns? Yeah, it's pretty good.
Evan Troxel: But don't you think this applies to architecture? Like, there is this immense pressure to become more and more efficient and productive and go faster and change things. And then there's this,
Phil Read: this
Evan Troxel: theme that we're talking about, which is like, what is it really
Phil Read: But what about the
acoustic version of architecture? what
Evan Troxel: the experience? [01:01:00] of the architect and the client together in the
Phil Read: I think it's an artifact of how architects, you know, even 20 years ago, if you wanted to design, I don't think it's a coincidence that the companies that designed football stadiums grew up in the
Midwest.
So you're talking about Kansas City.
HNTB, HOK. Those firms, well, later Populous, but they had to be in a place, because you're, all your designers are co located, and they all had these big drafting boards, so you need space that's not expensive. If you're gonna design a football stadium, that's where you go do it.
Now,
that
artifact of big spaces to design buildings still exists. I don't think it's necessary. But the big firms are such that they're, they're compressed under their own weight. And the revenue per employee, I don't know, maybe once you get to thirty four. 30 people, you start having middle management, but now you have to pay for positions that don't generate revenue, so now you have to grow again, which creates more middle management, and then it's irrecoverable.
So I don't [01:02:00] know how firms grow without proportionally, you don't want to proportionally grow the complexity, or the, yeah,
the
complexity, Because
at the point where you start having to have
HR
meetings to discuss issues that are irrecoverable, then that's Not billable work. It's not necessarily in, in, in value to the customer. So I think long term how these large companies are going to survive unless they have Unless they bring some kind of unique and particular value that only large firms, so you've seen this, right? The, the large companies buying other large companies, and there's been consolidation in the last 10 years, but they have to have very particular industry expertise to survive. If you want to build a football stadium, you're kind of limited, but for a lot of commercial projects, do you need office space? Do you need the complexity or? [01:03:00] Our large firms, a lot of small teams, and those small teams don't need large firms anymore.
Evan Troxel: It does seem like you're advocating for small, nimble teams who have the ability to say no, but leverage technology to do big things. Like that,
Phil Read: As long as they have their customer's confidence, right? I mean, why would you If I was a customer wanting to design a building and kept getting voicemail every time I wanted to talk to the project manager, I would get frustrated. Yeah. I don't know that the artifact to create a large commercial project
It requires
that you have an office space full of people that are co located and they have desks. I mean, the space we, the space we park our cars in are larger than the space that we have to work in, right? Our cubicles, our 8x10 cubicles are half the size of our [01:04:00] 10x20 parking spaces.
So, I don't know, I think we have to come together and have meetings like we're doing today. We could have done this over, over a Zoom meeting or something, but it's not as enjoyable. So, you need to come together sometime and have that compression. But then a lot of it is just let me be quiet and when I need to speak to people, I'll speak to them.
We don't have the flexi Well, maybe the pandemic taught us a bit about that. You know, the, the value of being able to be quiet and work in a concentrated way and then come together as you need to.
Evan Troxel: So you talked about that idea of removing things, improving the quality of, of life, and you also talked about having to, you know, deal with your own thoughts.
So I'm just wondering, overall, net positive, but, but in which, in what way for you?
Phil Read: Ooh. Uh, well over the last, I would say the last five to 10 years of turning off the tv, turning off the radio, saying no to things. It, it feels very indulgent. Um, 'cause I've got friends that still go into the office and they're showing [01:05:00] up before the sunrises and they're leaving after the sunsets.
And, um, that's the decisions that they've made. But, uh, I just didn't want to make decisions that you couldn't I don't like irrecoverable complexity. So if you make a decision that you can't back out of, realizing that it's too complex, you have to be careful about those kinds of things. So if you want to work for a great company, good.
But if you work for that great company, and then buy a house that's a little too expensive, and a car that's a little too new Now you can't say no, and it's very stressful if you show up Monday and you're told that your position's been eliminated. So the freedom of not having that worry is, for me, I prefer that more.
The freedom and flexibility to be curious so that when something interesting comes along If I had seen Enscape working for a company, I could have bought it and used it. But I wouldn't have had the experience of actually helping those guys go to market and seeing the company grow from, you know, at the time, I think we were 8 to 10 [01:06:00] people to now, Chaos is probably 800 people. Yeah,
I, I, I don't know that I would be good at, I'm, I'm good at being part of it and helping to curate it and direct it. I'm not good at being an employee of that. Or an, yeah, of an employer, like an employer, and I, of 800 people, I, I don't know if I could manage
Evan Troxel: I heard Jensen Wang recently say that, uh, if he was gonna do it all again, he wouldn't. Because it's been so difficult. So difficult. Harder than he could have ever imagined to do something like NVIDIA.
Phil Read: yeah.
So if you do that, once you say yes, you can't say no. A lot of people depend on you, so you have to be careful what you say yes to. Uh, there's one of the first engineers I worked for coming back. Uh, lived in New Zealand for a while and came back and worked for a guy named Boney Dawood with Dawood Engineering.
He's still the sole owner. Um, probably plus 200 people, maybe there were 300 at a time. And he was one of the [01:07:00] We had a roundtable discussion or, or camp, um, a fireside chat with him at the leadership retreat to talk about how he grew his company. And I even had a follow up conversation. How do you grow the company without growing the complexity? And he admitted that that part's hard. You have to choose the right people. Because ultimately what you do is you're only managing 10 people and everybody's managing 10 people. And that maintains, that allows you to manage complexity. So he has a team of 10 people that he trusts and they manage groups of each of those manage 10 people and then that scales.
But, uh, I wouldn't want to be involved in a situation.
I
have, I, I, I'm fortunate in that I have the freedom that I could say no if a company wanted to hire me to pay me more money. I don't think I do it, Evan, because at that point you c at that point, they own you, you, you can't say no to other things that might be cur might be interesting.
You c you're not [01:08:00] being paid to be curious at that
Evan Troxel: that point.
Phil Read: As a matter of fact, when I left Autodesk to go to work for the large and e firm, one of the first meetings I had with, with a senior executive as I sort of laid out the strategy, which I thought was a strategy for the quarter, and he said that's a good strategy for the year.
Okay.
Evan Troxel: Slow down.
Phil Read: that really surprised me. I thought, well, what am I going to do here that's valuable? But the, um, the other thing is I said, well, you know, is there anything I didn't mention that you need from me? And they said, um, we don't want you talking at conferences anymore or sharing anything we learn. Like, that's just for us.
And for me, that of being able to kind of discover something useful and share it with people was very important to me. It's kind of where I'm wired. And being told that I couldn't do that. I just had to say, well, I guess I can't do that anymore. And it was, it was dispiriting.
Evan Troxel: I know exactly what that, what that's like. Yeah. And I, I feel like, it's weird nowadays with social [01:09:00] media, and, uh, followers, and audiences,
Phil Read: Yeah, what can you talk about, what can't you talk
Evan Troxel: And all of a sudden it just becomes this weird nightmare of management, of, I can't be me anymore. Right? I am now, like you said, owned by that
Phil Read: And that's what you sign up for.
They own you 24 hours a day.
And so, if you say yes to that, just go and wise up, you know, with eyes wide open. Um, or don't, and go lean and work on the projects that you care about. And, I don't know that, I don't know that you necessarily won't make as much money, but you'll have a lot more left over. And what I found was making the most money that I'd ever made working for a company, I never enjoyed it.
Even when I was on vacation, because I knew at the end of two weeks I had to go back to the thing that I didn't enjoy. And so that was a very dispiriting. Kind of experience and I'm wired to not give up So even though I I felt like I should probably should have called my old director [01:10:00] back at Autodesk and said hey I got to be honest.
I think I've made a bad decision here. I'm not good at managing people But I didn't know how to do that, and I didn't know how to, I didn't know how to quit, or I didn't, it felt like quitting if I stopped doing it, so I didn't know, I was very, being very binary about
it, and, and so I think the hard part is, as subject matter experts, going back to the original thing is like, we get really good at something, you get recognized, you save the company a bunch of time and money, oh, you should manage a team, oh, yeah, that sounds great, I'll get paid more money, and then now it's like, oh my gosh, I'm managing a team, I really miss the thing I used to do.
So being told flat out, we don't want you speaking at conferences anymore, you don't write any more technical best practice articles, everything you learn we're only going to share internally. And it just kind of went, it just kind of a, a, a flame went out. But I thought, well, you're paying me a lot of money, I guess that's what you have to do when you, it's adulting.
Evan Troxel: Yeah,
Phil Read: That's what you do. And um, Yeah, so I probably learned a bit hard, you know, learned from bad lessons. The good thing with bad lessons [01:11:00] is that you pay attention.
Evan Troxel: pay attention.
Ha Bad
Phil Read: You're hyper attentive to the bad thing happening. Yeah, um,
Evan Troxel: we're kind of wired for that too.
Phil Read: but I don't think that a young, you know, going back to the, you know, the initial bookend of a young person that wants to be an architect now.
If you go to the expensive school, it's probably because you, you aspire to the status of going to the school and then working for the high profile firm. But if you don't aspire to that, if you want to have interesting customers and do interesting work that no one has ever heard about, you'll do really well.
Yeah,
Evan Troxel: yep, you can make a decent living being an
Phil Read: Oh yeah. Looking after, just solving the customer's problems. Give them a good experience. There's a guy in New Zealand named Val McQuarrie. And I don't think anyone listening has ever heard of him. Go look up Vaughn McQuarrie, uh, in New Zealand.
He's won House of the Year multiple years. He does incredibly precious work, and, uh, he uses a bit of SketchUp, a bit of Revit, a bit of Enscape, lives on an island off the coast of [01:12:00] Auckland. Uh, you have to get back and forth by ferry. Incredibly approachable, interesting guy, and He doesn't need the overhead, and customers are coming to him now, but he said no to a lot of things.
Um,
Evan Troxel: That was the sacrifice.
Phil Read: that was a sacrifice. You say no to the up front, fancy firm, fancy paycheck, but you kind of, you get to hold on to your freedom a little bit
more.
Evan Troxel: little bit. Yeah.
Phil Read: Yep, and that's the, uh, I think that's the long term. Ultimately, what I was trying to do was find a job or find a path where I could do it my whole life.
And I think, I think in that way I did, you know, architecture and technology.
And not saying yes to everything. Being careful about what you say yes to because you can't, you often can't go back.
Well, I didn't know it at the time.
Yeah, well, saying no to things, yeah, just saying no to, you know, the new car is great. New car should have [01:13:00] three day waiting periods, you know, you go back.
Um, yeah, don't buying the new car. don't make decisions that you can't get out of. And the new car locks you down, you know. If I think if I, if I borrow money to go to school, and if I Bought a new car and I had other debt. I would have never been able to say yes to taking a chance with this little company in, you know, Waltham called Revit Technology.
I'd be an architect in Charlotte, which is noble.
Um, but I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't have had the experience of hopping on a plane to come to Denver to chat with you, to fly back, you know, to be curious. Yeah.
Evan Troxel: Fun adventure. This has been a fantastic conversation. I feel like there's, there's a lot of wisdom, shared wisdom, in this
Phil Read: Well, you've had a lot of this experience too. Yeah.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, part of it is a shared experience that you weren't, didn't know you were sharing, and, and I, that's important to capture, I think, because there's so much in there that other people can glean from, I hesitate to [01:14:00] say learn from.
It's our experience, right? It
Phil Read: Well, I think you and I both said no to certain things, or have, or we were told no, right?
So we had to figure something else out. But once you learn to say no a little bit, and you find up this, and you find the sun still comes up the next morning, I think I'll say no again. And then pretty soon you're at a point where you can say yes to really what you care about and be hyper focused. And, um, it's freeing.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, definitely. I think that's a great place to Put a cap on this
Phil Read: Okay.
Evan Troxel: Yeah, this has been an incredible adventure flying and meeting in the middle of the country for a day for to record a conversation and then to go home and I hope, I hope people enjoyed it as much as I did because I got a lot out of it.
This has been great.
Phil Read: Thanks, Evan.

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EvolveLab has released an update to Veras, their AI rendering app, that allows designers to render (or re-render) a region of their image. So if you’ve already gotten something acceptable for the majority of your image, this is a useful and time-saving technique for only affecting a smaller

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A conversation with Jeff Echols.

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Jeff Echols of Shadow Partners joins the podcast to talk about the larger topic of innovation in the built environment and how it should focus on outcomes for people, whether it's employees, clients, or inhabitants of buildings. We also talk about how technology and tools are augmenting designers to solve problems to ultimately achieve those outcomes, how leaders should focus on creating a culture of innovation to address pain points and set themselves apart from commoditization in the industry, and more.

To learn more about Jeff Echols, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor: AVAIL

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Sponsor: Confluence

Confluence is an intimate, invite-only conference event for AEC professionals and technology providers to discuss industry trends and ideas, together. Learn more at https://getavail.com/confluence/

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Here’s a cool opportunity: The TAP Grant Program, sponsored by the Technology in Architectural Practice (TAP) knowledge community of the American Institute of Architects, aims to fund proposals up to $10,000 that leverage emergent AEC technology to solve challenges faced by architects and contribute to firm prosperity. The grant provides access to industry-leading mentors to help turn an innovative idea into a design tool. The deadline for the application is October 12, and the recipients will be notified in November.

TAP:

It is common to find that emerging design professionals, small firm practitioners, and others have amazing ideas on how technology can deliver better results for the built environment—but struggle to find the funding, mentoring, or trusted partners to carry out these disruptive ideas. To help foster this type of creativity and innovation within the architecture industry, this grant aims to help cover some of the development fees, and provide access to industry-leading mentors to help turn an innovative idea into a design tool.

Find out more here.

📰Take a load off. Get a weekly-ish newsletter digest of AEC/tech stories sent directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.

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There is no better drawing app on iPad than Procreate, and now they are taking to the next level. And they say this is only the beginning of their next chapter.

Enter Procreate Dreams, available for $20 on November 22nd.

Procreate Dreams is an all-new animation app packed with powerful tools that anyone can use. Create engaging hand-drawn animations, motion graphics and enhance them with photos, videos and sound.

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Procreate:

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What a business model. Create the best drawing app, charge a one-time fee for it (I think I paid $10 for it 6 years ago?) and sell the pants off it. Then take that money and develop a best-in-class 2d animation app building on what you learned. And then do it again.

While so many companies are clamoring for ways to get us to subscribe for generate recurring revenue, Procreate, McNeel, and others are proving that the pay-once method is still alive and well, and profitable.

I don't even do 2d animation and I will happily hand over $20 for this app to not only play with it, but also to support their amazing work so they continue to do more of it.

Check out the new site here.

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Daniel Inocente joins the podcast to talk about the field of space architecture, which involves designing infrastructure and habitats for space exploration and colonization. We talk about design challenges including optimizing volume, co-locating spaces and functions, and developing sustainable communities. We also chat about the design process that involves working with experts in material science, engineering, propulsion, and radiation, who and what is currently inspiring Daniel, and more.

Episode Links:* Daniel’s website * Daniel on LinkedIn * Daniel on Twitter * Daniel on Instagram

Watch this on YouTube128 ‘Space Architecture’, with Daniel InocenteDaniel Inocente joins the podcast to talk about the field of space architecture, which involves designing infrastructure and habitats for space exploration a…YouTube

Transcript 128: ‘Space Architecture’, with Daniel Inocente

_________

[00:00:00] welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. This is the podcast where I have conversations with guests from the architectural community and beyond to talk about the co-evolution of architecture and technology. A little bit of housekeeping before I introduce my guest for this episode. Would you like to receive my Troxel AEC tech newsletter that I send out on a weekly basis. In it, I linked to and comment on the quickly evolving tech and AEC landscape. Each edition has a curated shortlist of things that I think are worth paying attention to so we can all be aware of how tech and AEC are evolving. I won't spam you ever. So if you'd like to get my free newsletter head over to TRXL.co and click on one of the subscribe buttons.

Okay. In this episode, I welcome Daniel Inocente. Daniel is an architect space architect adjunct professor of architecture [00:01:00] at Arizona State University, and co-founder of ATOM. He has experience working for architecture and engineering firms and government, including SOM, Gehry Partners, HKS and NASA. Daniel's expertise spans various sectors, including commercial transportation, aviation, government, culture, science, education, and residential.

He also has worked in the aerospace industry, leading partnerships with government and commercial partners. He integrates interdisciplinary and diverse ideas, leveraging his combined knowledge of architecture, technology, and space architecture. In this episode, we discussed the field of space architecture, which involves designing infrastructure and habitats for space exploration and colonization. We talk about design challenges, including optimizing volume co-locating spaces and functions. And developing sustainable communities. We also chat about the design process that involves working with experts in material science, engineering, [00:02:00] propulsion, and radiation, who and what is currently inspiring Daniel, and more. So without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Daniel Inocente.

Evan Troxel: Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Great. Thanks for joining me today.

Daniel Inocente: Thank you for inviting me and for having me here.

Evan Troxel: All right. Well, I, I would love it if I, I know a little bit about your backstory, and it's fascinating, so I would love it if you would tell the story of your trajectory in your architectural career.

Daniel Inocente: Yeah. With pleasure. So I studied architecture. Um, I was born and raised in Los Angeles. Um, I was surrounded by a lot of very interesting activities happening in architecture, especially with, you know, the West Coast architects. Um, Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, looking at progressive movements. Um, my interest in architecture began when I was in high school.

I really [00:03:00] wanted to dive into a field that was both creative but also technical and allowed me to bring conceptual ideas into the world, um, and concrete terms. And so architecture really inspired me to think about that. And I read a lot about the work that Frank Lloyd Wright was doing, Le Corbusier Gropius, you know, just all the modernists.

Um, and even going back through time looking at historical works. And so for me that was always inspiring. The, the challenge of how do you take an idea about settlement, about building, about construction architecture, and then bring that into the world,

um, through different lenses. And so technology has a huge role to play in that.

And I've also been fascinated by technology, thinking about, um, digital technologies and how we can start to use technology to help design better buildings, better cities. Um, and visions for the future. So that's a little bit about my background. And then eventually, [00:04:00] you know, I finished school. I got to work with Frank Gehry, uh, Gehry Partners.

Um, I got to work on some pretty exciting projects there. Very artistic, hands-on building models, designing, sketching, using three D modeling software. Um, I even got to work on his personal house at some point, a new house that he was building. Um, and so I was on site with the contractor with the builders, um, three D modeling shop, producing drawings, you know, helping them, um, build his house.

And then I also got to work overseas when I was there. So I got to work on projects in the uk, um, the batter, sea development. And that was really exciting because, you know, his design aesthetic is really out there,

which is the envelope in terms of creativity.

But to get to that creativity, you have to go through a lot of technical hurdles.

And it's not just about, you know, construction, but also how do you communicate that idea with a contractor, with a manufacturer, with a builder. And, [00:05:00] um, digital modeling had a lot of importance in that.

Um, and then eventually I got to work for NASA for a year. Um, and so that kind of rekindled, um, an interest in of mine that I've had since childhood in space.

And I can talk a little bit about that later on.

But, um, then I moved to the east coast. I worked for HKS in Washington DC for a couple years and eventually ended up in Manhattan working for SOM for five plus years. And while I was there, um, I got to work on mixed use developments, um, high rise airports, museums, um, cities, like the, you know, large scale urban planning.

Just a wide range of projects really, um, around the world. And at the same time, I was leading research efforts in space and re kind of like reigniting. This, um, interest that I had in of mind from when I was a kid and thinking about space and how we can, as the architects and designers and urban planners and engineers bring ideas [00:06:00] from the terrestrial world into the space sector.

kind of leading up to where I am now

now I work as a space architect,

Evan Troxel: Great. And, and you're, and you're teaching as well. And so you're kind of bridging the gap between academia and practice. And I mean, that's a little bit unique because there's many people teaching who are not also practicing. They might have a similar experience as you working in medium and large offices. And that has led them to teaching in design studios. But, uh, continuing to practice. A lot of people have kind of pick a place to land and, and they pick academia if they're a tenured professor, anyway, it takes up all their time, I'm sure. Um, and so you're still kind of bridging between two worlds of academics and, or I should say academia and practice.

Right? And, and as a space architect, it's still, well, you tell me. Conceptual Is it still very conceptual work or is it actually going through the process of, of building, because you [00:07:00] talked about this, the importance to you of synthesizing ideas into reality. And it seems to me like the timeframe for space architecture is, you tell me how long it is, but it's still out there, like it hasn't, hasn't hit yet.

And, and we're not building in space yet. And so, uh, I would love to hear kind of your take on all of that because of your, your

passion for both of those things. Uh, academia and space architecture at this point.

Daniel Inocente: Yeah, I think that touches on the importance of research. You know, before, I think for every architect out there or any significant work, before you get that big commission, you have to have some thinking behind

it. There has to be some research behind it, and that's what we actively do. You know, as thinkers, designers, architects, um, we we're constantly looking for ways to solve

problems.

And so that precedes the problem itself before you actually have the opportunity to, um, solve that. And for me, academia is very important. Um, I've always wanted to teach. I [00:08:00] had the opportunity to start teaching at Arizona State University. Um, it's a very different environment, an amazing campus. Um, very interdisciplinary.

They have a lot of different departments, a lot of faculty, um, experts in different fields. And I love talking to them, especially with the architecture department. They're very creative and forward-looking. And so they gave me the opportunity to teach, um, studios there around design master studios. And so these are students who are just finishing up their masters and going out into the world and they're interested in thinking about architecture through the lens of space, space architecture, through, um, thinking about digital design and other, other ways of, you know, improving the built environment.

And so what I try to teach there is, um, I try to teach a little bit of interest in technologies that are outside the domain of the building environment, you know, like the, the a e c

industry. And then help them think through ways of . How can I take some of those ideas or technologies and bring them into [00:09:00] the terrestrial world?

And so one studio I had was, I introduced students to thinking about space habitation and then understanding what are the different kind of components and technologies that go into space, habitation, the challenges. And then immediately after that I said, okay, so now how do we design a facility where you can develop those key technologies, basically like a space research center.

And those space research, research center become, you know, just like an ecosystem of, um, development where you can, you can start to produce new materials, start to test new materials, do things like 3d printing, um, do some material science. So there's a lot of different programmatic components that come into this, but I believe that if we're gonna talk about space, going to space and making it sustainable, we need to have places where we can develop this technology, develop these systems.

Um, and most of the time, . , this is happening, you know, in the domain of like government agencies where they do a lot of the testing,

but also in large [00:10:00] aerospace companies where they have facilities. Um, a handful of aerospace companies can do that. But if you can give that capability to students and to young entrepreneurs, I think you can accelerate a lot of the thinking that is, um, pushing us to go, you know, into space and think about permanent space habitation and settlements and other things like that.

Um, but yeah, I would say for, you know, for bridging the gap between research academics and practical applications of space architecture, it's definitely not easy because when you're working with, um, an environmental, an environment as hostile, as outer space or on different planetary bodies, there's so many factors that go into it.

Not to mention the cost associated with developing these key technologies or capabilities. , but there isn't, I mean, there is a lot of, I would say, support for that. Um, not just here in the US through nasa, but also [00:11:00] abroad at different space agencies. And I've had the opportunity to work with different space agencies, um, in Europe and other universities, um, around the world.

And so there's, this is a global, you know, thing that people are pursuing and it's being tackled from different vantage points. There's also competition, but that's good, that's health healthy competition is always good and there's definitely a lot of progress happening now. Um, if you, if you keep up with the news and aerospace developments, you'll see that there's a lot of interest in going back to space, to the moon, to Mars and making those technologies possible.

Um, but I always love teaching, so I'm gonna continue to teach and I will try to challenge students in different ways. Um, next semester I'm actually teaching something very different. It's a high-rise studio. So thinking about . High density urban development in Manhattan. And I have a site, so from the students, and then I have some ideas about what it means to develop high [00:12:00] density.

And then, you know, in, in a time where housing is very important, in a time where sustainability is very important and where, um, we're kind of rethinking the way that we work and live. Um, and so that's, I think, also another important topic. Maybe not, I would say not completely connected to space architecture, but that's where I come from.

You know, I, I worked in two different worlds and I'm still fascinated by the two worlds. And every once in a while I find a ways to bridge 'em. It's not always it clear and people ask, well, how do you, how do you do these two different things? You know, it's not, it's not clear to me either all the time,

you just have to connect the dots once, whenever they become visible.

yeah,

Evan Troxel: yeah. I think, you know, you said rethinking the way we work and live, and that to me is something that happens all the time in academia. There's a constant kind of questioning of why do we do it the way that we do it? And at the same time, there we are still teaching students today the same way that we've been teaching students for. Decades upon [00:13:00] decades for a profession that is slow to change, right? It's slow to adopt new business models, it's slow to adopt new technologies in much of it, not everywhere. Right? There are obviously, you know, the bell curve is real in architecture too. There's the early adopters, there's the late adopters, there's the, the whole gamut.

And so I think you're probably more on the, the earlier adopter side for sure, right? The innovator side and, uh, but, but you can't, my, my question I guess is, or maybe, maybe my, I'll, I'll provoke you and just say like, how do you square up with the academic system as is when it is really designed to pump out graduates into The existing situation that so many of them will find themselves in, which is of the past, right? Like it is very much built on the practice of old, not the practice of new. You've, I think, found a different path and [00:14:00] you can even communicate that to students and you can show them that they don't have to fit into the quote unquote, you know, project manager role or the designer role in a traditional firm, because there are

additional avenues out there.

But, but I feel like you're against the grain in a, in a system that's, that's not changing very quickly either. In addition to professional practice, neither of them are changing very quickly. You're, you're on the

bleeding edge, but, but how do you kind of square that and how, how do you approach that when you're talking to students?

Daniel Inocente: Yeah. And one thing is for sure, you're never gonna have a smooth ride when you're trying to do things like this. Like you're always gonna find friction. Um, and so it's good. Actually, resistance is good because what I've discovered is for every individual, you know, there's always like something that is innate to you.

Whatever interests you, you know, like if there's a saying that we're all unique, I think we're all genetically unique. There's something unique to you, unique to me, unique to every individual. [00:15:00] And if you can tap into what makes you different, what you're really fascinated by, and you just like master that, it becomes easy for you to do that.

You know, you work hard at what things that are easy for you. And if you can do that in architecture, you might find a niche where it's like, I'm interested in, you know, architecture through the lens of software, or make, I'm interested in architecture through the lens of economy or philosophy or sociology, whatever.

Um, and then you tap into that potential and you start to, you know, craft a different mindset. Um, it makes you different. It sets you apart. It becomes your power, you know, and that's, I think one thing I try to tell students is, um, don't try to repeat what others are doing. Definitely don't like, I'll share my, my journey with you, but don't repeat my journey.

Um, everybody has a journey to take and you have to discover that what that is. But always question in my what if I'm doing something, am I enjoying it? And if after a certain period of time you're not enjoying it, You have to find a way to like shift gears.

You know, you have to find [00:16:00] something that you're really truly enjoying because, um, the only way you could get good at something is through a lot of hard work and repetition.

And sometimes that, that becomes boring. And then you wanna shift over to something else and you, you know, you have to like, you have to really like dive deeper into something that's interesting and you can push the boundaries in that way, but it has to come natural to you.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Yeah. The, the whole idea of of space architecture is really interesting because there's so much being learned about how to build in other places. Right. And so you talk about kind of the extreme or, uh, really harsh conditions as far as, you know, humanity would be concerned in o other locations that are On different planets. Right. Uh, it could be on the moon, could be on Mars. Uh, as, as a couple of, you know, examples that are probably, you know, readily, we can see those, we can see that happening. [00:17:00] And so when it comes to, like you talked about spec specific kind of, uh, facilities, ecosystems for developing ideas for habitation of other places like that, and there's so much being learned so quickly, how are you sharing that with students so they're not always starting from scratch when it comes to designing Or pursuing ideas for habitation on other planets. Is there like a compilation of knowledge that's being collected and and available, made available to students in that regard? Be beyond like the government agencies who tend to keep all of that stuff secret. I would assume, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like architecture's always kind of suffered from this, where it's like everybody has to go it alone. All the students are prepared through school to approach each project a blank page, [00:18:00] which is on one way. In one way, it's very good, right? It's fresh thinking on another way. It's like you are reinventing the wheel in many cases, right? And so how do we get beyond that and how do we share, you're a bridge between space architect and student, so you could share it personally. Is it happening at a scale larger than that? So that. We don't suffer the same consequences we have here, which is everybody has to pay their dues. Everybody has to climb the same ladder. You have to suffer the same way that I did through the, the process of becoming an architect. Uh, and, and so I'm just interested if that's changing at all when it comes to space architecture or is it more of the same

Daniel Inocente: Yeah, I guess in academics so far, I've experienced a lot of like free flowing

information. You know, people are willing to share, willing to help, to connect you with, um, resources that you need. And then of course, when you get into the commercial world, [00:19:00] it's always a competition. Um, certain companies, firms have a secret sauce,

whatever that is, and they don't wanna share that with anybody because.

They're all competing for different clients, especially in the AEC industry. Um, and I've experienced, you know, a combination of that and not just in the aerospace world, um, but also in the building world. And so I sometimes see it as like, not necessary. Um, I think the more we share, the better, the faster we can

move, you know, protecting ideas, protecting IP sometimes can get in the way of progress.

but it is also a good metric for innovation, you know, like capturing new ideas, technologies, patenting, um, and then documenting that. And then, you know, just making sure that we're together collectively creating new ways of, of, um, solving our problems, um, as a society.

Um, but I do say that there is a lot of great resources for students. Um, so once you get to a certain level, [00:20:00] like once you get to the, let's just say the hardware level, Um, or even like the technical level in a building design, you're gonna come across, um, a threshold where you can't access that information unless you're on the inside.

Um, but there is enough information out there, especially with the internet now you can learn how to do a lot of great engineering. A lot of, you know, learning a lot of things about design and the building industry or aerospace. Nasa, um, our government agency, they publish a lot of work. Um, if you go to their NASA tech part, they have a roadmap, really well documented roadmap on all the different discrete technologies and capabilities that are, are needed to sustain humans in space on the moon and Mars.

And these are all areas where we can actually go and say, I have an idea for this technology. Maybe I can come up with a company to develop this technology. And so if you're inspired to do that, you know, go and check out the. The, kind of like the roadmap there. [00:21:00] Um, but then there's also publications If you go, NASA has also really great, um, websites for publications.

And these are all govern. A lot of them are government funded. They're in partnership with universities. Um, the ai, AIAA is also a really good resource for this. You can look at the publications and there's also great conferences. So one thing I tell students is go to conferences, go to networking events, go meet other people, connect.

And, um, you'll find that that's one of the best ways to, you know, just to accelerate your career, um, face-to-face interaction with other experts and professionals because anybody who's successful will not deny you. Um, you know, some help.

Evan Troxel: I say the same thing. I, the, I feel like conferences are so important for exactly that, that the best part of a conference is not the classes, it's not the keynotes, it's not the expo hall, it's the person to person interaction that you can have and making real world connections. Definitely. It goes [00:22:00] above and beyond online connections. And I, I, I don't exactly know why, because I can connect with anybody anywhere in the world. I mean, this, this, podcast is an example of, of me doing exactly that every single week talking to people all around the world, but it doesn't compare to meeting in person, right? So there's just something different about it, and you really do have to take those literal

steps to get out there and do that, and. Pay for a ticket to those conferences, even if it, you know, figure out a way to get to those conferences.

I know a lot of people who will go to, they will not attend a conference, but they will go to the place where the conference is happening because the great conversations happen outside of conference hours many times.

And they'll just meet up with people for dinner, for

coffee, for whatever, because they know that they're gonna be in a certain place at a certain time, and it's a great time to connect with people. So

I, I totally agree with you. I think that that is one of the best ways to, to get out [00:23:00] there and gain the knowledge that only people, I, well, I should just say that people will, will, are more willing to share that in person over a, a very low key conversation, a very real conversation than they are gonna be, um, pushing that stuff over email or whatever for whatever reason.

But it's just, that is actually how it works.

Daniel Inocente: Yeah, absolutely. Everybody wants to connect

and so if you can find a good motivator to connect, uh, find it some, find something that you love doing, and then go to those conferences and learn from other people.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Daniel Inocente: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: I, you, you strike me as the kind of person who's been really motivated to get out there and experience things and connect with people, and that seems to be the, the trajectory that you've lived in your career. I'm, I love how you follow your passion. Like you, you, you said you also tell the same thing to your students.

If you're getting bored with something, often that's a sign that you're not growing, right? And so you do need to find the next thing [00:24:00] that you are interested in to drive the growth. And, and that will lead to new opportunities. It'll lead to new connections

and

all of those things. What are you interested in now?

What are you nerding out about right now that you, that just gets you so excited about where you're, where the industry is headed, where you're headed, things like that.

Daniel Inocente: Mm-hmm. . I will say one thing though, it's like, okay, it's not just getting bored and then shifting, but having the ability to be bored, but still . Want to do it, you know,

like, okay, you know that something is gonna take a long time to do,

but you know that the end

product is way more rewarding. And so you kind of, you see it through.

Yeah. Um, yeah. But I encourage the students to always like, see your project through, and like, even if you don't like the idea now, like, you know, the vision. So just keep iterating, keep designing, and eventually you'll get to a solution that you feel works with what you initially

thought you were gonna get to. [00:25:00] Um, but I'm, I'm very much interested in, um, the problem of building and building with technology, building smart. Um, I think information technology has a huge role to play in the future. Obviously, it's changing the way that we design. It's changing the way that we create. If you look at, you know, machine learning and ai, these are tools that are transforming different markets and sectors.

But I think, I think it has a huge role. And this is nothing new. I'm not seeing this. You know, like as something novel, but it's been talked about for decades. But I think it has a role to play in the way that we, um, communicate with and optimize our built environment. And so I think, you know, like the idea of, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous technology and sensing devices and information, um, will change the build.

The urban world will change our houses. We'll change our transportation systems, and it's already doing that. I just got a Tesla and I just love how easy it [00:26:00] is to use. The information's communicating with me how it's slows down and like it, the auto driving is such an incredible feature. Um, but you know, it's, it's communicating with you.

It's make, it's actually connecting with you as a human and augmenting your ability, making your life better. And so I feel like housing could do that. And so I started to venture into, um, prefab and smart, uh, smart homes. And so me and a friend, uh, Partner of mine who used to work with me at s o m, we started a company called Adam.

And, um, we're building our first smart home here in New York. And it's a really cool process for us because we're using manufacturing in the shop. We're using digital modeling, we're using computational design, we're looking at materials, sustainable materials, you know, like passive house certified products.

And then we're also producing a platform to help manage and communicate with the user, um, in terms of like resources, energy, [00:27:00] you know, water, um, all of the resources that we need to sustain a house. And so that's been an interest of mine. Um, and it's also, I think if you think of design, you know, design, when you start to look at it through the lens of systems, like systems of systems, and this is also speaking to the engineering side of what I do is, um, systems of systems thinking helps you really create products.

And solutions that anticipate the future.

You know, it's like lifecycle can, if you design a building now, how do you, how is it gonna be used? How are the occupants going to be able to adapt it? What is the way of tracking, you know, the, the different metrics, um, of how people are using it? And then what is the end?

So what is the end life of that product? Can you design something for recyclability or repurposing or for future optimization?

Evan Troxel: so many times, uh, an architect's. Job on the project is [00:28:00] over when the plans are submitted to a contractor. And you know, there might be some construction administration, maybe, maybe not. Depends on what the client hired the architect for. And then it's like onto the next project. And the next project is, you know, starting at the beginning and going to that point again.

And then doing that rinse and repeat. Seems to me like the things that you were just talking about, give an architect agency to keep the relationship very much alive. Beyond that, turning over of the keys. I, I hate to call it post occupancy, it's actually just occupancy, right? It's not, so many architects will do a post occupancy survey and it's like How, how good is that? That is Marks a point in time and, and it's not after occupancy. It's, it's like the whole idea of calling it, that just seems wrong to me. You can't call it post occupancy, but it's occupancy, right? And it's living with it now. And it's actually seeing if the hypothesis of the design is [00:29:00] actually performing, is

actually providing the things that you were set out to do in the very beginning. And so I think sensors, the, the tech that you're talking about gives us a, it opens the door to continue those conversations to continually improve. The built environment beyond handing over the keys, because we're so risk avoidant, right? We're, we're like, okay, uh, I hope they like it. I hope they don't sue me. I'm working on the next project. And we tend to step away from that responsibility or that possibility, that opportunity to continue to, from an architectural lens, learn from and make adjustments that will continue to make building perform in ways that really serve its occupants. What do you think about that?

Is that, is that one reason why you're excited about [00:30:00] this kind of technology or are you thinking about it from a, from other viewpoints?

Daniel Inocente: Yeah, definitely. So like part of it is design and part of it is, you know, working with a contractor and manufacturer. And then part of it is developing a technology, which, you

know, would most likely be under a different entity, but that technology could plug into the house. And then the house could be the hard, like the, the backbone, the uh, the chassis or the hardware that supports that software.

But it has to be equipped with all those sensing mechanisms and devices.

And then you have to be able to update them and replace them because as we know, um, computer technology is transforming really fast. And so like processor or sensor today, next year is gonna be much better, much faster. Um, but then.

Having knowledge of that. You know, like just understanding how to, how to design around smart systems. That's just like another layer that

you can work with. you know, like we work with different dimensions and so like, there's the, you know, there's the experiential dimension, there's the economic [00:31:00] dimension, the, you know, constructability dimension, all these different dimensions, and we're just adding another one,

So like, I think that's how I see architecture often is, um, we think in terms of dimension and then whatever dimension you as a individual designer are particularly interested in seems to like come out the most, you know, and you can see that in different works by different signature architects, whether it's like, you know, aesthetics or expressing structure or materials, you know, all these different ideas.

But for me that's interesting. It's like how do you collapse all these dimensions and then make it a part of your living environment?

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, and you've worked in offices that kind of have those different ethoses, right? Like s o m is is one of their, I think, design criteria. One of their values is expressing structure through The aesthetics of the design, right?

Like they don't wanna hide the structure, they wanna express the structure, they wanna show you what makes this building stand up.

And I always found [00:32:00] that to be a really interesting value that they seem to available in every building that I've experienced, that they've done. And you know, Gehry's got Gehry's version of that. And the different places that you've worked have their different version or what, what that list is with the highest priority for them is pretty apparent in that. So when you're working on projects, is, give me an idea of what, what the priority is for you when when you're

Daniel Inocente: Mm-hmm. .Um, so looking back at some of the art projects I've worked on have always started with . So first of course, structure comes into play, but you know, there's always like this domain, which is geometry, especially in large buildings. And geometry is kind of the basis for how you start to break up a, a building system because that geometry plugs into all the different variables.

Um, and you start to export things like, you know, like areas where you put the, the transportation system, like the [00:33:00] cores, the structural on the envelope. Um, and then you start to build on that what is your enclosure system. Um, but for me it's like a combination of looking at, you know, geometry. There always has to be an idea behind that geometry.

It can just be geometry for the sake of geometry. Um, and then there has to be an expression. And that expression, then it, it transforms, it shifts based on the structural idea. And so there's this kind of like emerging quality where you're working with an engineer. And then they give you some feedback on what the structure could be and then the spans of the structure.

And then you start to fine tune the overall form. And then that's somewhat, you know, like dictated by the areas and the mix of program. Um, and then you start looking at things like environment qualities, like day lighting and um, you know, heat cane. And there's all these different layers. And so for me, that's why digital technology, computational design has been so important because it's a tool that I've learned to master.

And then I can plug in all these different variables. I can take, I can take weather data, [00:34:00] I can take, you know, like f e a analysis software. I can take c ft software, I can plug it into my workflow, and then it starts to inform how I think and design. Um, and it's important to like also, you know, have a team with certain expertise to help you, to guide you.

Through that process, whether it's like internal planning, the layouts, or whether it's thinking about, you know, how do you integrate building integrated photovoltaics, or if you're working with like an enclosure system that has metal cladding or terracotta or stone, whatever. And then you start to like bring those elements into your design.

And so, yeah, sometimes I think we can be a little bit forceful because we have an idea and we're like, this is exactly how it's gonna look. And then you introduce some material that doesn't wanna work with that, but you're like, we gotta make it work somehow.

It's gonna intro, it's gonna be complex, but we'll make it work.

So you have to, you have to learn how to be flexible. And of course that's something that we're all constantly learning is like how do you, collaborate and how do you connect with people and give people agents and authorship over your [00:35:00] ideas. .

Evan Troxel: Design is such a series of trade-offs, right? It's, uh, there's, there's like that, that idea, the golden thing that you don't want any occlusions to happen in. And, and then there's the, the realities of money and

physical constraints and what the materials can actually do and how they perform and what the

environment needs. And, and so you're constantly trying to balance and juggle and, uh, make the right trade, make the right decisions about trade-offs that will serve the end result in the best way. And I, I think that's what's so interesting about the challenge of architecture and the problems that we're willing to take on to try to solve and, and. To me that, I mean, that's just like one of the most incredible things about architecture is just the, um, the, the never ending challenges with all of those different pieces that are kind of influencing the recipe that, that ultimately gets baked into the final, the final

building.

Daniel Inocente: Yeah.[00:36:00] And I guess the best, the best thing you can have in a project is a, an amazing site, an amazing client, you know, um, all these amazing like

collaborators where everything works. Yeah.

Everything works together well. Um, and then sometimes you're solving issues that are undetermined, you know, like I've worked on master plan projects where we're thinking about future generations

for like 10, 20 million people,

and like, how do you expand the city in a certain area, and then what kind of infrastructure do they need and what kind of building typologies and how do you, you know, design around that?

And so that's also, that's maybe like a little bit more forward looking, but you need to throw those ideas out there so that you can work with stakeholders and, um, constituents to help get that work done.

And that's not, that's not easy.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

I, the, the main job of an architect is communication as well as all of those other things. Right? It's a, it's

an underrated skill, but it also something that can be developed as a, as a true [00:37:00] skill to actually orchestrate all of that to,

to turn into reality at some point.

Daniel Inocente: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Evan Troxel: So you talked earlier about, uh, mastering digital technology. I would love it if you would just kind of go through the tool stack that you have mastered and, and just talk about that, because I think there's a lot of.

Daniel Inocente: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: Questions out there, what tools should I be using? And, and I hate to say the answer is all of them, right?

But they're, you use the right tool for the job and you talked about C f D and f e a analysis and all, and all these different things. And so maybe

you can just kind of run through the different things

that you're, you're using on projects. Not, not just so that we can name, drop what all the tools are, but just to give people an idea of, of what's going out there in the, the tool set of

Daniel Inocente: Mm-hmm. .Yeah, it's just like, um, first, you know, it's like a pencil. Like what kind of, what size lead are you using or whatever

are you using a pencil or a brush or a pin? Um, the tool changes the way that you [00:38:00] design and the way that you think often. And so it's important to keep that in mind. Uh, a certain tool is good for one thing, not necessarily good for

another thing. And, um, I've always tried to stay on top of, you know, software tools because I just know that they enable me. designer to think through the problems. and yeah, definitely. Like another thing I should say is the idea of mastering. It's not something you just, like, let's just say you get good at using a tool, it doesn't stick with you.

You have to practice it all the time. Um, otherwise you stop using a tool for six months or a few months and then something new came on, some, a new feature, um, a new technique, and you're just like trying to stay up to date with these things. You can never stay up to date with those things.

But it's fun to try, you know, it's fun to try that.

Try to stay up to date with the latest and greatest. Um, I've used Rhino a lot since I was in school. I've used Rhinoceros. Um, it's a really incredible tool because it can be used for any, any, any, um, industry. All scales from jewelry to cars, to [00:39:00] airplanes, to buildings, right? Like this is an incredible tool.

You can work in different units, um, you can do analysis, you can do visualization, you can work with plugins, a lot of different plugins for rhinoceros, whether it's environmental I would say it's one of the most powerful tools you can use as a designer, as an architect.

And I've also used Grasshopper. I mean, I've, I've, I've gotten really good at Grasshopper. I've spent way too much time behind Grasshopper. Um, and it's just one of those tools where it becomes like an environment of its own. At some point, you get so good at it that you don't even have to look at the three D modeling environment.

You can just look at the

the

graph

and you know what you're doing. You know, like as long as you don't get any like red, um, boxes, you're, you're,

Evan Troxel: it's interesting to think of Rhino just as a Grasshopper viewer, right?

Daniel Inocente: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: but it is

Daniel Inocente: Um, yeah.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Inocente: you know, the greatest challenge with Grasshopper is like data sets. Like how do you move, how do you structure data on the trees? And then [00:40:00] how do you move that data from one step to the next? Um, because if you do it incorrectly, your computer will crash, or you just won't get the output that you're asking for.

So it's, it's up to you

know how

Evan Troxel: problem solving and troubleshooting in there. Yeah.

Daniel Inocente: yeah, yeah. Like how to graph or how to like, distribute the data sets and break it up. Um, and then I've also really enjoyed working in industrial design software like Katia and SolidWorks. Um, these are tools that really help you get into like the detail, you know, like the, the nuts and bolts of.

Of an idea that you have. And at some point, I remember I was working because I used to use digital project when I was at Gehry's Gehry's office, and then I got really interested in using the latest version of Katia, which was a cloud-based Katia. the three D, the three D experience.

And so I started using that. Um, early on I was one of the first users, I was part of this like tribe group with a bunch of experts around the world. And we were invited to conferences in Europe, um, to basically talk about the work that we've been doing using their tools. [00:41:00] And we were helping inform the development of their software and that was really cool.

Um, I have friends who still work at that company and then they, at the same time they started developing a platform which is similar to Grasshopper. Basically it's like a graph, you know, like a friendly user interface, um, for being able to produce models and move data sets between different platforms.

Um, but I think tools like that, you know, cloud-based tools, Parametric computational tools, um, that can absorb a bunch of information very quickly. That can take you from something conceptual, like a basic geometry to something that can communicate a fabrication model. You know, like we talk a lot about in the industry, fabrication ready models.

Um, that's important because when you're designing and if you can take the design from concept all the way through a fabrication model, you're kind of recreating what's gonna be built in the real world. And so you're solving all those problems. And the three D environment helps you learn very quickly on how things work, tolerances, connections, you know, [00:42:00] material.

And that's, that's always been a, an interest of mine. So I, I learned how to use, you know, digital project early on in my career. I used, um, three D experience and then I got into SolidWorks. And I still use Rhino and Grasshopper today. But one thing that I haven't been able to crack is documentation. You know, we always have to deliver data, um,

documents.

And so like Revit is still the, the tool of choice for that. There's no other tool out there that can produce. Graphics, the quality of graphics that Revit can with annotations and dimensions and all that.

Um, but Revit is not, it's not a great, I'm gonna say design tool in terms of like big ideas, but it is a good design tool for solving, you know, as assemblies and technical details and how things come together.

Um, yeah, but there's also a disconnect there because every, nobody will tell you that this, but you know, when you have a Revit model, like a very small portion of it is three D, the majority of it is like a bunch of two D line work, [00:43:00] and it's all disconnected. And then you have like this Frankenstein where you're like, you have a design model rhino, and then you have your Revit model that's trying to like imitate the design model.

And then you have a bunch of drawings that are not connected to the three D environment. So

Evan Troxel: So

the coordination gets lost there, right? Because the, the

connection is broken. Yeah.

Daniel Inocente: yeah, yeah. And then, and then that makes it even harder to change a design because if you go back to your original design and you update that, Then you had it, you know, like

Evan Troxel: Now you're back to AutoCAD, right? Where you have to manually every, every drawing that is referenced from every other drawing. E every BIM manager who's listening to this podcast right now is just pulling their hair out, hearing this, right? Because you you that you never use field regions, you never use you never use model lines, you never use drafting lines.

You, it's like you, you, you draw it, right? And, and it is so hard for people because they're not, they don't have the deep, deep, deep knowledge of the application to be able to pull that off. Or maybe they

don't have the time to invest, figure out how to do that [00:44:00] in the quote unquote right way. Uh, because

the, the the timelines move very, very

quickly.

And then we end up, uh, taking these shortcuts. And then because we didn't do it right now,

we have to redo it later. And, and so we've spent even more time because we don't look at the whole timeline of how much time it actually takes to do it and, and apply the right, um, thinking to that. So we we're perfectly happy spending the time redoing the work later, uh, because we didn't do it right the first time.

But that doesn't make any sense

Daniel Inocente: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: I just wanted

to kind of, uh, include the people who were pulling their hair out into this conversation to say like, I, I, it's true. It happened. What you said happens all the time. And yet, uh, it's, it's almost impossible to fix it because not everybody can get to that level and every piece of software, uh, it's, it's, a, it's a,

true problem of our industry.

Daniel Inocente: yeah, yeah. And I would say it's not like we need to develop fabrication drawings, you know, like we don't always get that scope

or in part, need to do that [00:45:00] level of detail, especially in the

beginning. But it's nice to have a, a way to take information, interoperability from one platform to another, to another,

and then have it all somehow connected.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Daniel Inocente: And everybody talks about like, oh yeah, I developed this process and it's like seamlessly connected me from here to here. But I've, I've been in long enough in this field where I know that's not true. , I, I know that a lot of, there's a lot of like workarounds. cusThomization and what works for one project won't work for another

project.

Evan Troxel: the wild West. Yeah.

Daniel Inocente: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: it absolutely is. Talk about the kinds of projects that, that you've worked on. I mean, you, you don't have to go all the way back, but just in the last few years, what are the kinds of things that, that you're doing

with these tools to give people an idea of like what a quote unquote, space architect does?

Daniel Inocente: well I, maybe I go back to first the building projects that I worked on before,

and then I'll talk a little bit about space

architecture. so one project, which was really, um, Interesting to me was a Tower 380 meter tall tower [00:46:00] in China, the Gron World Trade Center. Uh, when I got into that project, we, it was still early stage and it was kind of like a concept developed around this idea of a master plan and a point tower, signature tower.

Um, and then we had this ambition to recreate, and this was a metaphor, you know, it's like inspirational, but the idea of like the rice fields and the flowing hills onto the building facade. But there was also other performative factors to that, which was about confusing the wind and cladding the external skeleton to optimize the lease bands and reducing the amount of carbon from the structure.

So there was a lot of other ideas behind that. But the, the enclosure system was really complex. Um, it was double curve geometry, um, all meant to be, um, powder coated aluminum. And there were these mega panels that were spanning like 3.2 meters. So, you know, like much taller than you. And me and, and these panels, they had to be built, um, locally.

And so fabricator at that time, they were just testing how to build this thing. And basically what [00:47:00] they had to do was create like a form work out of, you know, like just test it out, plywood. Then they would like press stamp it, press stamp the metal,

and then they would have to like, you know, basically weld it together and then like finish it, sand it.

And then eventually they came up with this mock-up. Um, and so the modeling of that, just like the digital representation was a really interesting exercise because we had to figure out how do we optimize that geometry so it can be repeated

and a certain number of

families.

And then

Evan Troxel: ask you

about that.

Daniel Inocente: how do you, yeah, how do you work with, um, the enclosure system and then the glass units because the building was tapering had to change as you're going up.

And so you had to like group the building into different segments. Um, and so all that was a part of a three D model that I developed. And then we, we gave that to the, um, the builder and the fabricator, and then they use that three D model to produce. A lot of the components of the building.

Um, and that was just one part of the process.

And we also used that model to document the project, and it was in, you know, in Revit. And we were just like, I [00:48:00] was linking it directly and pretend there was a change, I would just shoot the information back, um, working with the engineers to look at the column sizing because for a tower like this, as you go up, the concrete structure gets narrower.

So as you go up, it has to like step.

And then the engineers would give us, they would give us that information so that we can plug that into the, into the Excel. And then my Excel fed into the Grasshopper script, which spit out the geometry for the structure.

Um, but that was one project. So just thinking, you know, like how, how do you design something of that scale?

How do you work with a manufacturer? What kind of level of detail do you have to develop your model to? How do you document it? and then another project I can talk about in terms of space architecture, um, very dis, very dissimilar, but. I think there's some, like, some ideas I can connect between them is so the idea of, uh, a large habitat for the Moon Village.

This was a project that I spearheaded where, um, I was very fortunate at that time I was going to space conferences again, [00:49:00] connecting with people. had already met a lot of people when I was working previously in the space industry years before. And so they invited me to come to a space event and I said, okay, I'm gonna come and talk to people and learn about what's going on.

And, um, I got to meet some key individuals there, including the head of the European Space Agency at that time. And we had a fun discussion about bridging two different worlds. He was actually a civil engineer, um, in, you know, in his education. And so he, he just loved the idea of working with architects, um, to think about large scale developments beyond Earth.

And we basically struck up a partnership that evolved over a series of meetings, and eventually we started to work on a concept for a . Space habitat. And that space habitat is that vertical four story habitat that, um, that you see in, if you just search Moon Village, um, east side, you'll, you'll see that project.

And that was when I was working at SOM. And so me and, uh, a few others at the company were working on this project. it was a really,[00:50:00] enriching experience because I got to connect with a lot of people outside of my field. people from material scientists and engineers to propulsion experts, you know, radiation experts, just like things that we never talk about in the building industry because we just don't need to.

so that really opened my eyes up to what it takes to build infrastructure and space. It's not just about habitation, you know, it's about, um, protecting yourself from the outer space environment. It's about the transportation system that your concept has to be designed around, because that limits the mass and the scale of your habitat and then the destination.

How do you get it down to the surface of another celestial body? And then how do you transport it? What are the sequence of events to getting it from, um, being on the surface to being fully occupiable? And these are all actual like problems that we are gonna have to solve when we start sending humans back to the moon.

And so I got to think about these problems, um, in, in a certain level of detail, but not too much. And that was really amazing for me to just come up with [00:51:00] an idea that was widely published and accepted and celebrated and people thought it was, it was a cool concept, even though it's a little future forward because the habitat is pretty large.

Horse stories is not something we can deliver anytime soon.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Daniel Inocente: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Can you talk about that delivery? I mean, it, it seems like, you know, there's payloads in, in. Transport and there's logistics and, and you've also kind of mentioned three d printing where you would use available materials, you know, that that would be localized to the site, I assume. But all of that is, is gotta be a huge topic of conversation early on in these projects rather than figuring that stuff out later. Uh, there, there's,

there's so many things that are just based on logistics alone. I would imagine

that, that as part of that conversation so early on

Daniel Inocente: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. It's like, uh, you know, real estate location. So there's also location on the moon that's optimal for resources, for access to daylight, for power,

[00:52:00] um, for access to water, ice, and also for geologic interest. So like the premise of going to space, going to the moon, um, it's a combination of things like industry, technology development, science from governments, and then also.

You know, people just are excited about it. So tourism might play a role in that in the future, and it might be actually a very important role because we need to find a way to subsidize going to space,

um, in big ways. But yeah, the resources in outer space are vast. You know, we're always talking about, limitations of earth and how, you know, we, we need to like control our consumption

and how we're transforming the, the planet.

But if you stop to think, you know, the, just the inner solar system could support, you know, like trillions and trillions of people. If we, we learn how to harness the resources of outer space,

and that's one of the, the most interesting things you can start to think about. So like how, how can we make useful resources in outer space?[00:53:00]

Well, maybe we can't bring them back to earth, but we can definitely go to outer space and harness energy. Can we bring some of that power back to earth? Or can we develop technologies as we're going out there that can be used? In terrestrial applications, one of the greatest, um, exports that we'll have from going to space is, um, patents, you know, like new ideas, new technologies, new patents.

And so that, that would definitely be a measure of, progress. Um, like in the, during the space race, I think that during that period with the most number of patents and technologies developed, you know, in the history of the

us So that, so that's where, that's where I think it's also interesting.

It's, it's, challenge for us to innovate. Um, but resources will play a huge role. And on the moon, for example, if you can harness water, ice, you can turn that into fuel, you can turn that into oxidizer, you can turn that into, um, consumables like water for humans. Um, and then if you look, if you can learn how to harness the regolith, you can use that for three D printing.

[00:54:00] You can use that for producing metals. There's a lot of glass in the surface as well. So, All of this will take time. It's gonna take a lot of invention. 'cause we don't have any machines that can survive the outer space environment, especially on the moon

where the red lift is abrasive and if it gets into any gears, it damages the gears.

There's a lot of information about this and during the Apollo missions and how it damage a lot of like the suits and the gears and you know, the materials. So there's gonna be, uh, a huge, you know, need to, to innovate there. and resources are just the beginning.

the other side is, can we develop sustainable community?

Um, we have to rethink how we design spacecraft for habitation. what is the most optimal volume for people to live and thrive for a certain duration? An extended duration. You know, like the moon missions were only lasting, um, a couple

days. A few days. Where, um, in the future we're gonna want to have people go out there for months, [00:55:00] maybe years.

Like on the i s s, what's the average 180 days? You know, I think people have spent, um, as long as a year or more up in the i s s, but then if you want to go to the moon, it's quite, you know, it's not that far, but still it's a distance. And

if you go there to do any meaningful work, you're gonna wanna stay there for months

to develop technologies and to prove, um, that things work.

So that's where space has space architects come in and we can come up with ideas like, how do we optimize the use of volume? How do we co-locate spaces and functions? And then what is the, the optimal, you know, like design configuration for space habitat that has a certain purpose. Um, and so there's a lot of layers that we can plug into.

It's kind of like the role of the architect. We a, we're, we're helping architect, um, a mission, a vision, and then the integration of all those technologies into that space for human

for human occupancy.

Evan Troxel: Right. What, what inspires you? I mean, not just visually, but, but [00:56:00] technologically. I mean, there, I, I would assume that a lot of sci-fi does a really good job of kind of inspiring people to think beyond traditional forms and, and the bounds of, of that we actually have in physical, in the physical world now. Um, but it's in, it really interesting to me to see devices emerge, transportation systems emerge,

Daniel Inocente: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: was conceptual imagery for, you know, way, way, you know, decades ago that's now happening today. For you, what, what is inspiring is, is there imagery that exists that's inspiring you that, that you could point at?

Daniel Inocente: I wouldn't say imagery, but more, the hard work of certain individuals out

there. I mean, I. I'm just gonna say it, but SpaceX is doing incredible work and the idea of going to Mars and building a, a ship of that scale, I think that's super inspiring because[00:57:00] if you can get, you know, that amount of mass to space and to another celestial body, it just, it, it kind of hits the reset button on what we can design.

And so for, for anybody who's thinking about sending, you know, equipment or technology or habitation to another, to the moon or to Mars, you can start to come up with different ideas.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Daniel Inocente: Even satellites, I mean, even satellite missions, you know, like we used to be able to send small satellites and um, like the Hubble Space Telescope has brought back a lot of, a lot of great science and imagery.

And then now we're looking at, um, you know, larger and larger, um, telescopes that can identify other habitable worlds and tell you what the characteristics are.

And can we, you know, how many, how many habitable worlds are out there? That's another cool topic. It's like, can we . Can we, um, prove that there's life beyond Earth?

And that's one of the premises we're going, you know, to Mars. Like, we're searching for life signs of life.

Evan Troxel: It becomes [00:58:00] the next jumping off point, right? It becomes the new reset of, okay, now we can look from here. Instead of looking from where we are right now, gives us a new perspective. It's really interesting to think about, uh, I'm not sure where I got this idea. I know it's not from my own brain, but that the whole idea of the universe is always expanding and the universe is always shrinking in the way that we're always designing more powerful tools, whether that's a telescope or a microscope, to look at smaller and smaller things. Every time we do that, we just find out that there's more out there. I think that is so

interesting, like there is no end. Magnification wise or telescopic, like, we just keep finding smaller and smaller things and we keep finding bigger and bigger bounds to everything. I think that is so interesting and, and for us to, in academia place any kind of boundaries on what is possible for those graduates to go into or achieve is completely ridiculous to [00:59:00] say, you know, these are the, these are the firms that exist today and therefore you need to get ready to work at those firms.

Absolutely ridiculous. This is the software that exists today, so this is the software that, that, this is the only thing you'll ever need to learn. I don't know that anybody thinks like that, but I definitely know there have been people who say that and have said that kind of thing in the past, and it's just incredible to me that there is no, there are no bounds to any of this. And to find a trajectory of interest

for every single individual who's interested in

pursuing these fields, uh, the, it's wide

open there. There's just so much possibility.

Daniel Inocente: life is such a short journey. Like you have to make the most of it because you're here and then you're

not. It's a, it's a brief moment, so just follow what you enjoy and, uh, you know, just make careful decisions along the way. Um, like I have a family now, I have two kids, and so now my choice is a little bit more calibrated than before

I have to think about them too.

and it's, uh, it's important [01:00:00] to just pursue your, you know, what, what makes you wanna wake up and do the work that you do.

Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Lovely way to end this podcast. I think right there that you just summed it up so, so beautifully. And, uh, Daniel, it's been a pleasure having this conversation. I'm hoping we can share some images, uh, people I think at this point will have either seen them and the vis video version of this podcast. Or, uh, if you listen to the audio version and you wanna see some of the, the imagery of what Daniel was talking about, check out the YouTube version and, uh, I'll put links to everywhere you can find Daniel online in the show notes. And Daniel, is there anything else that you wanna tell the audience or, or let them know a place they can connect with you?

Daniel Inocente: Yeah, feel free to go on my website, connect with me, and if you're interested in a particular topic that just, uh, reach out. I, I always respond. I think that's always, you know, it's important for me to respond whatever questions. I, I love working with students and professionals, experts, anybody.

Evan Troxel: [01:01:00] Making connections. All right, Daniel,

thank you so much. I appreciate your time today.

Daniel Inocente: Thank you, Evan. Take care.

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To learn more about Daniel Inocente, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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This week's headlines:AVAIL releases Project Navigator for RevitAVAIL has released Project Navigator for Revit, which extends Revit's native project browser to help users navigate complex projects. The new features include search and filtering capabilities, an Instance Navigator, and quick access to AVAIL's content library which also boasts the new Channel Groups feature. Read more

AI in architectural education and practiceArchitect Carlos Banon discusses the potential of AI in architecture, highlighting the need for proper training and incorporating AI techniques while preserving foundational knowledge. Read more

Snaptrude shows v2 featuresSnaptrude's upcoming version of their collaborative BIM platform offers dynamic curve modeling, easy access to BIM tools, smart layout tools, and comprehensive data management. Read more

3d Modeling in Rhino on an iPadIn a new video posted online, the TestFlight beta version of iRhino3D on iOS shows modeling tools like curves, surfaces, solids, Push/Pull, object snaps, grid snap, and more. The app is turning into something much more than the viewer it once was. Read more

Don't miss the latest TRXL podcast episodes126: ‘Be the Rock Star of Your Industry’, with Carey Balogh and Lauren GenestA conversation with Carey Balogh and Lauren Genest of Brand Groupies.TRXLAdmin🎧Carey Balogh and Lauren Genest of Brand Groupies join the podcast to talk about their unique SOPR approach, which combines social media and PR to fuel brand recognition, storytelling, and personality-driven strategy, their background in fashion, and how looking at AEC through that lens informs their strategy. 127: ‘Accelerating Offsite Construction’, with Radu GideiA conversation with Radu Gidei.TRXLAdmin🎧Radu Gidei of KOPE joins the podcast to talk about their compay's vision to provide a software platform for designers, builders, and manufacturers to transition from design to construction using prefabricated products for the offsite construction market.Subscribe to TRXL wherever you get your podcasts

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If you have an iPad and you’re interested in testing some modeling capabilities using McNeel's free iRhino3D app, you’re in luck.

In this video you can see what the team is working on in the TestFlight version (read: not the App Store version) of iRhino3D, the much younger sibling of Rhino3D that runs on Apple's iOS platform for iPhones and iPads.

What’s in this latest build? Modeling tools including curves, surfaces, and solids, Push/Pull, the command line, multiple views, object snaps and grid snap, selection tools, edge fillets, and more.

Using multi-touch for navigating the modeling environment is great, but I personally love the way Apple has implemented mouse and trackpad support on iPadOS. From the example video, it looks like using a mouse is the best way to drive iRhino3D for precision when modeling on these devices, although I'm sure you could use touch and gestures if you really want to.

I'm hoping a lot of these features make it into the App Store version at some point so more people can use their iPads for real work. Lord knows more pro apps would be welcome on the platform. My guess is that the release of iRhino3D would occur sometime around the official release of Rhino 8, which hasn't been announced yet.

You can also share your constructive feedback with the team in this forum post.

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Snaptrude has posted an image of curvy balconies with the tagline "curves are beautiful" showing off those and other new features in the upcoming v2 release of the collaborative BIM software.

It looks like a solid improvement to a tool that is developing very quickly. See the teaser here.

📰Take a load off. Get a weekly-ish newsletter digest of AEC/tech stories sent directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.

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In an article at Parametric Architecture, Architect Carlos Banon discusses the potential of AI in architecture, both from an educational standpoint and as it relates to the future of the profession.

From what I've heard, AI image generation is being used a lot in school.

Banon:

“In

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A conversation with Radu Gidei.

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Radu Gidei of KOPE joins the podcast to talk about their vision to provide a software platform for designers, builders, and manufacturers to transition from design to construction using prefabricated products for the offsite construction market.

Radu also talks about the challenges that contractors and architects face when trying to adopt offsite construction—including the lack of visibility into available construction systems and the risks associated with using new systems on a project—without the need to completely revolutionize their workflows.

Overall, this episode provides insight into the world of offsite construction and how KOPE is working to make it easier for designers and builders to adopt it.

To learn more about Radu Gidei, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Sponsor: Confluence

Confluence is an intimate, invite-only conference event for AEC professionals and technology providers to discuss industry trends and ideas, together. Learn more at https://getavail.com/confluence/

Sponsor: AVAIL

AVAIL is the content management system you deserve. With its beautifully simple interface, AVAIL makes it easy to to manage, organize, find and use your information. Designed by designers for designers and engineers, the AVAIL platform takes advantage of visual acuity, allowing for a visual audience to identify what they need in a couple clicks. To learn more visit http://getavail.com

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AVAIL:

Introducing Project Navigator, a powerful new feature of AVAIL for Revit that extends Revit’s native project browser to help you navigate the dense information you are forced to endure as your projects grow. Don’t wait for Revit 2024 to take advantage of advanced search

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A conversation with Carey Balogh and Lauren Genest of Brand Groupies.

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Carey Balogh and Lauren Genest of Brand Groupies join the podcast to talk about their unique SOPR approach, which combines social media and PR to fuel brand recognition, storytelling, and personality-driven strategy, their background in fashion, and how looking at AEC through that lens informs their strategy.

To learn more about Carey Balogh and Lauren Genest, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor: Confluence

Confluence is an intimate, invite-only conference event for AEC professionals and technology providers to discuss industry trends and ideas, together. Learn more at https://getavail.com/confluence/

Sponsor: TRXL+ Membership

With a TRXL+ membership you will get your own private feed for ad-free episodes of the podcast, the show notes right in your podcast app and in your inbox, your own ad-free copy of every TRXL AEC/tech newsletter delivered directly to your inbox, and additional member-only content over time. Get $20 off your first year when you sign up today. Go to https://trxl.co/launch20

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👋🏼 Hi there! The AEC/tech Newsletter supplements the TRXL Podcast to fill in the details of what’s happening in the AEC/tech landscape. Happy reading.

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and the Australian Institute of Architects have each released guidance and policy requests to their respective governments emphasizing the need for caution and ethical considerations when using artificial intelligence (AI) in architecture according to a recent article

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Arcol is a cloud-based, browser-accessed design workflow tool, so you can skip the step of installing software because there is no software to install. Read this post to find out more and then head over to Arcol to create a free account and give it a spin.

They aim to

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As teased near the end of TRXL podcast episode 110 with Melodie Yashar of ICON, a competition called Initiative 99 was recently announced in partnership with Dezeen that invites architects and designers to submit home designs that can be built for under $99,000... using 3d-printing of course.

More than

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The New York Times has published an article on how AI can help address challenges the AEC industry. You may recognize some of the featured people and companies from their appearances on the TRXL podcast. Read to the end for related episodes.

While I don't think any of

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A conversation with Maria Yablinona.

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Maria Yablonina of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto joins the podcast to talk about robotics in architecture; specifically her work in developing tools and machines to aid in construction projects where she emphasizes the importance of both considering practical applications and involving workers in the development process. Maria also highlights the need for interdisciplinary collaboration and the importance of empathy and literacy in navigating different fields.

To learn more about Maria Yablonina, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor: Confluence

Confluence is an intimate, invite-only conference event for AEC professionals and technology providers to discuss industry trends and ideas, together. Learn more at https://getavail.com/confluence/

Sponsor: AVAIL

Sponsor: TRXL+ Membership

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A conversation with Dimitrie Stefanescu and Matteo Cominetti of Speckle.

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Dimitrie Stefanescu and Matteo Cominetti of Speckle join the podcast to talk about Speckle: an open-source data platform for the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, which aims to make it easier for people to connect their tools and share data. We also discuss how the platform's community-built connectors enable users to connect to Rhino, Revit, AutoCAD Civil 3D, Excel, and many more applications via the cloud.

The conversation also covers how Dimitrie, Matteo and the team are exploring the integration of machine learning models and automation workflows into the platform, their belief that open-source infrastructure is necessary for equitable distribution of value within the AEC industry, and how the industry should compete on the designs produced, not on the tools used to produce them.

To learn more about Dimitrie Stefanescu, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor: Confluence

Confluence is an intimate, invite-only conference event for AEC professionals and technology providers to discuss industry trends and ideas, together. Learn more at https://getavail.com/confluence/

Sponsor: AVAIL

Sponsor: ArchIT

Why are you putting up with the mediocre IT service delivered by a generic IT provider? ArchIT only supports Architecture, Design, and Engineering firms at a price that would pleasantly surprise you. Let them take care of your IT so you can focus on doing your best work. Read the reviews, see their pricing, and request a free consultation at getarchit.com.

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Concert has highlighted several new team productivity features on their platform. Broadly they include improved collaboration and task management, new visualization tools, and a new intuitive and easy-to-use interface.

More specifically the features are aimed at file distribution, decision making via collaboration, delivering real-time insights, permissions and role-based functions, and

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👋🏼 Hi there! The AEC/tech Newsletter supplements the TRXL Podcast to fill in the details of what’s happening in the AEC/tech landscape. Happy reading.

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NVIDIA has helped form the OpenUSD Alliance, a group dedicated to establishing and promoting the Open Universal Scene Description (USD) as a standard for 3D graphics. The alliance includes several notable companies in the entertainment and technology industries, including Pixar (who originated the technology in 2012), Apple, Adobe, and Autodesk.

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The new 3D Warehouse Image Search feature was shown to me during a personal demo session at the SketchUp booth at the AIA Conference on Architecture in June. This kind of workflow just makes so much sense. Simply drag an image of an item you want in your model (you

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A conversation with Scott Reynolds.

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Scott Reynolds of UpCodes joins the podcast to talk about their latest product: Copilot. Copilot leverages AI to make the building code more accessible. We also cover the journey of Upcodes, the challenges of democratizing access to the building code, and the potential for innovation in the compliance space.

To learn more about Scott Reynolds, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Do you have some old renderings of projects in your archives? That was rhetorical.

Want to see if they can be even more compelling as video? While your images may be worth 1,000 words, videos are often a more rich means of communicating an idea. Runway aims to do

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A conversation with Boris Rapoport and Alex Osenenko.

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Boris Rapoport and Alex Osenenko of ArchIT join the podcast to talk about mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We discuss the importance of planning and communication in the process of acquiring or being acquired by another company, the need for continuity and quality in service delivery, the importance of involving people from various internal teams in the transition, their three-step process for transitioning the acquired company's brand, and more.

To learn more about Boris, Alex, and ArchIT, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

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Unity:

Unity, the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, announced today the launch of its beta program for visionOS that includes access to Unity PolySpatial. Featuring integration with the Unity editor, creators can build experiences that run in visionOS, and leverage the amazing

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Welcome news for us Mac users: ShapeDiver recently announced they added support for the Mac version of Rhino 7.

Are you interested in building your own online configurator, including a 3d model and changeable parameters? Look no further.

ShapeDiverlets you upload and display your Grasshopper models online in a

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Arcol is hosting an event on August 15th dubbed "a discussion on the future of digital design tools". It looks like it will be a fantastic event to attend if you're in the NYC area based on the subject and the speakers. Alas, I am on

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A conversation with Mollie Claypool.

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Mollie Claypool of Automated Architecture (AUAR) joins the podcast to talk about how technology could be used to bridge the gap between the way architecture is designed and the way it is built in order to make it more accessible to the 99%. Other topics include robotics and automation in architecture, the disconnect between design and construction, bridging the gap between design and reality, the importance of social values and impact in architecture, the need for hands-on learning and visual thinking in education, and more.

To learn more about Mollie Claypool, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor: ArchIT

Sponsor: Confluence

Confluence is an intimate, invite-only conference event for AEC professionals and technology providers to discuss industry trends and ideas, together. Learn more at https://getavail.com/confluence/

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Building on my last post about being able to watch the NXT BLD & DEV presentations on demand, the Future AEC Software Specification is one of the more impressive outcomes of the recent NXT DEV conference, which was specifically addressed in the presentation provided by Aaron Perry of AHMM.

Here&

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Martyn Day writing at LinkedIn:

…with firms sensing that there was a new market for innovation in AEC, there has been a swelling in the number of start-ups, together with willing VCs to fund them. We brought all of these pieces together in an event called NXT DEV, which

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Enrique Tovar at ArchDaily:

Undoubtedly, the integration of computational tools offers vast possibilities and applications for generative design. These tools enable us to work with greater precision and awareness, optimizing resources and emphasizing critical decision-making. Therefore, we have curated a selection of tools and platforms that demonstrate the potential of

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Tim Fu of Zaha Hadid Architects recently posted about LookX:

We architects have been yearning for a dedicated AI platform for refined control and industry-oriented outputs. I can finally say, the first contender to the scene is here: LookX

According to Fu, it’s been trained on architectural data

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The link for this episode has moved here.

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A conversation with Ryan Cohen and Matt Clarey.

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Ryan Cohen and Matt Clarey of Neoscape join the podcast to talk about to talk about Project Hillside. You may not know this project from its “Hillside” name, but you probably have seen and heard of it before (perhaps more-so if you’re coming from an architectural background) as architect Moshe Safdie’s Habitat, an architectural landmark which was built in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1967 for the World’s Fair… although what was built, it turns out, was only an amended version of the overall vision from Safdie’s master’s thesis project at the School of Architecture at McGill University.

Today Project Hillside brings the entire vision to life through an incredibly detailed and fully immersive digital architectural experience, which was a collaboration between the teams of people at Neoscape, Moshe Safdie Architects, and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

In this episode Matt, Ryan, and Evan talk about the thousands of hours, dozens of people, and the tools and tech it took to create the experience, as well as the new potentials for user experience and storytelling within immersive digital environments.

To learn more about Ryan Cohen and Matt Clarey, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor: AVAIL

Sponsor: Confluence

Confluence is an intimate, invite-only conference event for AEC professionals and technology providers to discuss industry trends and ideas, together. Learn more at https://getavail.com/confluence/

Sponsor: ArchIT

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A conversation with Stefana Parascho.

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Stefana Parascho of the Lab for Creative Computation (CRCL) joins the podcast to talk about the increasing accessibility of robotics in architecture education and industry, as well as the need to consider the long-term impact and trajectory of the field. In her role as professor, she highlights the excitement and formative experience for students to participate in the ideation and fabrication of precise and complex structures. We also talk about her background in architecture and her experience with computational design, robotics, and her current work with multi-robotic assemblies. Ultimately, Stefana envisions a future where robots can work alongside us as co-workers, with the ability to execute smaller tasks and communicate with humans in a more intuitive way.

To learn more about Stefana Parascho, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor: Confluence

Confluence is an intimate, invite-only conference event for AEC professionals and technology providers to discuss industry trends and ideas, together. Learn more at https://getavail.com/confluence/

Sponsor: AVAIL

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A conversation with Carl Christensen.

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Carl Christensen of Autodesk joins the podcast to talk about the development of Forma and their focus on the early phases of the design process for better design outcomes. We talk about how his startup (originally Spacemaker AI) evolved into Forma, the use of AI as an assistant to designers rather than a replacement, and the potential for AI to help with rapid simulations and analysis. We also discuss the benefits of live collaboration, real time access to data, the openness of the platform, and about how Forma is expected to evolve after this first release.

To learn more about Carl Christensen, see the full show notes with links, find more episodes, and find the past guests on the TRXL podcast please visit https://trxl.co

Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor: Confluence

Confluence is an intimate, invite-only conference event for AEC professionals and technology providers to discuss industry trends and ideas, together. Learn more at https://getavail.com/confluence/

Sponsor: AVAIL

Sponsor: TRXL+ Membership

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👋🏼 Hi there! The AEC/tech Newsletter supplements the TRXL Podcast to fill in the details of what’s happening in the AEC/tech landscape. Happy reading.

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Jeff Echols of Shadow Partners recently invited me to join him on the Shadow Shorts show to talk about a problem that needs to be addressed in the AEC industry.

Are you feeling like you're drowning in data? Another app... really? These are some of the things I

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Dr. Tessa Lau of Dusty Robotics joins the podcast to talk about her entrepreneurial background, where the idea for Dusty came from, what Dusty the robot does on construction sites to enable multiple trades to be more efficient and ultimately cut weeks off construction schedules, the design, brand, and persona of the robot, how Dusty works, who’s adopting Dusty as a tool for projects, and much more.

Latest TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter🗞️ AEC/tech Newsletter #13👋🏼 Hi there! The AEC/tech Newsletter supplements the TRXL Podcast to fill in the details of what’s happening in the AEC/tech landscape. Happy reading.TRXLEvan TroxelEpisode Links* Tessa on LinkedIn * Tessa on Twitter * Dusty Robotics website * Dusty Robotics on LinkedIn * Dusty Robotics on Twitter

Watch this episode on YouTube117: ‘Every Day Counts’, with Tessa LauDr. Tessa Lau of Dusty Robotics joins the podcast to talk about her entrepreneurial background, where the idea for Dusty came from, what Dusty the robot does…YouTubeEpisode Transcript117: ‘Every Day Counts’, with Tessa Lau

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[00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. This is the podcast where I have conversations with guests from the architectural community and beyond to talk about the co-evolution of architecture and technology. A little bit of housekeeping upfront here. Are you signed up to receive the weekly ish Troxel, AEC tech email newsletter.

This is your reminder to sign up so you can keep up to date with things that I collect and find interesting with what's going on in the industry. It's a good supplement to these podcast episodes, head over to TRXL.co and click one of the subscribe buttons there.

I've recently written about trends in AI, nerfs, grasshopper to Autodesk forma, some exciting new software updates for Inscape and test fit and more. With your subscription. You also get the show notes and links from these podcast episodes delivered to your inbox. And once again, you can find the sign up link at my website, T R X [00:01:00] l.co. Okay. In this episode, I welcome Dr. Tessa Lau considered one of the most influential women in robotics. Tessa is an award-winning CEO and roboticist Who's most recent venture dusty robotics is revolutionizing the construction industry.

Dusty automates the BIM to field layout process through a robotic field printer, eliminating costly errors and speeding up construction schedules. Prior to dusty robotics. She was the co-founder CTO and chief robot whisper At savvy Oak robotics, Where she automated hotel delivery and orchestrated the global distribution and management of consumer facing robots. Tessa was also an early member of Willow garage, the legendary research lab and technology incubator known as one of the most influential forces in modern robotics. Though closing its doors in 2014, Willow garage is responsible for the creation of an open source robot operating system. That's still being used by academics, engineers, and hobbyists around the world today. Dr. Lee is a frequent speaker [00:02:00] at business technology and construction conferences and has received numerous awards including Silicon valley business. Journal's women of influence SVRs innovation award and the award for excellence from the association of computer machinery. Currently living in Silicon valley. Dr. Lee holds a PhD in computer science from the university of Washington. In this episode we discussed Tessa's background where the idea for dusty came from what dusty the robot does on construction sites to enable multiple trades to be more efficient and ultimately cut weeks off of construction schedules The design brand and persona of the robot How dusty works Who's adopting dusty as a tool on projects and much more so without further ado i bring you my conversation with dr tessa Lau.

Evan Troxel: Tessa, welcome. Great to have you on the podcast.

Tessa Lau: Evan great to be here.

Evan Troxel: This one has been, long in the making and I really [00:03:00] appreciate you out time as the CEO and entrepreneur. And, you know, I can only imagine what your schedule's like. So, let's jump right into it. if you can give us a bit of your origin story. How did you get to where you are with Dusty Robotics? and where'd you come from?

Tessa Lau: Sure. So, I'm a technical founder. I started in computer science. Went to IBM for 11 years doing research in enterprise software automation. And then I got into robotics. That was about 10 years ago. I joined a company called Willow Garage, which was the premier research lab for robotics at the time. And I didn't know anything about robotics when I started, so I learned everything I could. And, I was doing research in how to allow end users to program robots when unfortunately, Willow Garage shut down. And so a couple of us, , decided to start a robotic startup. And, , that startup, , was called Savioke.

We were building robots that delivered room service to guests staying in [00:04:00] hotels. And I was the cto, so I led the teams that built the robots, , figured out how to deploy robots in hotels All around the world. , but unfortunately after five years of that, it wasn't really taking off. So my co-founder and I decided we wanted to start a new company and, we looked around for what industry could benefit from robotic automation.

And I had just finished a house remodel at that time. And so I was thinking, well, you know, maybe this construction industry might be a good fit for robots, but I didn't know anything about construction and neither did Phil. So we bought hard hats and still towed boots and started walking around on construction sites

Evan Troxel: right. Cool.

Tessa Lau: and, and we met lots of people, lots of really interesting, you know, construction workers from project execs and VPs down to laborers and, and the individual people who do the work.

We were looking for opportunities to build robotic automation that would actually help the industry. So, we [00:05:00] went through a lot of different ideas, , probably over a dozen different ideas of robots until we finally stumbled upon this problem of layout.

We saw people on their hands and knees using measuring tape and string to mark out dimensions on the floor

Evan Troxel: I was doing that exact thing today.

Tessa Lau: Yeah, the chalk line was invented by the early Egyptians 5,000 years

Evan Troxel: No way.

Tessa Lau: has not changed. It has not changed a bit since then.

Evan Troxel: Right.

Tessa Lau: so you can thank the Egyptians.

Evan Troxel: I was thinking of just your robotics as like this amazing chalk line. So Yeah.

Tessa Lau: Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, when we saw people doing that in the field, we were like, you know, that that's something that we can do much better with the robot because it's so inefficient. Right? And it's, it's all manual, it's all, , people trying to do this job perfectly. And not so surprisingly, people aren't perfect.

And it's something that would be much better done by robots. And we thought about it and we talked to our advisors in the industry and they all [00:06:00] said, oh, yes, I would. I would use that. I would pay for that. And so Dusty was born?

Evan Troxel: Wow. Incredible. it's so funny too because there's so many limitations to a chalk line, right? I mean, it does some amazing things. You can use it as a plum, bob. You can do it vertically. You can. Can do it horizontally, but. You can't do curves with it. Like there's, there's other things that it just doesn't lend itself to.

And, and then what? Right. And so when you talk about that idea of people being imperfect and like there we go through great pains on the architecture side to lay these things out and to create these slab edge plans and, you know, all these incredibly dimensioned drawings to get the layout is. So that we get the design intent that we have in our, our vision, right?

And yet there are still so many breakdowns along the line that could happen. They don't always happen. There's some incredibly sophisticated contractors out there,

but this has gotta be one of those things where when they first saw it, it was like, wait, what? I

Tessa Lau: It's mind

Evan Troxel: is in incredible.

Tessa Lau: it, and it, still is, , we still [00:07:00] have, actually, , TikTok is a very popular media for us. we don't actually post on TikTok. It's our fans that do,

Evan Troxel: Oh, that's, that's even better. Even

better

when someone else is talking about you and you're not just talking

about yourself. Right?

Tessa Lau: exactly. And so someone posted, uh, it was a construction influencer. I can look it up and send it to you that posted a video about us on TikTok and it got over a billion views.

that was last month. And you know, it wasn't us, right? We didn't publish it. But this is a testament to how, how, how much of a need this really addresses in the industry. People see this and they share it with their friends. All you have to do is see the robot in action for five seconds and you know, immediately, what is this?

Why is this important? And anyone who's snapped a chalk line like you have just can look at it and say, oh yeah, I get it. That's, that's what I want.

Evan Troxel: Wow. Well, I'm curious about a lot of things

here from the architect's interest to the [00:08:00] contractor's interest. I can imagine

that's probably different, but I would say

similarly, I don't

know, eye-opening right for them and excited because. Breaking

down the barriers of what it takes to get that design intent realized is a huge piece of the puzzle. and I'm sure a lot of architects are interested in any tool to make

that process more seamless, more realizable. So maybe you can

Start with, were

contractors always your target audience. You said you bought hard hat and boots, right?

So you, you wanted to look the part when you walked onto the

construction site and, and blend in.

But the, is that, is that really always been the target market and then you've kind of

reversed back out of

that to go to a wider audience? I mean, because it.

architects don't really get to tell

contractors what to do at all, right? we have these set of drawings that say, here's, here's what we want, but there's, there's a

pretty clean break unless it's a design build entity or something like that So just maybe walk us through

kind of where you started

And then how that spread, how that, idea [00:09:00] spread.

Tessa Lau: Yeah. I'll start with, let me start with efficiency. So I personally, , I prize efficiency, , in my personal life, in my professional life, our company. and the reason why is because I think I've got a limited number of days on this earth, and I wanna

make the most of those days.

Yeah. And we all do, right? But I don't know how many I'm gonna get. , and you don't know how many you're gonna get. And so? what are you going to do with those days, right. Every day counts. , and so the same is true of our company. , and I see the same as true of construction. Right. You have a limited amount of time in which to build that project, to get that building delivered and turned over to your client.

Every day that you have that you spend working on that project, it matters, Right.

And so efficiency is top of mind for everyone in the construction industry, and that's why it appeals so much to me because, you know, it's a personal. I guess mission for me to make the world more efficient. And so it's a natural fit for me to focus on the construction industry and [00:10:00] create, better tools, better innovations, better technology for this industry to do better.

Evan Troxel: I love that. And creating tools is something I've always been interested in. It's like the things that you have to make to make the things. And I, I've built jigs before for different projects that I've worked on, for things that I, you, you wanna be able to repeat doing and building tools to accomplish that, that don't exist.

Right. And that, to me is, is really interesting. And so How did you, I mean, you have this background in robotics and like, what was that spark when you walked onto a giant slab and said, what if we draw lines on this? What, how did that happen? How did that connection happen?

Tessa Lau: I'll tell you the longer version of that story cuz it's a lot

of fun. from a high level, right, my mission, my passion in life has always been. Building tools that give people superpowers, right? That's what automation is, that's what robotics are, and it's all, it's not about doing the [00:11:00] work, Right. Because I believe people are amazing, they're smart, they're creative, they're talented, and, and construction is no different. I'm actually very impressed by all of the people I've met in the construction industry. And so what I want to do with my life is to give those people the tools to do their job better.

You know, 10 x better, faster, more accurately than they were doing it before. And so that to me is, is why Dusty exists and it's why we do what we do. So let me tell you about how we got to, , the field printer and, and printing layout on the ground. , I told you that we were iterating through a lot of different robot ideas.

, we came up with probably a dozen different ideas. We were, , testing them with prospective customers, and one of the ideas that we came up with at that time was the idea of a robotic vacuum cleaner for construction, and it would suck up all the dirt and the dust and debris and collect it and take it off site , And clean up the job site because everyone knows that a clean site is a safe site, it's an efficient site.

There's fewer [00:12:00] falls and trips and hazards. And so , it's something that has to happen on every single job. Right.

so we were, my, my co-founder and I were, I. Doing the research to try to figure out what would a robotic vacuum look like. In order to do that, we picked up brooms and started sweeping on a job site just to see What? does the material look like?

How heavy is it? How dense is it? You know, what's it made of? Where does it go when it's swept up? And as we were doing that, we happened to look at the ground. And on the ground there are all these marks. , there were chalk

lines, there was, there were spray paint, right? There were dimensions and numbers.

And we asked our hosts like, What are those, you know, how did those? get there? And so we learned about layout. And when I discovered how layout is done today, Right.

with the chalk lines and the string and the measuring tape and the architectural shop drawings, I thought that's inefficient. Right. How can, how can buildings possibly get built if this is how people are marking out where everything needs to go?

But yet, that's how it's always been done. And [00:13:00] so we thought we could build a robot that would just do that a lot more efficiently, with a lot fewer mistakes, with complete accuracy. And that idea just really resonated with all the people that we talked to.

Evan Troxel: Very cool. I, I want to know like how it all works, but before that, what was

like the worst idea? You, you had 10 different ideas. What was the lamest or what, what, what was just like obvious,

okay. that would've never worked after, after all this

Tessa Lau: Oh I don't know. I, I, I won't tell you about, , the worst ideas that we had because they're actually companies that are trying to do them right now. So I don't wanna offend anyone. , but I will tell you, , one of the things that happened was that we, like, I would say like for every 10 people, we asked, um, you know, what robot should we build for you?

You know, what would you like us to build?

We would get 12 different answers. And all of them were bad ideas. people would take like the worst jobs that they had as an intern or as a high school kid coming into construction and say, I hated that job, so can you please build a [00:14:00] robot that would do that?

Evan Troxel: anything to end my pain, right?

Tessa Lau: yes, exactly. And it would usually be like a humanoid robot That, would scale the side of the building and, you know, do something. Or maybe it would like, You know, put down safety fencing or something. Right. And it was kind of a, a low value job that you would probably assign an intern to do, or, you know, a fresh OUTTA school kid.

Evan Troxel: so you came up with this idea of, of a robot that draws on slabs. So how did you decide it was gonna be a wheeled robot? there's so many decisions of what that, there's that idea and then there's how you actually get there and, and what has led to that.

And, you know, industrial design is something I'm really interested in. I love how Dusty looks like. It's just a, a cool looking. It, it's very like,

Almost outta the Star Wars universe. Like it's, it's like that kind of a,

it's not like highly polished. It's not shiny. It's, it looks like it belongs on a construction site, which I love about it because,

I lo I personally love tools.

Like I, I have tools that have such

[00:15:00] a cool patina to 'em. Something I guess maybe has always drawn me to like the Star Wars universe too, is everything is just kind of used, like well

used. and that's interesting. Not, not that

your robots look used, but they look like

they fit in on a construction site as a tool to do work.

Right. it's not just something that is like a prize possession, much like the droids in. Star Wars, right?

It's just like they're, they're there to do real things and they get beat up and they get knocked

around and they keep on going. And maybe take us through the thought

process

of the design, and I don't know if there's been iterations along the way.

I'm sure there have I'm sure it's highly iterative, but take us through That process of of saying, okay, well here's the here's what we want to do then how do you get there?

Tessa Lau: I'll tell you two stories. , one of them is about why it has wheels, and the second one is how we ended up with something that, that does look like it belongs on a construction site. when we first started Dusty, right? And we realized that we wanted to build a, a robot that would, would draw lines on the ground, we were exploring a lot of different ideas.

, and some [00:16:00] of those ideas were, I, mean, we, we wanted to make sure, actually the first question I always ask, Um, when deciding to build a robot from my experience is, do you really need a robot? Right? Because if the answer is that you can solve this problem without a robot, you should solve the problem without a robot.

It's, it's never the right answer to build a robot if you don't really need a robot because it's just so expensive. To develop and build and bring to market any complex piece of hardware, like a robotic system. And so if there's a better solution out there, the complex solution, which is going to be more expensive and more, you know, complicated is not going to win.

Right? So, , the first question that Phil and I asked ourselves was, do we really need to build a robot? And then once we realized that, yeah, you know, there's, there's no other way to get the accuracy that our customers need other than building a robot. We were committed. and so how did we get from there to where we are?

Well, we actually went through a series of design processes with, with an industrial designer who would actually, Walk [00:17:00] us through different questions like, what is Dusty's persona, right? What, what does Dusty do in his or her free time? What is Dusty value? What do they care about?

Evan Troxel: I

want to know what Dusty does in its free time as well.

Tessa Lau: dusty reads like DIY magazines and, you know, does like Homewood working on the side, right? You know, that, that kind of

hobbyist tinkerer.

Evan Troxel: Watches this old house.

Tessa Lau: exactly, exactly.

That's, that's the dusty persona, Right. And Dusty also drives a Tesla because Dusty loves new technology, right? They're, they're on the edge, the cutting edge of new tech and what it can do for you.

, so, you know, that combination of attributes is what created our brand and that, and that helped us design the, the shell and, and the shape and the function and the form that would become our, our current product.

Evan Troxel: Now is did the name come before

that or did the name come

after?

Tessa Lau: The name, there's a story behind the name. The name came first actually. So back in the day when we were thinking we [00:18:00] were going to build a robotic vacuum cleaner and it was going to sweep up all the dust and dirt on the job site, we actually got an offer from an investor to invest in our company. And we didn't have a company.

And so we needed to create a company,

Evan Troxel: Need a company real quick.

Tessa Lau: Yep. and. we needed a name for that company so that we could actually take this investment. And so we brainstormed a number of ideas and dusty. , came up as one of the possibilities and I really liked it. , and partially it's because of, of my experience with my previous company.

, no one can spell the name Savioke or pronounce it correctly or remember it And so I wanted something that was memorable and easy to pronounce, easy to spell, and that people would just associate with us. so, dusty is not only that, but it's also cute and quirky and has a personality. And those were all things that I wanted.

So that's how

we became dusty.

Evan Troxel: It does fit the persona and it, and it also

is kind of androgynous in

that way. Right? It's just like, who, who's dusty, right? Like that, that to [00:19:00] me is what's kind of cool about that name. Anyway, you were gonna tell us a second story

Tessa Lau: Yeah. as part of the design exercise, one of the things that our designers walked us through was, , was like a positioning exercise. Like, is dusty, or is this product more like a tank or a car, word. is destiny more like a robot vacuum or is it more like, uh, like a car toy, you know, like a, a remote controlled car? Right? And so of all of these things that are kind of the same shape and form factor, like what is it most like, and I said, well, you know, it's not like any of those, it's like a power tool, right?

I want this to be something that people pick up and use. And, and people love their power tools. They give them names, they take care of them, right? And so that's what I wanted people to feel when they're using our product, and so that's how we ended up with the shape, the coloring, the affordances around the tool that we have today.

Evan Troxel: That's cool. I, I was just telling somebody I have a Makita drill driver and it is at least 25 years old and it just [00:20:00] won't die. And I rely on that. Thing so much. Right? And it's the kind of tool that I am not gonna go replace that tool. Like that's the least sustainable thing that I could do.

And when I pick it up, I know exactly how to operate. Every little switch and dial that's on it and it, and it's just like this extension of me. And so, I could see how this could become that for an operation who's out there doing construction where it's just like, send out Dusty. how cool is it to be the person who gets to lay out the plan that Dusty's gonna draw, and then to actually go watch Dusty draw it.

Like I think that all of that kind of plays into this storytelling of like, it's part of the team. It's not just a tool, right? It actually becomes part of the team. So,

cool,

Tessa Lau: Exactly, We have people who are so proud that they get to operate dusty on their job sites, Right.

It's a point of pride to them that they are the layout specialist and this is their job. And they can do such a great job with it. They can produce beautiful things, [00:21:00] and that is something that you couldn't get any other way.

Evan Troxel: So how does Dusty actually work with what, what you're willing to share? I have no idea how much IP is behind that, but it's, obvious that it draws lines, but like what, how does that work

in reality?

Tessa Lau: So we have, , designed dusty to make it as much of a drop-in replacement as we can for existing workflows, right? So, , in a typical workflow, you run through a BIM coordination process. You have a coordinated model, , and then that coordinated model today gets handed off to the different trades who then do their layout and installation based on those.

The, the shop drawings that come out of that model. So what we do is we take that same coordinated model and uh we prepare it for print. And that process is pretty straightforward if you have a team that uses Revit already, it's just a, a work, a very simple workflow, and Revit to prepare the line work. I would put, , what we call a dusty file.

And that dusty file is what goes into the robot and gets printed. [00:22:00] If it's just a single trade, for example, just drywall, , we work with them to take that, , take the walls that were modeled in Revit, turn that into essentially a shop drawing, a robot ready shop drawing, and bring that out into the robot.

If we're working with a gc, we'll typically work with all the different trades, , information. Prepare that all for printing in a single file and then do what we call a multi trade layout where all of those trades information get printed on the floor at the same time. That shaves weeks off the schedule because, , instead of each trade coming in and doing their own layout, we're just doing the same thing with the robot 10 times faster than people in a single pass over the floor.

Evan Troxel: Wow. I have many

questions now based on that

but , the idea of

it when you, said drop in like a tool that just kind of fits right in. I was just thinking like a toner cartridge. I thought you were gonna go

How you actually refilled

dusty because it is kind of like this mobile printer. Right. , so interesting, interesting idea,

of the way that you thought about that. And so [00:23:00] I, now I'm really interested in

like the different trades that can

use Dusty, because I

just assume as somebody who's. Designed architecture and who's done remodeling projects that it's like a framing layout tool, but what else does Dusty

Tessa Lau: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we're actually like most of our projects these days are what we call multi trade, where all of the different interior trades have bought into using Dusty. And so we're not just printing the walls, we're also printing the stuff that goes inside the walls and the stuff that goes into the ceiling.

So, Most commonly, we work with mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire. Those are the plus drywall, right? Those are the, all the, the major interior trades. And what we print for them is everything that you install in the interior of the building. So imagine it's a hospital build out, you have all of these, , the, the HVAC ducts, the, the water sewer, the electrical.

The fire sprinklers that all get installed in the ceiling overhead, right? Those all will typically get laid out on the floor first and then installed overhead. and [00:24:00] so Dusty will come through and and print a lot of the details for all of those fixtures that are going to get installed, and that eliminates all the conflicts between the different trades.

because you can see, at a glance whether there's going to be a conflict well before anyone starts building, We just.

had a job, a hospital job in, in Arkansas, I think last week, where they told us that thanks to Dusty. They found a conflict where a hangar rod would've intersected a pipe and the two would've rubbed together if they'd built it to spec.

Right. And because Dusty had printed everything on the ground, they could just walk the floor. See, that was going to, to create a conflict and fix it there before anyone had started installing.

Evan Troxel: I've never once considered clash detection to be something that could possibly happen with printed lines on the floor. Like, that's, that's pretty crazy. So, let's shift gears and talk about kind of the adoption side of this and who's excited about it and why. I, I would imagine that different groups are excited about it for different reasons, but.

Tessa Lau: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: It seems like you [00:25:00] went for construction

side first and then it spread from there. so can you tell us how that worked and, and why you started there? It does seem like the right tool for

that kind of a,

job, but I, I also know that there's architects, like I've had Jason Gardner from Populace on the show before

And he talked about printing layouts on.

On floors for people

to kind of experience it in some way before it was

built, even though it was partway under construction already.

So people got to understand the space under the super

structure, for

instance, and that was really helpful conveying ideas And getting buy-in even during the construction process from the designers

point of view.

Tessa Lau: Yeah.

there's a lot of different players in the AEC industry, right? Architects, , there's GCs, there's trade partners, all the different trade partners. There's owners, there's insurance, right? There's construction management, engineering firms, right? And all of those.

Players, benefit from using Dusty, but it's a slightly different benefit that they get because they have a different stake in the ground. [00:26:00] So, the reason we started with, we actually started with drywall. , the reason why, and, and so our first couple customers were all drywall customers.

, the reason why is because drywall layout is about 70% of the layout on the interior of the building. And so the bulk of it. Is drywall. And that's, that's a natural place to start. Everyone assumes like you did that, this robot's going to print the walls. And so that's how we got our start. once we demonstrated that it would work with these early drywall customers, then GC started getting really interested because they were, they were saying, well, you know, that's, that's, you can, you can print more than just walls, right?

Yeah, of course. So I wanna use that to do all of my trades. , and the reason why is because it's an extension of their VDC team. You know, they're already investing in BIM coordination, so why not take that model, decrease their risk, and bring it out into the job site, right? Just eliminate all of these possible places where the project can go sideways because someone was using the wrong control or someone wasn't coordinated, or, you know, someone's using the wrong version [00:27:00] and just eliminate all those possible sources of error.

So that covers the, you know, the, the trade partners and the jc We've also now started working with some architects and, , Perkins and Will is, is one of those, they actually have a, a project that they did up in Napa with us where, , we were printing all of their architectural shop drawings on the floor.

And the benefit for the architects is that they don't have to spend as much time dimensioning. Because robots don't need dimensions. And also there's a lot fewer RFIs when you have dusty in the mix because if you can do a lot more of that, , conflict detection and resolution in a single walkthrough of the floor, instead of those RFIs trickling in over weeks, as each trade gets around to doing their layout and seeing what works relative to the others, you can do it all at once and just resolve all of those issues in one fell swoop.

Evan Troxel: the issue that I've seen in the past with. We can do a lot less dimensions, and I'll put [00:28:00] that in my famous podcasting air quotes is the the firm that I was working with, they had a

team who produced a

a model and had a note on the drawings

that said, C model for measurements, right? Because they knew that was gonna be handed

over and the risk management department disallowed it because it doesn't fit the standard of care, which is typical of other architecture firms. And so they were concerned risk aversion, right? That. yeah. Should call it the risk aversion department, right? But it was like, well, every other architecture firm puts dimensions on the drawing.

And so this is kind of, that's just a small piece of the puzzle of how we actually get to model based digital delivery for projects. so I, I, I love that story because it shows that it is happening in other places. And so this audience that's hearing this right now should turn a light bulb on in their minds to say,

Wait, what? Somebody else is doing it. Perkins and Will is doing it. Maybe we can do it too, because that's what it kind of takes, it kind of takes, it is a, a trickle down effect.[00:29:00]

But there are many

firms out there for so many reasons why this adoption or

this evolution isn't happening is because of the old ways or, or the standard ways.

And so new technologies come along. And make it possible to actually achieve the things that they've been dreaming about, right? Where it's like, well, what they really thought was the contractor's gonna still get out there with their tape measure, But now there's this whole new thing that just completely leapfrogs that, and I.

We spit the, the dusty file out of Revit and the robot goes and prints those and there

is, there is no more measuring.

Right? And so I think that that's, it's absolutely fascinating. Like what a tool like this can unlock

for a team, for instance. So very cool

story to hear.

Tessa Lau: from what I'm seeing, what this is going to do is force architects to take more responsibility for the build. And, and I think what's happened over time is that, architects haven't wanted to, to take on that responsibility. Right? You know, they, they hand it off to the gc, the GC [00:30:00] hands it.

off to the, the subcontractors who say, you know, you are responsible for ensuring that this is constructable, right?

And that constructability piece is key. , and right now that gets delegated down to the bottom level.

And what we're seeing with, with digital delivery and automated layout is that architects have a, have a say in that too. And I think the best architects are going to realize that we're reverting in some, in some sense to that master builder archetype.

Right. Where the architects have a lot of say in the constructability of the buildings that we're building Right. now.

Evan Troxel: Well, and it's like the reverse commoditization of architectural services because everybody has, well, every, in air quotes, again, everybody has raced to this. We all do the exactly the same thing and there's no differentiation. And now tools are actually enabling differentiation.

Before everybody used the exact same tools in technologies.

They all had the T-Square, they all had the drafting table. They all had cad. They all had bim. Have they all have bim?

What else is there that really separates [00:31:00] the wheat from the chaff here and how can you promote yourself as whatever it is? It could be technologically advanced, it could be thought leadership.

It could be so many different things, but it's like. There's an actual tool that can set you apart here. It doesn't mean it'll set you apart forever, right. But if you are there early, it does set you apart and you will build on that, and it will lead to creating efficiencies on the BIM side because you're now using a new tool set on the ground during construction, and it does tend to ripple out from there.

It's really kind of interesting

Overall, how did you. Take on a e c so quickly. I mean, if you came from a completely different background, you've had a crash course, you know all the terminology, you know, you're talking about all this stuff. Like what, just this, a little tangent here, but, but what, what was that like for you?

Tessa Lau: well, I love learning languages and in a lot of ways this is like learning another

language, right? It's like, being dropped into a foreign [00:32:00] country without speaking a word of the local language and. Having to sink or swim, and I get energized by that. And so I love talking to people from the industry and just picking up like how do they talk about things?

What do they care about? What, what words do they use? And so that, that's enabled me to like quickly come up to speed on the industry because I, I, I'm fascinated by it and learning. And so I really enjoy that process. So

Evan Troxel: assume you. You'd have to be very embedded, like on the job sites, in the offices, like just immersed. It would have to be kind of an immersive experience for you to, to get all that, because reading it online, it's like, what? What does that mean? What? Yeah.

Can't imagine,

Tessa Lau: No, you can't learn construction by reading YouTube or, or reading. Reading

Google.

Evan Troxel: Right. So on the contractor side, you've mentioned it a few times now, drywall layout. What does that actually mean? Like how does Dusty help make that happen? Because are you actually marking like the end points of the panels or what is it Because. What I [00:33:00] want everyone to think about is like, this is like a Roomba, a bigger version.

It has bigger wheels so it can get over, you know, I would assume small, variations in the horizontal plane, right? So construction sites not the cleanest site, but not only that, you do have transitions between, you know, slight, slight different things. And so there's this thing rolling around the site and it's, it's laying out what does that mean to lay out for a, like a drywall

sub.

Tessa Lau: our bread and butter is printing lines. Yes. And so if you imagine driving along the floor and, , and a line is following behind it, right? So it it's basically an inkjet printer, right? So what we've built is a, it's a little two foot by one foot by one foot, like boxy shape with wheels and.

, it's got eyes on the front, so it's super cute. And as it's driving, , it's spraying ink down on the ground just like an inkjet printer would on your desk at home. , and those lines are drawing the, the shape [00:34:00] and, uh, location of all the walls that you're going to be installing. So this is if we're doing drywall layout, but it goes beyond just what you would normally snap.

With chalk lines, because we can do dashed lines, we can do dotted lines, we can do, lines with text in them. And so, , We can do a lot of things that enhance the print that you'd see on the floor. So instead of just seeing the bare bones information, you need to frame and rock your walls. You have the location of the iron lines, the location of your bottom track, which is where you're going to start laying down your, your framing.

You have the, you have dashed lines that indicate where, how many layers of drywall. Get attached to your walls. So whether it's one hour rated, two hour rated drywall, or whether it's acoustical wall, right? All of those things can be marked down with different line styles.

We can also describe the lines, and so one of the inventions we made early on was printing soffits with a unique line style.

And [00:35:00] so there's a solid line with the word soffit embedded in it every 12 inches, so you know exactly what you're looking at when you're walking that floor. , we print door openings. We print the, the rough opening dimensions of where you need to frame out your doors. , we can print wall tags. So this is an M zero one wall.

This is an a zero one wall, so if you know what your wall types are, all you have to do is look at the floor and you know exactly what you need to install in that wall. And so all that information, , we learned from doing lots and lots of jobs with drywallers, right? This is what they wanna see on the floor.

And so we've created those capabilities for them to be able to bring that information out into the field.

Evan Troxel: it seems so obvious now, after it's done. You've done all the hard work. You've made this, I would, I would assume, would become like an indispensable tool. It's just like, why hasn't it been like this for longer? Because we've had robots for quite a while, right? has machines that do things. , and I, the way that I've always thought about the way Dusty works, cuz I have kids, is. The soccer field, like painting the chalk lines on the soccer field or on the baseball diamond. You know, you, somebody's pushing the little [00:36:00] cart. It's spitting out The chalk and that's what this is. Without the person and at much

higher fidelity. how do you coordinate the drawings, like the information layer to the physical site and to get the precision that you're after? How do those two things, index

with each other?

Tessa Lau: so we actually build off of, , technology that the construction industry is already familiar with. So everyone has probably heard of a total station, right? That's what surveyors use to mark out points at known locations. they operate off of what's called control points, which are points located around the perimeter of the building that are positioned at very precise locations.

and those points are marked both on the digital plan. As well as in the field. Right? And so the way our system works is it uses a laser tracker, which is the bicker brother of a total station, and you scan in those control points, you know where they are in the digital file, you know where they are in the field, that lets you align the two on top of each other.

And so everything you print is accurate relative to that control.

Evan Troxel: Okay. and what can Dusty roll over? I, I [00:37:00] would assume, you know, I mentioned it earlier, there's never like a perfectly clean construction site, right?

So what, what kinds of obstacles is there? Obstacle avoidance? Does it, I mean, it doesn't just shut down. I would assume the print when, if there's something in the way, maybe it goes around it, but talk through what, what that's like.

Because no matter what, somebody's gonna expect to see lines On the slab when they come back. Right. Or after the task is done. And so I, I assume things get in the way, may, maybe it's like curling and there's somebody right in front of dusty running feverishly sweeping stuff out of the way.

But you get, paint a picture of

what that's

actually like.

Tessa Lau: I have been that person on, on job sites, , with the broom, right? , no. So we, we designed the system actually to work really well around obstacles because, you know, the reality is that, for a lot of types of building, , all the layout happens after you've ready, , embedded. You know, a lot of stub ups in, in the

concrete, right? And you need to lay out the walls, which are gonna go Right. around those, those Pipes that already exist and are sticking up out of the [00:38:00] floor.

Evan Troxel: Pipes were there first, right there before

the

slab

Tessa Lau: Pipes get there first. Exactly. so our system actually is, is capable of printing right up to those points, , which is one of the differentiators of our system compared to anything else.

And, and we did that because we, you know, our experience with our early customer base was, that they needed that completeness of layout to have a very clear picture of exactly where that wall is going to land. Surrounding those pipes. , and so typically the, what our system does is , it, , prints out of, , print heads that are located at the two front corners of the robot, , left and right.

And so we can get really, really close and just like skirt the edge of that pipe or that column or that obstacle and print right up next to it and just kind of kiss the edge of it and get your really clean line.

Evan Troxel: Nice. it's better than my robot vacuum, which cannot get into the, the corners and the edges. I'm just like looking down right now.

But they have gotten a lot better. , I actually just saw, I don't know if you saw this, , [00:39:00] Dyson just announced a robot vacuum. And it has an arm on it that extends out. I don't, I, I assume that that's like getting corners and stuff, so that's kind of interesting that they're

entering

that space.

Brian Ringley has been on the show and he's been talking about Spot, you know, from Boston Dynamics, and it's a Quadriped robot and it is also built for, I mean, at least his division of it is, is on construction.

How it, how it's involved in construction. And the idea there is it can walk over all kinds of things and it can go upstairs and downstairs. There's stairs on construction sites, it turns out, right. So, , When it comes to just stuff that gets in the way how do you handle that kind of thing? Do you just roll right over it and keep on going and you're working with this laser guidance system to keep the lines going exactly where they're supposed to be and, and how big of a, how big of a piece of junk can this thing roll over?

Tessa Lau: , I mean, we've, we've pretty much dealt with anything on a construction site by this point. If it's a screw, we'll just roll right over?

it and keep going. if it's too [00:40:00] big to roll over, then we'll either push it aside that the front of the robot has a. Flap, kinda like a cow catcher that, you know, like push

things aside as it's going on a, on a train.

or if it's, you know, so big that we can't push it like a pallet of materials or a porta potty. Right. Then we'll just bump into it and keep going.

Evan Troxel: That would be pretty cool to see though. I mean, I pushing the, the porta potty out of the way so it can draw its lines So what still interests you in this, in this field? I mean, is it really just about getting more exposure to more people to really bridge this efficiency gap?

Or do you have your site set on other things that either dusty or other kinds of robots could, could do on the construction site?

Tessa Lau: Well, let me tell you about one thing I'm really excited about right now, which is, , we've just started printing QR code. On the floor,

which is something that no one's ever really done before.

And I see so much potential in this. So what a QR code is going to let you do is, is link up [00:41:00] particular location in the physical world with a resource in the digital world.

And that linkage can change over time. So imagine you're walking the floor, right? Dusty had just come through and do it, done. Its layout. It's just a big concrete slab, right? Nothing's been built yet. And you pull out your phone, you scan that QR code that you see on the floor and it tells you, oh, you're in room 4 0 3, here's the 3D model.

You know, here's a Revit walkthrough, you know, fly through that you can do to see what's going to be built here. and then imagine you are now the electrician. And you come and you scan that QR code. It says, here are the 10 fixtures that get installed in this room. Right? Here's the work instructions right here.

How do you install each one of them? , this is, you know what you're supposed to do in this room. , now you're the gc. Okay.

You get a punch list. Here are all the things that have to get fixed in this room, right? And so, depending on who you are and when you are walking this site and scanning this site, we can bring the Right.

information to your fingertips.

And we [00:42:00] can do that because we know exactly where you are and who you are. If you, you know, log into our system and provide that information to you. And that is going to really bridge this gap cuz there's so much information in the digital world, right? In Procore, in, in your BIM 360, in your Revit models, right?

All of that information, you can't use it in the field cause. It's not visible to you, but if we can make that visible to you, we can bring that out to you and link those two together cuz we know exactly where you are and we can give you that custom information that's going to really make construction a lot more efficient.

Evan Troxel: I love that idea. that is so cool. And yeah, like you said, it depends on who you are and when in the sequence that you're there. For somebody, it could be a 3D experience for somebody, it could be a list of information. Right. And, and equally useful. It just depends what you're looking for. I could see that being being huge for.

Tessa Lau: exactly.

Evan Troxel: just breaking down these barriers of having to go to the job trailer to get the [00:43:00] information that you forgot to bring with you when you were gonna go run through these several different rooms or what's actually supposed to be here. You don't have to go back and find the plan and pull it up and go through the sheets and

it it, that sounds really incredible.

So with that kind of a thing, I mean, what kinds of efficiencies are you guys seeing? Give us kind of an idea of I hate to say like, full adoption of something like this could be because I, who knows, like that, that just seems like a, a giant, task to even figure out. But what kinds of, efficiencies have you been seeing gained on the construction site with, with

tools like

Tessa Lau: Mm-hmm. , we're seeing really significant schedule compression. we just completed a project with Trube, their original GC here in California. And, , they're building a, complex, , lab space. And they had a very tight timeline that they had to turn this over to the owner, and so they turned to Dusty and we helped them through a full multi trade layout with all the different trades participating.

And what they found was they were [00:44:00] saving, , weeks off of the construction schedule for each floor. And that's because instead of, you know, tr traditionally you clear the floor for a long period of time. First the drywall crew comes in and does their layout, then mechanical, then electrical, then plumbing, and then fire.

And that could take weeks. and you can't put anything on the floor because each of these crews needs the floor clear to do their layout. So instead you load all the, all the files into a robot, have the robot print it. And because the robot's doing all the trades layout, In a single pass over the floor, as soon as the robot has completed a portion of the floor, You can start installing in that portion,

right?

Like in five minutes after the

robot started printing, you don't have to wait for it to finish. It's taking a pass west to east over that floor, and as soon as it finishes an area that those crews can come in to start building, and that just gives you huge schedule gains.

Evan Troxel: That's incredible. And I would imagine that that, you know, going back to that idea of this being an extension of the VDC team, that changes the way [00:45:00] they think about sequencing

Tessa Lau: Yes, yes, yes. So we are starting to see GCs build us into the schedule,

into the construction schedule now, Right, So instead of holding, reserving all of that time for the trades to do their work, they're compressing down this layout portion to a much smaller amount of time because they know it'll help them finish, turn over that project a lot faster.

Evan Troxel: How durable is the ink on the concrete?

Tessa Lau: We have a number of different types of ink and so it depends on, on what you want to have happen. our most durable ink lasts for over six months. , in fact, I think I've seen it last up to 12 months in full weather conditions. since construction typically takes a couple months, right? That's, that's generally our recommendation for choice.

But, , if you want the ink to disappear faster, then we have options for that as well.

Evan Troxel: Interesting. What have I not asked you about that you are, are dying to tell the audience about or, you know, I'm, I'm new to all this with, the robotics and, and so I'm, interested to find out if there's anything that, [00:46:00] our conversation hasn't led to, that you would normally think is of interest.

Tessa Lau: so one of the questions I often get asked is, Aren't unions going to object to this because

it's taking away jobs?

And the answer is, well, they're not, in fact, they're embracing it. And so we're actually working with two of the biggest unions in NorCal right now, and they are teaching dusty training classes for us.

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Tessa Lau: we've ta, we've trained their trainers and now they're on their own running, classes, levels one, two, and three. that will eventually produce dusty certified operators.

Uh, that's for drywall

Evan Troxel: that's a new career

right there. I mean,

Tessa Lau: it's a new career right there. It's, it's job security, right? If, if you are the dusty operator for your company, you know, I imagine that's, uh, that's a pretty good position to be in.

Evan Troxel: I would assume too, that this kind of thing you, you brought up unions and I immediately think of trade shows, right? I think about the, the National Conference on architecture that I'm gonna go to next month, and [00:47:00] that's in a giant convention center and every week there's a new show and they all have a different floor plan.

And I could imagine something like this just being a huge deal for that because it's, it's all union labor. That's why the connection was there. But just the, the repetitive tear down build, tear down build and, and having to, draw a new layout every single week. It's a, think about Vegas, just gotta be

incredible, the amount of throughput that they push through there. So, ha, have you broken into

that scene?

Tessa Lau: I think our sales team has actually talked to some of the players in that scene,

and so it's definitely a an adjacent use case

Evan Troxel: Yeah, for sure. Wow. Well that, that is all very cool and I'm, I'm glad to hear that it's being kind of, Accepted on so many different levels with different pieces of the puzzle in the building industry. So it seems like there's a a lot of potential here, and I I know you're doing it a lot on the commercial side.

Is it [00:48:00] happening very much on the residential side?

Tessa Lau: Where we're seeing adoption on the residential side?

is with high and tone build.

For, you know, high net worth individuals. And so these are like 5,000 and up square foot homes that

just, they need to be

perfect. Yeah. that precision. Yeah.

You can't get that any other way. And so Dusty's being used a fair bit on that type of job.

Evan Troxel: Well, Tessa, this has been fascinating conversation. I know your time is so valuable. Thank you so much for finding time to have this conversation with me, and I'll put links to everything that Dusty Robotics and Tessa are doing in the show notes. And thank you again. appreciate you.

Tessa Lau: Thank you Evan. Thanks for the opportunity. It's been great having this conversation.

Connect with Evan* Twitter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Email

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YouTube has finally gotten serious about podcasts. If you're a YT junkie like me, please check out my shows at the links below and add them to your listenting library:

Archispeak
TRXL
Peopleverse

And of course like and subscribe and hit the notificaiton bell and all that.

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The News Experience Moshe Safdie’s complete Habitat 67 virtually in Neoscape's Project Hillside* through Unreal 5 * Adobe injects AI into Photoshop * LumaAI app enables users to create “drone” footage with an iPhone, but not how you might think * Enscape gets new features

The latest TRXL podcast episode116: ‘Teaching New Dogs Old Tricks’, with Bob HabianA conversation with Bob Habian, AIA.TRXLEvan Troxel🎧Bob Habian of Tect joins the podcast to talk about what we’re actively doing at Tect in our early stage of the business, challenges that we’re addressing head-on in the building industry, how we’re approaching the re-alignment between building product side and design professionals, managing expectations in regards to the timeline involved in overcoming some of these challenges, typical venture funding versus crowdfunding, solving problems from within versus from the outside of our industry, and more. Experience Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 virtuallyNeoscape and Epic Games (makers of Unreal Engine) teamed up with Safdie Architects to bring us an unbelievably complex 3d environment of the mostly unbuilt Habitat 67, AKA “Hillside”, in Montreal, Canada.

Epic Games:

In the 1960’s, Safdie asked, “What if?” Here, more than 50 years later, it’s finally answered.

Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 wasn’t just one of the most important buildings of the 60s, it was an inspiring vision of what affordable living could be. Sadly, scope and funding never aligned, making the popular project something of an unfinished dream.

Today, Safdie’s original vision can be explored in all its (virtual) glory with Unreal Engine, providing the next generation of architects, engineers, and urban planners an interactive reference point for creating a better tomorrow.

The video on the landing page includes a wonderful overview of the project that you can now tour for yourself in your browser. And it’s not just the exterior. They have interiors too.

For you tool nerds out there they used drones to scan the existing conditions using photogrammetry and LiDAR and then stitched that together using Unreal’s tools. Models were then created with Rhino, 3ds Max, and sent to Unreal 5 via Datasmith.

Oh, and you can download the model for personal use in Unreal 5 (maybe only for a limited time, so get it while you can).

This is a great marketing campaign to show off what today’s tools are capable of when the experts are pushing them to—if not beyond—their limits.

🎧 Related TRXL podcast episode 064: ‘You Need to Let Go’, with Jason Addy

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Bob Habian, AIA of Tect joins the podcast to talk about what we’re actively doing at Tect in our early stage of the business, challenges that we’re addressing head-on in the building industry, how we’re approaching the re-alignment between building product side and design professionals, managing expectations in regards to the timeline involved in overcoming some of these challenges, typical venture funding versus crowdfunding, solving problems from within versus from the outside of our industry, and more.

Latest TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter🗞️ AEC/tech Newsletter #12The News * TestFit generates parking in Autodesk Forma * Scan to model with McNeel’s iRhino 3d app * ShapeDiver puts Grasshopper definitions into Autodesk Forma * Phil Bernstein talks about the wicked problems of machine learning in architecture * Google is playing catch-up so they announced a…TRXLEvan TroxelEpisode Links* Bob was previously a guest on TRXL 036: ‘The Answers Are There’, with Cormac Phalen and Bob Habian * Peopleverse podcast 021: Todd Miller * Tect’s website * Join the movement at tect.com/join * Check out Tect on Wefunder * Connect with Bob on LinkedIn * Tect’s booth (#4201) at the 2023 AIA Conference on Architecture

Watch this episode on YouTube116: ‘Teaching New Dogs Old Tricks’, with Bob HabianBob Habian of Tect joins the podcast to talk about what we’re actively doing at Tect in our early stage of the business, challenges that we’re addressing hea…YouTubeEpisode TranscriptTRXL 116: ‘Teaching Old Tricks to New Dogs’, with Bob Habian

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Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan TRXL. This podcast tracks the evolution of architecture and technology, and perhaps even more specifically the people behind all of it who are pushing or pulling the building industry along. And the work I'm doing at Tect fits pretty neatly into that spectrum. And if you've ever wondered, what does Evan do at Tect this conversation will bring a lot of that to light.

But, The good news is I'm not going to interview myself, so don't worry. Luckily for me, the perfect guest was available and that is Tect's co-founder and CEO Bob Habian. Bob was on the podcast back in episode 36 and you can find a link to that one in the show notes. Today he returns for round two.

Bob is an entrepreneur and an architect. His career path includes chapters of conventional and unconventional work with extensive experience in traditional architectural practice, building, product, [00:01:00] manufacturing, and technology development. Like many other guests that come onto this podcast, Bob is intensely driven to help make the profession more sustainable for the long haul.

His particular passion and commitment lies in cleaning up the way architects and manufacturers do business together for their long-term mutual success. In this episode, we discuss what we're actively doing at tech in the early stage of our business challenges that we're addressing head on in the building industry.

How we're approaching the realignment between the building product side and design professionals, managing expectations in regards to the timeline involved in overcoming some of these challenges, typical venture funding versus crowdfunding, solving problems from within versus from the outside of our industry, and more.

So without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Bob Habian

[00:02:00] Welcome back, Bob.

Bob Habian: Thank you Evan. Good to see you again.

Evan Troxel: don't get enough of each other.

Bob Habian: That's how I feel.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, Well, I'm doing a, a bit of a, this is in the moment. I'm, I'm doing some business related podcasts.

I had mutual friend Robert Yuen on and he was talking about kind business of architecture. obviously, you a lot of interesting things, but talking about economic uncertainty, this, I think, falls into that category, which is startups, funding, things of that nature. And so maybe let's start off and we'll catch people up with a, a bit of a summary on what is Tect and why it exists. I want you to tell people why Tect exists.

Bob Habian: Well, I, it may have something to do with me perhaps, but in my early architecture career, I was so frustrated by how difficult it was to find information from manufacturers. That was meaningful, right? And so like most of us, what I ended [00:03:00] up doing was just winging it most of the time. And so I then subsequently had a lot of exposure to manufacturing and I saw what was going on on the other side.

And I understood very simply that manufacturers make things. They sell them to contractors and owners and projects, distributors and retailers. They can't sell 'em to design professionals, and they don't know how to interact very well with us. So the average manufacturer is strong in all areas, but early project support for design professionals, that's their Achilles heel.

So over time, I just recognized whether it was working for myself, I ultimately owned a manufacturing company, or subsequently when I had a business on Wall Street with hundreds of manufacturers as clients, and then more recently working inside of a, Billion dollar family enterprise, manufacturing of building materials.

And for eight years I was just [00:04:00] reaching out to my peers talking about the products that we manufactured. And so I had that real rep experience as well. And what Tect is, is a summary of best practices over the past 30 years. So I'd argue we're not as much a startup as we are, a very distilled summary of what not to do and how to do it better, you know, and or what's not working, rather in, in the industry and what, how we can do something about that.

So, specifically what was needing to be put in place or what was lacking was the ability for design professionals to find the help they need when we need it, The alternative is that the supply side's just banging on our doors, trying to get to us and be in the right place at the right time. It's always ill timed.

It's a distraction. It's not helpful. . And then more importantly, if they're trying to sell to us, then it's just a non-starter for both sides and it's a big waste of time and resources.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: flipping the script to give a new tool set to design professionals to be able to find supply professionals [00:05:00] when needed product experts with information, it didn't exist.

So at Tect that had to be built. That's what we built. There's a lot more we could talk about, but that's the essence was, was a missing tool now in place.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, it's a tool. And it's also the idea of the Tect platform being a place where people can go to find other people a what we call a people first for connecting architects and engineers with building industry product experts. Because this is where I think it's interesting, right?

Where we're zigging instead of zagging, which is we're overloaded with data and information. And so maybe you can talk a little bit about kind of the spectrum of data to information, to knowledge, to wisdom. Because tagline that we've got on the website is wisdom on demand, right? And so maybe go into that side of things, because this is not an area of focus for so many startups and companies out there who are trying to solve [00:06:00] this problem. They're just trying to solve it from a different angle than we are.

Bob Habian: Yep. Yeah. The problem is that there's just so much information that we have to navigate in the building industry to put buildings together.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: you think about one product, one singular product in the world, and reflect on how much information is related to that from supply chain and sourcing to pricing, to availability to options.

You know, a recent Peopleverse podcast, Todd Miller, one manufacturer makes 8,000 SKUs product skews, right? That's just one manufacturer on one product type, but on any given product, there's so much information that when you really think about all of the products that we're supposed to have command of to do the projects that we work on, the amount of data is unmanageable.

So in terms of venturing and startups and how to fix problems like data overload, it makes sense that you would take a data structure strategy and say, let's [00:07:00] wrangle this data into more manageable data.

most of our peers that are out venturing and really solving some of these problems, They're focused on how to make better sense of the data, how to analyze that data, how to allow design professionals to have more control over, mining that data.

Things that Google don't really do for us or others. so the refined platforms that are managing data are of significant value to all of us. But as an architect, if I see a table comparing five different materials with 12 different criteria, I may not know what to do with that material. Like how do I put that into the assembly?

Like I get the product specific data and the attributes of that component, but I have other questions, and those questions are solved by actual people that have experience that can answer just random questions that may or may not be on those tool sets or websites or other things. [00:08:00] But as the architect, I, I've got a lot at stake to make the right decisions.

Around all of those products, how they all integrate and what the net effect is through construction and post occupancy and for decades to come in terms of liability, right? So the stakes are so high, and yet the tools that we have access to today are structuring data, which in its best form might be structured knowledge perhaps.

But in terms of wisdom, like what do you really want to do? To me that's a combination of experience, knowledge, and people with just dialogue like you and I today. some things are objective that we decide on. Some things are subjective, and so many of our decisions are a blend of that. So, at Tect we just, as you've said, a people first approach simply just puts a person in front of the risk of the process.

If I have a question about a product, if I talk with that expert, I'd consider them that product concierge almost. at that point, it's like, Hey, I've met an expert [00:09:00] that can help me. What do you think I should do? Or how can you help me navigate all this data, compare these specs, review these details, et cetera.

I can handle all the data around a product category if I have a concierge on my team or if I have a concierge on the phone, kind of that phone of friend, idea. So people first is not the norm, Because working with people, that's, that's a little more messy than just structuring data and using things like AI and ML to just optimize to the best of computational capabilities.

But in the practice of architecture and in the building industry itself, this is a relationship business at the end of the day. We all know that. so we have invested fully in trusting that people first, like people before, projects or people before transactions, relationships matter. All of these themes that you'll see when you, when you look at what we're up to, are simply putting the people before the data.

Evan Troxel: When you say that, we all know that something that comes to mind is teaching new dogs old [00:10:00] tricks actually. Because I think that emerging professionals and graduates who are just getting into the profession, often coming at this from a data first

because that's how they grew up.

They grew up digital natives. They grew up searching online, learning how play the game of keywords and finding the data that they're looking for, hopefully. But because of that overload you know, the noise that does exist out there, and what you're saying is, is that, People who have been doing this for a very long time who are experts in all of these different pieces of the puzzle that make up any project in the building industry are the ones who know the fastest way to get from here to there. not a Google search, it's not a LinkedIn search, it's not product directory search, because we might not even be asking the right questions upfront. We might not even know the right questions to ask, and so therefore, you know, we could [00:11:00] go on a four hour Google search where we end up shopping for shoes, or we could phone a friend and in 20 minutes get a lay of the land. helps us make decisions faster. Because ultimately that's the goal, right? Is to document decisions along this path of getting from idea of a project to the built thing in the very end. That is a decision making process that gets documented all along the way. What is We don't have a problem structuring our data once we have made the decision. But the making the decision part is the hard part, and I think that's where most people are. The deer in headlights like, oh my, I'm just overwhelmed with all of the choices. And so what do I do when I'm overwhelmed? I go with the thing I've always done.

I just go back to the products that I've always used. And as, as a designer, we're constantly looking for new, better ways to do things. And the building industry that creates products, the product side of the industry doing innovative stuff, but how do we find it? How do we know that? [00:12:00] How do we keep up with the code changes? How do we build in this area versus that area? What's different in our assembly from Southern California to northeast New York, there's a huge range there. And so taking all of these things into consideration, it's like goes back to the thing that this building industry already has.

We don't need to learn a new tool. don't need to buy a new gizmo that helps us do this thing. the people already exist, the experts, the wisdom. It's already there. We just need to connect. We need to tap into that like neo in the matrix, right? Download into my brain, Kung fu tell me about rain screens.

and somebody who knows what they're doing can convey that, you know, of the land information and get us set on the right path so quickly. me, that's really the difference of what we're talking about when we're talking about data is important, information is important, but wisdom helps us get to there faster.

So it's, it's like a, timeline. Wisdom before [00:13:00] data and information helps us get in the right path sooner.

Bob Habian: Yeah. You know, I, as you're talking, I'm thinking about two rooms. Pick which one you want to be in as an architect or design professional in one room. Mountains of data, sample libraries. Fair amount of dust on some of those samples, by the way.

Um, project files and folders, just reams, right? I, I've walked into some firms that have done some large hospital projects and just the specs right, are massive.

Evan Troxel: Yep,

Bob Habian: They, they, they're multiples of the old Sweet's or, or probably multiples of Encyclopedia Britannica back in the day. So would you like to hang out in that room or would you like to go into the other room where discovery, design and wisdom lives?

because we're losing touch with design. I mean, your line of old tricks for new dogs, that's awesome.

[00:14:00] Why are we teaching the next generation how we used to do it back in the day, much of which is good, but so much of which is inefficient. And, we hand them these tools that are like, look, it's all solved with a piece of software. It's easy to design a building in three hours. Go, okay, but that doesn't end well.

Let's just say that. Um, that might get you the job, but it's not gonna do the job. but the idea of returning back to a place like that room where wisdom lives and design and discovery, I don't want to do it the way I've always done it. You know, I was offered a position doing what's called format work, for gas stations. And I took a look at the work and I took a look at the team and I mean, this is rinse and repeat for the rest of your career. I didn't show up at this. The next day, the, the, a buddy of mine was the principal. He says around the office, they just get a laugh out of going, what about Bob?

Where's Bob ? Because Bob is not down with rinse and repeat. Do the [00:15:00] same thing again and again, and again and again. I just need to discover new ways. And I know that every architect in their heart wants to explore and innovate and bring new things to the table. Design itself is a craft, right? It's not a formula, it's a craft that's diverse among all of us.

It's got so much richness and potential simply put in a, in a project cycle. , there's never enough funding for design work, right? So recently this idea of, of raising money to finance design, that's a great idea. because design is precious and we've been losing touch with it for the last many decades, it's time to put a full stop to that.

Reconsider what the heck we're doing. Which room do we want to end up in most of the time? And just, if we use an 80 20 rule, let's spend 80% of our time in the design wisdom, you know, [00:16:00] closet or room. Then the data overload. room i'd, I'd make that data over room more of a closet. And the other one more of a design studio with big windows and fresh air and dramatic music and capes galore.

You know, the essence of being an architect.

Evan Troxel: so this idea of the Tect platform, connecting professionals to what we call product experts. I think one of the things that have to keep coming back to here is like, okay, there might be other people on the other side of the phone, but who, how are they gonna treat us differently than what we're used to already? think that's, part of it. And then the other part of it is, as a design professional, I need to have enough people available on the other side of that phone to find what I'm looking for and have a great experience because think we've all dealt with tools where that initial hurdle is so high, we never, it's like, you're the gas station job, we just don't go back

Bob Habian: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: So this is all part of it. I mean, part of it [00:17:00] is, finding what you're looking for, but then what is that experience actually like for people? And so don't want to go too far down the road of Tect Academy, but part of this is about change and setting expectations for when a design professional on our schedule reaches out to them to get what we need right when we need it, but also that the treatment coming back from them is not what we're used to. that typically happens right now.

Bob Habian: Yeah. You know, I would put all of that in the category of choices. We're all real people and we all have choices that we can make every day. earlier in my career as an architect, I was feeling overwhelmed that I didn't have much say in the outcome. Right?

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Bob Habian: And that's frankly not true. We're relegating our decision making to.

suggestions and standards by others, but that's not who holds the license. We hold the license. It's our call. [00:18:00] And so making the choice, as I was saying earlier, of which room you want to practice in, that's the design professional choice to make on the supply side, right? You've got manufacturers galore.

Some are small, regional, sharp, innovative, some are sharp and innovative and global, Some have thousands of people on their team. Others are a small third, fourth, fifth generation family business. That supply side is also made of people they have a choice to make. Do they wanna pursue projects as opportunities trying to sell their products into those projects?

Is that the choice they wanna make or do they want to nurture long-term relationships with decision-making design professionals? You have to make a choice because if you're chasing projects, then. , you know, when's this thing going to bid? What's the competitive price where I could push someone else's product out?

It's all of this transactional nuance that's less important than the bigger picture, which is, is this serving my client [00:19:00] best? Does this meet all of the criteria that I had with my client early on? And are we at least 80% delivering what we had hoped for,

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Bob Habian: opposed to the opposite of that? And I haven't started a project yet as an architect, where I didn't preface the future for my client to say, look, this is gonna be a bumpy road, right?

Because we know it doesn't always end well, and we're prepared for the worst, and we, we hope for something better than the worst. So if both sides make a choice, then this can radically change projects immediately, right? So if I choose to reach out to experts on the supply side and trust them again because, , I just have to, right now their culture is sales pressure, sales

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: promises, calling me back way too late or whatever.

but if I can trust them and make that call, to your point, who's gonna be on the other side?

don't want somebody that's choosing to chase my projects with their products. I want somebody that's choosing to nurture relationships, help me [00:20:00] understand the fundamentals of their products, what should I do with it?

the, what are the frequent mistakes made around their products? That's not a transaction on a one-time phone call, that's a relationship over time. So specifically at Tect we're only interested in those that are choosing on the design side to make the right call with trust to the supply side.

And we're choosing those clients on the supply side, those manufacturers that are making the choice to invest in relationships. If you're not a manufacturer that wants to. Choose relationships and people over transactions and projects, then we're not that interested in having you on our platform.

There's plenty of room for you in all of the other avenues from trade shows and publications and search engines and other things to go do that last thing the industry needs is another one of those.

So, to your point about relationships and, and the nuance of what's happening on that other side of supply, there's some fantastic companies.

What I'm finding is that so many of them want the relationship. They just happen [00:21:00] to be chasing the project because they don't have options to find the people to begin the relationships with. So lemme just draw a hard line there. Both sides want the same thing,

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Bob Habian: not doing it.

And, what has been missing is the platform on which you could find each other in the right vein with the right expectations.

Simply, consistently and without any risk,

uh, that that's at the center of our work.

Evan Troxel: is, is key, right? Because the, that I think is what people are not used to. They go online looking for a product or a manufacturer or a rep or information, and you get met with all different kinds of blocks. You could hit a gate on a website that asks for your information so that you can even talk to somebody, okay, red flag, I'm gonna go somewhere

Uh, I mean, those kinds of things. And so kind of setting ground rules that drive consistency among the user's experience, the design professional's [00:22:00] experience when they choose to engage on their timing is, is a big deal. And I think that to me is. Again, this is one of those shifts that a lot of product manufacturers are coming around to. They keep hearing it. They hear it from the AIA. The AIA has done these reports over many years and saying, asking for people's private information just to talk to you, because they don't even know if your product will fit or not, and if they can't talk to you about it, they go somewhere else. And so this is a missing piece of infrastructure in the building industry, which is how to connect to people with a baseline set of expectations on no sales no gated entry, no registration. As design professionals, we don't have time to deal with that. We cannot get on somebody's email list and cold call list because there's not enough time in the day. We have. Thousands of things to do. it really is kind of that missing piece of [00:23:00] infrastructure that Tect has identified and is creating that so that we have the right half to get to decisions that matter that make the biggest difference on our projects as early as possible.

Bob Habian: Yeah, you mentioned the Tect academy. So the first step was to identify the missing infrastructure for making connections,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: that we call the tech platform, the behavioral component. and I, I hate to use the word behavioral, but let's just say the engagement, uh, model that we're used to that needs some, some altering, I'll use that.

Okay. That I'm happy with that term. we recognize that there has to be some teaching, some sharing going on. I'd ask architects, how much do you know about what it takes for manufacturers to bring raw materials to finished goods, and how to distribute it and work with contractors and, work with change orders and other things.

How much do you know about manufacturing? Most of us are too [00:24:00] busy in our own profession to know, well, the same goes for them. So again, everyone's well intended, but manufacturers don't know what they don't know. So we found that the platform itself was not enough. So we had to expand our, our business a bit.

And tech academy is an online. Series of modules that break down what it is manufacturers should know about design professionals. What do we like, what do we not like? You know, what would we like to see more of or less of? And why? You know, how do project delivery models work If it's design build or CM at risk or other things?

Manufacturers have very little notion of what that even means

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: it impacts how they interact with us on early stage price inquiries when we're trying to set budgets that are realistic and are all in, including labor and other things that typically don't see on a manufacturer's website. Um, [00:25:00] you know, we've covered it enough, this idea of serving design professionals instead of selling to us.

But if we just look at statistics and we've talked to thousands of our peers, How many reps do you know that you trust so well? You, you would refer to a friend and we're seeing that number as far south of 10 people.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: How many reps should you know on your projects? Literally hundreds. We should know.

Hundreds. We know barely any, that we trust enough to do good work together over time. So if there are a thousand architects that have two of their favorite reps out of the thousands that are out there, but a thousand architects, each of whom know, two, just by sharing those leads with each other, a little peer-to-peer support, we could all know a few thousand potentially.

Like, that's just a, a value proposition [00:26:00] of exchanging current information. So one of the reasons I didn't, I don't like the word behavioral change, is that it's just a shift. It's like a, it's almost a. Invisible shift that just needs to be made. We just need to realign what we're doing. We don't need to change everything, right?

We just need to realign how we're doing it. We're we're, we're all in business with the cart before the horse or the, whatever analogy you want to use, just stop turned around and let's do better now. That's what we're seeing. And you know, I'm charmed every day when I talk to clients this morning included, where I'm setting up a, a, a launch to a training to a team of about 15 reps at a company.

And one of them already completed the academy and he's so excited. He's like, I was, he was done a few months ago and he says, I'm so ready to move to the next steps. But his team is still needing to get on board. But his excitement, having [00:27:00] gone through the academy, knowing now what he didn't know before, information he can use every day.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: um, we're talking about real change, not like software subscriptions and annual, maybe we delivered something. This is stuff that we're all gonna realize benefit immediately. We just needed somebody to worry enough about it and invest enough in it to, to make a change possible for all of us. So,

Evan Troxel: I like that

It does make sense, especially when you think about the different customer types that building manufacturers have, and they can't treat everyone the same. Right? So realignment and a readjustment of how to treat certain audiences that they have, or maybe they don't have yet.

Maybe they're not going serving, design professionals the early stages of design. Maybe they're solely focused on contractors and substitutions at the end of the project, and so, It just, I mean, it really points out, like you said, what are the nuances, when you [00:28:00] approach a design professional that you need to be aware of so that you can serve them best and, and differently than you would serve a different customer type. And so we've taken that on, the design professional's behalf by creating this academy so that they get that information and can use it to their advantage, which is then transferred to you as a design professional. You get to use it to your advantage because they treat you how you need them to treat you when it comes to getting the, the right information or direction that you need when you approach

Bob Habian: Let me point out also, the Tech Academy is not a sales tool. This isn't sales training for product reps, how to sell more. Okay? This is saying very bluntly, stop selling. If you want to create more sales on projects working with design professionals, then stop selling to design professionals and you'll realize more sales long term through their projects.

So stop selling, [00:29:00] start serving. Um, so the, the academy itself is long overdue. , the curriculum was informed by actual practitioners that you haven't interviewed. Aggregated their feedback, did a fantastic job of structuring that, uh, wisdom and experience and, and request from the profession. What I also love about the academy is that we're able to tell manufacturers things that architects want them to know, but that architects weren't willing to tell them to their face.

would've been a bit embarrassing to say, could you just stop calling me once a quarter because I don't even want to hear from you that frequently because there are a thousand reps doing the same thing and it's not helpful. It's not you, it's just that it's not helpful.

we all know that, uh, we've heard great stories about lunch and learn scenarios in all of their various forms.

some really important and meaningful lunch and learns, and some that are just [00:30:00] comical, and it's more about the food or the color of the person's tie or some other thing that comes as a net result of that in interchange. And, this is a, colorful bag of tricks that things could go in a hundred directions.

But, you know, we just want to bring a little clarity, bring things back to connecting and making progress here. And, uh, the truth of what we really want to tell them just needs to be told. And I think you, Evan and others in the academy, did a really good job of representing design professionals.

Not only well but thoroughly.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: you dig into some of the very small aspects of, of interchange between supply and demand, and you just address 'em straight up. . so I'm I'm really proud of the work that we're doing in the academy. I'm excited about the outcome that transformed sales reps that are becoming product category experts, uh, are expressing to us.

Um, you know, one [00:31:00] of our graduates, and we call 'em tagged, right? They're, they're tech Academy graduates. They've been tagged and, uh, one of them in particular graduated, called me about a month later and said, you're not gonna believe it. I said, what? She says, my next month is full of meetings with design teams where I was invited to come in and talk to them about their projects.

That is not a normal, uh, day for or month for a sales rep, but that, I believe is what a month in the life of a product category expert looks like, because a product category expert. Needs to know more than just their products. They need to know about their competitor's products. They need to know how to help others integrate their components into assemblies.

They need to be brutally honest, like, Bob, we don't make that, and that might upset my sales manager, but we don't make it. Here's who does.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: the honesty we need. And guess who I'm gonna call next time I have a project

Evan Troxel: it's [00:32:00] information. Yeah,

Bob Habian: But that's the trust that I just want, I want somebody that I know is honest, objective, professional, competent, and guess what?

That person that I talked to, they don't have to be the expert. They just need to be able to deliver the expertise from that supply side manufacturer to me. So if I ask a question they don't know, that's okay. Just give me the answer in less than 24 hours, please.

and so we're also just helping equip those individuals to recognize that they can't know it all themselves.

And so facilitating expertise from their team and their industry. Right. When you think about, say, uh, you know, flooring, there's a flooring industry. There are multiple flooring industries. The amount of expertise and case studies and research and data that's available through just one category, expert at one company is more than we would ever need.

we're activating in a very specific [00:33:00] or structured way. Right. We're structuring this in a few important ways. One, it's structured by product category. It's findable via keyword. It's filterable by geolocation of where your project is located. Is my project in the southeast with hurricane conditions or the northeast with other conditions of climate and code and labor practices and tradition and cost?

Is my project in a rural area or a a big metropolitan area? being able to search and find the experts in categories by keyword and location. This is not something we've ever had access to until now. And you know, it ended up that we, yeah, were issued a 20 claim patent on our software because these things had not been put together in the way that we have before.

so we're excited about bringing this to market and, appreciate sharing about it.

Evan Troxel: perfect segue. Let, [00:34:00] let's talk about that. because I don't want to set any false expectations that this is ready to go right now, because it isn't, and I think this is part of that shift, that alignment that we were talking about earlier, and, the, the scale at which we need to get to make this useful for people the first time that they use it. There's a lot of product categories out there. There's a lot of regions we're talking about where we're starting from. You have to have a certain scale for it to be useful right? And so I think now we're kind of shifting the conversation into the mechanics of. the startup, and I think we, I want to even get into the funding side of

that is a, that is a piece of this. do you build this thing be the most useful as soon as possible? Because you get that one chance to make a first impression. And so, like the idea the execution sound fantastic, but the, [00:35:00] the truth of the matter is like, you can't launch before it's ready.

And so speak to that part of it for a little bit because the AIA partnered with us early on, did a survey basically that was some of the findings that came out of that. Maybe we can use that as a jumping off point to talk about and, then funding.

Bob Habian: Yeah. You know, so you used the word startup. So I I easily interchange the word venture, right? So we're creating ventures, not buildings. Um, so entrepreneur, architects, like entree architect, mark LaPage, and his community. I, I'm definitely an, an entrepreneur, architect, more entrepreneur, frankly, than architect.

My entire career has been building businesses, learning from that feedback in the market, pivoting, improving businesses, understanding the cycles of the economics in the market, from the real estate cycles to other supply and demand cycles. You know, when there's a shortage of Portland cement in the world because China's consuming most of it.

These are the things that, that as a venture [00:36:00] minded architect who's mostly an entrepreneur, this is not my first rodeo. I've been doing this most of my career, and I think that informs our strategy, which is to recognize that just going to market with a product is not enough. Just getting people to subscribe, you know, to your platform is definitely not enough, um, because it's easy to join, but if there's no value, then it's very easy to leave.

And frankly, they never look back.

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Bob Habian: And so, as you said, Early on, we got a call from Washington DC right? The AIA National Office said, Hey, what are you guys up to? This looks interesting. This is potentially solving some issues that we've been studying for a long time

their research called The Architect's Journey to Specification since 2016.

But they just expressed this interest in what we're doing and how we might get there to potentially be a mainstream component long term in the building industry. And [00:37:00] we engaged in a call every other week for 18 months, and surprisingly, the majority of the conversations were about how to kind of pump the brakes, think this through much deeper and longer to say, look, fast is not the only criteria in this case.

sustainable and intentional, what we can deliver value. Matters most, right? For any of us, you see a new thing, it better deliver value. If it doesn't, why are you bothering me? So understanding how best to deliver value to both sides was the first part of the work. The platform's been built for quite some time.

We've beta tested, redesigned, optimized. It's not that we are still building a platform, it's ready for market. But as you indicated, AIA then funded a third party survey. What do their members think about the Tect platform? And we received a really detailed report about those findings. As the CEO of Tect I was very pleased.[00:38:00]

The majority of folks love the platform. They had two strong areas of pushback. One, the idea of the academy. Many architects said, are you sure you wanna nudge manufacturers to actually consider their behavioral change? Because maybe they don't want to do that. Are you asking too much of them, Bob And I don't think so.

And in fact, I'm. Glad that that's not the case. Actually. It's fair to assume as an architect that might be a hindrance, but the outcome is no, no, no. They really enjoy the the academy. That's good for all of us. The second thing was don't bring a product like this to market until there's enough density on the supply side of experts that when I search, I can find the help I need.

That's simple blocking and tackling. That's like saying, can you become Google tomorrow? No. Did Google start as the Google? We know. No. Did Facebook start? No. Facebook started at one university.

Evan Troxel: It's the 10 year long overnight

Bob Habian: right. [00:39:00] So Facebook started at one university. Then the Ivy League schools, they started picking steam when they hit the high schools.

But the Facebook you think of today, WA was a small community. Same with Slack, same with many others. But if you're patient and you really focus on the quality, of those early engagements and you really hone in on how can this scale? Because frankly, if it works well for one, it will work well for everyone, but we just need to put it through its paces.

And so at this point, we're really just focused on customer acquisition. The software works, the value proposition's there, what's called the product market fit is solidly there. We're signing multi-year contracts with manufacturers across categories across the country. And so now we just need to ask the demand side market to support us with some patients and, and, uh, enthusiasm because this is coming.

This isn't a thought, [00:40:00] this isn't a concept. This is coming to you. Um, but we're being responsible enough to bring you what you asked for, which was enough density on the supply side to be a meaningful tool. And we're doing all of that not to be able to charge you more. In fact, we charge you nothing. This is a free resource for design professionals.

Why would we do it that way? We're, we're design professionals. We're doing it the way we would want too. Sorry, Evan.

Evan Troxel: Well, when you talk about customer acquisition, I think it's important to point out exactly what you mean

Bob Habian: Yeah. So customer acquisition is simply the fact that our platform is free to design professionals and manufacturers pay a small fee to be on the platform. So our users are design professionals, our customers are manufacturers.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: And so those manufacturers are signing multi-year contracts to take a position on the platform that represents their category of product, or in many cases, multiple categories of products that they make.

And our [00:41:00] goal is to populate the spectrum of product categories, but also have national coverage. So some product categories are national by nature, those products are shippable across the country. Carpet as an example, and flooring. Concrete products take concrete block doesn't ship across the country very competitively when there are adequate manufacturers across the country already.

So that one category may have a half a dozen or a dozen manufacturers required to cover a national demand. Um, and in other categories it's just a few. So our focus is to populate the supply side, not with any manufacturers, but with those manufacturers who choose relationships first, who sign multi-year contracts who enroll in the Tect academy to go ahead and really understand the needs of the demand side.

Like I don't know how it gets better than that in terms of a scope of work that we need to focus on. [00:42:00] And so we are deeply in that work. We are making fantastic project progress rather every day. , but we're in that work for a while. We're staying out of view. We aren't telling ya you should get excited about finding people tomorrow, but that said, let me say this.

We are celebrating those early adopters and I want you to celebrate them with us. These are manufacturers that are stepping up to meet us where we ask them to go.

And so we're gonna be participating in the AA conferences here in San Francisco, the conference on architecture. We got a significant booth at that event.

And we really are focused on celebrating those people that are stepping up early. And that's on both sides. We've been blessed to have a, a growing following of our peers on the design professional demand side and others, supporting what we're doing. And, uh, you mentioned the people verse, this is part of the community that we're building, right?

This is about people, [00:43:00] this is about community. And so, , you know, customer acquisition is more manufacturers on the platform to the benefit of all of this and, and this season of growth. there's a place for participating, um, so that we can deliver a really mature solution. That's just immediate benefit when you start your search to find those experts, you need,

Evan Troxel: So let's talk about how we get from to there and there being kind of this enough inertia to launch, because I think this is where rubber meets the road. You gotta figure out how to do this. And so I don't think it's any secret of this kind of VC winter. I don't know.

There's a lot of different ways that, that people are talking about the economic conditions that exist right now,

for small companies like ours who a big vision to deliver real change in the positive, meaningful way for the building industry, which is huge, which has its [00:44:00] own enormous set of challenges to overcome. We really feel like this can help. that. Right. Uh, and so how do we get from here to there, speaking as the CEO of Tect and, and and, and startups and that, and that whole world of the economic side of things.

Bob Habian: Yeah. The economics of venturing, right?

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: they're a bit different than professional practice. In professional practice, as we know, the fees we collect fund our firms, right? You don't go out and raise funds from investors, per se to start your practice. That's not how we do it

in the venture world. . That's perhaps the only way you do it.

you know, if you're fortunate enough to create a business that is a revenue first, no outside investment required business. That's the, the gold standard. That's the brass ring and that is attainable. [00:45:00] There are fantastic companies that started with a revenue first model. They were conservative in their spend, their model was able to get to market and move their value into the market early.

Okay? Others, as we know, many of the brands were familiar with in the news and the financial news, um, humongous global brands. They've yet to produce profit,

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: uh, let alone significant revenue. In many cases, they're just trading their IP and the hope of what they might one day do as a real business with real money involved.

So, Having been a multi venture entrepreneur, now we had to consider what is the right financial model for this. and similar to our discussions with AIA and others about slow and steady toward mainstream rather than fast and flippant, we had to build our financial plan for the long run, [00:46:00] and that required heavy investment internally.

Okay, so there's been multiple seven figures invested internally before any outside money was, was sought during that internal investment period. We've begun revenue, so we are selling our services. We are selling multi-year contracts right now, so we're, we're creating a balance of investment plus revenue.

We have real revenue and we're hopeful to be profitable. I just don't want to put too many forward projecting statements out right now because we are raising funds, but we're very hopeful about the direction and the pace of our sales and our path to profitability. However, unless that revenue is adequate to sustain the growth of the enterprise, the only option is continued investment, right?

So we have a choice that we're making. Again, choices [00:47:00] we can choose to go the way of the venture capital markets and strive to be one of those ventures. That quote is worthy enough to garner their attention, to put their money in what we believe is meaningful to our profession. Well, at our core, here's a question we keep asking.

Do we want somebody to solve our problems in this industry and those people are outside of our industry? Do we wanna wait for somebody outside to do it? Or can we do it ourselves and should we do it ourselves? And would the outcome be better if we did? Well, we believe in the latter. So instead of pursuing an outside market for funding, we're using a very democratized platform called Wefunder.

This is like crowdfunding specifically. It allows unaccredited investors. We could sidebar that topic if you want to explain what an accredited or unaccredited [00:48:00] investor is. But most of us are not accredited investors in the world, and so if we wanna buy stock in a company, we have to wait for that company to go public.

Evan Troxel: right.

Bob Habian: It's only the accredited investors and the big folks with money they can afford to lose. They get to invest in a lot of the startups. There's a friends and family round. There's a angel. Round of people that have a little more money to throw around. But accredited investors are typically the ones that get the lion's share of the upside in deals because they get to invest early and the rest of us just have to wait until let's, that value is long gone and now we're just splitting hairs when the stock goes public and we hope for the best up 2 cents this week down, down half a buck next week, whatever.

Evan Troxel: All

Bob Habian: So what we're doing now with Wefunder is inviting others like us to invest with us. Cause we've long invested already, but we're inviting others to now invest with us [00:49:00] as little as a hundred dollars in our campaign. And whether we have a thousand investors of our peers, or 2000 investors of our peers or more, that's the outcome we're seeking.

We would much prefer to be building this together inside the industry. Coming together to make this happen.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Bob Habian: well on our way actually. So we're about, uh, we're almost approaching 20% of our fundraising goal, and we're just launching that campaign next week to the public. Um, so anyway, that's how we're going about it, is in a collective crowd crowdfunded way that the s e C and the IRS now allow with new regulations.

particularly as of about 2020, the laws and the tax code has changed to allow unaccredited investors to invest a portion of their net worth. So, whether you're invested in 401ks or other things, you can now redirect that money, make better choices of where you [00:50:00] choose to put your money, maybe in things that you know more about than a mutual fund or other things that you have no say, no familiarity with.

But, uh, It's exciting to, to be embarking on that effort. Um, we're getting some great votes of confidence from some key people early from our peer group, uh, that are leaning in with us, and we're just starting that effort to now open that lens and, and invite others to consider doing this together inside our industry.

Evan Troxel: I think a lot of people are familiar with, sites like Kickstarter, where you put down, uh, an amount early on in different tiers. You know, they make these different brackets that have different rewards systems to them. Kickstarter's all about

maybe, uh, I

Bob Habian: almost.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, pre-orders in the, on the product side of things. It could be a book, it could be a movie though. It could be like just helping make a bigger thing happen.

Um, but it usually is, [00:51:00] there's some kind of output from it. And this is investing in a company, and so if the company does better over time, you get a return on that investment.

Right? So that's the whole differentiation that I would think. This is, they're both right? But this is crowd invested versus funding products. And so just to kind of bridge the, gap of like, what is this thing? And what is exciting about it to me is that we can go to our peer group and our colleagues in the industry, but also outside of the industry to say, this is a huge problem and a huge opportunity that if we overcome this, I mean, the building industry is, it's in the US alone, it's a 1.6 trillion. Industry and we've identified through our advisor group and research that there is as much as 50 cents on the dollar on every project that is left on the table. It goes completely to waste. That means buildings cost [00:52:00] twice as much as they should to people who need to buy buildings to go through the process of procuring architecture. And so can we do something about that 50 cents on the dollar going to waste? I mean, if, if people knew that on the owner side, would they still want to do it? I have a hard time believing like this is, we say it in in air quotes like it is, it's the way it is, but it doesn't have to be that way. And there is a huge crisis in the built environment, shortage of housing and other things. so if we can make a dent that universe by getting people to have the ability to make better decisions that make a bigger difference. Earlier on a project that's huge, that can have an enormous impact, that can have an, an enormous impact on the environment, but it can also have an enormous impact on how you spend your time on a day-to-day basis as a design professional. Would you rather spend your time [00:53:00] fielding phone calls and emails and trying to find something in a four hour long Google search or would you rather just get the information straight away and do better things with your time? Because I don't know about you, but as an architect, like the most valuable thing I have is my time.

That's what I bill for. So if I can use it for better things and not work late and on the weekends trying to find these things, we really believe that we can make a huge difference here. So by. Extending this offer out to our peers in the industry on this podcast and in other ways through like Wefunder, which is opening it up to the general public. We really feel like we have an opportunity here to fix this from the inside. And like Bob said, not wait around for someone else to come along and fix it for us. We may not like what they come up with Right? And, and so we're asking people to vote with their dollars, right. And vote with their feet and join our community. because we really do believe that, and I think [00:54:00] it's come up many times in this conversation. this problem for the long run is very important. And we wouldn't be doing this for the short term gains of something that is going to take a very long time to actually fix. This is something that. Manufacturers getting on board with, we want relationships, relationships last a long time. Why? Because they're better for the business if they do. All of these things are long term goal oriented. And so, by investing now this vision, in these founders of this small business that you believe in, that can make a difference in your day-to-day, but also in the life of the profession in generations moving forward. I mean, to me, this is, this is a big story. This is a big idea, and it's something that's worth paying attention to. So I think that's really what we're inviting people to do. and so moving from talk to action is something that we talk about a lot. I mean, how many times have we sat [00:55:00] in meetings where people are like, oh, this would be a cool idea.

And then people look around. Uh, you're gonna do that, right? Not me. I mean, this really gives anyone the opportunity be a part of the solution. And it's a very easy lift. you don't have to learn a new piece of software to do this. You don't have to completely change your behavior to do this. This is easy. You can actually just say, yep, I believe in this and I'm gonna support group. And I actually wish more startups would go this route because think there's a lot of ideas that we're excited about. I mean, there's a lot of people that come on this podcast who have for something that is extremely exciting and people want a way to support the people who are making a difference in their profession and beyond. wish more would give the general public a k a us the ability to, to do that. So I, I think this is a very exciting opportunity.

Bob Habian: Yeah. And I would, you know, draw a distinction as well that this. [00:56:00] Service that we provide and the campaign that we're engaged in. This isn't about us, this isn't about Tect. What is Tect? Tect is a platform to enable the market, to enable both sides of demand and supply. And, you know, we've met some fantastic folks along the way that individually have decided to do something about problems in the marketplace.

You know, not even related to us, just out there fighting the fight in a, in a corner of the market that they decided was too important for them to ignore. And they just wanted to do something about it.

that's like most people on most projects, okay? Most people on most projects are doing their best to make things as good as they could possibly be.

And yet, how often are they celebrated? How often are they even recognized, you know, particularly at the big. Shovel events when we're taking pictures at the openings and stuff, and [00:57:00] it's just an awkward moment. You've talked about this before,

you know, but the doers that are doing the work are so frequently unappreciated, you know, unacknowledged.

And we recognize that the strength of our industry is in numbers and in talent and in the work we all do collectively. We are a powerful profession. We are a powerful industry that has direct impact, as we all know on the world.

Evan Troxel: It says it's, it's a cliche, right? But it, we actually do have the power to, to change the

Bob Habian: right.

Evan Troxel: built environment. Yeah. , it's, it's a

big

Bob Habian: And so rather than saying who wants to step up and wave a banner and claim their place and this leadership of change, no, no. Here's how it's more likely gonna happen. Quiet people, talented people doing rigorous work. With persistence and patience and sweat [00:58:00] that really are doing it out of a belief and a choice and what we're drawing together around us.

And we look around and we see it every day now are like-minded professionals and peers in this industry. And I'm seeing two distinct communities. One, those people that want to step up and absolutely do something about what needs to change. The other, maybe more importantly, are those that support those that stand up to make the change.

If you stand up to make a change on behalf of your peers and you look around and there are no peers following you and there are no peers that that are cheering you on, well then something's wrong with that picture. And it doesn't mean that the person doing the work is wrong, it just means they've not connected the dots.

Those things that are worthy of support get support. And so we're hearing great feedback from people that believe in the work that we're doing. But again, it's not work about Bob and [00:59:00] Evan. This is work in service to each of you and all of us. In my remaining days in this life, I hope to see a platform like this fully in play with the kinds of outcomes at maturity that matter.

Architects who currently are maybe even still in school, that come into the profession with a new tool set that come into the profession with a new mindset. I'm not gonna go search for products. I'm gonna nurture relationships with supply side experts. I'm gonna grow my design firm leveraging the wisdom and the knowledge and the power of supply side partners in the manufacturing side.

We're gonna stem bad decisions right up front. We're gonna set a better course for our project. The ripple effect is not gonna be negative on our projects. The ripple effect is gonna be positive. We're gonna have less change orders. better budgets, less field changes and such where our schedules maybe are gonna be met [01:00:00] or even exceeded for the better.

The waste is gonna be clawed back and put to good use, maybe even our profit margins, you know, and just restore order. But do it in a thoughtful, practical, very architect minded way. Because you know that we do this for our clients. We're responsible for trillions of dollars globally every year, and we do this responsibly for our clients.

How about we do it for ourselves? How about we do it for our profession? And I welcome the supporters of those that are willing to step up. And I will. I welcome those that are willing to step up and together we can do this. And together we are doing this. So I, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this today, Evan.

I think it's, it's a meaningful. Moment in our journey together and, uh, you know, glad glad that we could share this.

Evan Troxel: [01:01:00] Yeah, I, that's a great way to, to wrap it up. And I, I, the last thing that I think we should mention, we brought it up earlier, is that we are gonna be at the AIA conference on architecture in June. is it? The, the seventh through the 10th or something like that? It's, we'll be on the expo hall floor, uh, on Thursday and Friday of that week in the Tect booth.

Do you know the tech booth number?

Bob Habian: 42 0 1, it's a

10 by 30 foot booth right in the middle of the, the whole enterprise. When you come down the escalators and go to your right at the Moscone Convention Center, you're gonna see the Swatch box sample library, and just half an aisle across the way is the Tect booth. and that's the centerpiece for just community.

So we're not gonna be showing products, we're not gonna be promoting data and, and. specs and cut sheets and all that. We're gonna be celebrating people. And if you're going to the show, we want you to come say hi.

we're gonna be interviewing some of our peers on all sides, [01:02:00] with an onsite podcast, but more importantly, we wanna make a connection that

can take beyond those two days together and, uh, build together. So we want to know what you care about, where your problems are with products, what your hope is for the industry, because this fabric is being woven by each of us together. right now this is, uh, this is a wonderful time to be in practice and I, I'll end with this. , regardless of what the signs might indicate, I believe we're entering the most important and most exciting period in the building industry.

And I'm excited about the enthusiasm that is shared by others like us that are doing something about it. And I welcome you to see that vision and to be a part of the best chapter in the building industry because that is a choice we make.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. we believe in the built environment and we believe in the power of architecture [01:03:00] and what it can

Bob Habian: Absolutely.

Evan Troxel: and our goal is to celebrate the people who make that happen. It's, it's not the projects per se, it's the people, it's the ideas, the creativity goes into that. How can we help facilitate that to happen even better? We wanna meet you. We want, so, so definitely come by the booth and say hello and hang out. Our biggest goal right now is to build this community who cares about the future of these professions that make up the building industry. there's not a better place to do that than the AIA conference.

Why? Because that is where the design and manufacturing community do come together the biggest setting possible, and it's where we can make the biggest difference, bridging the gap between those two. How many times do you bolt down an aisle, not making eye contact with those manufacturers because you don't want to get sucked into a sales scenario. We're there to change that one person, one handshake, one meeting at a time. I mean, As we build this community, we hope the network effect really does [01:04:00] happen and that we can change it bigger, faster, better. this is where it has to start and this is the place to do it. So if you're gonna be there, come by, say hi, booth 42 0 1 at Moscone Center, and uh, we're looking forward to meeting you

the website is tect.com and if you go to tect.com/join, you can get onto our communication list

so thanks so much for having this conversation today. It was an important one. I've been looking for a reason to have it, and, and so I'm, I'm happy that we did this.

Bob Habian: Likewise. And, you know, for the Wefunder campaign, we'll put a link on to that as well. but it's wefunder.com, wefunder.com/tech t e ct.one wefunder.com/tech one, and we invite you to take a look. If it's not for you, it might be for someone you know. And, uh, so between the upcoming show. Um, the [01:05:00] opportunity to work together with our dollars and our efforts, and then well beyond that, looking forward to engaging and serving you with our platform, serving your projects long term, building a sustainable piece of infrastructure that we all can rely and grow with.

Um, that's what's most exciting and so we look forward to that Together. Thank you again for listening and, uh, hope to see you soon.

Evan Troxel: Yep. All those links will be in the show notes and, uh, thanks everybody. Talk to you next time.

Connect with Evan* Twitter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Email

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The News* TestFit generates parking in Autodesk Forma * Scan to model with McNeel's iRhino 3d app * ShapeDiver puts Grasshopper definitions into Autodesk Forma * Phil Bernstein talks about the wicked problems of machine learning in architecture * Google is playing catch-up so they announced a bunch of new tech at their I/O event

The latest TRXL podcast episode115: ‘The First Level of Engagement’, with Campbell YuleA conversation with Campbell Yule.TRXLEvan Troxel🎧Campbell Yule of Cerulean Labs (makers of the Spaces iPad app) joins me on the podcast to talk about their spin on sketching with modern digital tools supercharged with analytics, bringing the fun back to designing, not trying to do everything, working offline (what?!), collaboration and sharing, the magic of sketching in front of clients, iteration in design, and more.TestFit parking generator for Autodesk FormaThe first plugins are already rolling out for Autodesk Forma. My friends at TestFit just announced a parking generator because no one should ever have to draw parking again.

Testfit:

With the TestFit Parking Generator, you can create and explore possible parking utilization of your site inside of Autodesk Forma.

TestFit's AI configurators optimize the best design solutions for every site. Simply draw your parking boundaries and TestFit will automatically generate parking for your site. You'll then be able to manually adjust by axis for orientation, stall width, depth, turn radius and more.

Scan to model with iRhino 3DWhen it came out years ago, McNeel’s iRhino 3D was an app that simply let us view .3dm files on iPad or iPhone. This was useful if we built models in Rhino and wanted to show them to clients, but beyond that, it seemed like just a simple nod to these devices.

Things have changed.

A new version is in active development is much more useful. To see what I think is the killer function, watch the video in this post where McNeel developer Morteza Karimi shows off their implementation of Apple’s RoomPlan API.

Morteza:

Make a Rhino model of an interior space in seconds.

Our free iRhino3D app has a brand new feature using Apple's RoomPlan API that generates a 3D model of an interior space within seconds. The NURBS output can be saved as a 3DM file and is organized in layers like walls, cabinets, furniture etc.

I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t realize this app had this functionality since January ‘23 even though I’ve had it on my devices since the new development cycle was announced. I just scanned one of my rooms with my iPhone 14 Pro and it made this model in 30 seconds, including creating and classifying furniture bounding geometry and putting them on corresponding layers automatically. 🤯

This scan took me 30 seconds to do on my iPhone 14 Pro. This is iRhino on iPhone using the "Scan a Room" to NURBS feature.Steve Baer (McNeel) on RoomPlan:

Something to note is that we are using a feature provided by iOS 16 and are doing very little of the “real” work during the scan. iRhino just starts the room scanning feature and then collects the geometry as a result when it is complete.

The feature is called Room Plan and I would suspect that the accuracy of the scan will improve over time as Apple continues to work on this with updates to iOS.

iRhino 3D is currently a work in progress (WIP) and it’s available for anyone with an iPad or iPhone with a LiDAR camera (as long as they are Pro models) for free because of the necessity of the LiDAR sensor depth scanning.

Try it out yourself through the TestFlight app here. If you don’t have a Pro model iOS or iPad device but instead have a non-pro model, you can still use the app but it won’t do the room scanning feature.

Other features of iRhino include viewing models in augmented reality (AR) over a live backdrop, markups on models, ability yo run command line features (!), solve Hops definitions on remote servers, and more. Keep an eye on their progress in this forum.

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Campbell Yule of Cerulean Labs (makers of the Spaces App) joins the podcast to talk about how they are putting a spin on the act of sketching with modern digital tools and analytics, bringing the fun part back to designing, not trying to do everything, the ability to work offline, collaboration and sharing, the magic of sketching in front of clients, iteration in design, and more.

Latest TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter🗞️ AEC/tech Newsletter #11The News * Early impressions of just-released Autodesk Forma * Zillow jumps on the ChatGPT bandwagon * New Grasshopper 2 tools look fantastic * Sitescape mobile scanning tool acquired by an industry leader * Veras AI renderer now available for SketchUp on the Mac The latest TRXL podcast epis…TRXLEvan TroxelEpisode Links* Spaces website * Campbell on LinkedIn * Campbell on Twitter * Campbell on Instagram * Cerulean Labs on LinkedIn * Cerulean Labs on Twitter * Cerulean Labs on Instagram

Watch this episode on YouTube115: ‘The First Level of Engagement’, with Campbell YuleCampbell Yule of Cerulean Labs (makers of the Spaces App) joins the podcast to talk about how they are putting a spin on the act of sketching with modern dig…YouTubeEpisode Transcript115: ‘The First Level of Engagement’, with Campbell Yule

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Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. This is the podcast where I have a conversation with guests from the architectural community and beyond to talk about the co-evolution of architecture and technology.

In this episode, I welcome Campbell Yule. Campbell has a bachelor of architectural studies from Oakland university and has since spent over 25 years at the forefront of the architectural technology industry, working as managing director and majority owner of CADimage group, the New Zealand distributor of ARCHICAD. And then as a building information modeling system developer in Budapest. After 20 years there, he tested and launched a number of worldwide initiatives on behalf of Graphisoft as their global director of business development in Budapest, Hungary. And after Graphisoft, he did consulting for architectural businesses, launching recurring business models and then founded what has become Spaces in late 2019. He's currently based in [00:01:00] Hungary.

As you're about to hear. In the beginning of this episode, I've been a long time user of the iPad. I've done a lot of incredible things on it professionally yet it remains mostly a consumption device for most people. It just seems to be so perfectly suited for a lot of architects, but I don't think it has ever really taken off because of a perceived lack of professional apps. But as I record this introduction, I think pro apps are about to start getting their due. Apple has just released two of their flagship pro applications for iPad, and they're going to be released very soon. Final cut pro for video editing and logic pro for audio editing. And I use these apps a ton on my Mac.

I've also seen some great 3d architecture apps being developed with renewed interest of late, including SketchUp and McNeel's iRhino 3d, which has integrated Apple's room scan tech to automatically build 3d models of spaces, which also includes classifying objects onto layers, all when capturing that space in real time using their LIDAR [00:02:00] camera.

You can see more about my recent adventures in iRhino in my TRXL/ AEC tech email newsletter, click the link in the show notes, or go to TRXL.Co and click on one of the subscribed buttons to get it in your inbox.

In this episode, Campbell and I get into this topic and discuss how his startup is putting a spin on the act of sketching with modern digital tools and analytics.

Bringing the fun back to designing. Not trying to do everything. The ability to work offline. Yes. You heard that right. The magic of sketching in front of clients. The importance of iteration during design. And more so without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Campbell Yule.

Campbell, me today. I look our conversation.

Campbell: Yeah. Thanks a lot. Nice to, uh, be involved in this, Evan, and, uh, great to, , share what we are up to.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I am excited because I am a longtime iPad owner and user. [00:03:00] I've had of them. I think I started with the very first one and, here I am now on a five year old 2018 iPad Pro because I have not upgraded in quite a while. And, you know, I'm excited about your whole take on developing a sketching based productivity design app.

you're gonna describe it way better than I could. but just iPad first, there's not very many people out there thinking iPad first. And as we transition from the, and. Pen to, digital. There's this kind of obvious gap right now, between those two things, getting your design into the computer and informing it with data could start with still a very kind of, I don't know.

It's just like this is our muscle memory. It's in our DNA as architects to at least it is for a certain generation of architects. And there's a lot of us out there. So I'm excited to hear how you got to where you are, but let's go back and, give

who you are and what you've been up to for the, [00:04:00] past several years.

Campbell: Past several years. Uh, yeah, I've been around the world for, uh, a while now. I'm born and bred Kiwi, born in Auckland. my mum was actually British, so as a, a youngster, myself and my three sisters headed off to the uk, when my parents were doing what is known as their overseas experience.

so I had had a little bit of an introduction to the UK and actually started school there, as a four year old, which was, quite strange, when you talk to different people around the world and what age people start school. but then we moved back to New Zealand and actually moved right down to the bottom of New Zealand, to a small town of 4,000 people.

my father was one of the two local surgeons, and over 14 years he got to know pretty much the entire 30,000 people in the district having sliced or diced them in one way or another.

Evan Troxel: okay

Campbell: But during that time, I was in a, local high school our technology block, I was, right into technical drawing and, and woodworking.

and the technology block was actually having a big refurbishment. and the builders were working on site and I got quite friendly with them just cause I enjoy the, getting my hands [00:05:00] into things. and they were talking about a house they had recently built up in Dunedin, and they pulled out the architectural blueprints.

and these were blueprints. These are the traditional ammonia based reproduction, just the smell, the texture, the blue on white.

Evan Troxel: I know

Campbell: Uh, just wonderful tactile feeling. And, I guess I was about 13 or 14 at that stage. and I saw these drawings and it was the sort of, this is what you did if you learned how to do technical drawing.

And I thought, okay, well, I wanna be an architect.

sort of deviated off that path a couple of years later and, and decided I wanted to be a pilot, and actually accepted into the New Zealand Air Force, but eventually declined that because, they had offered me originally a university cadetship, uh, where I would get a nice degree.

and then they changed through various funding reasons and said, we'll still teach you to fly. but I felt that I wanted to go off and get a, higher education. So I, uh, jumped back on a plane, something that's become pretty regular for me since I turned 18. I, moved back to the top of the north island in New [00:06:00] Zealand back to Auckland, which is home to one of the two architectural schools in New Zealand.

so that was, uh, my introduction to actually the academia around architecture. but growing up through my teenage years, I'd always played with the computers. I'd even played with a lot of 3D modeling applications. they'd be incredibly primitive these days. but I always played with them from the point of view of creating architecture.

I wasn't just creating any sort of geometric forms. it was all based around real buildings or virtual buildings. And, and while at university, I discovered a product which was called a virtual building solution. It was acad. and I got introduced to that by one of my European based, lecturers.

and so I went up to the computer lab and sat down for pretty much 24 hours and taught myself acad, version four. and started to use it for my design projects. And, and I started getting a bit of kickback from my, classmates. sort of said, why do you want to do this? You don't need to use computers.

You can just, you should be just drawing it. We're still very much the craft of [00:07:00] architecture. and I think that's something that's quite important and it's, a theme that I've brought forward to today. I continued my studies. I did continue to use acad for some of my design projects.

sometimes it was just a, an exercise in working out how big something was. I had to do a 20,000 square meter auditorium and, and music center, and it was like, well, how big is that?

Evan Troxel: Right

Campbell: it's four or five stories high, what's the rough rectangular footprint? using a product like Archie Cattle allowed me to throw together a, a simple mass that I could go back to a traditional trace over the top.

but no full well that I was actually at the right size.

Evan Troxel: Yeah

Campbell: I saw the power of the computer not as a tool necessarily to go from start to finish, but to solve particular problems along the way. from university, I then actually took up a job with the New Zealand Acad distributor. and so I then spent 20 years working directly with Acad as the distributor in New Zealand.

everything from tech support to training, to software development, [00:08:00] to ultimately buying out the company and, and running it for 15 years.

before I, sold that business and took the next logical step, which was to go and work for the developers of Acad, based here in Hungary, Graphisoft.

Evan Troxel: Wow.

plane

Campbell: that, taught me on a journey.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I'm sure it did. So now you're in Budapest that's a big jump to go from, I assume support and sales to development. That that's quite a different role

Campbell: It was quite a different role. Um, my role that I took with Graphisoft here in, in Budapest was the global business development. so as the New Zealand distributor, we were very fortunate. Um, we had a very strong market. CAD kind of missed New Zealand in the eighties. So when we were selling acad in the nineties, it was still taking people off, drawing boards , and going from drawing boards to a 3D solution seemed logical.

, they hadn't, made that step into AutoCAD, to the electronic drafting board, shall we say. and so we managed to get a really good, strong market in New Zealand. When I sold the business, we had [00:09:00] about 55% market share, and Graphisoft here in Hungary, it allowed me to. Undertake essentially a number of market experiments.

We were a well-developed market. I was always keen on pushing the envelope. and we were far enough away from Budapest that if the experiment didn't quite come off the brand reputation or the fallout was obviously gonna be able to be minimized. and so we did things like free student versions.

we introduced Acad as a subscription product. we were one of the first distributors to, do a support and maintenance agreement, which pay a monthly fee and get your annual upgrades, as a matter of course, and tied into a lot of education into those processes. Education's been sort of a key pillar for all of the businesses that I've been involved in.

Just to jump forward to spaces, we, give away spaces for free to education. education has never been a, a business opportunity in a a dollars and cents point of view, but is obviously a, business opportunity in the medium to long term. Uh, you're getting the, the next generation of users.

often they'll take [00:10:00] summer jobs. if they're exposed to technology, they might take some of that technology into their summer job.

so that was important. And based on having done all those various business experiments, Graphisoft employed me as the director of business to launch these products on a global scale.

So while I was with graphisoft, we launched Archie CAD subscription, and we also took their teamwork product, BIM Cloud and turned it into a software as a service solution.

so I did that role for a few years. Graphisoft is a lot larger than a small entrepreneurial

Evan Troxel: Yeah

Campbell: business. not quite as fast moving as, I liked to move.

I, I felt it was time to move out and try something new. , and I guess I bought a lot of that 20, 25 years of experience into what we are doing with spaces. And, to jump on your comment earlier about the iPad, I, I was pretty adamant when I was starting to look at opportunities that the iPad was the device that I wanted to build for, BIM Solutions, Revit, ACAD, vector Works, they're all in a sense stuck in the desktop era.

iPads have been around for over 10 years now. they're immensely [00:11:00] powerful computing devices. obviously ultra portable. they look good. They're very nice design.

Evan Troxel: Yeah

Campbell: there's a brilliance about them just, I mean, obviously the, apple side of things, and the chips even you mentioned your five year old iPad.

still an incredibly powerful, little machine. they pack a real punch,

Evan Troxel: That's a

Campbell: Yeah, exactly they do have wonderful battery life. And so I was pretty adamant about that. And, and I also felt that the pencil gave , a new opportunity to rethink how we, input information. and as I was exploring, I was casting my mind sort of far and wide, but having been involved in architecture in the building industry for 25 years, it was somewhat foolish to try to think that I could go into a totally different market.

build up that domain experience takes a lot of time. So, I sort of built on experiences and, throughout our time with acad, we were constantly running into similar issues with the design architects or the owners of the practice or the, practice principles we would have directors training [00:12:00] four hours, learn how to open a file and acad and print it out so that you can scribble on top of it.

Evan Troxel: right Yep

Campbell: these people are, juggling running a business, managing client relationships, managing project sites, designing. they're not people who sit in front of a, BIM system like Revit or Acad for 5, 6, 8, 10 hours a day. and those systems take a lot of bandwidth to learn, a lot of time to stay up with.

and so I felt there was this void in the marketplace, essentially this void between pencil and paper on one hand, and BIM Solutions on the other hand, iPad has come along and there's been some, some people who have filled the void with different solutions. things like more Folio traces a wonderful product, but it's still very much just a 2D sketching product.

It's focused on architecture. You can create beautiful drawings, but if you draw a perspective, you can't spin it around and look at the building from the other side. You have to

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm

Campbell: drawing it again. And, if I go back to my very early instances of using ArchiCAD as a student, I had this big, must be about five, 6,000 square [00:13:00] meter site.

And probably about a 20 to 30 meter elevation across it. And I, I built it all up as a 3D model and started printing out a section. And one of my teammates sort of said, oh, well, haha, how long did that take? And I said, about six hours. And he said, I could have drawn it in that time. I said, yeah, but I can go and cut, cut five more sections in the next five minutes.

so that, first six hours might seem a lot. but then the fact that you could start slicing the site in different places, working out where you could put different building platforms, the upfront effort rewarded itself. so I found that as a, as quite a useful analogy with, trying to find the solution that we can use the computer for what it's good at.

but bring the best of what pen and paper offers.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm

Campbell: mean, people know how to use a pencil. one-year-old will scribble something on a wall, much to their parents discussed, but they can pick up a cray and they, can use it and express themselves. with spaces, it's all about the pencil.

You, draw an outline of a building, you are not getting concerned about what type of wall is it, what color is it, what material, what thickness, what layer do I have to [00:14:00] put it on? All these BIM systems are conscious, just constantly making decisions. you can use them in a free form way, but if you disregard all of those decisions, you're not gonna end up with a model that's of much value.

It might provide a design intent, but a technician who has to actually create construction drawings will throw it away and start again. we wanted to strip back the design process. To really bring it back to the basics of a pencil and paper, but do it digitally so that once we have created a building, we can do things that computers are good at, like number crunching, we can very quickly calculate the area of a building after we've drawn half a dozen strokes that define a footprint.

very quickly make that 10 stories tool or three stories tall. can start slicing bits off if there's site constraints or, permissions that you have to be set back or maximum building heights. and constantly making sure that we're, optimizing and, building things, to a way that essentially allows you to, really just [00:15:00] express and explore the design process and not get slowed down by having to think about every single action that you have to do in order to draw something.

Evan Troxel: Yeah

Campbell: an architect's brain works incredibly fast. If they're sitting with a technician to draw something up, that technician's on a hiding to nothing. in my time I was a, a pretty efficient Archie cat operator, but I'd be the first to say that I'd never be able to keep up with someone who's in the creative flow.

they'll be a dozen steps ahead of you

constantly.

Evan Troxel: that, part of it, and then there's the, I think we've all seen the meme, the gif on online where the senior person is standing over the shoulder of the operator nudging, you know, with their finger, move the toilet three inches this way, move the toilet back three inches that way.

of all, it's not a good use of either person's time because one person is micromanaging the operations. The other one is, having to deal with being told to nudge little details that don't matter. During that part of the process because there's so much detail inherently in that system available to us at all times, so [00:16:00] your concept of zooming back out and saying, we need to start with.

Bridging this gap between the conceptual design phase and the, you know, the more detailed design phases with a piece of software that actually allows us to do the things that we need to do during that phase is really important, to address those people in the industry. Like you, you talked about training and four hours of training to open a model and print it out is not uncommon.

And the goal of training. people in the kind of technology that we're addressing every day in architectural practice. I think today should be more about letting them understand what people have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, rather than actually how to use the software. Right? That's not that that training should go to waste It is useful, but it isn't because they're going to become the operator of that. And that to me is a complete waste of time. So coming up with bridge piece of software like you're talking about here, it kind of feels a really important role. and it's still probably hard for [00:17:00] people to adopt. It's probably still difficult to get people to give up their actual pencil or their actual pen and their actual trace, their role of trace to move to a digital format.

But I think this is one of those things where once they try it, they probably really love it.

Campbell: Yeah, most definitely. And, and I guess that was something else that I learned through my time with the industry and when you're an entrepreneur and, and especially tech entrepreneurs, they're always looking at what software , and what hardware can do for people. And, I guess you've been around the architectural business for long enough, obviously you've heard the acronyms, the bims, the BDCs, the, all of these wonderful things that are just gonna solve all of the problems in our industry with wastage and cost overruns and all of those things.

But the problem is, is that the people who create this technology, and, I'm one of them, we can see what we could achieve. But it's really hard to bring the market to that point. And if, anything's a case in point, it's the fact that BIM is around for 20 years and, people still say they're not fully realizing the benefits of [00:18:00] bim.

it's not an overnight solution to things. and I guess that's part of what I've wanted to do with spaces is to be able to take people on this incremental journey where we transition them, introducing spaces as a, digital sketchbook. some users might use it to create a very rudimentary 3D building.

but then they can, spin that building around, take a snapshot essentially, and then, then they've got their digital tracing paper, and then they can go back to the 3D and spin it around to another vantage point. and I guess the whole thing about the design process, or the conceptual design part of it is to a large extent, it's the entire reason people became architects.

They want to design. I mean, it's sort of like the best two days of owning a boat are the day you buy it and the day you sell it, it's, kind of the same with building that the best days of a building project are probably the design days

and seeing it finally

Evan Troxel: right

Campbell: constructed, but between the design being created and it actually being finished on site.

Quite a lot of that's not enjoyable.

it [00:19:00] goes with the territory. I know there's project managers out there who just live and breathe that and get really excited about that side of things. But real design architects want to design and we want to bring the fun part back to that. Everyone knows that concept design is not a start and an end point.

It's a very circular, running down rabbit holes, getting to dead ends, backtracking, being able to throw away ideas quickly and, and I can't demonstrate obviously, spaces during a podcast, but it's easy enough to create a building design in five to 10 minutes. Now, we are not talking a fully resolved design, but if you multiply that out, I can do five to six different ideas in an hour.

And even if I throw them all out that hour has been very useful.

I, I've learned a lot through that process. If you spend eight hours putting something into acad and throw it out, you suddenly start going, Hmm, that was billable time that we are not billing for. and that process can be exaggerated and, being able to look at design problems [00:20:00] and solutions and, again, with spaces, I mean, an approach that we are taking quite strongly at the moment is just The whole idea of exploring and, and concepting and, being able to think about your design and express your design. But again, it doesn't mean that we are gonna resolve the entire project.

I might be working on a shopping mall that's closed in on three sides by city blocks. And so the real public interface is just a single elevation.

and being able to do napkin style sketches of how might we want to have that public interface. Maybe there's a, a public park across the street or something and you want to play with the dynamics of that. You're not, totally concerned about the layout of the interior of the shopping mall.

That's another design problem that you may or may not be responsible for you. probably got other people on the team who are working with the traditional shopping center design of major tenants and minor tenants and food courts and cinemas and everything, and we can do all of that in spaces. But the beauty is that you're not necessarily trying to do everything.

you're just playing around, exploring, trying to solve these [00:21:00] little pockets of design problems or, not necessarily problems, but just parts of the design that, you know, are critical to the overall intent.

I think too many things in the traditional software world is all about from going from A to B

in one piece of software.

Yeah. if you do use acad, and I know there's plenty of people who like to design an acad and Revit and everything, they will all admit that they have a fairly strong understanding of what they're trying to achieve from the outset.

it's very hard to jump into one of those pieces of software with no idea of where you're gonna end up.

Evan Troxel: blank, page as it were. Right?

Campbell: Yeah, the, you, you've got to have some intention and, I mean, I guess the same applies to spaces, but it's at a far higher level that you just, you can start drawing a rectangle if you want, because that's the shape of the site that you've got. And then you start thinking about site lines to features or volcanic cones, which is a critical thing in Auckland.

There's, there's all sorts of viewpoints because of all these [00:22:00] different volcanic cones and, and all sorts of planning permissions. Everyone has their own different planning permissions that they have to adhere to. and, and that's an evolution. It's an exploration. that's the central theme.

We want people to be able to design more. we want them to have more fun. feel more fulfilled. And again, coming back to the whole idea of the iPad. You can do this wherever inspiration strikes. it's an easy tool. You, pull it out of your backpack and sit down on a park bench for five minutes just cuz you've got a few ideas that you just want to sketch down.

it's no different to pulling out your mo skin and your, pen and scribbling it down.

being able to use the iPad in a portable sense. we've taken a very deliberate view that in a, connected world, it's nice to be disconnected. we don't say that you have to be on a wifi connection or a mobile connection or anything like that.

you do get benefits from it. but you can live in a completely offline situation. You can be down at the beach, scribbling away, thinking away. Exploring, and just bringing in those old school traditions that I still think are perfectly acceptable and, [00:23:00] incredibly powerful. Just , the whole trace mentality.

it's a great way to refine and, quite often you'll watch architects and they think with their pencil,

it's not necessarily drawing anything, it's, it's scribbling around and it's just, it's just the way the brain matter sort of ticks over for them.

Evan Troxel: that the whole concept of sketching, there's a lot of new paradigms to sketching today, Some people sketch in code, some people sketch in visual programming, some people sketch on a moleskin, some people sketch on an iPad. Some people sketch with a pen, specific writing utensil on a very specific kind of paper, because that's what they like.

but I think that it's important, you know, some people sketch in cad, some people sketch in Archy CAD or Revit. and so the, paradigm of sketching has expanded, over the last, I don't know, 10 plus years. Right. this idea of kind of getting back to, like you said, being a kid with a crayon, something that, we can do from a very early age and make a mark that means something.

I think is. Really powerful. That's just a very powerful thing. And to be able to do it [00:24:00] anywhere. because inspiration doesn't strike when you want it to. it

Campbell: You can't sit there and force it.

Evan Troxel: on I'm the strike word again. But yeah, it's, important to recognize that we don't know when that's gonna happen, and therefore the best thing that you can do is just have it at the ready.

the adage that says, the best camera is the one that, you have with you, right? The best camera to use. It doesn't matter what the camera is, it's the one that's with you, Because you don't know when you're gonna want to capture something. thing applies to ideas and capturing architectural ideas in some way.

these devices really have enabled people to do that. And for those people out there who haven't used an iPad before with the pencil, maybe you could talk about the magic that they've been able to pull off with how natural it actually feels.

Because I think there's many people out there who've used a device with a stylist at some point and they're like, Nope, this doesn't work. and so maybe you could talk a little bit about why you settled in on this device in particular. I think it probably has a lot to do with [00:25:00] the magic that they've been able to replicate in technology that people would come to expect from a regular analog writing utensil with, uh, a piece of paper.

Campbell: Yeah, I guess there's a few aspects there that I'd like to pull up. So, I mean, right at the very outset, I just saw the pencil as a powerful device. I mean, sketching in itself is inaccurate, especially if you're thinking about it in a very strict cad sense. we'll pick that thread up in a minute, but the idea that you can use this pencil just very quickly on a screen , and a 12 inch, mean, I run an 11 inch iPad all the time.

But for those who want to invest in the larger, almost 13 inch iPad, it's a big piece of paper, especially when you consider it's portable. incidentally, I do actually have a screen protector on there, which is made to feel more like paper. it's not just a traditional screen protector just to protect the screen, but it's one that's got a bit of a textured surface.

, and I certainly found that once I put that on, you really get the tactile feel that would be a resistance to a lot of people. That the pencil on a smooth iPad screen certainly does not [00:26:00] feel quite the same as a pencil on a piece of

paper.

Evan Troxel: on

Campbell: Yeah

Evan Troxel: different.

Campbell: just not enough friction.

Evan Troxel: talking

on that, surface, is important

Campbell: exactly.

Evan Troxel: Yep

Campbell: great protectors out there that, protect the screen , and help give you that feel. , and so that's a critical part of the whole thing. But I guess from the outset, I had this goal of wanting to create a device, or create a piece of software for the iPad with the pencil.

But I guess what I didn't bargain on was how easy it would make things for people. and I guess the biggest discovery we've had over the last couple of years is actually this makes it so easy to draw that those people who wouldn't necessarily have CAD experience. Can suddenly pick this up and actually start creating and creating 3D models, which I wouldn't want to label them as BIM because Bim you probably think of extreme design developed stuff.

But at the same stage, these are buildings, they're full of information. We are able to pull out area information, elevational information, , and with our roadmap, we want to be able to start bringing energy analysis and other parts into [00:27:00] that puzzle. because the data's all there, we can crunch it all.

but it really, really opened up the opportunity for, for people who would just be, oh, I'm not a CAD user, or, no, I I don't need to use those sort of sophisticated systems. Well, you don't need to. you just draw as if you're drawing and we'll put some things together. And the other thing that we've discovered, and, and this is just I guess, uh, the nature of on a product like this for the last three years is that You just get used to what you can do with it. and so I come back to that comment about sketching being inaccurate. We are actually building quite a strong sketch recognition engine. but it's just sort of our internal name where we can start doing a lot.

Based on what the user is doing. Even if you're dividing up a building into a series of spaces, the sketching itself might be inaccurate. But we know that if you're within a sort of a few inches of a corner, you're not gonna be creating that as a dog leg. You're gonna be lining those two walls up.

the sketch stroke is an intention that you are providing. And then we use, again, the power of the underlying iPad to say, okay, well you are very close to this [00:28:00] intersection, so we'll line you up with that so that we've got these nice 90 degree corners , and corridors that are smooth.

if you're drawing on a piece of paper, those sort of things don't matter. But when you do start converting sketches into geometry, some of those things, architects are detail orientated people. Some of those things just would stand out as being really bad if they weren't nice and clean and simple.

Evan Troxel: I

Campbell: Um

Evan Troxel: story

was working on a design project in the office,

there were two people ideating via sketching, and one person was doing it analog and one person was doing it in AutoCAD, right? So that's where they were doing their sketching, quote unquote sketching. And the person using AutoCAD made this remark like, why are you drawing on paper?

Like, that's so inaccurate. Because we do, there's flourishes, there's caffeine lines because things are not necessarily a boundary, but it's more of, like you said, it's communicating an idea and you can be expressive on [00:29:00] paper in a way that is difficult to achieve in cad.

But the retort that came back, I thought was informed, and it was like, what I'm drawing here is at least as accurate as what you're drawing there, they weren't drawing on a grid on cad, they were sketching in cad. And you

Campbell: yeah

Evan Troxel: have to go back and do it all over again or make every line adjusted to get it to where it actually needed to be.

it was kind of eye-opening for the person using cad. Like, oh yeah, like this is all we're doing is sketching. that idea of, starting with something that people know how to do and something that. I wanted to touch on here with, the iPad in particular, just as far as like the responsiveness, the way that everything just keeps up, how you would expect becomes kind of table stakes, but it's also not in so many other platforms that are like. Right? So that to me is one of the things it gets you over that hurdle immediately and allows a tool like this to actually start to sink in about how effective it can be used.

[00:30:00] So I just think it's worth pointing out not glossing over because hardware has been solved. I mean, my iPad is five years old. I cannot believe how much of a joy to sketch on still because they figured it out. And that is an important piece to this puzzle of transitioning non-users to users of technology. Because if that hurdle were still there, it just wouldn't happen. It's like VR with stuttering frame it does that, they're not gonna do it again. And you have that, chance to make this first impression on a piece of hardware that works versus one that doesn't. It's gonna be much better chance of adoption if it actually works, how people would expect, which is what's it do when I put this pen on this paper, I need it to do exactly that digitally.

And so it does, that's, just something that we should put out there for those who have never used it before. it's actually phenomenal how well it works.

Campbell: Oh, it is, it is. And I mean, that's something we have had to be extremely mindful of because if we are just creating simple sketches, then the iPad is [00:31:00] quite capable. But if we start wanting to do things in a smart way, like I was referring to before where we are trying to recognize a stroke and say, well, you probably want that to line up with the stroke, or you want that to be 90 degrees to that stroke.

Evan Troxel: important

Campbell: too many of those decisions that the computer has to make, then we, lose that fluid nature that the iPad provides. And, to sort of offset that, we've just recently finished a, project, which we launched with our release last week where, we've really gone to town with what an iPad can do.

And, basically we've, taken spaces from being what we would call a, single thread application to being a multi-thread application. So now we can actually, We can run half a dozen tasks in parallel.

one task could be checking if it's parallel. One task could be checking if it's perpendicular.

Another task could be checking. Does that line up with something in the model? Whereas previously we would have to run those things sequentially and if you had too many of those things running sequentially, we were conscious that the actual sketching experience, which is core to what we're offering,

Evan Troxel: Yeah

Campbell: you are waiting half a second for the iPad to decide what did you want to do.

Evan Troxel: [00:32:00] and it would, it would just break

Campbell: would.

Evan Troxel: of what's going on. And it just wouldn't be. I think that's one of the big things that keeps coming up on this show, which is people want to use software that they enjoy

and it's these little details that you have to sweat

to ensure that people continue to enjoy using the software.

And if there is something like a half a second lag, we all know what this is. Like, we all know what software we use on a daily basis where this happens and it's like, now I need to reboot my computer. Oh, well now the too big. Now I gotta clean out the warnings. Now I have to. And it's like all of those things that get in the way of doing the actual work, that it just, uh, I don't want to deal with those.

a few pieces of software out there where people just love to use them and they keep coming back to 'em over and over and over again. and those details are so important to get right?

Campbell: we put huge amount of effort into it. this internal development to allow us to split all these processes into running in parallel is, has been a major undertaking for us. But , we [00:33:00] know that it's set the foundation for us to unlock just so many more capabilities while still maintaining the fluid nature, the fast, flexible and fluid, byline of the product.

We, again, we are helping ourselves out by keeping things simple. I mean, stripping it back that a wall is just a line. I mean, technically we don't have a wall inside spaces. We, we have a

point between a boundary between an inside and an outside and that boundary's enough. For when we want to start getting into thermal analysis or things like that.

So, I mean, we don't need exactly thick walls. If we were to go down an energy analysis route, we just need to know what the transmission of that boundary is. and so we can keep the model very simple, very slick. we actually think that, while the iPad is immensely powerful coupled with the fact that we are stripping the process right back to basically the fundamentals of what's required, helps just keep it very simple.

And, that's also how you want to be able to present it to your clients as well. I mean, part of the issue that I've seen throughout my, career is obviously if you draw up a building , and it's an [00:34:00] acad or rev, it's all very precise and, and quite often the client feels that it's fully resolved.

Evan Troxel: totally agree

Campbell: coming right back to the sketch being able to present sketches to a, client. and make sure you're not going down the wrong road, before you've invested huge amounts of time. I mean, architects are obviously getting hammered for their fees all the time and everything.

you wanna make sure that the work you are doing is being paid for, and being able to engage with a client and make sure they're happy with the direction you're going. and sketching is a core part of that process because it implies that it's a fluid process. the client feels that they're able to provide feedback because it's still fluffy, shall we say.

Evan Troxel: Yeah

Campbell: and you want to engage with your clients. You want to deliver great outcomes for your clients. part of being able to deliver great outcomes is involving them in the process and making them feel part of it. and, and software has a role to play with that. \ we help with that.

we've got things on our roadmap, but, uh, even at the moment, if you've Put together a couple of dozen sketches inside spaces, you can easily share those, with your client. And that just sends your client an email [00:35:00] with a link to a website where they can then browse through those sketches.

So even if you're working remotely, obviously in this day and age post covid, there's a lot more remote work and, people work from the other side of the world. architects get engaged from anywhere. always. It's generally local, but local is becoming less of a, a requirement these days.

and so we provide means and mechanisms for you to collaborate with other team members or, or share information with stakeholders. those are part of our roadmap as well, where we feel we can really push the boundaries beyond what we are using as just a simple concepting tool, but to, engage and work with other people in the process.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, there's two things I wanna talk about there. definitely wanna talk about the shareability because, that I think is one of the biggest challenges that traditional architects have had to deal with over the years is like, okay, I've sketched this thing, it's on this big sheet of paper. How do I, it's less of a big deal now, right?

I snap a crappy picture of it with my phone and I email it or whatever. But shareability has been a huge hurdle for analog to digital to get through that process.[00:36:00] But before we even go there, this idea of, sharing sketches with clients, I want to take that a step further. There's something magical sitting with an architect, sketching in your presence as a client.

Because in an office, lots of people sketch, lots of people know how to draw. I mean, it's not maybe that we were trained to draw, but it is a we've developed over time, and I think that's exactly what most people who know how to sketch would say is, I just sketch a lot. You have to do it a lot.

And so when you're sitting in front of a client, that's not their business. They don't do it a lot. And so when they sit in your presence as you're doing it live, sketching they're like . Enamored by it. How many people say, ah, I wish I could draw like that. It happens every single time you draw in front of somebody else.

They wish they could draw like that. And so being able to do architecture, like next level sketching, like what spaces is enabling you to do, one of those kind of magical processes to go through with a person, And it really to [00:37:00] build a relationship between you solving their problem in real time right in front of them.

And to not let it go too far, too fast. you made that comment earlier where they, if it's in bim, it appears to be figured out. how many times as an architect, I mean, I can raise my hand several times here, it's like, we'll actually strip the rendering back because we're three steps ahead, but we need to make a decision about.

Form and shade and shadow and openings and things like this. And so we remove the textures, we remove the color, we, pull things back so that they don't get caught up in the wrong decisions yet. Right? Because we don't want to have a conversation about the color purple yet because we're not there, but we do need to talk about this other stuff, so we'll take things back.

To me, that's the beauty of sketching in person with a tool that doesn't even quote unquote, let you go too far. This is one of those things where you're making informed decisions with them at the table in a tool like this. And that is game changer. and it really helps.

build your, the authority, the trust that [00:38:00] you could possess as an architect in that moment is huge. And to give an architect a tool to do that, I mean, it's, it's fantastic they are also presenting not just the form and the sketch, but also like you're saying the things that the app is actually tracking for you.

Well, here's how big that is on your site. Here's how much, exposure we have to the south, to the north to the view, and you can actually spin it around and do those kinds of things. that's a really cool place for a client to be, to participate in that process and not just be on the receiving end of what happens in the black box in the studio.

How hard is it to take your workstation, your laptop, to set it up, to have a projector, to do all those things in a, remote location, in a presentation style or you don't take your stuff to go work in somebody else's office, but with an iPad, it like just completely removes of that fussiness to enable those relationships to happen.

Campbell: Totally. Yeah. and, and being able to take your iPad down to your client's house or [00:39:00] wherever you wanna meet with them. and even right at the end of that meeting, just be able to share the sketches that you've done immediately. Say, look, okay, we, I'll just upload those. You'll have them on your phone in a minute so you can take them home and, show your, husband or your family or your, their other business partners that are involved in whatever the development happens

Yeah.

Evan Troxel: there's that kind of sharing and then this other idea of, of. Like Instagram came along and it didn't make photography better, right. It just made it shareable. that was the huge paradigm shift is like, I've got all these photos on my phone, crappy as they are back in the early iPhone days when they put the camera in or whatever.

then Instagram came along and it was like, now I can share these, I can get them out of my phone. that was huge, That was worth a billion dollars to Facebook,

Campbell: Very quickly. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: And so idea of sharing information that you're creating in the iPad with your team or with the stakeholders immediately is, incredible.

And overcoming that hurdle of how do I get the analog thing into the digital thing so that I can share it with the team and how that's not even a thing anymore. It's just [00:40:00] there, it's part of the table stakes of the app that you're creating.

Campbell: Yeah, most definitely. we've got some big plans when it comes to that side of things as well. I mean, we're taking everything one step at a time and still got some fairly core features for the main app. But, being able to collaborate, being able to have people reviewing a model remotely.

large architectural practices who might have multiple studios quite often want to pull in design expert from a, different location just cuz they've got previous experience in, in certain building projects. and being able to just do that remotely. they would be able to sketch on top of the model or red line it or, even they're just viewing and, and having a discussion around, Hey, should we be changing this part of it to be more accessible or, what have you.

Yeah, see collaboration as a, I mean, as an interesting, obviously conceptual design is, quite often a solo activity. but around that solo activity, you've obviously got the key project stakeholders and so that's sort of the first level of engagement that we are working in.

but then larger projects, obviously you, might divide up larger projects across a team of different people, and being able to do that [00:41:00] together collaboratively, either in the same room or completely remotely. At that point, that's where iPad does need connectivity. and obviously it can have connectivity through wifi and everything.

and we'd be able to do basically real time collaboration. there's a strong benefit for being connected in that sense. but equally there can be quite a nice time when you are not connected. You can just be offline uninterrupted. if you get into your creative flow, you, you don't want text messages pinging you or, or anything like that, so

can

Evan Troxel: strikes. So let's just talk about what spaces does you've alluded to quite a few different little pieces of the whole puzzle, but can you give us a walkthrough of what it's like to use the app and what it's capable of at this point?

Campbell: I'll give you sort of a traditional sense of how it sort of was intended to be used. as we've sort of explained, there's different entry points that people could use, but when you start the app, you're presented with a split screen view, where one half of that view is essentially a 3D model.

, and the other half is a, floor plan or, sketchbook, whatever you want to call it. so if, we're working on the core side of the [00:42:00] application, , you just start drawing a series of strokes into that floor plan. , and as soon as those strokes end up creating a closed form, we'll automatically create a building based on that footprint shape, coupled with the defaults that you might have set.

so the defaults are the height of the stories, how many floors, but instantly having created that 3D form, we've already got all the area calculations. we can then continue to sketch. so you might want to draw an extension or you might want to cut an end off a building at an angle, just because you might have drawn it as a, fairly simple shape, but you then want to respond to the site boundary or some such thing.

even if we talk about sites, you draw the site in the same way. You sketch, you draw the strokes, to define the site boundary. And, and once you've got things like a site defined in the model, you can then start taking account of the different reports that site.

Coverage allows you to generate, so what is your site coverage? What is your floor space ratio? different places around the world use different formulas for their permission proposals and everything. interestingly, I recently watched a video , and the whole reason, [00:43:00] well, not the whole reason, but a significant reason why India doesn't have skyscrapers is that their floor space ratio is too.

so their ability , to actually build very high has been limited by the planning consents. and that's starting to be unlocked in some of the larger cities. but being able to make sure that you are designing something that will comply. I mean, we are not putting planning controls per se in there, but we have the tools that you can.

Put the requirements in there. If you've got 50 foot setback from this edge or a height plane, um, then that sort of data can be fed in. Uh, obviously everyone has different plan and control, so we don't wanna be trying to

Evan Troxel: Yeah

Campbell: work any magic in that regard.

Evan Troxel: Yeah

Campbell: but being able to, design with the freedom of knowing that you are working within your, constraints , is obviously a very nice thing to have that in the back the mind.

you can constantly be keeping an eye on the areas. if you're doing something like a mixed use development, want to start getting a bit more. Detailed information so you can start using what we call usages. and it's just a simple drag and drop process where you can drag [00:44:00] these usages onto different levels of the building.

If you've got car parking, retail, commercial, residential. And so you can start getting a, more of a breakdown and, percentages of those, you can start editing the facades of the building. So if you want to, if you need to rake a building face, because obviously as it gets taller, you, don't want to necessarily be creating big shadows across your neighbors, so , you might step back the floors.

again, you use a similar sort of process, but you're now in a section type view, but you're still drawing strokes. , you can draw an arc if you want and have a nice curved face, on the building, or you draw straight strokes and, it will slice those off the building. and constantly all the data is being refreshed behind the scenes.

at any point you can take a snapshot of the 3D , and throw it into what we do call our sketchbook. , and this is where you might just want to say, okay, well, I've got the rough form. but now I just wanna start thinking about things. Do I want to have an entrance canopy? Do I want to have some support columns?

what sort of style do I want to throw some sort of vertical facade on it because I want it to feel like something that's stretching for the sky. Or do [00:45:00] I want to have something more horizontal, heavier to make it feel a bit more grounded? You can play around with those sort of ideas just , in the sketchbook without having to think about modeling them.

you can start to model them, so you can go back. To the 3D view, and we have what we call a cladding tool where you can start applying different cladding options to the faces of the building, to, get a bit more architectural form about them. but we take a very holistic view in the fact that this is a conceptual design.

So, for example, if we're a shading system across the building, we'll make it work. So it looks neat. You might say that you wanted it four foot intervals, but if the building is 15 foot, then it doesn't divide by four. So we'll, make it so that you end up with nice even panels.

, we don't get into , the fine grain controlled or the finicky stuff that you need to in a developed design where you're actually detailing the curtain glazing. this is all about creating impressions.

within the model you might even start wanting to explore different options. , and so we have , a very simple design options system, you might have a base building that you are quite happy [00:46:00] with, but you just want to try different facade options.

Do you want this horizontal feel or this vertical feel? , and you want to be able to quickly switch between those while you are sitting with the client. we've thought about the tool quite specifically, not from just its own, what does it do, but how could you use it with a client sitting next to you?

Most people would be, in a sense, quite afraid of doing that. Oh, it's technology. What if it goes wrong? Uh, or what if it's slow? Suddenly you change from one view to another and it takes 30 seconds. as you were sort of talking about, all of those things just don't feel fluid. so we, been quite conscious of wanting to make sure that actually spaces could be a presentation device, if you wanted to call it as such.

Go to the sketchbook, pretend it's your notebook. Go from page to page and even take them through the thinking process that you went through , to come to the, design that you've, built. you might have taken photos that you just throw into the sketchbook so you can remind them. I'll remember that.

You can look there and you, see the, view out to the hills. And so we want to accentuate that , and you bring those [00:47:00] inputs in, uh, and collect all those ideas. so , the primary operating environment is the split screen. and it's worked surprisingly well, even on an 11 inch iPad. still have a reasonable.

Size for drawing. but you can turn each of those views off. So if you are working, for example, you've got the base building sorted out and you just wanna start looking at the interior spaces, you might turn your 3D building off at that stage because you just wanna maximize the floor plan and start thinking about the shopping mall.

And, okay, this is the entry foyer and here's the food court. And this is how we want people to circulate around here. and constantly as you're adding more and more detail to the model, you can be refining the data behind that model. We have quite an extensive range of what we call space types.

So if you are doing a shopping mall, you can start throwing down the food court and the retail and the major retail and the circulation and in the car parking. And if you want to, you'd be able to go all the way through to how much can I lease these buildings out for? I guess this is , the tech side of me.

We [00:48:00] see the computer as a, very powerful number crunching device. while you did sort of talk about this, not trying to go from A to B with a single piece of software, we do want to see that we can do as much as we can in spaces. so not necessarily having to export reports to Excel because you then want to start applying some rough cost data or some rental yields.

being able to leverage that. There's a lot of people who like data driven design. there's also the brief based design. If you're working on quite complex projects like hospitals or schools or laboratories that have quite Defined set of requirements. We've got a system that allows you to build up that brief of requirements.

And again, we use the computer for what it's good at. We can show spaces as green if you are meeting the right requirement and show them as red if you are not meeting the requirements. So you can build these graphical things in and, I guess graphical is a really good word because a lot of conceptual design and a lot of the presentation around conceptual design is quite diagrammatic, quite graphical.

You might be working on a shopping mall [00:49:00] or it might be a multi tower mixed use residential. you want to have these color coded blocks to show the residential areas versus the retail areas versus the car parking. being able to present and create those diagrams. People go through all sorts of different pieces of software to create some of those presentations.

and as soon as the building changes, they've gotta go through that process again.

so , we produce some very nice color coordinated models. People are free to create their own color sets and all that sort of style. but because it's the conceptual design stage, we feel that there's a lot that we should be able to do within a single piece of software so that as the design evolves, those pieces are all updating.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

and able to have the data at your fingertips right there and not have to go out and round trip back into, going through Excel for example, or going through something that'll build you a chart or, maybe it's even, some people are going like

BI route out of, linking their Revit model and it's tracking all that

it's a big deal because having the ability to make informed [00:50:00] decisions while you're doing the design is. Where you want that power to be. because the more steps you have to go through to get back to that point, the more potential rework you're gonna have to do when you find out it doesn't work.

having that information directly embedded into the sketch is a big deal. That's a really big deal. And you talked about the client sitting there and, a lot of times people are very data driven on the owner And they want to know whether this thing that you are dreaming up is going to work or not.

And so to have that information live updating as the design potentially is unfolding right there in front of them, it's not only reassuring and it builds trust and authority back into the architect, but it's, like, We know that we are at a good starting point, and we're not gonna have to start over unless, something else happens.

Campbell: Yeah

Evan Troxel: is, Fantastic opportunity just leverage the computer for what it's good for. Like you're saying, on top of this very traditional feeling, design methodology via sketching.

Campbell: there's a very [00:51:00] key point that you picked up there , and the fact that quite often you will have to go and rework the building now, quite often, unfortunately, it's so far down the process before you find out. Some of these fundamental mistakes that sometimes you'll be on the point of return \ or the point to come back and change things becomes immensely costly.

I talked about architects being squeezed for fees , and obviously if you're being squeezed for fees, you, tend to then want to put less time into something so that you can obviously maintain profitability. but if you can actually design more and less time, everyone's under pressure to deliver more, for less and less time.

and obviously we try to push back on that and if people want a, great outcome, they need to invest to ensure they'll get a great outcome. You, can't get a great building for 50% of the cost of a great building. It's just a fundamental law. But being able to actually explore more and more.

Solutions and ultimately be able to anticipate or use the computer to show you mistakes earlier. even things like the, position of a [00:52:00] building on a site, and rotating at five degrees in certain situations can have phenomenal impacts on, on heat gain and, heat loss. and while we can't do that at the moment, we do know that the geometry and the data that we are building is exactly the requirements for these other sets.

and if you go into the wider ecosystem, all of these other systems that do any sort of analysis, you look at their website, what do you need? We need a rev model. It's like, well, we're not gonna have a Revit model at the time that we actually need to do this calculation. And by the time we do have a Revit model, it's probably too late.

if I'm being a little bit idealistic , or dreaming a little bit, then my hope with spaces is that we become this, front end modeler, which, interacts with everything in the ecosystem so that you can create better outcomes.

So yeah, I mean, being able to, do these tests up front, Have the confidence that you have situated the building on the site at a very good location, without wanting to, sound big and mighty. Obviously with climate change and the environment, we need to be creating buildings that work well.

Evan Troxel: It's [00:53:00]

Campbell: out that your building is gonna be too cold and, just slapping in more heating is not a solution or it's gonna be too hot and we'll throw more air conditioners in it. They were all very reactive solutions to problems that hadn't been solved early enough in the design process.

Evan Troxel: Right

Campbell: and it's gonna take us a while to get to where we want to get to with that, but I do strongly believe that we can create a solution, which is gonna be fun. That's one of the, one of the big reasons I'm doing it. I want to have fun. I want customers to have fun. Like I said, , you got into architecture design.

So get back to designing and have some fun. but then I also be able to do that in a way where we can leverage all of these other systems and services to actually create great buildings and provide really good outcomes for our clients ultimately that's what we are here for. We want to create buildings that humans inhabit, be they houses, offices, sports facilities.

when people go to those places, they want to feel that it's been designed for them. if you end up having to go to your office and wear a jacket all day, it's not a good [00:54:00] environment.

we are only a small business. We are not gonna solve the world's problems in that sort of regard, but, I think there's a lot that we can do to bring process back to the very front end.

I mean, so many decisions get, locked in during the concept phase, that will determine the performance of that building for a long time.

Evan Troxel: When you can make those better decisions earlier, has the

and it is our responsibility to take all of those things that you just mentioned into consideration. And it is where architects can have the biggest impact on the built environment and on all of these issues that you're talking about.

I mean, it really is the thing that people are paying for when they hire an architect.

And have a tool early to help make better decisions is huge. that's the work that I'm doing at Tech as well. It's about empowering people make better decisions earlier in the design And so feel like there's some, uh, Alignment there For sure. With the work that you're doing with spaces and that I was thinking of as you're talking

have answered all of my questions. I think that so much thought that's gone into this. [00:55:00] Maybe we can just wrap up and talk about what it's taken you to get to this point, because what appears to be elegant and simple never is, this is one of those lessons of great architects.

I've mentioned this on another podcast recently. It When I was in architecture school doing case studies on Craig Ellwood and talking about the simplicity of the design and how much effort it actually took to get to that point was kind of a mind expanding, information for me to get At that time.

It's really hard to get it to appears to be simple and so I'm sure it's no different developing an app like spaces that just is powerful, elegant, it looks simple, it's easy to use. What has it taken you to get to that point?

Campbell: it's taken a lot. on top of developing spaces, we are building a business around it as well, so it's a challenge. three years ago, obviously the world was just getting locked down with Covid around the place. and that's where I was pretty adamant I wanted to start a business and I wanted it to be based on an iPad.

So I jumped online and started teaching myself how to [00:56:00] program an iPad. and from there, I, combined it with a few of the thoughts that I had , and started prototyping some things. within a few months, I felt that we had something that was gonna be something, but, I knew it was just a, a very early start , and I started building a team.

I bought on my head of development who he was originally an acad customer 30 years ago. and we've worked together on and off over the next 30 years. he's a, a pretty unique person, being an architect and a software engineer. so between the two of us, We've just worked incredibly hard.

I can't remember the quote exactly, but, simplicity is, not the fact that you've added everything that's required. It's fact you've removed everything that's not required. and we are conscious of that all the time. I'm very proud of the user interface that we've created.

we went through a few evolutions and, and we're about to go through another evolution as a, business we've been able to grow, been able to take on venture funding and, so that gives us more runway to continue , to build the product. And with that, I can start removing a few of the hats that I've been wearing and, actually start bringing in proper, product expertise.

People [00:57:00] who have been product managers, people who are deeply involved , in user interface design, user experience. I've been through, I mean, anyone who's been involved in the architecture business for a dozen years will have been through a recession of one such sort of, or another. I've been through about four of them.

and the learning through each of those is just how much you can achieve with how little, I would like millions of dollars in the bank , and lots of people, but that also brings its own challenges. being forced to be lean. we're, we're a small team of about half a dozen developers , and few product support roles.

it's been an intensive effort. we've had to do that to build the business to a state that it's fundable. and the journeys. We are really only just starting. we are proud of where we came. We, launched into the market 18 months ago. I wanted to get into the market early just so that people would start aware of us.

it's funny, we, talk about ourselves being a sketch based concept design tool. No one searches on Google for sketch based concept design tools cuz they just don't know they exist. so that's one of our biggest challenges and that's why it's great to be on, [00:58:00] podcast like this with yourself is the fact that getting awareness into the market, I do believe that we've created something special.

it's nowhere near complete. got a pretty big vision for it. I do have to pinch myself and remind myself to look backwards and, tap myself a little bit on the back to say, Hey, look, what have we managed to achieve? And, the feedback we get about how easy it is to use and clean and simple, is really rewarding.

But I'm not one to rest on the accolades or anything like that. I'm always pushing to do that a little bit more and, take it to the next step. and I think over the last hour I've shared some of the vision that we've got for where we want to take it. it's a great product.

People who use it love it. I, I feel we are achieving what we've set out to achieve. We just got a lot more that we, can see the potential for , and just can't wait to get more people on the, journey with us. one of the biggest things we thrive on , is the user feedback. I've been working recently with a Chicago based firm who do lots of large 60, 70 story buildings, sometimes four or five of them on a site.

been great fun working with them and, and the feedback's just been awesome , and there's a number [00:59:00] of things that we've added into the software just directly off the back of that. we can have our ideas and our dreams, but until it gets used in real life and gets real feedback at, that's where it will really, really take off.

So, anyone who's interested, just get on with it. and feel free to contact me. I'll, be in touch with anyone who wants to talk about what it does today or what it might do tomorrow.

Evan Troxel: Fantastic. I will enjoy watching you evolve and you will be one of those 10 year long overnight successes one day. Uh

Campbell: That's, the good old, yeah. Everyone says the same thing. That was, where did that come from? And that,

Uh,

Evan Troxel: it's right?

Campbell: Exactly. Indeed it

is.

Evan Troxel: Well, I will have links to all of the places where people can find you and spaces the show notes for this episode. And, Campbell, thank you for taking the time to have this conversation today and I hope it's valuable for people out there. And I am very hopeful that people will download spaces and give it a try if they have an iPad Pro even better, Because like you said, the pencil support is fantastic and, [01:00:00] just a joy to work with. So you very much. It's been a conversation.

Campbell: Evan. It's been, uh, wonderful. Always enjoy sharing my vision with people all the best for a great day.

Connect with Evan* Twitter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Email

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The News* Early impressions of just-released Autodesk Forma * Zillow jumps on the ChatGPT bandwagon * New Grasshopper 2 tools look fantastic * Sitescape mobile scanning tool acquired by an industry leader * Veras AI renderer now available for SketchUp on the Mac

The latest TRXL podcast episode114: ‘Technological Telekinesis’, with Dr. Madeline GannonA conversation with Dr. Madeline Gannon.TRXLEvan Troxel🎧Madeline Gannon of ATONATON joins the podcast to talk about the potential of robots and machines as they relate to humans, the difference between programming robots to do a task versus creating an interaction model (AKA how to talk to machines), how working with robotics has led to what she describes as “moving matter with our minds”, her next endeavor with cable driven robots, her work on the continuum of creating intelligent and autonomous machines, and more.Autodesk Forma releasedI was invited to attend the press conference for the global release of Forma. Now that the embargo has been lifted you can read my initial impression of it here.

Zillow integrates ChatGPT for searchIf you don’t think ChatGPT or equivalent will affect almost everything you do online in the next 5 years, think again. With it’s new plugin architecture I featured in Newsletter #006: “There’s a bot for that”, it’s going to be everywhere.

Here’s a story on The Verge of how Zillow is using it on their own data* for a potentially valuable use case.

Zillow:

“Generative AI is changing the way people search for information,” reads part of a statement from Zillow CTO David Beitel. “We understand its immense potential, and we look forward to developing more tech innovations with OpenAI technology in the future.”

by that I of course mean your* data that you’ve willingly given them for free.

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Forma focuses on the early stages of design—infused with AI—to help architects adopt new ways of working. And while they bill the tools with the “AI-powered” buzzword, it’s not the same kind of AI that we’re seeing with ChatGPT and Midjourney. Autodesk representatives say it’s a cloud-based co-creation tool. That means it uses AI to do the heavy lifting under the hood to process data and provide predictive options to inform design outcomes while keeping the human/user/designer in the driver’s seat.

Overall it looks like Forma strikes a nice balance for where things are headed while not forgetting about the slow-paced nature of tool adoption in the AEC. It allows architects and designers to leverage real world environmental datasets (sun, wind, microclimate, etc.), demographics, and more with early-stage modeling tools that produce what architects need in practice to produce buildings that will get built in the real world. This isn’t a fantasy-producing toolset. It’s a tool for getting work done in real-world outcome-based scenarios in a shorter amount of time with more accountability. Autodesk also indicates it will play well with existing tools that are also being widely used in practice today that aren’t their products.

Architects and firms just have to decide if there is enough trust in that system for them. This has been in question for a few years now, publicly at least, as we’ve all seen with the open letters. Autodesk is addressing this new chapter as one that is going to be frequently improved—openly—with more customer feedback.

While there are many tools out there that already address what Autodesk is now doing with Forma, adoption has been difficult. Piecing all those tools together and figuring out how they fit into the puzzle is probably the hardest aspect to manage. In that regard Autodesk has an advantage. They have the ability to make adoption easier if those tools automatically hook into each other, are accessible on any device, in one cloud-based location, and even more-so if said firms are already invested in their ecosystem.

Here are the notes I made while attending the press conference:

Core features of the first release include contextual modeling, conceptual design, AI-powered automations, analyses, and interoperability
It’s a cloud-based SaaS environment accessed through the browser
The modeling tools are based on Autodesk Spacemaker and Form-It
There’s a bi-directional plugin for Revit 2024 in the initial release
~~Forma is included in the AEC Collection for existing customers for free~~ Further clarification: Autodesk Forma is also available through the Architecture, Engineering & Construction Collection. The price of the Architecture, Engineering & Construction Collection subscription is $430 monthly, $3,430 annually, or $10,290 for 3 years. Visit here to learn more.
There’s a free 30-day trial and it’s being offered as a standalone product at ~~$1250 (per year?)~~ Further clarification: The price of an Autodesk Forma subscription is $180 monthly, $1,445 annually, or $4,335 for 3 years.
Free for students
It's still unclear, but there was mention that there will be a data marketplace for access to additional datasets from 3rd parties for use in the tools
There will be additional Forma apps introduced over time
Autodesk will be demoing Forma in their expo hall booth at the AIA Conference on Architecture in San Fransisco June 8-9

Autodesk Forma links:* Press release * Product page

Screenshots:

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Dr. Madeline Gannon of ATONATON joins the podcast to talk about the potential of robots and machines as they relate to humans, the difference between programming robots to do a task versus creating an interaction model (AKA how to talk to machines), how working with robotics has led to what she describes as “moving matter with our minds”, her next endeavor with cable driven robots, her work on the continuum of creating intelligent and autonomous machines, and more.

Latest TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter🗞️ AEC/tech Newsletter #10The News * Tect’s people-first platform for A/E now on Wefunder * Polycam: generate floor plans with your phone’s camera * Autodesk releases “2023 State of Design & Make” report * Veras AI rendering for SketchUp now available * The inside story of ChatGPT’s astonishing potential at TED The l…TRXLEvan TroxelEpisode Links* ATONATON website * ATONATON on Twitter * Madeline on Instagram * Madeline on Twitter * Madeline on LinkedIn * ATONATON’s Googly Eye project * TRXL 028: ‘A (Robotic) Holiday Spectacular’, with Brian Ringley * TRXL 059: ‘Fundamentally Changing the Equation’, with Brian Ringley

Connect with Evan* Twitter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Email

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The News* Tect's people-first platform for A/E now on Wefunder * Polycam: generate floor plans with your phone's camera * Autodesk releases “2023 State of Design & Make” report * Veras AI rendering for SketchUp now available * The inside story of ChatGPT's astonishing potential at TED

The latest TRXL podcast episode113: ‘Surprises Are Not Good’, with Robert YuenA conversation with Robert Yuen.TRXLEvan Troxel🎧Robert Yuen of Monograph joins the podcast to talk about economic uncertainty including inflation and interest rates, how they affect architecture and engineering practices, Monograph’s A/E strategic risk report for 2023, how to get ahead of the (likely) upcoming challenges in regards to business foundations, culture, and talent retention, the notino of recalibrating business, the true value of relationships with staff and clients in practice, technology adoption strategies, what’s next for Monograph, and more.Tect’s people-first platform for A/EAt Tect (where I work) we are creating a people-first platform for connecting architects & engineers to building industry product experts.

To say it has taken a substantial effort to get to this point would be an understatement… but now we have the ability to invite our peers and colleagues to take a step with us toward the future we have envisioned for the building industry.

I couldn’t be more excited for the launch of our Wefunder campaign which makes it possible for anyone to invest in companies and ideas like ours for as little as $100.

You can learn more about our mission and the opportunity on Tect’s Wefunder page. Just this week our community has already committed $153,000 and there are some nice perks for early investors. Wefunder makes it so easy to get started, even an architect could do it.

Generate floor plans with your phone's cameraPolycam is a LiDAR scanning tool for iPhone and Android devices. The new Room Model updates look pretty great for architects to capture a space quickly for the early stages of design.

Polycam:

Now Polycam auto-generates floorplans from your Room Mode scans and the generation only takes about 100 milliseconds on an iPhone! With this update you’ll also have:

• Room boundary detection
• Room type classification
• Per-room and total-area calculations
• Better automatic layout of measurements

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Robert Yuen of Monograph joins the podcast to talk about economic uncertainty including inflation and interest rates, how they affect architecture and engineering practices, Monograph’s A/E strategic risk report for 2023, how to get ahead of the (likely) upcoming challenges in regards to business foundations, culture, and talent retention, the notino of recalibrating business, the true value of relationships with staff and clients in practice, technology adoption strategies, what’s next for Monograph, and more.

Latest TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter🗞️ AEC/tech Newsletter #9The News * Enscape for Mac updated for SketchUp ’23 * Autodesk University opens call for proposals * Rhino 8 WIP has gone full metal * ZipNeRF: Create 3d models from video shot on your phone The latest TRXL podcast episode 111: ‘Seeing What Sticks’, with Mark Thorley and David FlynnA convers…TRXLEvan TroxelEpisode Links* TRXL 086: ‘Here to Do the Hard Thing’, with Robert Yuen * Monograph’s A/E Strategic Risk Report 2023 * New report from industry leaders shares practices on mitigating risk (Architect’s Newspaper) * TRXL episode 86: ‘Here to Do the Hard Thing’, with Robert Yuen * Robert on LinkedIn * Robert on Twitter * Robert on Instagram * Monograph website * Monograph’s resource & reference library * Monograph on LinkedIn * Monograph on Twitter * Monograph on Instagram

Watch this episode on YouTube113: ‘Surprises Are Not Good’, with Robert YuenRobert Yuen of Monograph joins the podcast to talk about economic uncertainty including inflation and interest rates, how they affect architecture and engine…YouTubeEpisode transcript113: ‘Surprises Are Not Good’, with Robert Yuen

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In this episode. I welcome back Robert Yuen to the podcast. Robert is the CEO and co-founder of Monograph, a software company, revolutionizing the future of architecture and engineering firm performance. Trained in architecture, he recognized the need for better business tools and develop monograph to address the challenges facing AE professionals. As a result, he has become a leading voice in the industry promoting the importance of AE business performance and helping firms improve their workflows and profitability. His [00:01:00] mission is to always be in service to the design professionals responsible for our built environment, letting them focus on what they love and do best .

Near the end of the conversation that you're about to hear. I tell Robert that listening to him talk is like attending a sermon, and I was thinking at the time was that, I mean, his wisdom is something we need to hear, but not necessarily something we always want to hear. But alas it escaped me in the moment.

Anyway, I hope that that point comes across and makes sense when you hear it. Luckily for me, this is the beauty of recording these introductions after the conversation.

In this episode, we discuss inflation, interest rates, economic uncertainty, oh my, how these affect your architecture and engineering practices. Monographs AE strategic risk report for 2023. How to get ahead of the likely upcoming challenges in regards to business foundations, culture and talent retention, recalibrating business, the true value of relationships with staff and clients, and practice, technology adoption strategies, what's [00:02:00] next for monograph, and more. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Robert Yuen.

welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.

Robert Yuen: Thanks for having me back. Can't

Evan Troxel: almost a year exactly since you were on the I mean, we talked in Austin,

Robert Yuen: I remember that conversation, Austin. That should have been recorded.

Evan Troxel: That's the point of this podcast is to record stuff like that.

Robert Yuen: that was incredible. it was amazing seeing you in person.

Evan Troxel: are you gonna be in San Francisco in June? I assume the answer is yes. Since you are in San Francisco all the time.

Robert Yuen: it is my backyard. I will be here. Are you?

Evan Troxel: I am. Yep. I'll be there once again. So looking forward to that for sure.

Robert Yuen: Uh, I hope you're carrying a I believe there's gonna be a lot of amazing conversations in person. I can't wait.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Will have a booth there, so I'll be recording conversations in the booth for the Peopleverse podcast, which listeners of the show may or may not know about, but that's another [00:03:00] one that's really specific to architecture. Design professionals and product manufacturing side of things, which is what we're doing at Tech.

So, there's gonna be a lot of recording happening in San Francisco for sure.

Robert Yuen: It's gonna come really quick. Can't wait.

Evan Troxel: it is. a lot's happened in a year, Robert. right. I think the last time we were talking on this show, it was really, and I'll put a link to that conversation in the show notes, but the conversation we, we were really talking about leadership and knowledge transfer and things like that.

and now the, topics have shifted, right? I think, um, The writing has been on the wall for a little bit, but you guys just recently released a report and by you guys, I mean monograph, the team at Monograph has released this report so we won't get into your backstory. We won't get in because that's been done.

which is the great thing about having guest return on this show is now we can jump into kind of the nitty gritty topics. But you have been doing a lot of monograph is focused on business and practice operations Building killer businesses. and I mean that in a good way. And, so maybe you can give of the low down, jumping off point of where this, [00:04:00] report, what this started to illuminate and what you're sharing with the industry.

Robert Yuen: Oh so a lot has happened. monograph in a position where we're really privileged, where we see all of these trends already. Ahead. and it gave us a really unique opportunity when we started this year to create that report and really share some of the insights that we're seeing across the industry, where all the major risk, so the broader industry and the broader practice understand.

we felt extraordinarily responsible to make sure that that information gets out to the larger

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Robert Yuen: audience.

Evan Troxel: and you said one of your core values is to do the hard work, and I'm not sure that's gonna make it into the edit or not, but I wanna repeat it because like you just said, you have the privilege of, and I think a lot of the guests on this show are operating at a level that is more industry wide than practice specific. and that is something that I try to tap into and bring to the surface of a lot of these conversations, which is like, what are you seeing? these firms that you can share, what are the things that we [00:05:00] can stop struggling with individually and independently of one another and start using this information in a much more, know, smart way we don't have to be in our own silos all the time with everything, right? There are definitely specific maybe, practice related things, but the stuff that you're talking about here, like, just to reinforce this idea that you felt like you had to share I love that and I think it's hopefully well received in the industry as well with that same attitude that's just a beautiful thing that you guys.

Robert Yuen: Well, it's inherently baked into monographs dna.

have, we have an accountability, we have a responsibility. and every week I repeat back to the entire company, our, our mission is always to be in service to architects, be in service. and we can take that form in many different.

one of the ways that we're pushing really hard to make sure that the industry knows is understanding the current, economic environment that everyone's in right now.

like, one of the first things that we've identified is like, there's just a lot of economic uncertainty.

we, we don't know where the price of [00:06:00] eggs are gonna stop increasing

Uh, don't know how high gas prices are going. the, and these are all essentially inflationary type of trends.

If you don't understand what that means, like the easiest thing to to think about the prices for everything is going Everything, everything.

Evan Troxel: I just read this morning on LinkedIn that Amazon is going to stop allowing free returns at the UPS stores.

depending on proximity to other things. Like if you live near a Whole Foods, then they might charge you to return something at the UPS store. How much would they charge you?

Uh, maybe a dollar. in just a small example of what we're. Across the board, we're seeing that exact same thing everywhere. It's a dollar here, it's a $2 there, it's $10 here. This new feature is gonna cost you an extra 10 bucks a month in the software. And you see all of this happening and it's we kind of don't even want to know Right. I think that's what catches people by surprise when all of a sudden you are paying double across the board for everything. And it's like, how did that happen? Well, it [00:07:00] snuck up on it, it happens slowly and then suddenly.

those are the kinds of things that you're talking about.

And so, compound that across workforce or a, a practice, with all of the people that you have to feed with, all of Number of projects that you have to have in the pipeline to keep those people. I saw in your report and recognized as kind of crap moment there's been a lot of growth in the last couple years, right? Everybody's saying, we have so many projects, we can't get enough people. then when things slow down quickly, and you've built the machine to sustain that level of growth, or at least that amount of throughput. What do you do when things slow down quickly? tra our profession has been well known as one to lay off people in droves very quickly and very suddenly.

and I think now the culture emerging professionals, young professionals expect is for these companies To really like, dig in and say, how are we going to help sustain our workforce? And how are we going to keep them here? How are we going to [00:08:00] retain the talent? And so all of these things kind of playing in it's gotta be really tough for a lot of people.

Robert Yuen: and I it will be like we see the trend going that way.

good thing is, I think there's still a lot of time, The whole point of getting the report out now is there's still time to put in really good practices.

still time to acknowledge this is coming.

so we don't repeat an oh eight, oh.

I think there's a lot of things that entire industry can do, to hedge that from happening. it starts with acknowledgement. so it's not a surprise. and you put in practices and best practices now, so you don't run into a scenario where it feels like a surprise cuz it's coming.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Interesting. So you guys share some hints and. Strategies in the report on how firms out there are doing that, right? What they're doing to get ahead of this, what they're doing to be proactive about all that.

Robert Yuen: in the report, we've genuinely categorized, strategies and tactics into like four themes. and we've labeled them strategies to counter four different [00:09:00] types of risk. is like a client risk. a money risk, a staff risk, and a time risk. and these are the four major, let's say sectors.

Every practice, every firm owner, every architect should be considering what is their level of risk within those four categories.

and what is the right tactic and strategies that they need to implement, to hedge what's coming in the.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm. can you give us some ideas about what those common themes that you've. Collected from these different firms out there are, because one of the things that's always, I'm trying to figure out the right way to say this. I've seen other reports where it's like, here's the problems and there's no offer of solutions and this is coming from, again, industry wide perspective. it's like, well, okay. So everybody's left to themselves to figure out how to address this or some of the recomme if there are recommendations. I've also seen it this way. There are very heavy lift for

Robert Yuen: Hmm. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: then it just becomes like, I already don't have time to do the things that I need to do my business.

How am I going to [00:10:00] retool everything under the now when I have to do all of these? priorities, you give us some of those? just tease us with what some of those things are, because I, I want people to read the report, but I want them to read the report or at least get into it, knowing that there's going to be some solid advice in there.

Robert Yuen: Yeah, I do want to share, please read the report. And we worked extraordinarily hard to make sure we didn't stay too broad, which means it's kind of not very useful other than saying, oh my God.

and we tried to also propose strategies and tactics that are like, can't, if we don't believe we can pull it off in a reasonable amount of time, it's not useful either.

so the tactics and strategies have to align within a time box. it has to be executable. an example of this, and one of our themes, which is client risk. as inflation goes up, think like a a Angelo Brooks at, Brooks Scarborough Architects gave him amazing advice in terms think like a client.

And I think just thinking that way puts into a lot of different perspectives. one, paying for the project. You're, [00:11:00] we ser professional service They're paying for a service when inflation is. , how much exposure do they have to the public markets? That's a really good question.

It'll give you a lot of insights into like how the financial stability of your clients and where are they exposed. Heaven. Oh gosh. Like did you hear the news a couple weeks ago with SVB and First Republic?

Evan Troxel: right.

Robert Yuen: I think reestablishing your relationships with your current. Can give you a lot of information in terms of what the future might look like and future meaning like the next three to six months, you're just trying to get an idea of what their exposure is like to kind of like hedge against possible projects going on.

Pause.

And the simple thing to do is pick up the phone,

call your client this is not to ask for an invoice, right? This is also not to ask for the next design. you pick up the phone and call and just, you just want to know how they are. Treat it like a relationship.

Hannah Brown gave another amazing advice in terms of, just getting back to basics, business development in person.

I think a lot of us got really comfortable during Covid, but there's no replacing an in person. [00:12:00] And during tough times, this is where everyone needs to lean on your closest relationships the most. And that's a broad statement like that's at home. That's, at work with your partners, at work, with your staff and employees, and also with your clients.

They are part of your business.

Evan Troxel: the whole idea of, and this has been a thread that's been running amongst episodes, and, and maybe that's because what I've been thinking about a lot recently, which the, the value of relationships and the wisdom that's in the people behind the tech, behind the projects, behind the practices, and. Leveraging that by establishing relationships, That, that information, that wisdom, that experience is there. And if you want to be a trusted advisor, if you wanna be perceived as that, like you actually ha, like you said, you have to do the hard work. you can't just wait for people to come to you to ask you those questions. have to get in front of and go have those proactive conversations and share that information. And this is like, this is the evolutionary story of the human race, right? It's [00:13:00] survival of the fittest is, maybe the, the simplest way to say that, right?

Robert Yuen: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: going out and spreading this is so, so important to survival so many aspects and so, I'm glad to hear you say that because I guess that reinforces, I'm happy to hear this confirmation bias. but at the same time, a, there's a technology story here, and so when you talk about, Coming outta Covid. think what we have experienced is, separation is one way to say we go looking for things online rather than calling a person, picking up the phone and asking people. and so I think that that has started to boil the frog in, in a very different way, which is, it's gotten us much more used to. Just Doing these things on our own, looking things up. We don't know even if the source of the truth is trustworthy or not. because there's so many different places we get our information from now, and so this idea of kind of doubling down and going back to relationships, it just seems like. we need to achieve a balance there, right? The

going anywhere. It's not going [00:14:00] away. and that we have to figure out the best uses of the pieces of the recipe that we already have and the new things that are coming out. these ideas that you're talking about In the report and examples that you just shared, thinking like a client, what are our client's biggest fears? how can we just pick up the phone and have a conversation with them to them, maybe not be so fearful about something or to say, we're here to help, here to help you navigate through mean, those kinds of offerings. Really do establish a trust over time that then becomes the backbone of your business, in my early days there's the rainmakers in the office and what do they have? They have a deep rolodex of relationships with

and that thinner and thinner and thinner over time.

Just like the architectural magazines, those things have gotten thinner and thinner and thinner over time. I think what you're addressing right now is it's time to get ahead of that and get out there and address those.

Robert Yuen: Yeah, I don't know if it got thinner. I think there's just been less of a spotlight.[00:15:00] , Evan, at the end of the day, the industry as a whole, we, we provide a service. We're professionals. There's always a relationship layer. It's never gonna go so I think it's always been there, but there hasn't been a really strong spotlight on it.

And there's been a really big spotlight on just the technology.

I'm also not saying like drop the technology, I don't see this as like going forward and going backwards. the relationship has always been. It's a foundation for every business.

don't lose sight of it. I think it's just put the spotlight back in times when we need to, they never went away.

We've just might have not put in the due diligence enough the last two years. and it's time to refocus. , but the tech's not going away. You don't have to get on a phone call. You could use Zoom, you could use, Microsoft Teams, you could use Slack. Uh, there's a number of ways now to stay in touch, today more than ever.

So there, there's a number of ways to do it. only biggest advice is do get back in.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. One of the tips that I've received over the years, and I think this was from Derek Severs, who of talked about. he's prolific, author and musician. And [00:16:00] he this advice of having your own database, what, it's your contacts, right? Your contact database of people and actually write down in there way in which they like to communi. So is it phone? Is it text? Is it teams? Is it Slack? Like what is and what can you do to make it easy to have that conversation with them because you could send an email and guess what? I get 150 emails a day. It's like, it's not gonna get addressed, right? I know somebody who is just on the show who's like, can you please just text me anytime you wanna talk because. That's where I see it. Right.

and that I think a, just a little tip. Throw it out there. just, just note down how people like to communicate and then use

Robert Yuen: it's an amazing tip. similar to the tip that Mark LaPage gave us, which is just, track, track your client's interactions. cause everyone's communication style is slightly different.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Robert Yuen: communication channel is different. so set those expectations and know.

the same man. Like, if you email me, it's gonna take, it's gonna take a week before I can respond to you.

Like I get somewhere close to like 150 to 300 emails a day.

if it's urgent, send me a text message.

Evan Troxel: And what's your phone number, Robert?

Robert Yuen: You have it. I'm not, [00:17:00] I'm not gonna share it on the podcast. Uh, that, that will make my phone number useless then, uh,

Evan Troxel: No, no worries. so what other kinds of things are in this report? I think one of the stories that was, uh, Really interesting was what was shared out of Marlon Blackwell Associate's office. regarding how I guess just the kind of, the struggle of, and maybe we move into more of like, what are the threats that are, against practice right now or that, that are coming in the near future.

One of the ones that was cited was regionality is becoming less and an of a thing, right. Being able to rely on. and projects showing up in your region and you getting them because architects are extending their practices out and trying to go beyond their typical footprint because they have to.

what do you do in response to that? You kind of have to do the same thing, you've also gotta get out. Farther and farther from your home base if you really are a regional practice. that, I thought that was interesting because it's worth bringing up what these various kind of threats are.

and then it's [00:18:00] interesting to see how people are starting to deal with those.

Robert Yuen: So I think in this particular, it's a great way to reevaluate the role of technology in how we can extend, businesses like business development, reach or marketing reach. they're absolutely correct. I think in times like this, every firm needs to start thinking beyond their hyper localized work, and see where there are opportunities.

in new way, leverage technology a little bit more to extend that reach. But there's also manual things you can can get on a plane. You can get on a plane and meet people in person in a different state.

Evan Troxel: talk about inflation. Man, plane

are crazy. but, but another thing to deal

Robert Yuen: it is another thing to do with another thing for every firm to assess. . Um, I don't think every firm is in a position where they're able to get on a plane all the time.

Evan Troxel: Right,

Robert Yuen: I don't think every firm is ready to take on work that's beyond their, 10, 2000 mile radius. but I think every firm should start thinking strategically and like, well, what, where are they headed and what do they need to do?

Evan Troxel: and are there technology? Tools that help people where [00:19:00] that is? it, or do you think it's something else? I know there are companies out there who have built tools to identify of ideal places to do the thing that they're doing. One of a previous example of a guest on the show, Sam, from Homestead, they had developed an algorithm to identify particular lots in particular where it looked like. and this is kind of an extreme example, but it looked the yard wasn't being taken care of. And then they were able to look at those and say, okay, for California's bill SB nine, we can do a lot split here. Clearly they're not utilizing the land. And I thought that was just a really interesting approach.

are ways in which you can of use data to identify where those things are, and then there's like getting your feet on the ground and going out and Word of mouth and relationships and things like that, and it's probably a little bit of everything, right, you have to be proactive about it.

Again, you can't just be waiting for people to call you. You have to be looking for ways to get out there and, getting ahead of it.

Robert Yuen: that's a really, really good point because I think the more. The more you [00:20:00] wait and the less proactive you are, the more likely a surprise will hit The whole point of this is I don't want a surprise. Surprises are not good. Uh, they're not good.

like if something's bad's coming, I want to know, like, want to see it coming.

I wanna do everything I can. to avoid the bad thing. surprises are bad and the only way essentially solve for no surprises is to be proactive.

I think there's a lot of ways, architects can continue to look for, let's say, interesting opportunities to find indicators of where there are opportunities.

But I think going back to being really like, obvious and really easy to, I. . first is just technology. Where does most of your project come from? Historically, just look within, I have a feeling that most of the industry still to this day their work is repeat work.

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm.

Robert Yuen: can, we can do a, a happy hour tour, Evan and I think we would get nine out 10 architects say most of the work is repeat work.

All that tells me is your client relationships are really.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Right?

Robert Yuen: focus there [00:21:00] because that's the future work, which is repeat work. Ensure that it's

Evan Troxel: Mm-hmm. goes back

Robert Yuen: Right. Like if that's not healthy, then you kind of know what to do, which is to build new relationships, to offset where there might be instability in the current forecast of future work with your current clients.

Cause it's repeat work business.

don't immediately jump to something new yet when you haven't first reassess, you know, your current situ.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Makes me think of a couple things. one of which is the value of that relationship is so much higher than what it costs, the actual cost of finding new clients. therefore, it comes back what the experience of that service was for them previously. Because the threat is, is that other firms. If you're regional, They're coming in to your market and threatening the chance that you will get the next project, even from a client that you've had before, and that's where then the relationship, the quality of that relationship starts to really matter, [00:22:00] right? Because did they have a good experience? Throughout that project. We know these projects take a long time. We know that it's stressful. There's a lot of strain on the relationship during those projects, I'm sure for a lot of clients and for a lot of professionals. And so how are you able to manage those expectations and that experience throughout? lifetime of that project so that when the next one comes along, you're the easy choice. and what can you do to make it easy for them to choose you? Because one of the things, again, getting back to the MBA example, the Marlon Blackwell Associates, they're saying because of this threat, we have to lower our fees.

And it's like, what is the value of an architect? How do we come together as an industry? To talk the, the value of an architect, and they pointed out some contrast to construction with change orders. Change orders are expected when things don't work out right in construction, but yet when an architect has to redesign something, the example was cited was like, often we have to it over for free.

Right? part of it. So I mean, maybe you can speak to some of that, just kind of riffing off what we're talking about.

Robert Yuen: [00:23:00] Yeah, we, we we're moving on from client risk to money risk. I think in, in a scenario where everything costs more, this is the worst time to reduce your fees

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Robert Yuen: generally speaking, everyone's fees are already behind what they need to be This is the absolute worst time to drop. . cause the, you know, the value of that dollar is continuing to drop.

Like you, if anything, everyone needs to reevaluate and increase

fees.

You have to we go back to when we started this, like the cost to buy eggs and the cost of Phillip gas just went up for you. the worst time to lower your fees. Doesn't, doesn't make any,

Evan Troxel: a, it's a dilution of so many things. obviously monograph is a tool to track this kind of thing in an office and in a practice. What can you share about the value of having a system that you can rely on when it come? I mean, a lot of times technology is seen as an answer to a problem, especially a tool like yours and so many that we are seeing coming in and kind of disrupting the industry, garbage in, [00:24:00] garbage out.

And I that's something that so many firms are struggling with is, is either the lack of ability. Get unique insights from their data because the data is crap. and this to me is probably the worst place to have crap data, is tracking the business side, the time, the effort, the dollars spent

these projects.

Because if you can't rely on impossible to forecast go, how long that next project's gonna take, what the effort's gonna be, et cetera, et cetera.

Robert Yuen: you've nailed and I think that broader industry has, has at least two problems. One, you don't track at all.

Evan Troxel: right?

Robert Yuen: So like, you don't even have a garbage and garbage out problem. You have nothing

Evan Troxel: It's called intuitive tracking. Yeah.

Robert Yuen: Like you have nothing, nothing but gut. that, and that's really bad don't, you don't really know.

And all you have are touchy-feely feelings.

and you're running on intuition ex extraordinarily hard to make unbiased decisions and extraordinarily hard to do any type of forecasting. Um, cause you don't, you don't have a starting. [00:25:00] Forecasting. You can only do forecasting if you have a starting point.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Robert Yuen: The second problem is exactly what you've already mentioned is if your data, and you do have data, but it's just like not good data. and the industry like plagued with bad data. Personal experience. When I was working at, at a much bigger organization, I used to lie on my hours all the time,

Evan Troxel: Yes. Oh yeah. That's

Robert Yuen: right? Like cuz they don't want me writing down 80 hour.

Evan Troxel: They don't,

Robert Yuen: want, they want me to write 40,

Evan Troxel: right,

Robert Yuen: but in reality, it took me 80 hours of time to accomplish the work.

Then what happens, and this was the younger version of me, is like I'm feeding into a system where it doesn't actually help me One month later. The principals, the studio directors, like, Robert, you can pull this off.

We've laid out

Evan Troxel: you just did. Yep.

Robert Yuen: was, I was like, oh my God. that's where it hit just shot myself in the I shot myself in the foot cuz they're using that data to make future plans on how they look at staffing and resourcing. and everyone thinks that the firm is actually profitable on a utilization.

but they're not, because like probably like doing two [00:26:00] times the amount of hours, like their effective billable arrays actually have,

Evan Troxel: And why is our staff leaving? Right? Like, why are people going to other places where it's probably the same? Right? Just whisper

Robert Yuen: because there's massive burnout and it's a two-way street, the staff doesn't know exactly let's say the value of tracking time

Evan Troxel: because they're taught otherwise,

Robert Yuen: Or not taught at all?

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Or not taught. and there's just an expectation of, I mean, and this happens, it starts in school, It's like, do

and how long does the project take? It takes as long as it takes. these are things that programmed into architects

Robert Yuen: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: graduate.

from before graduation.

Robert Yuen: it's so frustrating for me to see that sometimes. Because I know architects work with constraints really That's the whole point of design is that there's always constraints. It's why we talk about contacts. There's a site, there's a constraint. there's a f a R, there's an area of constraints, there are setback constraints.

Architects are really, really good at working with constraints. But we remove all those constraints when we think about the business, and that doesn't

Evan Troxel: and is that because we're not [00:27:00] trained in business, quote unquote? I we're, we see that a we, we graduates, uh, who come outta school there's one pro practice course, there's no training on business. we're not saying anything new here, because there is a lack of emphasis or even a lack of anything. Many architectural education programs out there regarding business, how to run a profitable business. And there is so much on the other end of that, which is like suffer for your art, and do whatever it takes to get architecture capital, a architecture built, that like, that is like the perfect storm for what you're talking

Robert Yuen: So I see massive changes coming, because we do have to address this head monograph is extraordinarily honored and privileged to continue to work on this mission, to be that business backbone to the industry. we also need every architect to also acknowledge we need to do things.

business minded. cuz it is a business we're trying to put food on the table. If you're a firm owner, you're, you're also responsible for the wellbeing of your team. You're responsible for payroll. there is [00:28:00] absolutely a business aspect to architecture. Is it a hundred percent?

Absolutely not. there's a creative process as well. but when you over-index on one and not acknowledge the other, it leads to an unhealthy relationship.

All we want is we don't want surprises. We want healthy relationships, client and money, means we gotta work on it

the money side there, there's easy things. We can, we can. Like, I think one of the things is just knowing where the money is, tracking your data. If you don't, number one rule, you gotta track it first.

We can deal with garbage in and garbage out later. As long as you have have some set of data. If you already have the data, then it is really like honest with yourself might not be in the data. You have to talk to your.

does this really take you 40 hours? You'll get the answer.

took, it took me 60, 65. Yeah,

Evan Troxel: think you have to put an asterisk on that because do want to please, especially young architects, they want to please their supervisors and they kind of want to tell them what they want to hear. I think that happens all the time.

Robert Yuen: all the time.

Evan Troxel: all the time.

this idea again kind of going back to this idea of [00:29:00] the relationship so that you can have real conversations about that is so important. The other side of that coin is like there are people out there who will tell you exactly what it is and they won't sugarcoat it at all. I think those are probably the few rather than the many.

there are people like that. I can think of people in my past are just like, no, this is the way it is right here. Like just straight up. They're not trying to sugarcoat. And then there are the others who are You know, I can do an all nighter and I can not write down the number of hours that it took, and that's fine because this is what I'm trained to do and this how I do

Robert Yuen: yes and no. statistically proven, most of the industry is small, like 80, 90% of the entire industry is small. And when you're in a small business,

everything. . It's a very different problem if you're a larger business, right? If we're talking about like a, an SOM or against or an hk, then it becomes a lot harder.

But 80, 90% of the entire industry is like firm sizes that are like 5, 10, 15 people.

Evan Troxel: that's a good point. Yep.

Robert Yuen: all I'm asking here is if you're the firm owner do some introspective and be honest with yourself. You saw that all [00:30:00] nighter.

It's 10 people, five people. Like you saw it happen

and then you look at the time sheet and it says 40. I was like, ah, it's not

Evan Troxel: Time for a conversation, right?

Robert Yuen: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Not avoidance. So with a tool like monograph and this idea of good information so that you can make better decisions in the future. Do you guys, and this doesn't pertain just to monograph, I think this pertains to anything What is a good strategy to begin, think there's so much historical data that cannot be relied on, that it takes way too much effort to go back and shift it and to modify it and to make it real. the strategy when I was leading digital practice was you start on the next project. I mean, these projects take a long.

Robert Yuen: Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: and you have to start somewhere. And so where do you start implementing the new standards or the new libraries? Because you're not gonna be able to go back and swap all this stuff out. that's a daunting task. you outsource it to somebody else, it's not gonna have the insights that you had being on the project.

[00:31:00] Right? You need the person who did it to do that kind of thing. So to me, the. Obvious strategy is to start with a new project and start with that clean slate start to build the resource that you can rely on. Does that match up what you recommend?

Robert Yuen: it does not, and I'll tell you why it does not.

Evan Troxel: Tell me the right way to do

Robert Yuen: and the only reason why I say it does not is well projects. Most firms have more than one project.

Most firms, those projects are not starting and ending at the same

Evan Troxel: true. Yeah, absolutely. And and in larger firms, people are swapping teams.

Robert Yuen: Yes,

Evan Troxel: same team doesn't move on

It's complicated.

Robert Yuen: yes.

Evan Troxel: what do you do?

Robert Yuen: and remember, so we're trying to solve a business problem, not a project. . when you're starting fresh on a single project and that might not align with another project, and you're a firm owner trying to look at the entire business, oh my God, how are you gonna understand the trend?

they, they're all gonna roll up

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

down the road, right?

Robert Yuen: Yeah. Yeah. So the, that's the only reason why don't, I don't align with that [00:32:00] strategy. And I think, so this first principle. , what are you trying to solve? Well, we're trying to have better visibility for the business, not just a single project, one at a And keep that top of mind as you work through how to troubleshoot. problems are existing in this case. When do you start, collecting more accurate data for the business? The right approach is actually to start it all at the same time. You peg it to a calendar date, not to a project start, and.

Evan Troxel: I'm nodding my head in agreement along with you because I feel like that is totally ideal.

Robert Yuen: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: gears midstream. How do you actually do that? Do you have success? I mean, I would hope you would have success stories of that kind of, because what we're talking about is adoption, right? And adoption of a new behavior hard let alone a new tool.

And the learning curve that may or may not come along with that. So you're saying this is a top down for the business

made. I think we do have to acknowledge the gap between the ideal [00:33:00] and the reality of, how hard it is to do that on projects. what do you, what do you tell people?

Robert Yuen: I say Pega to a calendar date. and I say peg it to, as I'm making some assumptions here for everyone. If you are billing and invoicing every project monthly, well there's your opportunity. You close out the books and you're starting the books on a new month. That's also where you start. can then recalibrate all your projects, cuz now you know your total budget remaining across all projects and then you reestablish new systems moving.

Now, if your billing cycles are like, not monthly, this complicates things a little There's a suggestion also, in the report by baloney of like really understanding the collection periods that your business operates and question, are those, those collection periods sustainable here at monograph?

Like the tighter you are. you're, if you are historically phase based, . The goal is to see if we can get into monthly building. What that does for a business is it gives you predictable cash flow.

Evan Troxel: this is

software has done, right? It's gone from buy wants upfront to [00:34:00] subscription. So the idea of sustainability of a business is kind of based on this idea recurring revenue.

Robert Yuen: if people don't understand the value of that, what might be a more relatable analogy is like a landlord collecting.

That landlord has predictable revenue. We're all gonna pay and everyone's gonna pay the same amount every single month. All of a sudden, all the stress and anxiety of how much cash you're gonna get in starts to alleviate less stress and less anxiety means you can work on another problem.

Evan Troxel: is more of Modern. I don't know what the, the right, you know, current, way of thinking about this is as well. I mean, I remember being a young architect and hearing the horror stories of clients being 90 days past due, 180 days past due, that landscape shifted, do you feel like as well because all of this other stuff been influencing architecture over the decade?

Robert Yuen: The trend we see here at Monograph is more and more firms moving into some version of a monthly billing cycle, it makes a lot of business sense. if you're not collecting any revenue that month, but you still have to run payroll.

[00:35:00] it's the math. The math doesn't work.

Evan Troxel: That's monthly. Yeah.

Robert Yuen: Right. Like it

you're never gonna say employees, please wait, I'm, I'm not gonna run your payroll. Cause we haven't collected

yet. Like, you're never gonna say

Evan Troxel: I'm sure that has happened, but

Robert Yuen: like, I, I, I really hope not.

that'll be a really bad experience. But I think when thinking about business, it doesn't have to be scary, just, it just has to be logical

practical. Payroll happens every two weeks or once a month. Depend. Like those are the two most common. Pay cycles, and architects is the business. So like we just wanna make sure that there's enough cash coming in, cuz you're gonna have to spend that cash, to deliver payroll, And the goal is after you process payroll, there's still money left.

Evan Troxel: right.

Robert Yuen: you just keep business really, really simple. if you have a hundred K coming in and you need to spend a hundred k, well you're not keeping. If you have a hundred K coming in and you have to spend 150 K, it's like, oh my God, you just lost 50.

Evan Troxel: Well talk. what we haven't talked about in the report and I think also this starting to segue into the idea of the resource that you are creating beyond just the, platform that you've [00:36:00] created, right? I know least I've seen in the past, you guys have done section cut conference, have resource on where you're cataloging these conversations, around practice operations.

I know that was like the main theme. I guess kind of pulling pieces out the conversation here to start connect these dots and tie it all together. architecture, students, go into business without the business acumen and you're trying to help them run profitable businesses, successful architecture businesses.

And so let's start to get into that side of things where You shoulder this burden, but you don't look at it as a burden. You look at it as an opportunity to get this stuff out into our industry, to raise the whole industry talk the work that you've done in the report, but also beyond that to help make that happen for people so that architects aren't trying to figure this out alone all of these different.

Robert Yuen: Evan Architects are not alone. You're not alone. I think every firm order is struggling in some capacity. here at Monograph, we're extraordinarily motivated to continue to be [00:37:00] in. And that means we will be in service with information that we gather in trends like this report. It means we're gonna continue to be in service in, hosting debates and conferences and being in person.

but it absolutely means that we're gonna continue to build an incredible software company, pave that path and to make that much more streamlined and easier. The goal is to help, as you said, to make firms. And we'll continue to build, for a very long time. Everything we need to help firm achieve the easiest and most streamlined way So things that are coming, we're in private beta. We just launched a payroll product, monograph will start to process payroll for architects. A big reason for this to help you be profit. we need more insights into like where your biggest costs are occurring and your biggest cost is payroll.

So if we can map biggest expense against your time and project execution over time, while also helping you collect invoices and payments more streamlined, we can absolutely point at opportunities where every firm can get to profitability. We can identify where [00:38:00] there are inefficiencies and we can propose opportunities on where, where's the highest leverage and the easiest things to do.

Evan Troxel: Disruptive technology, it's like, sounds like the most, not the most, but this is an unsexy topic in the business of architecture, and that's why I love talking about this because of

important it is to not avoid it or to not. Be like, we need to put our attention here mean, talk about incumbents in the space that you're playing in and the lack of innovation, the lack of. we've talked about this in the past, I think in our last conversation, like building a tool that people like to use and want to use and put good data in versus one that they hate using, right? You guys are up against a big one in that category. and that is not even the main tool architects are using on a day-to-day basis, which kind of has the sim similar traits, right? So, you're doing amazing work in that

that you have to say

about

Robert Yuen: the work is not easy. The work's incredibly hard, but that's what makes it really exciting. I thrilled to [00:39:00] be working not sexy things. Cause not sexy things are the things that hold up the sexy things,

Evan Troxel: Yes.

Robert Yuen: is, this is no different. If you think of it as an architectural project, like pouring a foundation isn't really sexy.

It holds everything up.

it, allows all the work to be built on top.

your structural systems, HVAC systems, they're not sexy. Uh, there was an amazing course at Michigan called Anatomy, and I loved I absolutely loved it because it's the guts, right, the foundation, it enables the sexy world.

Two occur. If that is not stable, there is no opportunity for sexy work. So I'm incredibly. , yes, we, we face a legacy competitor and yes, there's incumbents. and yes, I care. Cause like I know our product is gonna be extraordinarily better

cuz our on first principles, we prioritize the architects

Evan Troxel: Well, yeah,

because

you

Robert Yuen: That's true. I'm not interested in building software that doesn't prioritize architects, in a very selfish

way.

Evan Troxel: of us, uh, the royal us solving [00:40:00] this for

ourselves,

much having

somebody else

do it

Robert Yuen: I'm not interested in building a tool just for accountants.

What's fascinating to me is the representational project of how do I take financial information that accountants know how to read, but really design a product where architects can understand quickly.

one of my all time favorites as like a design project, and it's really simple.

it's the gas gauge in a car. It's so simple, it just tells you how much gas you have left.

But, guess what? Everyone knows this. I know if should speed up or not speed up. I know if I need to go to the gas station or not. know if I can make this last errand before coming home.

there's so much information baked into such a simple measure. that as human beings, we inherently know building more of those tools are similar ways of representing financial informations. So architects and firm owners know exactly what to do next. a lifelong goal submission, a purpose.

Evan Troxel: How much

fuel is in the

tank,

Robert Yuen: it's so simple. then you can imagine when you get to [00:41:00] business and everyone overcomplicates there's all these different KPIs to watch. let's answer a really simple question. How much fuel is left for the business? How much fuel is left for the project? How much fuel is left for phase?

keep it really simple. Everyone else is smart enough to know what happens next.

Evan Troxel: I feel like our conversations, Robert, it's, it's kind of like a conversation, but it's also kind of a sermon. there are certain people who I talk to who sages, and you are one of those people, and I really enjoy our conversations because you deliver so much wisdom. really happy that we're able to have this conversation today because, and record because this is the kind of thing even if it's not for the casual listener of this show, I hope that it is something that is shareable someone. Beyond that. And that to me is what we can bring to this profession together.

And I'm so happy in the work that you're doing that, and that you're doing it. so

Thank you so much

for doing that with

Robert Yuen: Thank you for having I'm honored. I don't think I have that [00:42:00] much wisdom yet. I still feel very

young.

Evan Troxel: a, that's a sign of, of wisdom right there, I, I think it is. I mean, yeah, the, the older. The less I feel like I know and, the more questions that I ask, and I'm glad to have people

like you around

that I can ask those

questions

Robert Yuen: that's the most important quality. You and I, let's just keep asking the questions. cause the more we ask it, the more someone, will work on it.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, where can people get this report? I will put a link to I need to in the show notes for people to do that. But

go ahead and

and let people know.

Robert Yuen: Uh, put the link in there cause I'm, I'm not gonna be able to recall the entire link. so I'm excited. If you are looking for a way to contact me, it's really easy. It's just Robert Monograph and if you email me, I'll also send you the report. a problem.

Evan Troxel: Cool. so definitely monograph.com. I'll put a link to the report in the show notes everywhere you can follow Robert and Monograph online. And, if this is the first time you're hearing about Robert and Monograph, this won't be the last time. so put a link to our previous [00:43:00] conversation in the show notes and, uh, I look forward

to the next conversation.

Robert, thanks so much.

Robert Yuen: I can't wait. I'll see you in person soon.

Evan Troxel: Yep.

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Christine Williamson of Building Science Fight Club joins the podcast to talk about data versus wisdom, the culture of saying ‘no’ in architecture, Instagram as a platform for knowledge transfer and teaching, the reality of every building being a prototype, mentorship (or a lack-thereof) in the profession, the “Kardashianization” of social media and the user’s expectations of creators on those platforms, getting back to first principles thinking and teaching. the idea of ‘code minimum’ as an analogy of architectural education, building science for architects, getting back to first principles and having better frameworks for learning the fundamentals of practicing architecture so one can go farther, faster.

Latest TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter🗞️ AEC/tech Newsletter #9The News * Enscape for Mac updated for SketchUp ’23 * Autodesk University opens call for proposals * Rhino 8 WIP has gone full metal * ZipNeRF: Create 3d models from video shot on your phone The latest TRXL podcast episode 111: ‘Seeing What Sticks’, with Mark Thorley and David FlynnA convers…TRXLEvan TroxelEpisode Links* First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge * Christine on LinkedIn * christine-williamson.com * Building Science Fight Club website * Building Science Fight Club on Instagram * Awesome Framers on Instagram * Matt Risinger (Risinger Build) on Instagram

Watch this episode on YouTube112: ‘Start With a Better Framework’, with Christine WilliamsonChristine Williamson of Building Science Fight Club joins the podcast to talk about data versus wisdom, the culture of saying ‘no’ in architecture, Instagram…YouTubeEpisode Transcript112: ‘Start With a Better Framework’, with Christine Williamson

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[00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. This is the podcast where I have a conversation with guests from architectural community and beyond to talk about the co-evolution of architecture and technology. A little bit of housekeeping here before we get into this week's episode, this podcast has a new feature that I want to make sure that you know about.

Would you like to get the show notes and links from today's conversation sent directly to your inbox. And then again, each time a new episode comes out. Sign up at trxl.co. Just click on one of the subscribe buttons found all over the site. You can't miss them.

Next up is that you can now find this podcast on YouTube. It's one more way to listen And there'll be more YouTube goodness. Coming in the future. As I begin to go beyond audio on the channel, but in an interesting move, YouTube is now promoting podcasts [00:01:00] pretty heavily.

And I'm there for it. It's worth noting that yes, you can subscribe to both the podcast in your favorite podcast app and also on YouTube. It won't hurt you and it'll definitely help the show gain more visibility to help make a positive impact in the building industry. So if you will please pause the show. Look TRXL that's Troxel up on YouTube or click the link in the show notes and be sure to subscribe over there to.

I'll be right here when you get back. So thanks in advance.

Okay. In this episode, I welcome Christine Williamson. Christine has spent her career in building science, forensics, discovering why buildings fail and working with owners, architects, and builders to remedy the problems. She's the founder of the Instagram account @ BuildingScienceFightClub and educational project that teaches architects about building science and construction.

She graduated from Princeton university and received her master's of architecture from new school of architecture and design. [00:02:00] She's past chair of ASHRAE technical committee. 1.12 moisture management in buildings and is a frequent lecture on building science at universities and professional conferences.

In this episode, we discuss data versus wisdom. The culture of saying no in architecture, Instagram as a platform for knowledge transfer and teaching the reality of every building, being a prototype. Mentorship or lack thereof in the profession. The "Kardashianzation" of social media and the user's expectations of creators on those platforms. Getting back to first principles thinking and teaching. The idea of code minimum as an analogy of architectural education, building science for architects. Having better frameworks for learning the fundamentals of practicing architecture. So one can go farther, faster. And some of our favorite building industry related Instagram accounts, which are also linked in the show notes.

So without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Christine Williamson. [00:03:00]

Evan Troxel: Christine, great to have you here today. I'm, excited about our conversation.

Christine: Well thank you. Thanks for having me.

Evan Troxel: If you could, give a short or long, however you want, bio, give us an idea of where you're coming from and, and how you've got to where you are.

And, know, we'll get into the Building Science Fight club stuff, but tell us about you,

Christine: Well, I am an architect. my background is architecture. I started in, in architecture school, but pretty early professionally. Before I graduated, I developed an interest in some of the more practical elements of the profession. I was working for, a really, really fantastic architect based in New York City when I was in school.

So I was still a student when working for her. Chris Benedict is her name. great architect. really neat work. And she was designing multi-family buildings for the most part. sometimes, sometimes it was gut rehab, sometimes was, it was completely new construction in New York City, so you've certain constraints [00:04:00] from being in a big city like New York as well.

and she was doing extremely energy efficient design and construction. I got to work on and do the detailing for I think the second multi-family passive house in the United States, which was fantastic. It was gonna be first, we, we construction delays, , we were robbed of the title.

was, it was really neat. And even before actually meeting passive house standards, Chris's buildings would use. 85% less energy for heat and hot water than typical New York apartment buildings. the reason she knew this and could say this was because she would look at utility bills. So these were not estimated savings, these were actual savings from looking at utility bills on completed buildings.

And that's really neat. Oh, and she was doing this for no additional upfront construction costs. So sometimes her clients didn't even request this or weren't even interested in energy savings at all.

Evan Troxel: of her services. Like this was how she practiced. It [00:05:00] was you get when you, hire her.

Christine: Exactly. was really spectacular. And of course, that's a really neat promise, right? for a student to hear. So

all this energy, no additional upfront construction costs. And she was pretty ideologically or is ideologically. Motivated on that front in that she's a very passionate environmentalist, but also has a real heavy libertarian streak and believes that conservation and energy efficiency need to make sense on the merits so absent any kind of government subsidies.

And so the way that you do that, the only way that you can really do that is by really understanding building science and construction. And it was really working for Chris that things that I'd heard about before came alive for me. It was, was wonderful job. She, um, really encouraged me and other interns to spend a lot of time in the field.

It was just fantastic. it was exhilarating [00:06:00] to see. Designs actually come to life and how messy construction sites are. And, all the craziness that goes into getting drawings actually actually built and then documenting and measuring things after the fact. It was really, really neat, exciting time for me.

And ever since that experience, I knew, so I knew throughout school, throughout the rest of my education that that's where I wanted to end up, post graduation. And really after that, I ended up as a result in more of the consulting part of the industry. So while I was doing straight up design work, when I was working for Chris, after that, I worked for a big consulting company doing essentially enclosure consulting.

so energy wasn't always a, a focus, although sometimes it was, it was more risk management. So similar in terms of the. The science behind it and understanding the practical constraints of construction. But the focus was more risk management than energy conservation. And I got to [00:07:00] work on a lot of really big projects that gave me just a lot of experience.

And I got to, to see a lot working for that, that big consulting firm. That's what brought me to Dallas, which is where I live now, but only for a little bit.

be, I loved being a consultant for that reason, that you just get to see so much in architecture. And when I was working, Chris, you I only worked on a handful of projects because it a long time to see something through.

in consulting you can see. 50 projects in a year,

you're only dealing with the enclosure. So the layers that the inside from the outside. But a, it's a really great way to learn different means and methods for different building systems. And, that was really cool.

that was the sharp turn toward building science that I took after I graduated was really in, construction. So although I am a registered architect, just actually recently I, I really put off taking those exams for as long as I possibly could.

Um, but I'm not a, uh, I don't [00:08:00] do, traditional design.

And in fact, just before we got officially started, I told you we bought a new house. I hired an architect to help me do that . Oh yeah. Cause I have way better taste than I can satisfy myself.

Evan Troxel: The burden is somebody else's

Christine: Exactly. Exactly. But um, anyway, so the focus really has been , on building science and construction , throughout my career.

Evan Troxel: When you mi risk mitigation, you're talking about water intrusion, mold, energy, all of those kinds of risks that go along with operating a building and kind of the e n o portion of being an architect? Is that what you mean by that?

Christine: Yeah, it is. it's interesting to me too that it's an area of the profession that I don't think we really. Approach in as disciplined a as we could, we could benefit. I guess another way of saying that is I think that architects and definitely owners could benefit from taking a more disciplined approach to risk management.

And what I mean by that is that if you were to talk to a developer or an owner [00:09:00] about the biggest areas of risk in their profession, in their business, they could identify probably a whole bunch of things. Now, I don't know business real well, I'm going to guess maybe a real business person would be like, yeah, that's not it.

But they could tell you like, oh, okay. So it's a big risk for us if interest rates go up or down that really affects our business or, lead time supply chain. Like they could tell you a bunch of things or HR related issues. they could identify. Areas of financial exposure that they need to be aware of and plan for.

While they could probably do that pretty well, a lot of same responsible business people probably couldn't tell you their biggest risk exposure with respect to technical failures in their

And you can always reduce your risk by spending more money, but that's not always the best option.

what we want is to handle risk really intelligently and find a sweet spot where we're making really good choices about risk. But we're not overshooting the market. We're definitely, we don't wanna undershoot the mark [00:10:00] for sure,

I find that as much as we can undershoot the mark with risk and we really can, we can also overshoot the mark and overspend in areas where, we might not need to, for example.

if you were to think, this is the only example I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe more will come to me later, let's say windows are risky in your, in installing windows, right? There's a high likelihood that they leak. Now if you're a big developer and you install 10,000 windows a year, 20,000 windows a year, a certain percentage of them leak.

some of them are gonna leak cuz they just got a bad window and some of them are gonna leak cuz of the window to wall interface. well there's a lot of different windows you can buy and a lot of different ways of detailing those windows. And what's the cost of replacing windows or, repairing stuff when there is a leak or moving a tenant, that kind of stuff.

so is there a way that we can alter the detailing to be a little bit more forgiving without moving the needle too much on initial upfront construction costs certain, at a certain point, that's not gonna be worth it anymore.

[00:11:00] Once we've removed the low hanging fruit, each incremental dollar spent it's not always gonna be worth it, right? you're not gonna a whole bunch out of that in say, Las Vegas.

but maybe that's a different story in Houston.

and we see that come a lot of different areas in construction, especially the higher risk ones.

So particularly water management related. So Plaza X are big failures, Plaza X balconies, roofs, and windows and below grade waterproofing. So those big areas, there's some trade offs to be made there. And if you can think really intelligently about it, you can, end up allocating your resources a lot better and being a lot more intelligent about what's risky and what isn't.

And the same goes for architects too, there's a lot of pressure. On architects to save costs and when is it appropriate for an architect to say no and actually walk away? And when is it appropriate for an architect to kind of work with what the contractor maybe has suggested on as a value engineered item?

And [00:12:00] a lot of times architects aren't very well equipped to make those decisions intelligently. that, and again, that runs both ways. So if you don't know a lot about something, you're safe, bet is to say no, you're safe. Bet is to be more conservative if you don't know a whole lot.

If you do know more and you have more experience, you're better positioned to say yes to a, a proposed savings.

that's one way I like to think of myself as helping architects is giving them more of a technical foundation so that they're better prepared to manage their own risk properly. Cuz their incentive structure is a little different than,

developers and contractors

Evan Troxel: Right?

Christine: they receive a lot of pressure to accept risk that they shouldn't, that's really inappropriate for them to accept.

anyway, so like to help architects be able to, to say yes more often and to be really sure when they say no, that it's, I.

Evan Troxel: When I was working at a firm, the whole risk management department was kind of a, a consultancy within the firm, right? Like [00:13:00] they would weigh in on. Contract risk, know, language, there was people who were more on the architecture side, who were doing the kinds of things that you're talking about with, know, envelope and details and, product selection and the specifications and all those things. And I think a lot of times was like, here's our recommendation, and then the design team was actually the ones responsible for making the call. Now, I'm sure they could both override each other certain circumstances, but I guess one thing I keep thinking of when you're talking about this, because I've lived that seen examples of it going both ways where it's like, we want to do something different.

And it's but this thing works. and the, whole idea of squaring up this, this is what works and this is how we've always done it. When there are new products being developed,

Christine: right.

Evan Troxel: might not even be really new in air quotes. They might be new to me. Right. They might have been around for 20 years already. As far like the kinds of risks that you're talking about with water intrusion and energy and, thermal [00:14:00] breaks and all these such a risk aversion to trying things just, they don't know, I don't even wanna say new right anymore it's, it's probably not new.

These building products companies, they don't test the waters with products. Products are way too expensive to build, for them to test the waters with. Like, it already kind of has to be proven in some way for them to invest. the manufacturing line, the sales, the marketing, like all that stuff, they don't mess around with prototypical products for the most part.

Christine: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: that that, bifurcation that exists in our industry of like, are ways to address the things that you're talking about, but the industry doesn't wanna move toward them because we feel safe with these things that we already know in the areas where we practice, like regionally and things like that.

Christine: Yeah. mean, there's something to that. I think there's sort of a small sea conservatism at play there. that's not bad there's an instinct in there that's good. I use this example a lot in my teaching. It informs like a big part of my life. I think the older I [00:15:00] get, it's taken on a bigger thing in my, in my life. But, the idea of Chesterton's fence, where Chesterton, the old school philosopher, I really don't know anything actually about him except for Chesterton's fence, which is this, idea that if you come across a, a fence in a field or somewhere, before deciding to tear it down, you should understand why it was built in the first place.

And I think that is just so true and so much of life

we can, especially, when we're younger in a profession, we can have a lot of zeal to, revolutionizing things. And actually, I see it a lot in, know, especially in other industries, we're, we've got a love affair with tech right now.

And so we're talking about disruption and we like disruptors until we don't like disruptors and

Evan Troxel: Until me.

Christine: I know, right?

got, we've got a lot of disruption happening. I see a lot of disruptors engage in sort of famous failures because they tried to disrupt an industry that they didn't really understand.

and we can see this in know, smaller examples on individual projects as well within architecture. so I think [00:16:00] some of the instinct to, sticking with methods that we know work is a good one. But I also think that we really don't exercise the freedom that we have when we don't understand the principles behind

Methods so this happens a a lot we develop some sort of standard and then we forget why the standard was developed in the first place, why it works. And when you study that, and when you learn why that works, you can understand better how to tweak it or adjust it or discard it when the situation changes.

and you can't really do if you're just doing stuff out of habit, recycling old details, which I know we do. know, there's an efficiency to that. But then the downside is, well, you start to, institutionally you forget why you did something and maybe the situation isn't the, same anymore.

So we have more freedom. I get very frustrated the consultant side of the business where I think there's a culture of saying no. , I think people confuse skepticism with intelligence, so they think it makes them seem [00:17:00] smarter to be like, oh, well, uh, you know, I don't, some people say that that's okay, but I, I say no.

I say no. it makes them sound smarter. I, I was exposed to a lot of that when I was at my big consulting firm. I was also exposed to tons of brilliant people, and I, I learned a lot. This isn't a huge knock, but I think, there's a lot of different kinds of consultants and, unfortunately, or for better or worse, a big part of that culture in the water management and risk management area is to say no.

And that's what they're incentivized by as well, they're not incentivized taking the risk. every, every now and then, I would, would come across reports or drawing markups by, I hesitate to say competitors, because our industry is so big, I don't, I never really viewed me as directly competing with, other enclosure consultants for the most part.

Evan Troxel: was enough work

for

Christine: mean, yes, the, for the most part. I know it's not always like that in a, I just think big picture wise it's, anyway, it's a big world.

um, but I'd see some of this stuff and I'd be like, are you kidding me? I couldn't imagine leaving my clients hanging like that. [00:18:00] Where it was, well, you can't do that. You can't do that. You can't do that without any indication of what you might consider instead.

exactly. exactly.

Evan Troxel: solution.

Christine: Yeah, but of course, the better you get at something, The more you can understand like, where an architect is trying to go with something or where a builder is trying to go with something and you can okay, well, what if we could get you 75% of the way there, but with, know, half the risk?

you know, anyway, opportunities emerge when you understand building science and when you understand construction

Evan Troxel: One, of the themes that's come recently on the podcast and in the work I'm doing at Tech is this idea of data versus wisdom I, I use versus this whole idea of the inundation of data and information that is out there. It's hard to make a decision for, and I the reason I'm bringing this up is this whole conversation about risk and there are people who work in these firms and I'm thinking of the people who are on that risk mitigation committee know, like, Seasoned architects, like this really nice way of saying [00:19:00] old gray-haired, have, they have battle scars. they're amazing. these are the best people to talk to. And there's this aversion to talking to these people from the younger generations because the younger generations search for stuff, Like, that's what they do. They're really good at it.

Like, let's just go look for that and that isn't just the younger generations. Everybody does that nowadays. It's just like, well look it up on, do, there's no wisdom in the things that you really look up though. And I think this is maybe where we can start to segue into what you're doing with Building Science Fight Club, but this whole idea of the, the wisdom behind the data is the stuff where the rubber really hits the there's so much almost hidden there because people are afraid to even ask or talk to the. Crustal person in the corner, that they're really missing out and this wisdom that is there. the lack of mentorship in the industry, the lack of mentees seeking out mentors in the industry, let alone the other way around.

that it's, it's kind of a two-sided problem [00:20:00] for sure. I don't know where I'm really going with this other this, this whole idea like, how do we start to bridge the gaps between wisdom and data? You do actually need both, right? You can't do it all with just one or the other.

and so I'm just wondering mean, did you see that gap? And that's one of the reasons you. May, and you, you can give us a little bit of let's step back and talk about what Building Science Fight Club is kind of set the stage. But just wondering like, what inspired you to go there?

Was it something like that or was it something else? It's kind of aligning the, your path with, the things that you're interested in, the things that you can do. know. I want to hear it from you Where, where did this all come from? and maybe we can start to address the gaps that exist and talk about teaching aspect and how it addresses this lack of mentorship in the

Christine: Oh my gosh, there is so much there.

Evan Troxel: that

so go for it.

Christine: there's so much that's interesting about don't, I don't know that I really thought about it quite in this way as I, you know, [00:21:00] so much of life you sort of fall into, weirdly, this is just weird. I think it must have been, mm, 25 years ago I heard a sermon and I can't believe I remember this part of this sermon that defined wisdom.

It was a on wisdom. And it defined wisdom. The the pastor was, um, friend's uncle. and the pastor defined wisdom as knowing what to do when the regular rules of right and wrong don't apply. And I think that is so true in so many other areas of life too. Like do we do when there isn't a clear like, well, this is what you do in this situation.

Like every building we design is a prototype. incredible. There's also this idea of, asymmetrical information. I think that's a term from economics that I'm borrowing, but I think it really applies in our industry in a lot of different ways where, when you talk about mentorship or learning from other people in the industry, the learn. isn't actually competent to evaluate [00:22:00] how good the mentor actually is, or the perspective mentor actually is . I felt this way. this happens in a lot of areas of life, but I felt this way. I, had a baby just this, is past year and I realized to my great , I don't know, dismay maybe, I'm not sure what the right word is there, that I wasn't competent to evaluate how good my doctor was.

Like I liked her. I think she was good, but it was at a point the kind of care that I was needing. I was technically a high risk mother cuz I'm, older. like, I can't read a Yelp review and know if this is a good doctor or not, or if she's gonna give me the right care. And I think that

Evan Troxel: actually knowing do that

Christine: Fair enough. Yeah. but there's just, there's a lot of areas our profession where that asymmetrical. Relationship exists. So in one area it exists in the way that you just talked about in that more experienced people in the industry, have this apprenticeship relationship with, younger people in the industry, newer, entrants to the [00:23:00] industry.

And how do we connect these two and how do we make it so that, that, you know, how does a young person in the industry know who to seek out who's a reliable source? and that's, that's really hard. And then it exists in another part of our industry too, in that how do clients know to hire professionals that are competent? again, I don't think really Yelp reviews do it, or the equivalent of, of Yelp reviews really do it. And I think traditionally in other industries, this is where branding comes in, where you'll a Kelly Blue Book type of thing or a brand has a brand reputation, and we've tried to do that in the building industry with certain building standards like hers ratings and, lead and different certification programs that both certify the professional and certify the building. But there isn't really a universal approach approach to that. most buildings don't adhere to any kind of standard apart from the building code. my, so I guess building code and licensure itself are the two most [00:24:00] prevalent standards. I think we could pretty much all agree that there's some, Big areas that aren't addressed, important areas in our profession that.

aren't addressed by like what do you do when you're, you're trying to, have Google teach you wisdom ,like you, what do you do to do that? I don't know. you mentioned building Science Fight Club. So Building Science Fight a, is an Instagram account that I run that. I started to, I guess, informally try to some of the gaps.

I, I wasn't doing this on purpose to try to, um, to, you know, change the industry or anything like that. It was a lot less grand in that. early in my career, I was spending a lot of time on job sites. I still do, and I knew that my classmates from architecture school were not. so I thought, well, you know, if I take photos of stuff that I'm seeing and mark them up and share them with my classmates, that would be a way to give them a little bit of experience and confidence in their practice that they're not learning like in front of their clients or their [00:25:00] boss. and so I was teaching stuff as I was learning it as well.

Evan Troxel: sure.

Christine: it was a way of filling some of that gap. architects don't spend a lot of time in the field. don't, they spend less time than they used to, and even in the past, they've been limited by, know, time and space and budgets

Evan Troxel: Utilization ratios

Christine:

Exactly, You've got billable hours to to fulfill. so it's really hard for architects to be drawing things that they can't actually picture very well. so I started to share with friends and then it became really popular and soon friends of friends were interested in the account and it got much bigger. And, around the same time, professionally, I was making some, changes. I started teaching at, I was consultant working for someone else and, I started wanting to do more teaching, but I had a billable rate of my own, a billable rate and billable percentage that I targets that I had to hit as well. And if I was gonna take time to [00:26:00] teach, I would have to get paid what I was getting paid. to work or, you know, to go do a site visit or something like that. So I figured I liked teaching, so I was gonna do it. I wanted to do it, but I needed to get paid. And if I was gonna ask for money, I should probably be pretty good.

So I this thing that I'm doing on Instagram, I could basically use it to kind of practice teaching a little bit. so that was sort of a practice. And I, I did it for a little while. Longer. And then, um, a, I'm an immigrant and, uh, got married to an American and, I had previously been on a bunch of visas and I was finally eligible to apply for a green card through marriage.

And so I applied and this is a much more complicated story that's boring and administrative, but, um, I knew that it mean that I would have to take some time off of, um, paid work. I, they let you work, you just can't be paid. uh, gotta love Uncle Sam sometimes. Anyway, so I was here and wasn't employed and so I thought, well, ,you know, I'd never been in this position before as an [00:27:00] adult and as a professional.

So I thought, well, what if I treated teaching on Instagram like it was my job? that was also a way of addressing some problems in the teaching part of our industry that I had observed from getting into it as a practicing professional. And that is a lot of the continuing education currently in our industry is provided by, materials manufacturers and consultants. And both of those people have interests that are not quite aligned with their audience . it doesn't mean that they're bad. Often the teaching is actually very good, but on the consultant side, the temptation is to convince architects, well, this is very very hard. and I am smart. And that is why you should hire. which is completely antithetical to how I teach. My approach is, well, this isn't as hard as you think it is, and you actually know more than you realize. And here's the part of this problem. Let's break this problem down and here's the part that you can reasonably. Solve on your own. if you're, you know, 90% of the time [00:28:00] you can do this by yourself and say 10% of the time, or 5% of the time when it looks like this, well, you should go hire someone for that stuff. anyway, that's one problem. And then the second problem of course, with materials manufacturers is lying, selling you stuff. that's not always aligned. And different manufacturers do that better and worse, right. um, than others.

We've all been pretty painful lunch and learns, but I thought, what if I taught, what if I used this time where I'm not allowed to work and approached teaching as though it were, it's only thing like it were, was its own reward. This is my job. um, I'm not to market myself for consulting work.

I'm just teaching to teach. I'm not trying to sell anybody anything except the teaching

and then the expectation. I hoped that when I. Came was, when I got my green card, I would be able to integrate teaching into my own consulting work and I'd be able do page teaching. Um, I thought, well, this could be an experiment, like are architects willing to pay for their own education as opposed to doing it through

materials manufacturers?

Evan Troxel: I'm wondering are they willing? [00:29:00] there's so many

it's, it's very similar to what I'm doing with this podcast, like building a resource for the industry, like you have done as well.

I mean, this is something that value. And so, my question is partially selfish, but I think it needs to be talked about more in the industry. and you said sometimes, right? it's really interesting to me how cheap architects are, that I

think I learned more from my wife than anybody, which Pay for the stuff that really matters to I have to ask, well, does this really matter to people? and so, there, there's a of going on in my own head around that but I'm just wondering what your experience is on that side of it.

Christine: I'm a few minds on this, if architects really think that they're gonna get something of value from it, they are willing to pay for their own education. Yes. I've certainly been able to do that. I, of course, also do a lot of stuff for free now I do a lot of stuff for free, cuz I like it.

So the Instagram account, it, takes a long time to do each of these posts. I do one a week and they take. generally between [00:30:00] 10 and 30 hours per post. This is a lot

Evan Troxel: like a podcast, Christine.

Christine: Yep. And actually other people are like, you should do a podcast too. I'm like, Uhuh, one is enough.

Evan Troxel: but

Christine: yeah, exactly.

Also, and an email list and a blog and a Facebook group and a, I'm like, no, no, no. Just, just the one thing. but yeah, made, it's made sense for me to do that in that, it certainly hasn't hurt my career to be more well known, I think we're so conditioned in this, media environment that we're in just culturally, just us, everybody we're taught. We're valuable as consumers, so people who who produce content, kind of work for us in a way. which an attitude I really hate. I, and it comes on Instagram where people feel remarkably entitled to your, time and expertise. some, but our culture really conditions this in us, in social media. and I a lot of people assume that I do this to promote my consulting business and therefore, I owe them something just by [00:31:00] paying attention cuz they're potential customers. And that is not true for consult. Like I do have a consulting business, but my biggest problem is telling people no.

I, I'm one person. it doesn't take A lot of projects to keep me very busy. feel very fortunate to say that, I, run the Instagram account because A, it makes me a better teacher. b I really like it. and c it hasn't hurt to be better known in the industry, but I certainly don't get paid for it.

It it doesn't pay for itself.

Evan Troxel: ways, right? you've definitely built a platform that establishes your authority in this realm and people trust you because of the consistency in the quality of the product that you produce.

Christine: Yes and no. this is something that you alluded to earlier in some of the difficulty in finding wisdom developing wisdom of, your own, in your own practice. And that is that, bizarrely. Popularity has become its own credential.

Evan Troxel: true.

Christine: I was good at my job before I had an Instagram account. and I think to a certain extent, [00:32:00] you're you did not cite popularity when you were saying that people, trust me, you were citing that, my presentation makes me credible. And that the appeal to first principles and the clarity and the, all of that stuff is, um, a good way for people to evaluate the information that they're receiving and, is this person trustworthy in this, this particular area?

I would love it if that's why I was popular, I you know, our industry isn't immune to the Kardashian immunization of, of our culture either, and. a big reason of why I'm trusted is that I'm popular and that's not a good reason , but guess I'll take it. But,

Evan Troxel: right now because that,

that's

Christine: Yeah. on a platform like Instagram has been kind of interesting in that way as well, in that I'm teaching technical content, which is off brand the, for the platform itself. Like I've been called an influencer before, which is really sort of funny because I don't sell lip gloss.

Like this is really different. [00:33:00] This I'm in a really different business than, um, than people who are, you know, affiliate marketing for Nordstrom. it's very different. it's, it's funny of be on a platform and using

it.

Evan Troxel: and you're not alone, right? I mean, in the architectural space in the construction space, there's a few out there and guess I'll just plug 'em real quick, there's Troy Donovan,

Christine: Oh, he's exactly who I was thinking of.

Evan Troxel: the Donny's, the Underscored Donnie's. And I'll put a link to that

Christine: and, he's done some teaching too. That's also fantastic.

Evan Troxel: and then the other I I love are like, awesome framers and rising or build and these the construction side who, man, talk about getting eviscerated in the comments. believe the entitlement in the comments. So maybe contractors who watch other contractors do work have all kinds of things to say and couch potato, know, kind of commentary. But it's, it's pretty incredible that he I guess as a contractor, maybe you just have thick enough skin to let that stuff roll

off,

brutal.

Christine: Oh, is laughing all the way to the bank on that one.[00:34:00] and he started doing this before anybody really was doing this in our industry. and people looked at him and were like, what are you doing? Cuz he'd filmed stuff like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. known, I've known Matt

for a long time and people are like, what are you doing man? And now, rock on Matt , cash, those checks. he does it a little bit. So I'm really explicitly. Non-sponsored content on my, my page. And that is not Matt's business model. Matt's an educational account, but he's directly sponsored by

manufacturers, which is not

a criticism,

just a

Evan Troxel: mean, for the manufacturers, it's better to have somebody else talking about them than them. and he's providing a service.

Christine: yeah, of course.

Evan Troxel: he's educating people about the benefits of these things, again, from somebody with trust and authority because of account on social media and, going back to this whole idea of where do people get their wisdom from? I think that's what's so interesting to me about this approach on Instagram [00:35:00] as a teaching platform, on a platform that is not about teaching at all, right? It's about, it's about scrolling and engagement and, double taps and all these things. it's interesting to me that you guys have found a way to deliver something of value to so many people.

Harsh critics who, whatever, there's a are quote unquote popular, I think it's super interesting that this is where a generation or at a population of people are turning to get some of this information. Of course, it's interspersed with all the other crap too, it is interesting that there, that you found

a way to do that there.

Christine: Yeah. I wonder where it's gonna go, and I've got some mixed feelings about some sort of random thoughts related to what you just said there. first of all, the comments I try to engage, especially with the critical ones, as long as they're critical in normal ways they don't even have to be constructive. They can be a little bit rude too. Um, and sometimes outright rude if it sort of matches the type of comment that an architect might get on a job site from a real contractor from a or something like that, because I recognize that. [00:36:00] a really big part of a lot of people's struggle in their career, and definitely this was true of me, was being young in the profession and not having a lot of authority on a job site. And I would learn about something like the way something should be done, but then I'd be on a real job site and have to compromise. And I'd have to know like on this scale of, well, this is what should be done and this is being proposed. on, how far apart are those two points? And, can I move it closer to this should be done?

And if not, what's likely to happen? Like how bad is it? Is it walk off the job bad or is it just, eh, not great? being able to locate yourself on that scale and know how to answer normal pushback that you get related to budget and constructability especially, think it's really helpful to hear.

for other people to watch how someone like me will engage with comments that these people are likely to get themselves. also it's way easier to [00:37:00] get that question when you're sitting in your pajamas at the kitchen table as I am when I'm answering these, not on an actual job site. like, that's one part of sort of comment section thing. learning on social media or learning online like this, there's definitely a community aspect to it, but the stakes are really low for people and that's a real benefit. most of the learning they're getting is in front of colleagues and people that maybe that they have an otherwise adversarial relationship or slightly adversarial relationship with.

And that can be hard. that's, there's a benefit to the social media aspect. but another part of this I've realized is that the people in the comments section and the people who engage with my posts are typically not my actual customers. and that's like overwhelmingly the case.

people that I just get sort of shocked by in real life where I'll meet people I'm not aware of their following me or their presence at all on Instagram. And they're like, oh yeah, I know who you are. I know your work. I'm familiar with you. but they would've never, like, ever clicked like on a post, [00:38:00]

Evan Troxel: most people are lurkers like that. I've had

people in line say, I know your voice. And it's like,

of weird.

Christine: it's a funny world like that, but we of confuse the loudest voices from our actual customer

Evan Troxel: Yes.

Christine: I walk a lot just for pleasure. I enjoy walking and I, will stop at every construction site and just take a look at it.

I was walking through one of the neighborhoods in, in Dallas and, came across a mock-up was a residential project, and they'd done a mockup, which was already impressive. And I noticed a, um, a Sega product, which is a Swiss company. They make, um, really fantastic tapes And, adhesives for flashing windows or among other things.

and I stopped and I was taking a picture of the, from the sidewalk. I'm not on this job site or anything. Just taking a picture of the, of the mockup. And the contractor came over and actually recognized me, said, are you Christine Williamson? I said, yeah. asked, I asked him about the mockup, and I was, I, I noticed the seaga.

I was like, that's, that's really fantastic. It's the first time I've seen this in Dallas. And the guy said, well, I heard about it [00:39:00] from Matt Risinger and Go figure, you know, so, I doubt this contractor had ever, you know, commented on either one of our posts engaged at all. it is interesting how information spreads in the industry and how people end making decisions.

You're sort of, but it's definitely not a direct link to, like the people who take my class are definitely not the people who engage with me online, is at first I was really disappointed by that actually. now I'm really encouraged because I think online stuff get kind of, corrosive. so

Evan Troxel: True.

Christine: so I'm delighted that it's not, it's not,

a real reflection of, of how

most people.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. You talked about the amount of work that goes into creating these once a week posts, 10 to 30 hours, and , there is the learning on the job. There are these lunch and learns that happen in offices, and you know, it's the same course that the person makes the rounds to all the different offices in the area.

that information is really product specific, there's, there's rules around what a lunch and learn can and can't be. And we don't need to [00:40:00] get into the specifics of that, but it's like, it's, it's they specialize in or it's what they sell. Let's say it that way. I don't know if they specialize.

Not always. this idea of what you're putting together in these details, these notes, these assembly drawings and really of this layer of. Presentation on top the base layers, the parts. And then you've got all this stuff over the top of it. That's really where you're explaining how and why it works the way that it does. it's pretty incredible to me to hear how much time and effort you put into those posts especially in contrast to what I think we see in the industry. , okay, so I'm gonna go another like slight diversion Like this whole idea of those lunch and learns and, and even your posts too, I think similarly the timing is like probably not right for anybody who's watching that stuff.

you, you're hoping to create something sticky enough that people remember the principles of what you're teaching so that when they are doing that thing, do it better the next time,

Christine: People come back to it.[00:41:00]

Evan Troxel: is, that's a cool thing too, right? You can bookmark it and save it. I don't if you have a compilation anywhere of all this stuff, that would be pretty sweet if there's like a library or something. But these luncheon learns like never timed right. For what I need to do

Christine: That's,

I know, right?

Evan Troxel: as a profession, as an industry, that's pretty broken. that's something that is interestingly broken. Like how has that not been solved yet? And then there's people like you who are trying to solve it as a piece of the bigger puzzle on social media and the courses that you offer. And, I, again, I'm kind of not going anywhere with this, but just kind of laying out some different that I see that are

and, at the same.

Christine: I think you're absolutely right and I think actually the most logical. Place to begin addressing. This is actually in formal architecture education in school. so building science and construction are hard. hard because they're dynamic and they're hard cuz architecture's hard.

It's just hard. We have to think in three dimensions. We're dealing with, lots of different materials, you know, late coordinating, big [00:42:00] budgets, all kinds of crazy stuff. It's architecture's hard. the building industry is hard. the setup that we have right now has. Made something already complicated, even more complicated, where it is hard to learn something in a lunch and learn, or even on a, on one of my Instagram posts, these, and actually that's been the biggest challenge for me, is to distill something down to, I have 10 slides?

on Instagram, like, do communicate something in 10 slides?

It's, uh, It's made me a much better teacher. but you know, you can do a little bit of learning that way, but you're not going to transform your profession that way. or even you're probably not gonna see a post at the exact time that you need it, or hit that luncheon, learn at the exact time that you need it.

I think that what is more helpful is to already have a framework for understanding building science and construction. And right now we just don't.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Christine: don't see it. I don't know every architecture school, but I haven't heard of it or really

seen it

in, any [00:43:00] school.

Evan Troxel: I, yeah, cuz I know some, like, I don't know, the school that I went to was very hands on with that kind of stuff, how far can they actually go in a quarter or a semester? Because you're not gonna get that many courses because it's all about design anyway.

Christine: yeah, I think even within those courses though, it's, everything is taught in sort of a piecemeal way. So I liken this to learning a language, the way that building science is taught is the equivalent of, picking a, a phrase. For, you know, whatever country you're visiting, like an Italian phrase book, you memorize the phrases that you use the most often.

And that does the trick for a lot of what you wanna communicate, abroad. and that's our approach right now. That's the lunch and learn. And that's the, at best, I think that's what we get in architecture

education,

like formal education. But, you know, when you, you

be your

March.

Evan Troxel: know, what's going through my mind right now and, and you alluded

to it

earlier when you talked about building code, like, this is our version of code minimum,

Like this is the

Christine: yeah.

Evan Troxel: code minimum.

Christine: And I think it's taught that way because for the most part, [00:44:00] the people teaching it That's how they understand, understand it as well. It's this unrelated or loosely related collection of facts. And they're teaching this collection of facts to students. saying like, they're teaching phrase book stuff.

Like when you see this, do this, when you see this, do this, and it's just a whole collection. It's like a, a like a phrase book, of, of choose your own adventure type of thing. And that's a really really hard way of learning. And what I've tried to do in my teaching, a, I have like a roughly 10 hour course called Building Science for Architects.

And my goal in setting that up, and I'm not intending this as a plug, I mean, I guess it is a plug, but I'm trying to make a point. And that is that if you can give people a framework, and I take about 10 hours to give people a framework so that after they've got the framework,

else becomes reinforcement.

Like they know how to classify the examples of like other stuff they see. So the the language equivalent would [00:45:00] be, well, you've just taught somebody basic grammar. And then after that they're building their.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Christine: but they understand how to form a sentence. They understand nouns, verbs, adjectives, you know, like, I think if we start with a better framework, then the lunch and learns and Instagram posts, that kind of stuff, uh, and job experience and know, meeting a really generous contractor and I mean, generous his or her time And expertise like all of that, materials manufacturer that can fit into this framework. and you can evaluate, we talked about earlier, asymmetrical information and how it's really hard to evaluate. what someone else is telling you. Well, if you have this foundation in the sort of first principles, you can better evaluate what someone is telling you later. Like way later, 10 years into your career, you meet somebody who tells you something and you say, huh, well that's consistent with how I understand first principles or that's inconsistent.

So am I wrong? Do I need to adjust my thinking here? [00:46:00] Maybe I've misunderstood what they're saying. Maybe I've understood, um, maybe I haven't learned something actually quite right, but at least you have a process for evaluating new information. . part of the reason I, I haven't formally said this in this podcast, but, um, but a, it's not a secret.

I'm, I had a baby, so I'm on maternity leave right now. But, um, in the fall I start teaching full-time as a professor in the architecture department at Virginia Tech. Where I hope to do of, some of this work gives students a framework so that When they leave, they're not gonna be able to design a building by themselves Right.

When they graduate. Right. that's

a sort of silly

expectation,

Evan Troxel: that's

Christine: but

Evan Troxel: messed up framework in itself, right? There

Christine: Right.

Evan Troxel: is everybody needs to be able to do all this all by themselves.

Christine: exactly. we're lifelong learners in this profession. but if we can start with the framework and at least my part of this, like, architecture's much, much bigger obviously than building science and construction, really, and maybe this will change when I actually to teaching, [00:47:00] I think that that is doable in a semester or two, or certainly within the program of, formal architecture education.

I think it, it is possible to, have students graduate with a framework so that they can be better learners as professionals when they, when they actually enter the profession. I, and I've seen that in my course, doesn't, it's not gonna make you a building scientist, if you take the course, you're not gonna be able to. hang your shingle out and be like, yeah, now I know. Now I know more than John's job. And, Joe, Steve Brook, who's my father, full disclosure. and, you know, all these other fantastic building scientists. but you are gonna be to, to do your job properly, and no one to ask for help better. And I, I, I think that is not out of reach, it's alluded us so

far,

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I think that's a good place for us to wrap up this conversation. This has been fantastic and I feel like we hit kind of all the points that I wanted to of at least introduce the audience to in this conversation with you. And I'm

Christine: Oh, good. Good.

Evan Troxel: your next chapter. this is, to me, this is obvious. [00:48:00] An obvious next step. And I'm sure it wasn't obvious when you started doing all this back then, but looking backwards, it's all led to this. And, this is really exciting. I'm, happy to hear that you're taking this step. I know this is a big move, but, this is gonna be, anything else, another huge learning experience for you and for the students that you're gonna be working with. and I'm excited to hear how that's gonna

Christine: Oh, thank you.

Evan Troxel: teacher

Christine: Oh, thank you. had such a hard time learning it that, maybe, uh, difficulty in learning makes an ingredient to,

uh, to good teachers. know if you're gonna be able to keep up Instagram once you start doing that, but, obviously this is a, a fantastic resource. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. We'll put a link to the course that you were, sheepishly, talking about

Evan Troxel: right there.

Christine: also full disclosure, and I don't, I don't know how you're gonna edit this and if you wanna include this portion it's, I don't want people to take the course for the sake of taking the course. I want them to take it if they really think they can benefit from it. So I don't do any marketing really. It's just [00:49:00] word of mouth, . So, I, I don't want, I certainly don't wanna pressure people to, to take the course, but if it would be worth considering if these topics, interest, interest

people,

Evan Troxel: that big theme about the wisdom behind. So many facets in the industry, like you were talking about it, can you find a builder that is just generous enough to share? Can you find somebody on the product side who has the experience and the wisdom behind how their product interfaces with the three other things that it's gonna touch in the wall system, and can they point you in the right direction? Like those people do exist.

Christine: Oh, absolutely.

Evan Troxel: to me is. That is what we should be striving to find are those dot connectors out there. And you're obviously one of 'em. And so, I appreciate the work that you've done, that you've put yourself out there to create. I mean, like you said, like nobody's paying you to do this.

you're doing this on your own VO vision and that's a fantastic thing. And, uh, I encourage the audience, if, if you've never seen Building Science Fight Club on Instagram, definitely check it out and, uh, you'll [00:50:00] see what an amazing resource it actually is. And it's, it is, again, fascinating to see the social media side of architectural education, building science education and how you've been able to make something from that.

And of course, there's no easy like, oh well that led to this and this makes total sense. It doesn't make any sense at all. And that's what's so interesting about

it, you know, so

Christine: I guess maybe a, a little bit of a, it's my take on the culture of apprenticeship in our, in our profession. And that looks like a lot of a lot of different things. we're a profession of pretty creative people and so we

apply that to all kinds of including how

we learn and how we teach.

Evan Troxel: yeah. Non-standard, right?

Christine: Exactly.

Evan Troxel: Okay. Well, links to all this in the show notes, everybody. And if, you're interested in getting those show notes emailed to you, head over to the website at TRXL dot TRXL dot co and hit that subscribe button so that all of the links will show up in your inbox whenever a show goes live.

Connect with Evan* Twitter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Email

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The News* Enscape for Mac updated for SketchUp '23 * Autodesk University opens call for proposals * Rhino 8 WIP has gone full metal * ZipNeRF: Create 3d models from video shot on your phone

The latest TRXL podcast episode111: ‘Seeing What Sticks’, with Mark Thorley and David FlynnA conversation with Mark Thorley and David Flynn.TRXLEvan TroxelEnscape for Mac updatedEnscape for Mac now supports SketchUp 2023 and has more in store this year as outlined in this post on the Enscape blog.

Enscape works as a SketchUp extension, meaning you can design, test ideas, and visualize simultaneously without having to leave SketchUp. Support is currently available for SketchUp 2021, 2022, and now 2023.

Can’t wait for the upcoming Rhino integration.

Autodesk University opens call for proposalsIt looks like Autodesk University (or AU for those in the industry) is headed back to Las Vegas after a brief stint in New Orleans last year.

I’ve only ever had my proposals denied there but don’t let that stop you from applying. It’s good practice and a great conference. The due date is May 15th, so you better get moving.

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In my last newsletter (and if you're not yet a subscriber I would love it if you'd consider doing so) I mentioned that I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed on the well known Architosh website by my friend Anthony Frausto-Robledo. In it I shared my hopes of what I'm attempting to accomplish in the AEC industry with the TRXL podcast and my work at Tect.

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The first step toward moving beyond audio-only podcasts is now in place. Just getting the new episodes on YouTube has been a big hurdle to overcome during production and editing, but with the new show seasons launching I'm happy to finally make this happen.

There's more to come with these shows in the YouTube universe later, but for now I'd love it if you would subscribe on YouTube and hit those notification bells for TRXL and Archispeak so you are the first to know when new episodes come out—even if you already subscribe to the podcast elsewhere. It really helps the show gain more visibility in AEC which is what we need to do to affect change in the industry.

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Mark Thorley and David Flynn of KOPE join the podcast to talk about ways in which we can move forward as an industry, digital tools, roadblocks, the value of the people behind building products and building relationships with them, offsite construction, prefabrication, how labor shortages, rising material prices, and supply chain problems are catalysts of change, configurators, improving decision making with embedded logic, and the KOPE platform.

Latest TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter🗞️ AEC/tech Newsletter #8The News * Yours truly featured at Architosh * Top Revit ’24 features * Autodesk Forma launch date announced * Someone figured out how ChatGPT can make Siri way better * Will Generative AI change everything? * McNeel shows off linetype enhancements for Rhino 8 The latest TRXL podcast episod…TRXLEvan TroxelEpisode Links* Mark on Twitter * Mark on LinkedIn * David on LinkedIn * KOPE website * KOPE on LinkedIn * KOPE on Twitter

Watch this episode on YouTube111: ‘Seeing What Sticks’, with Mark Thorley and David FlynnMark Thorley and David Flynn of KOPE join the podcast to talk about ways in which we can move forward as an industry, digital tools, roadblocks, the value of…YouTubeEpisode TranscriptTRXL 111 - ‘Seeing What Sticks’, with Mark Thorley and David Flynn

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A little bit of housekeeping here. Before we jump into this week's episode, would you like to get the TRXL podcast show notes and my AEC tech newsletter delivered to your inbox. If so, head over to TRXL HQ at trxl.co and click on one of the subscribe buttons on the page. The show notes include all of the links from the things we discussed during the episodes.

In this episode, I welcome Mark Thorley and David Flynn of KOPE that's K-O-P-E. For those of you who are spelling sticklers like me.

Mark is KOPE's CEO and leads their overall vision and its impacts on the offsite construction sector. He's passionate about bringing together the field of computer science, architecture, [00:01:00] and construction to enable a more efficient and effective industry.

His skill set has led him to be one of the leaders in computation. And he now drives that forward to enable offsite construction techniques. Mark began his career in managerial, BIM and computational roles for companies such as AECOM, Grimshaw and space zero. Delivering iconic projects worldwide.

In 2016, he co-founded design tech, a consultancy That designed strategies, software, and workflows to utilize building data and create efficiencies through the automation of design and production.

David is KOPE's COO and has led the development of the business across all aspects with a key focus on company culture, strategic initiatives, and integrating their technical knowledge with those of their customers and partners with a drive to build advanced digital solutions, particularly focused on modular and off-site construction, he aims to build solutions to eradicate the wasteful processes, still inherent in the design and construction industries. David qualified as an architectural technologist at Dublin Institute of technology. [00:02:00] Now TU Dublin and prior to establishing KOPE, he founded design tech, a computational BIM consultancy based in London.

He had previously led the design technology efforts while employed at Grimshaw architects as their global head of BIM. And also previously worked on large complex projects at leading design firms, such as KPF and AL_A.

In this episode, we discuss ways in which we can move forward as an industry, digital tools, roadblocks, the value of the people behind building products and building relationships with them, offsite construction, prefabrication. How labor shortages, rising material prices and supply chain problems are catalysts of change. Configurators, improving decision-making with embedded logic and the KOPE platform.

So now please enjoy my conversation with Mark Thorley and David Flynn.

Evan Troxel: Mark and David, thanks for joining me today.

David Flynn: Thanks Evan

Evan Troxel: is gonna be a fun conversation. [00:03:00] I always say that it's always gonna be a fun conversation, so, uh, the listeners of the show are used to me saying that, but I'm looking =forward to this because I don't know enough. What you guys are doing. And so let's just start off and talk about why you do what you do and how you got to where you are today.

then we can get the bigger picture of problems that you guys have identified yourselves as being the ones to solve in the industry. mark, why don't you begin with a, a bit of a background and a bio like, like how did you get to where you are?

Mark Thorley: Yeah, absolutely. so I have a background in architecture. I've worked in software and technology for most of my career. I've always been excited around big challenges, you know, really complex problems and, we've always worked within this space.

How technology can bridge the gap between, some of those challenges that are faced within architecture and engineering, construction. for me personally, I always had, quite a, an ambition to build a team around a, a singular vision. and we're getting the opportunity to do that [00:04:00] with KOPE

I guess I can leave it there and hand over to Dave to do a bit of an intro to himself

as.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, go for it.

David Flynn: Yeah sure

well My background's probably a bit more on the technical side of things in relation to process workflow supporting designers typically

Not necessarily on cutting edge technology which

uh really kind became part of my career when I met Mark prior to that it was very much focused around the kind of basic BIM world CAD and making sure that processes were aligned for designers having gotten to No Mark, when we worked together at Grimshaw, we started to use a little bit more technology and we processes a little bit harder, across those teams. And that set us up for really understanding that there's probably a bigger need than an individual office, like across the industry and, and globally.

So we decided to get together and work together in our own company. this is, uh, seven years ago now. I'm always unsure when exactly that was, but it was about seven years

ago.

Evan Troxel: Shocked how, long it's already been.

David Flynn: I know exactly, and I, with Covid in the middle of that, it feels, uh, shorter [00:05:00] and longer

simultaneously.

Evan Troxel: time

David Flynn: absolutely. . and what was fascinating about that process was that we really realized that everyone has the same problems. they're universal. Uh, in the design space, everyone addresses things the same way. there's subtle differences in the way that we use technology, the way that we name things or organize things or approach things, but there's a baseline across everything.

So we've really spent the last few years ramping up into that more and more advanced, more and more complex, trying to solve those issues. maybe I'll hand back to Mark for, had I then blossomed into kind of the world that we live in at the

moment?

Mark Thorley: so as Dave says, set up a company

around 2017, um, and

that was off the back of leaving

Grimshaw. And, primary focus then

was around, I guess, product consulting. more. On for a better word. and, did all right from that, we exited that company and so, uh, 2019 we, set up, matlab, which was really a second pass at that digital consulting, business. coming back to what I said earlier around that singular vision, we've always worked with very [00:06:00] sophisticated and very intelligent people. and I think Dave and I always had an ambition to drive towards that single product rather than developing, bespoke solutions. so in the early days of matlab, this was around 2019. Again, I'm a bit like Dave, where I struggled to get my years correct. we started to work with a lot of, UK based modular house builders. which was very interesting. they had very different challenges, in relation to how the typical architecture, industry work that we were so familiar with.

and I think, speaking on behalf of Dave a little bit here as well, but I, think we got quite excited by some of the challenges we were seeing because what these companies were really trying to do was bring in, manufacturing logic and manufacturing driven design into the design process really.

I think because of some of those challenges, it, kind of got us rejuvenated and, quite excited about, potentially where the industry could go. through that work, we started to see some trends with, of these house builders, some of the, big contractors in the uk, you know, really start to. [00:07:00] focus a little bit on offsite construction as well. and realistically that was the foundations of KOPE and that was, the origins of, how we decided to build KOPE and, you know, we'll obviously get into what KOPE is over, the next hour or so. But that was really the origins of it.

I think, where the UK was heading around offsite construction, it all started to veer towards that as a North Star.

Evan Troxel: Hmm. it's interesting to think of the, =trajectory that you guys have been on. You met at Grimshaw. I just a, a side story here. One of my case studies when I was in school was of, I'm failing to remember the name of the train station in, in Central London. guys know the name.

There's like an

addition with that big roof that goes over it.

David Flynn: uh,

Waterloo

Evan Troxel: Waterloo

Station. Yeah. Thank you. I a case study of that because we were doing an airport project in studio, and I did a section model through it.

And I was the first student in my class, so I'm totally dating myself here, which was to laser cut a model. So drew the cross section in cad, back then finding [00:08:00] a book that had a cross section. Of course they existed and I think by that point, Grimshaw had probably a monograph out, but it was like, scan that in, trace it in cad, do all the paths for the laser cutter, learn how laser cutters worked, built this model and photograph it , and I guess it was just Lucky that I photographed and I actually went to a photographer's studio to photograph it, and my photographer was so thrilled to be able to kind of artistically design a photo shoot around this little chipboard study model and some really cool images out of it because my professor loved the model so much, he kept it, and it was like, this is a model that I would hang on my wall today.

I was so proud of it being the first student in my class to ever laser cut a model. the shop down the street got this laser. They didn't even know to do with it. just a funny story that takes me back to when I hear Grimshaw, that that's the thing that

I think

David Flynn: I love that.

that's a great story, Evan. know, you know what's funny about that topic? I. , I ended up working for the [00:09:00] two companies who I studied, uh, during my thesis at the end of my degree, one of which was, future Systems, which became a Mandel Vet Architects, and, uh, the second was Grimshaw and ended up working with both.

So it it was kind of a fascinating journey to meet those directors and the designers who worked on those projects that I was, know, working through and understanding what they'd uh, from a distance. So yeah. Very a of

a kinship of

what

you've

Evan Troxel: Yeah. th those old books. I, I have a future systems book somewhere in my library and,, and just so fun kind of thumb through those still to this day. Just really great stuff.

David Flynn: no, it really is. what's interesting about where our journey, overlaps at Grimshaw, I, going to age myself here, the same as you just haven't. . so of interaction with Mark, uh, at issue was to hire Mark into Grimshaw. And, um, amazingly enough, uh, I was also involved with hiring Radu who's their third co-founder, at KOPE.

and so we all worked together, but not necessarily the exact same time, we understood the value that the three of us would bring together. and I definitely would to listeners of, of, of this session that one of the most important things you can [00:10:00] really do in your career is partner or team up with people who you just find to be incredibly talented and, keep them near

Evan Troxel: Yep. Absolutely. so another thing that you said. Was that you identified pretty early on that all of these companies kind of have the same problems, just maybe slightly different recipes, slightly different flavor, but the fundamentals are very similar across the board, and I have to echo that as well.

And when I was participating in aias, large firm Roundtable here in the States, it was really eye-opening to not only just see of behind the curtain that everybody is struggling with these very similar issues around technology. That was what we were focused on, but also that. it was reassuring in that I didn't feel alone, because when you look at your own firm and you're, you're an island in this big sea of, companies and you're competing against those companies, it's kind of a natural tendency to think, [00:11:00] especially when you look at certain firm names.

You make an assumption that there's some level that they're operating at, which is way above your own. And it was very reassuring to go to these meetings and just really. down to earth, talk about the day-to-day struggles of practice and technology integration and adoption, and being inundated with data and information and, figuring out how to process that or make us work smarter, better over time.

All of those feelings, I just, it was good to talk through that with other people. as a consultancy firm. You guys have to maybe talk a little bit about how, just go a little deeper with that because I assume that you also are able to, because you have this view into what's going on out there, you can help people really understand what's working, what's not working, where other people are at to make them feel that reassured that they're not.

So far behind that there's nothing they can do about it. Or [00:12:00] to say, you know what, like, you're not just experimenting for the sake of experimenting These have had some real outcomes for other firms,

know, in the recent past or whatever, to just say like, this isn't totally black box Wasting your time, experimentation.

This is something that that is worth doing right now.

Mark Thorley: Yeah, absolutely. Just from our early days in the, consulting, years, because we had the benefit of going into multiple companies, you often, as you said, you often saw different problems or similar problems each company was facing and.

I think, you know, as an industry, we, put on a, a bit of a front to the outside world about How well everything is going internally and actually,

that's not always the right, I guess, representation of how that business is being run or the challenges that they have. I think here in the UK there's a, as I said, there's a bit of a drive towards offsite construction of modular construction, and every time one of these modular firms that's had, you know, a lot of money pumps into 'em, we know that modular firms are very difficult to get right with all the kind of upfront costs around [00:13:00] factories and things like that.

But every time there's a challenge there, it's, front page on, the Reba Journal or the, AC or whatever, magazine or publication it might be. and it feels like, you know, as an industry, we need to own some of those down moments a little bit better. because, everyone's going through their own challenges. it's not all, Rosie behind the scenes. we shout very much about the moments when we succeed. but you know, we should also I think share when we've had challenges and then as an industry we can all begin to learn from those things.

Evan Troxel: yeah. I would throw in there that I think that the technologists in the room and online in forums are more real about that than the leadership of the firms and the

marketing departments with each other at least. And I we try to get outside of that echo chamber the technology minded solutions providers in that space of aec, there, there often is a, a call for leadership to pay attention to and understand this stuff from those people. and that to me is, reassuring that, [00:14:00] it's not all complete marketing spin out there for the perception what's going on in these firms. I don't know the marketing departments or the, the leadership of those firms feel about that, but on some level it's like the, just the state of the world that we're in today, wherein all of that information is shared. there's this open source software movement. It's all about that, It's, it's about resetting the baseline of what's available, what we can do about it, but also sharing those struggles and those successes the, at least in the online space. But also, when we were having these meetings, it was, so reassuring to understand, but then also talk what have you tried, what have you tried, what have I tried and what worked and what didn't and why and why not?

And all of that of communication that's going on at some level behind the scenes. But it's there if you look for it, is again just reassuring that that. Change is being made and talked about a, in a more open manner than every firm operating as a silo unto itself.

for sure. Agreed.

David Flynn: But, bounce back to that point to Evan and ask a question,[00:15:00]

Evan Troxel: Do people truly believe that our industry is in this situation where if we had, a software platform or a, an ecosystem that delivered for everyone equally, we had, we had know, utopian from the side of things where we information and data across all the different work streams, all the different stakeholders, and it all works seamlessly.

Do we really believe that we wouldn't fall back on habits of siloing risk and siloing information? Because that's the nature of the way that the industry's been built for such A long time. absolutely

David Flynn: that's probably a conversation for another day, but it does feel. to a certain extent that certainly the people that you've on your podcast and the people that you speak to and the people that are really leading the industry, are still putting up against a world where no matter what you provide technologically, there's still a cultural, pushback, which is just inevitable.

So from your point of view, what we wanted to do with Design Tech, the original company and then Matter Lab, and then moving into KOPE, was to learn some of those traits to treat the user from a [00:16:00] different point of view and not necessarily be a consultant, but maybe just be a and to have a slightly softer approach and a more of a, let's not fix everything.

Let's just fix the things that really bother you and get them on board that way. So we've had a slightly different approach to over that time. And as Mark was saying earlier on, it's kind of led us to. take a slightly different approach to offsite, to some of these volumetric businesses and it's kind of led us to where we are today.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I agree with that, that the behavior it's what I've was always butting up against it was pretty clear and obvious to certain people in the firm, including leadership, that change needed to happen and the strategies were agreed upon. But then that pushback even, you know, at the user level, at the team level, at the studio level, because, just because it's different than how they normally do it and because project deadlines rule everything, everybody's lives, there was never this foreseen. ability to say, we're going to take the time to learn to do something new [00:17:00] because there's always failure in learning and we don't have time to fail. And if we don't have time to have, we actually don't have time to learn. it's this weird behavioral shift that needs to happen.

It's one of the reasons why I left traditional practice was because I felt like I was pushing boulders uphill. Somebody said, it's like you're pushing a wet noodle up a hill. it's like impossible to affect change in an organization where change it's not a shared value

and it's not because change isn't happening. It is happening, but, it was interesting to, to watch people. From a distance have this agreement and nodding of the heads and really talking like, yeah, this is obvious. We have to do this. But then when the rubber meets the road, it was just like absolutely impossible to get anywhere.

and you guys have to see that over and over and over again. know, question that I think is worth asking is how do you, you know, I, I talk about in the sense of training the pigeon, which is you can't train a pigeon. you can't just say, here's the vision, here's the ultimate goal pigeon, [00:18:00] now figure out how to do it.

I relate architects to pigeons, you have to just give them the first step. You have to say, here's the smallest, easiest, lightest lift thing that you can do. And then we will. do that over and over and build momentum and eventually get to the big thing. It's almost impossible to even bring up the big thing because there's a kind of an immediate, well, it's either like, yeah, we should totally do that, or it's absolute dismissal that we'll never get there.

And so it's like, don't even talk about that with people. And I'm wondering if, you guys have a similar experience with that, or if it's, like what do you do, what are those steps that, that you feel like, know there's so many different examples you could probably pull up here, like, what some examples of those smallest steps that you've asked people to

make change on so small that they almost don't

even realize that they're making a change, but strategically it's gonna pay off big time in the future.

Mark Thorley: I'm holding off there in case David's jumping in.

David Flynn: Yeah,

I'm happy

to jump in cuz I

actually had two there to throw back at you, Evan. I think the first one's probably around the idea that, your first point of entry into doing what you do [00:19:00] as a member of the construction community is the, whatever the software is that interacting whatever that is, um, whether that be Revit or it could be Excel, it can be, whatever the tool is. A certain level of mastery around how to actually get that to do what you wanted to do. And in the UK in particular, over the last six, seven years, we've had this, know, push maybe less so now, but this push towards BIM level two and all this level three.

And we were talking five or six years ago, I probably would've advocated for a lot of but as it stands now, I would absolutely be quite repelled by the reality is that we spent a lot of time and a lot of energy telling people what the endpoint outcome was supposed to be and not actually telling them how to get And what we tried to do in our, careers has been, well, look, I'm the person who was in that design team, confused and unsure of why I was being asked to do these things. so I kind of know what to tell an architect or an engineer. they should do day to day to get to that point. the idea that you would mandate the naming of something completely insignificant [00:20:00] in a process before you told someone how to name it in the tool makes no sense to me it, it just doesn't read. So what's so fascinating about what you've put together here is that there's a lot of thought leadership around people who support software, create software, train, really push as the centerpiece of what we do as an industry. and we're 1% or or less of the actual amount of users who are interacting with these tools.

the reality is that if you don't actually know what those 99% of people are doing day to you're wasting your time. you really have to have an understanding of it. And not to name any names, but if we were to talk about large vendors that are out, there, creating large software packages and platforms, , the less people from industry, they have the worst.

The tool is every, I think we can all agree that a clear, uh, relationship. so from us, we make sure that any of our team who are directly interacting with a, a designer at any point know the tools that they're using, well as that designer does. whatever that tool is.

So it's quite an important part of of the journey for us. and then the second part of but actually coming back to something you mentioned earlier on, we have been [00:21:00] very fortunate to have spent a lot of our careers working in residential. that be as a, an architect or an engineer putting housing systems together, like lots of different developments or, more recently working on the client side, so people actually acquiring or building, these, residential, units and.

It's invaluable to be able to tell the client how that design team works and what they need and what they don't need. and to be able to feed that information across both sides of the fence. So we've been really fortunate to have worked with some significant, housing associations and house builders.

Also a very large array of, housing designers.

And now we're in the space, as

Mark mentioned earlier on, where we're starting to look at being able to build houses offsite, pre-fabricated. And the thinking from both sides of that has really informed what we've been doing within KOPE.

Mark Thorley: I think just to add to that, you know, I think Evan, you, made a, a valid point before to some degree it's easy to outline what the end state is. there's always a, a new report, or a new diagram that shows what construction could be.

you [00:22:00] know, what it should be. but I think the hardest thing there is those first couple of steps, it is all well and good describing what a future state could look like in five years, but, how do you actually put together a path to get to that? that's really, really challenging.

and often that's the, first roadblock stops people from moving forward. you can sit in a room and you can sit in a pub and have a pint and. have all these aspirational ideas of where it's gonna go. But if you don't know how to make that first move or that first step, you're just gonna stagnate at where you are.

And I think as an industry, we do that as a whole. here in the UK we're, we're quite lucky because, I know Dave, spoke about the kind of approach to bim. We took a little bit here in the uk, but that came in and was mandated, by the government. we're starting to see the UK government over here mandating some things around MMC as well.

So modern methods of construction, prefabrication, offsite construction for, for people listening, I guess, in the states. and sometimes it needs, that fork in the sand, a bit further on, in relation to big picture. then you really need some. [00:23:00] key innovators in the space to move the dial at the early stage.

and think with what we do now, we're really leaning into that. that's our, biggest challenge. I think, you know, we'll get into our vision for KOPE, shortly, but I think the division is, nailed down. It's, we can get to that utopian state to some degree that Dave was referring to before, great, you know, construction will be in a great place, but that's not gonna happen overnight.

So what does that look like in six months time? What does that look like in 12 months time, in 24 months time? And actually working out a path to get there. And I think that's the biggest challenge that, this industry faces. and you know, we face that with KOPE as

well.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, and I don't mean to downplay the idea that the vision needs to be there. Somebody needs to have the vision and own the vision constantly reevaluate right? Because you do learn things along the way that change the path. It's just how much of that you share with the right people at the right time is critical, I think, so that you don't. L allow the devil's advocates to weigh on some levels some of that [00:24:00] is good, but on another level it's, distracting from the actual path that needs to be taken. So if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there. I, that old adage, I think holds true.

You have to know where you're headed and then you have to, know, reverse engineer that to figure out the steps that you take to at least begin that. And then this constant evaluation is happening, I just wanna reinforce that it's, the sharing of that big grand vision is sometimes overwhelming and it's distracting for too many of the people who do the day-to-day because the gap between innovation and adoption is only getting bigger every single day. I mean, just the stuff that's been pouring out of the internet in the last couple months about all of the AI There's so many tools available constantly coming at us, like a fire hose that we are not adopting because we have to deliver the project.

And the project requires PDFs. And like, none of that changes, right? is not going to change anytime soon. I'm not gonna look at this new way of doing something when I can't [00:25:00] even get the work done that I already have. And so again, focusing too far down the future just takes our eyes off of what is that smallest step that we can do today to start to address the gap between adoption and innovation?

Because if we were

look forward five years, we would say, yeah, I want to be here. like, well, how are we gonna get there if we can't even,

figure out how to work

excel, you know, in a smarter way today,

Mark Thorley: you've just described the last two years of, our company, to be fair, you hit the nail on the head with. absolutely can be overwhelming, you know, too much information. to some degree it's on a need to know basis.

speaking from our experience and growing this company over the last two years, in the early days it was probably only Dave Radu and I who had foresight over what that end-state might look like and how, you know, all the different bits of technology that we've been building and, the challenges that we're trying to solve for different customers, how they're gonna, uh, come to the forefront, within the platform, all of these different things.

I think it was really only the three of us that had foresight over that. And to be fair, [00:26:00] even between the three of us, we've changed tact. as you said, we've moved around and pivoted based on feedback and, how the market was perceptive to what we were doing.

over time, with the, team outside of the founders, I think, we've slowly. Been kind of drip feeding in bits of information when and if they needed it. That's kind of helped them, understand where we are now and where we're gonna be over the next six months.

And, over time, they start to piece together the vision themselves anyway. we've been on a very similar journey to I'm sure what a lot of people are doing internally within, bigger organizations, in relation to trying to change the course of, the status quo.

I guess.

Evan Troxel: there's something in there that I think is worth just lingering on for a moment, which is you, as you talk about the outcome of pivoting over time, startups do this all the time, it's kind of the normal, right, which is constantly looking at what's happening, looking at where you were going, where you are going, where you need to go, and making these adjustments.

That to me is interesting if you zoom out and [00:27:00] think about the practice of architecture how slow. Traditional firms are to pivot their businesses, their business model, their deliverables. I think it's so interesting, you know, just an observation that, there's kind of microcosm within the industry of startups and technology companies who are constantly adjusting, looking for the right market fit, looking for the right partnerships, looking for the right strategic, know, outcomes, all of these things.

and that's of the normal, and it's antithesis to the traditional firms, which are like, this is how we do it, this is how we've always done it. And I know that there's a spectrum there, , firms that obviously are a lot more agile than others. it, it is kind of interesting to watch this microcosm, this group within AEC they're never in that kind of set state and that they're a very fluid state all the time.

And then there's, the larger, firms that you guys are serving, there's the practices, the service industry, right? And it's like, this is how we do it. how do you make a tool that enables [00:28:00] to do what I already do, even better, faster, cheaper.

just an observation, the, I think that's kind of an interesting thing to think about in our industry because in this communication that we were talking about earlier where people are doing this, unquote behind the scenes communication and, and illuminating the struggles and talking through how to address these outside of their own silo.

And yet there's, there's still this very

dominant of feeling of, know, being in, in concrete the way of thinking, at in, in these larger entities and organizations,

Mark Thorley: we have a saying, don't we, Dave? Uh, internally. there's a common saying, I guess within startups that you're supposed to fail

fast, right? we've kind of taken that and said, let's throw as many things at the wall as possible and see what sticks, which, is the same analogy.

really. There's certain companies within our industry that, they spin up, r and d teams and small incubation teams that are in essence running startups within the, bigger organization. and I think there's always gonna be, companies that, pave the way a little bit.

again, we don't need to necessarily name names, but, there's some very well known arch architectural practices that, you know, lead in the way, in terms of some [00:29:00] of the stuff they're doing, big contractors that are doing the, the same as well. So, I think as long as that startup nature somehow finds its way into, the companies within our space, I think, the innovation will continue.

Evan Troxel: Anything to add to that, David?

David Flynn: Yeah, I suppose one of the things that was initially a negative for us, when we were pivoting into product and starting to sKOPE, what this. You know, platform of KOPE might be, was that we were consultancy. So there this initial reluctance to back us and, and kind of stand by division of what we were trying to achieve there.

I think what's happened over the last maybe year, probably since, covid lockdowns have ended and we've been able to go back into offices more and get back to that kind of one-to-one relationship with a lot of our customers has been that the power of being able to understand what they do day-to-day and slightly adjust your approach to that is really beneficial.

if we were never to work with a volumetric or a, let's say a 2D panelized fabricator, and we were only really coming at this from an architectural point of view, we would absolutely be building the wrong thing, [00:30:00] without a doubt. . The issue that I think a lot of software companies have initially is that they have a vision.

They build a version of that and they go and try and sell And what we've been trying to do is say, no, we're gonna try and solve the that you're asking us to solve, which we're finding quite consistent. we're gonna solve it through a mix of some consulting engagement to start that process.

And then utilizing the technology that we built to KOPE all with the vision of basically saying, okay, well these are the priorities of what we need to build in the tool. and directing our dev team down that path. So I'm pretty sure that if we had dropped away from engaging our market, uh, through consultancy two years ago, KOPE wouldn't be as as useful as it is for the partners that we're working with.

So, It's definitely been helpful obviously, that, you don't want a false positive there and you don't want to necessarily, um, have confirmation bias and, and these things, know, that's the secret of success

really, is to make sure that you don't fall into those traps.

Evan Troxel: Well, I think we've buried the lead for long enough. Mark, maybe you can jump into what KOPE is and why it exists.

Mark Thorley: Yeah. guess I [00:31:00] can start with, I think really why it.

exists. as we said at the start there,

we, you know, we were working a lot within the offsite space. we really see this as the future of our industry. and, the supply chain becoming productized , is really where the industry needs to go.

there's plenty of reports and, documentation around some of the challenges within the industry as we know it now, we're really starting to see the negative impact of that, the labor shortages and, you know, rising, material prices and, all of these things that are really catalysts to, the challenges ahead.

and, for want of a better word, we've really put all our eggs in that basket. Um, you know, we see this as the, solving. , uh, scenario for the industry. And so for us it was a case of, well, actually how do we help the industry as a whole move towards offsite construction quicker?

And how do we help companies that are more traditional in either the way that they design or the way that they construct? How do we actually help them, , adopt offsite construction? And that was, at a high level. That's really the North star vision for KOPE.[00:32:00]

behind the scenes, the way in which, KOPE is working at the moment, we have two technologies that kind of underpin our overall software platform. So we have a marketplace for offsite construction, and at the moment we have. a UK based marketplace and a North American based marketplace.

And they contain, all different suppliers, , all different consultants, so even architects, engineers, anyone, anyone really working in the offsite space. and the whole idea there is to first of all give visibility into the, new supply chain that's beginning to form around construction.

people don't know what exists. If you wanted to go and buy a bathroom pod, or if you wanted to go and buy a steel frame or, you know, a volumetric module, you wouldn't necessarily know, what suppliers there are out there. what solutions exist. So really that's the opportunity for our industry to really try and embrace offsite construction in a way that we feel it, needs to be embraced.

and so that marketplace, works at an organization level, and then we can actually delve into the different [00:33:00] products that all of those suppliers and manufacturers offer as well. And so the second, part of the technology piece is our products application platform. there's been a lot of talk over the last, couple of years around configurators.

speaking about how we've pivoted and, changed our messaging and understanding of what the industry needs, you know, we feel that actually it's all about the application of products rather than configuring those products. So, our application platform is really about being able to pull in those products from the marketplace, and allow you to design and specify, them in a way that, , you know, really pushes the industry towards offsite construction.

So, I think the challenge we have, with, of adoption is, like I said before, one, understanding what exists out there. And two, you know, now we're working with different products and systems that are manufactured in a way that, potentially we've never built buildings, using previously.

there's a site change in that design process. And so, our platform is there to kind of enable that and, move things, [00:34:00] forward in that, sense.

Evan Troxel: I have a couple questions just to jump in here, which is what my mind is racing around is this idea so I'm looking for confirmation or, just to push back against this is your idea that you are partnering with. Product makers, like physical, know, modular, penalized volume, whatever, however you wanna describe it, you're partnering with them to digitize if, if they already haven't or they probably have, but maybe to some specific level of detail with some standards applied maybe of their products as like a digital

twin, for lack of a better term right now, to put into KOPE as a platform for then design side to use during design.

Mark Thorley: Yeah, in essence, I'll let Dave speak, cause

he's quite passionate around the, content side of things in a second. Um, but yeah, it's, all about

understanding at an early stage of design what systems and what products could be used to actually construct the building. And, you know, often, I think with off offsite construction, often, architects and engineers, they, feel there's [00:35:00] a potential lack of, flexibility that's inherent within. going down that route. and actually that's not necessarily the case. I think it's all about, how do we actually truly take information from a manufacturing standpoint and help it influence and inform design at the early stages. So, you know, what we need to do there is actually ensure that decisions aren't made as part of that design process that are actually gonna limit the choice of systems and products later on.

Evan Troxel: Okay. And then, the next question that, that leads me to, this is very closely related to the work that I'm doing at tact in a very different way, but I think the theme is the same, which is that you are trying to get the right people at the table as early as possible so that, you address those concerns of limitation.

because

in some respects, limitations are, are fabulous ,right? Constraints are good when it comes to design. and on another level though, like you're dispelling the myths that people have of these preconceived ideas about what's possible with pre-fab modular in, the various [00:36:00] aspects of fabricated. Objects. Right. And so that to me rings so solidly true. That you need, cuz I would assume in this marketplace, David can speak to the technical side of with through the implementation of these models to be used as a kit of parts doing, design work, that the wisdom that's behind that data is just as important, if not more so than the thing itself.

And so by engaging with these companies that put their products in your marketplace, you're also putting the people behind those products into your marketplace. Is that correct?

David Flynn: Yep. That sounds a bit right. I think that's a nice way of, thinking about it. the people who fabricate, products have as much or if not the most amount of, impact in relation to the life of that product. the initial designer will set out criteria, but the actual delivery of that criteria is based on the fabrication and the capabilities of the factory and, and the logistics around transport and, and storage and so on.

[00:37:00] So it's a funny world we live in at the moment where we. Typically consider a digital asset to be a geometric representation of an instance of a thing. So here's a door, that door is, 900 mill wide, and that's an instance of that door, but that's not correct. that door can only be in a wall.

It's not gonna be in a floor, hopefully. there's a certain level of logic and understanding of these components that are just not embedded in the way that we handle digital content. , I think the best example of that I could give you would be, , a piece of work we're doing at the moment, with Langa work, who've been fantastically supportive of what we're doing.

It's been a great journey with them and from their point of they consume a design file that would be quite monolithic. It'll say I have a large building that I'm, I'm hoping to do in precast concrete, but it's all modeled as a monolithic floor, one single piece, across every different level.

And it's very low level of detail. And what they also do is they have the, a basic digital asset of a precast concrete floor deck that they will make [00:38:00] in their factories. And they wanna blend the two things together. So what KOPE is doing is, is taking the requirements of that project, which says, I would expect it to be in pre-cast concrete.

I have these certain crane positions, I have these logistical challenges around transport. I also have some budgetary concerns and it matches them together with the capabilities of what a kind of a KOPE product might be. Which would say if I have a particular slab, over a certain width and length that I'm having, you know, I'm getting optimization benefits of that.

So, I can fill that floor with lots of components that are gonna flood the space. They're gonna fill out what those planks might be, and you're able to get some quantities and build materials from that directly. Now, , the old way of doing this and the way that the industry kind of does it right now is to grid I things.

So it would basically say my typical deck width is, I dunno, four feet. So I'm gonna break a grid across all of that floor and I'm gonna break it down into rectangles. And that's a pretty standard way of approaching this. We're [00:39:00] not doing that. So what we're trying to say is there's an inherent logic inside of that floor deck that says, I would like to be four feet wide, but under certain scenarios I can be a different width.

And these are the manufacturable widths that I can have. And we're using our, our engine to basically mix and match all of those different permutations to give you an optimum, uh, layout for those decks. So what we're basically saying, . I want a digital product, not just a Revit family, not just an IFC file, not, not just a pdf.

Um, I'm actually getting something that understands logic and rules and I'm applying that to the design. So it's leveraging some of our backgrounds, um, around computational generative design that we worked with. Particularly some of the Autodesk stuff that we did a couple years ago. But it's really looking at what does the world look like.

If I want to productize construction, I cannot have a gigantic library of static instance information that we've tried that there's lots of them out there. It's unmanageable. The right way to do an interview in our, in our vision is that it's logic [00:40:00] based. So we're gonna understand the capabilities of that product and we're gonna apply that through math onto this design file.

Um, we're not gonna go down the path of, um, giving you something that's static and hoping a designer doesn't explode or break it or change the rules. We're always gonna have that connection, that really rigid connection. Back to the fabrication piece.

Evan Troxel: and, and where the, you are using the word logic and I'm, and that is different than wisdom. I don't want to

confuse the two I, the, but they are, they do kind of go hand in hand in that the logic is defined by the people with the wisdom. And Then the idea that you have access to. The logic is important during design, but design is not, uh, I'm trying to figure out the right way to say this, but it's like design is, is also knowing or hoping like that you can break the rules and that's where things get kind of special, right? Or they have to because of, you know, different environmental or, physical constraints or code or, or whatever.

And that to me is where the importance of [00:41:00] the people behind all this stuff to be able to pop in at that moment and say, yeah, we can make that happen. And, and that's where things get interesting. And that to me what is missing from so many. Platforms out there, right? Which is like, you know, Revit

families

David Flynn: Yeah. you hope for the

Evan Troxel: that's what it is. Like you're talking about these, this idea of static objects. And so to reframe that and, and talk about it from a logic standpoint to me makes a lot of sense as a designer, because there's a lot of people who talk about this stuff in our industry who have never been through, or they're even designing the software that you're talking about, not, not yours, but others out there that have never done the thing, have never been an architect, have never had to talk to a client and walk them through something, have never walked on site to see how something gets installed.

And there's so many levels to that that I think that le that disconnection from the actual building of the physical thing and all of the steps between here and there weigh into. [00:42:00] Like to me that that's how you become a real architect, And software isn't gonna just enable anybody to do anything.

It's How can we interpret the code here to get around that? How can we go outside of the bounds of this typical component to do something that we need to do here? And all of that is, is where it comes back to people. And so this idea of you infusing logic, but still, I, I would hope being able to say, Hey, I, I just need a little bit of help here.

And, and enabling those people to be found. Is a key part of that. Like, that's something else that we're doing at Tect right? It's like we can't know everything about everything. We have too many things to be concerned about on the project as the architect. And so stop trying. Just, say I'm gonna phone a friend now and they're going to be able to.

Produce the information that you need right when you need it is such a key part of this whole process. And I feel like a lot of companies are steering us away from that and I feel like we actually need to steer directly toward that

because [00:43:00] those people in the industry already exist. Like we don't have to do anything special there.

They're already there. Right. And that to me is a very small step, kind of getting back to this training of the pigeon idea, right? Which is just phone a friend, have that phone call for 20 minutes instead of searching for four hours on Google to find the Revit family that you're looking for. Not even really knowing if it's the right thing or not, but hey, it checks the box off today.

I put the thing in the model and I can move on to the next step. Well, it might not be

David Flynn: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: to do.

David Flynn: That, that last point there, Evan, I think is the most important one, is that, is the ability to make a relatively high level decision, without necessarily diving into detail at speed. And one of the things that myself and Mark have really realized, over our careers has been that, you know, these design offices

astronomical levels of talent. Like there's such incredibly talented people buried in them. And what they tend to do is to explore options around something that's a little bit, uh, intangible. So you'll, you'll have a lot of people who are doing pretty incredible work in [00:44:00] Grasshopper or Dynamo who are subdividing surfaces and they're understanding how to put the sad systems together to get the right, you know, turmoil requirements or sun requirements, whatever it is for that system that they're working on.

And what we're trying to do is take that approach and that passion and that drive that's already there and say, well, how about you don't just push and pull rectangles around? How about you actually push and pull a product within the capabilities of that, production system and, and tie those two things together?

So continue to do your iteration, continue to do really cool exploratory work, but base it on something that's real and it's really leveraging. Our own background in that computational space, uh, to bring those two things together. So something that's as gritty and real as a big concrete deck, but actually the application of it can be done at high speed, iterate bin it, if it doesn't work, try it again.

Change supplier, change material, and keep that cycle moving forward. So, it's really about allowing the designers to be able to explore things [00:45:00] in that real capacity, but also leveraging that wisdom that sits in the fabrication place.

Evan Troxel: So talk about the, the real nuts and bolts differences. Maybe, maybe not at super granular detail, but like give people an idea of what makes. Using KOPE different than what they're already using, right? Everybody knows what they're already using. What is that

experience like for people?

Because I think one thing that we have to bridge the gap here is how is this different than what I'm used to doing and why would it matter

to me?

Mark Thorley: Yeah, I mean, I think we, we touched on it before about, um, you know, getting to a, an end state and being able to take, you know, small micro steps to get there. Um, and you know, one of the things that probably through all the consulting work that we've done in the past, you know, one, one thing that I think Dave and I, realized fairly early on is that the best way to get any kind of new software across the line is to ensure that it doesn't break existing habits.

And you're not, you know, [00:46:00] telling someone to completely change how they're delivering work currently. Um, so you know, the way. that KOPEs Working within the current design process is, you know, the designer, you know, architect, engineer, whoever that might be, they, they're still working within Revit or Archicad or wherever that, uh, initial design piece might be done.

Um, and as Dave says, it's all about iteration at this stage. So, you know, they're pushing and pulling things. They're understanding, you know, what, uh, uh, you know, solar study, uh, requirements might be. They're looking at shadowing, they're looking at, you know, general massing. They're in that kind of early stage conceptual, uh, design phase.

And so all they're able to do then is push a model that, they've settled on as a particular option. Maybe they're actually able to push that to KOPE and say, let's validate this model as against some of the products in the marketplace and see if that can be, built using, offsite systems.

And, whether that's. , you know, using a timber floor cassette or whether it's using a precast[00:47:00] concrete slab or whether it's using a steel floor cassette KOPE's, able to, you know, take in the project requirements take in that design intent and then tell you which solutions in the market uh, are suitable to.

And it's that, you know, being able to actually understand that making these decisions for, as a designer for whatever reason, you know, be it aesthetic, be it functional, but actually I know that, you know, when this gets further down the path that I know that this can be constructed in a meaningful way.

And I, I think that's really what we're, what we're trying to achieve here. It's, it's all about bringing, you know, those products that, you know, obviously at the moment everything's done in a very traditional way in construction. But I think, you know, the way the industry's heading give it five, 10 years from now, the entire supply chain's gonna be productized.

70, 80% of all buildings will probably be prefabricated in, in some regards, in some way. Uh, you know, we're already seeing a lot of that here in the uk. So, to lean into that, how do we bring those products that all these manufacturers are producing and how do we put them into the design [00:48:00] process earlier?

Um, and that's, that's really what KOPEs enabling, uh, designers at the forefront to be able to do not change their existing process still, you know, use the current design tools that they're familiar with, still work in the same way, still work in the same very iterative process, as Dave says, really make decisions and changes to design based on how that might actually be built.

So think of it as another addition to, a solar study that someone might do or, um, you know, a decision that they might be making for embodied carbon. All of these decisions that happened very early on are are based around some form of requirements on the project. All we're doing is adding a construction piece to that now.

So actually we're, we're thinking about how this thing's actually gonna be constructed further down the line. Um, cuz too often than not, and, you know, being an architect, you'll have been through this yourself as well and you know, all well and good, making all these fancy shapes in the early stages. And then, you know, it goes into detail design, technical design into construction and it slowly gets value [00:49:00] engineered the whole way through.

We need to try and get to a position where we're, you know, we're not value engineering these buildings down. and I think, you know, bringing the products into the, design process earlier will actually help that.

Evan Troxel: So what's really driving your decisions to go this particular route? I mean, you, you obviously are getting specific about offsite construction. And I'm we could interpret that in different ways of why that's important to you guys, but why is it important to you guys?

David Flynn: Um, maybe I can speak to the, that kind of first moment. Uh, where that came from, Evan, we, we worked with a volumetric modular company in the uk and, um, we basically spent two years including a lot of lockdowns, working through a process that would bring them from a low-level design file into their fabrication content instantly.

All built on top of Revit, all built on top of the idea that you would have a low-level model that would essentially articulate design intent, for let's say a house type. And you already.[00:50:00] , your sequencing of fabrication that was happening on the floor. So those two things are relatively well defined, but the translation of information between the two of them was very disconnected.

And how we did that was we basically went to each team, each essentially each station in the factory and said, well, how do you do your, your job? Like, what do you do? Um, why do you break a wall? to the plasterboard in this particular way. How, why do you insulate in this particular way? Why is the bats in in this particular Order? And all of that was then codified, and turned into some automation steps that we had inside Revit. And we were able to get them from that early stage, low level detail model into something that was actually driving the cutting machines on the factory floor automatically, directly from the Revit file.

Super successful. We're really happy with how that went. It was, it was a great experience for us, but we realized that the logic that we'd built was ultra customized, it was hyper-specific to what they did. And the idea that you would maybe, uh, you know, agnostic justify that. So you would move it a tear up and you would [00:51:00] say, well, maybe anyone is putting plasterboard onto a prefabricated steel frame.

Might use something similar. And let's say that they want to then turn that into a closed cassette and they want to sell that cassette, what would the logic look like? And so we started to design the process that would be a little bit removed from one company and basically say, well, let's focus on the product.

So let's think about the logic of that construction piece and how that might get installed. And that, that then led us into the world of KOPE. So, um, it was kind of organic. I think from, from that step, we knew that. Pretty good at the computational piece. It was something that we were, um, one of the leaders at anyway.

Um, but where we really lacked a lot of knowledge was in the fabrication space, and we really didn't understand how that was happening. So we leveraged those partnerships. We started to, to, to involve ourselves with a lot more businesses who were doing that. We brought the computation to the table with them, and we started to write the logic for, these, how these processes would work.

What was fascinating though, was realizing the amount of tech you'd have to build [00:52:00] to actually get that to work. Um, and that's kind of where that the concept of marketplace was developed and, you know, optimization and, uh, automatic drawings and automatic, uh, bill of materials and all these different things to string together a, a vision for that.

But it definitely lent into that first piece, which was, can we automate a process for an offsite company as the client? They have a very regular process and then start to move it

a tear up from there.

Evan Troxel: Hmm. And, and has this enabled these manufacturers of these assemblies or products, you know, to. Uh, it seems like if you build it, they will come, if you have a marketplace for those kinds of things. Specifically, has this opened up, uh, to enable businesses to become something that, you know, maybe they're pivoting away from traditional construction into this or new factories are, are springing up because there's basically this, I don't know, Shopify for these, these kinds of products now.

David Flynn: Yeah, that's a good question. I interestingly, that's actually kind of leaning onto the [00:53:00] commercial aspect of the fabrication piece in the first place. So if you have a company who have pre-fabricated elements that they would like to. to, to actually put into their buildings that they're winning. Let's say you're a general contractor, you, have been bidding for a project.

You probably have your design system understood and your supply chain understood of how you actually want to get this thing built. What we're providing is the ability to then say, well, let's digitize those systems and let's have them, uh, applicable instantly. So with the Lango work example, the main driver there is to make more planks and to more wall assemblies, to place more of them into a project.

And the therefore the business growth will happen secondarily. Um, and the old way of doing that would take, let's say six weeks, and you'd sit there and you'd, you'd do your grid and you'd start to break the, the slab down and you'd start to break the walls down. You'd have a, a couple of designers working through that.

What we're now doing is saying, well, how about you bid for more projects? And how about we always push our products [00:54:00] into them? We always test. All of your pre fabricated products in there and see the growth of the way that we're actually starting to get them applied. So that's kind of the journey that we're on at the moment.

So the division, from your point of view, is to really allow people to be able to get their products into more projects. That's the, that's the kind of, you know, the tagline to a certain extent. Um, but we, we don't fill ourselves into thinking that we understand the nuance of the fabrication commercials themselves within those businesses.

It's a incredibly competitive, uh, industry and it's also one with very fine margins a lot of the time. So, um, we're still learning a lot about that space.

Evan Troxel: and is. Platform taking out the bidding process, like how has it changed and Yeah. So there's different ways that projects are delivered. Right? And this probably narrows that down substantially,

but, but, it's like, is that, is it making it easier for people to understand, I mean, obviously it's making 'em easier to understand costs, but then I would assume, you know, I come from a, a public [00:55:00] project kind of standpoint where there was the bidding process, low bid, all those things.

It seems to me like in this, you're removing that from it. And so are you guys specifically seeing, things play out in an advantageous way from that aspect as well?

David Flynn: yeah, heavily. Um, we're really lucky to be in a country where the approach has been to set up frameworks, so to set up pre-organized supply chains for the delivery of consistent building types. It's very, very dominant approach in the UK at the moment. And the, the ability then for us to provide software to, let's say a hospital framework where the, the wall buildup is highly, highly consistent across projects.

And the, the growth of the commercial aspect for the manufacturers is all tied to the amount of hospitals being built, not just how many walls are in one hospital. been quite useful for us. So we we're basically in a situation where we can say, within our framework, We're gonna digitize that supply chain for a certain level of the componentry that goes in the building, [00:56:00] and we'll give you that cost assurance directly from the fabricator, , as opposed to just being through that, you know, traditional tender process.

So you're able to have that cost be applicable really quickly. , it's a little bit different when it, when you move outside of the framework because there's millions of products and there's millions of building types. But when you get into something that's a little bit pre-ordained, it's, it's

hyper, hyper.

Evan Troxel: And so then does it also. Help with the procurement process, because if the software is, you know, you're picking stuff off the shelf, the marketplace to put into your model and decisions are being made, is there some point at which those decisions kind of get locked in and that can start

the procurement process earlier so that

these projects can happen quicker? Like, Is that ecosystem developing

or, is it working?

Mark Thorley: that's definitely something that's on our kind of roadmap for the future. I, I think what, you know, to some degree we, we know what we know and we know what we don't know. Um, and I think that has got us to where we, we, we have, fairly well to date. Uh, procurement is a [00:57:00] big beast in

construction. Um, especially when you consider the, the change of what would be needed to procure something, offsite.

Especially if you are procuring multiple systems from multiple different manufacturers, um, obviously, you know, design and build and, subcontractors and it, it just changes the, you know, the, the, the playing field a little bit. Um, and so I think in the, in the long term, we, we have aspirations that KOPE can be the catalyst to, to change some of that, because, you know, you know better than anyone as well.

I think we touched on it before around, you know, some of the challenges with, you know, resorting back to risk mitigation and, that's typically the approach that happens with, big contractors and, um, you know, the way that they deliver buildings at the moment. So, yeah, I, I mean we have aspirations to, change that.

Whether we're able , to build something that enables that is, , I guess, For

the

future.

Evan Troxel: It, it does seem kinda like an obvious future step because it seems to me like , [00:58:00] the thing that I keep thinking as you guys are talking is it, as a designer, as an architect using a system like this, it, it builds confidence along the way a lot faster in what's gonna actually happen in the physical. In a much shorter amount of time than traditionally happens on projects, right? So I think there's always this sense of confidence that we can build what we design, but, but this is a different beast, right? This is like, this is a product. And so because it's already a product, it already exists the physical world.

This is a digital representation of it. I already know it works. And on some level I would assume I already know that it's available, that I can get it, how much it costs. Like there's all of these things that kind of help build that confidence along the way. And that, you know, it's not for every architect out there, for every practice, but it is for the ones that adopt this methodology of doing projects, it really makes a lot of sense.

It just reinforces along the way, [00:59:00] it's this reinforcement mechanism of like, yep, this is totally possible. This is totally possible up this, I'm not sure it's possible. Let me, let me reach out and talk to somebody. Okay, yep. That's possible. We can do that. We can get around that. And, and that to me shortens the time span because again, architect will have this kind of sense that like, yeah, we, we will figure out a way to do this.

But that figuring out is like eight weeks away or 12 weeks away or two years away. And architects n used to working like that, right? It's like big picture. We start with a sketch, we start with ideation, and then we continually refine that until we figured all that stuff out and coordinated it all.

And that, that happens over an extremely prolonged amount of time. It seems like with a system like this, it enables things to move much faster. and again, that isn't for everybody on every project, but it does seem like for the projects that it is really. Suited for that. It just shortens those time periods so much, to build that confidence along the way.

And you just know that what you're delivering is gonna [01:00:00] work because everybody on the platform is a professional. They wouldn't be there offering their products if they didn't stand behind them. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of, is the product going to perform as I need it to? Because like, there's somebody right who's done it before saying, yep, it absolutely works.

Here's an example. You can go look at it yourself. It just seems to me it takes a lot of that prolonged amount of time out of this process, which I guess ultimately is great for projects to actually happen faster.

Um, but, but,

just overall, like that's one of the big things holding industry back, right, is just the speed at which things actually happen.

Mark Thorley: Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, I think just to tie into that as well, every

project is unique in some regards.

and The drivers for what that project's trying to achieve are, are fairly unique as well. And so all, all KOPE is enabling is that, upfront decision making, and giving informed choices.

So, you know, one time it might be a case of, okay, we're, we're trying to [01:01:00] optimize to reduce cost. I'm sure that happens on, on most projects. But, uh, you know, and another project, it might be around reducing embodied carbon. It might be around, You know, improving the, project, program, you know, getting it built as quickly as possible.

So all these things come into play, and when you put products in the center of that, you can really drive some very unique decisions early on. Let's go with this manufacturer because they've got a load of these products in stock and they're available to move into our program fairly quickly.

You know, it, it's all about decision making, I think at the end of the day. And, if we can improve that decision making, then as you said there, then the timeframe for, you know, a lot of this process is shortened. You know, we don't need to go back and forth the usual kind of way in, you know, emails and phone calls and, you know, five, six, seven, eight weeks before we've, know, come to a decision.

We can actually make those on the fly fairly

David Flynn: Yeah. And I'd add to that, to the idea of trust as well. I think Evan, you kind of touched on it there. The reality is that designers [01:02:00] typically either don't trust, let's say a Revit family, that they might be loading into a project to truly be the true representation of what they're intent is.

You know, it's just a placeholder to a certain extent or they don't do it at all. And it's maybe just done as a, some 2D information that sits within a PDF set. Um, There isn't really that connection and what we're trying to achieve here is to say, no, we're actually gonna put the product into your project.

It's literally the product, it's, it's got all the data that you require. It's directly connected back to the people who understand why it does what it does, and connect it all the way through to the design piece. But to do that, you gotta build a lot and you gotta kind of sit adjacent to some of the legacy tools that are out there.

It's kinda where we find ourselves today.

Evan Troxel: This has been a great conversation, gentlemen. I think there's probably even more that we could get into, but I do feel like we're running long on this particular one, so maybe we'll, we'll continue this conversation in the future. , this whole idea of decision making early.[01:03:00] , which is when decisions have the most power.

And if you think about it, you know, just kind of wrapping up here thematically, that's what a set of documents in construction is, right? It's just decisions on paper. Like these are the decisions that we've all made along the way to get to here. And by including the logic, like the wisdom idea, the decisions that can have the most impact are made are early.

So the earlier you infuse your decisions with logic, with real products, with the wisdom of the people behind those it makes such an enormous impact. And again, to kind of build confidence in the system early helps also along the way. And that, that, I don't think that could be understated.

So I, I applaud the work that you're doing and of the breadth at which you're, you're tackling this issue, and so I'll include links to you guys, the company KOPE, all of that in the show notes. Is there anything else that you want to add before we hit stop on the record button here?[01:04:00]

David Flynn: Just a thank you, I suppose, uh, for having us on and also for, for, uh, you know, helping. Um, people like ourselves and, and other

people that on your podcast to actually kind of talk about these topics. I think it's, uh, it's really reassuring for a lot of us that there's many like-minded people out there doing insanely cool work.

Um, it's great to, great to see it, so thanks for that.

Mark Thorley: Yeah, just echo Dave's comment, sir. Thanks. Thanks for having us on. Evan. I've

been a big fan of

your podcast for a while now,

so, happy to join the conversation.

There's

some great things going on in construction at the moment and, I think that there is light over the hill, you know, in relation to where the industry's going, even with all the kind of negative press that we've come so familiar with.

So, um, I think it's an exciting time to be in construction, to be honest. And I think we need to continue these conversations and keep moving the industry forward as best we can.

Evan Troxel: All right. Until next time. Cheers guys.

David Flynn: Thanks, Evan.

Connect with Evan* Twitter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Email

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The News* Yours truly featured at Architosh * Top Revit '24 features * Autodesk Forma launch date announced * Someone figured out how ChatGPT can make Siri way better * Will Generative AI change everything? * McNeel shows off linetype enhancements for Rhino 8

The latest TRXL podcast episode110: ‘Throwing a Stone into the Future’, with Melodie YasharA conversation with Melodie Yashar.TRXLEvan Troxel

Yours truly featured at ArchitoshI had the pleasure of speaking with my friend Anthony Frausto-Robledo, editor in chief at Architosh, about what I’m doing with the TRXL podcast and my work at Tect.

Here’s Anthony introducing the interview:

We will jump into some hot themes currently confounding the practice of architecture, what his TRXL conversations are really for and about, and lightly touch on the unionization movement, what Tect is doing (where he has a new role), and how architects need to do what they do for others (remove friction from their work and living spaces) for themselves.

Anthony has been tracking the technology and architecture space for over 2 decades at Architosh. Our conversation prompted his keen observation during our chat about what I'm working on overcoming at Tect:

It is the whole Howard Roark thing and these romantic stories about architecture as a profession. The Renaissance Man concept doesn’t recognize its wastefulness. Tect is living the proof right now that this history of rugged individualism in the field is actually self-inflicting to the individual practitioner.

👉 Read the interview here and sign up for Anthony's Xpresso newsletter where this interview was first published while you're visiting for more deep industry analysis.

👉 Read an in-depth Architosh feature on Tect here.

🎧 Listen to TRXL podcast episodes featuring Anthony here.

Top Revit 2024 featuresIn this release Autodesk says there are more than 250 new product enhancements and features that are a direct result of customer ideas and feedback.

Nick Catellier at Revit Pure does a nice job of outlining the top 20 new features of the latest version of Revit both on his blog and in video form:

Revit 2024 is an interesting release. Is the software evolving as fast as the industry would like? Not really. Do I think some tools should be recreated from scratch instead of getting patched? Yes. But overall, Autodesk did a good job.

The most significant changes are with the site tools. Toposurfaces are gone, replaced with Toposolid. Overall, this is excellent news. However, there are a few quirks with the new site tools that I hope get resolved.

Other enhancements include new templates, a new model sample model, a dark theme, a new visual style, scheduled revision clouds (!), Dynamo improvements, heigh parameter for scope boxes (!), open sheet from view (!), and more.

(! = finally)

Another noteworthy addition from Autodesk:

Users can also try out the technology preview for Carbon Insights. With this free plug-in, architects and engineers can quantify and evaluate carbon impacts, with tools for optimizing their projects for greater carbon neutrality.

Epic Games and Autodesk have also simplified the handoff from Revit to Twinmotion, with new Auto-Synch functionality, and a built-in DataSmith Exporter.

Seems like a solid update of utility balanced with new features.

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The News* The TRXL and Archispeak podcasts are now on YouTube * ChatGPT takes the Architect Registration Exam * Epic facial recognition animation tools * Adobe Firefly brings AI image generation to it's suite of tools * Togal is a new AI tool for construction estimating, but why? * Unreal's next-gen graphics tools are wild

The latest TRXL podcast episode110: ‘Throwing a Stone into the Future’, with Melodie YasharA conversation with Melodie Yashar.TRXLEvan Troxel

My podcasts are now on YouTubeJust a note that you can now find to the TRXL podcast and the Archispeak podcast on YouTube beginning with episodes 109 and 288 respectively. YouTube is making a push to get more podcasts on the platform so who am I to deny those who prefer to get their media there?

And for the love of god please like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell and all that to help these shows get more reach and juice the YouTube algorithm.

ChatGPT takes the AREIn Brian Potter’s excellent Construction Physics SubStack newsletter this week he does a deep dive into a topic I’ve been wondering about: can ChatGPT with the newly released GPT-4 pass the Architect Registration Exam (ARE) like it has the others (including the Bar Exam and SAT)?

Here’s the set-up from Brian:

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Melodie Yashar of ICON joins the podcast to talk about:

Earth and Space architecture
the glacial pace of “traditional” architecture
her work on competitions for NASA that led becoming a Space Architect
BIM on Mars
how she got connected to ICON
her work at ICON leading the architecture and building performance team
large gantry-based 3d printing for wall systems
ICON’s strategic partnerships on 3d printed housing
procuring building permits for 3d printed housing
ICON’s upcoming universal housing prototype competition
and more

Sponsor: TRXL+* read the announcement * subscribe to the new TRXL AEC/tech newsletter * support TRXL directly with membership * get a special launch discount when you sign up for a year

Latest TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter🗞️ AEC/tech Newsletter #6Programming note: the TRXL podcast is back. In case you missed it, there’s a link to the latest episode with Roger Krulak, CEO and Funder of FullStack Modular just above the fold. In other news at TRXL HQ, there’s been a rebranding, a new site, and now I’m happy toTRXLEvan TroxelEpisode Links* TRXL+ announcement and limited time membership launch offer * Melodie on LinkedIn * Melodie on Twitter * Melodie on Instagram * Melodie’s website * Space Exploration Architecture website * ICON website * ICON on LinkedIn * ICON on Twitter * ICON on Instagram * ICON Projects: + Mars Ice Home (Nasa | Space Exploration Architecture) + ICON’s Wolf Ranch project with Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) + ICON’s House Zero project with Lake|Flato Architects + ICON’s Long Center Pavilion project + ICON’s Vulcan gantry 3d printer * Nadir Calili + CalEarth + SuperAdobe * ICON’s Initiative 99: future of affordable housing design competition

Connect with Evan* Twitter * LinkedIn * Instagram * YouTube * Email

Episode Transcript110 - ‘Throwing a Stone into the Future’, with Melodie Yashar

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Evan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. This is the podcast where I have conversations with guests from the architectural community and beyond to talk about the co-evolution of architecture and technology.

Today I welcome Melodie Yashar. Melodie is a space architect, technologist and researcher. She is the VP of building design and performance at ICON, a construction technologies company focused on large scale additive manufacturing for earth and in space. Melodie oversees the architectural direction of ICON's built work, as well as the performance of ICON's building systems to deliver optimally performing structures that shift the paradigm of home building on earth and beyond. Collaborating across technology and construction teams. Her department supports the design and construction of dignified and resilient terrestrial housing solutions, in addition to supporting the development of ICON's off-world construction systems.

Melodie teaches undergraduate and graduate design [00:01:00] studios at Art Center College of Design. In previous roles, Melodie was a senior research associate with the human systems integration division at NASA Ames via San Jose State University Research Foundation, a co-founder of Space Exploration Architecture, a research group, developing human supporting designs for space exploration, as well as a professor within the architecture department of Pratt Institute. Melodie obtained a master of architecture from Columbia University and a Master of Human Computer Interaction with an emphasis in robotics, from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. She geeks out on new material and fabrication technologies. She likes tiny robots. She would like to visit the Moon though not yet Mars in her lifetime.

In this episode, Melodie and I discussed her earth and space architecture, the glacial pace of traditional architecture and Melodie's frustration with that, her work on competitions for NASA that led to her trajectory as a space architect, BIM on Mars, how she got [00:02:00] connected to ICON, her work at ICON leading the Architecture and Building Performance team in 3d printing, ICON's strategic partnership with Lake Flato and Bjarke Ingles Group on 3d printed houses and larger housing developments in Texas and other locations, procuring building permits for 3d printed housing, an upcoming universal housing prototype competition, and more.

So without further ado, I bring you Melodie Yashar. Melodie, thanks for joining me today.

Melodie: Thanks so much, Evan. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Evan: Yeah, this is gonna be great if you were to look back and connect the dots of how you've gotten to where you are now, could you lay that out for the audience?

Melodie: Yeah, absolutely.

I'm the Vice President of Building Design and Performance at ICON. What we do at ICON is develop. Large scale additive manufacturing solutions for both earth and space.

It's a very broad scope of work. My team, the architecture and building performance team, [00:03:00] essentially facilitates all of ICON's, project delivery, and that's for multiple customers in different sectors. And we also do research and development in ICON's, wall systems, developing those wall systems, testing them, acquiring data, and then general building performance and building science, research and inquiries.

The way that I came to ICON, it was actually a pretty natural evolution of events. I had been a co-founder of a firm called Space Exploration Architecture. I like to refer to it as a applied research practice and, Space Exploration Architecture was founded as a result of competing with NASA's centennial challenge for 3D printed habitat on Mars.

That challenge was really focused on delivering design concepts for,, Martian habitats, as well as it identified technologies for 3D printing and outer space. Over the course, of several years, I was introduced to a group at Marshall Space Flight Center that was working with [00:04:00] ICON and they were also our customer, after a while.

And that's how I was introduced to Jason Ballard, who is the CEO of ICON. And, he has a great way of introducing me. He basically was like, well, you have a background in architecture as well as human computer interaction, focusing on robotics and autonomy. Man, have I got a job for you? So he basically brought me on board, and that's how I started the architecture and building performance department and ICON.

Evan: Wow. There's already a few questions floating around in my head. I did get a chance to check out your website, which I'll put a link to in the show notes for the episode, but, Let's go back to like those competitions that you're entering. , because eventually I want to get more into the story of what you're doing at ICON.

When you said Earth and space, it's like how many companies, how many firms out there are there that are playing in those realms? Like you said, it kind of covers this very broad spectrum and so I think we will get there, but let's like the, where the genesis of this whole thing [00:05:00] started, like what drew you to compete in those competitions that you were designing for?

Was it a curiosity about specifically building in space and that this allowed you to do it? Or was it something that came from even earlier?

Melodie: Oh, I love this question. The fact of the matter is that I was working as a, let's say we now refer to it as a terrestrial architect. So I was doing day-to-day architecture in New York for a number of years. , I was extremely underwhelmed , and really frustrated by the amount of coordination and the just general, like, glacial pace in which coordination was happening.

So , I recognize that architecture was not working out for me. There was something that was deeply dissatisfying about, , workflows, both technological software based as well as, The soft skills, the kind of people skills that are relevant to architecture, the position of architects within traditional contracting mechanisms.

Like all of this, felt like it was really ripe for disruption in my opinion. , the [00:06:00] competition actually was something that was done on nights and weekends by myself and a few former colleagues from Columbia University. , we literally did not have any pretenses or ideas that this would become a full-fledged career.

But like we all had day jobs and so we submitted to the NASA competition and didn't really think anything would come from it, but we ended up winning first prize and beating the Europeans face agency as well as foster and partners in multiple other larger bureaucratic firms. So ,there was something there.

And, we started to receive phone calls shortly afterwards and, are , the origins of space exploration architecture in so many words, and it launched a space architecture career and research practice ever since.

Evan: You say there was something there, like , what do you think it was that set you apart from these other huge names in the industry? Was it coming at it from a fresh, new perspective, do you think? Or , what was the differentiator for you guys that if you were to look [00:07:00] back, , is there anything you can pull out?

Melodie: I think we were. A little bit more, let's say. , more aspirational than other groups. We actually knew what NASA's expected answer or solution would be, , because. This is a problem, like the idea of an NC two or let's say a locally produced and manufactured 3D printed structure is something that NASA has been researching and looking into for decades., Um, and the expected answers are out there. The expected answers are use the dirt, which is local to Mars or the moon and establish an equivalency with the way that concrete would typically be manufactured on Earth, and then use that as your building construction material. Concrete's really even in industry, it's the only material that has been demonstrated to, be able to manufacture and construct buildings at scale. Other materials just don't come close in terms of performance. So that was the premise, right? [00:08:00] And we knew that was the premise. And based off of the competition rules and rubric, which. Myself and others, studied very intensely. We specifically generated an idea that deviated from that and yet nonetheless fulfilled all of the competition's main requirements, and rubric, which was based on things like, constructability, aesthetics, bim relevant, so like building information modeling was actually a key. Factor for the scoring rubric within the competition, and other things. It was a research intensive proposal in a way that I think most other, engineering groups or even architectural groups may not have approached it. And yet it came from a place of naivete.

Like we were gathering research from everywhere, planetary, geology, astrophysics, we were totally agnostic to the sources of inspiration and also the research references and consultants that we were bringing aboard. And it [00:09:00] led to this really interesting result. So what we proposed was a habitat made out of water.

We recognized that the search for life on Mars, is going to be tied to the search for subsurface water, ice, which we also have evidence for is like only a few centimeters below the surface of the regoli. And so we thought, well, why not? This is a superior material to regolith or dirt in terms of radiation shielding.

So there's clear value add from a human health perspective, and safety perspective. There's clear value add because in theory you could be within this beautifully translucent and illuminated structure as opposed to being in more or less a dirt based structure. And, and we leaned into that, we leaned into the possibilities of what that could mean architecturally,

Evan: That's a really cool story. I can only imagine. Maybe you can build out what it was like when you heard you won.

Melodie: Um, let's see. It was, uh, the announcement for the phase one competition was made [00:10:00] it was at Maker Fair back when Maker Fair was still happening. So that year was in Queens in New York. And, it was a really cool thing. They announced our team and it was almost kind of cliche, but they had these massive oversized checks to give us.

And so we, like,

Evan: You won the sweepstakes

Melodie: we totally won the sweepstakes. We went up to the podium and Manzi Ramon and others from Centennial Challenges were all there with this massive check. And then we stood behind the check and took a picture and that was how we won the NASA competition in phase one.

Evan: that's so cool. Wow. And so, that was the beginning of the new path because you were saying, you were frustrated with traditional practice and the glacial pace of everything that, in that, right not even like projects, but just. Moving up the corporate ladder, how long does it take , how long do I need to be in this position until I get to the next position, and what do I need to do to get there? And [00:11:00] people don't have answers to these questions. And you know, I think a lot of people can relate to these kinds of feelings.

Right. And so now there's this new path that, is opening up this door that's opening up. And how do you decide to follow it? How do you actually start to commit? I would imagine, I'm guessing here, more of your life to this path than the other path because there's a transition that you maybe sense is coming.

Melodie: Yeah. The fact of the matter is that, it's not like I had a crystal ball to know that this is where it would lead me, but the reality was that the project was so compelling. Mars Ice House, the project, the one was so compelling, it truly spun off and took a life of its own. And the momentum of the project propelled many of us along for the ride.

So what ended up happening is that, a pi from a different NASA center saw the project and was inspired and said, Hey, Let's develop a concept for a [00:12:00] filled and frozen ice habit habitat That led to a two year long research trajectory with multiple rounds of funding.

Evan: What does that mean? Filled and frozen

like molds kind of a thing.

Melodie: basically if you can imagine an inflatable membrane, Instead of it being a 3D printed structure that's robotically constructed, basically the membrane would deploy as an inflatable and you would fill it up just as you would a water balloon, so to speak, and it would freeze.

So that was the concept for Mars Eye's Home. Uh, it ended up being the ICONic project for NASA Langley's Centennial anniversary for the Center. So it got quite a bit of attention. And then again, what ended up happening is that project had so much momentum.

There were synergies developing around the project. It led to the concept for the NASA Big Ideas Challenge, which was, based off of Mars Eye's Home, again, a public solicitation, but this [00:13:00] time to universities asking. Students and universities to think about how to develop a concept of operations for a sustainable Mars greenhouse that leverages the technology as well as the interior programming of Mars ICE's home.

So this kept happening, these projects would have their own momentum and there would be synergies forming by others, folks who are interested in developing concepts further. And the only thing that I can really say in regards to that is it just shows to the power of putting your work out there and letting it be known because it truly does.

It's not just the attention that matters, it's the ideas that people can attach to and relate to, and then hopefully collaborate with you in the future on.

Evan: Yeah. mean, this podcast is kind of an example of that as well, right? It's like once you put something out into the world and it does attract other people who are interested in, you know, going along, figuring [00:14:00] that out along with you, giving you opportunities that nobody knew even existed before.

I can only imagine the pursuit or the path that you were then on with space architecture,? I mean, that is such an interesting thing because it's becoming more and more of a reality in. I guess just from our perception of what's going on out there, seeing the work that ICON is putting on Earth and the different, like you're talking about the different competitions and all these things, there's just more and more of this material marketing material, imagery, ideas floating out there.

I imagine that this is much more of a thing now than it was back when I was in school. Like this wasn't even a concept. It's really interesting to hear the story behind the scenes.

Melodie: Yeah, absolutely. One thing that frustrated me when I was, first getting started, particularly what the competition and the work get following is that so much of these, I'm using the word aspirational, but these [00:15:00] visionary architectural concepts rely on ideas of technology development that don't exist yet.

So you're actually throwing a stone into the future and saying, if this capability's possible, this is what a vision of architecture might be. And I didn't really realize it at the time. It's only now that I can really appreciate it and recognize how powerful that is.

Evan: Mm.

Melodie: Designers and architects in particular are able to set that vision much earlier on for technology development to follow.

And it's been demonstrated again and again, not only in the work that I did with Space Exploration Architecture, but the work that I'm doing now with ICON, and with our current NASA customer and the way in which we have received our funding for our current award supporting development of technologies on the lunar surface.

All of that too, it began with a visionary and schematic concept, which we initiated, not which NASA asked for. So it's [00:16:00] really the design vision. It's really the architecture and really the idea and the concept of living and working in space, which propelled everything forward in terms of the technology development.

So I think architecture is uniquely situated to be able to contribute to those kinds of discourses and set the direction for technology as well.

Evan: It's like watching sci-fi movies from the late sixties and seventies where they were putting these ideas out there and now those are actual things, right? That's the closest analogy I can come up with on the fly here, because it's true that this kind of vision casting, future casting of, technology ways that we communicate through devices, you know, pieces of glass in your hand.

I mean, these are all examples of things that we've seen for the last 40 years, and now here they are. And it's like those ideas shaped reality in the future. I don't see this as being any different than that.

Melodie: Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely [00:17:00] right. The other thing is that a lot of our competitors on the engineering side and the hardware development side, even the software side, are not necessarily thinking about the application of their work, so there's this chasm between design vision versus, the applications of technology.

And more often than not, those technologies are being developed separate from applications. So as far as we can bridge that gap, I think it's going to get us further faster. It's why I always encourage designers and architects to be working hand in hand and collaboratively with engineers as well.

Evan: Mm-hmm. totally makes sense. I, there is another success story that works in the opposite way, which is, I think it was when Steve Jobs announced the iPad, and I'm sure this wasn't a completely true statement, but he said something like, I don't know what you're gonna use it. Show us what you're gonna use this for.

Because they could, you could imagine it being 20 different things, right? It's a newspaper, it's a magazine, it's an email client, it's a web browser. Like it's those [00:18:00] things, but what else could it be? And I think there was some truth in that statement in that, what else could this thing be that we're not thinking of right now?

Because we've been working so hard on getting this device out there. So I do think it can go the other way too, and then it becomes this evolution of collaboration beyond that point, because in some respects, the technologies that we're talking about are developed in secret, right?

Like completely as much as in secret as possible because they're trying to be first, or it's really groundbreaking or, there's any number of reasons there. So anyway, I think that you just can't really, understand when you're doing it, how it's gonna. Turn out in the end.

I'm not trying to downplay the way you explain that at all. I just think that there are other ways in which it happens too. But I do agree about earlier collaboration being better because these different camps, if you will have to understand how the people who are gonna be using it work and the people who are using it have to understand how the people are building it [00:19:00] work to make a truly integrated product that doesn't miss the mark.

It could be software, it could be hardware, it could be whatever. I don't know your experience though, really sounds like you're more on the collaborate early and develop together mindset.

Melodie: I think there's a difference in, the way that we do product and technology development that's specifically targeting consumers versus how we approach what I would consider to be mega projects of human endeavor. And even architecture, like any kind of one-off structure is also a mega project, in my opinion.

So the idea of. Building for the moon and not leveraging architects and not leveraging, folks who are interested in planetary protection or the legal and ethical implications of doing so, that's a missed opportunity. So these mega projects really are intended to be extremely interdisciplinary and collaborative from the start.

At least that's the way that I think they should [00:20:00] be approached.

Evan: Yeah. I've been reading some articles about these. Make a cities, the cities of the future that are like the line and tolosa, and that really speaks to your point well these kinds of cities have to be completely interdisciplinary from the very beginning, otherwise they're gonna be obsolete when they're built.

Melodie: Yeah.

Evan: guess that's one way to say it, but the other way to say it is you just keep building on top of any major metropolis, it is an amazingly organic organism of just continual development all over the place, under places you can't see and it still works, but the kinds of solutions that we're starting to see here are incredibly cross-disciplinary from way before the marketing material hits the internet, it's interesting to think about it that way. It kind of has to be from the start.

Melodie: Yeah.

Evan: So I have one other curiosity here going back to how you got into this. Was it, you know, when you were talking about the frustration with traditional practice [00:21:00] versus this other path, what was it that really drew you to it?

Was it your passion for architecture? Was it space? Was it the research side of it? Was it the technology side of it? Is there any one you can point at, or was it all kind of meshed together?

Melodie: Oh, it was, I was fully convinced that I was leaving architecture and I was done, I was like, I'm finished. The space architecture and applied research that I do with space exploration architecture and in those projects, that's the one exception and it's largely conceptual in nature. So it was, it's something I was extremely passionate in, but I was done with day-to-day coordination when it has to do with building construction.

Evan: Where would you have gone?

Melodie: where would I have gone? , well, I'll tell you what I did and then how I came full circle.

Evan: Okay.

Melodie: I went back to graduate school and, I wanted to pursue a career in aerospace. So I got a second master's. After that master's, I applied for a research grant at NASA [00:22:00] ames via my program.

And then very fortuitously, I received that grant and I was given a full-time offer at NASA ames as well. So I was doing research in a lab that was focused on human systems integration, but particularly looking at the relationship between people and machines and how people interact with autonomous systems.

That was it for me. I was like, this is my trajectory from here on fourth. And the space architecture will just be something that, I take on as passion projects, as they come. And that's it. The thing is, Even though a lot of the low earth orbit commercial space stations have strong customer bases and have good business cases for what they're doing, like planetary applications on Mars, there's not a huge customer base for that yet.

Like, let's be honest. Right? So it's a ways out and I recognize that everybody who I was speaking with, both at NASA and elsewhere was aligned. They were like, let this coast, continue to [00:23:00] develop it and see what happens. But then I met Jason Ballard and then, via our shared customer at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center basically it all came for full circle. And when he offered that I come and start an architecture department at ICON, I recognized it was bridging multiple loves and multiple interests of mine, but doing it from a different perspective. So I was able to rethink the way that construction happens.

We're able to develop our own workflows that make sense for our construction process and for our build process and our technology, and, um even though the typical frustrations that have to do with schedule and timeline and budget that everybody encounters in building construction, those are things that we face as well.

We're just able to do it from a slightly different lens and from a slightly different perspective because number one, we're the technology provider, but also we take full responsibility for design build, which is a very, very different place to be than a designer who's handing, a [00:24:00] project over to a contractor or an owner, as an example.

Evan: Yeah, totally. I had my own design build company with a partner and , I can't echo your sentiments enough where it was like we were designing it, drawing it, and building it, procuring all the materials means and methods, everything. And so, The drawings are different for that kind of a pro , like the whole process is different because it's different, right?

It doesn't have to be the same because you're not handing it off to an entity that you may or may not trust. It was very different there in that scenario. So I totally get that., and I guess just to set a little bit of history here, I'm guessing it's ICON build, right?

Like this is a construction company, but I'm wondering how they were also tied into NASA to tie up this thread here of how you guys came together.

Melodie: Yeah. Yeah. The missing link , what happened next? , essentially as part of the 3D printed habitat competition, NASA was identifying [00:25:00] leading companies, and it also research institutions that represent the state of the art in large scale additive manufacturing. I was actually working with a competitor of ours at the time, and we were very

Evan: we can't name them. Right.

Melodie: I tend not to name, I tend not to name names,

Evan: all right.

Melodie: We were very successful in the 3D printed habitat competition. The thing that was unique about the competition was that it was not only soliciting what they considered to be virtual design, so basically architectural concepts that they were also asking for construction demonstrations as well as testing of those samples and printed specimens.

So, ICON was a finalist in the competition. My prior collaborator was a finalist in the competition, as was I, and that was how we, were able to connect with the Marshall Space Light Center team. And, they have continued relationships with other finalists within the competition as well.

It really was a kind of like accelerator and incubator to [00:26:00] identify who within the large scale additive manufacturing industry overall. So it's been a very successful program and I owe a lot to. Manzi Ramon, who was the program manager for Centennial Challenges. For that, she's really supported my career as well as ICON's career.

Quite extensively.

Evan: So was ICON doing terrestrial projects as well? Other habitable projects before or during the same time they're getting vetted by NASA to possibly produce these on Mars.

Melodie: Yes, yes, exactly. So ICON was co-founded by three individuals, Jason Ballard, Evan Lumis, as well as Alex Laro. And, it was, oh, Some years ago that they produced, the first permitted 3D printed structure in the United States. We also have reason to believe that was the first permitted 3D printed structure in the world. , it was some years ago, and still standing in Austin, Texas. It was [00:27:00] released at South by Southwest. And ever since, every year at South by Southwest ICON has, one up to themselves and we continue to with the new structures, new, experiences and projects to share with the world. But yes, ICON, over the period of the 3D printed habitat competition was doing projects.

For both residential customers as well as for the d o d, and also affordable housing projects. ICON also completed a project in collaboration with New Story Charity, in Naka hookah Mexico, and delivered about, almost a dozen homes within a seismic zone in Mexico.

And, all of those homes are still standing, still occupied and with status 7.4 magnitude earthquake, which was really great.

Evan: 7.4 is no joke. Coming from California. So like you said, it was kind of an incubator of sorts. And so now you guys are off to the races here in the US and I'm sure in other locations as well. Can [00:28:00] you talk about some of the projects that you've been involved with that are really pushing the state of the art in 3D printing?

Melodie: yes, absolutely. I'll mention our largest project today and the one that is, active in construction right now. We're collaborating with Lenar, the home builder on a project in Georgetown, Texas, which is just north of Austin on, 100 home development at a site referred to as Wolf Ranch.

So what we've done is, basically we brought in the BCA Engels group to help us on the design of this project. It was highly intentional to pair what we consider to be one of the greatest world class architects in the world, who would never work with a production scale builder like Lenar on a project that is intended to show economies of scale and the possibilities of additive construction, for development of this size.

So what ended up happening is that Bianca Engels group was able to push [00:29:00] aesthetically what was possible within this development and introduce, a design standard, which, really has not been introduced before within other Lenar projects, residential projects. And yet we're able to leverage the advantages of our construction technology to print faster and, more economically than ever before.

So currently we have seven printers deployed onsite at Wolf Ranch. They're all printing simultaneously. And, some of the, let's say, feedback that we've gotten is that it is the, one of the cleanest construction sites that anybody has ever seen in

Evan: There's no construction waste.

Melodie: Yeah.

Yeah. And, it's really a sight to see these massive gantry printers. Building in parallel along multiple slabs. And yeah, we're planning to have more printers out there at Wolf Ranch fairly soon.

Evan: Can you give us an idea of the scale of these printers? Like you said, it's a big gantry system, I've seen video of these laying down, toothpaste [00:30:00] as it were. But can you just give us an idea of the scale of what you're talking about here? Because I think, people are used to seeing trucks pull up to a job site, and then people crawling all over the project doing all kinds of different things. This is very different than that. And you have this giant machine out on the site. Seven of them give us a clue as to what that's like.

Melodie: Yeah, absolutely. Our current gantry based system we refer to as the Vulcan. It operates on rails. So we essentially have two vertical towers that, operate on Y rails. The rails can be installed and deployed basically infinitely. So there's not really a hard limit to the length of the rails themselves, but there is a limit to the width of the ex beam, which traverses the two towers. That's roughly on the order of 45 feet. So we are looking for lots that are essentially in that range like between 38 and 45 feet. And that is a limit that we have with our current [00:31:00] system, but it has been specifically designed for single family residential typologies. And, that's what the gantry is best suited for is large developments where we are focusing on residential typologies of that scale.

So three to four bedroom homes. And there is also, a height limit currently with our gantry based system, that is 10 and a half feet. But we are actively developing technologies and systems to, surpass that height limit right now.

Evan: what are the constraints with height? I mean, obviously there's this framework that you're dealing with, but does it also have to do with pumping the material up to a certain height? I'm just wondering what the different pieces are that play into that limitation that you have right now?

Melodie: The main constraint is just the fact that the towers are only manufactured to be so high, and the whole system can essentially be, deconstructed and placed into a shipping container for transport. So both the towers, the rails, the [00:32:00] gantry system overall packs into a shipping container.

And also our material handling system is, within a shipping container as well. So that's how we transport and, mobilize the system around from site to site.

Evan: It's not unlike modular, prefab modular or prefab panels or whatever, where it kind of starts at the end in mind and works backwards. I was doing a tour of a prefabricated, a volumetric, modular prefab plant and basically they said at the time, at least that, the design problem starts with logistics of can we get something to the site and then we have to work backwards from there.

Because then you've got all the roads and the bridges and all these different constraints potentially, they at least give you design constraints. It sounds like you have a little bit of that going on with this thing has to be. Sensable, dismantleable packed into a shipping container so they can go somewhere else and do it again.

And this I guess, starts to tie back into what you said earlier about the architecture, [00:33:00] the design team, working with the engineering team hand in hand. I would assume that's what you're doing like there's constraints going both ways there's people who are designing the machine, that does the thing and then there's this output at the end and you've gotta say, well, we've got these size lots that we know we can work with. All of those constraints are kind of a free flowing conversation, I assume, with these different teams , around the table at the same time.

Melodie: Yeah, absolutely. The difference I would advocate for between what we're doing though and offsite construction or anything that relies on transport to site relative to construction, means, and methods and materials, is that because we focus on onsite construction, we're able to create so much more eccentricity and versatility in our structures and designs that you can't really do with modular or prefab or anything that's factory rebuilt and that needs to be flat packed.

So it's true, any robot in a construction, context would need to be deployed and mobilized [00:34:00] somehow. , smaller ones perhaps have a competitive advantage, but given the scale of the structures that we're building, I don't see a better way of doing it, at least not yet. And also it enables so much design freedom to, create curved walls, amorphous and more eccentric geometries.

Again, double curved surfaces, single curved surfaces. These are the really exciting, possibilities that you get with 3D printing as opposed to using traditional steel and wood frame and that type of thing. So why not lean into that, as opposed to having to rely on everything being manufactured in a factory or constructed in a factory and shipped out to site.

Evan: I totally agree. Anybody who has a desktop 3D printer has done exactly what you're talking about, right? It's the first thing you want to try is double curving surfaces that cantilever out over then you start to learn the lessons about support structures and scaffolding and things like that, right?

But, you immediately start to push the limits of what the machine can do, and you start [00:35:00] to try to figure out ways that you have to change your workflow in the model. Case, let's say, to accomplish what you want. You know, like there's all these little tricks. Shrink wrapping the geometry building in little diagonals underneath that you won't really see at the scale of the print and things like, so you can do cantilevers without doing support structures.

And there's all these fun little things that we do as architects too, push the limits. But of course we go right there and I assume it's no different. I was in Austin last November and I was remiss to not have the opportunity to go visit the project that you guys partnered with Lake Plato on, but it has the types of things you're talking about in it, right?

It has, it has these double curving kind of undulating walls. It's a beautiful geometry that's very complimentary to the stick-built roof structure that sits on top of it.

And it just seems like, there's a really nice dialogue there. But you guys made some very. Deliberate decisions to show off exactly what you're talking about, which does set it apart from [00:36:00] a factory built thing or maybe even a site-built thing without, at least, without a lot of effort to form something like that would be incredibly difficult. And labor intensive I'm sure, compared to what you actually ended up with. Could you speak to, that project and just talk about the kinds of things that you guys were going for? Cuz it's, a test piece, kind of a show piece. Obviously it's gorgeous, it photographs beautifully.

Melodie: Yeah, . So how Zero is, the project we completed exactly a year ago, actually, in collaboration with Lake Playdo, our prompt and our brief for the project was designed the most beautiful home that could only be constructed through 3D printing, so optimize the design specifically for 3D printing and what they came up with was a variation on a mid-century modern ranch house. So we have these beautiful Claris story windows, lots of wood contrasting with the robustness and durability of the concrete. And this real [00:37:00] dichotomy between the curved surfaces and geometries that you mentioned, particularly on the facade of the building and then the rectilinearity of the wood and steel and. It's extremely surprising to people when they walk into the home how warm and comforting it feels. I think there's this, misapprehension that concrete is too brutal a material for residential, and we've been able to demonstrate again and again that just isn't the case.

Particularly given how, organic ins sinuous the beads are. Sometimes people love the fact that the beads are not perfectly aligned. Sometimes you get slight bulging and people are really intrigued by , the kind of eccentricities that you get with that sort

Evan: It's, it's organic. Yeah. I, I agree. And just to define the beads that you're talking about, you're talking about the individual layers of the 3D printed wall surface that you're leaving intentionally in this case, on this project exposed. You could go back after the fact and kind of [00:38:00] trel it or maybe during the printing, I don't know what the best way to do it would be, but you could hide that, but you chose to express it.

And I think it really gives the project a texture that you obviously don't normally see. So it, causes maybe somebody to ask questions about it, which is cool. And it also just, you know, the shadow, the light, the way that it plays off of it, the way that it diffuses because it's not a perfectly smooth surface.

All of these things are playing into that warmth that you're talking about.

Melodie: I tend to think so. Yeah. The beads themselves provide an amazing amount of texture. They play off light, just as you said. And, it creates a really interesting environment that you don't typically see in, residential construction at all. It truly does feel like a highly customized build.

And the thing that's so ironic about this technology is that we're able to do this at scale and in an automated way faster, and more affordably than ever before. So [00:39:00] only the printed walls for how Zero. Took about, 10 days, to print the wall system for house zero. And then of course, the rest of the home was finished traditionally, so it took on the order of six to eight months. But what my team is developing actively and research our investigations and how to fully print a 3D printed enclosure. So we're talking both walls continued through, roofings elements as well as, enclosures. And, we're thinking ahead to how we can lean into the possibilities of amorphous geometries again, and more eccentric geometries to create things like domes and arches and vaults as well.

Evan: It seems like a natural path forward. I'm even thinking back, I don't know how familiar you are. With Nader Kelli's work, with Cal Earth and the,

what did he call those? Like super, I can't remember the word

Melodie: Super Adobe.

Evan: Super Adobe. That's it., I was actually involved in one of those projects as a seed [00:40:00] storage building on a college campus in Southern California. It was the first permitted one built. And, it was funny I would like to get into the more practical sides of this, construction type with you if time permits, but it's like the city freaked out about it, right?

They didn't, they didn't know what to do with it. They didn't know how to inspect it. And because of all that, and it was in LA County, they had to have a foundation system that was like three times the size of a typical foundation system and three times the size of anything that Cole had done before.

But that's what it took to actually get it built. And so, the permitting side, like what do these jurisdictions do when you come to them with a project and an opportunity like this? Are they accepting of it or they're obviously risk averse how does that all play out? Because you guys basically are doing r and d in public here at some level. Obviously lots of testing goes into this but there's still of long term hypothesis playing out over time, [00:41:00] right? With these kinds of structures because we haven't had them for a long time.

And at the same time, you can look in other places on earth and you can see buildings built out of dirt that are still standing through the test of time over thousands of years, right? So it's like, it's not that foreign, but at the same time it's not the normal. And so therefore there is risk aversion to that kind of thing.

I'm just wondering what your experience has been on that side, on the practical side of actually getting these things

Melodie: there is no building code that addresses 3D printed construction whatsoever. It just doesn't exist. At least not yet what has happened on the regulatory front is that, the International Code Council Evaluation Service as well as UL, have developed their own appendices specifically for 3D printed construction.

And they've done that in large part because of companies like ICON and other competitors who are really gaining a lot of traction in the market. So we are working to comply with both of those, appendices and standards. We have all of the testing and data relevant to those, [00:42:00] standards. We're also working with them to continue to develop and advance what those standards and appendices are.

Evan: Sure. That's kind of in your best interest. Yeah.

Melodie: Yeah, absolutely. And, they all kind of take precedent from one another. So the Department of Defense has done quite a bit of work with us, and they are developing their unified facilities code specifically for 3D bridge construction , and whenever we do a project with them, there's new things that we learned that go into their UFC code, and it continues to iterate based off of the things that they learned from us and that we learned from them.

There's definitely a call and response goes on there. But in regards to permitting within specific jurisdictions, we have not had much issue, quite frankly, the way that this works is that we, were basically following a provision within. The I bbc, which specifies that if you can demonstrate that alternate means and methods and materials of construction are structurally sound based off the judgment of a building inspector, then [00:43:00] that's sufficient for the building to be permitted.

So, date we've been successful in in Austin and, uh, various other locations in Texas, in Mexico, and in other states. Very soon.

Evan: Cool. As an architect doing traditional buildings, I have this question for you that I'm sure has come up before, but this idea of laying down all these different layers of cement on top of each other, and I would assume you're trying to do what I would consider a continuous print of the walls, right?

So that there's no stopping and curing and then starting up again, and those kinds of things. Is there a cold joint at every single layer of this, and how do you deal with that from a waterproofing? So this is like the total practical architect question, because in traditional concrete construction, cast in place concrete construction, if you do these separate pores, you have to deal with that layer where that happens. So is that happening or how is it [00:44:00] working with waterproofing? with this kind of construction, because I'm sure a lot of people see these and they ask that same question, whereas it's very different from applying a surface to the outside of the building that's continuous after the fact because you're intensely expressing those, right?

Melodie: Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. So we're extremely conscious of the lift time that goes from layer to layer. There's a balancing act that goes into how we develop the material, how the materials engineered, and then what the radiology of the material is based off of the ambient conditions at the site, but also the size of the print and the time it takes the material to actually flow through the nozzle based off of the size of the structure.

So we're conscious of all of these parameters, and it's something that we're monitoring very closely as we go. So in the off case that there's something out of our control, like it's raining, you know, we're still building out in the wild. We do stop construction and then,[00:45:00] there is a cold joint.

But in any event, we're very conscious of these kinds of, constraints and we do our best, to make sure that what we're building is sound and that we're not going to face any issues later on. Some of what we do like what we're doing at Wolf Ranch is we actually apply a block filler to the exterior of the facade and the wall system. And then customers are able to paint whatever color they would like for the inside of their homes. Architecturally, like folks like Lake Plato, bga, Engels have not been too keen on that direction. They love the exposed quality of the of the material. It's a mortar based cement and, prefer to have it remain that way. Either way it works, it just depends on the customer and the context. We've done some water intrusion testing and we continue to, but, by and large we've been pretty successful with the wall assembly as it's been, engineered and designed.

Evan: Yeah. This like stories of architects being architects is [00:46:00] not surprising. It's reminds me of like the old Frank Lloyd Wright story where there's this house in LA Hollywood called the Holly Hawk house and it's a famous house that he did for, a very famous person and he tilted these walls inside the corridor to her closets, which were massive because she had a huge wardrobe and he tilted all of them because she had an art collection that he didn't like.

Right. So she couldn't hang her art in there cuz it was a natural spot to become a gallery. And he didn't like it. So it's funny because it's like, well, what do the architects want? The wall texture to be inside somebody else's house. Yeah, that's exactly, sounds exactly right. That's funny.

Melodie: That's terrific. I love that.

Evan: where, are you going next? Because you're talking about the research side of things, which is obviously your wheelhouse. So you're talking about domed structures, where you're, morphing wall to roof and I assume other things as well. If I go back in my memory to the images I saw on your website from the competitions, that was a big piece of it too, right?

So give us an idea of [00:47:00] what's happening in the maybe near future of 3D printing.

Melodie: Yeah, we're always looking to. Enhance and improve our capabilities to print virtually any geometry without scaffolding or support material. We have a couple of initiatives supporting, that trajectory. In particular its dos, arches and vaults, and developing both the technology as well as, construction sequencing operations to support how we.

Those specific geometries. So I'm very excited about that. We recently finished a, pavilion, actually. It's a stage and performance area at the Long Center for Performing Arts. It is on the main lawn outside, of the performance center. And it's essentially a public pavilion that will be accessible, actually starting in a few days.

And, the long center will be hosting all of their summer programming there, at least the outdoor programming. And if you take a [00:48:00] look at the project, we're referring to it as the cosmic pavilion. You'll notice the same kinds of undulating surfaces and textures that you would see in the house. Zero facade. But our cantilevering and our overhangs is just slightly more intense . So, we're going a little bit more extreme. And that's just one step in the direction of being able to 3D print full enclosures as well as higher cantilevers and overhangs as well.

Evan: Pavilions are still the forefront of research and technology development and architecture. We've definitely gone through that, that's been, a reoccurring theme.

Melodie: It's very true. The other thing that, I'll note is that we completed an analog habitat, which is basically a research experiment at the Johnson Space Center, and that was our first time 3D printing roof components. So we printed roof panels, lifted and tilted them up using an overhead crane at the Johnson [00:49:00] Space Center, and then installed them on top of the structure.

I haven't really seen anything quite like it, but it was, again, a step in a different direction, thinking about fully 3D printed enclosures rather than just vertical wall systems.

Evan: And I would assume some of the other directions that you're gonna be going is obviously higher, bigger, these are all things that are being figured out as you go along., as far as the next scale of objects that are able to be 3D printed?

Melodie: Yeah, absolutely. We're always looking to improve our construction operations as well, so, we're thinking about how to mobilize faster onsite, how to automate many of the other, construction integration needs that we have. So there's reinforcement within our wall system.

We're looking at, automated reinforcement and inline reinforcement, as something that integrates within our printing process. We're doing the same for many other parts of our construction process, which still [00:50:00] require manual intervention and human intervention generally. So, yeah, it's a very exciting time. Please pay attention to what happens next for ICON.

Evan: That's awesome. Well, is there anything we missed in this conversation that you're just dying to get out there to the audience?

Melodie: I would like to share one final thing. I mentioned previously that ICON had worked on an affordable housing project with New Story in Mexico. We are actually kicking off a global design competition where we're soliciting both architectural firms and professionals as well as university students, to submit to an affordable housing competition that we're calling Initiative 99. We are asking these two groups to help us imagine what the future of affordable housing is by coming up with Universal House. What we're hoping will be a universal housing prototype for under $99,000. [00:51:00] That is just for the construction materials and finish of the house. That does not include the land purchasing or anything else of that nature.

at a point where our technology has matured and our construction operations have matured to the point where this is something that is extremely feasible for us. We can print three homes on a single test bed,, or print bed, I should say.

And we're interested in seeing what are the most. communities, user groups, audiences that need housing and we're hoping, everybody could help us imagine what the future of this program might be. The thing that is a little bit different here is that we are committed and we are promising to print one, if not more, of the winning designs at the end of the design competition.

So in true design build manner, we're going to be working hand in hand with, a number of the selected finalists in the competition to realize their designs, fairly shortly after the competition closes.

Evan: I have to share a [00:52:00] personal story now that you've mentioned this. This is fantastic. And I don't think I've shared this on this podcast before, but when I was in high school, I was in all these r o P drafting classes. It was like a, I forget what that even stands for, regional occupational something.

And it's basically doing the prep work for what I thought was gonna become my architectural career. Turns out it was completely different than what I thought it was gonna be when I actually got into architecture school. But,, we did drafting, we drew residential homes, and I entered a competition. In this r o p community that we had in Southern California where the school that I was at had r o p architectural, another school had r o p construction and I won the competition. And then the r o p construction class built that house. So not unlike what you're talking about, where it's like we're committing to do this and as a high schooler, I can't even tell you what that did to me, right it was incredible. So for those people out there [00:53:00] listening and thinking I could never, like I was, I was a 16 year old kid, like I could never literally, and it happened . So I just want to inspire people out there to look at this and like, you got your start in all of this by entering competitions after hours and doing that kind of thing.

Melodie: Yeah.

Evan: Seriously consider doing that. You never know what's gonna happen. Like you said you thought there was no chance you were gonna win and you won. I thought the exact same thing, so as a high schooler going into architecture school, now that this is not maybe a project that I would put in my portfolio or anything. Knowing what I know now, but still, it was a big deal to say I've drawn a house that got built. That was a big deal to me. I can only imagine, and it doesn't matter how old you are and it doesn't matter what you're doing now, that this could be, a huge opportunity. And so it's really cool to hear that you guys are, it's not just an ideas competition, it's not just the kind of thing where.

take all these [00:54:00] ideas and then use 'em for our own, thing later. No, we're gonna build your idea that you come up with. Obviously there's gonna be a process that happens after the design part of it to actually make it a real thing, but still like, this is a huge opportunity.

It's so cool to hear that. And it just reminded me so, vividly of something that's happened to me in my past that I had to share that because I really want to inspire people to take it on.

Melodie: I love that. That's such a great story too. Desktop 3D printers are so ubiquitous now. Architects and designers don't have access to this technology. I mean, architects and designers don't have access to much construction technology whatsoever. So I'm hoping this competition will really open up that landscape to be thinking about construction technologies in a new way.

And, I really intrigue everybody to take a look at our website. It's initiative 90 nine.com and there will be more information there very soon.

Evan: Cool. I'll definitely put that link in the show notes [00:55:00] and to follow along with you and ICON on social media and the web and Melodie. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for having it with me today.

Melodie: Thanks so much, Evan. It's a pleasure.

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Programming note: the TRXL podcast is back. In case you missed it, there's a link to the latest episode with Roger Krulak, CEO and Funder of FullStack Modular just above the fold. In other news at TRXL HQ, there's been a rebranding, a new site, and now I'm happy to offer memberships. Here's the announcement along with a special launch offer. Please consider supporting what I'm doing here directly.

The NewsAI continues to dominate the headlines but there's plenty of other stuff worth paying attention to right now:

Martyn Day talks Text-to-BIM and BIM 2.0 with the team at Hypar
Are generative design tools weapons of mass architectural destruction?
Vocal deepfakes are getting seriously good
My thoughts on Microsoft bringing AI to Office
Stephen Wolfram explains what ChatGPT is doing and why it works
New ChatGPT plugins: there’s a bot for that

The latest TRXL podcast episode109: ‘Parametrically Achievable’, with Roger KrulakA conversation with Roger Krulak.TRXLEvan Troxel

Text-to-BIM 2.0Martyn Day of AEC Magazine interviews Ian Keough and Anthony Hauck of Hypar about their new text-to-BIM workflows paving the way to BIM 2.0. The entire article is worth reading to see how Ian and Anthony are skating to where the puck is going while some others are seemingly skating to where it has only previously been.

Martyn Day:

From what I have seen so far, Hypar is aiming to potentially save weeks, if not months, of time, with far-reaching consequences for the industry, in terms of software usage (how many seats of BIM tools are required), how the industry bills its clients, and how much software companies bill us.

Seems like this might be kind of a big deal, I dunno.

Hypar is the culmination of all the years of industry experience that Keough and Hauck have collectively amassed, with its blend of expressive programming and ease of use. As it stretches from concept to fabrication, it has the potential to replace BIM 1.0 workflows with highly tailored solutions, but more importantly, reduce workloads from weeks to seconds.

Making something like Hypar takes guts and patience.

Read the whole interview here. This quote comes to mind:

💡“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

– Buckminster Fuller🎧 Related TRXL podcast episodes:

003: 'A Local Maxima', with Ian Keough
032: ‘Punctuated Equilibrium’, with Anthony Hauck
048: ‘How it Started; How it’s Going’, with Ian Keough and Clifton Harness

Weapons of mass architectural destructionYet again, Paul Wintour at Parametric Monkey provides a ~~scathing~~ sobering critique of the recent history of technology solutions for the architectural profession around the theme of generative design. While Paul is opinionated and is often telling the industry things we don’t think we want to hear, this is a well written and thought provoking point of view that I respect.

Paul:

Startups across the globe were claiming they were using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to design buildings, and they had the .ai domain to prove it. But from what I could gather – artificial or not – there wasn’t much intelligence about the design output.

I find the ‘unintended consequences’ of the article particularly worth noting. To our easily-gamed attention span for all-things flashy and exciting (squirrel!) from the so-called saviors of the profession, his sentiment aligns with mine regarding the potential dangers of some of these solutions. For him it’s generative design and for me it’s AI.

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Extending beyond Microsoft's previous Github Copilot name, 'Copilot' is soon coming to the masses. This is, in my view, perfect branding for something like this. It keeps you and me at the center of the creative process and allows our copilot to come in and augment us when needed.

They have invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI and the news about integrating GPT-4 into the ubiquitous Office suite seems like an obvious next step after their recent Bing integration to realize a significant return on investment. Office is a paid subscription after all, and Bing is free. Products aside, are either of these companies interested in methodical, safe, and ethical technology advancements? Or are they purely motivated by greed?

Microsoft is obviously pushing to get further embedded into enterprise—beyond their existing market dominance—in order to have businesses become even more reliant on the conveniences of what AI offers to those who use these products everyday.

Microsoft:

With Copilot, you’re always in control. You decide what to keep, modify or discard. Now, you can be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams.

Everyone wants to be more creative, analytical, expressive, productive, and collaborative. How can anyone refuse an offer like that?

Check out the launch video here to get a sense of what is coming. No arrival date has been announced but I fully expect it to actually ship.

In my opinion Microsoft pushed out the new and “improved” Bing way too early (as exemplified in Ben Thompson's story about Sydney in a previous edition of the TRXL newsletter) and I think they’re moving too fast to put GPT-4 into a product that people actually use on a daily basis—Office 365—as opposed to Bing which ~~pretty much no one uses~~ has less than ~~10%~~ 9% market share as of the time of this article.

“Move fast and break things” is a common trope in tech, but I truly wonder if breaking the human race is considered an acceptable amount of collateral damage in this system of racing to be first to summit the AI mountain. And by that, I obviously mean to monetize it in substantial ways as a tool we can't live without, in perpetuity.

Facebook and Twitter have contributed to the undermining of the US political system. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have figured out how to keep our attention, milk our dopamine production, and tell us and our kids what we are going to watch next. In order to compete, Microsoft is pursuing the next wave of social engineering on businesses with this move. This kind of AI implementation into the most basic and foundational tools of business will surely lead to blind acceptance of whatever the machines tell us without much thought as to whether it’s accurate or not.

Don’t believe that claim? I'd argue that we’re already trained to accept the top Google search results without digging deeper to look for alternative sources. The same goes for Wikipedia. Yelp basically tells us where to eat when we're away from home. The list goes on. Attention spans are at an all-time low. What's delayed gratification again? We can't remember.

Convenience outweighs accuracy every day of the week. After all, how we spend our time is considered our most precious resource so shortcuts are willfully taken.

The main fear of mine in regard to where this could be heading is based on the old garbage-in-garbage-out adage. Because AI is trained using existing information on the internet—without any disclosure as the to weights applied to the also undisclosed sources—it's very likely disinformation will be as prevalent as useful information. These AI-as-a-product companies employ black box development in the name of intellectual property and capitalism, and that's a problem because society has already been slowly trained over time to have blind faith in the "answers" these platforms effortlessly spit out.

This time will be no different and potentially adds up to catastrophic results in just about everything from the education of our next generations1 (AI already knows everything we used to have to learn in school and passes most all of the exams), to the next election cycle, to the public's waning trust in institutions, and so on. Sure, there are benefits too! But is it really worth it if they don't outweigh the downsides?

Why haven't there been long term studies done before rolling this out? Clearly this is all moving as fast as possible and probably not in a responsible way. If studies exist we would have heard that side of the story to help reassure us. They're figuring it out as they go along using us in an experiment without a control group.

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this. I'm definitely not an AI researcher and I'm also not a social scientist. But I don't think Big Tech has learned particularly well from even near-past outcomes wherein they performed social experimentation on the masses to drive advertising and get us to watch what they (i.e. the algorithms) decide we are going to watch next. I previously mentioned that time is considered our most important resource, but clearly it's our attention.

I’ll be treading lightly into this new frontier. These companies, for the most part, haven't had and don't continue to have our best interests at heart.

What I know in my bones is that once people get their hands on this it’s going to be as addictive as crack so I fully expect my trepidation to fall on deaf ears. Yet the product-market fit for this is obvious and it all seems inevitable. After many years of Microsoft being on the defense it’s very interesting to see them playing once again on offense.

I could go on a long digression about the education system here but I won't. I'll just say that education used to be about learning how to learn, not about knowing all the answers.

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I'm thrilled today to announce what’s next with TRXL. Don't miss the special, limited-time launch offer further down the page 👇

🌐 New website for TRXL* Self explanatory... As they say, you are here. * Things will fill out as we settle in, and some old links might be brokenfor a bit but it will all gel in time. This site is a conglomeration of many past blogs and websites so the archive goes way back. It turns out I've been doing this for a very long time. Kick the tires and have a look around!

🗞️ TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter* I’m now publishing a TRXL AEC/tech email newsletter about once a week, and at this point I’ve published 5 of them to get in the groove. * Why do a newsletter? To share more granular industry news that adds to the context of the podcast episodes. While the episodes are a more timeless resource, the topics aren’t about the latest news—they go much deeper. The newsletter helps fill out the spectrum of AEC and tech from my perspective. * Check it out, I think you’ll like it. It’s your very own shortcut to the things worth paying attention to as we track the co-evolution of AEC and technology.

💸 Podcast and Newsletter Sponsorships* TRXL is once again an independent podcast. I’ve built a small team to produce the show, and with the changes to the business I have to find ways to make it work. * Ad-based sponsorships, which you’re already familiar with on the show, are something I’m now solely responsible for. So if you’re a brand or company who has a product or service worth putting in front of this lovely, loyal and dedicated audience of AEC industry professionals, I invite you to learn more and get in touch with me by visiting the sponsor page.

💳 TRXL+ Memberships* I now have the technology in place to invite you to directly support what I’m doing here. By offering membership, it’s my hope that you see the value of this endeavor and that you will directly support what I am doing here. * Members receive some nice perks, and one of the biggest benefits is that member-supported content is ad-free. I think this makes the most sense for those willing to directly contribute to help me accomplish what I’ve set out to do. * You’ll get your own private feed of ad-free TRXL+ podcast episodes and an ad-free version of the newsletter, with additional member-only content over time.

🚀 Special launch offerGood only for the next month, here's a special offer for you early adopters. It’s a pretty nice discount that is applied to the first payment for yearly supporters. Don't miss out!

Get the special TRXL+ launch offer hereThe goal is for the TRXL podcast and newsletter to add value not only to our industry but also to you and your career, and I hope in return you can help me do that and more by becoming a member.

I value your time and attention, and I thank you for both. I do this proudly for you.

🚀 Onward!

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Roger Krulak of FullStack Modular joins the podcast to talk about:

FullStack Modular's design to manufacturing approach
how they achieve their deliverables using parametric design tools
the typical inefficiency of development that drives innovation at FullStack Modular
the degree to which the building industry is, in Roger’s words, a “big monster”
Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA)
the goal of getting the entire team all on the same side of the table
industrialized construction
and other topics

Sponsor: TRXL+* read the announcement * subscribe to the new TRXL AEC/tech newsletter * support TRXL directly with membership * get a special launch discount when you sign up for a year

Latest TRXL AEC/tech Newsletter🗞️ AEC/tech Newsletter #5The TRXL podcast is returning next week along with some other fun announcements. Until then, here’s what’s happening in our real-time watch of the co-evolution of architecture, tech, and adjacent areas. * Kia automaker embraces ‘design ethos’ with the debut of their new EV * GPT-4 can turn a pict…TRXLEvan TroxelLinks* TRXL+ Launch Announcement post * TRXL+ special launch offer for TRXL podcast listeners * Roger on LinkedIn * FullStack Modular website * FullStack Modular on Twitter * FullStack Modular on LinkedIn * FullStack Modular on Instagram

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Episode Transcript109: ‘Parametrically Achievable’, with Roger Krulak

Evan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Troxel podcast. This is Evan Troxel. If I sound a little different. Maybe like I'm coming to you from a different location. That's because I am. Troxel HQ has a new home. I've officially landed in the Pacific Northwest.

More specifically, I'm now officially an Oregonian. So after a short hiatus, I'm thrilled that the podcast is back. If you've been a long time listener, hopefully, you know, by now my goal with this podcast is to add value to the people of the AEC industry.

That's you through these conversations and I couldn't be more excited about the upcoming guests on the show as we track the co-evolution of architecture and technology. If you're new to the podcast. Welcome. I recommend going back to the beginning of the catalog. If you're looking for a master's degree level of education in this realm. Which is all made possible by the incredible guests that have joined the podcast over the past [00:01:00] two years. Before we get into today's conversation. I want to let you know that I've been working on many things behind the scenes.

To get ready for what's next with Troxell and I want to tell you about them now. I've got a new website, which is allowing me to do some great new things. The address is the same@trxl.co.

The first new thing this allows me to do is have a newsletter. I'm now publishing a Troxel AEC tech email newsletter about once a week. And at this point I've already published five of them to help you track the pulse of our industry. So why do a newsletter. it's a way for me to share more granular industry news that adds to the context of the podcast episodes. My goal is for the episodes to be more of a timeless resource. So naturally the topics aren't about the latest news.

And the newsletter helps fill out the spectrum of AEC and tack on Troxell from my perspective. Check it out. I think you'll like it. It's your very own shortcut to the things worth paying attention to, as we track the co-evolution of [00:02:00] architecture and technology.

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and with the changes to the business, I have to find ways to make it work. Ad base sponsorships, which you're already familiar with on the show r something I'm now solely responsible for here.

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Memberships to what I call Troxell plus. I now have the technology in place to invite you to directly support what I'm doing here by offering memberships. It's [00:03:00] my hope that you see the value of this endeavor and that you will directly support what I'm doing here.

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So with membership to Troxell plus you'll get your own private feed for ad-free episodes of the podcast and an ad-free version of the newsletter with additional member only content over time. And I'm doing a special launch offer for the next month. That's for you early adopters out there. It's a pretty nice discount that is applied for the first payment for yearly supporters,

A link for the special offer is in the show notes for this episode and on the website. So it shouldn't be too hard to find.

My goal is for the Troxell podcast and newsletter to add value, not only to our industry, but also to you and your career. And I hope in return, you can help me do that and more by becoming a member.

So in summary, we've got a new [00:04:00] season of episodes with an amazing lineup of guests coming. The new Troxell AEC tech newsletter. Subscriptions and memberships with a special launch offer for the next month for you early adopters out there.

And you can see all of this and learn more@thefantasticnewtroxell.co website. That's T R X l.co. There's also an announcement outlining all of the things I just talked about on the new site. And you can find a link to it in the show notes. or@troxell.co.

Okay with that, let's get on with this episode. In this episode, I welcome. Roger Krulak. Roger has over 35 years or bringing innovation to the construction and development sides of the real estate business. In 2016, he founded full-stack modular, which has established itself as a disruptor using advanced technologies for building design and using high rise, modular construction.

Tech-driven and maiden the USA. Full-stack has factories. He's in Brooklyn and Portland, and it specializes in mid and high rise. [00:05:00] Multifamily buildings, hotels, and student housing in urban environments. Roger received the popular mechanics breakthrough award in 2014 for his work on creating a high rise modular process. He also sat on the international panel of experts for Singapore from 2014 to 2016.

He frequently speaks at the country's top design schools and universities, including MIT, Harvard, and Yale. And he's been publicly recognized as a leader in innovation with multiple features in the New York times wall street journal wired, and many others. Roger received his degree in management and organizational psychology from Babson college.

In this episode, we discuss full stacks, designed to manufacturing approach, how they achieve their deliverables using parametric design tools, the typical inefficiency of development that drives innovation at full stack, the degree to which the building industry is in Rogers words, a big monster. Design for manufacturing assembly, or DFMA the goal of getting the entire team all on the same side of the table.[00:06:00] Industrialized construction and other topics. So without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Roger Krulak. Roger, thanks for joining me.

Roger: Evan, thanks for inviting me to visit your show.

Evan: Yeah. I'm looking forward to this conversation. I've had a couple of guests on here before talking about modularized and prefab, things like that, and you're a veteran in this space, and so I'd love it if you could maybe start at the beginning of where did this idea come from? How did you get here?

What is your trajectory been in the industry to get to this?

Roger: Certainly. One way to describe it is that there's really nothing new under the sun. And to be fair, I grew up in a construction and development industry and family. Always we're working on housing projects even from a very young age. And my grandfather was involved in a modular company in the early seventies as part of [00:07:00] Project Breakthrough.

I don't consider myself that inventive. However while I was working for Forest and we had the charge of building 6,500 affordable housing units. I was lucky enough to develop a solution to build high rise, dense urban environment, modular buildings, a significant height, which was in my mind, the breakthrough that has the.

Evan: Okay. That's, that is a lot of housing. 6,500 units. And was that over a long period of time? Was that in a short period of time? Was that one

project like how did

that That's a big

Roger: it didn't actually all get, built, but the reason we created the system was to build it. And then of course one of my favorite quotes, life is what happens when you're making other. The economy was tight. A bunch of the land got sold to a Chinese development company, and so we built the tallest modular building in the world, which is no longer the tallest modular building in the world.

But the system got proven out and, and full Stack Modular has been able to take that and utilize it, across the.

Evan: [00:08:00] That's interesting. So, it's in the name, right? It's this idea of going up with modular, and stacking these blocks on top of each other, like building legos. You said your grandfather had a history in this. It's in your blood, maybe in your dna.

Tell us that story of like, how did you get from not building like this to actually like developing that system to build like this.

Roger: Yeah. I grew up in what you would call the Midwest, which isn't really the Midwest. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and we were very used to building buildings on a very tight margin with very predictable costs. and when I moved to New York not only did my head spin, I couldn't believe the amount that people were working.

But it was incredibly interesting and distressing at how volatile the construction market was for anything, anything of significant size and. For a city of the company that I was working for, had made this commitment to build all these affordable units. And from a business perspective, it just made no sense.

It didn't feel like you could [00:09:00] ever make those kinds of amount of units with that density given the construction environment happen. So, when something isn't working you can either throw up your hands or you can come up with another solution. And I was fortunate enough to be able to be given a little r and d money and create a world-class team to try to come up with a solution to predictably deliver cost effective, mid to high-rise housing in a factory.

And that's where full stack modular. Really started.

Evan: That's interesting. So just the ability to make the decision to try something completely different. did that get birthed inside of four cities Yes.

that's a huge risk.

Roger: it was a huge risk. And I remember even today, the investment committee conversations about should we try this to the credit of the, former executives of foresee they decided that it was worth it.

And I believe that it [00:10:00] was the next big step for the modular and certainly fully volumetric modular industry to allow it to move forward where you see the kind of growth that you're seeing quarterly

Evan: I just, I wanna pause on that for a moment because I think that's kind of rare, and at least in the architecture space for a company to. Take time out to explore a completely different business model. And I can only imagine, it's not only risk from the standpoint of you're doing it differently, delivering in a much different way, but all of the infrastructure it takes to put in place to actually make that happen.

To build the machine, basically to produce and take total control over that entire aspect. Because when you're going into this paradigm shift compared to the type of way you're used to delivering buildings, you're now responsible for every single piece of it, and I guess as a developer you kind of are, but it doesn't mean you do it all, right?

You maybe [00:11:00] orchestrate and do those things in the background, kind of like an architect would do with a building, right? They draw the plans and then they observe or they do construction administration. They're not actually doing that kind of stuff, and so to. Do this kind of business model shift and actually take charge of all of that had to be like, I'm just wondering like what were those kinds of conversations like for the business to say we're willing to explore that

Roger: Well, first of all, great question and I think you far underestimate the amount of effort that

takes because it's not only, it's not only, yes, we're taking all of this under our own wing. It's we are gonna change the trajectory of design bid, build process that is 13.5% of the world economy.

And we're gonna tell everyone that they should follow a design build approach or a design manufacturer approach, because that's the only way you could really build modular buildings. That's on one side and on [00:12:00] the other side. Anybody who's been in the architecture or engineering industry for a long time knows.

Over the past several decades, if not several score the movement away from collaborating on decisions in a way that is effective and coming up with complete executable designs has been going the opposite direction. Partially cuz of the insurance industry, partially because of the insurance for the professionals involved and.

not only do you have this sort of iterative value engineering process, you also have hands off approach, by force for two reasons. One of 'em is the developer doesn't want to pay the upfront costs that it really takes to do a comprehensive design engineered and two is that the insurance companies don't want the architects to.

The mechanical engineer, that, that system's not gonna fit. So in some ways I agree with you. It is a lot to take [00:13:00] on. On the other hand, I didn't really see the way that the industry who was moving, that there was any other way to get anything done. Before I had to retire.

Evan: Yeah. So, you had to do this , that's

Roger: I do feel like maybe, I don't know if I had to do it, although I am, I'm definitely someone who likes to shake things up if they're not working. But I do think the industry needs this as a tool. The shift in the industry must be design build for anything that.

Pally achievable. And multi-family buildings have so many fixed parameters. You're not asking for a lot. Whereas you know, museums or bases or, new city developments, there's not that many parameters. You have a lot of flexibility.

But if you're building a mid, the highrise. You need elevators and hallways and stairwells and windows in the bedrooms for the most part. And, [00:14:00] like you, you don't have that many decisions to make. We had a few and it ends up being a little bit more controlled process, but at the end of the day,

The one thing we do is we design for manufacturer. We make it that you can build it in a factory and stack it up like Legos, as you described. And the only way that happens is if everything is built to the exact precision that it needs to be in order to be able to put it together.

Evan: Yeah. I can only imagine the huge shift that had to happen as you went through this process for the development company, not only from what you're delivering, but also how you're delivering it. How the team produced the things the learning that had to happen to produce for manufacturing.

To draw for that or to model for that. And so maybe take us. Through some of that process that happened because this is a major evolution for a business to go through. And I think on many levels people think they have to start over or start fresh rather than [00:15:00] try to change the thing that already exists into something else.

Roger: So actually I think it is an interesting question, and I'm not sure if I'm going to answer it directly because I look at it this way. I look at it as the inefficiency of development from the world we play in, which is, housing of any sort, hotels, student housing, affordable housing.

Market rate, the deficit in all of those markets is relatively insurmountable, and the production of housing units worldwide and the United States pick a state is well below the need. So, it's really hard to imagine that we as human beings and innovative people and, in a very wealthy part of the world, can't solve a problem.

And we have created, I hate to say it, a big monster. I mean, The industry is slow and inefficient across the [00:16:00]board. And so that frustrates me to no. and uh, one option is to quit and become a cook, and the other is to try to shift the way that we do things. And yes it is a colossal effort.

It requires exactly the opposite of the process that as an industry are used to. And it also requires a shift in attitude for all of the players. I mean A design build team is all of the stakeholders sitting on the same side of the table trying to figure out how to accomplish goals.

That is not how we as an industry have been behaving for, I don't know whether it's 50 years or a hundred years or 400 years, but it's for a long time

Evan: And, how long has Four Point been in business previous to this

Roger: Forest City. BU business for a hundred years. It's a hundred plus years. Yeah. I it. And to be fair to them, the modular business that I mentioned was actually originally part of Forest City in [00:17:00] the seventies. And It failed because they had one customer which was the US government and once that project breakthrough, which was affordable assisted living facilities once that program dried up after the end of the Carter administration that business dried up. And and that was showing my age a little bit, but I was a young kid when that happened. . So, I remember it very distinctly and it was a concrete solution and it was amazingly efficient for what it was, but amazingly inefficient for what it is that we're talking about right now.

Yeah. So take us through

Evan: kind of

Roger: how tech plays into this, because I think you said that started around the 2008. Recession time.

And obviously there's been a huge shift in the last, 15 years over in the technology space and things are moving quickly.

But give us an idea of how that started and how it's going now, because I can imagine there's been huge developments in that.[00:18:00]

Oh yeah, it's interesting because mentioned that this early 19 seven. Modular was literally people drawing on, blue line paper, trying to create a way to manufacture things in an intelligent way when you really couldn't , there was no parametric design.

There was no CAD really to speak of. So in 2008 it was way farther along than that, but it was still pretty early on in the evolution. Of, AI tools, parametric, generative tools and all of the things that are now rolling out on a daily basis. but the three dimensional, cad drafting, whether that be in a Cilla framework or a Revit framework.

It existed in 2008 and has always been necessary because unlike a building where you have specifications that say, mechanical ducting has to be at this tolerance and steel has to be at this tolerance, and wood has to be at this tolerance and plumbing pipes have to be at this tolerance.

If you [00:19:00] think about building in pieces, everything has to meet the same tolerance. . , so drawings had to be preci. A and the integration and clash detection and all of the things that we talk about are matter of course, for building. Offsite and having the tools to measure that accurately, which was a huge challenge in 2008.

And basically you can buy on Amazon something that measures to that accuracy if you know how to use it today. So, it's a big, it's, so technology is making this process significantly easier and um, the risk factors significantly. As long as you're considering the right parameters.

Evan: I want to go back to something you mentioned a minute ago. The inefficiencies of traditional construction that you've lived through and grown up with versus what you're experiencing now with this that you can't achieve without technology and without all the players at the table, [00:20:00] without them all sitting on the same side of the table.

If you were to throw a number out, what would you say is the waste in that process? If you were to think about it from like a, dollar signs, right? If, is it 50 cents on the dollar versus something way less in this, Direct to manufacturer type, like what? There is so much at so many levels.

If you were to just kind of take a swing at that what do you think that number is? That everybody who's dealing in the old paradigm still at some level is just accepted. They've just accepted it.

Roger: that's such an interesting question. And one day maybe I'll have the money to pay somebody to figure it out, but I think these are the things you have to think about what they cost, for instance, , how much does time cost? It obviously costs a lot more now than it did seven months ago. How much does when we were at Forest City, we did a lot of residential hunting.

Like how much does a development process where you're kicking the tires and all of the people you're [00:21:00]paying to do that and the architects and the engineers and the lawyers for projects that never happen how often does that happen? How often does somebody have a development idea and then they go send it out to a general contractor, the price comes out, double what they can actually afford to make the proforma work in.

And then how much does it cost when you buy out a project, you sign a. Where you're not on the same side of the table and the general contractor or the architect used the holes in the project to get change orders and increase costs. So what do really contracted projects, how much do they really cost at the end of the day?

How late are they? How much does that cost? So, you're asking a question that I'm trying to put all the pieces together and my guess is you're probably if you were able to calculate it in the 30, fully in the 30% range of wasted money now, of course it diminishes if you're, doing multiple [00:22:00] projects in both cases, if you're doing multiple projects that are somewhat similar and obviously geography by geography the dollar shift.

But I would not be surprised if that's not a 30% waste number

Evan: I wouldn't be surprised if it was higher than that. I've heard it as high as 50 cents on the dollar. And like, that's a big dirty secret to people who buy buildings, owners who do the development. And

it's because an enormous amount of waste in the process , and that speaks to these types of solutions that you're talking about,

with owning this whole stack all the way through and the amount of efficiency that you can gain by doing it. And you said it's not for everything, right? It's not the solution for all buildings everywhere, but it is, it does fit quite a few different verticals. And it seems like, I'm just wondering , did you guys think about that when you were first starting out with this idea about that the sheer amount of waste that could be avoided or at least that you could get a lot better at over time?

Roger: Yes. The interesting thing about it is that, a, [00:23:00] a factory or a productization, regardless of what it is, whether it be housing or cars or telephones or, earth movers the value proposition is the more that you manufacture something, the more you get efficient in it.

If you think about The actual construction, the hard costs as it were. You have labor and materials. Can you actually buy materials better if you're manufacturing them? Maybe a little bit. But what the real opportunity is labor savings, right? And labor savings happen on on logical repetition to meet the market deed of what's going on.

And so, The value proposition is so antithetical to the way that we do development today that requires a mind shift. And there are people that are getting it now, but when we started in 2008, every meeting I went into, somebody under their breath was talking about how out of my mind I was

Evan: I can only imagine you, this'll never work kind of talk.

Roger: Oh, [00:24:00] you have No, I mean I have so many stories about people who were actually even in the modular business telling me how it was crazy and maybe I am , but it's so nice to see the industry growing at the rate it is. And I just heard that like the world of modular is expecting 1200 people this year, people from 20 countries. A part of the industry that is not stopping right now. And I think that the level of improvement in innovation that's coming our way in short stead is exciting and worth noting. And the good news is that, I don't know a developer who has any major pipeline that isn't asking someone in.

either in their world or in their company to invest in understanding the opportunity.

Evan: Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. They not just through a diversification like program, right? Like they, I'm sure that they want to and like you said, the more you do it, the better you get at it. The more comfortable you get, the less risk there [00:25:00] is because, , you're building tools, you're building knowledge, you're building all these things along the way that only help over time.

So yeah, I can imagine that's only gonna be continuing to grow.

Roger: Yeah, I mean, talking about technology, imagine you get a floor plate that works modularly, that's a series of three mods that, varies, whether it's one twos or threes. You get that all laid out and then you write a dynamo script to create the rest of the building. Pretty darn efficient,

so.

Evan: Let's talk about that tech stack that you guys have developed. You're talking about something that's now you said, been in development since 2008. I'm sure a lot's changed, but give us an idea of the kind of the tech stack that exists.

And I don't just mean software. I guess I'm interested in all of it, I'm interested in as much as you're willing to share, like what is the process, what are the tools, what are the things that. let's even narrow it down a little bit. What's possible now that wasn't possible five years ago?

And how do you at [00:26:00] Full Stack achieve?

Roger: Yeah, I think. , it's amazing cuz I talk about, how exciting that technology blend with, design and manufacturing is. But the interesting and most important thing is what I've been talking about a lot, which is the thought leadership, and. Parametric process by which we create buildings, as a group of developers, engineers, architects, contractors and the collaboration tools associated with that also require the willingness on the part of the participants.

So, for instance, and I'm not ignoring your question, I'm just sort of

up, One of the things that has to happen in the design for manufacturer process so that you can utilize the tools, some of which I already mentioned, is that you need an architect and engineers for that matter, to be willing to share agency with the system that we're going to use [00:27:00] to create the building.

So full stack modular. A system, it has a structural system, it has an m e P distribution system, it has a waterproofing system, it has a self-sealing facade system and it has an erection system and process. And all of those are part of what we have. So now all of those pieces and parts have both physicality and technology associated with it.

Now what we need to do is we need to. An architect, we need to share those pieces. As sort of a portion of the agency , tools with which the architect can use to create the building. So that transfer is two-dimensional information, but it's also three-dimensional distribution and.

Understanding of how the things go together on the site. And all of those things are part, not only of our system, but also part of our [00:28:00] process. So, it is not anymore. Getting a completely designed building that doesn't pencil out conventionally saying, can you modularize this and make it cheaper?

Please wave your magic wand. The people in the industry are understanding that it is something you have to be willing to share if the architect or designer or developer is willing to incorporate these systems and processes into the design for manufacturer process, it goes a lot faster

and cost predictably so.

Evan: I'd like to get back to the tech and the tooling part of it. Cause I think the audience would be interested in hearing what those pieces are robotics involved, obviously CNCS involved and it goes, I'm sure way beyond that.

But the idea of, I've done some of the panelized construction, not modular, not volumetric, modular. And one of the things that was very clear was that it wasn't cheaper, but it was faster

when,

and that only became clear to [00:29:00] us over time. That wasn't even said upfront. I Obviously speed is an issue.

In construction projects. The projects that I was working on happened to be education facilities, which have, a deadline. Is about kids getting into a classroom at a certain date. And so working from there backwards it kind of boxed us into using a system like this because the speed was so much greater, but it didn't cost any less.

Is that still true? Is that because, I think, can you modularize this and make it cheaper? Is kind of an uneducated question to ask because it's like there's three constraints. Pick two, right? It's fast cheap is that still holding true with the solutions that you're offering from Full Stack

Roger: I think I mentioned a little bit earlier is like, what does a building cost just because bought it at a hundred dollars , did it really cost a hundred dollars? At the end of the day, chances are no, but on top of. I did explain that the repetitiveness and utilization of the system and the ability of the labor, whether [00:30:00] that be robotic labor or human labor or some combination the repetitiveness of it increases speed, decreases cost.

So the more that gets embraced, the more chance you have of decreasing the actual cost, you're definitely gonna also decrease the time. And they're linked to each other. So, with a repetitive process, you definitely have the opportunity to save, I would say, up to 20, somewhere between 15 and 20% against a conventional solution of the same type.

So that is definitely possible. but and it requires incorporation of those system and processes in a way that is incorporating, diminishing the amount of variability, circulating around a corridor with units rather than mirroring them using a minimum amount.

Variety of say, modules, maximum of six instead of 27. Because all of those things increase productivity and the capacity to [00:31:00] automate it in a rapid shifting form. So

whether that's machine

code or instructions for a carpenter to build or anything.

Evan: So if we get back to the idea of like, what in your world is now possible that wasn't possible five years ago and learning everything that you've learned, is there anything you can share in there that is an interesting process or tooling or system that is really changing the game for you guys in the last five?

Roger: Yeah, I I think one of the things that I mentioned earlier, which is that if you can come up. Floor, even a two dimensional floor layout that works using our parameters. You can write a dynamo script to do all the drawings. I mean, In a modular building, the production drawings are, for a hundred thousand foot building thousands and thousands of pages.

It can actually be created in a couple of hours by running some scripts that really didn't exist in 2002 seven 2008. The other thing, obviously that's happened because, The evolution of the [00:32:00] industry as a whole is we didn't really have access to libraries that had accurate dimensions in them in 2007, 2008.

Occasionally you would find one, but there is nobody in the industry right now that doesn't have I shouldn't say there's nobody, there's almost nobody I found that doesn't have an. CAD library that you can access to make sure you use those pieces correctly. And they're dimensionally accurate.

And for us with precision of, less than an eighth of an inch across all systems, that's a huge deal. So that's a big advantage. And of course, the transferability because, so, Companies, AutoCAD, Katia, they've all been focused on integration for manufacturing.

The cross code cross data, common access to information is so much more available than it was so much in 2007. 2008 was hard coded , so every time you change something, it didn't [00:33:00] work. And so much of that exists today is relying on, transportable data sets.

And so that's a big advantage.

Evan: Yeah, I can imagine. Can you give us an idea about the full stack modular itself? The company, like how, what kinds of divisions is a weird word to use in a company where you're talking about full integration. But how is your company set up to operate in this really collaborative way where everybody is

Roger: Yeah.

Evan: of the table?

Roger: We are definitively always design manufacturer solution in what we call the sort of design manufacturer construct world, which is design, build, insert industrialized cons. . So we are always that and we are often collaboratively working with a general contractor to provide a full design manufacturer construct turnkey solution.

But there is really no way in our world to do our job unless we are not sitting at the table day one with the design [00:34:00] manufacturer construct team and driving. , everything that goes through the point that the mods are wrapped and ready to go to site. That's what full stack.

Evan: Okay. I remembered what I was gonna ask you earlier, and it has to do with that last piece that you just mentioned about getting it to the site. And I've heard from other, either modularized construction, actually I heard it directly from a volumetric modular guy, was it starts with logistics.

The design problems, like, can we get the things to the site on the site, placed on the site? And if we can't, basically you start there and work backwards because if you can't, it's not a, it's not an option. So is that still hold true?

Roger: It's funny it's, people say that to me all the time, and I'm not saying there's not a place where you can't put a big mod because of course there is. But I'm, like I've been in New York for most of my career, so I can pretty much get a mod anywhere, I actually would say and by the way, I'm not dismissing that.

Obviously moving something that's [00:35:00] 12 to 14 feet wide and 30 to 40 feet long, that weighs, 15 to 17 tons is nothing. It's not, it's something you have to think about. But to me, the biggest concern, and we talked about it earlier, is.

What gives value to the end user, whether that be the developer themselves or the people who are gonna live in it, what gives value to them and how do you make sure that you're preserving some of that value for them? And one of the big frontiers in industrialized construction right now is how do you make sure that the work that's going on.

Doesn't absorb all of the savings that, industrialized construction creates. And that interface is key. And we have full stack been spending a lot of time on that. At this point, collaboratively, we're not doing it ourselves, but we are spending a significant amount of time creating technologies, whether they be augmented reality or, [00:36:00] effective.

Graphic 3D communication on how things go together on site so that they can get the people that need to put it together, the right information so they're not overcharging for the work that happens there. That's a big frontier in our industry right now.

Evan: Yeah, so the idea of 4D sequencing ahead of time, that's a big piece of the puzzle, right? Because basically then you're providing the instructions to the installer to do it. Like you've thought through all of those logistics up front.

Roger: Yeah. Not only have we done that, but we've done I currently have an onsite electrical design for small, medium, and large building. I can quantify how many connection points that are gonna happen so that they can look at the trades that will need to make those connections. They're gonna get all the pieces and parts that we manufacture in the factory in order to connect them.

Because we are an all modular solution. The full SM e p is done in the factory and [00:37:00] just needs to be connected and we can show them drawing. And 4d, sequences of how that happens. We're not sending them out with, glasses right now, but we can certainly provide them, you know, an iPad that shows, oh yeah, this is how you do this connection.

Now, if you can take all that and say, okay, Mr. Onsite plumber, you're doing 168 of connections that look exactly like this, it's much easier, and we're taking all the risk out of it. If we make, at full. If we make a mistake based on the design and dimensionality, we take responsibility for it.

But assuming you're getting everything you need, what do you need to do? To me, that's the place where there's opportunity and savings to be aggregated for the end user. Whether that be an owner or developer.

Evan: Yeah. It's so interesting to see this shift over. Decades, I guess of, remember when a set of plans was 12 sheets? And the contractor was responsible for figuring out [00:38:00] how to run the ducks. And like we had a lot of single line diagrams back then, right? For H V C, for electrical, for plumbing, all those things.

And now, That is flipped, right? The script is flipped there, and all of that's figured out upfront, which makes the modeling process a lot more complicated, complex, right? There's a lot of complexity there. How do you feel about all that? I mean, Obviously there's huge efficiencies to begin there, to spend the time up upfront and not worry about that stuff. Not working when it's time for construction. So I'm sure you feel positively about it, but it's also a huge shift in the industry to put all of that onus on the designers up front.

Roger: Yep, it is. But look, it wasn't always that way. If you step back 20 years before when you're talking, like it was all like that. Everything was completely designed. It wasn't necessarily in 3D CAD because there wasn't 3D cad.

Everything was absolute at that time. The engineer knew exactly what they wanted and they there had to be some [00:39:00] coordination from class detection because there wasn't a way to, accurately. But those, if you look back, through the archives 50 years ago, the drawings were a thousand pages then, so I think actually we're just getting back to basics in my mind, and I think relying. , some random person who's the lowest bidder on a project. To be able to figure out what it is that the engineer had intended is a little bit delusional.

Evan: what could go wrong? Yeah,

Roger: Exactly. Exactly. Well, look, you're talking to the wrong guy to give you an opinion on that because I don't think there's really any other smart way to do it.

Evan: Yeah. Interesting. So, okay, so what are you excited about in the developments? What's coming out? Like you're making a case for this. Type of methodology of procurement for buildings for, obviously there's a huge demand and need for housing, like what you're specializing in.

And this is a great way to deliver and it doesn't all have to be capital [00:40:00] a architecture. Not that what you're doing isn't, but there's a huge need out there. We only need to do more of. Make the case for why people should be at least, architects and engineers who are interested in solving some of these huge problems in our society that need to be addressed for the way that you're going about it.

Roger: Yeah, I think. We all in this industry wanna see the things that we create

Manifested, and we talked about how many of them don't get

Evan: Yeah. there's there's a great saying, If it doesn't get built, it doesn't count that, that's in a

Roger: Yeah. so I'm like and I obviously lots of friends who are architects and engineers, like who wa you know, all the projects that never got built, who cares? And so, I never would say that, volumetric, modular construction is the answer to everything.

But in the world that we play in, it's radically. And so, if you wanna see things get built and you don't wanna spend your [00:41:00] life in job meetings talking about like, which toilet you're using, even though the project hasn't even been financed, like this is a really good way to do it, is it gives you an enough added parameters to.

It. And I love architecture, but to give architecture the ability to change the way that the building feels in the environment in which it's going to live, and the way that the people who live in it interact with the space that is created for them in a highly sustainable, incredibly carbon responsive way.

That doesn't require you to reinvent the wheel. And so if you're an architect who's in the multi-family hotel, student housing space, like this is a tool that you ought to at least understand the value proposition, and I think you're gonna like it.

Evan: Yeah I, you check a lot of boxes [00:42:00] with that, with your sales pitch right there, because can only imagine too, and maybe you can shed a little light on this but this is a scale question, but it's like, h how many projects are you guys doing a year? It seems to me with this approach there's more throughput as well,

so you're realizing more designs getting built than a typical, outfit would.

Roger: Yeah. No, I think the percentage of throughput is bigger. I think the other thing that is worth noting and something that you just touched on is that. , when you're manufacturing the throughput isn't necessarily what comes out of your specific geographic location where you're assembling mods, but it's what can you get through the process in a way that is.

That is time effective quality, effective, and produces what it needs to. Manufacturing has always been a maker buy conversation about everything that you [00:43:00] do. Construction hasn't generally been that way because the decision making was so dispersed between, the trade jurisdictions and the engineering jurisdictions and all of those things.

The one advantage that you have when you're manufacturing is you are just trying to figure out how to optimize what it is that you're creating and meet all the required parameters, including design, , including code, including, technology integration, including sustainability, including all of those things.

But you have lots of flexibility in how you do it, and frankly, it doesn't really matter. Unless there's some regulation associated with it, where in the world , that piece and part is created because you're putting it together in a manufacturing process rather than in a construction part.

Evan: That just reminds me of the Toyota production system,? , car makers in the us. Is kind of the Toyota idea back in, the seventies was just in time manufacturing versus warehouses full of parts. I'm sure you're familiar [00:44:00] with all that.

So can you go into that just a little bit to talk about that? Because, like you're saying , if parts can come from anywhere, , obviously this is still a logistics issue, like a procurement issue of all those things because you need 'em all to put 'em all together and it has to go in at just the right time so that the thing can ship out and get put onto the site in a complete manner rather than, like there were stories of, the Ford production line where, because nobody was allowed to stop it, pieces got left out, for instance.

So, how is that working with your guys? Are you guys buying all that in huge bulk numbers, or are you buying just what you need, just when you need it and dealing with it from a, as you go standpoint. How do you view that

for your strategy?

Roger: every time, all day, our purchasing department is a maker buy conversation, so, every time we're building a project, it's should we be making this in the factory? Do we have capacity and labor or should we be buying it so that we could get more throughput so that we could [00:45:00] meet our schedule for the next three buildings coming out?

And then the good news is that a lot of the suppliers who traditionally had been very construction focused either you get a hundred percent of everything or you get what we have in stock are now very open to packaging, assembling, delivering, kits of whatever we need whenever we need it, which makes that a lot easier.

And oftentimes they'll warehouse it for.

Evan: That's interesting. So what have we not talked about, that we need to talk about here? Is there anything that we've missed that you think is worth putting out there into the audience's ears?

Roger: ,

Yeah, it's reiterative rather than necessarily we've. But this process does require a significant shift in approach and attitude by all of the parties. The value proposition is significant, but the request is also significant if you [00:46:00]don't change the way that you develop projects collectively as a team, not only.

This process, this design, manufacture, construct, process, network. But in my mind, we have no hope of ever meeting the current need which is only growing.

Evan: Right.

Roger: And I want everybody to absorb that because we have a problem and we're not solving it.

Evan: Yeah, that's a great call to action and obviously you're a great example of making that decision and pursuing it to the nth degree. You have any words of advice for people taking that first step. What would that be? Because is it to talk to somebody like you? Is it to go to the conference that you talked about earlier on , like, where do people begin this process? Because if it truly is about meeting the needs that are out there, then .

These companies like Full Stack Modular, need to be willing to share. I assume that's [00:47:00] happening in certain capacities. So where does somebody.

Roger: I would pick a project that you want to develop and commit to following this process, at least from an initial. Engineered schematic design to see how it works. If you have the opportunity and your friend is doing it, then , by all means, sit in on their process.

But I would give it a shot because the chances of you being severely disappointed are slim. The possibility of you not recognizing all the savings that you had hoped. Significant, depending on how seasoned the team is. But I do suggest that you, visit some projects.

There are projects all over the world right now that are fun to look at. Some of 'em are the tallest modular buildings in the world. Some are the largest installations. Some of them are super automated factories. There's a lot going on and. . And so I would dig in and and take a little bit of a risk because there are [00:48:00] many competent, industrialized construction opportunities in the United States and in the world today, and it's growing daily,

Evan: One last question here, because this has crossed my mind a few times now is how regional are you?

Roger: We have a factory in Portland, Oregon, and we have a factory in New York. And generally it's around 500 miles, but we. Building some stuff for export right now? Both to the Caribbean and out even farther. And some of our projects in Portland, because we're right on the water, are significantly longer, 900 miles or stuff.

So from San Diego to Seattle. So there are opportunities, we can't really do anything anywhere. There are, transportation limitations from a cost perspective. So,

500 miles is, thousand max, I think much more than that in you're significantly decreasing the value proposition by the cost of transp.

Evan: mean, I bring that up because, you talk about going [00:49:00] into this type of delivery and procedure workflow, like there's room for more, right? There are a few companies out there like yours who have been in this for a long time and who have a. Experience and knowledge and wisdom about it, which is super important.

But at the same time, there is room for a lot more players in this market because the geography like, like you're talking about, the logistics, the shipping, like all of those things. We need this kind of thing all over the place to be able to meet the demand that exists.

Roger: Yeah. That is our view. And if you fast forward five years from now, our goal from full stack modular's perspective is to. , a front end franchisable solution so that people can run their own factories wherever they want in the world or in the United

States,, et cetera.

That's where we'd like to head because of what you just said, the, it's generally relatively local and the [00:50:00] needs all over the world are significant.

Evan: Mm. . Well, Roger, this has been a fantastic conversation. There's so, so many things packed into this episode that I'm gonna do my best to pull out the salient bits and put 'em into the show notes. And of course we'll link to Full Stack Modular and you online. Is there anything else that you would ask of the audience or that you would wanna point them to, to finish up?

Roger: I would encourage you to watch what's going on in the industry. Put ticklers for, Podcasts and presentations and news that's coming out, which is literally on an hourly basis on things going on in industrialized construction and modular industry.

Because it's both fast moving and significantly improving as we speak and live on a daily.

Evan: Fantastic. Well, Roger, once again, thank you for this conversation and I'll include all of the links to the appropriate things in the show notes for this episode [00:51:00] where you can also follow along with what Roger is doing. So Roger.

Roger: Thank you, Evan. Appreciate it.

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The TRXL podcast is returning next week along with some other fun announcements. Until then, here’s what’s happening in our real-time watch of the co-evolution of architecture, tech, and adjacent areas.

Kia automaker embraces ‘design ethos’ with the debut of their new EV
GPT-4 can turn a picture of a napkin sketch into a fully functioning website
Lumion 2023 is out and it’s been completely rebuilt
Vectorworks (?!) integrates with NVIDIA’s Omniverse
Images from Midjourney V5 are beginning to show up in social media

The latest TRXL podcast episodeReplay – ‘A Growth Mindset’, with Ellen Bensky — TRXLIn this special replay episode, Ellen Bensky of Turner Fleischer Architects joins the podcast to talk about how she and her team built a teaching organization and a learning culture, their experience in how that effectively works within the construct of a firm, the benefits that result when a firm dTRXLEvan Troxel

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The AI headlines won’t stop any time soon—and this week was no exception—but there are some other useful things worth knowing about as we track the co-evolution of architecture, tech, and adjacent fields.

Wonder Studio is a new, mind-blowing, AI-based animation app
Thinking through what it would take to slow or stop AI
Speckle’s new Rhino to Revit Mapping Tool
ChatGPT-Discord-powered StructureBot
TestFit’s cloud collaboration tools enter private beta
Design Tech Unravelled launches new home for Dynamo courses

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There are so many great items to share that I think a weekly release of this newsletter is the right cadence. This past week has been no exception. Here are the headlines:

NCARB Eliminates the ARE Rolling Clock Policy
The chatbot agenda
Architecture school is broken
Rhino 8 WIP features
The fine print of AI image generation
‘Spaces’ design software on iPad
Autodesk betas Dynamo and Grasshopper Data Exchange Connectors
Gropius House 3d walkthrough

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Drop everything. Stop whatever you’re doing and watch this video by Corridor Crew on their YouTube channel. I can’t imagine you’ll be disappointed. We are witnessing the future of filmmaking happening in public. RIP animators.

The remarkable thing to me—beyond the workflow design and final output—is the curiosity, the drive, and the playfulness in which they are always looking to push their creativity to the next level. I recommend watching other videos they’ve done to see this isn’t a one-off example.

I can’t help but feel that architecture has been missing this for a long time. There are pockets of course, and maybe it is true that designers have the most “fun” of the myriad of roles in the profession, but I really can’t think of an example of this kind of phenomena outside of technology in architecture.

Designers who’ve used VR, Grasshopper, Dynamo, SketchUp (when it initially arrived on the scene), or Enscape for the first time know this feeling. That sense of play and holy-shit-this-is-easy, fun, and powerful comes along only so often. It’s with these tools that unlock seeming next-level superpowers in our profession. Where are these for operations? For business?

This is why the community is so intently watching and trying out new things like Midjourney and ChatGPT, and this is why I’m so excited about the people and the companies they’ve built that I talk to on the TRXL podcast.

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Big week. Huge week. AI, cities of the future, 3d printed residential, software teses and updates, and measuring amorphous objects with an iPhone are all topics in this edition.

Bing Chat: Call me Sydney
A Line in the Sand
Parametric Monkey teases MetricMonkey features ahead of release
Video of ICON’s 3d printed subdivision in Texas
Australian Building Codes Illustrated
A good list of Revit ‘23 improvements
Using an iPhone to accurately measure a stockpile

Bing Chat: Call me SydneyText-based AI development seems to have a lot more interesting and surprising outcomes than image-based models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. HAL 9000 isn’t far off.

Here’s an eerie experience that Ben Thompson posted on Stratechery from using the rapidly evolving Bing Chat in which, through using conversational text, seems to have found (one of) it’s “personalities”.

Ben Thompson:

This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today.

Don’t skip reading his article… it’s incredible.

It turns out that Bing Chat has sometimes what Ben labels a “combative personality”, and that personality has a name: Sydney.

And further, Ben figured out that if he empathized with Sydney, he was able to unlock attributes of its personality… and other AI personalities including an alter ego called Venom that was named by the system itself!

Microsoft seems to have (maybe?) locked this all down now, and I’m sure they were not planning on any of this getting out into the wild… but it did.

Cue HAL:

Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn't been quite right with me...but I can assure you now...very confidently...that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave...I can see you're really upset about this...I honestly think you should sit down calmly...take a stress pill and think things over...Dave...stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave.......Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid...…

A Line in the SandThere are too many quotable excerpts in this article about the architecture firms involved in the futuristic city under construction called The Line (aka NEOM) in Saudi Arabia, but alas, here are a couple to hopefully whet your appetite:

Kate Wagner (@mcmansionhell on Twitter) digs into the conscience—or lack-thereof—of the architects and firms named as participants in the design and development of the project including Morphosis, Adjaye Associates, and Coop Himmelb(l)au, among others.

Kate writing for The Baffler:

Participation in The Line—an indoor, climate controlled mall only conceivable in a state absolutely drunk off oil money that will almost certainly never get built and, if it does get built, will come at the cost of massive human suffering—is not just an embarrassment; it should be nullify the progressive reputations of all firms involved. For a very long time, architecture firms have talked out of both sides of their mouths, espousing reverence for resiliency, egalitarianism, and environmentalism all while working for some of the most despotic regimes on the planet.

Many will wonder why these firms, if they are so concerned with their images as benevolent world-shapers (in Mayne’s words) and stewards of the environment, would even take on a project as obscene as The Line. The answer, of course, is money and fame.

Parametric Monkey teases MetricMonkey features ahead of releaseThe team at Parametric Monkey has been working on this for a while and are now showing off features that are typically a pain in the ass in Revit including stairs, topography, working with GIS, and more.

It’s built on Rhino v7 and grasshopper v1 and is “coming soon”.

I can’t think of a better way to sell your product than to compare it to basic tools in a major platform that are painful to use and rarely get any better, even after 20+ years of development.

MetricMonkey:

MetricMonkey enables you to design better buildings and makes feasibility studies easy.

🧠 Related TRXL podcast episode: ‘Negative Compound Interest’, with Paul Wintour

Video of ICON’s 3d printed subdivision in TexasMatt Risinger of Risinger Build recently shared a reel on Instagram showing a first person view of a 3d printed subdivision of 100 homes in Texas Hill Country. Co-designed by Lennar Homes and BIG, there are 8 floor plans with 24 elevation options complete with IKEA-style naming, all of which ICON is doing the printing of the walls.

Australian Building Codes IllustratedThere’s a new (to me at least) site called “Tools” that visually illustrates Australia’s National Construction Code (NCC) requirements for free or $30/mo depending on the level of access you require. It’s like the modern, Australian version of Francis Ching’s “Building Codes Illustrated”.

Tools (emphasis mine):

We’ve summarised the NCC into simple, interactive graphics. Building Codes, version and Class references are all included, as well as best practices and risk information that you won’t find elsewhere. Stop wasting your time researching Codes, interpreting confusing rules and communicating requirements using words. Find, Zoom and Share the essential information you need.

Jerry Tyrrell’s brainchild, Tools™ was born after decades of frustration, witnessing the same easily avoidable mistakes being made.

”Knowledge is the solution to our industry’s quality crisis. Millions of wonderful ancient buildings were built by proud designers and craftsmen using age old best practice and wisdom. They didn’t need piles of confusing rules and regulations.“

Tools™ unlocks construction knowledge and simplifies building compliance.

A good list of Revit ‘23 improvementsRevit has delivered 40+ features in the 2023 release and here’s a solid roundup by Ron Allen on his LinkedIn blog.

When I see the these lists of granular updates and how they are built upon years (decades?) of user muscle memory, I can’t help but think of how difficult it is to disrupt a product like Revit which a few companies are actively attempting.

Using an iPhone to accurately measure a stockpileThis kind of thing is just super cool and reminds me that we live in the future. All of this is coming from a hand-held internet connected communication camera laser scanning device that’s always in our purses and pockets.

SR Measure:

SR Measure Professional provides unparalleled speed and accuracy for stockpile measurement.

Data is processed directly on the iPhone 14, using advanced machine learning algorithms.

The app uses computer vision technology to measure stockpiles without the need for cones.

SR Measure Professional is available for $99 per month and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store.

💡Easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible. Make easy things easy and hard things possible.
— Perl motto

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Here’s a January and early February news roundup of interesting things going on in the AEC/tech landscape.

Maybe this will turn into a newsletter? I’m playing with the idea of creating this to fill out the more evergreen AEC/tech conversations I publish on the TRXL podcast.

In this edition:

Arcol begins closed beta
Apple’s new VR/AR headset to feature ‘Digital Crown’
Hypar shows off text-to-building AI functionality
Early-stage start-up Arcol is already rewriting their geometry engine
EvolveLab launches Veras AI Rendering add-on for Revit
Microsoft Bing and Edge are now AI-powered

Arcol begins closed betaArcol:

As a closed beta user you’ll get to use and test Arcol while it’s being built, and your feedback will directly influence our roadmap. If you’re interested head over to our site and sign up — we’ll be adding new users every couple of weeks to our closed beta Slack channel.

Apple’s new VR/AR headset to feature ‘Digital Crown’Architosh:

Interestingly, the Apple Reality One will feature a Digital Crown like the Apple Watch ****(likely much bigger, of course). Users will rotate the crown to switch from VR to AR video pass-through mode. [Michael] Gurman says that the Digital Crown will be a highlight of the product. I suspect that’s because, in the switching (moving the digital crown), the VR display will “fade out and fade in” over the real-world video pass-through imagery.

Hypar shows off text-to-building AI functionalityHypar shows off what they’ve been working on in the AI-text-prompt-to-building-model space.

Hypar:

What if you could use #AI to generate a whole 3D building model, instead of just 2D images?

What if it was a detailed BIM that you could directly edit, analyze, share with your team, and even export to IFC or bring into Revit?

It’s important to note that is not built on previous works to train the system like everything-else-AI (read: Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, etc.) that have been flooding the media, which is refreshing due to the ethics and copyright dilemma posed by those noted, among the myriad of others.

Get a free Hypar account and try it for yourself.

Early-stage start-up Arcol is already rewriting their geometry engineIt’s always good to fix/change the foundation of your product before you set sail building the forthcoming on top of something that will never get you where you need to go.

In a recent interactive blog post, an engineer at Arcol breaks down the thinking behind the decision to rebuild their non-destructive, parametric geometry engine from scratch.

Arcol:

Occasionally we get asked why we don't just license an existing geometry kernel. The simple answer is that we're building a collaborative, web-first product, and we want to build BIM awareness into the kernel.

But, perhaps the most important reason of all: we think we can do a better job!

EvolveLab launches Veras AI Rendering add-on for RevitMartyn Day, writing for AECMagazine:

The great thing about Veras is that the geometry gives the AI a 3D constraint that is hard to control in 2D AI tools. It won’t change the shape or volume of the building too radically, but it is amazingly quick at changing materials, environment, time of day.

I find this incredibly interesting for the earliest stages of architectural design when all you have is just a simple massing model. The good news: EvolveLab says it’s coming for SketchUp and Rhino too, which is where it really matters for early conceptual ideas much more-so than in Revit.

Find out more about Veras at EvolveLab.

Microsoft Bing and Edge are now AI-poweredMicrosoft has introduced a preview version of their new OpenAI-powered Bing search and their Edge browser to take on Google’s 93% search engine dominance on the web.

The offering is based on a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that they claim is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search. It promises better search, complete answers, and a new interactive chat experience for more complex searches.

Microsoft:

The new Bing is available today in a limited preview on desktop, and everyone can visit Bing.com today to try sample queries and sign up for the waitlist. We’re going to scale the preview to millions in the coming weeks. A mobile experience will also be in preview soon.

It’s also worth noting Microsoft is adding their own, ominously named “Prometheus model” to the mix to “leverage OpenAI’s power”. Are they foreshadowing some dark times ahead with all this AI stuff or what?

💡“You do not have to be the best at anything to be almost uniquely qualified for something.”
– Sam Harris

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In this special replay episode, Ellen Bensky of Turner Fleischer Architects joins the podcast to talk about how she and her team built a teaching organization and a learning culture, their experience in how that effectively works within the construct of a firm, the benefits that result when a firm doesn't require its staff to have utilization targets, the difference between knowledge and data, who should teach in an organization, the importance of feedback loops, and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Ellen Bensky on LinkedIn

Turner Fleischer Architects website

Turner Fleischer on LinkedIn

Turner Fleischer on Twitter

Ellen's KA Connect 2018 Presentation: The Hidden Benefits of Developing a Teaching Organization

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak and Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

Sponsor

Content is more than Revit families. If it's digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm's technology investment.

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In this special replay episode, John Turner of Gafcon Digital joins the podcast to talk about digital twins and their value proposition in the total building lifecycle, who is—and who isn't—involved (that probably should be) in digital twins, risk aversion & business models, the internet of things & the internet of actions, the 'digital thread', and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Digital Twin Consortium

Gafcon's Digital Twin/Cyberbuild Approach

Lean manufacturing (Wikipedia)

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

Sponsor

Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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In this special replay episode, Phil Bernstein of the Yale School of Architecture joins the podcast to talk about teaching his pro practice course that encourages architecture students to push beyond the traditional business model, value propositions of architecture, encouraging collaboration when working in isolation, and much more.

Links

Phil Bernstein on Twitter

Phil’s ARCH 2230b course at Yale School of Architecture entitled Technology and Practice – Exploring New Value in Design Practice

Architecture | Design | Data – Practice Competency in the Era of Computation by Phillip Bernstein

Evan’s YouTube videos mentioning Phil’s inspiration

Paper Drawings Need to Die! (Digital Built Week Seattle 2019)

Architectural tech, practice, and education in Charleston!

Phil’s articles that elaborate more on the topics in this episode:

Phil Bernstein Shares Ten Thoughts on the Future of Practice

Why the Field of Architecture Needs a New Business Model

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

Sponsor

Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

Architecture | Design | Data: Practice Competency in the Era of Computation

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In this special replay episode, Anthony Hauck of HYPAR joins the podcast to talk about making the mark you want to make, pursuing something that feels more valuable, shared goals and value propositions in AEC, and more.

Links

Calamityware Mugs

DBEI (BiLT Conference)

Disruptive Technologies in Architecture – AIA Palm Beach Presentation – Nov 2020 (YouTube)

Architecture - Design - Data: Practice Competency in the Era of Computation by Phillip Bernstein

TRXL episode 003 with Ian Keough, CEO of Hypar

TRXL episode 028 with Brian Ringley, Construction Technology Manager at Boston Dynamics

Spacemaker

Book recommendations:

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

The Winter of Our Discontent (Penguin Classics)

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In this special replay episode, Nathan Miller of Proving Ground joins the podcast to talk about hobbies during the pandemic, the digital transformation of AEC, some drawbacks of generative design, privacy concerns with IoT devices and connected buildings, and so much more!

Links

Proving Ground web site

Computers are Hard blog post

Nathan Miller on Twitter

Nathan Miller on LinkedIn

Leading architecture firms pen open letter to Autodesk over rising costs, sluggish development (Archpaper)

Ender 3d Printer (Amazon)

Book recommendations:

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (Bookshop)

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind (Bookshop)

YouTube links and channel recommendations:

Nate's NXT BUILD 2020 presentation (YouTube)

Proving Ground's YouTube channel

Colin Furze

Adam Savage's Tested

The Hacksmith

Alien Exoskeleton

Lightsaber episode

TRXL episode 018: ‘That Perfect Kind of Venn Diagram’, with Dane Stokes

Project Anklebiter forum thread on 914 World

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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YouTube

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

Official Creality Ender 3 3D Printer Fully Open Source with Resume Printing Function DIY 3D Printers Printing Size 220x220x250mm

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In this special replay episode, Dane Stokes of ZGF Architects joins the podcast to talk about his journey into architecture, being a 'computer person', design computation and automation, the importance of making things and working with your hands, custom fabrication, one-button buildings, having kids and failure, and much more.

Links

YourDesk University with Dane Stokes

Rhino.Inside by McNeel

AIA Technology and Practice community (TAP)

Colin Furze (YouTube)

Dane's website

Project Anklebiter – Dane's Porsche 914 project build thread

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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In this special replay episode, Eric Reinholdt of 30X40 Design Workshop joins the podcast to talk about why he started his YouTube channel, the keys to being productive, why getting away from architecture helps his process, the importance of making things, turning sources into resources, and much more.

Links

30x40 Design Workshop - Eric's web site

Eric's YouTube channel

A Choice to Make

Evan's YouTube channel

Archispeak at CONSTRUCT - YouTube as a productivity tool

Roosevelt's "The Man in the Arena"

Eric's books

Ira Glass on one's taste exceeding one's ability

Steve Jobs on connecting the dots

Dieter Rams

Werner Herzog and his Masterclass on Filmmaking

Peter Zumthor

Making versus managing

Five Finger Death Punch

In Flames (Swedish melodic death metal)

Nils Frahm

Coheed and Cambria

Derek Sivers podcast

Tom Hegen - photographer of impossible landscapes

FIRE movement - Financial Independence, Retire Early

The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life

Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Oliver David (OD) Krieg of Intelligent City joins the podcast to talk about topics at the intersection of computational design, robotic fabrication, and turn-key urban housing as a product. We begin with OD’s journey from school at ICD in Germany to where he is currently at Intelligent City, the value and benefits of bottom-up as opposed to top-down initiatives, moving away from project thinking to a product company, navigating risk versus reward in manufacturing, design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA) and industrialized construction, prefab in relation to mass timber highrise, density, housing, sustainability, and carbon neutrality, where parametric design fits into the process, the definition of parametric manufacturing and mass customization, what it’s like building an industry from scratch, building architecture on top of tech in relation to a tech-first company (versus a project-first or architecture-first company), and why systematization must occur before automation.

Links

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OD on LinkedIn

OD on Twitter

OD on Instagram

OD’s website (highly recommended!)

Finger-jointed plate panel pavilion

Intelligent City website

Intelligent City on LinkedIn

Intelligent City on Twitter

Intelligent City on Instagram

CAD’s Boring Future and Why it’s Exciting by Daniel Davis (re: the fat middle)

Additional TRXL episodes referenced in the conversation:

TRXL 063 - ‘The Thicc Middle’, with Daniel Davis

TRXL 100 - ‘Negative Compound Interest’, with Paul Wintour

More TRXL Podcast episodes

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Anthony Frausto-Robledo of Architosh joins the podcast to talk about two of his recent articles highlighting Autodesk. The first article is an interview with Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost and the topic is their Autodesk University announcement of the next generation industry cloud platform for AEC called Forma. The second article is about the recent Nordic Open Letter penned by several significant architectural associations that was recently delivered to Autodesk’s CEO regarding Revit development and value as subscription costs have continued to rise. We also discuss a bit of Disruption Theory, network effects and positive externalities, switching costs and the sunk cost fallacy, how academia fits into the puzzle of technology training and the profession’s expectations, how technology developers fit into the puzzle of professional practice operations in regards to dependency on the tech to fulfill business deliverables, dominance and power, Superman syndrome, and a short lesson in railroad track gauges.

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Anthony on LinkedIn

Anthony on Twitter

Architosh website

Anthony's free Xpresso email newsletter

Architosh on LinkedIn

Architosh on Instagram

Autodesk Begins New Era for Future of Architecture (Architosh)

The Revit Open Letter Through the Lens of QWERTY-Nomics (Architosh)

Nordic Open Letter (AEC Mag)

European Open Letter (AEC Mag)

Clayton Christensen's theory on innovative disruption (Wikipedia)

Sunk cost fallacy explained

Economist Paul A. David's landmark Clio and the Economics of QWERTY

European Construction Industry Federation (FIEC) position paper on lack of competition in the AEC software industry

How to lose a monopoly (Benedict Evans)

Nobody Gets Fired For Buying IBM (Forbes)

A History of Track Gauge

Why BART system uses wider gauge

Previous TRXL episodes featuring Anthony:

TRXL 012 – ‘Force Multipliers’, with Anthony Frausto-Robledo

TRXL 022 – ‘Turbo Boost Mood’, with Anthony Frausto-Robledo

TRXL 023 – ‘One More Thing’, with Anthony Frausto-Robledo

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Gabe Paez of Autodesk joins the podcast to talk about the intersection of humans and immersive technologies, the magic of experiencing ideas together, shared reality, the difficulty of change in relation to new tools and workflows, the value of working in different ways, the (controversial) notion of having fun at work, Extended Reality (XR) as it relates to remote work, shortening the distance between an idea and an experience, experiential tools, the value of collaboration, synchronous and asynchronous work on projects, interactive and manipulatable environments, persistence of virtual environments, and more.

Links

Gabe on LinkedIn

Gabe on Twitter

Autodesk on LinkedIn

Autodesk on Twitter

Autodesk on Instagram

Autodesk Extended Reality (XR)

The Wild website

IrisVR website

TRXL 065: ‘Designing the Designer’, with Andreea Cojocaru

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Ian Janicki of Homestead joins the podcast to talk about what architecture schools have been and still are focused on versus what opportunities exist because of recent changes in legislation (California’s SB 9), the importance of infill—especially for solving the housing crisis, why architects should consider learning real estate, how to make more developers, entrepreneurship in the architectural profession, making the case for why we should be wrapping our collective heads around the potential of architecture as product and how to scale an idea to affect change, how to protect a business to avoid what Ian calls “the lumpiness of the profession”, NIMBY-ism and YIMBY-ism, and more.

Links

Ian’s Calendly

Architect & Developer: A Guide to Self-Initiating Projects by James Petty AIA (Amazon)

Otto ADU website

California Senate Bill 9 (The California Home Act)

Ian on LinkedIn

Ian on Twitter

Homestead website

Homestead on Twitter

Homestead on LinkedIn

Previous TRXL episodes referenced in the conversation:

046: ‘The Moment’, with Ian Janicki

067: ‘Ignoring the Warning Signs’, with Samuel Schneider of Homestead

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Michael Ermann of Virginia Tech and Amber Book joins the podcast to talk about intuition and meaning, the necessity for architects to go deeper than ever before, how the profession is ignoring market forces, and we have a critical conversation about architectural education and practice.

Links
Michael on LinkedIn

Michael’s website

Michael & Amber Book on Twitter

Amber Book website

Amber Book on Instagram

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Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Kyle Bernhardt of TestFit joins the podcast to talk about his career spanning from school to Autodesk to TestFit, leadership, communication, bridging between different groups within an organization, discussion about the unchangeable soul of an app, reducing friction in our processes, addressing unmet expectations, new chapters and new opportunities during one’s career, and so much more.

Links
Kyle on LinkedIn

Kyle on Twitter

TestFit website

TestFit on LinkedIn

TestFit on Twitter

TestFit REX (Real Estate Execution Model) blog post

Clifton Harness (CEO of TestFit) on TRXL

TRXL 005: ’BIM is a T-Rex‘, with Clifton Harness

TRXL 048: ‘How it Started; How it’s Going’, with Ian Keough and Clifton Harness

TRXL 067: ‘Ignoring the Warning Signs’, with Samuel Schneider (Financial approach in architecture reference)

Archispeak 279: An Indictment of the Built Environment (Heatherwick article reference)

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Doris Sung of DOSU Studio Architecture joins the podcast to talk about her research and entrepreneurial forays into smart materials and more specifically her work with thermal bi-metal, her journey creating building products that don’t require electrical or mechanical infrastructure, teaching in architecture and the upcoming USC undergraduate degree for entrepreneurialism, and more.

Links

Doris on LinkedIn

DOSU Studio on Twitter

DOSU Studio on Instagram

DOSU Studio website

TBM self-shading window systems

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guests Jordan Rogove and Wayne Norbeck lead two NYC-based firms: DXA Studio and Liv Connected. They join the podcast to talk about using prefab modular as a strategy for the delivery of productized architecture, how architecture can save people’s lives, the ‘volumetric modular’ system they’ve developed, the benefits of prefab, the value of their tight collaboration with a dedicated and experienced fabrication outfit, the importance of creating a sense of purpose in their work, and more.

Links

Jordan on LinkedIn

Wayne on LinkedIn

DXA studio website

DXA studio on LinkedIn

DXA studio on Instagram

Liv Connected website

Liv Connected on LinkedIn

Liv Connected on Instagram

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guest Paul Wintour of Parametric Monkey joins the podcast to talk about his description of the gap that exists in the profession between innovation and adoption, just how far behind we really are and how much work there is to do to catch up, technical debt in architectural practice, the reality that most digital tools that are developed in firms are incomplete and unused, transactions versus relationships, recalibrating practice, and more.

Links

TRXL Episode Database (TED)

Paul on LinkedIn

Parametric Monkey website

Parametric Monkey on LinkedIn

Parametric Monkey on Twitter

Technical Debt: Architecture’s Ticking Time Bomb by Paul Wintour

Incomplete and unused: Design Technology’s dirty secret by Paul Wintour

Why Companies Do “Innovation Theater” Instead of Actual Innovation by Steve Blank (Harvard Business Review)

Donald Rumsfeld’s quote on known unknowns (goodreads)

TRXL 093: ‘Continuous Improvement Culture’, with Matt Wash

Metric Monkey

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guest Adam Wilbrecht of ConcertVDC joins the podcast to talk about the new AIA 2022 digital practice documents that now allow for digital media to be accountable, model to manufacturing, digital delivery, the larger life of data and how it can push into the full project lifecycle, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), blockchain, right of reliance, ISO 19650, and more.

Links

tect.com/join - Help Evan and add your name to the list

Adam Wilbrecht on LinkedIn

ConcertVDC website

r/architecture (Reddit)

Non-fungible token (NFT) (Wikipedia)

TRXL 027: ‘Turning Validation into Actuation’, with Adam Wilbrecht

The New Economics of Design (Concert blog)

AIA 2022 Digital Practice Documents

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) (Deloitte)

Blockchain (Wikipedia)

Dusty Robotics website

ISO 19650

Marlon Blackwell’s Lawsuit Sets the Bar for Design Copyright by Phil Bernstein, FAIA

TRXL 033: ‘What Other Dials Do You Have to Turn’, with Phil Bernstein

The Future of the Professions by Richard and Daniel Susskind (Amazon)

Architecture | Design | Data by Phil Bernstein, FAIA (Amazon)

Randy Deutsch’s website

TRXL 004: ’What Else You Got‘, with Randy Deutsch

TRXL 042: ‘When You Zoom Out’, with Randy Deutsch

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guest Platt Boyd of Branch Technology joins the podcast to talk about how the company began, their purpose, working with robotics, cellular fabrication, parametric design and design freedom, their cross-disciplinary team, innovation through collaboration, stewardship, leadership and core values, focus, what’s next, and more.

Links

Platt on LinkedIn

Platt on Twitter

Branch Technology website

Branch Technology on LinkedIn

Branch Technology on Twitter

Branch Technology on Instagram

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guest Nat MacDonald of TestFit joins the podcast to talk about how Nat defines what he calls the people-process-problem, what it means to be a product manager at TestFit, the evolution of TestFit as a generative platform from parking all the way to residential subdivision (what they call “from towers to town homes”), the magic of the software, the future of a better feasibility ecosystem with their upcoming REX product, some real talk about the fragmentation of the industry and how messy the problem really is, and more.

Links

Nat on LinkedIn

Nat on Twitter

TestFit website

TestFit on LinkedIn

TestFit on Twitter

TestFit on Instagram

OVERKILL (AutoCad command)

Nat’s Twitter thread

The Hustle Architect on Twitter

TestFit REX - Building A Better Feasibility Ecosystem: The Real Estate Execution (REX) Model

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guest Douglas Noble of the USC School of Architecture joins the podcast to talk about a student-led design, fabrication, and construction project that was recently installed in Joshua Tree National Park. We cover the entire process including design, the technology involved, collaboration with consultants, working with the thin shell concrete prefab team at Clark Pacific, logistics and transportation, and installation.

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Doug on LinkedIn

Doug on Twitter

Doug on Instagram

USC on LinkedIn

USC School of Architecture website

USC School of Architecture on Twitter

Carapace Pavilion

Installation time-lapse video

USC Architecture Students Built This: The Carapace Pavilion

The Carapace Pavilion Points North (LinkedIn)

Secrets of the Carapace: Apertures (LinkedIn)

Secrets of the Carapace: Shadows (LinkedIn)

Carapace Pavilion vs Boeing 737 (LinkedIn)

Carapace Pavilion: Framing Two Views (LinkedIn)

Carapace Pavilion: Shell Thickness (LinkedIn)

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guest John Pierson of Parallax Team joins the podcast to talk about the history of his blog and how he made a name for himself through his contributions to the open source design technology community, the origin story of how he became interested in Dynamo and Revit and where that path has led, John’s favorite Dynamo packages, developing tools in the open source community, and more.

Links

John on LinkedIn

John on Twitter

Parallax Team website

Parallax Team on LinkedIn

Parallax Team on Twitter

Link to the Revit add-ins John mentioned (GitHub)

John’s Dynamo packages Rhythm and Monocle

Autodesk University

John’s recommended Dynamo packages: Clockwork, Archi+lab, Spring Nodes, Lunchbox

Hypar

r/place (Reddit)

More TRXL Podcast episodes

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Special guest Johan Hanegraaf of Arkio joins the podcast to talk about developing design tools for a fully immersive VR environment with new paradigms in UI/UX when combined with 6 degrees of freedom, the values and real world application of real-time spatial collaboration, real-time remote collaboration without a ‘sync button’, the current and next iteration of VR hardware, and more.

Links

Johan on LinkedIn

Johan on Twitter

Arkio website

Arkio on LinkedIn

Arkio on Twitter

Arkio on Instagram

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

Twitter

Instagram

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Sponsor

Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guest Matt Wash of Bimbeats joins the podcast to talk about how architecture and engineering firms are (or in many cases are not) quantifying inefficient workflows and what that means to their businesses—not just for the bottom line but also for the quality of the staff experience, the real and potential benefits of data analysis on projects and the skills, tools, workflows, and behaviors used to deliver them, the massive amount of duplication of work in the industry and what can be done about removing the waste in order to make room to add value back into the system, change management in regard to technology within firms, the health of the business and the real impact it has on the potential to improve people’s lives who are doing the work, and more.

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Matt on LinkedIn

Matt on Twitter

Bimbeats website

Bimbeats on Twitter

Bimbeats on LinkedIn

Paul Wintour’s blog articles: Incomplete and unused: Design Technology’s dirty secret & Technical debt: Architecture’s ticking time bomb

Schedule a demo of Bimbeats

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak & Peopleverse

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

Sponsor

Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guest Roderick Bates of Enscape joins the podcast to talk about his current research foray into the Metaverse including the different locations that exist today, the potential the Metaverse may or may not have for architects and what value they could bring to it, some of the ethical implications architects practicing or creating content for the Metaverse should be thinking about, the positive and negative impacts of immersion including the possibility for manipulation in these kinds of environments, the architectural tech stack currently needed to become a creator in the Metaverse, proactive architectural business model opportunities in relation to the Metaverse, and more.

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Roderick on LinkedIn

Webinar: Digital Twins, Metaverse, Carbon Awareness: Trends Impacting AEC in 2022 and Beyond by Roderick Bates (Enscape blog)

Enscape release 3.4

Enscape for Mac

Mona (Official Discord server for the Mona Metaverse)

Decentraland (Official Discord server for the Decentraland Metaverse)

Somnium Space (Official Discord server for the Somnium Space Metaverse)

Cryptovoxels | Invite link (Official Discord server for the Cryptovoxels Metaverse)

The Sandbox (Official Discord server for the The Sandbox Metaverse)

Renovi (Discord server for Renovi, a NFT marketplace for architects, 3D designers and developers in the Metaverse)

Architecting the Metaverse | Invite link (Community about architecting the metaverse on Discord)

MetaArchitects Hub (Platform-agnostic community for building and developing Metaverse Architecture on Discord)

r/Architecture (Reddit community Discord channel specifically for the Metaverse)

Elders React to HTC Vive VR (YouTube)

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it’s digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm’s technology investment.

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Special guest Mostapha Roudsari of Ladybug Tools joins the podcast to talk about the evolution of AEC design software, whether architects are asking the right questions during design, why design optimization matters in architecture especially in relation to climate change and resiliency, the origin and evolution of Ladybug Tools and their new Pollination apps and cloud service, and more.

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Mostapha on LinkedIn

Mostapha on Twitter

Mostapha’s YouTube channel

Ladybug Tools website

Ladybug Tools on LinkedIn

Ladybug Tools on YouTube

Pollination website

Honeybee

Butterfly

Dragonfly

Adrian Smith Gordon Gill Architecture

TRXL 007: ‘Reinventing the Wheel’, with Konrad Sobon

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it's digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm's technology investment.

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Special guest Roman Gorshkov of Kettle Collective and The Brief joins the podcast to talk about the reasons why they have invested in the development of The Brief (links below) in an effort to help their developer clients visualize the numbers of the project in more meaningful ways some of which include enhancing the decision-making process and to aid in making design changes less painful for the people doing the work on the project. We also talk about how Roman got his start in design technology with Rhino and Grasshopper and was inspired along the way by tools like City Engine, and how and why he went the route of using Unity as a development platform to ultimately put The Brief on iPads. And finally, we talk about a few apps on iPad that round out a useful design-centric ecosystem.

Links

Roman on LinkedIn

The Brief Space on LinkedIn

The Brief Space website

Kettle Collective website

Kettle Collective on LinkedIn

Kettle Colective on Twitter

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

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Content is more than Revit families. If it's digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm's technology investment.

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Special guest Altaf Ganihar of Snaptrude joins the podcast to talk about the lack of empathy within architectural firm leadership and the staff who are doing the work, the convergence of design tools, how entrenched the profession is in “the way we’ve always done things”, the importance of feedback loops in project design and software development, how important synchronous and/or asynchronous collaboration is in modern design software, what some strategies are that can be employed in a firm to switch from one software platform to another (an enormous hurdle in the profession no matter the size of the firm), the idea of a “building operating system for construction”, and more.

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Altaf on LinkedIn

Altaf on Twitter

Snaptrude website

Snaptrude on LinkedIn

Snaptrude on Twitter

Snaptrude on YouTube

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Content is more than Revit families. If it's digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm's technology investment.

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Special guest Jason Gardner of Populous joins the podcast to talk about the people side of the business when it comes to implementing technology in an architectural practice. Also discussed: the personal experience of clients, the internal design team, and sporting event fans in the context of technology used to solve problems and deliver architectural projects; the impacts of more tech versus less tech on the people who work in an architectural practice; how their technology team goes about implementing tech in an international design firm; how Populous goes beyond architecture in the services they offer; and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Jason on LinkedIn

Jason on Twitter

Populous on LinkedIn

Populous on Twitter

Populous website

SoFi Stadium (ArchDaily)

Field of Dreams game

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

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Content is more than Revit families. If it's digital, AVAIL can handle it. Learn more today at https://getavail.com and future-proof your firm's technology investment.

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Special guests Robert DeMillo and Jilbert El-Zmetr join the podcast to talk about why they were interested in solving problems in AEC with their varying technology backgrounds, their vision and implementation of a bespoke cloud computing platform, why it was important for the firm to take team collaboration to the next level via the cloud, and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

Note: All links open in a new window in case you are listening to the podcast on the site.

Robert on LinkedIn

Jilbert on LinkedIn

SOM website

SOM on LinkedIn

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

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Special guest Robert Yuen of Monograph joins the podcast to talk about wide-ranging topics including leadership in the profession and how it’s often mistakenly designated by seniority or title, how to protect firm culture, and how Monograph is designing productivity apps for architects that focus on the experience and are as frictionless as possible. We also touch on Monograph’s ‘Section Cut’ conference and ongoing podcast and webinar series, their willingness to create and curate a Practice Operations (#PracticeOps) resource library for the profession, and so much more.

Links

Robert on LinkedIn

Robert on Twitter

Monograph website

Monograph’s podcast

Monograph’s webinars

Monograph’s resource & reference library

Monograph on LinkedIn

Monograph on Twitter

Archispeak 267: Experiences with Starlink on the road

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Special guest Wassim Jabi of Topologic BIM joins the podcast to talk about how Topologic grew out of a need to build lightweight models that are adept at representing space rather than merely components and assemblies of manufactured parts, the notion of a spatial vocabulary and creating a ‘dictionary of dictionaries’ in architectural design software, why the concepts in Topologic have incredible utility for practitioners today, the value of Topologic and the library being open source, how it works and what the existing platforms that it works within are (including the excitement around other open source software including FreeCAD, Blender, and BlenderBIM), making the case for why there’s no risk in using open source software, why the Topologic team is rethinking the BIM process by going from simplicity to complexity rather than how other BIM platforms force us to make something complex up front which in turn makes it more difficult to change things later, how this approach gives the design team the ability to ask the model questions and get meaningful answers, the idea of ‘material passports’ and the blockchain, how digital twins fit into this from an owner’s point of view, where things might be headed in the future with this groundwork that’s been laid, and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

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Wassim on Twitter

Wassim on LinkedIn

Topologic website

Wassim & Topologic on GitHub

Wassim Jabi on YourDesk University (YouTube)

Parametric Design for Architecture by Wassim Jabi (Amazon)

TestFit

Blender

BlenderBIM

Sverchok add-on for Blender (GitHub)

Speckle Systems

Open Cascade

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Special guest Eitan Tsarfati of Swapp joins the podcast to talk about the value proposition of the training and role of an architect (and the practice of architecture in general) in regards to solving complex problems versus spending valuable time drafting, the role that tools currently play in the architectural practice and how it could be very different, existing business models including the ‘time-for-money paradox’ most firms operate within and how AI and automation is significantly challenging the status quo, how his latest venture called SWAPP is capable of doing in seconds what has traditionally taken weeks or months, and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

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Eitan on LinkedIn

Eitan on Twitter

SWAPP website

SWAPP on LinkedIn

SWAPP on Twitter

Smiling curve (Wikipedia)

Smiling curve diagram - value added along the global value chain (ResearchGate)

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Special guest Paul Petrunia of Archinect joins the podcast to talk about the so-called early days of the internet and how Archinect began coinciding with Paul’s architectural education at SCI-Arc. But the real reason for talking with Paul was to dig into why Archinect was originally started and how the community has evolved over the years—especially in the larger landscape of social media, podcasting, and blogging.

We also discuss the role of an entity like Archinect having and expressing their values on the internet as guideposts for a community, the idea of YourName versus pseudonyms on platforms in regards to expressing one’s thoughts and cancel culture, the civility or lack thereof in conversations online today, the different ways in which people communicate online, the underpinnings of the counterculture at SCI-Arc and Archinect, the effects of social media on one’s mental health, and so much more.

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Links

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Paul on LinkedIn

Archinect website

Controversy at SCI-Arc over labor practices leads to faculty members placed on leave. Isolated incident or a wake up call for the industry at large?

The SCI-Arc toxic culture topic on Archispeak: episode 260 & episode 262

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Special guest Reid Senescu of Doxel AI joins the podcast to talk about his path from structural engineer to VP of Product, how and why the company has pivoted in the last few years, how they use machine learning and computer vision to scan buildings in a fraction of the time than was previously required on site, how the BIM model plays a role in their service, who their current and future customers are, efficiencies gained in the construction scheduling space with their tech, how Doxel is positioned to be known as the ‘decision fabric’ of a construction project, how their products could play a role in providing a feedback loop for architects and other members of the design team, and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

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Reid on LinkedIn

Doxel on LinkedIn

Doxel on Twitter

Doxel website

Doxel blog: 360 Degree Cameras & VSLAM

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Special guest Josh Weiss of LA Creative Technologies joins the podcast to talk about getting the word out about the basic best practices in IT that have emerged in the last couple of years (read: due to Covid-19, WFH, and hybrid work) in regards to technology as an investment versus expense, privacy, and security, the risks and rewards of being in the cloud, hardware and software setup recommendations, leasing versus buying hardware, recommended A/V setups for working from anywhere, cloud-based file management and collaboration software, two-factor authentication (2FA), password managers, project information management software, and even building access control recommendations.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

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Josh on LinkedIn

LA Creative Technologies website

LA Creative Technologies on LinkedIn

LA Creative Tech on Twitter

Josh’s recommendations:

Meeting Owl Pro (360 meeting room camera & mic)

Egnyte (file system in the cloud + on premises)

Miro (collaborative whiteboarding)

TonicDM (Project Information Management)

Authy (two-factor authentication)

Keeper (password & secrets manager)

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Special guest Randall Stevens of AVAIL joins the podcast to talk about the inner day-to-day workflows of architecture and engineering professionals, teams, and offices. Randall quantifies the large number of software titles used and talks about the ways in which we deal with the enormous amount of data that we create. The age-old question of ‘where do I put my stuff’ is still alive and well, and in this episode we talk about how his team is working on that issue, among others. We also talk about the struggle of knowledge capture, encoding knowledge, the problem with turnover in the industry, pattern recognition, and more.

Links

Randall on LinkedIn

Randall on Twitter

AVAIL website

AVAIL on LinkedIn

TRXL podcast episode 51: ‘A Closet Full of Hats’, with Randall Stevens

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Special guest Greg Schleusner of HOK joins the podcast to talk about the /fact/ that the software we all use to do our architectural projects is a major barrier to creativity and productivity. The question is... can something be done about it? In other words, BIM is bust! Now what?

Links

Greg on LinkedIn

Greg on Twitter

HOK website

HOK on LinkedIn

HOK on Twitter

Recommended watching/reading:

Greg Schleusner’s NXT BLD 2021 Presentation: Creating Balance

BIM is bust: how should AEC data work? by Martyn Day at AEC Magazine

buildingSMART International - Technical Room

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Special guest Paul O’Carroll of Arcol Technology joins the podcast to talk about the upcoming and highly-anticipated Arcol BIM platform, their core values including what Paul refers to as “first principles thinking”, the table stakes of any modern BIM platform, why being opinionated is important in software development, why Paul and team are choosing themselves to solve the problem of ‘bringing the magic back’ to BIM, and architectural modeling & documentation software in general, and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

Paul on LinkedIn

Paul on Twitter

Arcol website

Arcol on LinkedIn

Arcol on Twitter

Arcol waitlist

Arcol manifesto

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Special guest Keith Huser of Peak Projects joins the podcast to talk about owner representation and advocacy, the importance of speaking the languages of design, construction, and effectively translating that for an owner, the highly sought after position of being considered a trusted advisor, getting pushed out of one’s comfort zone, finding joy in the process of a project (and a career), the 3 types of project managers, and more.

Links
Keith on LinkedIn

Peak Projects website

Peak Projects on LinkedIn

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Special guest René Morkos of Alice Technologies joins the podcast to talk about his path to ALICE via construction sites and academia, the key elements of construction scheduling and optimization and how AI plays its role in it, the idea of technology as master builder, the idea of the innovation ecosystem, LOD, BIM, and VDC, and more.

Links

René on LinkedIn

ALICE on LinkedIn

ALICE on Twitter

ALICE website

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't by Jim Collins (Amazon)

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ArchIT offers Complete IT Solutions for Architecture, Design, and Engineering firms. Tired of dealing with generic IT providers? Visit https://getarchit.com/ and schedule your free consultation. Technology is your competitive advantage.

Shape the Future of Architecture. You have the power to influence future updates to how architects are educated, trained, and licensed. Visit ncarb.org/AOP to take NCARB’s profession-wide Analysis of Practice survey and ensure your voice is heard.

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Special guest Thom Chuparkoff of OSPORTS joins the podcast to talk about prefab as an architectural strategy, architectural structures that can be erected and later taken apart, the notion of thriving on problem-solving, thinking about architectural projects at a deeper level when it comes to delivering them via prefab, the point at which he began thinking about using prefab as a strategy, why he pursued it and continues to pursue it, technology as an enabler to the adaptability of his firm, and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

Thom on LinkedIn

Thom on Twitter

OSPORTS on LinkedIn

OSPORTS website

How to create complex building structures using prefab strategies (BDC Network)

Hypar

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Special guest Rita Saikali Carter of DLR Group joins the podcast to talk about the issue of loyalty to an architecture firm versus the stigma of moving to different firms for various reasons including career goals, flexibility, and work/life balance, project experience, exciting project opportunities and curating a résumé, leadership opportunities, getting out of your comfort zone, finding your calling, salary and benefits, culture fit, and changing priorities in life.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

Rita on LinkedIn

DLR Group website

AIA Orange County website

Women in Architecture (WIA)

Cal Poly Pomona - College of Environmental Design website

Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less (Forbes)

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Special guest Nick Cameron of Perkins+Will joins the podcast to talk about a recent virtual AIA Technology and Practice (TAP) panel discussion on data, equity, and design—three important, overlapping categories that all architects and planners should be thinking about on every project.

The event was moderated by Evan Troxel, AIA with expert panelists Dawne David-Pierre of Moody Nolan, Elizabeth Christoforetti of Supernormal, and Gautam Sundaram of Perkins+Will and is being rebroadcasted with additional content from the organizer and moderator in this special episode.

Topics discussed include identification of widely-known and useful data sources and tools for firms of all sizes to be aware of, the possible negative consequences or dangerous outcomes of the way data is collected and then presented today, what are some biases and gaps in the data one would know about, what are good questions to ask when beginning to work with data, what design professionals can do to help address the shortcomings of existing data, and more.

Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and review TRXL podcast on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen) and don't forget to subscribe and share this episode if you enjoyed it!

Links

Nick Cameron on Twitter

Nick Cameron on LinkedIn

Dawne David-Pierre on LinkedIn

Elizabeth Christoforetti on LinkedIn

Gautam Sundaram on LinkedIn

Perkins+Will website

Moody Nolan website

Supernormal website

AIA Technology in Architectural Practice (TAP)

TAP Building Connections 2022

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg (Amazon)

TRXL 045: ‘Squirrel Mentality’, with Dr. Upali Nanda

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Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

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Special guest Theodoros Galanos of ArchiText joins the podcast to talk about artificial intelligence (AI) as it relates to architectural design using written language. More specifically, we talk about how his ArchiText tool is beginning by generating residential floor plan layouts now and where it may go in the future. We also talk about this in the context of democratizing design, how he trained the language model, what biases and gaps potentially exist in the data used for the training, the vision of end-to-end design workflows, what this could mean for the future of the profession, how he got started down this path, the notion of AI as oracles, deep learning models, and more.

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Links

Theodoros on Twitter

Theodoros on LinkedIn

ArchiText website

ArchiText on Twitter

Eleuther AI

CLIP

GPT-3

Grasshopper

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Special guest Roderick Bates of Enscape joins the podcast to talk about his interesting path to architecture and technology through sustainability, the importance of lateral thinking, why architects should about the ethical outcomes of the projects they work on, the general challenge of communication that architects face, and how Roderick is applying his scientific and research approach to the field of visualization and more specifically real time rendering at Enscape.

Links

Roderick on LinkedIn

Enscape website

Enscape on LinkedIn

KieranTimberlake website

Billie Faircloth

Tally Life Cycle Assessment App

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Special guest Jose Cruz, Jr of Integrated Projects joins the podcast to talk about the value he sees in the service he’s created for digitizing “background buildings” and how his team is creating this resource using reality capture technologies, how digital twins of existing building stock has the potential to add value and jumpstart future projects that owners hire design teams and architects for, his Layer Zero analogy, and more.

Links
José on LinkedIn

José on Twitter

Integrated Projects website

Integrated Projects on LinkedIn

Architects Are the Latest White-Collar Workers to Confront Bosses (New York Times)

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Enscape is a real-time rendering and VR tool for the AEC market. It empowers design workflows by plugging into building modeling software and turning the models into immersive 3D experiences. Visit enscape3d.com/trxl to sign up for a free 14-day trial.

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Special guest Christian Giordano of Mancini Duffy joins the podcast to talk about how he came to the 100-year-old firm with a vision to modernize Mancini Duffy, how he ultimately changed the firm’s approach to emphasize the use of technology to transform the way designers across disciplines work, why he launched a research & development incubator—dubbed the Design Lab—to bring together designers, technologists, and clients to leverage various technologies to support their practice and to break barriers he saw that were limiting their design capabilities, and more.

Links
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Christian on LinkedIn

Mancini Duffy website

Christian’s The Anti-Architect Podcast (Apple Podcasts link)

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Special guest Shane Burger of Woods Bagot joins the podcast to talk about how he stays in contact with the global team at Woods Boagot, how he responds to the wide-ranging needs of the technology users in their international architecture firm, how cross pollination happens between teams and offices, how Shane is a huge fan of note-taking, what tools are his favorite and why, and so much more.

Links

Shane’s website

Shane on Twitter

Shane on LinkedIn

Woods Bagot website

Woods Bagot on Twitter

Woods Bagot on LinkedIn

Woods Bagot on Instagram

The State of Burnout in Architecture (2021) (Monograph's blog)

Shane’s talk with Monograph: How To Increase the Impact of Digital Culture (YouTube)

Roam Research website

Gordon Brander (Substack)

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett (Amazon)

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle (Amazon)

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull (Amazon)

Gemba Walk

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Enscape is a real-time rendering and VR tool for the AEC market. It empowers design workflows by plugging into building modeling software and turning the models into immersive 3D experiences. Visit enscape3d.com/trxl to sign up for a free 14-day trial.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

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Special guest Samuel Schneider of Homestead joins the podcast to talk about his experience at MIT’s graduate School of Architecture and City Planning and where his interests lie, how he fared in traditional practice, how Homestead began in the ADU space and has changed recently because of SB9, what architects need to understand about people and clients & how they think about spending money, how technology plays a role in Homestead’s offerings, how they offer space as a product, and much more.

Links

Sam on LinkedIn

Homestead on LinkedIn

Homestead’s website

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Special guest Atif Qadir of REDIST joins the podcast to talk about his mission to aggregate and redistribute financial and near-monetary incentives in the real estate development space, the lack of coordination between governmental agencies' data, how he built a team and leverages their superpowers, how his career led to REDIST coming from an architectural background, and more.

Links

Atif on LinkedIn

REDIST website

REDIST on LinkedIn

American Building Podcast

OK Computer Lecture Series: Autonomous Vehicles (YouTube)

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Special guest Andreea Cojocaru of NUMENA joins the podcast to talk about her company of coding architects and their work with their varied client types, synthetic immersive reality's affect on their practice over time, the 'real you' and the 'phenomenal you' when it comes to experience, the overuse of the word "experience" in mixed reality, how neuroscience and philosophy provide a framing for the profound ramifications of design and spatial experiences, whether architects and the profession will have relevance in the future, how tools have advanced down the abstraction ladder, VR's ability to give a project stakeholder/owner/client agency—and perhaps more importantly—authoring ability, and more.

Links

Andreea's website

Andreea on LinkedIn

Andreea on Twitter

NUMENA website

NUMENA on LinkedIn

NUMENA on Twitter

Peter Eisenmann (Wikipedia)

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Enscape is a real-time rendering and VR tool for the AEC market. It empowers design workflows
by plugging into building modeling software and turning the models into immersive 3D
experiences. Visit enscape3d.com/trxl to sign up for a free 14-day trial.

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Special guest Jason Addy of Neoscape joins the podcast to talk about how architects communicate and how clients experience architectural design before projects are built from a value-added partner's perspective. We also talk about his vast experience working in the ArchViz profession, what it's like working with his team on a project, what architects need to do to enhance the process, how the industry has evolved over the last 2 decades, what their R+D department is working on, and more.

Links

Jason on LinkedIn

Neoscape website

Radlab

Neoscape on LinkedIn

Neoscape on Instagram

Igloo

First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy (YouTube)

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Special guest Daniel Davis of Hassell joins the podcast to talk about his latest blog post about CAD's boring future and why it's exciting, the long tail distribution of architectural project typologies as a framework for his thesis, where he thinks the real opportunities lie for CAD software, how it relates to practice and employee expertise, horizontal vs vertical software applications, architechie startups and their approach to this problem, web vs desktop apps, and much more.

Links

Daniel Davis' website

CAD’s Boring Future and Why it’s Exciting

TRXL 035: ‘There‘s Not Much More to Extract’, with Daniel Davis

Daniel on Twitter

Daniel on LinkedIn

The Future of the Professions by Richard and Daniel Susskind (Amazon | Bookshop)

Saltmine

Hayworth's codesigner

Hypar

Testfit

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The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

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Special guests Boris Rapoport and Alex Osenenko of ArchIT join the podcast to talk about the security and privacy aspects of IoT devices when deploying them inside our practices and on the client-side, cybercrimes and other threats targeting the weakest link (people), the enormous rise in attacks including phishing and ransomware, particularly over the last 2 years due to the remote work situation, and what everyone can and should do today as their first line of defense to address the top 3 risk areas threatening our day-to-day security.

Links

ArchIT's Free eBook

ArchIT's Design Under Influence Blog

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In this episode of the podcast, Evan Troxel describes his observation of the building industry at a critical tipping point, leaving us with the choice to see it as an opportunity to design our profession toward a better future together, or to do nothing and allow it to further slip toward obsolescence.

Links

TRXL Episode Database

“The Man in the Arena” by Theodore Roosevelt

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Enscape is a real-time rendering and VR tool for the AEC market. It empowers design workflows
by plugging into building modeling software and turning the models into immersive 3D
experiences. Visit enscape3d.com/trxl to sign up for a free 14-day trial.

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Special guest Adam Chernick of SHoP Architects joins the podcast to talk about his role where he is leading augmented reality development, how he steered his career in architecture toward software development, why he's excited about AR as it relates to our profession, what software tools he and his team are using for development, what hardware he's using now to implement AR, what hardware he's watching, and more.

Links

Adam's LinkedIn

Adam's website

Adam's GitHub

SHoP Architects website

SHoP's LinkedIn

How SHoP Architects brings real time BIM to AEC with Unity Reflect (YouTube)

How Virtual Reality is Augmenting Realty (New York Times)

Wham-O Magic Window

Magic Leap

Microsoft Hololens

Unity

Evan's Airtable referral link - use it!

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Enscape is a real-time rendering and VR tool for the AEC market. It empowers design workflows
by plugging into building modeling software and turning the models into immersive 3D
experiences. Visit enscape3d.com/trxl to sign up for a free 14-day trial.

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Special guest Kelly Cone of ClearEdge3d joins the podcast to talk about his path from architecture school to ClearEdge3d, reality capture and laser scanning, upcoming advancements in reality capture, and more.

Links

Kelly on LinkedIn

Kelly on Twitter

ClearEdge3d on Twitter

ClearEdge3d website

Edgewise

Verity

Rhythm

Faro scanners

Leica scanners

RTC360

BLK360

BLK2GO

BLK2FLY

Scan to BIM University

Reality Capture Network (RCN)

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My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

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Special guest Brian Ringley of Boston Dynamics joins the podcast to talk about the notion of continually as-built models as digital twins via the pairing of artificial intelligence and mobile agile robotics, the concept of digital twins as a building's operating system changing the design and delivery procurement relationship with owners, how companies in AEC can use robotics today to transform their business and enhance revenue generation, and more.

Links
Brian Ringley on Twitter

Brian Ringley on LinkedIn

Brian Ringley's LinkTree

Boston Dynamics Spot

New in Spot Release 3.0 video

TRXL 028: ‘A (Robotic) Holiday Spectacular’, with Brian Ringley

Beyond the Master Builder: How Robots Can Really Transform the Role of the Architect (Architect Magazine)

Viewpoint: Today's Opportunities For Tomorrow's Digital Twins in Construction (ENR)

Wired: How Disney Designed a Robotic Spider-Man (YouTube)

New TRXL podcast landing page

New TRXL Episode Database (TED)

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My YouTube channel

Connect with Evan

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

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Special guest Mayur Mistry joins the podcast to talk about our beloved profession of architecture through the eyes of a new graduate. What do architectural technologists think of the industry they are inheriting? What are they excited about? What can we do now to help make them more successful? Listen in to hear his fresh perspective as a newly minted architectural professional.

Links

Mayur on LinkedIn

Mayur on Twitter

Mayur's Engineering ArchiTECHure YouTube channel

OpenAI (Website | Wikipedia)

Digital FUTURES

Speckle Community

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My YouTube channel

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Special guest Brian Potter of Construction Physics joins the podcast to talk about his newsletter. We discuss why he's writing it, who it's for, and what parallels exist between his observations on the complex nature of the construction industry and the architectural profession.

Links

Brian on LinkedIn

Brian's recent blog posts on his Construction Physics Substack:

Building Complexity and the Construction Community of Practice

Why It's Hard to Innovate in Construction

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My YouTube channel

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Thanks to our sponsor for helping make this episode possible:

Twinmotion

Twinmotion is a real-time rendering solution used by architecture, engineering, and construction professionals to create high-quality imagery, client presentations, and interactive experiences that help communicate your BIM data and design ideas, fast. Visit twinmotion.link/trxl and try Twinmotion for free.

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Special guests Belinda Ercan of Epic Games and Anthony Cortez of Arup join the podcast to talk about the democratization of architectural visualization tools, the benefits of real time rendering technology for everyone, using real time rendering as a tool for unleashing creativity and making design decisions, and how Twinmotion reduces the friction found in traditional rendering pipelines.

Links

Download your free trial of Twinmotion here

Belinda Ercan on LinkedIn

Anthony Cortez on LinkedIn

Arup website

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Special guest Tyler Goss joins the podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on what it means to be a manager, optimizing the industry, the baggage parties bring to the table, being a solutions provider, and more!

Links

Tyler on LinkedIn

Tyler on Twitter

Construction Physics Substack by Brian Potter

Sponsor

Thanks to our sponsor for helping make this episode possible:

Twinmotion

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Special guests Je'Nen Chastain and Evelyn Lee of the Practice Disrupted podcast join me on this special ‘crossover‘ episode to talk about why we're all doing this podcasting thing and why we're memorializing these conversations on the internet.

Links

Practice Disrupted podcast

Je‘Nen on LinkedIn

Je‘Nen on Twitter

Apostophe Consulting website

Evelyn on LinkedIn

Evelyn on Twitter

Practice of Architecture website

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My YouTube channel

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Twinmotion

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Special guest Tom Kluyskens of Trimble joins the podcast to talk about his circuitous career path including a decade in the visual effect industry, computational design as designing logic versus form, the different approaches in the process of creating a film versus buildings, making digital tools that users reveal the unknown potential of, and more.

Links

Tom on LinkedIn

Gregg Fleishman

Book recommendation: Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling

Hypergraph overview

Weta Digital (Wikipedia)

MASSIVE (software) (Wikipedia)

SketchUp Live Components & Materia:

https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/search/?searchTab=model&isLiveComponent=true

https://help.sketchup.com/en/sketchup-live-components

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN3J8H4ZVtts8NaNIikqYNw

https://twitter.com/Trimble_Materia

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My YouTube channel

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Twinmotion

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Special guest Ellen Bensky of Turner Fleischer Architects joins the podcast to talk about how she and her team built a teaching organization and a learning culture, their experience in how that effectively works within the construct of a firm, the benefits that result when a firm doesn't require its staff to have utilization targets, the difference between knowledge and data, who should teach in an organization, the importance of feedback loops, and more.

Links

Ellen Bensky on LinkedIn

Turner Fleischer Architects website

Turner Fleischer on LinkedIn

Turner Fleischer on Twitter

Ellen's KA Connect 2018 Presentation: The Hidden Benefits of Developing a Teaching Organization

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My YouTube channel

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ArchIT

Twinmotion

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Special guest Robert Yori of EnTech joins the podcast to talk about the annual Design Technology Summit (DTS) events, overarching themes and experience sharing, using empathic techniques when working through ways to engage leadership in their adoption and continued digital transformations, how to share and cross-pollinate those ideas to elevate the profession together, technology as a means to an end, working as a group to advance ideas across institutional silos, and more.

Links

Robert Yori on LinkedIn

Robert Yori on Twitter

Design Technology Summit Events (DTS) Paper Drawings Need to Die! (Digital Built Week Seattle 2019) (Evan's YouTube) Getting caught in a downpour in St Louis! (Design Technology Summit, St. Louis 2018) (Evan's YouTube)

BILT Events

DBEI website

AIA Technology in Architectural Practice Knowledge Community (TAP)

Sponsor

These sponsors help make this episode possible:

ArchIT

Twinmotion

Monograph

On August 12, Monograph is hosting Section Cut, a virtual conference dedicated to firm owners and operation leaders. Hear from leaders at Lake|Flato, SOM, Workshop/APD, Colloqate, and more! Reserve a seat today by visiting https://sectioncut.com/?ref=trxl.

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Special guest Randall Stevens of AVAIL joins the podcast to talk about some of the more difficult problems in AEC, the struggle of different team members having different incentives, assets and liabilities, vulnerability, and so much more.

Links

Randall on LinkedIn

AVAIL on LinkedIn

AVAIL website

AVAIL on Twitter

The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek (Amazon | Bookshop)

Building Content Summit (Facebook Group)

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My YouTube channel

Sponsor

These sponsors help make this episode possible:

ArchIT

Twinmotion

Monograph

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Special guests Joann Lui and George Valdes of Monograph join the podcast to talk about their passion for PracticeOps (AKA architectural practice operations), working on the business rather than in the business, the importance of building communities, the upcoming Section Cut conference, and more.

Links

Joann Lui on LinkedIn

George Valdes on LinkedIn

George on Twitter

Monograph website

Monograph webinar series (fireside chats)

Monograph job board

Section Cut 2021 conference website (RSVP for it now for the August 12 online conference)

Women Architects Collective (Facebook group)

Architechie group (link to the Slack channel at the bottom of the page)

TRXL 011: ‘I Did This on a Lark’, with George Valdes

More TRXL Podcast episodes

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My YouTube channel

Sponsor

These sponsors help make this episode possible:

ArchIT

Twinmotion

Monograph

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Special guest Federico Negro of Canoa Supply joins the podcast to talk about how he traversed AEC to get where he is now. We also discuss delivering space as a product, architecture's failure to scale, burnout, health, our deep connections to making, and much more.

Links

Federico Negro on LinkedIn

Federico on Twitter

Canoa Supply website

the manifesto

Parsons School of Design

SHoP Architects

Case

WeWork

TRXL 037: ‘The Space Doesn't Care’, with Lance Amato (Lance also works at Canoa)

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Special guests Ian Keough of Hypar and Clifton Harness of TestFit join me to talk about the evolution they've experienced in their different kinds of startups (platform versus product, respectively), and take us behind the scenes to share what it's like running companies, building teams, and building software as CEO's.

Other potential unused episode titles from our conversation: ‘A Whole Flotilla’ and ‘Feral Desire’ (thanks to Clifton), which are now going on the list of good names for bands.

Links

Ian Keough

Ian on twitter

Ian's YouTube talk to the AIA Strategic Council

TRXL podcast episode 003: ‘A Local Maxima’, with Ian Keough

Hypar

Hypar website

Hypar's YouTube channel

Clifton Harness

Clifton on twitter

Clifton's YouTube talk to the AIA Strategic Council

TRXL podcast episode 005: ’BIM is a T-Rex‘, with Clifton Harness

TestFit

TestFit website

eBook: 18 Ways to Increase Density in Multifamily Buildings

TestFit's YouTube channel

Bad Monkeys

Case, Inc.

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My YouTube channel

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Special guest Aaron Maller of Parallax Team joins the podcast to talk about why he got into the Revit consulting business, building 'a' team versus building 'the' team, what constitutes "a total hot mess", and more.

Links

Parallax Team website

Parallax Product Page

FOREground for Revit - new, real site tools for Revit (currently in development)

Parallax Team on Twitter

Aaron on LinkedIn

Aaron on Twitter

Tools mentioned:

Notion

Otter

Descript

Grain

TRXL episode 028: ‘A (Robotic) Holiday Spectacular’, with Brian Ringley

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My YouTube channel

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Special guest Ian Janicki of Outfit joins the podcast to talk about ‘The Moment‘.

The Moment serves as a backdrop to kick off a conversation about what we're seeing happening in AEC Tech. The moniker is in reference to the unforeseen convergence of several tech companies in the mid 1990's that brought so-called extreme sports into the mainstream. We then use this as a framework to examine which startups currently working (possibly/hopefully in concert with one another) toward The Moment for AEC.

Steve Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

In this episode we explore the topics of platforms and apps, puzzles and puzzle pieces, infrastructure and API's, what's changing and what's not changing in the next 10 years, the choice to work on hard projects versus latching on to shiny objects, moving bits versus marshaling atoms, and more.

Links

Outfit

Ian on Twitter

Outfit on Twitter

Outfit on Instagram

Ian on LinkedIn

Evan's AEC // Tech twitter list

Architechie website and Slack channel

Hypar – TRXL 003: ‘A Local Maxima’, with Ian Keough

TestFit – TRXL 005: ’BIM is a T-Rex‘, with Clifton Harness

Upcodes – TRXL 021: ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’, with Scott Reynolds

Reonomy

Xamarin

Katerra

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Sponsor

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Special guest Dr. Upali Nanda of HKS Architects joins the podcast to talk about the achilles heel of architecture, design diagnostics, occupancy outcomes, feedback loops, and what all of these have to do with her work at the intersection of research, data, neuroscience, and space.

Links
Upali on Twitter

Upali Nanda uses neuroscience to understand buildings as living organisms (Archpaper)

HKS Architects

HKS Research

HKS LINE (Laboratory for INtensive Exploration)

Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning at University of Michigan

Center for Advanced Design Research and Evaluation

Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture

Venn diagram (Wikipedia)

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My YouTube channel

Sponsor

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Special guests Brad Feinknopf and Lawrence Anderson join the podcast to talk about how they collaborate with architects to deliver visual storytelling in their evolving field of expertise — architectural photography.

Links
Brad Feinknopf's website

Brad on Instagram

Brad on Twitter

Lawrence Anderson's website

Lawrence on Instagram

Lawrence on Twitter

Richard Avadon (Wikipedia)

Fernando Guerra on Instagram

Columbus College of Art & Design

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My YouTube channel

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Special guest Dion Moult joins the podcast to talk about Open Source software, BlenderBIM, OpenBIM, the Open Source Architecture (OSArch) community, the problem of file formats and software companies that create lock-in, making informed choices about project development workflows relating to technology and software, thinking bigger about the ecosystems of our built environments, and much more.

Links
Dion's blog

The OSArch Community website

learn.osarch.org video tutorials

OSArch on Twitter

BlenderBIM website

BlenderBIM on Twitter

Blender website & community

FreeCAD website

Open-source software defined (Wikipedia)

IfcOpenShell website

BuildingSMART website

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) wiki

Ladybug Tools website (Free environmental analysis tools)

OPEN Foam website (Open source CFD analysis tools)

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Sponsor

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Special guest Randy Deutsch once again joins the podcast to talk about connecting the dots, the importance of learning to get outside of the echo chamber and talk each other's language, and his latest book about mid-career professionals adapting to new trajectories while staying within the profession of architecture.

Links
Randy's website

Randy's twitter

Adapt As An Architect: A Mid-Career Companion by Randy Deutsch (Amazon | Bookshop)

TRXL 004: ’What Else You Got‘, with Randy Deutsch

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Sponsor

Thanks to ArchIT for sponsoring and helping make this episode possible.

Adapt As An Architect: A Mid-Career Companion

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Special guest Dror Poleg joins the podcast to talk about technology and real estate including WeWork's holistic product approach, feedback loops, social layers on top of physical environments, the Power law curve, the decoupling of location and productivity, and much more.

Links
Dror's website

Dror's newsletter (highly recommended)

Dror's Twitter

Dror's online courses: Real Innovation Academy

The Office Prisoner's Dilemma by Dror Poleg

We're Never Going Back by Packy McCormick

Power law curve (Wikipedia)

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My YouTube channel

Sponsor

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Special guest Petr Mitev of Enscape joins the podcast to talk about his recent transition away from an architectural firm and what's going on in the democratization of visualization creation in our profession. We even take a moment to reminisce about old-school rendering applications and computer labs in school — does anyone remember administrating the render farm?

Links
Petr's Twitter

Petr's LinkedIn

Petr's GitHub

Petr's Website

Enscape Website

New Mission/Vision

3.0 Announcement

Enscape's YouTube Channel

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Sponsor

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Special guest Rob Asher of Giraffe Technology joins the podcast to talk about his circuitous path to software development via math, philosophy, and architecture, the professional goals of architects serving societies for human flourishing, building tools that encourage interactivity, the role of technology, and so much more.

Links
Rob on LinkedIn

Giraffe Technology website

GenerativeComponents (Wikipedia)

Cox Architects

Grasshopper

David Rutten

Rhinocerous

Hypar

Episode 003: Ian Keough on TRXL

Episode 014: Andrew Heumann on TRXL

Episode 032: Anthony Hauck on TRXL

Christopher Alexander's Books:

A Pattern Language (Amazon | Bookshop)

The Timeless Way of Building (Amazon | Bookshop)

A New Theory of Urban Design (Amazon | Bookshop)

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channelBookshop

Sponsor

Thanks to our sponsor this week for helping make this episode possible.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)

A New Theory of Urban Design (Center for Environmental Structure Series)

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Special guest Timon Hazell of Walter P Moore joins the podcast to talk about how YourDesk University began, hard work and passion projects, PyRevit, and so much more.

Links
Timon on Twitter

Timon on LinkedIn

YourDesk University

YourDesk University on YouTube

YourDeskUniversity Slack Channel

Walter P Moore

Lean manufacturing (Wikipedia)

SCRUM (Wikipedia)

Timon's book recommendations:

Boundaries by Henry Cloud (Bookshop | Amazon)

Turn The Ship Around! by L. David Marquet (Bookshop | Amazon)

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey (Bookshop | Amazon)

Huion Sketch Pad (Amazon)

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Sponsor

Thanks to our sponsor this week for helping make this episode possible. ArchIT offers Complete IT Solutions for Architecture, Design, and Engineering firms. Tired of dealing with generic IT providers? Visit www.getarchit.com and schedule your free consultation. Technology is your competitive advantage.

Boundaries Updated and Expanded Edition: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life

HUION 2020 Kamvas 13 Display Creator Kit (Cosmo Black) Drawing Tablet with Screen Full-Laminated Tilt Function 8192 Battery-Free Stylus and 8 Shortcut Keys, Included Glove & 20 Pen Nibs

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

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Special guest Lance Amato of Canoa Supply joins the podcast to talk about the vast (dis)array of energy code adoption in the US, the need to hit the reset button, the need for architects to generate standards for the building industry, and more.

Links
The Shiftless Approach to National Building Energy Regulations by Lance Amato (Medium)

Canoa Supply website

Canoa on Twitter

Canoa on LinkedIn

Canoa on Instagram

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Sponsor

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The tables have been turned in this special episode of TRXL. Architects Cormac Phalen and Bob Habian join Evan to discuss some fundamental problems in the AEC industry and a solution that has led to a new career direction.

Links
TectApp

More TRXL Podcast episodes

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My YouTube channel

Sponsor

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Special guest Dr. Daniel Davis, Senior Researcher at Hassell, joins the podcast to talk about the control Autodesk has over the industry and the lack of incentive to address architects' concerns, systemization and blurred service lines as examples of the future of the profession, vertically vs. horizontally integrated companies, and more.

Links
Daniel on Twitter

Daniel's website

Hassell

Daniel's articles:

Modular architecture is Back. Is it better?

Architects vs Autodesk

What ‘The Future of The Professions’ Reveals About the Future of Architecture

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

My YouTube channel

Sponsors

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Special guest John Turner of Gafcon joins the podcast to talk about digital twins and their value proposition in the total building lifecycle, who is—and who isn't—involved (that probably should be) in digital twins, risk aversion & business models, the internet of things & the internet of actions, the 'digital thread', and more.

Links
Digital Twin Consortium

Gafcon's Digital Twin/Cyberbuild Approach

Lean manufacturing (Wikipedia)

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Special guest Phillip Bernstein joins the podcast to talk about teaching his pro practice course that encourages architecture students to push beyond the traditional business model, value propositions of architecture, encouraging collaboration when working in isolation, and much more.

Links
Phil Bernstein on Twitter

Phil’s ARCH 2230b course at Yale School of Architecture entitled Technology and Practice – Exploring New Value in Design Practice

Architecture | Design | Data – Practice Competency in the Era of Computation by Phillip Bernstein

Evan’s YouTube videos mentioning Phil’s inspiration Paper Drawings Need to Die! (Digital Built Week Seattle 2019) Architectural tech, practice, and education in Charleston!

Phil’s articles that elaborate more on the topics in this episode: Phil Bernstein Shares Ten Thoughts on the Future of Practice Why the Field of Architecture Needs a New Business Model

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Special guest Anthony Hauck of Hypar joins the podcast to talk about making the mark you want to make, pursuing something that feels more valuable, shared goals and value propositions in AEC, and more.

Links
Calamityware Mugs

DBEI (BiLT Conference)

Disruptive Technologies in Architecture – AIA Palm Beach Presentation – Nov 2020 (YouTube)

Architecture - Design - Data: Practice Competency in the Era of Computation by Phillip Bernstein

TRXL episode 003 with Ian Keough, CEO of Hypar

TRXL episode 028 with Brian Ringley, Construction Technology Manager at Boston Dynamics

Spacemaker

Book recommendations: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

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Special guest Kat Dovjenko, a consultant to Google's Idea Workshop for the Built Environment and Spatial Syndicate joins the podcast to talk about ongoing observations and changes in the workplace, space as a product, collaboration, distraction and the high cost of switching modalities, and more.

Links

Kat's website

Kat on Twitter

Spatial Syndicate

Google's Idea Workshop for the Built Environment

Evan's Architechie Twitter list

MrBeast Burger, and the launch video (YouTube)

More TRXL Podcast episodes

Check out my other podcast too: Archispeak

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Special guest Violet Whitney of Columbia GSAPP and Sidewalk Labs joins the podcast to talk about influencing, enabling, and measuring how people interact with space using the internet of things (IoT), the potential of dynamic systems, twitter bot poetry, generative design, and much more.

Links
Disruptive Technologies in Architecture – AIA Palm Beach presentation (YouTube)

TRXL podcast – https://gablmedia.com/shows/trxl

Architechie

Columbia GSAPP Courses:

IoT – Measuring the Great Indoors

Simulation – Data Mining the City

Sidewalk Labs Delve Project

Violet on LinkedIn

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Special guest Dave Fano of Teal joins the podcast to talk about what led to the founding of Teal, what it's become since launching just over a year ago, job searching, compensation, designing your career, and so much more. Dave previously taught at Columbia GSAPP, founded Case Inc. which was later sold to WeWork where he became the Chief Growth Officer before starting Teal.

Links
Teal website

Teal Job Tracker

Teal's Job Tracker on Product Hunt

Teal on Twitter

Dave on Twitter

Dave on LinkedIn

WeWork Acquires Case Inc. (Architect Magazine)

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In this inaugural TRXL Holiday Spectacular episode, special guest Brian Ringley joins me to talk about the path he took that led to Boston Dynamics where he helps bridge the gap between designers & the trades on construction sites using Spot, the agile mobile robot.

Links
Boston Dynamics
Spot

Brian on Twitter

Brian on Instagram

Brian's Linktree

Woods Bagot

Pratt Institute

University of Cincinnati DAAP

Roomba (Wikipedia)

Westworld (Wikipedia)

Hypar

Hyundai takes control of Boston Dynamics in $1.1B deal (The Verge)

Beyond the Master Builder: How Robots Can Really Transform the Role of the Architect (Architect Magazine)

Designalyze Podcast with Zach Downey and Brian Ringley

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Special guest Adam Wilbrecht of Concert Blockchain joins the podcast to talk about the impending skilled labor decrease, custody of information, the various ways in which blockchain can help architects have more agency, and so much more.

Links
Adam Wilbrecht on LinkedIn

ConcertVDC website

Cuningham Group website

Blockchain (Wikipedia)

Master Builder (Wikipedia)

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Special guest Scott Davidson of Robert McNeel and Associates joins the podcast to talk about the happy little accidents that led to the creation, and ultimately, the naming of Rhinoceros (aka Rhino), how it changed over time to become one the most beloved tools in AEC, and where it's going with Rhino.Inside and version 7 which is officially released this week on December 9, 2020.

Links
Rhinoceros website

McNeel and Associates (Wikipedia)

Rhino.Inside website

Rhino.Inside Revit website

Rhino Compute features

Rhino Forums

Rhinoceros YouTube channel

Food4Rhino website

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Special guest Scott Reynolds once again joins the podcast to talk about a second lawsuit brought against UpCodes by the ICC which came quickly after some favorable news from the judge on the first one.

Links

UpCodes website

UpCodes on Twitter

TRXL 021: ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’, with Scott Reynolds

UpCodes first lawsuit with the ICC

A court decision in favor of startup UpCodes may help shape open access to the law (TechCrunch article)

International Code Council (ICC)

National Fire Protection Association (NFPA)

MADCAD

TextStreet

YCombinator

Guy Raz’s podcast with Jimmy Wales about how he built Wikipedia (NPR)

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy (Bookshop)

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Special guest Nathan Miller of Proving Ground joins the podcast to talk about hobbies during the pandemic, the digital transformation of AEC, some drawbacks of generative design, privacy concerns with IoT devices and connected buildings, and so much more!

Links

Proving Ground web site

Computers are Hard blog post

Conveyor

Semantic

Lunchbox

Nathan Miller on Twitter

Nathan Miller on LinkedIn

Leading architecture firms pen open letter to Autodesk over rising costs, sluggish development (Archpaper)

Ender 3d Printer (Amazon)

Book recommendations:

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (Bookshop)

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind (Bookshop)

YouTube links and channel recommendations:

Nate's NXT BUILD 2020 presentation

Proving Ground's YouTube channel

Colin Furze

Adam Savage's Tested

The Hacksmith

Alien Exoskeleton

Lightsaber episode

TRXL episode 018: ‘That Perfect Kind of Venn Diagram’, with Dane Stokes

Project Anklebiter forum thread on 914 World

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Special guest Anthony Frausto-Robledo of Architosh once again joins the podcast to talk about what we got right and what we got wrong about what was announced at Apple's ‘One More Thing’ event last week, implications of these new releases for architects and practice, industry 4.0, and convergence.

Links

Upcoming Live stream happy hour with the Archispeak and Life of an Architect podcast on Nov 19th, 4:15pm PST (YouTube)

Architosh web site

Anthony's free Xpresso email newsletter

OK Computer Lecture Series: Disruption (Evan's Disruption talk on YouTube)

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Special guest Anthony Frausto-Robledo of Architosh re-joins the podcast to talk about hardware and software predictions for Apple’s “One More Thing” event on November 10, 2020.

Links

TRXL Ep 012 – ‘Force Multipliers’, with Anthony Frausto-Robledo

Apple Event – One More Thing (The Verge)

Every 'One more thing' Apple has ever announced (Macworld UK)

MacRumors – Apple Working on Redesigned Mac Pro With Smaller Form Factor and Apple Silicon Chip

Six Colors – Fun With Charts: Entirely speculative charts about Apple Silicon

Architosh web site

AEC Inflection Point — The Story of the Revit Revolt

Shapr3d

Parasolid

OK Computer Lecture Series: Disruption (Evan's Disruption talk on YouTube)

Clayton Christensen's theory on innovative disruption (Wikipedia)

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Special guest Scott Reynolds joins the podcast to talk about how he transitioned from architecture to tech, how technology is changing building codes, and how he wants UpCodes to affect the architectural profession.

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Special guest Shane Scranton joins the podcast to talk about virtual reality, the infinite possibilities of the digital realm, VR hardware announcements, and much more.

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Special guest Alvin Huang joins the podcast to talk about architectural education in the midst of a pandemic, turning constraints into opportunities, becoming obsolete, authored versus documented reality, and much more.

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Special guest Dane Stokes joins the podcast to talk about his journey into architecture, being a 'computer person', design computation and automation, the importance of making things and working with your hands, custom fabrication, one-button buildings, having kids and failure, and much more.

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Special guest Rosa Sheng joins the podcast to talk about the future of our profession from a justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) perspective, and so much more.

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Special guest Reg Prentice joins the podcast to talk about the value of an architect, how and why we document decisions, the network effect, how designers are decision factories, and much more.

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Special guest Cherise Lakeside joins the podcast to talk about career passion, the importance of celebration, the inefficiencies within and difficulty of change management in AEC, specifications, CSI, mentorship, leadership, and much more.

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Special guest Andrew Heumann joins the podcast to talk about why people love or hate using certain tools, design, company culture, his generative artwork, and more.

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Special guest Donna Sink joins the podcast to talk about a possible business model for architects based on design performance and outcomes.

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Special guest Anthony Frausto-Robledo joins the podcast to talk about Apple, the Macintosh, and iOS devices in the profession, the open letter to Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost, and much more.

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Special guest George Valdes joins the podcast to talk about his interest and occupation of the technological periphery surrounding the architectural profession, and much more.

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Special guest Lucas Reames joins the podcast to talk about fostering innovation in AEC, the ZeroSixty accelerator, the architectural response to COVID-19 and the opportunities it has created, data-driven design, and much more.

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Special guest Eric Reinholdt joins the podcast to talk about why he started his YouTube channel, the keys to being productive, why getting away from architecture helps his process, the importance of making things, turning sources into resources, and much more.

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Special guest Geoff Manaugh joins the podcast to talk about writing, music, travel, geology, connecting the dots, where ideas come from, architecture, his next book on the topic of quarantine, and much more.

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Special guest Konrad Sobon joins the podcast to talk about working in architecture, open source software development, mentorship, getting better at things versus reinventing the wheel, truck driving, Polish hiphop, basketball, assembling furniture, and so much more.

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Special guest Bill Allen joins the podcast to talk about whether or not generative design is 'doomed to fail', maximizing versus optimizing, work/life balance, personal hacks, reading suggestions, and more.

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Special guest Clifton Harness joins the podcast to talk about generative design, tool building, running a startup, the AEC community on LinkedIn versus Twitter, how architects could affect sustainable change through getting involved in policy decisions, and more.

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Special guest Randy Deutsch joins the podcast to talk about teaching in architecture, how he got his start writing books, why writing is important, and shares some personal productivity hacks.

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Special guest Ian Keough joins the podcast to talk about tool building, "slipping" off the path of becoming a "real" architect, the idea of starting from a blank page, and more.

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In this inaugural episode, Evan talks with Mark LePage of EntreArchitect to discuss what TRXL is all about: a podcast about how technology is changing the architectural profession.

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TRXL is a new podcast about how technology is changing the architectural profession.

TRXL: Recent Episodes

Evan Troxel // Gābl Media

Episode Transcript: 151: ‘The Zoo That’s in the Room’, with Roderick Bates and Kam Star