innovative by design: how organizations can sustain ......innovative by design: how organizations...
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Innovative by Design: How Organizations Can Sustain Continual Innovation in Highly Competitive Markets
by
Andreas Hoffbauer
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Sociology University of Toronto
© Copyright by Andreas Hoffbauer 2018
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Innovative by Design: How Organizations Can Sustain Continual
Innovation in Highly Competitive Markets
Andreas Hoffbauer
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Sociology University of Toronto
2018
Abstract
Almost every contemporary organization operating in competitive markets is pressed to come up
with novel concepts that create new experiences or meaningfully transform product typologies.
For most organizations, this is a quest for survival and continued relevance in rapidly changing
markets. The intuitive solution is “act,” more like a startup, playing fast and loose to disrupt
established rules and conventions. Research shows however that the entrepreneurial mindset is
short lived, giving way to the routines and structures that founders initially rebelled against, as
companies scale and persist over time. More often than not, this leads organizations to exploit,
disproportionally, existing knowledge at the cost of exploring for new ideas and ways of solving
problems. This raises a fundamental question: how can creative organizations, whose value and
vitality are derived from consistently generating novel concepts, do so reliably and over time,
without becoming predictable in their output? My research, based on a yearlong ethnographic
study at a world renowned architectural firm in New York City and interviews with designers
across the United States, points to the criticality of project-based organizational structures, which
serve as the framework for balancing the twin tasks of learning between projects and unlearning
within projects — which is vital to productively breaking with past experiences and expectations.
This organizational typology is in many instances necessary to drive innovation within a
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company, however not sufficient to explain its continuation and nonconformity with past
outputs. I argue that it is the presence of company specific predispositions to ways or modes of
responding to situations, and not particular acts, that enables highly innovative organizations to
continually move forward explorations into the unknown, to generate genuinely novel concepts. I
argue that to successfully drive continual innovation, three distinct areas of a creative-project
based organization’s approach rely on predispositions for moving forward explorations,
including team coordination, exploration, and constructing ideas.
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Acknowledgments First and foremost, I must thank my best friend and wife Tammy, whose support and
encouragement pushed me to complete this dissertation. My thanks also go to Erik Schneiderhan,
Daniel Silver, and Clayton Childress, whose mentorship, both intellectual and professional,
supported the development and execution of this research. I will forever be indebted to my
research participants who opened up to me in a way I could never have expected. My thanks also
go to the incredible mentors, friends, and colleges who have challenged, encouraged, and
believed in me along the way.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................... iv
Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................v
List of Tables .......................................................................................................................... vii
List of Figures........................................................................................................................ viii
INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................1 1.1 The Sociology of Discovery and Organizations .................................................................... 4
1.1.1 The Balancing Act: Exploration Versus Exploitation .......................................................... 8 1.1.2 Maintaining The Balance Over Time and Between Projects ................................................ 8 1.1.3 Foundations of Exploration: Kicking Off a Project .............................................................. 9 1.1.4 Advancing Knowledge: Venturing Into the Unknown ....................................................... 11 1.1.5 Gathering the Raw Creative Material: Foundations for Innovation .................................... 13
1.2 Implications: Why Mechanisms Matter for Innovation .................................................... 18 1.3 Joining The Studio .............................................................................................................. 20
1.3.1 OAE: Office of Architectural Exploration ......................................................................... 22 1.4 Blueprint: The Outline of My Dissertation ........................................................................ 24
2 TEAM COORDINATION .............................................................................................. 27
2.1 Collaboration: Coordinating Chaos ................................................................................... 30 2.2 Agility: Responding to Change ........................................................................................... 33 2.3 Mutual Monitoring: Mapping Shifting Topographies of Work ........................................ 41 2.4 Distributed Intelligence: Shaping the Direction of Discovery ........................................... 51 2.5 Translation: Conveying the Concept.................................................................................. 59 2.6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 67
3 THE EXPLORATION .................................................................................................... 70 3.1 The Project’s Argument Sequence: Setting In Motion Searchs Into The Unknown ........ 74 3.2 Predilections: Approaching the Puzzle .............................................................................. 78 3.3 Suspending Disbelief: Breaking with the Familiar and Predictable ................................. 85 3.4 Design Principles: The Framework for Transformation ................................................... 92 3.5 Genealogy Of Ideas: Progressing Through the Unknown ............................................... 100 3.6 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 109
4 THE CONSTRUCTION ............................................................................................... 112
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4.1 Construction: The Tools for Developing Novel Ideas ...................................................... 116 4.2 Precedence: Gathering the Raw Creative Material to Start............................................ 120 4.3 Studies: Generating Information to Evolve Concepts ..................................................... 128 4.4 Iteration: Transforming Away from the Origins of a Seed ............................................. 136 4.5 Configuration: Reproducing Signature Styles that Differentiate .................................... 146 4.6 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 151
5 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 154
5.1.1 Resolving the Puzzle: Finding a balance ......................................................................... 155 5.2 Who Cares: Why Does Innovation Matter?..................................................................... 156 5.3 Foundations of Exploration: Seeing the World Differently ............................................. 159 5.4 Explaining Consistent Innovation: My Findings ............................................................. 161
5.4.1 Team Coordination ......................................................................................................... 162 5.4.2 Eexploration ................................................................................................................... 164 5.4.3 Constructing Novel Concepts.......................................................................................... 166 5.4.4 A Double-Edged Sword: Enabling and Constraining Innovation ..................................... 169
5.5 The Democratization of Design: Addressing the New Dynamics of Markets ................. 174
Methodological Appendix ..................................................................................................... 178
References.............................................................................................................................. 180
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List of Tables Table 1: OAE Projects ……………………………………………………..….…………31
Table 2: Team Coordination ……………………………………………..………………77
Table 3: Exploration …………………………………………………………………......119
Table 4: Construction ………………….…………………………………………………161
Table 5: Features of Project-Based Organizational Typology …………………………..185
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List of Figures Figure 1: Team Coordination ……………………………………………………………..40
Figure 2: Exploration ……………………………………………………………………..84
Figure 3: Construction ……………………………………………………………………126
Figure 4: Dealing with Uncertainty ..…………………………………………………….178
Figure 5: Dealing with Nested Issues …………………………………………………….180
Figure 6: Introducing Novel Concepts ..………………………………………………….181
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INTRODUCTION
Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.
- Andy Warhol
What is design? For some, typically consumers, it is an expressive element of something that
either adds or detracts from an experience. While for others, the producers who engage with it
daily, it is an activity. This latter group describes it as:
For us, exploratory. I think it is absolutely about inquiry and exploration. Inquiry is an
important piece because it is asking questions, understanding and digesting information,
problem solving. Exploration because it is a creative endeavor, it is brainstorming, it’s
intuition. The bridging of analysis, what we have called informed intuition, the sense of the
art in architecture, which is not all technical but the need for it to perform in certain ways.
The process is about the marrying of the two, the inquiry and the kind of creative aspiration,
in a very, like, iterative way. It is absolutely about collaboration and iteration. There are a lot
of things it is not, but the process is really important to us, to the degree that we talk more
about process than our work itself. I think that we have gotten better about that but you can’t
really separate them, because it is all really closely knit together.
Partner, Architectural Practice, NYC
I see it as a process. Mostly because I am a strong believer that in the life of design, and this
is going to sound really cheesy, but you know it needs time, like sometimes it happens that
we find an idea today, awesome, great, but tomorrow when you are trying to push it forward
it’s not quite there, and certain things don't work, and it starts growing and growing from the
simple discussion at the beginning whether it is program or what do we want out of the
project or the drawings that we do in the end? It is a really interesting process; it’s like
growing, it’s like a baby or a plant, like it has a life of its own, and that is my favorite part of
it; it’s a journey. It really is, it’s a ride, you really don't know where you are necessarily
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going to go, like obviously you are directed, but I think that is how we approach it to a
certain degree, we never approach it, ‘I want to make another white building.’ I don't want to
reiterate something. I want to see where this takes us.
Partner, Boutique Design Practice, NYC
I learned that it is really about questioning. It is really about learning, what are the common
things, questioning the conventional things, and posing something new. I think that is what
architecture is in general, and making it functional and making it useful for a human being. It
totally is a puzzle. As a practice, it’s a puzzle.
Junior Designer, International Architectural Practice, NYC
Questioning, inquiry, exploration, learning, emergence, and venturing into the unknown are
common themes in response to the question: what is design? The enterprise of design, which is
most commonly associated with its aesthetic expression, is also an active endeavor of discovery.
It is an enterprise described by all respondents as deeply guided by a process or approach, which
is paradoxical, given the chaos typically associated with creative acts.
My dissertation, based on a yearlong ethnographic study at a world renowned architectural
firm in New York City and interviews with designers across the United States, is about this
discovery. Not a search with known coordinates, where the challenge is finding an optimal route.
Rather, it is about searching into the unknown, where an endpoint does not exist at the outset of
exploration. Yet it is not about discovery in far off, uncharted territories. I am interested in
discovering new territory within established environments, where the introduction of new
practices and ideas have the potential to disrupt established ways of doing and thinking about
things. A challenge many organizations are tackling in spaces so familiar to us, we assume they
are immutable. Within design, the drive to generate novel concepts extends beyond the
immediacy of monetary gains. As public products that millions of people will potentially interact
with, the drive to introduce novel concepts is about meaningfully transforming the relationships
between individuals and the spaces and objects they interact with. Going beyond addressing
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functional requirements, to create new experiences and meanings to enhance a typology or
introduce a new typology altogether.1
In a real estate market seemingly out of new ideas, the Bjarke Ingles Group (BIG) managed
to introduce a new concept for urban living. In 2015, something strange started taking shape on
the bank of the Hudson River in Manhattan. Driving north along the West Side Highway, where
the road sweeps out in a gentle S shape at 56th street, a silver pyramid appears as you make the
turn. Straddling an entire city block, between 57th and 58th Street, the behemoth, extra-terrestrial
like structure, stands in stark contrast to the glass towers that surround it. As you get closer to the
structure, the portal like perforations on its taught skin, start to come into focus. They are
balconies on one of the most anticipated residential high-rise projects in Manhattan. The building
isn’t a pyramid. It's technically a hyperbolic paraboloid that the Danish architectural firm uses to
solve a lot of problems it identified in existing residential typologies in one single form. The
467-foot parabolic pitch and central cutaway combine the efficiency of a courtyard building with
the density of a high-rise. The result, every unit gets a stunning view of the river. By combining
multiple typologies into one, BIG introduced an entirely new concept for urban living.
Adapting to changing markets can be even more challenging, especially when the direction is
unclear. Late last year, a new car design was unveiled to an enthusiastic crowd of onlookers. The
car does not give the driver herculean power at the tap of the peddle, or elegant lines that turn
heads. The anticipation for a glimpse of this industry transforming prototype was nevertheless
palpable in the room. This is not the Geneva or Detroit auto show, where vehicles of this
importance typically are unveiled. The crowds are at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas and excited for the very absence of pedals, steering wheel, and for that matter, need for
human engagement altogether. The car on stage is a fully autonomous Ford Fusion Hybrid. “We
will not miss the future like Kodak,” proclaims Ford’s CEO, Mark Fields, as he addresses the
crowd. Ford is once again leading the revolution in mobility by combining previously separate
technologies and cultural perceptions into a new concept, starting with the question of what
mobility and car ownership could mean.
1 See for instance Vidler 1992; Venturi 2002; Tschumi 2001 whose rational for pursuing novel concepts in design echoes this statement.
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Like in the two cases above, discovery is about constructing ideas that do not currently exist
either in practice or imagination. In what follows, I focus on how ideas are imagined and
constructed through the transformations that take place when ideas are repurposed, recombined,
and transposed, potentially introducing something genuinely novel as an outcome. Focusing on
design, specifically architecture, communication and industrial, I explain how organizations
construct novel concepts and then recognize their potential value. It is a type of challenge that
extends beyond the borders of the field of design into almost every contemporary organization
operating in competitive markets where there is pressing demand for novel concepts that create
new value. Rather than finding a novel concept and then, over time, gaining increasing efficiency
at bringing the product to market, the kind of organizations I am interested in are required to
bring a completely new product or concept to market, every time, largely because they serve
competing clients who demand market differentiating products or services. Families and
generations of products and services do not exist in these latter kinds of organizations. These can
best be described as entrepreneurial organizations, or creative project-based organizations, that
are constantly seeking to exploit uncertainties in markets, disrupting cultural taken-for-granted
and organizational routines. Fueled by rapidly changing markets, value generation in these
organizations is typically described as chaotic, disorganized, and highly unpredictable. The work
of these organizations stands in stark contrast to those whose value proposition is based on the
optimization and efficiency of delivering a product reliably and predictably to market. To anchor
one line of my research questioning — how do creative firms consistently produce innovative
responses to the challenges they face — I will next review existing explanations.
1.1 THE SOCIOLOGY OF DISCOVERY AND ORGANIZATIONS
There is a long-established association between discovery and collective groups of individuals.
Across the arts (Becker 1974; 1984; Harrison and Rouse 2014; Grazian 2003), sciences (Beunza
and Stark 2002), economics (Padgett 2012; Granovetter 1985), and business (Schumpeter 1934),
creativity is shown to occur in collectives. Creativity is rarely an individual act, even when on
the surface, creators appear to work in isolation (Childress 2017). Alexander (1964) attributes
this to the fact that “the intuitive resolution of contemporary design problems simply lies beyond
a single individual’s integrative grasp” (see also Rittel and Webber 1973; Rittel 1987). In
academic research (Wuchty et al. 2007), as well as medical breakthroughs (Lee et al. 2010),
empirical research demonstrates that both exert greater impacts in their respective domains when
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occurring in collectives. Formal organizations provide the structure for the emergence of
innovation (Tushman and Anderson 1986; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Powell et al. 1996;
Hansen 2002; Danneels 2002; Padgett 2012; Burt 2004).
Formal organizations are generally described as systems of coordination and controlled
activities (Meyer and Rowan 1991:41; Nadler and Tushman 1997) that create and transfer
knowledge (Kogut and Zander 1992) on a reoccurring basis (Becker 1974; Martin 2009).
Research stresses that successful learning and innovation within these kinds of organizations is
predicated on the long-term relationships that they foster, which are vital for generating trust
between individuals (Asheim and Cooke 1999; Maskell and Malmberg 1999; Oinas 2000). Trust
is shown to be important when information is complex and unfamiliar (Vedres and Stark 2010;
de Vaan et al. 2015:1153), and especially critical when risk taking is involved or dealing with
unfamiliar information (Uzzi and Spiro 2005). Or when projects require a diverse range of
collaborators, roles and skills that can only be performed “after a certain ‘incubation’ and lead up
period” (Grabher 2002:211). Through continuous interaction, deep stores of organizational
knowledge become embodied in people and embedded in technical systems (Leonard-Barton
1992:116; March 1991:84; Quinn 1985), conventions (Becker 1974:770), schemas (DiMaggio
1997:268; Cerulo 2010), and rules (Vaughan 2002), which are enhanced through systemic
training and staff development (Grahber 2002:211).
Guided by the assumption that breaking out of formal organizational constraints can catalyze
innovation, temporary collectives — working on one off projects — is another popular tactic for
generating innovation (Stark 2009; de Vaan et al. 2015; Ludin and Midler 1998; Van de Van
1986; Becker 1974:770; Grahber 2001). Defined as “a set of diversely skilled people working
together on a complex task over a limited period of time” (Goodman and Goodman 1976:494;
Grahber 2002:207; DeFillippi 1998), each output is unique, search procedures for ideas are
complex, choices among alternative options require experimentation (Faulkner and Anderson
1987:880; DeFillippi and Arthur 1998), and job descriptions are vague (Stark 2009:93; Martin
2013:73; Martin 2009:118-121). These transient characteristics are attributed to the non-routine
nature of temporary project collectives (Faulkner and Anderson 1987:880; Meyerson et al. 1996;
DeFillippi 2001; Swan et al. 2002). Commonly distinguished by their flat reporting structures
(Stark 2009:102), decentralized decision making (Martin 2013:13), collaboration (Stark
2009:97), and intentional loss of control (Leberecht 2013), coordination of work through formal
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rules, structures, conventions, hierarchy, and performance audits is generally found to be relaxed
(Faulkner and Anderson 1987:881; Grahber 2002:211; Ekstedt et al. 1990:60; Jarzabkowski et al.
2012). These relaxed conditions reflect what research finds to spur innovation (DeFillippi 2001;
Swan et al. 2002), which is the uncovering of taken-for-granted assumptions and expectations by
shifting our mental gazes (Zerubavel 1997; Becker 1974) through the disruption of established
conventions (Leschziner and Green 2013). Not surprising, permanent organizations with
significant inertia (Hannan and Freeman 1984) attempt to imitate these transient conditions by
building autonomous research and development facilities (Powell et al. 1996), which are often
geographically distant from the main organization (Hiltzik 1999; Smith and Alexander 1988). Or
they enter into joint venture programs with other organizations (Kogut 1991; Windeler and
Sydow 2001) to break out of the constraints imposed by the entrenched practices, rules,
procedures, conventions, and schema of a single formal organization.
When a temporary collective is successful, it is not uncommon for the episodic project
collaboration to transform into something more enduring (Grahber 2002:210). This is the critical
point when a temporary collective turns into a formal organization, at least in ambition. The
disruptive qualities that make temporary collectives highly adept to innovate, also make them
volatile, unpredictable, and prone to break up (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; March 1991).
Introducing a certain degree of systematized coordination (Okhuysen and Bechky 2009; Feldman
and Pentland 2003) and regularized conventions (Becker 1974) dampens the destabilizing
qualities of temporary collectives. The facilitation of coordination within organizations primarily
serves to enable teams to learn within and across projects (Stark 2009:109; Hargadon and
Bechky 2006:486; Walsh and Ungson 1991; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). Research shows that
collective learning is only possible, however, through a shared coding scheme (Katz and Kahn
1966; Becker 1974), which facilitates the successful coding, storage, and retrieval of information
from the group’s collective memory (Wegner 1986; Wegner et al. 1991; Arrow 1974; Doeringer
and Piore 1985). By sharing a common stock of knowledge and coding schema organizations can
“generate new applications for existing knowledge” (Kogut and Zander 1992:391), which is
shown to be a fundamental aspect of innovation (Padgett and Powell 2012; Schumpeter 1934;
Latour and Woolgar 1986). Over time, knowledge increasingly becomes stored in an
organization’s procedure, norms, rules, schemas, and form (March 1991:73), leading to the
emergence of organizing principles (Kogut and Zander 1992:384). When coordination
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mechanisms between projects are weak or broken, learning closures threaten organization wide
learning, leading to information silos (Hobday 1998; 2000).
Considering permanent organizations and temporary collectives in tandem raises a puzzle:
learning between projects and episodic unlearning within projects are arguably two of the most
potent strategies for generating innovation, but, when combined into a creative project-based
organization, they might cancel each other out. That is, providing project teams within creative
project-based organizations with too much inter-project learning can ruin the ability to break out
of established rules, procedures, conventions and schemas, thereby canceling out the benefits of
both tactics. This might explain why, to date, evidence of disruptive exploration within creative
project-based organizations is mixed — some studies support the notion that unlearning is
possible within these organizations (Stark 2009; de Vaan et al. 2015; Beunza and Stark 2002),
while other studies find that unlearning becomes increasingly less likely as organizational inertia
sets in (Sydow et al. 2004; Grabher 2004). This puzzle raises the fundamental question of how
creative project-based organizations, whose value and vitality are derived from consistently
generating novel concepts, can do so reliably and over time, without becoming predictable in
their output.
To add complexity to this puzzle, March (1991:74) argues “as individuals in the organization
become more knowledgeable, they also become more homogeneous with respect to knowledge.
An equilibrium is reached at which all individuals and the code share the same (not necessarily
accurate) belief with respect to each dimension. The equilibrium is stable.” Yet historical and
contemporary research show that something that is genuinely novel does not already exist in our
current practice or imagination, it must be constructed (Padgett and Powell 2012:1). To advance
knowledge, writes Peirce, we must free ourselves from former perceptions and interpretations
and from the false certainty of the past (Peirce 1933; see also Joas 1996:135; Misak 2013:48).
And instead, as Martin (2009:25) states, stare into a mystery to ask what could be, to construct
something new. Staring into the mystery and trying to discover what lies within is the
fundamental challenge of creative project-based organizations.
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1.1.1 THE BALANCING ACT: EXPLORATION VERSUS EXPLOITATION
For organizations to be flexible, empirical evidence shows that a fine balance needs to be struck
between exploration and exploitation (March 1981; 1991; Levitt and March 1988; Levinthal and
March 1981; Levinthal 1997). Exploration, which captures concepts like experimentation, play,
flexibility and discovery, seeks to generate new knowledge. Exploitation, on the other hand,
capitalizing on what has already been learned, through refinement, seeks to generate efficiency
and execution (Lester and Piore 2004; Martin 2009; Martin 2013; Stark 2009). The challenge, as
an organization grows, is balancing the scale. As an organization evolves, research finds “it must
develop organizing principles and a widely held and shared code by which to orchestrate large
numbers of people and, potentially, varied functions” (Kogut and Zander 1992:390;
Jarzakowbowski:909; DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Giddens 1984). This is also shown to push
organizations to tip the scale disproportionately towards the exploitation of existing knowledge
(Lester and Piore 2004: 107), ultimately locking themselves out of markets when they fail to
innovate because they neglected to emphasize exploration (Stark 2009:82/177) by staring into a
mystery and asking what could be rather that what is (Martin 2009).
To date, most theories of creative project-based organizations do not adequately address the
tension of simultaneously balancing learning between projects and unlearning within projects,
particularly over time. Anticipating these issues, researchers have identified a need for both a
richer conceptual understanding of these dynamics (Kaplan and Vakili 2014) and empirical
research (Sydow et al. 2004). This is a point of entry for my project and helps inform the
questions I ask of my data.
1.1.2 MAINTAINING THE BALANCE OVER TIME AND BETWEEN PROJECTS
By exploring the tension between the twin tasks of learning between projects and unlearning
within projects, my research exposes assumptions about work practices within creative project-
based organizations, where the fundamental challenge is constant innovation. Taking the
tensions between organizational learning and project based unlearning seriously, my research
points to the criticality of mechanisms, established from learning across projects, to enable
unlearning within projects — which is fundamental to innovation. “Composed of chains or
aggregations of actors confronting situations and mobilizing more or less habitual responses,”
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mechanisms are defined as the habitually conditioned responses of actors to these situations. Yet
there is always the “the possibility, greater in some circumstances than others, that a novel way
of responding to a problem could emerge” (Gross 2009:368-369; see also Giddens 1984).2 I use
mechanisms, like Dewey, to represent a non-teleological interpretation of the intentionality of
action, where habits represent “acquired predisposition[s] to ways or modes of response, not to
particular acts” (Joas 1996, see also Schneiderhan 2013:289). In other words, mechanisms
provide ways for designers to move forward when muddling through an issue in which a sense of
where they will end up does not exist (Lindblom 1959).
Despite representing predisposed ways or modes of responding, mechanisms are not static.
The mechanisms I identify are dynamic, constantly evolving and changing to absorb and address
emerging ways of responding to issues. I do not conceptualize them dichotomously, as either
present or not, but rather along a continuum, in which their presence within a practice either
increases or decreases the likelihood of innovation occurring. These predisposed ways or modes
of responding to issues are also considered idiosyncratic to each project. Their individual
emphasis, configuration, and context within which they are deployed varies dramatically across
projects, increasing the likeliness of innovation in some instances, and decreasing it in others.
The habitually conditioned responses I identify, vary across multiple dimensions, and cannot be
activated by merely flipping a switch.
Before going any further, I will briefly outline how design projects typically start. I ground
this discussion in theories of innovation and creativity — specifically how actors break out of
taken-for-granted routines and procedures.
1.1.3 FOUNDATIONS OF EXPLORATION: KICKING OFF A PROJECT
Projects in creative project-based organizations typically start with a brief. The brief, prepared by
the client, as part of a competition package or a direct commission, outlines the objectives and
2 Gross (2009: 370-71) distinguishes between three types of habits: individual cognitive affective habits, defined as “habitual ways individual actors have of understanding and responding emotionally to situations in general, resulting from their psychological experience or their biological endowment or propensities;” individual behavioral habits, defined as “the dispositions to enact specific behavioral responses or routines when individual actors are faced with particular kinds or problem situations;” and collectively enacted, defined as ways that groups of individual actors, including those who comprise collective actors of various kinds, have of working together to solve problems.” These are not distinct from one another, “I would argue,” writes Gross “that habits often come bundled in habit sets.”
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intentions for the project.3 Yet unlike exploring for objects that are known in advance, like an
address or precious metal, the kind of design projects that I focus on are not guided by a defined
set of criteria or established endpoint. I use the term exploration narrowly, following March
(1991) and Stark (2009:3-4), to refer to approaches to work that break from successful and
familiar routines, to search into the unknown. The terms innovation and invention are also used
judiciously to indicate the “construction of something neither present nor anticipated by anyone
in the population” (Padgett and Powell 2012:1). Something that by its very definition is hard to
understand and comprehend due to its genuine novelty.
After reviewing the brief, designers assigned to the project immediately start identifying the
issues and conditions unique to the project. Explorations into the unknown however are rarely
embarked upon unprovoked by a set of conditions that challenge existing practices and routines.
“We go through life,” argues Whitford (2002:340) “as creatures of habit until we encounter an
indeterminate situation that presents us with conditions that we experience as a need, a conflict,
or a lack” (see also Schneiderhan 2011:596; Stark 2009:5). When teams are confronted with
issues or challenges, where pre-existing habits fail to resolve these wanting conditions, Gross
(2009:366) argues “an action-situation” rises to the forefront of our “consciousness as
problematic” (see also DiMaggio 1997:272; Schneiderhan 2011:596; Joas 1996:128). Established
responses for resolving the problematic conditions will not help the team move forward. And as
Dewey (1998 [1938]:172) stated long ago, situations like this “cannot be straightened out,
cleared up and put in order, by manipulation of our personal state of mind.” The restoration of an
integrated experience is only possible through “operations which actually modify existing
3 In architecture, and the other fields of design I investigate, there are two primary ways of getting business: through commissions or competitions. Commissions are the most direct form of getting business, where a client hires a firm to complete a project. These projects are not guaranteed, however, like in the case of the DC Premium Space project, there is an initial approval following the concept design phase where the client, armed with the design and preliminary cost estimate, decides whether to proceed as is, go through a redesign phase, or find another firm to give the commission to. It is not rare for commissions to be lost at this stage due to disagreement on design or feasibility of building it within budget. The second, and more precarious way of getting business, is by winning it through competitions. Either in open or closed competitions, multiple firms vie to win a commission by submitting an initial concept design, which a panel evaluates and awards a winner. Many firms prefer not to enter competitions due to the marginal compensation they get for entering, which does not begin to cover the massive amount of effort and resources competitions consume — in some cases, entire offices for a month, with slim odds of winning. Yet many prestigious projects and public spaces like performing arts centers, which architectural firms want to pursue due to their cultural import, are awarded through competitions. For this reason, firms will pursue competitions because it is the only way to get career and studio defining projects.
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conditions.” Teams cannot simply reframe the project brief to overcome the challenges posed by
the client, they need to transform the existing conditions upon which the design is premised to
restore an integrated experience. It is because of the uncertainty that surrounds these situations
during the first days of a project that Stark (2009) finds they become full of possibility.4 An
opportunity space presents itself to break away with how designers have approached these issues
in the past, enabling teams to introduce a new experience and meaning to the typology they are
engaging with.
Yet most actors, under conditions of uncertainty, where the chances of successfully pursuing
unfamiliar lines of action cannot be calculated, revert to familiar and reliable routines —
exploiting existing knowledge (Knight 1921, Stark 2009:14; March 1991; 1981; Levinthal and
March 1981). Forcing uncertain situations to fit within a framework that is intelligible with past
experiences and expectations. Hence the minimal variation in many building and product
typologies. It is much easier to design and convince clients of existing ideas than it is novel ones
that are inherently unfamiliar and challenge taken-for-granted assumptions. For ambitious firms,
like the ones focused on throughout my dissertation, this is the starting point where they begin to
question and examine the fundamental issues and conditions that are unique to the design
challenge. The point when they go from understanding the brief to exploring for new
opportunities.
1.1.4 ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE: VENTURING INTO THE UNKNOWN
The possibilities for reimagining the inherent issues of a project are not limitless. Designers are
enmeshed in webs of meaning. “Problem situations present themselves to actors through the
lenses of the cultural environment in which they are immersed,” says Gross (2009:367). These
webs he elaborates “give meaning to and help provide the content of the goals, orientations,
identities, vocabularies of motive, and other understandings of the action situation that actors
come to have” (see also Mead 1967[1934]:140; Dewey 1998[1933]:144; Dewey
1998[1938]:173; Zerubavel 1997:15). A designer’s environment therefore shapes how the issues
of a project are understood by the team and the strategies available to them for resolving it. For
4 Whitford (2002:340) writes, “creativity becomes a necessary part of the action framework, as actors seek new combinations, new means (and hence new ends and ends-in-view), new responses to vexing situations.”
12
this reason, Padgett and Powell (2012:2) state that inventions are permutations of the social
context within which they arise (see also Schneiderhan 2011; Cerulo 2010:122; DiMaggio
1997:265; Vaughan 2002:51). The challenges therefore facing designers as they begin to tackle
design challenges is breaking out of the webs of meaning in which they are enmeshed to
construct concepts that do not currently exist in practice or imagination — breaking the path set
by those before them to unlearn within a project.
After surveying the issues and conditions unique to a project, designers need to break out of
the webs of meaning they are enmeshed in, or unlearn within a project, to fundamentally shift
the way they look at an issue. “Logical cognition, no matter how useful for refinement and
improvement, is unlikely to be a fundamental process for generating novelty,” argue Padgett and
Powell (2012:1), because “logic can only use axioms that are already there.” The exploitation of
existing knowledge and experiences is fundamental to refining and increasing the efficiency of
existing concepts, but not for radical transformation (March 1981; 1991; Levitt and March
1988). Designers need to suspend rational thought and make seemingly “foolish” decisions,
concludes March (1981:574).
Shifting their mental gaze enables designers to see things that they never noticed before,
“even in extremely familiar environment[s],” states Zerubavel (1997:26). Through his historical
research, Schneiderhan (2011:613) finds this is possible by rejecting existing vocabularies of
motives, immersing oneself in new social contexts, and through experimentation, constructing
new vocabularies.5 To do this, designers start by gathering precedence research to identify
exemplar or interesting ways to approach the inherent issues they are grappling with. Drawing on
extensive ethnographic research, Leschziner and Green (2013:122-124) provide actionable
insights on how precedence research enables designers to break with routine practices. When
existing strategies of action stop working and an actor “consciously decides on a strategy of
action that is new to her, though one that is part of the widely shared repertoire of action in the
field, then one has a deliberate and non-habitual practice (at the level of the individual) that is
routine at the level of the field.” Although new to the designer, these strategies of action
5 To this end Joas (1996:133) writes, “In … various crises of habitual action, the action situation have to be redefined in a new and different way. This involves defining that which is as yet undefined, rather than simply making a different selection from a reservoir of situation components that are either already defined or have no need of definition.”
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“represent a repertoire of intelligible, effective forms of action and are to be expected under
normal field conditions.” These actions may challenge the team deploying them, but will not
transform the existing field or establish a new field. The resulting actions are relatively
predictable. Conversely, when a designer “consciously follows a path of action that is novel to
her” and the field, “one has an attempt at innovation.” The practices employed by these actors
are considered non-routine within a field, because “they are not widely perceived as acceptable
ways of conducting given actions, or even cognized as possible lines of action.” Drawing on
diverse and unexpected precedence cases helps shift the mental gaze of designers working in the
most familiar and seemingly immutable environments. This is how BIG began the process of
designing a hyperbolic paraboloid to resolve the fundamental issues the team identified, which
needed to be addressed to meaningfully transform the urban residential high-rise typology.
Gathering information on novel paths of action is one of the primary challenges of innovation,
consuming significant energy at the beginning of a project. This is because it lays the foundation
for subsequent ideas.
1.1.5 GATHERING THE RAW CREATIVE MATERIAL: FOUNDATIONS FOR INNOVATION
The next step in design is constructing new ideas through the repurposing, recombining,
transposing and reshuffling of ideas gathered from precedence research, context conditions, and
other pertinent sources of information. No matter how radically new, novel ideas are
combinations and permutations of what was there before. It is the transformation of these
existing ideas that make them novel, according to Padgett and Powell (2012:2). This is not a
straight forward process. The process of design starts to get messy when teams begin to
transform ideas. Following Dewey (1998[1938]:175) “ideas are operational in that they instigate
and direct further operations of observation; they are proposals and plans for acting upon existing
conditions to bring new facts to light and to organize all the selected facts into a coherent
whole.” Concepts, on the other hand, represent these coherent wholes.
Introducing strategies of action that are not considered acceptable or even cognized as
possible lines of action into a typology is not a simple task. Stark (2009:4) states “the process of
innovation is paradoxical, for it involves a curious cognitive function of recognizing what is not
yet formulated as a category. For this reason, Padgett and Powell (2012) assert that novelty, by
its very definition, is hard to understand. This is because non-routine strategies of action at the
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level of the field must be drawn from other fields (see Csikszentmihalyi 1996:9). Information of
this nature emanates from people with different backgrounds and perspectives, enmeshed in
distant and unfamiliar webs of meaning (Lester and Piore 2004:51; see also McDonnell et all
2017:9; Stark 2009). The contextual residue, left by the originating web of meaning, is not shed
as diverse ideas move from one domain into another — there is no inherent process of
translation.6 The value of information curated from these sources is for this reason found to be
unfamiliar and consequently hard to understand.7
A curvilinear relationship exists between cognitive distance and resonance, according to
McDonnell et al. (2017:7-9). “Resonance is most likely and likely strongest,” they state, “when
the solution offered by the object is neither too familiar nor too resistance to interpretation or
extension.”8 What utility, if any, does this material have, and how can I use it to resolve my issue
is the essential question that needs to be answerable to designers.
Despite the tremendous amount of decoding and interpretation required to recognize the
potential of distant ideas, the value of crossing domains of knowledge and practice cannot be
understated (Zander and Kogut 1995; von Hippel 1994). de Vaan and his collaborators
(2015:1150) find, through extensive empirical analysis, “where groups comprising a team are
cognitively (stylistically) distant, members might confront a babel of dissonant languages, where
even the same term might not have the same meaning. Cognitive diversity has potential to shake
up existing codes and categories, leading to the development of innovative products” (see also
Lester and Piore 2004:51) It is, therefore, “not enough for different communities to be in
contact,” argues Stark (2009:17). “Recombinant innovation requires that they interact.”
6 Padgett and Powell (2012:6, footnote 18) write, “we stick with the word recombination because that is so prevalent in the literature. But in our empirical case the elements being recombined are not atomic entities, decoupled from their context, but rather nodes or ties in some network or other. For that reason, network folding more accurately describe the phenomenon we observe than does the word recombination, which to our ears has atomistic overtones.” Like Stark and his collaborators, I, too, find that information does not lose its contextual characteristics. 7 Uzzi and Spiro 2005; This information is referred to as sticky due to its inability to be transmitted without significant interpretation and understanding; see also Polanyi 1996; Hansen 1999; von Hippel 1994. This contrasts with information that passes through networks that requires no uncoding (see for instance Burt 1992; Burt 2002; Burt 2004). 8 de Vaan et al. (2015:1147) find “teams are most likely to be creatively successful when cognitively heterogeneous groups have points of intersection.” When ideas are too resistant to interpretation, teams will not have common points of intersect and likely overlook the idea.
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Ideas whose value and utility is immediately apparent, and in turn easily exchanged, will not
challenge existing perceptions and understanding. McDonnell et al. (2017:3) state “to the extent
that resonance is about congruence, we argue that it is about the act of making a cultural object
congruent as a person works through a situation or problem they face rather than having an
already congruent or familiar solution ready at hand.” Making cultural objects resonant does not
occur in bounded moments of insight, but rather emerges through the interactions of team
members as they repurpose, recombine, transpose and reshuffle ideas. “Resonance is a specific
kind of experiential effect (or interpretant) emerging at the same time that actors come to see the
world in a new light.” This sentiment was echoed nearly twenty years earlier by Zerubavel
(1997) on shifting our mental gaze to see new things in extremely familiar environments.
At the end of the initial design phase, teams need to get client buy in. Whether to win a
competition or move on to the next phase of development, the concept design is established at
the end of this phase. With the direction set, teams now work to bring the design concept to life,
adding increasing levels of resolution until it is fully executed.
When explorations succeed at reorientating action, they have the potential to shift
perceptions on a wider scale. Something that Joas (1996:129) describes as a creative
achievement on the part of the actor. “In some of these instance,” Leschziner and Green
(2013:136) find, “these practices will gain traction, producing new, shared ways of approaching
old situations.” They elaborate to say that “such innovation [may] over time become
institutionalized, to constitute habitual practices and, eventually, new dispositions.” Eventually
these new approaches to resolving issues inherent in a typology, will have to be disrupted, for
creative project-based organizations to stay relevant and survive.
To successfully venture into the unknown, three distinct areas of a creative project-based
organization’s approach rely on mechanisms for moving explorations forward, these include:
team coordination, exploration, and constructing novel concepts. The following three literatures
provide vectors for my analysis of mechanisms within creative project-based organizations and
inform the structuring of the three substantive empirical chapters of my dissertation.
1.) Team Coordination within project-based organizations is critical. Following Harrison and
Rouse (2014:1258; see also Okhuysen and Bechky 2009), I define coordination as the collective
intertwining of components of work to achieve a common goal. Through coordinated efforts,
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empirical research finds that teams are more likely to produce more impactful work within their
field (Wuchty et al. 2007), helping to overcome the increasing complexity of contemporary
problems that lie “beyond a single individual’s integrative grasp” (Alexander 1964:5; see also
Rittel and Webber 1973; Rittel 1987). When teams are physically proximate to one another, Lee
and his collaborators (2010) find that the physical proximity of team members is positively
associated with the impact of their work within their given domain. Hence Stark’s (2009:17)
conclusion that “it is not enough for different communities to be in contact,” they need to
interact to meaningfully transform ideas. Yet empirical research demonstrates that creative teams
need to also actively separate (Harrison and Rouse 2014) to introduce divergence (George 2007)
and dissent (Nemeth 2012; Nemeth et al. 2001), which are two factors attributed to innovation
(Dane 2010:589). Harrison and Rouse (2014) call the dynamic process of integration and
separation in collaborative groups elastic coordination. Research finds that when teams are
challenged with uncertainty (Argote 1982; Adler 1995), often the case with creative projects,
ready-to-use procedures for elastic coordination are not available (Jarzabkowski et al.
2012:921). Rather than emerging anew for each project, my research challenges this by
demonstrating that in creative project-based organization, collaboration mechanisms are in fact
in place, established sufficiently enough within the organization’s procedures to be deployed
almost immediately when a project begins. Rather than being highly flexible (Ching et al. 1992),
I will show that they are rigorously established within the organization. When these coordination
mechanisms are challenged, coordination breakdowns occur, inhibiting teams from moving
forward collectively. Overall, I demonstrate that when a collaborative foundation is in place to
coordinate successive cycles of individual exploration and collective reintegration.
2.) Exploration into the unknown is fundamental for innovation. The challenge facing teams
seeking novel resolutions to an issue, however, is that solutions are not defined at the outset. As
Dewey (1998[1933]) put it, “it is artificial, so far as thinking is concerned, to start with a ready-
made problem, a problem made out of whole cloth or arising from a vacuum. In reality such a
“problem” is simply an assigned task.” No matter how challenging the problem, they have
coordinates to guide work, which research shows enables actors to reverse engineer a solution
(Rittel and Webber 1973; Martin 2009; Lester and Piore 2004). By contrast, searching into the
unknown evokes “a troubled, perplexing, trying situation where the difficulty is, as it were,
spread throughout the entire situation, infecting it as a whole.” Dewey states that under these
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circumstance, “we know what the problem exactly is simultaneously with finding a way out and
getting it resolved” (see also Stark 2009). I view action, following the pragmatist theoretical
tradition and in particular John Dewey, as continuous rather than aiming for a terminal endpoint,
where actors are embedded in streams of continuous action (Dewey 1991[1939]:239). Building
on Whitford (2002), McDonnell and his collaborators (2017:4) state “resonance helps identify
lines of action towards “ends-in-view,” potentially revising people’s desires and imagining of
what is possible.” Whitford (2002:345) writes, “the actor is an experimenter, who encounters
problem situations … the actor hypothesizes activities — means-to-ends — that might resolve
the problem and make predictions about their results … choosing a best course of action but
constantly adjusting it upon receiving new information about the actual effects of means chosen”
(see also Mead 1907:110; Gross 2009:367; McDonnell et al 2017:4; Schön 1983). Guided by
what could be questions, a hypothesis “if nurtured with loving care — as opposed to applying
force and determination — unfolds according to its own logic” writes Joas (1996:135), “until it is
finally ripe for testing.” I draw on pragmatist theory for my analysis and add to it in a modest
way by clarifying some aspects of ends-in-view within design. I will show that creative project-
based organizations, which are premised on asking what could be questions, in fact deploy
approaches, which move forward the unfolding of an idea and mean-to-ends selected along the
way. They do not force it, but the idea does not emerge in a vacuum either — or, as the image
commonly portrayed suggests, in a wild and untamed environment. When the mechanisms for
moving means-to-ends forward are upended, I show why teams have problems producing novel
concepts. Overall, I show that when procedures exist within practices to help move forward the
successive development of ideas, even when teams start with highly familiar material.
3.) Constructing ideas while keeping ends-in-view is not exclusively a mental activity. One
needs tools from time to time. Following Latour and Stark, I define tools as inscription devices
that shape views, revealing information that is not immediately apparent (Latour 1986; Latour
and Woolgar 1986; Stark 2009). Focusing on architecture, Ewenstein and Whyte (2009:28) find
“a focus on objects can reveal the iterative, even dialogical, process through which knowledge is
developed by both subjects and objects as agents” (see also Latour 2005). The active role of
tools and the artifacts they produce is not exclusive to design. Scientific facts, finds Latour
(1986:129), are not pre-givens waiting to be discovered. They are “constituted through the artful
creativity of scientists” deployment of the inscription devices, or tools, available to them.
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Drawing on Latour’s (1986) emphasis on thinking with eyes and hands, Stark (2009; see also
Beunza and Stark 2002) demonstrates that the tools used in arbitrage trading, similarly shape
how quantitative traders see markets and, in turn, construct novel trades. These qualitative
studies all provide actionable insights into how recombination works in practice to transform
disparate ideas. As Latour found long ago in scientific labs, transformations occur through the
modification, reshuffling, and superimposition of different artifacts (Latour 1986; Latour and
Woolgar 1986; Stark 2009; Beunza and Stark 2002). My findings contribute to this literature and
add insights by explaining how and why material objects matter for design. I will show that
established patterns of use, emphasis, and ordering of tools contribute to the novel solutions
constructed by design firms. Contrary to Latour’s findings, I demonstrate how mechanisms for
deploying tools, rigorously enforce their emphasis and ordering, rather than perpetually changing
order as he states. When tools are deployed in unusual ways, I show why teams are challenged to
construct novel concepts. I demonstrate that procedures exist within studios for translating
visions into tangible representations, enabling teams to gather the necessary information to
construct concepts that at the outset are vague visions which lack clarity and definition.
1.2 IMPLICATIONS: WHY MECHANISMS MATTER FOR INNOVATION
Focusing on mechanisms for moving forward explorations into the unknown, my research
reveals how creative project-based organizations are enabled to continually produce innovative
design concepts, without becoming predictable. It also reveals why creative project-based
organizations fail to innovate, and the inherent conditions that constrain innovation within this
organizational typology.
First, it reveals the unanticipated enabling role of mechanisms in the exploration into the
unknown. This runs counter to the broader literature on innovation that suggests that these
features inhibit the ability to break with the past. I find distinct mechanisms exist that enable
collaborative collectives to explore for unfamiliar ideas and then identify their potential value
(see for instance de Vaan et al. 2015). This task is identified as one of the greatest challenges
facing any contemporary organization because searches of this kind are not guided by known
coordinates (Stark 2009:1). My findings reveal that mechanisms that are woven into the fabric of
a creative project-based organization are malleable, providing a flexible framework for the
construction of novel ideas. Because these mechanisms are not formalized into explicit rules and
19
procedures, they evolve as new practices emerge and new skills and experiences are introduced
into the organization. Collectively, these mechanisms constitute the foundation for an approach
that enables learning between projects, but are flexible enough to allow for unlearning within
projects.
Second, by revealing these mechanisms, my findings call into question the perceived
procedural laxness of creative project-based organizations (Grahber 2002:211; Ekstedt et al.
1999; Dougherty 1992). These mechanisms lock organizations into producing specific types of
response to the challenges they face. Put another way, creative project-based organizations are
not as fluid as recent research suggests (Lundin and Soderholm 1995; Midler 1995; Lundin and
Midler 1998; Hobday 1998; 2000; Gann and Salter 2000). They may be more adaptable and open
to exploration than other types of organizations, but not completely nimble as they are often
made out to be. This offers insights into the unique signatures creative project-based
organizations impart on their products, despite sharing little other resemblance to previous
output.
These contributions are significant because they provide new empirical evidence to the
debate on the emergence of innovation within organizations. Much of existing research on
project-based organization is episodic (Hargadon and Bechky 2006; Hargadon 2003; Sutton and
Hargadon 1996) or predominantly focused on interviews (Livingston 2007). While incredibly
useful, this research does not get at the conventions, rules, procedures, and schema (see Polanyi
1967; Jerolmack and Khan 2014) that are woven through the fabric of this organizational
typology. My research provides new empirical insights, into these previously overlooked aspects
of creative project-based organizations through extended ethnographic research.
My findings establish a new theoretical foundation for future research on the mechanisms
within creative project-based organizations whose value and vitality are derived from
continuously producing novel responses to the challenges they face. Shifting away from the
traditional dichotomy between highly structured and unstructured organizations, my research
examines how and why functional features of different kinds of mechanisms enable and
constrain activities within organizations. Through a pragmatist framework, I contribute to
theories of organizational structure, by demonstrating the emergent, dynamic, and unanticipated
qualities of the mechanisms that structure organizations.
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A related and perhaps more fundamental implication is that my findings call into question
popular management techniques focused on creativity within organizations. By example, many
management books and business journals tie the creative capacity of organizations to the
elimination of hierarchy and structure within a business. While flatter reporting structures,
decentralized decision making, collaboration, and a casual culture are all aspects of creative
project-based organizations, they are not sufficient to enable the creation of genuinely novel
concepts. Implementing these organizational features will not in themselves help teams unlearn
within projects. Focusing on these high-level characteristics has the potential to demoralize
teams as they endlessly circle in their exploration as they struggle to define their path. The focus
needs to be reoriented on the mechanisms from which these expressions or features emerge.
Similarly, it highlights that although not enshrined as rules, these mechanisms still need to be
constructed, maintained, and most importantly continuously developed. Based on my research, I
believe this is a task that requires managers to become pragmatist sociologists rather than
management experts.
Exposing cleavages in our existing understanding of the production of innovation, I
demonstrate how this limits our understanding of the processes and procedures within creative
project-based organizations that enable them to produce novel concepts. My research helps
ameliorate some of these tensions by focusing on mechanisms within a studio’s practice —
explaining how they enable teams to overcome the twin tasks of learning between projects and
unlearning within projects. To do this, the three substantive chapters of my dissertation draw on
extensive ethnographic research and interviews.
1.3 JOINING THE STUDIO
My dissertation is based largely on ethnographic research at an internationally acclaimed
architectural practice located in New York City, where I observed teams tackle projects and
interviewed designers. In June of 2015, I received unprecedented access to the architectural
practice, being provided with a workstation, email address, access to internal servers, and most
importantly cart-blanch freedom to shadow design teams and the firm’s principal. On only one
occasion was I asked to leave a meeting. Otherwise, for over a year, I took on the life of a
designer, entering the studio early in the morning to catch up on field notes and leaving when the
last member of the team I was observing left — often staying early into the next morning.
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With openness and willingness to explain their craft, beyond what I could have expected, the
designers at the studio let me into their lives. At the end of my first week at the practice, a group
of designers were headed to the Lower East Side for drinks with friends, to which I was invited.
On the subway ride, a senior designer cheekily asked how many more weeks I would be with
them — insinuating that my likely short stay would reveal little to nothing. When I responded
51, his demeanour changed immediately, telling me that soon everyone’s guard would drop and I
would see what architecture was really about. Sure enough, a few weeks into my stay, tempers
started to flair. Designers started openly expressing frustration in front of me, revealing their
weaknesses and fears. During the early days of my fieldwork, a designer, without hesitation,
handed me a foam block and asked me if I could cut the models. After a brief tutorial at two in
the morning on how to use the hotwire cutter, which I can assure you teaches its own lessons to
the tired and inexperienced, I was cutting models in preparation for a meeting the following
morning. I was in. Breaking for lunch with designers at the firm daily, joining them for drinks
after work, and going to events with them, I learned a tremendous amount about them and their
lives as designers.
I also interviewed 25 other designers working in architectural, communication, and industrial
design practices in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Berlin.9 These
interviews were predominantly conducted with principals and senior designers, all working at
renowned and highly acclaimed practices. These interviews provided additional depth of
information. These interviews also play the role of control case, indicating whether the practices
I observed at my field site were idiosyncratic to that particular design studio, or are to be
expected given the types of exploration engaged by designers with similar ambitions to
transform typologies.
Beyond the formal interviews, I had informal conversations with designers from within the
practice I was observing almost daily — consultants with whom the firm was working, clients of
the firm, and friends of designers working at different practices throughout New York City and
more broadly in the United States. Whether being introduced at lunch, during drinks outside of
9 In total, I interviewed approximately 75 designers, a large proportion of these interviews were not included in my dissertation for various reasons, including: over saturation, redundancy, bad interviewing on my part, inability to get consent forms signed due to administrative lags within the practices, and content that was explored initially but not included in my dissertation.
22
the studio, trade events, or as a friend of a friend, I was on the inside of many intricate and
revelatory conversations.10 These conversations ranged from aspiration-focused, with interns on
their first work assignment, to sceptical and jaded, with industry veterans on the brink of
retirement.
I also had the fortune to be invited into over 75 design studios in New York City, Chicago,
Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Italy. The invitations were extended as a part of my
“participation” in design teams, interviews, open houses, and most fortuitously friends of friends
in the industry proud to show off the studio they worked at after finding out about my research.
These visits, although not initially part of my research strategy, became invaluable in
understanding commonalities across the physical studio spaces and the unique features that
differentiate the work produced by the different studios. These visits revealed aspects of team
coordination, work practices, and the artifacts produced in design that were not revealed through
formal interviews or casual conversations. Most importantly, these studio walkthroughs
highlighted the incredible passion and ambition of designers, always keen to explain the projects
they are working on.
1.3.1 OAE: OFFICE OF ARCHITECTURAL EXPLORATION
I have given my field site the pseudonym Office of Architectural Exploration, henceforth
referred to as OAE. The firm was working on multiple projects, all at different phases of design,
during my year at the site. I focused on five projects, which largely comprise the stories in the
following chapters. I focused on these projects because I was able observe all five of the projects
as they started in the concept design phase, which is the first phase of development, at the end of
which designers need to present novel concepts to win competitions or secure future funding for
commissions.11 The Metro Skyscraper project is a competition to design a commercial high-rise
10 The concentration of architects and designers in New York City is incredible. To my surprise, when discussing my research with friends completely removed from the industry I was often put in contact with someone they knew. 11 Within architecture there are five phases, these include: (1) concept design, which is described above; (2) schematic design, where concept designs are further developed to demonstrate spatial relationships, scale, and form of the proposed design; (3) design development, where other major elements like structure and mechanical are incorporated into the design and materials are selects; (4) construction documentation, where the team focuses on providing the detail required to construct the building, adding no additional design changes; (5) construction administration, the team makes sure the general contractor is following the plans (see Arts Build Ontario 2013 for a good overview). Within industrial design and communication design there are analogous phases, each successively adding resolution to a project from initial vision to final execution.
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building in New York City. The DC Premium Space project is a commission for an ultra-
premium office building in Washington, DC. The Playful Performing Center is a commission for
a performing arts centre for a private school. The International Performing Arts Center is a
commission for a world class performing arts center located in one of the major international
centers of arts and entertainment. Finally, the Landmark Project is a competition to preserve and
add an addition to a historical building in a metropolitan city with a penchant for historical
preservation and modernization. I was fortunate enough to observe the DC Premium Space
project pass through schematic design, design development, construction documentation, and
during the writing of my dissertation, in the actual construction phase.12 Thus, I observed the
entire lifecycle of a building from initial inception to final execution. These projects were not all
successful in transforming typologies. The Metro Skyscraper and Landmark projects did not win
in their respective competitions, largely because they did not follow the processes and
procedures typically engaged by OAE. This will be discussed in further detail in the chapters that
follow.
Although these five projects were my primary focus, I was also exposed to other projects in
the studio, which were in later stages of development. These projects were harder to observe
because they were in phases of development that required less teamwork and strategizing,
relying on independent work, consuming at times only ten percent of a designer’s weekly time
allocation. Talking to designers working on these projects provides a balanced view of design,
highlighting the downstream implications of certain decisions at the start of a project and
consequences of overly complex ideas. As one designer told me, the cute decisions at the start of
a project have a way of becoming nasty beasts during construction documentation.
Throughout my dissertation, the voices, actions, and thoughts of the designers at OAE and
other practices provide the texture and character for my narrative.13 Everyone is given a
pseudonym and all identifying information has been changed.
12 Although I was not physically at OAE when the project went into construction, I have followed its progress on various social media sites, the web, and in-person visits almost quarterly. 13 My field site and the other practices where I interviewed designer were selected based on their reputation within the field – by colleagues and industry authorities – for being innovative. Following Csikszentmihalyi (2013:6), I look to “a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation.” Rather than deciding myself if a new line of action is merely new to a practice, yet “part of the widely shared repertoire of action in the field,” versus those that are both novel to the actor and field (Leschziner and Green 2013:122-124), I rely on experts, who consecrate a
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Table 1: OAE Projects Source Typology Status Metro Skyscraper
Competition Commercial high-rise building in New York City. Lost
DC Premium Space
Commission Ultra-premium office space in Washington, DC. Completed
Playful Performance Center
Commission Performing arts center for a private school. On Hold
International Performing Arts Center
Competition World class performing arts center located in a major international metropolitan city.
In Construction
Landmark
Competition Preserve and add an addition to a historical building in a major international metropolitan city.
Lost
1.4 BLUEPRINT: THE OUTLINE OF MY DISSERTATION
My dissertation is divided into three substantive chapters — team collaboration, exploration, and
construction — reflecting the areas of a studio’s approach in which mechanisms enable the twin
task of learning between projects and unlearning within. The following sections provides a brief
outline of what is to come.
Chapter Two — Team Coordination — offers readers a chance to learn how designers work
together under conditions of uncertainty to collectively construct concepts that do not exist in
current practice or imagination. It engages a broad range of concepts and thinkers to demonstrate
how mechanisms foster collaborative cultures in creative project-based organizations, which
enable teams to venture into the unknown together and not all go in separate directions.
Providing the reader with practical insights from OAE and principals at other design studios, I
identify the mechanisms that enable and sustain work cultures that thrive on the uncertainty
inherent at the start of every new design project. I also highlight moments of rupture, when the
practice and their work to be innovative, to make this distinction. All of the practices, including OAE, had won multiple awards, recognizing their innovative approaches to design. Where possible, I also focused on projects that had won awards. This was not always possible when projects were in progress and had not been released to the public.
25
mechanisms that are woven through the social fabric of the practice are challenged or break
down, leading to coordination issues. The chapter begins with a sketch of the first month of the
DC Premium Space commission, throwing the reader into informal chats, meetings, and review
sessions. Moving across projects, I highlight the similarities in coordinating practices and how
they constitute the very fabric that makes up a studio’s unique approach to resolving issues.
Throughout the discussion, I encourage the reader to consider how these mechanisms for guiding
coordination enable the agility required by designers to constantly monitor the changing
topology of a project, but also constrain the spectrum of activities they engage in — limiting
different types of innovation to emerge.
Chapter Three — The Exploration — explains how teams develop responses to design issues
that are genuinely new and unexpected. It considers how mechanisms, familiar to the designers
and unique to the practice, support a process for moving forward the development of new ideas.
Throughout the chapter I demonstrate how these mechanisms provide teams with the confidence
necessary to navigate through the initial ambiguity of a project. Sitting with the Playful
Performance Center team during the initial meeting that defined its design, I show how a sketch
evolved into a refined design concept that radically transformed the performing arts center
typology, shocking even one of the most established theater consultants. Looking across projects
and studios, the chapter provides practical insights on how a set of mechanisms help move a
team’s exploration forward and then help identify the potential value and utility of the concepts
they construct along the way. It challenges the reader to consider how work practices can be
informed by previous projects, yet still result in genuinely new and unexpected outcomes.
Chapter Four — The Construction — starts by walking the reader through the first days of
the Metro Skyscraper project. Highlighting the number and diversity of artifacts produced, I
show how the team quickly tests ideas and gathers feedback, using multiple tools on an almost
moment-by-moment basis to understand what direction they are moving in and the potential
value of continuing down one path and not another. Exploring this important, yet often
overlooked, aspect of constructing ideas, I explain how teams gather information that previously
did not exist to understand concepts that are genuinely new. Providing practical insights from
multiple projects and studios, I demonstrate how the mechanisms for employing tools leads to
the generation of information, varying significantly across practices despite all generally having
the same set of tools and competencies. This is most vividly demonstrated by a firm’s unique
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design signature, something that is consistent across building typologies ranging in diversity
from football stadiums and commercial high-rise buildings to performing arts centers, yet not
appearing as self-plagiarizing. Throughout the chapter, I challenge the reader to consider how
these mechanisms are both generative and constraining, opening new possibilities despite the
rigor and consistency in their deployment.
Chapter Five — The Conclusion — explores how mechanisms provide a richer
understanding of how creative project-based organizations confront the challenge of constantly
developing novel products and services. The driving take-home: explorations are not embarked
upon blindly, mechanisms exist that despite their structuring nature, enable designers to produce
novel design concepts. They are both generative and constraining, yet still malleable enough
because they inform an approach and not an outcome, allowing for unlearning within projects.
Albeit representing a niche subset of organizations, I discuss how the insights I provide
throughout the three substantive chapters can be introduced into other organizational typologies,
demonstrating the utility of these practices beyond the confines of creative project-based
organizations. Engaging existing literatures on innovation, I identify how my findings expand
our understanding of the production of innovation.
“It’s a ride,” states the partner of a boutique design practice in New York City quoted in the
introduction to this chapter, when describing what the act of design is. “You really don’t know
where you are necessarily going.” This statement epitomizes one of the fundamental challenges
facing creative project-based design studios: the need to constantly innovate — inherently
throwing them into a state of ambiguity — to remain relevant and not become predictable in their
output over time. Exploring how teams draw on mechanisms to balance the duel task of learning
between projects and unlearning within projects, I will demonstrate how they deal with this
challenge. First, I will address team collaboration.
2 TEAM COORDINATION
We are not coming at things with a preconceived conception for what things should be or what
the solution is, we are starting with a conversation, and the conversation evolves as a team…
- Principal, Architecture Firm, NYC
It’s 9:30 on a Monday morning. A sense of calm fills the workspace of OAE, one of the most
acclaimed architectural studios in New York City. The warm summer sun, rising over the
Manhattan skyline, floods through the windows, into the large open space, reflecting warm hues
of color on the white interior walls.
This calm is surprising, given the chaos commonly associated with the design process.
Today, after all, is the first official day of work on a newly commissioned project. Having
received a brief introduction by the firm’s principal on Friday, the project is now in the hands of
the project team. In a little over a month, the six designers, Sheela, Reinier, Kim, Stephen,
Thomas, and Richard, not including the firm’s principal, Pierre, and director, Jean, who will
serve more as curators of ideas than designers, will be expected to present a highly resolved
concept to the client for approval. Fail to get the client’s approval and the lucrative commission
will likely go to another firm. But that is a long way away. The client will be stopping by at the
end of the week for a presentation of the initial vision for the project to ensure they are on track
to meet his expectations. The project team — drawn together as a result of other projects in the
studio entering a dormant or less labor-intensive phase — will be working together for the first
time. And they have less than four days to come up with an initial vision for the project. As time
passes and members of the new project team arrive at the studio, tapping their keyboards to wake
up their computers, the mood remains calm.
The new commission is for a premium office building in the center of Washington, DC
(hence forth referred to as the DC Premium Space project). To attract top tier tenants, the client
has mandated that the building’s design stand out in the local market. He wants a trophy office
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space that tenants brag about. It sounds simple considering that the city is largely composed of
two very distinct building typologies. On the one end of the spectrum are the heavy concrete and
masonry buildings, with their high-relief facades and punched windows. Despite coming in many
different styles, all of these buildings share a sense of weight. Appearing frail by comparison are
the modern office buildings with taut glass facades. They are often embellished with decorative
treatments that appear as afterthoughts, applied to distract from the generic form that lies
beneath.
Standing out for the sake of standing out will not suffice. Applying a decorative treatment, no
matter how artistic, is simply an embellishment whose novelty will wear off. The client wants
the firm to rethink the office building from the core out. Working with a building typology that is
so pervasive and familiar, it seems few novel ideas still exist to radically challenge our
conceptions and experiences of the space. For this reason, the developer has approached OAE, a
firm known for reimagining how familiar and predictable typologies function. Applying a
rigorous approach to design, the firm introduces new ways of interacting and experiencing
spaces thought to be fixed and immutable.
As if provoked by a jolt of energy, the silence in the studio lifts. The pattering of casters,
gliding across one-hundred-year-old factory flooring, echoes around the space as Kim, a junior
designer on the team, moves her chair, making room for Sheela, one of the project’s leaders, to
look at her computer screen. Suspended in the middle of the screen is the first stylized three-
dimensional representation of the building. The massing model is still crude; only a set of lines
depicting the maximum dimensions allowed for the site, but it is a start. Rotating the model, both
designers are examining how the vertical and horizontal surfaces, which compose the volume,
come together. There is a moment of silent reflection, as both consider how the aspects they have
been working on have combined into one. Looking in her notebook, and then back at the screen,
Sheela, who is standing over Kim’s desk, suggests an alternative dimension for one of the floors.
Pulling her chair forward to reach her keyboard, Kim enters the numbers into the computer, both
waiting in anticipation to see if the new dimensions will resolve an issue they have been tackling
all morning.
Pleased with what they see, both walk over to the modeling area. Standing at the corner of
the square table, waiting to catch the attention of the team’s modeller, Thomas, who is delicately
29
cutting blue foam. Pulling off his headphones, he hands the blue foam volume to them that
represents the minimum dimensions for the building. With her notebook open on the table,
Sheela, who is responsible for plans — or horizontal surfaces — reads out the new dimensions
just tested on Kim’s computer, gesturing where he needs to add some volume to the model.
Recognizing from across the studio that alterations are being proposed, Reinier and Stephen,
who are responsible for generating options for the contours — or stylization — of the massing,
walk over to listen in. What started as an impromptu reference check, cascades into an informal
team discussion.
Just as quickly as they come together, they return to their respective work areas where they
absorb the information they just gathered. This pattern of coming together, exchanging
information and ideas, and then returning to absorb them independently into the aspect they are
currently responsible for, continues until 9 pm. This pattern repeats all week, often ending in the
early hours of the morning, until the team has an initial vision for the project to present to the
client. With his approval at the end of the first week, this unrelenting pace of work continues for
the next three weeks until the end of the initial design phase — testing both the mental and
physical endurance of the team. Perhaps a clue as to why the first day of the project started so
calmly. They were anticipating a marathon, not a sprint.
Visibly exhausted, the team sits together in the modeling area, basking in the mid-morning
sun. It has been four weeks since the project started. They made it, working until three in the
morning preparing the final details for the project’s presentation to the client. There was little
they could do. The fate of the project is in the principal’s hands, who is traveling across town in
a cab to present the project to the developer.
The DC Premium Space team did not have to wait long to find out about the fate of their
design. The office building’s design was so unique; the client did not need the contractual two
weeks allotted for deliberation. With a direct, and unambiguous reaction: “it’s fucking great.
Let’s build it,” the project was given life at the end of the presentation. With the news arriving at
the studio less than two hours after Pierre left, the team leaves early to have a celebratory drink –
they are now officially two weeks ahead of schedule.
A year later, one of the creative influences on the DC Premium Space project very succinctly
summarizes the design’s novel approach for dealing with the façade and structure, which caught
30
the developer off guard. “The whole building is distilled down to a single idea. It seems so dumb.
Why hasn’t anyone done it? Because it’s not that easy. It’s elegant, but not easy.” And the reason
no one has done it before is that “most people wouldn’t even think about it unless they saw it
first.” That is what made the concept, painstakingly developed over five weeks, catch the
developer off guard.
Focusing on the team, within creative project-based organizations, this chapter explores how
designers work together under conditions of uncertainty to construct concepts that do not exist in
current practice or imagination. I ask: how are teams able to move forward, integrating future
work that at the outset is not defined, and in turn lacks clear points of intersection? To answer
this question, in the first section — collaboration — I lay the foundation for how coordination is
enabled within teams when a design concept’s points of intersection and overlap are not known
in advance — a fundamental challenge of unlearning within a project. The following four
sections outline how collaboration, which is learned between projects, unfolds within teams, on
the ground, in practice. First, in agile, I explain how teams stay flexible and responsive to
changes in the project when parameters change repeatedly and unpredictably. Then, in mutual
monitoring, I explain how teams map the production of the individual designers within the team
when conditions are constantly changing. Next, in distributed intelligence, I demonstrate how
teams combine knowledge to shape meaning when novel concepts lie beyond the interpretive
grasp of one individual alone. Finally, in translation, I demonstrate how the project specific
language is made accessible to noncore project members, when the team needs to collaborate
with a much broader group of individuals. Throughout the chapter, I show how collaboration,
which is learned across projects, enables teams to unlearn within a project, addressing the
fundamental challenge facing creative project-based organizations: how do you continually
innovate?
2.1 COLLABORATION: COORDINATING CHAOS
How do teams work together to construct novel design concepts? A principal at an acclaimed
architectural practice in New York City, says:
Ultimately the team will generate work, it could be one person it could be three or four
people and then we meet and look at it together and sometimes as principals we don't always
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agree on the direction so we work the problem until we get to a place where everyone is
excited about the same direction.
One of the hallmarks of creative project-based organizations, and key features found to
enable their success in searching and identifying novel concepts, is their collaborative work
practices.14 Project members working collectively, coordinating to intertwine components of
work, to achieve a common goal.15 The principal’s response to the question above is common,
echoed across studios, disciplines of design, and at all levels within a practice from principal to
intern. Simply put, collaboration is critical for innovation.
Yet teams rarely produce work collectively. As the principal of an architectural practice
known for its experimentation describes, “the intent is always that the person is going to come
back with something that they discovered from the process or they are going to take something
and bring back something that is better than you expected.” “Then when they come back to the
group,” after a period of independent work, says the same principal, “they will be able to share
with them the product of that focused effort.” What the principal is describing is a dynamic and
iterative process of teams collectively collaborating to integrate, evaluate, and set the direction
of work, and then separating to independently produce work. This is depicted in Figure 1, in
which teams work independently and then reintegrate until a concept is defined. A process aptly
referred to by sociologists of culture and creativity as elastic coordination.16
The separation of teams, is therefore critical for innovation as well. Coming “back with
something that they [independently] discovered from the process” is crucial to developing ideas.
This is where the “good stuff comes from,” tells another principal of an architectural studio in
New York City, when self-motivated staff “just take it away.” Existing empirical research finds,
like the two principals, that when teams separate to conduct individual work, divergent thinking
is introduced, leading to more creative, complex, and thoughtful work.17
14 Martin 2013. 15 Harrison and Rouse 2014:1258. 16 Harrison and Rouse 2014. 17 Harrison and Rouse 2014; George 2007; Dane 2010:589.
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Figure 1: Team Coordination
This raises a fundamental problem for coordination in creative projects. When teams are
tasked with developing a novel concept, which, by its very definition, does not exist in current
practice or imagination, how do teams moving forward integrate their future work that, at the
outset, is not defined and in turn lacks clear points of intersection? Unlike refining existing
knowledge, exploratory work requires team members to break with successful and familiar
routines to introduce ideas into the project from different fields or create entirely new concepts
through the recombination of existing ideas.18 When multiple team members are doing this
simultaneously, the possibility for misalignment or complete disharmony is tremendous. Overall,
this chapter asks how teams in creative project-based organizations are able to produce work
independently, and then collectively integrate their work to construct a cohesive design concept?
Contrary to prevailing theories on group coordination (see for instance Jarzabkowski et al.
2012), I demonstrate that ready-to-use procedures for collaboration are in fact sufficiently woven
through the social fabric of creative project-based organization like OAE. Rather than emerging
anew for each project, my research challenges existing scholarship by showing that collaboration
mechanisms, learned across projects, exist to structure the integration of independently
produced work that is not defined at the outset of exploration. As approaches, rather than explicit
acts, practices for coordinating the integration of future work embolden risk taking,
experimentation, and free association, by being highly adaptable to the context of discovery
18 Leschziner and Green 2013.
33
where information is yet to be defined and a sense of where the team is going does not exist. This
enables teams to unlearn within projects, by not forcing teams to explicitly define in advance
what they will produce, which encourage conformity.
This helps explain the calm that filled the studio on the first day of the DC Premium Space
project. Despite the natural apprehension and uncertainty of constructing a novel concept under
demanding conditions, the team knew that the necessary social foundation for collaboration,
which has been developed and learned across multiple projects, was in place to structure their
collective efforts, allowing them to freely explore for new concepts. In the sections that follow, I
will demonstrate how mutual monitoring, distributed intelligence, agility, and translation
structure the coordination of work on projects that require teams to venture into the unknown.
2.2 AGILITY: RESPONDING TO CHANGE
How many architects does it take to design a 150,000 square foot performing arts center? The
answer might surprise you. During a job interview with an architect that had over fifteen years of
experience, Pierre comments how surprised people are to discover how small OAE is relative to
the scale and ambition of the projects it is currently working on. After listing off five buildings,
whose total combined budgets exceed a billion dollars, and the competitions the firm has been
invited to enter, he tells the candidate the firm’s size. The feed of the video conference is not
frozen, it is the candidate who doesn’t know how to respond, stunned by disbelief. The five faces
in the conference rooms, on the other side of the screen, all start to grin. And rightfully so, as 18
design staff are creating buildings that are receiving significant praise for reimagining taken-for-
granted typologies by introducing ideas that seem so intuitive, but do not exist previously in
practice or imagination. Reveling in the candidate’s quiet disbelief for a few more moments,
Pierre describes how the firm’s size is part of what allowed them to push boundaries.
Paths of exploration are constantly changing when teams construct concepts that previously
did not exist in practice or imagination. Before the concept design is established, changes in
direction occur frequently and unpredictably, by example, when Pierre sits with the Playful
Performance Center team to review their progress, he changes the trajectory of the project within
a matter of a few minutes. The problem raised by the constant changes to a project’s trajectory is
that everyone on the team needs to instantaneously adapt their individual efforts to reflect the
revised collective trajectory of the team. Having to remain responsive to unpredictable changes
34
in everyone else’s aspect of the project — a feature of unlearning within a project — puts
significant strain on the coordination of teams. Agility is the ability to remain hyper responsive
to the changes in other team member’s work, quickly absorbing them into the individual efforts
of the rest of the team, so that points of coordination are not lost.
When a project can be broken down into highly definable discreet tasks, they can be
sequentially engineered. Like a production line, elements of a project can be developed
autonomously and brought together with limited communication and a high degree of certainty
that they will cohesively fit together.19 Adding more members to these teams increases
operational capacity, resulting in faster throughput. Yet when a project’s outcome is not known,
increasing a team’s size does not positively correlate with increasing productivity as intuition
would suggest. For these types of projects, where interpretation, experimentation, and constant
communication are necessary, fewer members are found to be better. This is because it facilitates
styles of coordination, which I describe below, that are not possible in larger teams.
Organizational sociologists for this reason argue that small organizations should not be treated as
less sophisticated, simply based on numbers of employees (see for instance Granovetter
1984:333). We need to understand what they are doing, interpretive versus defined tasks, before
assessing how they should do it with respect to team size. By example, the 150,000 square foot
International Performing Arts Center concept was developed by five designers, with three more
members added to the team at the peak of the design phase to help execute ideas.
Across some of the top architectural and industrial design studios in the United States and
Europe tackling similarly ambitious projects, I find teams are typically composed of five to
seven designers, excluding directors and principals. Principals are the most senior in the studio,
whose voice carries the most weight, setting the vision for a project and more broadly the
direction of the studio. Directors, who help curate the work of teams before it is reviewed by a
principal, are the second most senior and more involved in the day-to-day progress of a project.
Each project has a project leader, or equivalent, who has experience leading a project and is
responsible for meeting project deadlines and keeping the team progressing forward. Then there
are project members, who are full-time employees of the office, whose responsibility is to
19 Stark 2009; Martin 2009, Martin and Christensen 2013.
35
translate the vision of the principal into reality. Finally, most offices employ interns, who
temporarily join the studio during leaves from school. They are responsible for doing a lot of the
task orientated work that is distributed to them by the regular members of the studio.20 Studios
are not completely flat as is commonly assumed; a certain degree of hierarchy exists that controls
the curation of ideas and setting the vision for a project.21 They can therefore be thought of as
small collectives of individuals, working directly and interdependently with one another.
A project leader working on the International Performing Arts Center project explains the
team’s surprising size by stating, “with smaller groups you can coordinate much better.” When
teams are smaller, it is much easier for everyone to know what the other person is working on,
making it clear who to turn to for information, especially when a sense of the outcome does not
yet exist. As the performing arts center team grows to eight members, it reaches what the project
leader feels should be its maximum size, because it is “getting to a point where it is hard to keep
20 The diversity with respect to age, gender, race, class, and educational background is tremendous. By example, I interviewed principals who ranged in age from their earlier 20s to late 70s, gender, race, Ivy League educated to no formal education, and coming from elite backgrounds to what might be considered socially disadvantaged. I did not collect any data on this aspect of the studios where I conducted interviews, and although architecture is historically a white, elite profession, I conducted research with a set of studios where this was the exception and not the norm (this was not done purposefully). Research, however, shows that this is an important aspect of creative work dynamics (see for instance Bielby & Bielby 1996; Crane 1997; Grazian 2003). Given that I do not have sufficient data on this, I am not able to make any meaningful claims on its impact on the design process in creative project-based organizations. For an exceptional treatment on the role of gender, age, and socioeconomic background on creativity see Gardner 2011; also Csikszentmihalyi 2013:Ch9; Molotch 2003:49-52. Future empirical research should be conducted on this, especially the divide between highly diverse cities, like New York City and San Francisco, and less diverse cities. 21 Stark differentiates between hierarchies and heterarchies. Heterarchies reflect “the greater interdependencies of complex collaboration” (2009:19). Hierarchies he argues direct from above, engineering work across subunits. In the case of design, where collaboration is required, heterarchies he argues better reflect the interdependencies between work. Principals rarely ask for something to be designed exactly as show, thus requiring a greater degree of collaboration between them and lower ranking individuals within the studio to bring the vision to life. I find the term heterarchies to be fitting in this sense. I use the term hierarchy is the broad sense to denote levels of control over the final design concept produced. As many designers always reminded me, at the end of the day, it is the principal’s name on the door and their opinion matters the most. Although they work collaboratively, there is an asymmetry in the relationship towards the voice of the principal, then directors, followed by project leaders, project members, and finally, with the least voice, interns who are given tasks that are highly defined and require minimum judgement. The composition of these roles varied across practices, in very young studios the age distribution was limited, whereas in more established studios the distinction between levels might be decades. Unfortunately, my sample is too small to make any meaningful claims about this with respect to work practices, apart from that it varies and is an important aspect to investigate in future research on innovation within creative project-based organizations.
36
up with everyone.”22 The team has surpassed its ability to effectively coordinate due to the
number of designers involved.
Agility enables team members to remain adaptive and responsive to constantly changing
project parameters as new information is learned. Without predefined points of intersection, this
approach to working, which is learned across projects, enables team members to work
independently, but still recalibrate their efforts quickly to align with the collective trajectory of
the team without significant lags. To remain agile, teams at my field site remain small to reduce
diminishing returns as additional members are added and own aspects of the project so that
everyone knows who to turn to for what information.
Without a clearly defined solution to work towards, especially during the initial design phase,
there is a limit on the number of elements that can be developed simultaneously. As the team’s
size increases, members will start to work on aspects whose parameters have not yet been
established. “I think it is bad to branch out too far, says Aldo when asked about team size. “It is
better to really focus on a few key things,” he elaborates “and really develop those and move on
to the next thing with those same people, rather than trying to do everything at once and not
coming together.” Focusing a team’s effort, which can be achieved by limiting its size, is critical
for remaining agile and, in turn, the successful collective integration of independent work.
When a team’s work outpaces the development of the core principles of a project that will
drive the development of connected elements, like the façade, the probability of producing work
that will not cohesively fit together increases. This is because novel design concepts emerge
through the interaction of multiple elements, shaping and redefining the direction of the project.
Aldo’s concern is that when one or two elements are developed ahead of the rest, the designers
working on them will not gain the resolution and understanding of the issues that the other team
members are getting through constant interaction. Like the choreography of a dance, sociologists
22 During design competitions, in which studios have as little as one month to develop a highly-resolved concept for a project, teams often consume entire offices. It would not be unusual for 15 to 20 designers to work on a high-profile competition. During these instances, teams are simultaneously designing and producing. There is no clear transition between the two phases. Core designers will get help from other members of the studio to complete work that is broken up into relatively defined tasks.
37
of creativity argue that the timing of when creative ideas comes together is everything.23 If the
components are out of sync — in this case, ahead of time — the rest won’t make sense. In other
words, a designer cannot work on an element outside of the coordinating interactions of the
team, without risking that their work will not fit physically and stylistically into the emerging
design. Working ahead is not productive, but destructive for collective progress. For this reason,
Elaine, who was asked to create sculptural staircases for the International Performing Arts Center
project, waited a few hours until she received the updated plans and elevations from her
teammate, Jean. Rather than spending hours developing work that would not fit into the
parameters of the building, and then having to start over again, Elaine patiently waited until she
had a defined starting point, where one piece of work organically flowed into the next.
The sense of team cohesion and awareness is adversely impacted as more members are
added. There comes a point, which is different for every project, when it is no longer efficient to
meet as an entire team. Spontaneous informal team meetings are harder to hold because members
are working on elements that are not immediately connected to one another. Consequently,
informal meetings and reviews take place between subsets of members, splitting the team into
smaller projects. When her team grows to nine members, Tory, a junior designer at OAE,
remarks, the “team is so big, I feel that tasks are more divided, and I am only on part of the
project.” Splitting a team to focus their work by reducing the number of designers working on an
aspect of a project is not an effective strategy for increasing the number of designers allocated to
a team. The underlying issues of disrupting the choreography of the different elements
emergence remains a problem that plagues the collective integration of work.
One of the consequences of this breakdown in coordination Wegner (1986:198) argues is a
partially constructed “collective cognition,” leaving “certain individuals not knowing who is
expert in important domains of knowledge.” As a result, team members do not know who to turn
to, to get information from, resulting in lags in coordination. A designer on another project
remarks that after the team size shrank from eight members to five, “I get these moments where
it feels like we are all in the project together on the same page.” Her sense of the team being
“…all in the project together on the same page,” speaks to the feeling of coordination among all
23 See for instance Ford and Sullivan 2004; Harrison and Rouse 2014.
38
the elements being developed simultaneously. Rather than feeling disjointed from the team, like
Tory, she feels she has a good overview of what everyone is working on, and how the different
elements would intersect and overlap, enabling her to be immediately responsive to changes in
another element rather than having to wait until the subgroups regroup collectively. She knows
who to integrate her work with and how.
When teams are smaller, the individual elements of a project emerge into a synthetic and
cohesive design concept naturally through constant interaction and collective oversight. In
instances where teams become split, and members feel “…only on part of the project,” different
elements require more coercion and retrofitting to come together, resulting in a forced design
with awkward moments that take additional time to resolve.
These enabling benefits of an agile team also put significant pressure on a few individuals to
come up with novel design concepts. Often working until three a.m. in the studio, just to come in
a few hours later to continue work, during the initial concept design phase, small teams endure
significant emotional strain.24 After countless nights of not getting enough sleep and the
relentless pressure to produce work, designers are visibly exhausted both emotionally and
physically. It is not uncommon for tempers to flair. Rather than having multiple people to test
and experiment with different ideas for an element, one individual is put under significant
pressure to produce ideas. One designer at OAE stats that this results in producing a lot of work
between meetings, without having the necessary time to process or really think through the
issues. This is a common complaint amongst designers at OAE who feel the pressure to produce
limits the time to think through complex problems and in some cases, stop developing promising
ideas that require more time to develop than a simpler option. This limits the kind of innovation
produced by teams to ideas that do not require long periods of investigation and incubation. This
also limits the number of people working on any one aspect at a time, which I discuss next.
24 At OAE teams rarely worked over the weekend, and when they did it was to complete a competition. A long-time employee told me that when the firm started, they worked almost every weekend, however over time they opted to work later under the week. Every studio is different in this respect. The workloads are typically the same, what changes is how time is distributed across the seven days of a week. By example, if a studio has a standard 9:30-18:30 workday, it is likely that they will work more frequently over weekends to meet deadlines. This is determined by the culture within the studio, and how previous competitions have been tackled — i.e., the practices learned across projects within the studio.
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Before the design concept is established, elements shift quickly and unpredictably as new
information is gathered. With the pressure to produce concepts quickly, the challenge facing
teams is reducing redundancy in output produced and lags in exchanging information, which is
vital to exploring as many ideas as possible within the limited timeframe. Ownership of elements
on the project, like the visualization of details, in which sole responsibility is attributed to one
individual, allows for a nimbler and more connected team because dependencies and
responsibilities are clearly defined, which ultimately helps to coordinate the integration of
collective efforts.
When the number of members on a team exceeds the number of elements it can work on
simultaneously before losing focus, a number that varies project to project, multiple members
will be assigned to a single element. This results in a team doing as Aldo says:
So many studies that are just nonsense, like four people testing the site plan. That is okay,
but you can only have one, so we are going to have four people making options, resulting in
twenty options, with many of the options overlapping. It is just a waste of time.
This explanation from Aldo highlights the fact that more is not necessarily better when it comes
to the number of team members assigned to a project.25 A project can only have one site plan,
which illustrates the context in which a project will be placed. Learned across projects,
developing multiple overlapping options is not an efficient expenditure of individual efforts or
collective efforts to evaluate which iteration of the site plan will be selected. This wastes time
and stresses coordination by unnecessarily introducing friction into the team when selecting an
option.
Multiple people responsible for one element of the project also raises issues of coordination
of individual efforts within the development of the element, and between the other elements of
the project. Through ownership, everyone on the team knows who is “responsible for encoding,
25 In his classic book on software engineering, Fredrick Brooks (1995) reflects on a similar challenge of breaking up new code to increase the speed of production. With the ever-present threat of introducing “bugs” as components are broken up and coded by separate individuals, he proposes that one person lay out the basic architecture, system design, and write the code. Breaking up components of a design project, and having multiple people work on individual sub-components is also inherently fraught with problems. For this reason, during the early design phase, what Fredrick refers to as the basic architecture and system design, it is more efficient for one designer to tackle a component.
40
storage, and retrieval of any new information” associated with an aspect of the project, which is
vital to developing what social psychologists refer to as a system of distributed intelligence
within the team.26 During the initial design phase, “it is hard to have multiple people working on
things and coordinate it because everything is changing so quickly. It is better if someone owns
the aspect of the project.” When two or more individuals are responsible for collecting all the
necessary information about an element of the project, there will be significant redundancy in the
collective knowledge base of the team. Although everyone interprets information differently,
situations arise where it is not clear who is collecting the knowledge. Two members scrambling
through their notebooks to discover neither had the necessary information was the most obvious
sign of this at OAE. A lack of clear ownership strains the formation of a system collective
cognition within the team, because it is unclear who knows what, and in turn, who to turn to for
what information.
Multiple ownership also makes it difficult for members working on different aspects of the
project to know who to go to, for what information, pertaining to that element. Meeting with
multiple people to parse out the same information is cumbersome; slowing down the
development of connected and overlapping elements of the project. Therefore, adding more
people to a team does not necessarily increase its productive capacity.27 When teams assign
ownership to one individual, coordination between members becomes easier.
Albeit enabling coordination under conditions of uncertainty, assigning ownership can also
create tensions within the collective, which, in turn, constrains innovation. Fearing losing control
over an aspect of the project, individuals can become defensive over their aspect at the expense
of getting input from other individuals. On more than one occasion at OAE, when a member was
temporarily added to an established project team, and their presences was viewed as a threat to a
member’s authority over a piece of the project, information was withheld and owners would be
skeptical and defensive of new ways of developing the aspect. When this is the case, across
project learning is inhibited, limiting the ability for the past experiences of other members of the
firm to influence the construction of evolving concepts. The influence of personal attachment to
26 Wegner 1986:192. 27 Brooks 1995.
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aspects of knowledge, creating defensive barriers to constructing a system of collective
cognition, is not typically considered by social physiologists. Yet my case demonstrates that
designers develop personal attachments to aspects of a project, which erect barriers to
establishing these systems. I find trust between members of a team, which can only be fostered
overtime, reduces defensive acts. This indicates that organizations who wish to benefit from the
power of systems of collective cognition, need to work on creating trust within and between
teams, through team building exercises and less overt practices of bridging personal differences.
Teams at OAE that eat lunch together are often more connected than those that split off to eat
individually.
Constructing concepts that previously did not exist in practice or imagination results in continually
changing paths of exploration as new information is gathered by individual team members. The
constant changes in direction places significant burden on individual members to instantaneously
adapt to new lines of inquiry to successfully coordinate their efforts to collectively construct a
cohesive design concept. Exploiting lessons learned across previously successful project teams,
new teams are given the confidence that their efforts will be collectively structured to explore for
novel concepts. When agility is developed, and learned across projects, and present in the
collaborative fabric of a team, my research demonstrates that teams are equipped to rapidly adjust
to new information, mitigating the risk of misalignment. When teams attempt to establish
collaborative practices anew for every project, there is a higher possibility that they will not be
equipped to remain hyper responsive to the uncertainty of exploration, resulting in failed efforts.
2.3 MUTUAL MONITORING: MAPPING SHIFTING TOPOGRAPHIES OF WORK
“So close” exclaims Philip, a junior architect working at OAE, as he thrusts himself back in his
chair in frustration to the point of almost falling over backwards. “What’s the problem?” asks
Aldo, the project leader on the Metro Skyscraper project. Propping himself up on the length of
table that separates their workstations, Aldo leans over to get a better look at Philip’s computer
monitor. “Soooo close,” says Philip again, zooming into the misaligned plan to make his point.
Looking at the plans, Aldo does not say anything. The core of the commercial high-rise
project that houses the elevator shafts and stairwells, which Philip has been attempting to make
more efficient for the past week, will not accommodate one of the stairwells required by code. If
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he cannot resolve the current scheme’s issues, they will have to opt for a less efficient and
radically different core configuration. If this turns out to be the case, Aldo will have to alter the
massing options he is currently working on to fit a larger core. Throughout the afternoon, Aldo
keeps a close watch on Philip’s computer screen, never saying anything, just watching.
Unlearning within projects results in teams pursuing ideas that lack predefined endpoints that
can be agreed upon at the outset to coordinate collective efforts. This unpredictability is
heightened at the start of a project when the overall direction is not known. As individual
production efforts lead team members down unfamiliar paths, like in the case involving Philip
above, the direction of their work is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. They don’t know
where they are going. The problem raised by unlearning is coordinating the intertwining of
multiple pieces of work that are being produced individually. Mutual monitoring, which is the
practice of constantly mapping the production of the individual aspects of work being developed
by other members of the team, helps address this problem.
“The more the project members must take into account how their actions will shape the
parameters of others,” argues Stark (2009:102), “the more they must increase the lines of lateral
accountability.”28 This is because the emergence of novel concepts is typically treated by
cultural sociologists as a collective act, in which clarity and direction is gained through the
constant interaction of team members and the individual elements they are producing through
their individual acts of exploration. These patterns of interaction transform not only the elements
being developed, but the team members’ understanding of the solution they are collectively
working towards.29 Mutual monitoring enables what Padgett and Ansell (1993:1263) call the
multivocality of action, where “single actions can be interpreted coherently from multiple
perspectives simultaneously,” and that these “single actions can be moves in many games at
once.”30 For the emergence of design, I find the individual work being produce and the collective
understanding of what they are working towards are the primary games in which single actions
impact multiple perspectives simultaneously. The complexity of these patterns of interactions
28 See also Grabher 2002. 29 McDonnell et al. 2017:7. 30 This also reflects Addams (1893:44-45) that perplexity — or the situation that is wanting or lacking in some respect — stems from the “mystery and complexity of life” (see also Schneiderhan 2011 for a good overview).
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requires that practices for monitoring the progress of other team members’ work are learned
across projects.
Not all aspects of a project, however, are equally influential in setting the parameters of other
components. “When you are working on plans, for example, if you change a perimeter wall then
everyone has to change everything,” explains Elaine, a junior designer working on the Metro
Skyscraper project with Philip and Aldo. “But I am just doing studies of a certain part of the
building so I feel independent from the group.” Her shifting connection to the team highlights the
changing influence that an individual designer’s work has on the collective shaping and
understanding of a project. Sometimes your work is intimately tied to the development of others
and, in other cases, your work is independent, at least for the time being. The games in which
single actions play are therefore not always equal. In some instances, single actions directly
influence the unraveling of a game in which multiple actors are involved and, in others, they
respond to the unraveling of the game from the sideline. Knowing the impact of your current
work on the overall development of the project, is something designers learn across projects.
Mutual monitoring enables team members to map the constantly changing dependencies and
direction of the team’s collective efforts. This involves knowing who is doing what, and who to
turn to at what point, to coordinate, work with or get information from. To chart the constantly
shifting topography of dependencies and direction — for multivocality of action — of
independent work within the team, designers at my field site use four primary methods of mutual
monitoring: morning meetings, informal reviews, glances, and email.31
Breaking with familiar routines and established knowledge can pull a team in many different
directions. Without a point of orientation to work towards, a team can drift apart quickly.
Morning meetings provide teams with goals to collectively guide their individual processes of
discovery, providing insights into the individual actions of team members.
As the name suggests, morning meetings are held early in the day. Once a team’s project
leader has arrived in the office, along with a few other members of the team, they informally
meet. Initiated by the project leader pulling their chair towards the rest of the team, they briefly
31 Padgett and Ansell 1993:1263
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form a circle, occupying the space in between their desks. No formal agenda exists for these
meetings. Apart from a rough idea of the list of deliverables that needs to be produced for a
meeting or presentation, or comments left for the team by the firm’s principal that need to be
absorbed into their work, the discussion is informal and unstructured.
Not everyone is expected to comment on one another’s issues. In fact, in most instances, they
do not unless someone explicitly asked for input or help on resolving an issue, or two members
need to coordinate how their work will intersect. Team members discuss what they are going to
work on that day and how they will roughly approach it. Excessive detail is not given, nor
required. Just an indication of the direction they will be working in. This level of detail is
sufficient to coordinate the choreography of the team.
During the concept design phase, when the primary elements of a project are in constant flux,
morning meetings provide the team with a rough idea of where everyone is and, more
importantly, where they are going that day. It provides a planning timeframe, almost too long,
when elements are changing by the minute.
Elaine, who sits immediately behind Philip and would have been at the receiving end of his
tumble, does not turn around when she hears his aggravated groan. This isn’t out of a lack of
empathy. Frustration and failure are a daily part of work in a design studio — far more common
than gratification. Philip’s actions don’t register a response because Elaine is working on an
unconnected element of the project. Aldo, on the other hand, knows that if Philip is frustrated,
surely it will impact him. Without morning meetings, teams will only see what other members
are working on when they have formal meetings, likely discovering after completing a
significant amount of work that they are all working in different directions that will not come
together to form a synthetic and cohesive design concept. In short, this will lead to a failure in
choreography.
Before a concept design is established, the direction of the project is constantly changing as
members return to the team with new and often unanticipated findings. During this initial phase
of discovery, the possibility for misalignment or complete disharmony in integrating individually
produced work is tremendous. Informal reviews provide team members with an indication of
what issues the other members on the team are currently working on resolving. My research
demonstrates that these moments signal where each member is going with their work. Learned
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across projects, this enables team members to assess when it is appropriate to collectively
integrate. This is the point in elastic coordination, as Harrison and Rouse (2014) call it, when the
preverbal rubber band brings everyone together again. The shock of integration, like the snap of
a rubber band, when only a part of the whole converges on the center is typically not considered
in these theories of coordination. I find that informal reviews help to dissipate this shock, by
bringing everyone, equally, together at about the same time.
Throughout the day, when milestones are met, usually established during morning meetings,
team members informally gather around someone’s desk to review work. If a study, with
multiple options, needs to be displayed, members gather in the conference room where multiple
sheets of paper can be laid out on the large table to provide an overview of all the options that are
currently being tested for an idea. In the very early days of a project, when the driving ideas of a
concept are not established, existing only as vague notions, informal meetings include more
members of the team, because dependencies of work are not clear. The informal meeting that
takes place between the team working on the DC Premium Space project on the morning of the
first day of work, brings together the entire team. What at first seems like a minor reconciliation
of information between Sheela and Kim quickly affects all the elements and team members.
Depending on the work’s level of completion, measured in iterations rather than terminal
completion, the firm’s principal will join in. He serves as a critic to select options and set the
direction, albeit very vague at the beginning of the design phase, for the next iteration. Pierre,
however, is often stretched thin across multiple projects and other responsibilities. Without the
time to dictate solutions, Pierre’s schedule enables unlearning within projects by providing only
brief moments of intervention. Brief moments for guiding collective work efforts, however, often
turn into hours until he has time to sit down with the team. These instances often result in lags in
production that frustrate the team, slowing down collective reintegration and, in turn, the forward
momentum of exploration.
During the initial design of the Playful Performance Center project, which challenges the
boundaries between front and back stage, dynamism is the rule.32 The primary elements of the
concept are not locked in yet, resulting in sudden and unpredictable changes as new ideas are
32 OAE broke down many of the boundaries Erving Goffman (1959) analogously identified in his seminal work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
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introduced to the design that cascade quickly through the other elements being developed.
During this time, members often get up from their desk to discuss their work with another
member whose work directly impacts theirs. They typically bring with them a plan or sketch to
guide their conversation. Meeting formally would be too cumbersome, slowing down progress
and the flow of the project. Rather than formally setting times to meet, individuals pull up a chair
or lean over their colleague’s desk to share information, which is an example of a practice
learned across projects. Yet decisions are not always clear. Following a quick review in the
conference room with Pierre, the DC Premium Space team realizes after he leaves that everyone
has a different impression of the direction they were asked to move in. Causing more confusion
than clarity, the team realizes they need to further detail the elements under consideration, adding
more information to them, to get clearer insight from Pierre.33
The frequency of informal meetings enables the team to move very quickly and in a
coordinated manner, but often at the detriment of taking a pause to think through challenging
issues. Multiple members at OAE complain about this, constraining team members to revert to
less ambitious ideas that they feel are more easily executable. The pressure to reintegrate, which
grows as individuals explore further away from the center of the group, pulls them back. This
essentially limits how far out individuals in creative project-based organizations can search,
before the effort to demonstrate the value of an idea exceeds the period in between reviews.
When elastic coordination is the dynamic that dictates how teams separate and then reintegrate,
firms need to consider how the cadence of meetings will influence the conformity of teams.
Members will only endure the sting of the proverbial elastic band so many times before limiting
how far they stretch it in the search for novel ideas, which is an example of practices learned
across projects. This varies project by project and in relation to the project’s phase of
development. No two projects are alike, requiring directors to constantly recalibrate the cadence
of meetings to ensure designers are not artificially limiting their explorations.
Without checkpoints throughout the journey of discovery, which allow for assessment of the
progress of other team members’ independent work, it is hard to assess when to collectively
33 Like the Medici, Pierre often acted ambiguously, with interests that were themselves multivocal and not orientated towards clear ends (Padgett and Ansell 1993:1307), often causing confusion among the team trying to interpret them.
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reintegrate. Constantly checking in on teammates is disruptive to independent workflows.
Glances unobtrusively and quickly provide an update for future patterns of coordination.34 The
power of face-to-face exchanges is highlighted by Grabber (2002:209) who writes:
The tighter the project schedule and the less a clear separation of specific tasks can be
programmed, the stronger are the imperatives for face-to-face exchange … spatial
proximity facilitates the continuous ‘monitoring’ of the relevant pool of resources and
potential collaborators.
Physical configuration of teams therefore matters for coordinating work.
Walking through the studio to a meeting, the kitchen for a cup of coffee, or out to lunch, it is
hard not to glance at the computer monitors of other designers. The two large, ultra-high
definition screens, a common fixture across studios, grab your attention. Sneaking a glance at a
teammate’s screen, a practice that is learned across projects, can reveal a lot of information. Is it
time to pull up a chair and see what we have, or have they not reached a point where our two
aspects of the project can come together? Are they able to answer a question about the placement
of a wall, or are they not there yet? A quick glance over a shoulder oftentimes is enough to
answer these questions and to guide collective reintegration.
The physical configuration of a team within the studio is therefore important to facilitating
these unobtrusive status updates to coordinate collective reintegration. Collocation, which refers
to physically proximate work, while important, does not in itself enhance the ability of
teammates to quickly glance at one another’s work.35 At OAE, they find that sitting with their
backs to one another is the optimal seating arrangement. This might sound counter-intuitive.
Being able to see someone’s face across from you is easier for assessing if they are concentrated
and if checking in with them will interrupt their flow of work. But this makes it awkward to see
34 Grabher (2002:209) writes, “the tighter the project schedule and the less a clear separation of specific tasks can be programmed, the stronger are the imperatives for face-to-face exchange … spatial proximity facilitates the continuous ‘monitoring’ of the relevant pool of resources and potential collaborators …” 35 Examining the collocation of collaborators, Lee and colleges demonstrate that the physical proximity of collaborators is positively associated with publication impact (2010). The authors, however, are not able to explain how proximity facilitates collaboration or leads to higher quality research that tends to be cited more — the key finding of their study. Employing quantitative techniques, the authors are not able to examine the unique social contexts within which collaborators work.
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where they are at with their work, without physically getting up. With teams typically ranging
from five to seven members, you can at best see the screens of the two members seated
immediately next to you. When seated back-to-back, with three designers on each side, everyone
can see each other’s screens with a quick glance. Over the course of the initial concept design
phase of the DC Premium Office project, Sheela would startle Kim, having to physically get up
and stand over Kim’s shoulder to see where she was at with her work. Interrupting both of their
flows of work to get a simple update of when it was appropriate to coordinate their work.36
Given that lines of dependencies are constantly and unpredictably changing — a feature of
constructing novel concepts whose process of creation cannot be coordinated in advance — the
person next to you might be counting on your work today, but tomorrow it will be the person
behind you. Ease of oversight of the entire team is imperative when dependencies are constantly
shifting and the pace of work is not amenable to constant “formal” check-ins. An architectural
studio in Chicago took this one step further. Occupying a massive open plan floor plate, all the
furniture is modular, allowing teams to physically move their desks, easily changing position as
members are added and removed from teams and as lines of dependencies in work change.37
Spatial flexibility of this extreme allows the plasticity of coordination demanded by explorations
for novel concepts.
Even in design disciplines where monitors are not as pervasive, studios find it advantageous
to tightly cluster teams into project spaces so that everyone can see the in-progress work of their
team mates. By example, at IBM’s main design studio in Austin, Texas, where teams are
tackling broader questions of how the organization thinks rather than product development,
designers work in tightly coupled project spaces. Whiteboard walls suspended by tracks in the
36 The DC Premium Space project was dispersed across the studio. When it started the team was quickly brought together from other teams and the office was not reorganized at the time to bring them together. Realizing the difficulties this was causing in the team, when compared to other projects, the seating arrangement within the studio was changed to ease communication between the team. This is an example of learning practices between projects, and then deploying them in a new team, to facilitate coordination. 37 Understanding the subtle cues of when and how to interrupt another member of the team is an invaluable skill in this intense and high paced environment. Quickly learning the nuances of how to interrupt each team member is important to knowing when it is appropriate to pull a chair up, or when they are still in the middle of work. As one designer reflected on the various teams he was part of, “they all have different vibes.” His statement speaks to the idiosyncratic nature of team dynamics. No two teams are alike, requiring members to quickly assess how best to work with one another so as not to unnecessarily introduce conflict and disharmony into an already tense work environment.
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ceiling, which allow the space to grow with the team, are covered with pictures, scribbled notes,
hand-drawn diagrams, and a fluorescent array of Post-It Notes. In the middle of the workspaces,
large conference tables are covered by notebooks and whatever documents the team is currently
working on.
Tight project grouping has an isolating effect, however. Members of OAE often remark that
they haven’t spoken for months with long-time colleagues working on other projects. Although
getting entrenched within a team productively enables coordination, it has the adverse effect of
limiting the exchange of information across teams, reducing between project learning until
members physically come together when they work on a project together — which may not be
for years.
Finding moments to provide other team members with insight into an individual’s production
can at times be challenging. Whether team mates are consumed in focused work or coordination
requires multiple team members to collaborate, finding windows of time when everyone is at a
natural pause in their work rhythm can be difficult. Despite the small size of design teams, they
can at times feel distant and disconnected. Email and instant messenger services help overcome
these challenges of coordination by bridging chasms erected by focused individual work.
During the initial design phase of the DC Premium Space project, Stephen — a “rock star”
intern, as he is remembered by his colleagues — produces twenty plus options for each of the
features he is studying for the lobby. With the other members of the team working on different
aspects of the project, pulling everyone together is too difficult. An attempt to do so at the start
of the project, when he first starts his internship, fails because not everyone is at a natural
stopping point in their work. Sending the study with ideas he is testing for the design via email
allows everyone to quickly scroll through the package when it is most convenient for them,
select the options they like, and provide brief comments that are shared with everyone on the
team through the email thread.
The package also signals to the two designers working on plans and elevations, Sheela and
Kim respectively, that Stephen is experimenting with designs for the lobby that are both single
and double height. If everyone likes the double-height options they will have to change their
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current work, which accounts for a single-height lobby, to account for the additional space
required above the lobby to double the height of the ceilings.38 This is an example of how email
virtually pulls the team together, unobtrusively, to gather feedback.
When members of a team are inundated with emails from the various stakeholders of a
project, emails can get overlooked or lose priority. It is not uncommon for team members to have
to send follow up emails to get feedback, slowing down their progress. When this occurrs, the
strategy of getting incremental feedback as people became available to speed up the process of
getting collective feedback fails. Despite their potential productivity gains, emails limit the kind
of feedback provided to plain text or annotated images. Text and annotations by itself strips the
feedback of the emotive qualities that often are more telling of a reviewer’s experience when
conveyed in person.39 When the objective is expressive work that transforms how spaces are
experienced, which is fundamental to creative project-based organizations, this can significantly
hinder the construction of these concepts.
With teammates constantly monitoring the progress of each other’s work, it requires a certain
sense of vulnerability on the side of the designer. The multiple methods for monitoring each
other’s work leaves little room for designers to conduct completely private work. Yet part of
constructing ideas that previously did not exist in current practice or imagination is
experimentation, which disproportionately leads to failure. At no point at OAE do designers
personally criticize a teammate for proposing an idea. The idea might be axed or the argument
for producing it might be challenged, but the creator is never attacked personally. Yet despite
this, to be successful in a highly ambitious practice like OAE, designers need to be willing to fail
often in front of their peers and not let it censor their drive to explore into the unknown. As many
designers tell me, it takes thick skin.
38 Lengthy emails from the firm’s principal were common during the initial design phase. With multiple projects in various phases of development and other responsibilities, the firm’s principal was unable to review all the work being produced in person. Detailed emails provided points for further refining aspects of the project. Teams collectively reviewed these emails, even if they were focused on only a few aspects of the project. Everyone keenly aware that the changes the principal was requesting for one aspect, could quickly impact another aspect with respect to how they come together. 39 Dewey 2005[1934], specifically chapter 8 “The Organization of Energies.”
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Pursuing ideas that lack predefined endpoints that can be agreed upon at the outset of collective
efforts poses challenges to coordinating the intertwining of multiple pieces of work that are
produced individually. Exploiting practices learned across projects for coordinating the
collective integration of individual efforts is vital to exploration or unlearning within projects.
When procedures for mutual monitoring are in place and can be relied upon to structure the
collective exploration of a team, my research demonstrates teams are equipped to take greater
risks and push the boundaries, with the confidence that they are not working in different
direction. Rather than limiting exploration by establishing points of intersection at the outset,
when procedures for mutual monitoring are woven into the social fabric of a studio, teams can
focus on exploration, trusting it will come together, rather than negotiating coordination.
2.4 DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE: SHAPING THE DIRECTION OF DISCOVERY
“The massing is good,” says Pierre, the principal of OAE, but the “form isn’t there yet.” Sitting
at Reinier’s desk, a junior architect on the Playful Performance Center project, Pierre scrolls
through the options the team has produced for the building’s shape. With a client, whose
ambitions for the project are incredibly high, the principal wants to develop a concept that
reimagines how students of the school for which the project is being developed interact with the
space. “We need to do something exciting,” says Pierre as he cycles through the images over and
over again. “It needs to be innovative, but what that is, I don’t know,” he tells the team who have
congregated around him. Reinier and Aldo, who are responsible for the form, don’t say a word.
Noticing that the entire team is looking at him with confusion, he picks up a pencil and
sketches a few ideas on a scrap of paper — a few lines that suggest a shape. Providing very
vague comments, he gets up and walks away. Pulling their chairs up to the table, Reinier says to
Aldo, “how do you want to start?” For the next hour, both try to interpret how to absorb Pierre’s
comments.
Venturing into the unknown, part of unlearning within a project, requires teams to grapple
with ideas that are not well defined. This state of ambiguity is heightened at the start of a project
when the possible routes of exploration are almost limitless. Lying beyond the interpretive grasp
of a single individual alone, like in the case of Reinier and Aldo attempting to interpret what it
means to do “something exciting,” it takes multiple perspectives to construct novel concepts. The
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problem raised by unlearning within a project is coordinating the interpretive power of multiple
team members’ individual efforts to shape the collective meaning and paths of exploration
pursued by the team. Distributed intelligence is the act of combining knowledge within the team
to develop a response to complex issues that harnesses the capabilities of multiple individuals.
Constructing novel concepts “depend[s] on an elaborate body of collective knowledge and
diverse skills.”40 This is described as “collective cognition,” by Hargadon and Bechky
(2006:486), which “connects individual ideas and experiences in ways that both redefine and
resolve the demands of emerging situations.” One individual alone therefore cannot resolve the
design challenges faced by creative project-based organizations like OAE.
Teams, however, are formed because other projects in the studio enter dormant or less labor
intensive phases. And despite efforts to form rounded teams, the demands of a project are not
known in advance, given that issues requiring unique resolutions are not fully apparent at the
start of a project. Teams, therefore, according to Jean, a creative director at OAE, “organically”
decide who will do what when they first form.41 With a general sense of who is good at what
within the studio, members naturally gravitate towards the aspects that they are best at.42 Simply,
“because they can quickly accomplish things.” This is a recurring explanation provided by
designers at OAE for self-assignment of responsibilities, which is an overt example of learning
across projects. “It becomes productive,” exclaims Jean. “Maybe it takes a little time to settle
down, but then it becomes pretty damn productive.”43 The period of “settling down,” refers to
40 Grabher 2002:205. 41 This echoes Grabher’s statement on creative project that “they depend on an elaborate body of collective knowledge and diverse skills, yet there is mostly not sufficient time to clarify abilities and competencies of members in order to plan for a detailed division of labour in advance” (2002:205). 42 “The construction of a working transactive memory in a group is a fairly automatic consequence of social perception…” of what other members are good at and can be expected to know (Wegner 1986:194). In the studio, designers generally know who is best at what, and will default to them to take ownership. When multiple people were good at an aspect, typically the person most proficient would take ownership. This “social perception” of who is best is considered a double-edged sword. People get very good in a particular skill, which allows them to quickly develop ideas, but they also get held into that skills set, limiting their ability to expand their repertoire of skills. 43 When people are new to the office there is a period of uncertainty as to how they will integrate into a team. When social perception is limited [see previous note] team members will not know what strengths the new member has, and if they can be relied upon to take responsibility for a specific domain of knowledge. Wenger states, “transactive memory can be built because individuals in a group accept responsibility for knowledge” (1986:194). Issues with reliability were most prevalent when interns started in the studio who had little previous experience and were still learning the collaborative practice of encoding, storing, and retrieving domain specific information. Some grasped it quickly and became strong additions to the studio that could be counted on to “own a section” of the project, while
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the time it takes a newly formed team to learn about each others’ domains of expertise and how
they apply to a particular project. Once a general understanding is established of who to draw on
for what knowledge, and the member’s proficiency, the team forms a “collective cognition”
whose knowledge is larger and more complex than that of its members individually.44
Distributed intelligence, which is a practice learned across projects, enables team members to
combine the unique and diverse interpretive perspective of each team member to collectively
construct novel concepts. To do so the designers at my field site rely on distributed intelligence
to collectively construct meaning and set parameters for each other’s individual work efforts.
In the absence of being asked to design something exactly as shown, a rare request at the start of
the design process, teams must translate the vision of the principal, which can be as vague as a
few lines on a piece of paper or statement, into actionable insights. OAE’s principal, along with
those of other design practices recognized for developing truly novel design concepts, do not
believe in napkin sketches.45 In other words, ideas are not engineered from above and then
delegated to design staff.46 Serving as a curator of ideas, the principal’s comments only suggest a
direction. My research demonstrates that the challenge facing teams is figuring out how to
realize the direction provided by the principal, and in doing so construct meaning through the
collective interaction of the team member’s individual skills and perspectives.
Remaining in the conference room or around a designer’s desk after the firm’s principal has
left the meeting is not uncommon. In fact, during the initial development of a concept, it is rare
for a team to return to their respective desks without first discussing how to absorb Pierre’s
others required constant supervision and another member to take account of what they were accountable for. This duplication of encoding, storing, and retrieving information is not efficient, reducing the ability to rely on the team member when the pace intensified. 44 See Wegner et al. 1991; Wegner 1986. 45 In response to a question about avoiding self-plagiarism, a director of one of the world’s most recognized industrial design agencies elegantly told me “we try to be as true to our specific problem as possible, versus having an outside point of view that we impose on something.” Across studios, industries, and specialties, designers gave similar answers: “we have to develop different methods to deal with different problems.” For all of them, designing the process was one of the greatest challenges of developing a design concept. Refusing to force previous solutions, on new problems — even if they are the same problem, the designers would argue that the conditions, contexts, and expectations were constantly changing and required updated process to arrive at unique solutions. This is what they mean when they state we do not do “napkin sketches.” In essence, they are trying to do the exact opposite of Gehry’s supposed process for designing the IAC building in Manhattan (Pollack 2006). 46 Stark 2009:101.
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comments and direction for the next round of iterations. These “post-meeting” meetings,
however, are not as simple as discussing how to integrate clearly defined recommendations into
each member’s existing work. Recognizing that the massing, or volume, of the Playful
Performance Center project addresses the functional and programmatic requirements in an
efficient and elegant way, Pierre is not pleased with the building’s form.47 But he too is unclear
what it means to do something “exciting” or “innovative” with it. He could only provide Reinier
and Aldo with sketches and very abstract comments to guide them. Like the Cosimo de’ Medici,
who is described as an “indecipherable sphinx,” Pierre is not decisive in what he wants during
the initial concept design phase (Padgett and Ansell 1993:1262). Through multivocal interests,
“which are interpreted coherently from different perspectives simultaneously” he encourages the
team to construct meaning from his visions. The very act of being indecipherable provides a
relatively flexible opportunity space to explore for the team. I find this is instrumental in
providing direction in innovative organizations and encouraging exploration. When leaders
provide highly defined, explicit instructions, teams will focus narrowly on executing that exact
vision, which stands in contrast to how sociologists typically treat the emergence of novelty.
Constructing meaning is a collective negotiation between members of a team because design
solutions are not realized through one approach alone. Developing and simultaneously
recognizing an emerging solution’s potential requires multiple competencies and perspectives to
come together in a coordinated manner — a coordination act, which is learned across projects.
The two designers who attempt to interpret what Pierre is suggesting with his comments and
sketches for the Playful Performance Center project have very different competencies. Aldo, who
is responsible for plans, is considered the best in the studio at spatial organization; and Reinier,
how is responsible for rendering and modeling, is considered one of the best visual designers at
OAE. A third designer, Jean, who is drawn into the conversation when they realize the
implication of the comment’s effects on other aspects of the design, is considered especially
strong at fine detailing elevations. None of these competencies alone or in sequence can
47 The functional and programmatic requirements of a project refers to the specific spaces that must be included in a project to meet the requirements set out by the client, as well as by legal code and construction. By example, for the Playful Performing Arts project, this includes classrooms, performance space, and a set shop, as well as life safety egress, HVAC conduits, and plumbing, to name only a few. This is the organization of everything that needs to be in a building to make it function as intended and meet strict code and building regulations.
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efficiently or effectively interpret the meaning of the comments. Working together, the three
discuss how different ways of absorbing the comments will affect the design from their unique
perspectives. For instance, if we sink the entire theater of the Playful Performance Center into
the ground, what will that mean for plans and elevations. This reflects the power of team
members absorbing vague comments from directors, which can be interpreted coherently from
multiple and often competing perspectives simultaneously. In this instance, the different strands
of interpretation are brought together to develop a cohesive design concept that could not have
been envisioned by Pierre at the outset.
This “integrative process” is considered by Wegner (1986) to be “among the most important
events in groups because they manufacture new knowledge.”48 It reinforces the old saying, if
you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, the team has an entire
toolbox to develop a novel solution, which could not be realized by a hammer alone. Drawing on
each member’s unique knowledge of their aspect of the project, they integrate their knowledge
through discussions to construct meaning out of the vague comments given by Pierre. What the
individual members of a team take away from a meeting with the principal is not always clear.
After the principal gives feedback, “different people think different things. People are like I think
he said this and some think he said something else. He gives comments but it is not always
clear,” remarks a designer. Despite the ambiguity of his statement to do something “exciting”
and “innovative” with the form of the performing arts center, everyone is clear on the issue that
needs to be resolved. With this common understanding, the team could negotiate between their
perspective how to develop a series of solutions to test. In other instances, the team is not clear
on what the issue is that needs to be resolved. Everyone has a different understanding. Following
a lengthy design meeting for the DC office building, the members of the team discuss what they
think the principal had requested. It is only after the principal returns to the conference room,
seeing that they are not getting anywhere, that the issue is clarified and the team can work out a
solution. For ambiguity to be productive, teams need to know what the fundamental issues are,
around which they will construct an interpretation. Clarity is therefore required on the issues that
48 Wegner 1986:197. Wegner is not alone in arguing that creating new knowledge through the integration of different domains of knowledge is one of the most important aspects of team work. See also: Sutton and Hargadon 1996; Hargadon 2003; Lester and Piore 2004. Martin 2009. And for an exceptional historical account of how teams integrate knowledge: Isaacson 2014.
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need to be resolved, but not the form of the resolution. This distinction is critical for managing
innovation and its continual production within an organization.
Organically assigning responsibility to the different areas of a project based on who is most
efficient has a constraining effect on the individual designer’s growth within the studio. When
individuals are known throughout the studio for being exceptionally skilled in one aspect of
design, for instance visual renderings, which is the visual portrayal of design ideas, they become
trapped in this position. Designers at OAE, who are known for their abilities in an area of design,
lament that they are not able to expand their skill set because they are always assigned the same
role. Without the time to slow down development on a project while a member learns new skills,
there are few opportunities to switch areas of responsibility. To do so, designers have to find
time outside of work hours to learn new skills. Given the demand of the regular workday, this
requires incredible persistence. Yet as one senior designer tells me, often when looking at a
resume, the applicant might have a decade of experience, but it is only in one specific facet of
design, which makes them unappealing. In this sense, being good in an area of design is a double
edge sword, which designers have to actively break out of if they want to advance their careers.
The constraining nature of systems of collective cognition stands in contrast to how cognitive
psychologists typically treat the predictability of who owns what pieces of knowledge. Treated as
a fundamental enabling aspect to create a system of collective cognition, my research
demonstrates that members need to actively break these systems to learn the responsibilities that
are associated with being responsible for different pieces or types of knowledge. The type
casting these systems encourage, and more broadly learning between projects, explains whey
designers often need to leave studios to advance their careers. To mitigate the loss of knowledge
gained between projects, studios need to actively focus on learning and development within their
practices to encourage the growth of their designers.
Yet the horizon of possibilities is limited by the diversity of competencies represented within
the team. Within architectural practices, by example, it is rare for competencies outside the field
to be represented within a team, in turn limiting the diversity of thought introduced into a
project.49 IDEO has notably broken with these limitation of creative project-based organizations
49 de Vaan et al. 2015, see also Burt 2010. In architecture, visual, spatial, engineering, façade, lighting, material, experience, drawing, to name only a few, are competencies typical to be expected at an architectural firm. Yet it is
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by staffing their teams with diverse competency sets, ranging from engineers to accountants to
marine biologists, to introduce greater diversity into shaping meaning and, in turn, the novelty of
the new knowledge that is manufactured.
Before the design concept is established, the number of possible paths of discovery are far
greater than can be explored within the time constraints of any project. With each team member
exploring paths independently, the challenge facing teams is working towards a collective design
concept that cohesively comes together. Informal meetings and reviews help set the parameters
for each member’s individual work by constraining the options tested, helping to guide the
team’s collective efforts.
In the case of the double or single height option for the lobby of the DC Premium Space
project, the members working on elevations and plans set the maximum dimensions possible for
the space. By exchanging information that the other two designers had previously gathered
regarding the vertical and horizontal dimensions they had to maintain to achieve maximum
square footage, they set parameters on the design of the lobby. Exchanging information learned
in one aspect of the project, as demonstrated in the example above, is critical to setting
parameters of other members' work, ensuring that options are not proposed that will hinder a
coherent and cohesive design concept.
Constraints imposed by a team member’s work serves to focus the efforts of other designers.
Options explored and presented to the team by each member’s unique competencies serves as
constraining resources, which sociologists of culture find in turn generate new resources.50 A
proverbial foothold in an otherwise expansive sea of potential options.51 For the International
Performing Arts Center project, Elaine is given the challenge of designing four sculptural
staircases, whose form is not purely dictated by their function. The request was clear: reimagine
the staircases so that they contribute to the patron’s aesthetic experience of the space. Where to
rare to find studios with full-time ethnographers on staff to produce journey maps of different users’ experience of a space — identifying pain points and moments of opportunity to enhance these experiences. More radically, it is rare to find staff members in studios who have biology backgrounds, which mechanical engineers and industrial designers have found to significantly influence design, the most obvious being the blades of wind turbines that emulate the fins of whales. 50 Harrison and Rouse 2014:1267. 51 Raney and Jacoby 2013; Rodriguez and Jacoby 2013.
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start was not. Gordon, one of the senior designers at OAE gives her a few exemplar cases to use
as references, but Elaine does not start until the member of the team in charge of the overall
plans, into which the plans for the staircases would be placed, sent her the most up-to-date
information. The existing buildings plans significantly limit the options she could pursue for the
design of the stairs, providing her with a starting point. In these instances, parameters set by
another member of the team serve as a generative function for developing ideas.
When teams fail to regroup at frequent intervals to exchange and discuss information, the
individual efforts of each member cannot be leveraged to help shape the parameters of the other
team member’s work and ultimately the collective direction of the project. After a long period
without a formal meeting between the International Performing Arts Center team, Aldo
complains: “we haven’t had an internal meeting this week, and are not totally sure where we
should be moving with the project.” With an entire team developing ideas without meeting to
gather input from other members, he is concerned that they are not moving in a cohesive
direction. A perilous position to be in when navigating through uncharted waters, where every
member can take a different path. Simply put, this causes a breakdown in the choreography of a
team.
Despite serving a generative function in guiding the collective effort of the team by limiting
the individual options explored, setting parameters also sets meta limits on the introduction of
radical innovation. When one design element limits the options tested in another, ideas that
might require a complete rethinking of the initial element are less likely to succeed or even be
proposed. The implications of setting limits is akin to what theorists of behavior and cognition
refer to as bounded rationality, in which individuals make decisions under constraints of limited
knowledge.52 In the case of the sculptural staircase for the Performing Arts Center, Elain has to
work within the confines of the space given to her. Elain is therefore limited to ideas that adhered
to these limits, closing off ideas that would require a complete rethink of the initial constraints.
The enabling function of providing a foothold in these instances also imposes path dependency
to an extent on the emergence of the design concept.
52 See Gigerenzer and Selten 2002 for a good overview.
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Part of venturing into the unknown involves grappling with ideas that are not well defined. This
in turn raises issues for coordinating the interpretive power of multiple individual efforts to
collectively shape the trajectory of a project. Exploiting strategies developed and learned across
projects for shaping the collective meaning and paths of exploration pursued by the team,
enables project-based teams to unlearn within a project. When a system of distributed
intelligence is developed within the project team, my case demonstrates individual explorations
that collectively converge to develop a more complex solution to design issues than could be
proposed by any individual alone is possible. When teams focus exclusively on individual
exploration, at the exclusion of other member’s efforts, misalignment and disharmony will be
more prevalent, thus limiting the ability of a team to execute novel responses to design issues.
2.5 TRANSLATION: CONVEYING THE CONCEPT
“Is everyone okay with this?” asks Richard, a senior designer and project leader on the DC
Premium Space project. Looking around, Sheela, Stephen, Reinier, and Kim all say “yes” as he
locks eyes with them.
A week before the design deadline for the DC Premium Space’s initial concept, the team
meets early in the morning to review a list of deliverables that needs to be prepared for the
project’s presentation to the client. The list includes all the architectural drawings and studies,
followed by initials of the team member who owns that line item.
Leaning back in his chair later in the afternoon, Pierre asks Jean, a senior designer at OAE,
“how are they doing?” nodding his head towards the DC Premium Space team. “They are on
auto pilot,” says Jean, who hardly looks up from his desk.
Through the process of constructing a design concept that previously did not exist in practice
or imagination, teams develop a unique project specific language.53 Due to constant and
unpredictable changes in the project’s direction, the project specific language and understanding
of each component remains largely undocumented throughout the initial design phase. The
problem that unlearning within projects raises is that at a certain point, teams need to coordinate
with a larger group of individuals, both within and outside the studio, to bring the concept to life.
53 Lester and Piore 2004.
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Problems need to be translated into easily executable tasks that can be carried out by individuals
not familiar with the subtle nuances of the project’s process of discovery, like façade consultants,
structural engineers, electrical engineers, to name only a few. Translation is the practice of
breaking a project down into easily executable tasks that require little interpretation or judgement
to accomplish independently or bring together again collectively.
There are always more options to test, ideas to develop, and modifications that can be made
to a design when exploring into the unknown. Deadlines have a way, however, of settling
lingering design issues, locking in the driving principles of a concept.54 Towards the end of the
concept design phase, teams need to start the fine detailing required to transform visions into
reality. They must shift from design mode to production mode. With agreement on the individual
components and how they will come together, a project can be broken into highly defined,
discreet tasks, whose points of intersection and overlap are clearly defined. At this point, the
team can sequentially engineer the production of these tasks.55 Patterns of coordination between
team members, and the individual aspects they are developing, change as a result. Team
members are no longer shaping and refining each other’s elements through constant interaction.
Now, they are coming together to hand off work, requiring marginal interpretation or negotiation
between the members. As Jarzabkowski and colleagues (2012) argue, coordination flexibility
changes over the course of a project. During initial states of ambiguity, hierarchies and rule-
based systems are shown to be ineffective. Once greater certainty, however, is introduced into a
project, hierarchies and rule-based systems for coordination can be introduced. This is because
major changes will not impact the system of coordination, and more importantly the points of
intersection where project elements come together. Knowing when to introduce conformity
through sequential engineering, and sidelining the introduction of new ideas is critical for
successfully executing an idea. The challenge is that this point varies project to project, requiring
directors to be adept at when the design is ready to transition into this phase of development.
Deadlines are an effective way to manage this transition.
54 Stark 2009:108. 55 Stark 2009:97.
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Translation, which is learned across projects, enables small design teams to execute large
projects, like the DC Premium Space project, by facilitating coordination between a larger group
of specialists who are not intimately familiar with the nuances of the project. At OAE, projects
are translated through deliverables lists, the standardization of project knowledge, and breaking
work into highly defined, discreet tasks.
After reviewing the deliverables list with the team, Richard sent out a link to the file, stored on
the team’s shared internal drive, via email. Members can edit the file, updating it as line items
are finished, or ready for review by Pierre. Everyone has an up-to-date picture of where the rest
of the team is and where they are going next. Patterns of coordination are now determined by the
pages of the drawing set — which is analogous to a project grammar, providing a complete set of
drawings for every element of the project ranging from façade to door handles — something that
was not available when the team initially embarked on their exploration into the unknown.
With a master list in hand that hierarchically defines each element and their respective lower-
ranking components, team members finally have a roadmap for coordinating work. Morning
meetings still occur during the initial design phase, but are less focused on figuring out how to
tackle problems and more about setting times to review work with the firm’s principal. When
two intersecting components of the DC Premium Space project are completed, the designers
share links to the files, via instant messenger. Knowing with a high degree of certainty how the
elements will fit together due to the established grammar, the files can be effortlessly merged
into one another. Little negotiation between team members occurs at this point. A dramatic
change from the first day when Sheela and Kim were waiting in anticipation to see if minor
dimensional changes would resolve a vaguely defined problem they were dealing with, whose
outcome ended up cascading through the other elements of the project. Teams are not dealing
with runaway ideas that are illusive anymore, they are now defined and can be grasped firmly.
The silence that fills OAE’s studio the morning the DC Premium Space project kicks off
returns as spontaneous meetings become less frequent. In place of informal meetings, teams
gather more formally in the main conference room, reviewing studies and drawings with the
firm’s principal. Following these meetings, team members rarely sit around and collectively
negotiate how to absorb Pierre’s comments.
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When designers enter production mode, the role of the principal shifts from curator of ideas
to what can best be described as director of execution. Suggestions are now direction. After
formal meetings, designers almost always take with them back to their workstations heavily
marked up sheets of paper that include all the changes they need to absorb into their work.
Architectural drawings and studies are covered in red marks, indicating the exact changes that
need to be made to an element. My case suggests that at this point little translation is required. A
wall must be moved just a little bit to align with another wall, or the reflection in the
photorealistic rendering is not strong enough. Far more detail is provided than the rough sketch
the firm’s principal leaves for the Playful Performance Center team after he asks them to do
something “exciting” and “innovative” with the form.
During each successive phase of the project — concept design, schematic design, design
development, construction documentation, and finally construction — the project gains
increasing resolution. Although the design for the DC Premium Space project is not fully
completed in the first four weeks of the project, the main driving principles — or grammar — of
the project is locked in. As the project passes through the next three phases, work increasingly
shifts towards detailing and adding resolution to the established elements. Morning meetings,
informal reviews, and sporadic meetings become less prevalent.
After the design concept is established, the parameters of each aspect of the project becomes
increasingly better defined. With pressure to execute the project, the challenge facing a project is
minimizing judgement and interpretation of individual and collaborative efforts as much as
possible to reduce unforeseen changes in the production of the project.56 Standardization of
knowledge across the project elements allows designers to work individually and then coordinate
collectively without the risk of significantly reshaping elements of the project as they are
produced.
During the initial design phase, each member of the project takes on the responsibility for a
set of elements and unique evaluative lenses through which to view the project. With everyone
taking on different spheres of the project, there is minimal overlap between the different
56 With firmly set parameters for each element and their sub-components, work is now centered around refining the elements to within a fraction of an inch, so that everything comes together seamlessly during the construction phase. This is critical for setting the concrete foundation, welding structural joints, etc.
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members’ knowledge of the individual competencies required to construct the concept. If you
were to visualize the different domains of knowledge required to construct a design concept as
the individual circles of a Venn diagram, shared knowledge would be the overlap at the center.
The parts that do not overlap represent unique knowledge that is not shared by everyone in the
team. This is knowledge gained through independent exploration, which is not necessarily
conveyed back to the team due to time constraints or relevancy. By example, the renderer will
have most of the knowledge on the design’s aesthetic expression, while the member responsible
for plans will have the most knowledge of how the spatial organization works. For this reason,
when everyone knows who knows what, a system of distributed intelligence is formed that
exceeds the knowledge of any one member alone. This means that a significant portion of the
knowledge possessed by each member at the start of the project is relatively foreign to the others.
Consequently, knowledge needs to be translated, so two or more members of the project working
on different elements gain a shared understanding; by example, when the three designers of the
Playful Performance Center collectively try to interpret what it means to do something exciting
and innovative. During these moments of translation, where members build a new grammar for
understanding how two elements intersect and overlap, based on their unique knowledge and
perspective of the design, they are actively shaping and redefining the trajectory of the project.57
This kind of information can best be understood as “sticky,” requiring constant communication
and interaction to exchange.58
Once the driving ideas behind the design’s concept are locked in, and the project specific
grammar is established, everyone has a clearer understanding of how all the elements will come
together, information exchanges change. My case demonstrates that shaping and redefining
intersecting and overlapping elements is at a minimum. Increasingly, information can be
exchanged with the expectation that other members know how to decipher it through a shared
grammar, requiring less interaction and negotiation to exchange it. Information is not
transformed as it is passed along to the same extent as it was during the first few weeks of
design. Information now retains its integrity as it is passed between members of the team.59
57 de Vaan et al. 2015:1152. 58 von Hippel 1994. See also Polanyi 1967; Zander and Kogut 1995. 59 Kogut and Zander 1992:386.
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Walking back to their workstations, with plans pulled from the master drawing set, Sheela,
Stephen, Reinier, and Kim sit down to “pick-up” the redlines. They know exactly who to turn to,
and at what point, by looking at the updated deliverables list. Exchanges between team members,
when not through instant messenger, are to confirm dimensions or explain a specific point to
coordinate work.
The design principles many be locked in; latent issues, however, might surface that challenge
the ease of communication between team members when interpretation and judgment is required.
Nearly five months after the façade for the DC Premium Space project was established, a latent
issue emerged that challenged members of the team to strategize how they would maintain the
design intent. Suddenly after months of detailing elements, the team had to jump back into
design mode to mitigate the impact of the issue.
During the initial design phase when design elements are being constructed, individual efforts
are focused on defining the overall design concept. When the overall concept is locked in,
elements need to be detailed to add the necessary resolution to translate a vision into reality.
With this shift in focus, from the proverbial forest to the trees, the amount of work increases
dramatically. Breaking work into discreet tasks that are highly defined, enables an agile team to
remain productive while adding additional support staff to detail the project without risking
jeopardizing the overall design intent of the project.60 The team can now grow without adversely
impacting coordination.
The International Performing Arts Center project eventually reaches a point in the initial
design phase where it has to transition from design to production to meet the project’s deadline.
At this point in the project, the parameters are set — at least for the time being — so they can
present the concept to the client. With defined parameters and a deliverables list, the team’s size
can grow to pick up the additional work that needs to be completed. There is less concern that
the work of a larger group will not come together in a cohesive way when it is well known how
60 As Dewey states “...it is artificial, so far as thinking is concerned, to start with a ready-made problem, a problem made out of whole cloth or arising out of a vacuum. In reality such a “problem” is simply an assigned task... if we know just what the difficulty was and where it lay, the job of reflection would be much easier than it is” ([1933]1998:140).
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the different elements of the project will intersect and overlap. Work can now be produced in
advance and added in as other elements are completed.
In the middle of a morning meeting, Gordon, one of the firm’s senior designers, stops the
conversation and looks past the team that has gathered around him. Sitting a few feet away from
them is Philip whose team, just moments before submitted their proposal for the Metro
Skyscraper competition. “Have you submitted everything?” asks Gordon. “Yes,” says Philip.
Without hesitation, Gordon says “great, then you can help us.” Following the end of the morning
meeting, Aldo pulls his chair next to Philip’s. Showing him a printed elevation of the exterior of
the International Performing Arts Center project, he asks Philip to investigate how the structure
would interact with it. A few minutes later, Gordon rolls his chair over and further clarifies the
constraints within which the work needs to be completed.
With a long list of studies that needs to be conducted to better understand specific aspects of
the project, the team is adding additional designers. A few hours later, Elaine, another designer
from the Metro Skyscraper competition, is asked to join the team to conduct specific studies, one
of which is the sculptural staircases. When the number of members added to a team outstrips its
capacity to coordinate, members may not be used effectively. One designer at OAE recalls that
when asked to join a team a week before its deadline, he cannot get work. Still shocked, he
recalls that he has to beg to be given a task on the project. Here the limits of coordination have
been met. The team leaders cannot oversee all the individual production and task out additional
work without losing control of who is doing what, when it will be completed, and who else’s
work it will integrate with. There are limits to a team’s size; however, this changes project to
project, requiring directors and project leaders to be conscious of how a project’s unique
requirements influence the ability to coordinate teams.
Team sizes quickly shrink again as the project enters successive phases of development. With
highly specified tasks that need to be conducted to resolve lingering issues, the team does not
require multiple lenses through which to view the project. Additionally, a lot of the work is now
in the hands of specialist consultants, such as structure, mechanical, electric, plumbing, and
façade, who work on independently detailing their specific aspects of the project. During the
construction documentation phase of the DC Premium Space project, the team of six designers
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shrank to three. All of which are only working part-time on the project, picking up work on
competitions and where additional help is needed.
Translating a project to facilitate coordination with larger groups of individuals, both within and
outside the studio, places inherent limits on the kind of innovation that can emerge. The pressure
to execute a design essentially limits innovation to the first four to six weeks of a project, during
the concept design phase. After this, radical or transformative ideas are actively isolated from the
project to ensure that it will stay on schedule with a demanding timeline, typically imposed by
clients of creative project-based organizations. This kind of innovation reflects what Grant
(2016) describes as conceptual innovation, in which innovations formulate a big idea and set out
to execute it.61 Experimental innovators on the other hand develop ideas through trial and error,
“learning and evolving as they go along.” The latter of which, following the pragmatist
theoretical tradition, typically takes a lot longer because innovations are based on years of
methodical investigation.62
Project specific languages must be translated to facilitate the coordination of larger numbers of
individuals, both within and outside the studio, required to bring a concept to life. Exploiting
practices from previous projects for translating a project to eliminate judgement and
interpretation that may jeopardize a project’s completion enables teams to construct novel
concepts that previously did not exist. Guided by the knowledge that the unique project specific
language can be translated and its grammar taught, practices that are developed and learned
across projects; my case study shows that teams are not limited to exploring ideas that are routine
or familiar. The more robust that procedures are for translating a project, which is developed by
exchanging best practices learned across projects, the more complex ideas can be explored with
confidence that they can be broken down into manageable and executable tasks and tackled by
larger numbers of individuals.63
61 Grant 2016:109-110. 62 See for instance Dewey 1991[1939]. 63 Becker 1984.
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2.6 CONCLUSION
The commission to design an office space challenges the DC Premium Space team to develop a
new concept within a commercial real estate market seemingly tapped for new ideas. This
challenge requires the team to venture into the unknown, shedding existing perceptions and
interpretations of commercial real estate environments. Without known coordinates to work
towards, the commission requires the team to work cohesively so that they are all gaining the
benefits of what others are learning as they are exploring and experimenting with unfamiliar
ideas. This is a stark contrast to projects with defined endpoints where work can be sequentially
engineered and tasked out to disconnected individuals across an organization.
The DC Premium Space project epitomizes one of the fundamental challenges facing teams
tasked with developing novel concepts: how do you coordinate the future integration of yet to be
defined work of multiple individual efforts, without forcing predefined points of intersection?
This challenge is compounded by the fact that to successfully unlearn within a complex project,
team members need to produce work independently to introduce divergent thinking and integrate
their efforts collectively to produce a cohesive design concept.
Rigidly defined habitual acts for coordinating the collective integration of individual
explorations does not lend itself to innovation. I find that the constantly changing contours of a
project, which is emblematic of searches into the unknown in which a sense of where the team
will end up does not exist at the outset, requires highly adaptable and flexible mechanisms for
coordination to move a project forward. Forcing the yet to be defined and constantly shifting
contours of a project to conform to rigid acts for coordinating collective efforts, like team size,
constitution, sync up schedules, and vocabularies, constrains the incredible transformation that a
project goes through and the unpredictable turns it takes. By fostering an approach to
coordination, which is highly adaptable and reactive to the constantly changing contours of a
project, teams can coordinate under incredible conditions of uncertainty and in turn introduce
novel concepts. My case shows that this kind of approach, which is learned across projects,
enables teams to take greater risks and explore further into the unknown, encouraging responses
to design challenges that are truly novel and have the potential to disrupt taken-for-granted
assumptions and expectations.
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Developed through repeated use across different projects, mutual monitoring, distributing
intelligence, agility, and translating the project into easily interpretable tasks, enable teams to
unlearn within projects by being able to incorporate highly unfamiliar and unpredictable
information.64 When the collaborative foundation within a firm is premised on transformation
and change, rather than strict conformity of information to guide integration, organizations can
continually innovate, without falling prey to predictability in their output.
64 Following Swedberg (2011:32), I turn nouns into verbs here.
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Table 2: Team Coordination What How Overview: A dynamic and iterative process in which team members collaborate to integrate, evaluate and set the collective direction of a project, and then separating to independently produce work and introduce divergent thinking. Challenge: Coordinating the future integration of yet to be defined work of multiple individual efforts, when the possibility of misalignment or complete disharmony is high.
Agile: the ability to remain hyper responsive to the changes in other team member’s work, quickly absorbing these challenges into the individual efforts of the rest of the team, so that points of coordination are not lost.
• Remaining small to avoid
multiple people working on the same aspect.
• Team members own aspects of the project so that everyone knows who to turn to for what information.
Mutual Monitoring: the practice of constantly mapping the shifting dependences and production of work being developed by other members of the team, to guide the collective direction of the team’s efforts.
• Morning meetings to provide an
indication of the daily direction that the team plans to work in.
• Informal reviews to sync up with team members as daily milestones are met.
• Glancing at other team members’ work to guide future patterns of coordination.
• Email and instant messenger to provide insight into individually produced work when meeting collectively is not possible.
Distributed Intelligence: the practice of combining the unique and diverse interpretive perspective of each team member, to collectively construct novel concepts.
• Construct meaning through
discussions to integrating each member’s unique knowledge of the project.
• Set Parameters by constraining the options tested by other members when reviewing other members’ in progress work.
Translation: the practice of breaking a project down into easily executable tasks that require little interpretation or judgement to accomplish independently or bring together again collectively.
• Deliverables lists that define all
the work that needs to be done to execute the design concept.
• Standardizing project knowledge by codifying a project specific grammar.
• Breaking work into highly defined, discreet tasks.
Outcome: Encourages an approach to coordination, which is highly adaptable and reactive to the constantly changing contours of a project, enabling teams to coordinate under incredible conditions of uncertainty and in turn transform ambiguity into novel concepts.
3 THE EXPLORATION
Never let reality get in the way…
- Principal, Architectural Firm, NYC
Sitting in OAE’s studio following a strategy meeting with a leading theater design consultant, the
firm’s principal cycles through the initial ideas the team has come up with for the concept of the
Playful Performance Center. Forming a semi-circle to his right, as he sits in front of a computer,
Aldo, Jeane, Reinier, Throsten, and Greta silently watch as the different options appear across
the screen. With new information and clarification on existing documentation, the team is
waiting for direction on how to further refine their ideas. Yet Pierre appears to be searching for
something within the plans and is not finding it.
Over the past week and a half, the team has been analyzing the requirement documents
provided by the client seeking to build a new performing arts center. During this time, they have
taken the documents, ranging from written statements of the project’s goals to spreadsheets with
exact dimensions for each component, and translated them into various one dimensional
drawings. These drawings represent how the program for the building could be organized. Using
the site’s incredible view as the focal point for organizing the space, all the options play on the
idea of bringing the outside in and the inside out. This concept was initially identified through
precedence research, which identified exemplar examples of existing performing arts centers,
conducted during the first two days of the project. Images of the Tanglewood Music Center in
Lenox, Massachusetts and Wolf Trap theater in Washington, DC fill a study package, illustrating
how the two environments seamlessly combine into one performance space.
For the next five minutes, Pierre continues to search through the plans. The mood among the
team surrounding him starts to change. They realize that he is not sitting in silence as a result of
seeing the ideas for the first time — although this is surly part of it. He is not happy with what he
has been delivered. The expression on his face is telling. Turning to the team, he tells them to go
back and start by asking what the performative ambition of the building should be. Not only in
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the sense of the flexibility of the performance space, but more generally how people will
experience and interact with the space.
Apart from capturing the beautiful views of the site, there are no performative ambitions for
organizing the space. Explaining to the team that the building cannot be dematerialized down to
a single view, Pierre says they must start over again. This time, however, before planning
program adjacencies, they need to start by articulating a high-level ambition for how the space
will be experienced. Looking at the team, the principal asks them to fundamentally question what
a performing arts center is and how they can deal with the typology’s inherent issues.
Although opening the theater to the outside is unique when considering most performing arts
centers, it is not novel. It is a concept that OAE, and many other architectural firms, have
successfully introduced into the performing arts center typology. In OAE’s past, however, the
concept was deployed on a much larger scale and for a very different clientele. Rather than
incrementally building on existing ideas, the principal wants the team to challenge the current
theater paradigm by returning to the fundamental issues that needs to be resolved. Questioning
what a performing arts center can be by questioning what it is.
Taking a piece of paper, Pierre starts drawing out a rectangle the size of a business card.
Roughly dividing it into two squares by drawing a line through the middle of the rectangle, he
writes “A” and “B” into the two respective boxes. Turing to the team, he tells them that half of
the building should be formal — incorporating all the elements that comprise a professional
theater space. Then glancing back at the piece of paper, he starts to wildly scribble in the second
box, telling them that the other half of the building should be playful.
The client, commissioning the performing arts center, is a boarding school with a nationally
renowned theater program. Yet the designers cannot forget the intended users of the space.
Despite their accolades and commitment to the performing arts, they are still children and young
adults, ranging from kindergarten through high school. Rather than simply being a state of the art
performance space, he wants the building to serve as the campus’s nucleus that brings everyone
together. A space where students of all ages can interact with every aspect of a performing arts
center — from stage to lighting to scene shop. The ultimate goal is to encourage students from
all backgrounds to fall in love with theater, whether they are part of the production or merely
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witnessing it in passing. This represents a stark contrast from the formal front stage/back stage
dichotomy that typically splits a production.
Returning to the presentation package on the screen, Pierre narrows in on one of the ideas the
team has proposed. Rather than organizing the space horizontally like the rest of the options, it
organizes it vertically, stacking the program requirements. On the same piece of paper as the
previous sketch, he draws a single curved line to represent the hillside upon which the building
will sit. Cutting through part of the pitch of the hill, he draws a rectangle to represent the vertical
stacking of the program. Drawing a line through the middle, where the curve of the landscape
levels off at the top of the hill, the simple drawing reflects the rectangle that is split into two
distinct sections — half serious on the bottom, and half playful on top.
Looking at the drawing, he asks one of the designers to go to the studio’s library and find one
of the SANAA monographs. Knowing exactly what project he is looking for, he quickly flips
through the book. Placing the book on his lap, he slowly flips through the pages of the project to
show the team. As he turns through the pages of the project, he explains why certain features are
elegant and how they transform the feeling and experience of the space. Flipping between an
image of a theater, and the project’s plans on another page, Pierre takes the sketch of the building
in the hillside and draws a ribbon of glass around the upper perimeter of the theater.
For the next 30 minutes, they sit together building on the initial idea of a half serious and half
playful space. While further developing the idea of a sunken theater with a full 360-degree view
to the outside, other ideas emerge that drive the design of the performing arts center. With the
initial push of the diagram, major design elements are introduced that embody the performative
ambitions of the building, transforming the way students interact with theater spaces.
On a Sunday afternoon in February, teachers, trustees, and the head master of the school gather
in OAE’s main conference room for their first look at the design for the school’s performing arts
center. Rarely looking at the screen at the front of the room on which the design is being
presented, the design team watches the reactions on the faces of the committee. Having pushed
the design far beyond the comfort level of the theater consultants — a battle successfully won by
the design team’s persistence and belief in their ideas — they know they are proposing
something radical. Whether they know it or not, the committee members' faces are not
concealing their shock as Pierre presents the design. The team members' eyes are scanning the
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committee members' faces for some sign of approval. After a long question and answer period,
the committee members pack up, say their goodbyes, and prepare for their long trip home.
Once all the committee members leave the conference room, Jeane, who is the project leader,
arches her back, throws her hands in the air, and mimes a slam dunk.
The committee is blown away by the proposed design. One member is so overtaken by her
emotions, she blurts out “I love it, let’s build this” before the presentation is even over. There is a
palpable feel of relief in the room. The team has developed a concept that transforms the way
people interact with a performing arts center, and their client loves it. And more importantly,
they want to build it!
Focusing on searching for ideas within creative project-based organizations, this chapter explores
how teams develop responses to design issues that are genuinely new and unexpected. I ask,
under these conditions of uncertainty, how do designers decide what to produce and then identify
the potential value of these unfamiliar ideas? To answer this question, in the first section — the
argument sequence — I lay the foundation for how courses of action are structured within
projects when the final design concept is not known at the outset. This is a fundamental
challenge for unlearning within a project. The four sections that follow outline how processes for
moving forward the development of new ideas, which are learned across projects, occur in
practice. First, in predilection, I explain how teams establish a starting point to resolve design
issues when the horizon of possibilities is almost limitless. Next, in suspending disbelief, I
demonstrate how teams generate information where it did not exist before, which is critical when
attempting to break with familiar ideas. Then, in design principles, I explain how teams identify
opportunities when it is unclear in what direction to move to transform a typology. Finally, in
genealogy of ideas, I demonstrate how teams successively develop the initial raw creative
material that initiates the exploration. Throughout the chapter, I demonstrate how these
processes, which are learned from repeated use, enable teams to unlearn within a project. In
doing so, I provide answers to the fundamental challenges facing creative project-based
organizations: how do you continually innovate?
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3.1 THE PROJECT’S ARGUMENT SEQUENCE: SETTING IN MOTION SEARCHES INTO THE UNKNOWN
How does a project develop? “At first you jump into it and produce everything that you can.
Through time, you get more and more selective, basically building the principles of the project.”
This explanation, by Reinier, a junior architect at OAE, is commonly offered up by architects
and designers when asked how a project starts and builds momentum within a creative project-
based organization.
When projects are completed, we are often only privy to the post-rationalization of how the
design evolved.65 The story typically starts with a muse, from which all decisions and actions are
inspired.66 These accounts provide a very neat and sanitized portrayal of the concept’s evolution.
American painter and photographer, Chuck Close famously challenges this account of artistic
innovation when he states:
Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. [With] the belief
that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into
other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were
just sitting around looking for a great ‘art [idea].'67
Close and the young architect — who has already worked on a career-defining project — both
attribute the development of a project not to one single idea, but a multiplicity of ideas out of
which a design intent emerges.68 The more you produce at the beginning, the more likely you are
to develop strong ideas. This is the prevailing wisdom propagated in design literatures and one of
65 A consultant intimately familiar with the firm where I conducted my field work, and other similar practices, put it this way when talking about a project’s evolution: “Yeah, yeah, yeah everyone has seen the post rationalization.” He knew that I was only familiar with the sanitized account of the project. He wanted to explain how the ideas emerged, the unsanitized story of how an idea was taken from one project, played with, and then emerged into a new idea. This echoes Tilly (2002:9), “social processes involve unanticipated consequences, cumulative effects, indirect effects, and effects mediated by their social and physical environment, none of which fit the causal structure of standard stories” (see also Tilly 2006:64). 66 See Ingles 2015; Koolhass and Mau 1997; Holden et al. 2012. 67 Fig 2009:42. 68 This is akin to Padgett and Ansell’s (1993:1263) robust action, in which a “single action can be interpreted coherently from multiple perspectives simultaneously, the fact that single actions can be moves in many games at once.”
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the characteristics of creative project-based organizations that is found to enable their success in
producing transformative ideas.69
Producing “everything that you can,” is a necessary aspect of design — and will be discussed
in Chapter Four — but as my case demonstrates, not sufficient to explain the emergence of a
cohesive design. A sheer volume of ideas will not in itself provide a direction through which
novel design concepts will emerge. As David Stark (2009:1) argues, “the fundamental challenge”
facing innovation “is the kind of search during which you don’t know what you are looking for
but will recognize it when you find it.” Yet Stark and his colleagues do not provide insights for
how this is done in practice.
This raises a fundamental problem for producing novel ideas in creative projects. When
teams are tasked with searching into the unknown, how do designers decide what to produce and
then identify the potential value of these unfamiliar ideas? Unlike refining existing knowledge,
where there is a fixed point to strive towards and defined trajectory to follow, searches into the
unknown require teams to break with successful and familiar routines to discover entirely new
concepts. This chapter asks: how do teams know where to search in the unknown and how do
they reorient their paths of exploration as they move forward?
I contribute to scholarship on ends-in-view by demonstrating that highly creative project-
based organizations, like OAE, employ firm specific approaches for moving forward
explorations in which a sense of where they will end up does not yet exist. As approaches, rather
than explicit acts, mechanisms for pushing forward explorations into the unknown, which are
learned across projects, encourage unanticipated associations and unexpected turns, by
constantly formulating hypothesis and being highly adaptable and responsive to the information
gathered from testing these hypotheses. This enables teams to unlearn within projects by not
forcing designers to explicitly articulate where they will go in advance, because their approach is
premised on changing the path of exploration in response to the information generated along the
way. Rather than taking one large step, I argue teams take many little steps, constantly
readjusting their course of action as new information is generated, allowing designers to “bump
into other possibilities and kick open doors that you would never have dreamt of,” in the words
69 See Fraser 2012; Molotch 2003.
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of Close. This cycle of stating hypotheses, generating information to test them, and then
reassessing ends-in-view targeted, and means selected is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Exploration
To successfully identify the value of newly generated information in uncharted territory, I
argue, searches — or the successive formulation of hypothesis — largely depend on an evolving
project specific argument sequence. Which is “so important, it is like a little assembly line,”
explains the director of an acclaimed architectural practice in New York City. “Assembling the
linear argument, to be able to explain the project, becomes like a lifeblood of the whole thing,
which generates design decisions.” He is not alone in emphasizing the importance of the initial
argument sequence. A principal at a leading international design consultancy states “you need to
come up with a strong enough vision, so designers can build on it easily,” when explaining how
a coherent design emerges from the almost limitless possibilities at the start of a project. The
argument sequence therefore serves as a framework for making sense of the information
gathered from constantly testing hypotheses, to identify the signals from the noise.
After explaining at length how the Metro Skyscraper project evolved from the initial brief to
design concept, Aldo concludes: “I guess it came from the initial push of the diagram.” Although
the project evolves significantly, its rationale comes from the initial argument developed during
the first two days of the competition: a simple diagram sequence — referred to in the studio as
the argument sequence, composed of a set of crude line drawings on a piece of paper, maybe five
or six at the start — that provides “the initial push” or vision to guide the project. Like the
process of gaining resonance between previously disparate ideas, the argument sequence is
emergent — it is not fully formed or defined at the beginning. During the initial design phase,
the argument sequence is constantly getting refined as ideas gain clarity and resolution through
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their constant interaction with other ideas, designers — as discussed in Chapter 2 — and the
situations within which they are developed.70 Yet, how does the argument sequence “push” a
design forward? “When an agent vocalizes or imputes motives,” states Mills (1940:907) “he is
not trying to describe his experienced social action. He is not merely stating “reason.” He is
influencing others — and himself. Often he is finding new “reasons,” which mediate action.” I
argue that the project specific argument sequence provides a framework around which to
orientate conversations for moving ideas forward.
The argument sequence is less about providing the rationale for proving something true or
false, as in the traditional academic sense, and more about setting the vision for how a set of
issues might be dealt with. By example, a square sketch that depicts half the space as playful, and
the other half as serious, like in the case of the Playful Performance Center. Considering that
“novelty almost by definition is hard to understand,” because “something is not genuinely new if
it already exists in our current practice or imagination,” creative teams need a framework for
bringing these disparate ideas together.71 In many instances this requires a framework abstract
enough to focus the team’s search on a project’s fundamental issues, rather than iterating on
existing responses to them, which scholars of innovation find is an unproductive route to
novelty.72 The project specific argument sequence provides a framework for initially
“recognizing” previously unconnected ideas by helping to identify their value in relation to the
vision for the project.
Reflecting on the argument sequence that provided the initial push for the Metro Skyscraper
project, Aldo states, “our end building wasn’t that at all [referring to the project’s initial
argument sequence]. Our end building came from me and the rest of the team playing in
[modeling software] and kind of stumbling upon it in a way, but it came from the initial push of
the diagram.” The argument sequence thus serves as a catalyst for unanticipated associations to
be made and then identifying their value. In the sections that follows, I will demonstrate how
predilections, suspending disbelief, design principles, and knowing the genealogy of ideas move
explorations in projects forward in which a sense of where they will end up does not yet exist.
70 McDonnell et al. 2017:1. 71 Padgett and Powell 2012:1. 72 Martin 2009; Christensen 2000; Christensen 2003.
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3.2 PREDILECTIONS: APPROACHING THE PUZZLE
“Napkin sketches are ridiculous, and I will not do one,” responds Pierre to a request that he
publically issue a diagram of the International Performing Arts Center’s unique ability to
transform into multiple theater configurations. Everyone gathered at the conference room table,
including the client’s representatives who requested the sketch, turns silent. They have broached
a touchy topic within the world of design. Without requiring justification, the room remains
silent for a few more moments before the client’s representative awkwardly tries to resume the
conversation.
Unlearning within a project requires the team to break with familiar ideas and established
perceptions, and venture into the unknown. This state of ambiguity is heightened at the start of a
project when the paths for approaching a problem are almost limitless, presenting teams with
more options than can possibly be explored. The problem raised by this is establishing a starting
point within the unknown to initiate the team’s exploration. Predilections, which are learned
across projects, are established approaches within a practice to address the unique issues of a
design challenge, which serve as starting points for exploration.
To limit imposing an a priori outcome on a project, which fundamentally limits innovation,
many of the most highly acclaimed design practices refuse to start projects with a sketch. “We
are not an office that has a napkin sketch that we then enact the architectural side,” says one of
the principals of a studio known for their commitment to research. “We try not to start projects
with an a priori sense of what the outcome will be, and we are open to exploring alternatives,”
elaborates one of her partners. Starting a project without a preconceived notion of the final
design is not unique to architecture. The executive creative director at an international design
consultancy says “we try to be as true to our specific problem as possible, versus having an
outside point of view that we impose on something.”
Yet firms do not start projects tabula rasa. For this reason, it is rare to find a firm whose
projects do not share a similar language or signature that tie them together. By example, when
the iPad was released in 2010, it was clearly part of the Apple design ecosystem. There was no
mistaking it for a Samsung or Blackberry product.
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Rather than starting with a fixed idea and “then enacting the architectural side,” predilections
serve as stand-ins to guide the development of solutions to the issues unique to a design. Yet,
they are not in themselves the solutions. The designer, or actor, writes Whitford (2002: 345), “is
an experimenter who encounters problem situations.” They “hypothesize activities — means-to-
ends — that might resolve the problem and make predictions about their results.” Yet in
choosing a best course of action, they are “constantly adjusting it upon receiving new
information about the actual effects of means [or predilections] chosen.” In the case of the
Playful Performance Center, playfulness/seriousness is the predilection, which helped the design
team develop the concept of a building split into two. The end solution was far more than this
simple dichotomy, but it helped them get to the next idea, constantly evolving as new
information becomes available.
As the signature of a firm, and more fundamentally an established mechanism teams employ
to puzzle out of issues, it is imperative that studios have different predilections than their peers.
As Steve Jobs remarked long ago, “if you are gonna make connections that are innovative, you
have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else.”73 Yet it is not as simple as
“having new resources to accomplish new tasks,” argues Stark (2009:162), the challenge is
“recognizing configurations that others would not see as resources.” While my case demonstrates
this to be true, there is little discussion within the literature on how to configure ideas in novel
ways to resolve issues.
Predilections enable teams to establish a starting point for exploring for ways to deal with the
unique issues of a design challenge by anchoring their first line of questioning. My research
shows that the trick for successfully unlearning within a project is combining predilections in
ways that expose the relationships and connections that would otherwise not be identifiable. The
Playful Performing Center project design team, by example, combined different predilections to
develop ideas that pushed one of the most highly regarded theater design consultants out of his
comfort zone. Not because the concept jeopardized the quality of the space, but because it had
never been thought of before.
73 Grant 2016:45.
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Often when studios are successful, designers stop going back to the predilections that lead to
their success in introducing innovations to a typology. This is an explicit example of when
learning between projects does not lead to the growth. Many principals told me that by
constantly going back and further developing their predilections or introducing new ones to their
repertoire, they can continue to innovate within a typology — avoiding falling into path
dependency. Appealing to a risk averse client’s request to reproduce one of the studio’s existing
buildings, teams forsake innovation to get a commission. This is a quick way to make money,
but all the principals I spoke with said that when a client asks them to do this, they either
convince them to let them reassess what the project’s fundamental issues are — given that no
two conditions are the same — or they turn the client away. This is risky in the short term, but in
the long term it keeps the studio relevant and in demand. They therefore do not allow themselves
to define the end point at the outset of the project.
To begin explorations into the unknown, I find teams rely on predilections to focus their
initial research and align the ambitions of a project to search for truly transformative ideas.
The first day of the Playful Performance Center project is anticlimactic. After announcing the
project in the main conference room during an office-wide meeting, Aldo, the project leader,
immediately gets to work. But there isn’t much to see. Apart from the internal project folder on
the firm’s computer server filling with documents, there is no visible sign of forward momentum.
Inundated with data, the challenge facing teams is identifying the fundamental issues unique
to a project that if addressed have the highest probability of positively transforming the typology
they are dealing with. More information is not the problem, as is typically assumed, it is
identifying what is important and why. My research demonstrates that to focus the initial
research phase, predilections are employed at a high level to identify signals within the noise of
data. This is not an easy task. As pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1998[1933]:140) noted
long ago, the challenge with perplexing problems is that we come to know what the problem is,
simultaneously with finding a resolution. Identifying the fundamental conditions under such
uncertainty is challenging without the assistance of a heuristic to guide the initial information
gathering phase of resolving a problem.
At the start, teams need to conduct a deep dive into all the data they can that relates to a
project. This data comes from many different sources. The client provides project specific
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information relating to requirements, budget, users, and intentions. Specialist consultants provide
technical information. Local and municipal agencies provide code and zoning information.
Existing buildings provide precedence information. At the end of the documents gathering phase,
teams are inundated with information.
Where do you start? Framing this data is imperative to identifying the signals, or first
principles that are unique to the design challenges. In the basic language used to describe a
theater, the Playful Performance Center team identifies the distinct separation between front and
back stage as an issue with the performing arts center typology. To engage children and young
adults, they decide to demystify the end-to-end process of producing and performing a play by
providing unparalleled transparency to every single aspect of a production. Transparency is one
of OAE’s predilections. Diving deeper into the standard typologies of performing arts centers,
the team identifies the fundamental conditions that cause this organizational separation. As
Reinier describes it, “we go right back to first principles.” By starting with the fundamental
organization of the space, the team transforms the experience of the performing arts center in a
novel way; this is only possible by employing predilections to separate the signals from the noise
during the team’s initial research efforts.
The Metro Skyscraper project conversely was initially plagued by the team’s research not
being focused. Without established predilections within the practice for approaching the inherent
issues of commercial skyscrapers, the team struggles to construct novel concepts for
transforming the typology in part because they do not know where to look in the unknown. The
team searches; however it does not have the mechanisms to identify what is meaningful to
engage with to transform the typology. This is because they have no heuristic framework, which
has been developed and learned across projects, to focus their search and in turn develop
hypotheses for testing.
Transcending past surface level issues and identifying other root issues is challenging when
breaking with familiar routines and practices. Guided by predilections, teams know roughly
where to launch pointed explorations to identify how other predilections can be deployed to
further frame the issues in ways that will expose unanticipated connections. By looking deeper
into the organization of the performing arts center typology, the Playful Performance Center’s
team identifies fundamental issues associated with it and, in turn, employes a different set of
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predilections that help them develop a novel response to the existing conditions that separate the
different aspects of a theater. A response that would not have been possible had they just focused
on the site survey data and images of the beautiful view. Put simply, issues are nested. The goal
is to identify the causes of an issue, rather than their symptoms.74 The influence of addressing
root causes rather than symptoms is well documented within the study of design. Rittel and
Webber state “The level at which a problem is settled depends upon the self-confidence of the
analyst and cannot be decided on logical grounds … one should not try to cure symptoms; and
therefore one should try to settle the problem on as high a level as possible.” (1973:165). Firms
that aim to push typologies dedicate a significant amount of time at the start to research — even
as anxiety and stress set in as the countdown to the deadline relentlessly marches on — to
identify root causes.
Focusing a team’s research is fundamental to unlearning within a project; predilection,
however, limits the kinds of responses an office is inclined to pursue, because it limits the signals
that become apparent to them. With limited time to develop an initial concept design, teams
revert to the conceptual frameworks within the office they are familiar with for constructing
novel concepts. The influence of self-confidence for identifying root causes stands in contrast to
how sociologists treat the influence of motives in directing action. Like Mills (1940:909) states,
“along with rules and norms of actions for various situations, we learn vocabularies of motives
appropriate to them.” Teams revert to the vocabularies of motives, which are appropriate to the
predilection, and in turn follow the rules and norms of actions tied to them. Without learning new
vocabularies of motives, teams will continue to employ the ones they are familiar with, or as
Mills states, following “standardized motives which promote prescribed actions and dissuade
those proscribed.” Yet as Leschziner and Green (2013:123) demonstrate, ideas considered
unacceptable in a field — or proscribed in Mills’ language — is where opportunities for
innovation lie. In the absence of constructing new predilection during down times when studios
have more time to experiment, teams will be limited to innovations in kind, not type.
74 Rittel and Webber’s 1973 paper became the foundation for “Design Thinking,” (see for instance Martin and Christensen 2013 for an excellent overview of the literature — which makes many references back to Rittel and Webber 1973).
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Following the meeting with the theater design consultants, when Pierre startes sketching the
rectangle split into two environments, he is not setting the ambition for the project for the first
time. Immediately after the site model is completed, the team all gravitates to the view from atop
the hill where the building will be located.75 Bringing the inside out and outside in is the first
performative ambition identified for the project, which plays to one of OAE’s predilections:
flexibility. However, as the team engages with the theater consultants, it becomes evident that
they are not setting their ambitions high enough. In other words, they are only going to
marginally change the way the students experience and interact with the space.
Establishing the ambitions of a project to guide unlearning within a team is challenging given
that the territory being explored is unfamiliar. Identifying what will transform a typology is
difficult to meaningfully asses without a guide. Aligning the ambitions of a project to addressing
the fundamental issues of a design, rather than marginally improving on surface level issues,
enables teams to open themselves up to unanticipated connections and associations.
Flexibility of space is not the right predilection to resolve the issue of engaging children and
young adults. At the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, opening the theater
space to the outdoors transforms the patron’s interaction with the space. Sitting on a blanket
under the stars, with a bottle of wine, while the Boston Theater Group puts on a performance is a
significant departure from typical performing arts center experiences. Yet the patron’s interaction
with Tanglewood is episodic at best. For the school’s performing arts center, the space will
become an integral part of the student’s daily lives. All music and theater classes will be held in
the building. The novelty of the concept will wear off quickly, and, more importantly, it only
addresses the issue of engaging youth when performances are being held. OAE was simply not
setting their ambitions high enough.
Rather than curing symptoms of youth participation, the team needs to find the underlying
causes of the issue, something that evades them when framing the issue through the lens of
flexibility alone. As Rittel and Webber (1973:165) argue, “marginal improvement does not
75 Site Model: Typically made out of white massing foam, Site Models are three dimensional representations of the site where the building will be located. Model include all of the surrounding buildings and natural contours of the site. The intention of building large site models is to allow designers to drop in models of the building they are working on — typically out of blue massing foam — to understand how it interacts with its environment.
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guarantee overall improvement.” With the guidance of OAE’s principal, the team reestablished
their ambitions for the project by employing a new predilection. Although flexibility would still
be incorporated into the space, it was not the guiding predilection used to resolve the issue of
demystifying the end-to-end journey of a theater production and getting students excited about it.
Broadening the scope from one aspect of the design to fundamentally questioning the
programmatic composition and organization of a performing arts center, the team is able to
generate the argument sequence of a half-serious, half-playful building.
“Frankly, what is the big idea?” writes Pierre to the design team two weeks into the
Landmark competition. Despite identifying a tension between the building’s public and private
space, the team has not identified the fundamental issues driving the separation. Consequently,
they have not been able to deploy any of OAE’s predilections to start developing ideas for
resolving the tension or set the performative ambition for it.
Sitting with the team in the conference room, Pierre decides that in the absence of a “big
idea,” they would have to make something beautiful. This is not a strong suit of the studio,
which, in part, is why they have been so successful in introducing novel concepts. Rather than
simply dematerializing a building to a subjective aesthetic element, they start by allowing a form
to emerge around their response to the project’s unique issues. In the case of the Playful
Performance Center project, the strategy exposes beautiful aesthetic elements; but these do not
drive the design. They are a consequence of resolving larger and more fundamental issues of
engaging children and young adults in the arts. In this case, they aligned their ambitions for the
project with the root issues that will enable the design team to transform the experience of the
building’s patrons. Alignment of ambitions and issues is critical for introducing novel concepts
that meaningfully transform typologies.
Without an issue to resolve, and in turn an argument sequence to drive the development of
the Landmark competition’s design concept, the team has trouble deciding how to progress. A
senior member on the team is frustrated that they are introducing awkward moments and
unresolved elements into the design because they had only focused on making it beautiful.
Despite an incredible effort from the team, and, in fact, a very beautiful design, they do not win
the competition. Speaking to the team afterwards, they all commented that the building “didn’t
do anything.” Translated: it did not propose a unique experience for those using and interacting
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with the space, which is the very essence and signature of OAE. Unlike the Playful Performing
Arts Center project, its ambitions were not aligned with driving transformative impact. For most
design teams, this requires challenging conversations, not only internally, but with client as well.
Pursuing ideas that at the outset of a team’s exploration do not exist in practice or imagination
challenges designers to establish a starting point to initiate a search. Exploiting practices learned
across projects for initiating a course of action is critical for structuring unlearning within a
project. When predilections can be reliably drawn on and recombined to initiate a project’s
exploration, my research demonstrates teams are equipped to approach challenging design
problems that have a seemingly limitless number of possible routes for exploration. Rather than
limiting exploration by building on existing approaches that are easily definable at the outset,
which only marginally challenge the familiar and routine, predilections provide the vocabulary
of action for exposing relationships and connections that would otherwise not be identifiable.
3.3 SUSPENDING DISBELIEF: BREAKING WITH THE FAMILIAR AND PREDICTABLE
Unlearning within a project requires teams to generate information that previously did not exist.
This is because truly novel ides do not exist in current practice or imagination. The design brief
and initial discovery phase can therefore only guide a project so far. “The danger of the drive to
clarify,” Lester and Piore (2004:69) argue, “is that it often reifies insight, to the point of
eliminating the very conditions of uncertainty that are needed for creativity to flourish. The
analytical approach typically assumes that the ambiguities have already been eliminated, or, if
they still remain, the basic thrust is to get rid of them.” Yet scholarship shows that ambiguity is
critical for encouraging creativity and innovation. At a certain point, designers need to stop
analyzing and start throwing out ideas. A partner at a boutique architectural design practice in
New York City puts it this way:
“I would say we always get to a point where we are thinking too much, researching too much
and relying or waiting on some sort of rational explanation to guide us and it doesn’t always
happen, so it’s nice to have intuition — throw shit at the side of the wall — to balance things
out.”
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Logical cognition “no matter how useful for refinement and improvement,” argue Padgett and
Powell (2012:1), “is unlikely to be a fundamental process for generating novelty, because logic
can only use axioms that are already there.” For this reason, “we always want the rational and
irrational happening side by side and bouncing off one another,” says a principal at a design
consultancy in New York City. He elaborates that “it is never purely a rational process because
we believe in the inventive accidental qualities of sketching and looking at things.” Unlearning
within a project therefore raises a problem for designers: how do you suspend established
procedures and expectations associated with a concept to introduce ideas that challenge existing
typologies?76 Suspending disbelief enable designers to make the switch between rational
axiomatic thinking to playful, “throw shit at the side of the wall” thinking to gather vital
feedback on ideas where information does not exist.77 It allows designers to formulate
hypotheses, which have the potential to introduce unexpected associations and information into
the project.
Suspending disbelief, under conditions of uncertainty, is not done blindly. Although “you are
always suspending disbelief to a certain degree,” explains Jean, a director at OAE, “we have a
knowledge that it is feasible, that it should be doable this way.” In other words, designers are
only suspending disbelief to a certain extent. They are proposing ideas that should be possible.78
Suspending Disbelief enable teams to generate information that currently does not exist by
testing the effects of hypothesized associations. As other scholars have found, it is only through
the act of transforming ideas that designers discover what they are looking for — given that it
does not exist in current practice or imagination.79 My research demonstrates that suspending
disbelief enable designers to bring ideas from disparate fields together, transforming them into
something new and unexpected. It is through these acts of suspending disbelief, which are
learned across projects, that unanticipated connections are made, which lead to innovation. The
76 Stark 2009.83; Leschziner and Green 2013:122-123. 77 Like Böcking (2008:1) states, the suspension of disbelief means accepting “limitations in the presented story, sacrificing realism, and occasionally logic and believability.” 78 My research focused on designers working on products that must meet functional requirements as well as a host of strict laws (both natural and legislative). By example, an architect cannot suggest ideas that defy physics. Unlike an installation artist, live loads, bearing capacities, etc., all constrain what is possible. Moreover, city by-laws and building codes restrict what is permissible. 79 Stark 2009:175; see also Padgett and Powell 2012; Kogut and Zander 1992; Vedres and Stark 2010.
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designers I observed and spoke with suspend logical cognition by faking details, ignoring
aspects, and building on assumptions.
Reviewing in progress plans for the International Performing Arts Center project, Aldo and
Jeanne zoom in to review what they are holding for the structural elements of the building.
Having worked on the plans all morning, Aldo tells Jeanne that there is not enough room in the
current scheme to adequately represent the structure that they anticipate is required to support the
building. Without hesitation, Jeanne says “that’s okay,” with a quick shrug of her shoulders.
Aldo agrees, informing her that they don’t even know what the exact dimensions of the structural
elements will be, as they are still waiting to hear back from the structural engineer who is
working with the team to develop the structure for the building. Aldo and Jeanne agree to simply
put a line in the plans for now to “represent something.”
The information required to constructing novel concepts is not available or comprehensible at
the outset of a project. Until designers start exploring, information cannot be gathered, requiring
teams to fake details until a sufficient understanding can be developed of what information is
necessary. Like in the case of the Performing Arts Center project, Jeanne and Aldo fake the
structural components of the building so they can make enough progress to start gathering
information on the structural elements. Using the most minimal line-weight in the drawing as a
placeholder, they continue developing the plans — roughly accounting for the structure of the
building.80 Waiting for the structural engineering consultant to provide highly resolved drawings
for the structural elements was not an option. In part, this was because the team was still
developing the concept, and the engineers were waiting for this information to calculate the true
weight of the building. Although their entire design is contingent on the structural system
working, they cannot define what the structural system will entail until they produce a more
resolved design concept. They are in a bit of a catch-22. Therefore, to move ahead, the team
must fake it, formulating hypotheses about its potential conditions.
80 Line weight refers to the thickness of a line in a drawing. The relative thickness of a line signals depth, proximity, and importance. By drawing a structural frame with the most minimal line weight, the team is indicating the presence of the structural elements, but not the true thickness relative to other elements within the drawing. By example, the walls.
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Stopping to figure out all the details at the start of a project, when teams initially start
exploring, dampens momentum. Faking details and elements enables teams to keep building on
ideas when they are only tentative to develop initial proofs of concept to assess where they are
going. On many occasions during a formal review, Pierre tells the team to “fudge it.” He pushes
the design team not to constrain themselves to what is currently possible given the information
they have. The principal tells the team to “fake it so it works.” Often done in preparation for a
review presentation with a client, teams show an idea that they want, even though it is not
completely developed or resolved. By showing what they want, the team can get buy-in from the
client and then figure out how to make it work after — before showing the final design to the
client. To move forward, teams must therefore provide enough information to move the concept
forward, so they can look back in their evolved state of exploration and see with greater clarity
how to fill the gaps they previously faked.
By not forcing the resolution of an idea prematurely, unanticipated outcomes are introduced
that would otherwise not be possible with existing information. Once more information is
available or they have more time, the designers will add the necessary detail previously left out.
This allows designers to gather information on other elements by “sketching and looking at
things” and not constraining themselves to what the data in front of them says is possible. In
instances like the International Performing Arts Center that Aldo and Jeanne are working on, the
final structural solutions introduce elements that come to define the aesthetic feel of the main
lobby level. This is an example of looking back, after enough of a concept’s framework is
developed, to fill in the faked elements, which can now be apprehended with greater definition
and clarity. Rather than forcing something, which is an expression of what is known, designers
use this strategy to make unanticipated connections that would otherwise not be intelligible to
them.
“Take it step by step,” says Gordon as the International Performing Arts Center team realizes the
implications of the news they just received via email.
“Don’t tackle it all at once,” Gordon instructs, referring to the new set of constrains imposed
on them, for which they must find a resolution to maintain the overall design intent.
“Take the data,” he says slowly and deliberately, recognizing the herculean task given the
situation and time constraints, “and then move on to the next.”
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Nodding in acknowledgement, the team shift their chairs towards their desks and start
absorbing the information.
Constructing novel concepts, part of unlearning within a project, by its very definition
implies that information does not exist to guide progress or find resolutions to problems. The
complexity introduced into a project of this nature is incredible. My field work shows that
ignoring aspects of the design is a method, learned across projects, to reduce the complexity of a
problem by breaking it into more manageable steps. Ignoring all but one aspect of the design,
isolating their efforts, teams are less inclined to get overwhelmed trying to resolve them all at
once. This allows them to take on far more complex problems, by constantly adjusting their
strategies of action as new information becomes available.
Without any information to support their proposed solution, the International Performing
Arts Center team had to break it down into smaller pieces to get the necessary data to
demonstrate the fidelity of their idea. The new information just received challenged them to
propose a solution that radically shifted the way they thought about the building to maintain the
integrity of their argument. Aldo, one of the International Performing Arts Center’s project
leaders, captures it beautifully:
Every day I would say that we have to ignore something. You have to tell yourself okay we
are going to ignore structure and solve this pretending that whatever we do we know that
structure is going to work, because if you consider that this needs to work for MEP, this has
to work for structure, for code, it has to be beautiful, it has to do this and that, you are not
going to get anywhere, you are just going to get stuck, you often just ignore things on
purpose, do it so that we like it, then bring it back, now start looking at it through the lenses
of structure, where are our problems, is there another way to resolve structure, is there
something else that we can do completely differently, or is it too big of a problem and it was
a mistake, let’s throw it away and try to redo the stairs or something. So, it is impossible to
manage all the problems at once, so you have to break them down, keeping the overall in
mind.
Making sure that all the isolated pieces come together as a cohesive design concept is
challenging under these conditions. Breaking down larger issues by ignoring other aspects is
important for unlearning within a project. So is “keeping the overall in mind.” Without the
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argument sequence in mind to guide decisions, elements will not fit together to form a cohesive
design. Rather than reverting to a simpler design concept after receiving the new constraints, the
International Performing Arts Center team breaks down the components into more manageable
pieces, always with the argument sequence in mind to ensure the revised elements will come
together.
When critical aspects of the design are ignored that are foundational to the design concept,
the pieces being developed can be killed on arrival. During the DC Premium Space project,
internal aspects of the design were being developed, ignoring the primary façade. When the
pieces were brought together, the internal aspect challenged the primary façade, which was one
of the driving concepts of the project. As a result, the interior work had to be rethought, requiring
more time to develop. Although enabling designers to move forward in the face of complexity, it
limits the ability of successive design elements to transform the overall concept, limiting
unanticipated transformations to be introduced to the design through secondary elements of the
project.
The site where the International Performing Arts Center will be located has below ground
elements that must be incorporated into the design. Rather than accommodating them as
suggested, the design team significantly modify the elements to fit with their design intent. The
team develops a design scheme that they want rather than one that will accommodate the
elements as easily as possible. Knowing that they will be met with resistance from the client, and
unsure if the alteration is even permissible by city code, they move ahead anyways. “Not letting
reality get in the way,” as OAE’s principal often tells the team.
There comes a point at the start of a project when faking and ignoring elements of the design
is no longer possible. As a design’s resolution increases, drawings need to account for the
dimensions and functional requirements of the elements being constructed. Yet when a lot
remains unknown — an inherent issue of developing novel ideas — teams are challenged to
incorporate this information. Assumptions move the progress of a project forward by enabling
teams to insert provisional data. Making assumptions is therefore a tool, learned and honed
across projects, for working through uncertainty by generating tentative information. Like Suri
(2013:112) writes, “as soon as we start to think ahead to future experiences and how people
might respond, we begin to draw upon our intuitive and interpretive abilities. We begin to
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imagine and empathize.” Thinking ahead to the future is accomplished through formulating and
testing hypotheses.
In the case of the inherited below ground elements, the team gets to a point where
placeholders have to be replaced with “something” resembling their real conditions. At this
point, the team needs to provide enough resolution to demonstrate the fidelity of their proposal.
Faking and ignoring will not provide the hard data they need to convince their client.81
After working four weeks on the assumption that they could significantly alter the inherited
site elements, the International Performing Arts Center team finds out that their proposal is not
possible. Like many assumptions, they don’t always hold. Failure, which is discussed in Chapter
Four, is a common outcome of exploring outside of established ideas and conventions. The
studio does not lose the project. They do, however, have to modify their design intent to conform
to the below ground elements, which redirected their path for exploration. Luckily the team has
time to restore the project’s argument sequences, quickly adapting to the new information, which
requires more faking, ignoring, and building on assumptions to maintain the spirit of the design
intent the client fell in love with.
The enabling power of faking elements and details to start work also constrains exploration
by leading teams down false paths. During the initial design of the DC Premium Space project,
the team details the window panels with an incredibly thin reveal, minimizing the frames as
much as possible. For months, the team assumes this was possible. By assuming this minimal
reveal was possible, the team closes themselves off to exploring other ideas. For this project, it
was a practical maneuver to lock in the primary design elements so that they could meet the strict
timeline imposed by the developer. Yet this stands in contrast to an emergent style of innovation
that continually evolves throughout the process of detailing the building, which sociologists of
culture, like McDonnell and his collaborators (2017) find is critical to innovation. This is
because it closes the team off to information learned throughout the process of investigating the
individual elements. Faking elements can also lead to what psychologists refer to as confirmation
81 Listing off all the primary elements of a building for which information was still tentative, a senior designer laments, we are “building assumptions, and more assumptions.” When too much is unknown and the team still moves forward with an argument sequence and design intent, they cannot be certain it will hold in the face of verifiable information. As one director mentioned, this is the point when a project can be lost at any moment.
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bias, where evidence is interpreted in ways that reflect existing beliefs, expectations, or
hypothesis.82 This exacerbates, the effects of closing of the organic emergence of innovation, by
blinding teams to more fruitful paths for exploration.
Pursuing ideas that currently do not exist in practice or imagination challenge teams to suspend
established procedural and experiential knowledge to introduce ideas that reimagine existing
typologies. Exploiting practices learned across projects within the studio for breaking with
existing routines and practices is critical to unlearning within a project. When strategies for the
suspension of disbelief are in place and can be relied upon to help teams venture into the
unknown, my research shows teams are equipped to break out of familiar paths and generate
information where it does not exist at the outset of exploration. Rather than limiting exploration
by relying on existing information, when practices for suspending disbelief are woven through
the productive fabric of a firm, teams can focus on constructing novel concepts, trusting that the
necessary information they require to realize them will become available throughout the process
of exploration.
3.4 DESIGN PRINCIPLES: THE FRAMEWORK FOR TRANSFORMATION
In early 2015, a building opens that sends shockwaves through the architectural community.83
Surrounded by hulking masses of concrete inspired by the brutalist movement of the 70s and 80s,
the taught, white glass façade of the building stands in stark contrast to its surroundings. It is not
the exterior that is generating the attention, however; it is the building’s interior.
Identifying and addressing a shift in how students learn, the building’s space is organized
across large open floor plates filled with casual seating to facilitate group discussion. Gone are
the rows of fixed desks and individual study corrals. This is all possible because the library
contains no books. Also gone is the repetition of space. With multiple “environments” on each
82 Nickerson 1998. 83 When I arrived in Manhattan to conduct my research, three months after the Ryerson Learning Commons opened, I was often asked about the design. I was asked repeatedly by architects when they found out that I was from the University of Toronto if I had visited it. Fortunately, I had, and through many informal conversations understood why it was such an important building. It was most important because it set a precedence for all future university libraries. Architects could tackle issues previously not possible, like removing books, which inhibit them up from dealing with the larger issues inherent in the future of learning.
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floor, and with no two floors alike, there is a unique space for every student’s academic needs
and preferences. Rather than imposing one way of learning and interacting, the designers have
provided a diverse setting to appeal to as broad a set of users as possible. The self-proclaimed
library of the 21st century, is located on the Ryerson University Campus in Toronto, Canada.
Identifying where opportunities lie to meaningfully transform a typology is fundamental to
introducing novel design concepts. The complexity of this is heightened by the fact that
designers working in profit orientated creative project-based organizations have limited
resources and time to design, develop, and execute projects. The challenge for unlearning within
projects, is identifying two or three foundational issues within a typology, which can realistically
be dealt with given their constraints, and then approaching them in a way that has not been done
before. If done successfully, teams will introduce novel concepts that previously did not exist in
practice or imagination.
Snøhetta, the firm responsible for the design discussed above, identifies social learning, e-
books, and diversity of learning styles as the main issues that needed to be resolved in the library
of the future. Design principles are the conceptual scaffolding employed by teams to guide their
exploration into the unknown to construct novel resolutions, for dealing with the foundational
issues of a project.
When identifying the issues unique to a project that need to be resolved, you “have to be like
okay that’s already been done, but there is an opportunity here to push in another direction,”
explains the principal of a boutique architectural studio in New York City. Lizaridis, the former
CEO of BlackBerry, added to this with his statement at the height of the company’s success:
You have to always go back and say ‘Is there something fundamentally wrong with the way
we’re seeing the market? Are we dealing with incomplete information?’ Because that’s
what’s going to get you: it’s not necessarily that some young whippersnapper’s going to
come up with some better idea than you. They’re going to start from a different premise and
they’re going to come to a different conclusion that makes you irrelevant.84
84 Mike Lizaridis, quoted in Martin 2009:61-62.
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Neither alludes to complete reinvention. It is finding a few ideas that are the seeds for developing
a different approach to an issue. Although focusing on two or three issues may sound trivial
when considering the scale of a building, it is enough to transform a typology. As Lizaridis and
the architect state, it is all about going back to the fundamental premise of an issue, and finding a
different way of approaching it than others have. This requires a new line of questioning and a
path for generating the design concept.
The “content used earlier in the development of ideas,” writes Berg (2014:14) “exerts greater
influence on final creativity than contents incorporated later in the creative process. In other
words, once the primal mark is set, the fate of any idea that grows from it may be largely sealed.”
Like the first brushstroke that a painter lays down on canvas, Grant (2016:136) states the starting
point in generating ideas shapes the path for the rest of the painting. It constrains what is
imagined. Although my research supports this, I find that designers put far more on the page than
the simple stroke of a brush. Designers begin with the rough sketches of a pencil, which provide
the conceptual framework that allows for successive ideas to emerge.
Design principles enable teams to construct novel concepts by providing the conceptual
framework from which ideas cascade, often resulting in unanticipated outcomes. In this sense, I
find design principals analogous to the rough pencil sketches placed on the canvas, which inspire
ideas, long before paint is applied. At my field site, teams employed design principles to move
their exploration forward by setting the horizon of possibilities and identifying paths of
opportunity.
Coming back to the same idea, study after study during the first week of the International
Performing Arts Center project, it becomes clear that the materiality of the façade will become
an important aspect of the design. To address one of the issues unique to the project, Pierre
decides to resort to one of the studio’s predilections — transparency — to resolve the issue.
Designers on the team responsible for generating options propose many different materials and
methods for providing transparency, however the design team keeps coming back to one of the
original options proposed. This idea will become one of the design principles of the project.
“From then on,” recalls Reinier, one of the designers on the team, “we knew we had to make
something very nice about the skin.” The design principle was set.
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Without knowing in advance where a team is going, a feature of unlearning within a project,
making progress towards developing ideas is challenging. Without defined waypoints to strive
towards, the challenge is knowing what to produce to progress. Setting the horizon by identifying
a rough design principle generates ideas and sets in motion streams of unanticipated associations.
Starting as a rough outline, like the pencil sketch that a painter lays down before the first stroke
of a brush, they are broad and abstract enough to allow for successive ideas to emerge.
The idea of transparency, which changes as the environment of the building changes, sets the
horizon for exploration, establishing a target to work towards and explore within. As the designer
responsible for rendering and modeling the building remarks, “we knew we had to make
something very nice about the skin.” Elaborating on this point, Jean, the studio’s director, says
“sometimes it’s one thing like [the façade] that is the seed that carries so much and creates so
many by products that are part of the expression.” The façade in many ways becomes the
building. To maintain the transformative quality of the material and provide transparency, the
internal circulation of the building would have to go around the perimeter of the space. This
organization of space creates unique opportunities for developing a highly flexible interior. In
this way, the initial idea for the material composition of the façade “created so many byproducts
that are part of the expression” of the building’s design. Expressions that were not anticipated at
the outset, and would not have been constructed had the team not used the design principle to set
their initial horizon of exploration. In this way, design principles set trajectories for moving
forward explorations.
Design principles should not be viewed pejoratively as “constrain[ing] what people can
imagine,” as Grant (2016) describes them. As the starting point — or vocabularies of motives —
for generating ideas, in the words of Berg (2014), the idea for the façade “shap[ed] the path for
the rest of the painting.” This reflects Mills (1940) vocabularies of motives that established
strategies of action, which, in this case, is analogous to design principals setting in motion
streams of action. Without knowing what the final painting would look like, the initial idea
created many unanticipated conditions when the team went from initial project specific argument
sequence to designing the building. In effect, design principles unleash a stream of focused
actions.
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If we return to the Landmark competition where the principal asked his team “Frankly, what
is the big idea?” it becomes evident that without design principles, it is hard to generate ideas in
uncharted territory. Where do you search? How do you build on other ideas? There were no
seeds to “let [the design] grow on its own,” as one designer describes it. No stream of action was
initiated that provided the environment, as Joas (1996:135) argues, to nurture the unfolding of a
promising idea according to its own logic. Beauty, which became the team’s big idea, was only
skin deep. The decisions made on the façade do not cascade through other aspects of the project,
because there is no conceptual framework to tie them together. Consequently, there are no
unanticipated outcomes in other elements of the project to transform the way the space would be
experienced. By contrast, the façade of the International Performing Arts Center discussed above
is incredibly beautiful, but it starts as a method for resolving a more fundamental issue unique to
the project. To maintain this design principle, it would go right to the core of the building —
generating successive ideas as it transcends the various elements that constitute a building.
Following weeks of sudden and unpredictable change in the conceptual design of the
International Performing Arts Center project, Aldo looks at the rest of the team, who are sitting
around him exhausted and says, “I thought today would be a nice day.” In a tone of frustration,
he remarks: “why do we have to start from scratch every day.” Until the principles of a project
are established, teams work at a relentless pace, often redesigning the same element hundreds of
times, until they get traction with the principal and from the client. Frustration, anger, and
exhaustions are the norm during this phase of a project’s development. This is not unique to
OAE. The emotional toll of searching into the unknown is often forgotten after the fact, but
during the process of discovery it weighs heavily on designers. Designers often iterate to me
stories of team members, ranging from intern to industry veterans, breaking down and walking
out of the studio. They usually come back, but there are always stories of those who walk away
— often going to the commercial developer side of architecture where these pressures do not
exist. Trying to encourage unanticipated associations, which is critical to breaking with past
experiences and expectation, is not an easy process.
Albeit generative in setting a target for exploration, setting horizons limits the field of
possible exploration, initiating certain streams of action and not others. The unanticipated
connections born out of exploration are limited to the horizon set by the design principle. Ideas
that cascade out into other fields may be aborted, reducing the possibility of radical ideas to
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emerge through the convergence of unanticipated horizons of possibility. The likes of Ubers and
AirBnBs, whose transformative power is premised on the convergence of distinctly different
value pools, may not be possible within this approach to generating novel concepts. Teams need
freedom to explore to determine where they might productively interact with concepts in
different fields, if they intend to bring about disruptive innovation. Bringing together previously
distant fields, to introduce new concepts, requires a significant amount of freedom, which cannot
be circumscribed by imposing limits to the fields of possible exploration. Teams therefore need
the freedom to formulate and test hypotheses and readjust their paths of exploration according to
the information generated, even if it is divergent and leads project’s in unexpected directions.
“We are down to optics, and distortion, and color, and blushing, and all sorts of other funky
things. If this is all you are dematerializing the building down to, is this one surface, you better
be in fucking control of it.” After a long discussion on the tremendous amount of work his team
is putting into detailing the façade of the DC Premium Space project, this is how one of the
project’s artistic influences concludes: “You better be in fucking control of it.”
Without reference points, determining the potential value of ideas that previously did not
exist in practice or imagination is challenging. This is because “novelty almost by definition is
hard to understand” Padgett and Powell (2012:1). Once a novel concept is identified, maintaining
it and not reverting to what is familiar or easily understood becomes an ongoing challenge for the
design team. Identifying paths of opportunity enables teams to focus their efforts on maintaining
these elements to ensure novel ideas are brought to life. Like robust lines of action in which
actors “pursue openings whenever they present themselves,” teams need to be “shrewd” like the
Medici to keep them open (Padgett and Ansell 1993:1308). “Maintaining discretionary options
across unforeseeable futures in the face of hostile attempts by others to narrow those options”
(Padgett and Ansell 1993:1263), reflects the challenges teams face when developing novel
concepts. By focusing on paths of opportunity, teams can channel their energy in a concerted
way to ensure opposing forces, who would prefer more predictable concepts that have been
previously tested, do not prevail.
Maintaining promising paths to transform a typology is challenging because it requires
designers to work with unfamiliar ideas. The tendency to mitigate this uncertainty, especially
when the inevitable problems are discovered, threatens the potential novelty these unfamiliar
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ideas introduce into a project. When Aldo gets temporarily put on the DC Premium Space
project, he immediately scans through the in-progress drawing set. Turning to Sheela, the project
leader, he remarks that it is scary that they are still waiting for the façade consultants to get the
team dimensions for the vertical connectors that fuse the panes of glass together. What he is most
shocked by is that the project is halfway through the design development phase, and the team
still does not know exactly what the detail is going to look like. For the past 19 weeks, the team
has been assuming they will be able to have a seamless joint between the glass panes. All the
photorealistic renderings — which they use to sell the project to the client — show a sharp knife-
edge where the windows panes meet. This minimal reveal is part of the argument sequence for
the project. Now that the team has one-to-one mockups in the conference room, they are
realizing it is a far more complex challenge than initially anticipated.85 How do you hide all the
caulking and structural elements in a few millimeters? With a hard cap on the cost per square
foot for the façade, if the elements and labor required to realize this design principle are too
expensive, it will blow the client’s budget and one of the driving principles of the project will be
lost. Knowing that the entire building is premised on this one surface, the consultant is keenly
aware of how important it is to ensure that it is not value engineered out due to cost overruns.86
If it is, all the successive decisions made to support the design intent lose their meaning and in
many cases will disappear altogether. Doing a few things very well and not trying to do too
much, a practice learned across projects, enables teams to maintain their desired design intent.
For this reason, designers typically only focus on two or three things, so that they can maintain
the control required to bring these concepts to life.
In one instance, OAE comes precariously close to losing one of their project’s design
principles. In an email to the client of the International Performing Arts Center, the firm’s
principal writes, “I am loathe to do this because this removes that last bit of theatrical innovation
for the project. It just becomes a very pretty building. But certainly, not a game changer in the
85 1-to-1 mockups: These are prototypes, either made out of modeling foam or the real materials, which show the actual dimensions of an element in the design. There is no scaling, which can conceal awkward moments and/or problems. 86 Value engineering is a process where a third-party cost estimator is brought onto the project to estimate the cost of all the elements of a building. If the cost of materials and construction are higher than the allocated amount, which is set by the client, the engineers will suggest cheaper materials or materials that allow for cheaper construction methods. For some projects, value engineering occurs at the end of every phase of development.
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world of theater.” His email was in response to the client’s request that the design team reduce
the size of the building to reflect a reduction in the budget. Doing this would make it impossible
to maintain one of the project’s driving design principles — one that generates so many other
ideas. The risk here is that the constituent ideas supported by the overarching concept would fall
flat. This is because the driving design principle set the direction for inquiry and more
specifically the means chosen to pursue them, which, when upended, challenges their rational.
Pierre is not being dramatic in stating that it would “just become a very pretty building.”
With this design principle eliminated, the argument sequence will be broken, and the building
will not “do anything.” With it will also go the successive design ideas that emerged to support
it. It will not transform the way patrons experience the performing arts or offer creative directors
the flexibility to perform in almost any configuration. This wis the performative ambition that
drives the design of the project and helps adjudicate the best courses of action pursued by the
team to achieve this vision.
Remaining in control of the design principles is not easy. One designer on the team fighting
to maintain the performative ambition of the performing arts center put it this way:
The hardest thing to do in design I have realized is to maintain that original idea through two
years of design where everyone is trying to tear it down, because everyone wants to do the
easy thing. We have great engineers on [the project], but it is so often the case that engineers
don't want to go through the trouble of engineering something that they have not designed
before, or the local architect is scared and doesn’t want to take the liability of building
something unique, or the client doesn't want to take the liability that is a bit untested.
In the case of the DC Premium Space and International Performing Arts Center projects, both
have design principles that introduced novel concepts to their respective typologies. Taking them
from concept to reality requires a level of detailing and cunning strategy to maintain the design
principles at all costs — in the case of the latter project, toing the line of losing the commission
all together — in an effort to maintain the coherence of the argument sequence. By focusing on a
few things, and knowing what their dependencies are, it is easier for teams to maintain
challenging concepts, even when clients and contractors attempt to eliminate them.
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This is so important, in fact, that during a job interview with a young architect who was
currently working at one of the most highly regarded studios in the world, most of the
conversation revolves around maintaining the argument sequence and recovering when an
element is jeopardized or lost. The senior OAE staff interviewing the candidate are most
attentive during this part of the interview, because it is what allows them to introduce novel
ideas, by constantly pushing against all the forces that want to do something simple as the
architect quoted above refers to.
Defending a path is vital to carrying unfamiliar concepts from initial exploration through to
execution. Yet such defensive action becomes constraining when concepts are held on to as
constituent elements are eliminated or altered; the initial intent of the idea is lost. Reflecting on
substantive changes to the Performing Arts Center project, one designer said it was insane to
keep one of the design principles intact when it no longer performs as intended. Holding on to it,
in their opinion, jeopardizes the quality of the design. This is the resounding opinion of the team.
Exploring for novel responses to existing problems challenges teams to identify two or three
foundational issues within a typology, and then approach them in a way that has not been done
before. Exploiting practices learned across projects for identifying foundational issues upon
which to construct a design concept is vital to unlearning within a project. When procedures for
identifying design principles within a project are in place, teams can rely on them to help them to
identifying the most opportunistic paths for exploration. Rather than trying to establish practices
anew for moving a project forward, teams can focus their energy on developing emergent
responses that have not been pursed before, better enabling them to construct design concepts
that transform typologies.
3.5 GENEALOGY OF IDEAS: PROGRESSING THROUGH THE UNKNOWN
After a week of conducting studies on alternative façade materials, Philip is asked to start
working on the International Performing Arts Center’s plans. Transitioning from peripheral
research, to working on the in-progress drawing set, Philip is actively involved now in shaping
the building. It isn’t an easy transition, as he recalls:
I remember it was difficult in the beginning because I had no idea about the building. It was
the first time that I saw it and if you change things that you don’t know what they are
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actually … I don’t know, maybe some people can do it but I like to know what I am working
on, and not just dumb moving lines around.
Going from conducting peripheral studies that may or may not be absorbed into the design to
actively manipulating the drawing set requires Philip to gain a whole other level of
understanding of the project — one focused on how and why decisions are being made. Albeit
having worked on the project for a week he says, “it was the first time I saw it,” referring to the
plans that portray all the elements and how they fit together.
Unlearning within a project inherently requires a team to explore into unknown territory
where existing paths and waypoints are undefined. With the speed of experimentation, sheer
number of ideas chased down, and sudden unpredictable changes to streams of action, mapping
the course of a project and the territories explored with any level of detail is impossible. This
raises a problem for project teams: how do you progress away from the initial creative material
that set a search in motion, without endlessly looping in circles or worse not continually pushing
into the unknown where true novelty lies? Preserving the genealogy of ideas through
conversations enables members to understand how the relationship among objects, persons, and
situations have come to transform disparate ideas into new combinations, which is vital to
progress.87
When developing novel ideas, which do not exist in current practice or imagination, there is
no established experience to draw on to understand how an idea has emerged. Organizational
sociologists like Kogut and Zander (1992:389) argue, “the act of solving a problem rests on a
sense of how the phenomena function; the formal expression of the solution is unlikely to
capture fully this procedural knowledge, or even the data and information leading to the
solution.” Philip’s challenge is learning the procedural knowledge of how the design team got to
where they are when he jumped onto the project. These evolving, project specific conversations,
are “formed out of, but not reducible to the simple sum of the multiple untranslated languages”
of the different aspects of the design, they are constantly evolving and intertwining. My case
87 McDonnell et al. 2017:1; see also Mills 1940.
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demonstrates that being entrenched in these conversations is critical, given that they serve as the
only record, under conditions of uncertainty, for moving forward and making decisions.88
Despite “inform[ing] every single decision from big idea to door knobs,” according to the
principal of a boutique architectural studio, the argument sequences do not provide information
on the individual decisions that have been made, a finding that existing research demonstrates is
necessary for designing a cohesive concept.89 By example, the argument sequence for the Playful
Performing Center will guide a designer’s decision towards a playful interior that espouses the
performative ambition of the project. It will not however provide insights into all the decisions
that have been made up to that point in the design, why some ideas were promoted and others
were not.
The genealogy of decisions enables teams to collectively understand where they have been,
why they are on their current trajectory, and roughly where they are going. To collectively
progress forward and construct truly novel concepts, designers at my field site rely on the
principal curating ideas, team members knowing the decision history, and other members from
the studio giving perspective, which are practices honed and learned across projects.
Unlearning within a project requires teams to make unanticipated connections within and
between concepts by developing ideas in ways that are not initially apparent. Yet projects must
come together to form a cohesive design concept. The challenge for teams is productively losing
control, where individual efforts are encouraged to produce unanticipated connections, however
still collectively come together to progress the design. Curating ideas is the practice whereby the
principal plants seeds with the team to set the direction, and then gives relative freedom to the
members to interpret and further develop these ideas.
Open conversations are critical to progressing into the unknown. I find that by always
discussing options during the process of curating ideas, teams focus on inquiry, rather than
advocating for a solution. Like Hoffman (2015) finds, when you start with a solution, you close
off the doors for other ideas to emerge. The leader’s role according to an established architect is
88 de Vaan et al. 2015:1151; McDonnell et al. 2017; Lester and Piore 2004. 89 Schön 1983; Lester and Piore 2004.
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“framing the trajectory of the study,” identifying what the larger interests are but not
“constraining people to just becoming a set of hands.” This is a common perspective among
design directors and principals that I interviewed. By framing the trajectory of the resolution, I
find directors can help move explorations forward, without infringing on the ability of designers
to explore. Discussions are an effective strategy for providing this framework.
It is rare for directors and principals at leading architectural and design firms to ask designers
to reproduce something verbatim. “The intent is always that the person is going to come back
with something that they discovered from the process; or they are going to take something and
bring back something that is better than you expected,” explains the principal of a leading
architectural studio. A far younger principal, who went from obscurity to runaway success,
echoes the established architects statement. “The good stuff comes from self-motivated staff that
further ideas without being asked. No specifics, just take it away.”
Yet individual efforts must come together again to form a cohesive design concept, which is
challenging when everyone is developing ideas in uncharted territory. Without knowing what the
designer is going to produce, due to the expectation that they will take an idea and “come back
with something that they discovered from the process,” the direction of the project is constantly
adjusting.90 Curating ideas not only frames the trajectory of a study, but it also established
decisions that guide successive iterations of a design idea. My research demonstrates that
understanding why decisions are being made helps designers make decisions in line with those
previously made so that a collective cohesive design concept emerges.91 This is particularly
important when multiple aspects of a project are being developed simultaneously by different
members of the team — as discussed in Chapter 2. An idea pertaining to one aspect of the
project may be axed. The justification for not selecting it will help the other members of the team
working on different aspects make decisions. By example, when Pierre made significant changes
to one aspect of the DC Premium Space project because it was “off module,” the rest of the team
90 As Dewey puts it “... the determining of a genuine problem is a progressive inquiry” (1998[1938]:173). See also Gross 2009:367; Whitford 2002. 91 An aspect typically overlooked in existing research. McDonnell and his collaborators (2017) by example do not discuss how the history of decision making influences the emergence of novel ideas. Mills (1940:909) provides greater insight with his analogy of the mother providing her child with “standardized motives which promote prescribed actions and dissuade those proscribed,” by imputing motives through conversations.
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knew they had to strictly adhere to the 5’ by 5’ grid. Working within the loose trajectory in
which an idea is emerging, the team is constantly getting new feedback and information to use
when making future decisions. Looking back at the Landmark competition in which Pierre ass
the team “frankly, what is the big idea?” the lack of ideas to curate from hinders the team from
constructing novel concepts. There are no decisions to build from that are generative, leading
designers on fertile journeys of discovery that expose new means to achieve ends-in-view. Put
simple, conversations are generative with respect to setting in motion streams of action. The
more teams talk, even if it is unfruitful, it opens the potential for new streams of action to be
unleashed.
Understanding why previous ideas are selected or not is important for making these smaller,
independent decisions. As Kim, a designer at OAE, states, “a lot of smaller decisions get made
when you are rendering or using Photoshop. A lot more than people realize, because so many
things aren’t flushed out until you have to build things in 3D and you notice weird moments.”
And “for smaller things,” says another designer working on the same team, “they leave it up to
whoever is doing the study, trusting that they will make the right decision.”
The evolution of the project specific conversation that captures the genealogy of ideas is
most evident during reviews. When teams meet formally to review studies, there is an
established procedure of laying out all the options of a study, followed by walking the principal
and team through each option. Making an argument for each option, stating its strength and
weaknesses, and then letting the principal comment, is crucial to deciding which option to select
and how to refine it. Like Mills (1940:907) states, “when an agent vocalizes or imputes motives,
he is not trying to describe his experienced social action. He is not merely stating “reason.” He is
influencing others — and himself. Often he is finding new “reasons” to mediate action. As one
designer at OAE states:
When you have an idea and you need to express that idea to him, you need to have all the
potential questions and reasons to support that idea already worked out so that you are done.
So, you really need to be fast. If not, your ideas, even if they are really good, they are not
going to fly.
Pierre rarely walks into a review, looks at the options and simply states “this one.” There is
always a dialogue, something that other designers working at different studios mention as well in
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my interviews. This is an example of how the principal and designers influence the actions of
others, constantly adjusting means chosen, to develop a cohesive design concept. No one is
simply stating facts about an option, they are providing a rational, which will influence if it is
selected or rejected. This in turn impacts the successive development of the design concept.
Curating ideas enables teams to progress forward under conditions of uncertainty, however it
limits innovation to the curatorial voice of a single individual. Design concepts thus emerge
through collective efforts, but are directed through a singular voice. Although all the designers at
OAE are expected to develop arguments for the decisions they make individually and articulate
them to the team — a feature that fosters a collective conversation around the project — Pierre
ultimately has the final say. The field, or vocabularies, of possibilities is therefore limited
disproportionately to one individual’s voice — a feature of creative project-based organizations
with creative leaders — rather than a collectivity of voices where decisions are made by
consensus.
Venturing into the unknown inherently throws a team into a state of ambiguity, particularly at the
start of a project when the overarching concepts are not locked in yet. In the absence of defined
paths and terminal end points, there is no clear next step to take in the journey of discovery,
challenging teams to chart a path forward. Knowing the decision history of a project enables
teams to evolve a design by understanding what has come before, and more importantly why
other directions have been considered but not explored.
Building proficiency in the history of a project’s evolving decision conversations helps
calibrate a designer’s understanding of the general direction the project is moving in. This is
congruent with what organizational sociologists describe as a project specific language, which
“provides a normative sanction of how activities are to be organized or what information is to be
collected and evaluated” (Kugut and Zander (1992:389). “If someone is involved in the [initial
phase of a project],” tells the director of a practice “it is nice to keep people on throughout the
various phases because they understand the underlying rational for the design and for what we
are doing.” Reflecting on the project he has worked on since starting at OAE, one designer says
“when you are so into the weeds of the project, you know exactly the conditions, the geometric
limits, the real issues.” This is valuable knowledge to have. I find that this helps designers decide
what to build and then identify its potential value. Philip’s challenge of jumping into the
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International Performing Arts Center project isn’t technical, it is learning the project specific
language that helps guide the decisions of teams.
The instructive nature of knowing past decisions was most obvious when new members were
added to a team. When Gordon, a senior designer, jumps onto the DC Premium Space project
during the first week of the design development phase, 16 weeks into the project, the conflict
begins almost immediately. One of the project’s designer recalls:
That was a distraction at the time, it was at a point where [the senior designer was] proposing
design proposals without having been on the project and knowing the history and interacting
with the client and then wasn’t listening to us when we were saying the client is never going
to go for that because it is too expensive and going to push to project over budget.
From the designer’s perspective, formed by the history of decisions made on the project, Gordon
is “proposing these crazy things.” Without knowing the genealogy of decisions, Gordon is
proposing reasonable ideas from his perspective — which he fought for with well-articulated
arguments. But without knowing the “underlying rational for the design” they appear crazy in the
minds of the designers who have been on the project since day one. The team’s reactions to his
ideas make this very clear.
This is not confined to senior level designers who have a greater potential influence on a
project. Another project leader at OAE talking about an intern jumping onto her project recalls,
“when [the intern] pops in and is like why don’t you guys do this?” she responds “well because
you don’t know that a year ago we did all these options and you don’t know where all those
decisions came from.” Albeit well intentioned, the intern does not know the genealogy of ideas
specific to the project, and is consequently backtracking by proposing ideas that have been
previously explored. Without knowing how the team got to where they are when she jumps onto
the project, she doesn’t understand why courses of actions were adjusted, and why new means
have been chosen.
Drawing on past knowledge to inform future progress has the potential to constrain horizons
of possibilities. When adhering too closely to past decisions, project teams are susceptible to fall
into path dependency. The project horizon may become limiting and after a certain point limit
members from suspending disbelief to make leaps into the unknown that challenge the current
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trajectory of the project. In for profit creative project-based organizations, challenging the
trajectory of a project introduces destabilizing forcing, risking derailment and not meeting
deadlines.
It requires a significant amount of energy on the part of designers to construct ideas which
previously did not exist in practice or imagination. This requires significant trust and belief that
the unfamiliar ideas they are constructing can be successfully executed. The challenge facing
designers under these conditions is evaluating the fidelity of their ideas. Giving perspective is the
practice of someone not involved in a project, reviewing work and strengthening ideas.
The necessity of detailing ideas requires designers to get into the weeds, loosing perspective
of the bigger picture. “When you are focused everyday on a project,” tells a partner at a boutique
architectural practice, “you forget to zoom out, so it is always nice to have someone come in and
give perspective.” Following years of research, organizational psychologist Charlan Nemeth
(2012; et al. 2001) and her collaborators have come to a similar conclusion. She finds that in
groups where dissent is voiced and maintained through argument and debate, more information
is considered and strategies for problem solving are employed. The dissent results in more
creative ideas, something which I found as well.
Dissenting for the sake of dissenting is not useful, however. To simulate thought, clarify
ideas, and embolden a position, it needs to be authentic dissent. When it is not authentic dissent,
it in fact detracts from decision making (Nemeth 2012:374). People become over confident in
their options. “Armed with the belief that they have considered alternatives by virtue of exposure
to the [devil’s advocate], people may become even more convinced of the truth of their initial
position — and possibly more rigid and resistant to reconsideration” (Nemeth et al. 2001:9).
Authentic dissent, I find, is possible by bringing in a designer who is not familiar with the
project’s genealogy of decisions. “I think that it is really helpful to have someone look at the
[drawing set] with fresh eyes,” recalls the project leader at OAE who commented on the intern
jumping onto the project. Another member of the project’s design team, referring to the same
fresh set of eyes, put it this way: “To have [her] come in and ask why we are doing this,
sometimes in your head you have a way of thinking that doesn’t need explaining, but when
someone new comes and asks, you have to reflect and you notice things.” In doing so, the fresh
set of eyes expose biases, taken-for-granted assumptions, and oversights.
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The senior designer, who provides the fresh set of eyes, uncovers taken-for-granted
assumptions that the team can no longer recognize in their own work. I find, like Dane
(2010:589), that “doubt helps generate new perspectives by reducing habitual behavior, fostering
creativity, and motivating a search for discovery.” In this sense, the conflict it generates within a
team, is productive, which goes against our typical intuition to reduce friction and conflict within
teams as much as possible. As one of the project leaders on the same project was quoted earlier
“you are so into the weeds of the project,” it is hard to zoom out.
In this vein, one partner of an acclaimed design consultancy remarked:
I have a suspicion these days that we have lost a sense of conflict, that conflict is a useful
thing, it does generate ideas that are durable, it generates ideas that can stand the scrutiny of
other people. I think that for a while now there has been a culture in the studio that has not
been great, like everyone is just doing their own projects in their own configurations.
Years earlier, he reflects, when the firm first started:
We would just duke it out until we came up with something that we both were okay with. It
was not always a particularly fun process, but it did result in very strong ideas because any
idea to make it through had to go through both of us ripping it to shreds.
Ripping ideas to shreds is not an exaggeration, and in many instances the collateral damage of
this was apparent in the OAE’s studio. Yet in doing this, it exposes taken-for-granted
assumptions and weaknesses in an idea, not apparent to those working on them. In effect, it helps
expose inappropriate means to achieve desired ends-in-sight.
Albeit powerful for helping see the big picture of a project, giving perspective can threaten
the development of early stage ideas that are still premised on assumptions and unqualified
information. Ideas that require longer development periods are likely to be axed prematurely, or
worse not proposed by designers in anticipation of not having time to develop them fully. In
many studios, where weekly critiques are organized to gather reactions from the entire studio on
in-progress projects, this is a serious concern. For creative project-based organizations whose
timelines for completing projects is limited, this helps to reign in long term ideas whose
development will not meet deadlines. These ideas require longer term commitment, either as
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thought projects within the studio to be leveraged on future projects or in research and
development institutes whose time horizons are longer.
Developing novel concepts challenges teams to progress away from the initial creative material
that set their search in motion so that the final concept bears little resemblance to it. Exploiting
practices learned across projects within the studio for moving an idea from the initial creative
inputs and continually progressing forward is critical for unlearning within a project. When
strategies for remembering the evolving genealogy of ideas are woven through the productive
fabric of a practice, my research demonstrates that teams can rely on them to help understand of
how the relationship among objects, persons, and situations have come to transform disparate
ideas into new combinations, which is vital to progress. Rather than limiting exploration by
documenting all of the paths and territories explored, these mechanisms enable a team to move
quickly to explore as many options as possible to construct highly robust novel concepts.
3.6 CONCLUSION
The Playful Performing Center project, which opens this chapter, begins with a search. It starts
with the team’s attempt to reimagine how a performing arts center is experienced, by
fundamentally questioning what it is. And more importantly, what it could be. In doing so the
team ventures into the unknown. Moving beyond building upon and refining existing typologies,
the team cannot rely on past experiences and vetted information.
The initial design phase of the Playful Performing Center project exemplifies one of the
fundamental challenges facing teams attempting to construct a novel concept: how do you search
for and then identify the value of unfamiliar ideas? Put another way, how do you move forward
explorations along the most promising path, when a sense of where the team will end up only
exists as a vague vision?
Deploying rigidly defined acts for moving forward explorations into the unknown does not
lend itself to disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions and expectations. I find that the emergent
nature of truly novel ideas, whose contours are constantly changing in unanticipated ways,
requires a highly adaptable and flexible approach for exploration. Employing specific strategies
of action will force yet to be defined solutions to conform to the kinds of information on which
these strategies typically draw — artificially narrowing the opportunity space for exploration. By
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deploying highly flexible approaches, which are learned across projects, for moving forward
explorations, I find innovative organizations are encouraged to constantly ask small what could
be questions, rather than all-encompassing what is questions. This is critical for generating new
information, and then, with this information, constantly reevaluating means selected and ends-in-
view targeted to construct concepts that emerge organically. When coupled with project specific
argument sequences, which serve as a conceptual scaffolding for building concepts around,
teams are able to quickly evaluate the value of unfamiliar and potentially contradictory ideas. My
case shows that this kind of approach enables teams to answer what could be questions, and then
quickly evaluate the worth and utility of the information, and, in turn, how to incorporate it.
When the argument sequence emerges along with the concept, I find it take designers from the
highly familiar, the starting point of exploration, to new territories, which come to define
genuinely novel concepts. Simply put, it is a catalyst for pushing a project from the familiar into
the unknown.
Learned across projects, employing predilections, suspending disbelief, selecting design
principles, and learning to follow the genealogy of decisions enables designers to venture into
unfamiliar territories. When the exploratory foundation within a firm is premised on ends-in-
views, which are moved forward through constant questioning and in turn reassessing means
selected, organizations can continually innovate because they are not focusing on specific acts or
strategies that will produce predictable solutions.
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Table 3: Exploration What How Overview: Constantly asking small what could be questions to generate new information, and then evaluating it in relation to the project specific argument sequence to determine the utility of the unfamiliar information, and in turn potentially changing to ends-in-view targeted and means selected to move a project forward. Challenge: Moving forward explorations along the most promising path, when a sense of where the team will end up only exists as a vague vision, and in turn not knowing what to search for and then assessing its potential value to the project.
Predilections: established frameworks within a practice for approaching the unique issues of a design challenge, which serve as starting points for orientating explorations.
• Focus the team’s initial research
around the first principles of a problem.
• Aligning the ambitions of a project with the fundamental issues that need to be resolved to achieve the desired outcomes.
Suspending Disbelief: the practice of generating information that currently does not exist by enabling teams to test the effects of hypothesized associations.
• Faking details until a sufficient
understanding can be developed of what information is necessary to resolve an issue.
• Ignoring aspects to reduce the complexity of a problem, breaking it into more manageable steps.
• Building on assumptions by inserting provisional data to move a project forward.
Design Principles: the two or three conceptual scaffoldings employed by teams to construct novel concepts around that represent the fundamental issues they are dealing with and are driving the design.
• Setting the horizon of possibilities
to generates ideas and sets in motion streams of unanticipated associations.
• Identifying paths of opportunity to focus what a team fights to preserve within a project.
Knowing the Genealogy of Ideas: the practice where teams, through conversations, learn how the relationship among objects, persons, and situations have come to transform disparate ideas into new combinations.
• The principal curates ideas by
planting seeds and then giving designers freedom to interpret and then explain their work.
• Through conversations, team members know the history of decisions, and why something was selected or rejected.
• Designers from other projects providing perspective by challenging a team to explain the rational for their work.
Outcome: Encourages a highly flexible and adaptable approach to exploration, which enables teams to answer what could be questions, and then quickly evaluate the worth and utility of unfamiliar information, and in turn, how to incorporate it and move forward.
4 THE CONSTRUCTION
I will draw it and see what it does …
- Designer, Architectural Firm, NYC
Following a meeting for an ongoing project, Pierre asks a designer to pull up a document on the
large flat panel screen at the front of OAE’s main conference room. As she scrolls past the
introductory page, he blurts out “argh,” jerking his head back as the first image appears on the
screen. They are all visibly repulsed. Scrolling further through the package, their shock turns into
disbelief. Each new option that appears on the screen is worse than the last. When they reach the
end of the document, Aldo groans, clutching his head with his hand. He knows this is going to be
a grueling competition.
The competition package they just reviewed shows preliminary massing options proposed by
a commercial real estate developer for a plot of land in lower Manhattan. As one of three firms
selected to participate in the Metro Skyscraper competition, their primary directive is to exceed
the rentable square footage of the models. Following a call between Pierre and the client, inviting
OAE to the competition and completion of obligatory legal work, the team has less than one
month to submit a highly resolved design concept to the client. Apart from the initial call, the
team has only a very brief description of the project and site, along with extensive zoning
requirements, to initiate their exploration.
Printing off multiple zoning documents that dictate street setback rules, height restrictions,
and maximum square footage per floor, included in the competition brief, Philip starts to review
the dimensions of the proposed massing models. The clunky models, which are an expression of
maximizing rentable square footage at the expense of aesthetics, is disjointed, lacking crisp lines
that pull the monolithic façade together to form a cohesive design. Although Pierre is certain the
firm hired by the developer to assess the financial viability of the project maxed out the envelop
of the building according to zoning regulations — hence the shocking massing options — they
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need to know where they have room to maneuver. Before they can start designing a concept, they
need to know floor by floor what the maximum and minimum dimensions are. Every inch
counts.
While Philip is analyzing the dimensions, Greta and Thorsten, two interns assigned to work
on the competition, come to him for guidance on building the site model. Pulling up Google
Earth on his screen, Philip zooms in on the project site. Slowly zooming back out, he tells them
that they need to think about scale. Not only of the building’s massing model, but also the
surrounding context within which it will be built. Panning the camera angle 360 degrees to view
the surrounding buildings, he roughly indicates with his finger on the screen how much of the
surrounding context should be included in the site model. Philip asks the two interns to also
make a foam massing model of one of the options proposed by the client. He wants to see what
they are working with.
Working in a typology seemingly exhausted of new ideas, the client wants something that
will stand out in the Manhattan skyline. They want bold ideas that will distinguish the building’s
design from the banal office buildings that are associated with commercial high rise real estate.
A reality of designing in a space where financial imperatives take precedence over experiential
and aesthetic expressions. Something that this project is not immune to either. Nevertheless, the
client wants a landmark building, whose distinctive design will become a distinctive brand
identity, like the Grace, Lever, of Seagram buildings in Manhattan, which command the highest
price per square foot on the commercial rental market due to their designs. This is a challenging
task given that Manhattan has been the canvas upon which master architects like Mies van der
Rohe, Gordon Bunshaft, Renzo Piano, and Norm Foster, to name only a few, have built career-
defining commercial skyscrapers. The team will have to reinterpret the inherent constraint of the
typology and issues unique to the project to develop a novel design concept.
Two days after first reviewing the competition package, the firm’s principal and team return
to the conference room to review their progress. Taking up a large portion of one of the
conference room tables, the site model is complete. Beside it is the massing model Philip asked
Greta and Thorsten to produce. Reviewing the dimensions of the options proposed in the initial
competition package, Pierre and Gordon identify the perimeter offset from the core as the driving
force determining the geometry of the options presented by the developer.
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Reaching over to grab the foam massing model from the other table, Pierre tells the team to
pare it down to the cleanest form possible. “Once you get a perfect shape,” he gestures with his
pencil on the scale model, “it is easier to fuck with it,” as he sketches out a perfect rectangle on a
piece of paper.
Following a brief internal team discussion on steps moving forward, they return to their
respective workstations. They take only a brief break to get beer and snacks from the Friday
evening social hours taking place at the other end of the studio.
On the following Monday, the team meets in the conference room for another formal review.
Next to the site model there are three foam massing models, and multiple computer generated
three-dimensional wireframe drawings of the massing. On the main conference room table, is a
set of plans and elevations that depict the three schemes the team is currently pursuing, along
with zoning diagrams and dimension tables illustrating the site’s street setback and height
restrictions. Philip provides a brief overview of the zoning restrictions, after which the entire
team gets up and moves across the room to stand around the table with the models. The team is
silent as Pierre reviews the various studies and models.
Without saying anything, Pierre takes a piece of paper and starts sketching a few crude
diagrams. Looking at Aldo, he tells him that he keeps thinking about a previous project they
designed. Nodding his head, Aldo starts to draw a basic rectangular massing with similar
extrusions to illustrate to the rest of the team what they did. Pausing to look at his sketch, Pierre
rotates the piece of paper 180 degrees, realizing that by flipping his idea, it has the potential to be
an interesting concept. Combining a façade option that the firm tested in the past with the
inverted sketch, he asks Aldo, the project leader, to immediately mock it up in 3D.
For the rest of the day, Aldo works on translating the sketch into a three-dimensional
wireframe model.
The next morning Pierre pulls his chair next to Aldo’s. Zooming out from what he is
currently working on, Aldo show him five options he has generated off the initial sketch. Taking
the computer mouse, Pierre handles each model, flipping and rotating them to see how the sketch
is translating once the rough dimensions of the building are taken into account. Selecting his
favorite option, he asks Greta to quickly make a foam massing model of it.
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A short time later, she emerges from the modeling room in the back of the studio. With the
blue foam model in hand, roughly 15 inches in height, the team gathers around Pierre’s work
station, who is anxiously waiting to see how it turns out. Rotating the model in his hand, it is
clear to everyone that the idea, which looked so promising when sketched out and then modeled
in the computer, will not hold. The tapered and pleated form they were hoping to achieve is
imperceptible. They don’t bother to place it in the site model to see how it reads in relation to the
surrounding context. The concept is broken. On to the next idea.
Returning to the five massing models, Pierre looks at one of the other options developed by
Aldo. Taking a seat next to Aldo at his work station, Pierre and Gordon ask him to pull up
various images of builds on Google. On his second computer screen, Aldo is quickly making
alterations to the three-dimensional massing model to reflect the changes they are proposing in
relation to the photos he is pulling up on Google. Standing up, Pierre tells Aldo to quickly
develop the ideas they just discussed.
Over the next twenty days the team continues in this way. They rapidly prototype ideas using
multiple tools to convey the emerging design concept. As ideas gain traction, their fidelity is
tested using a whole new set of tools, to the point of developing a set of photorealistic renderings
that depict the near real conditions of their proposed design.
Focusing on constructing ideas, within creative project-based organizations, this chapter explores
how teams generate information which previously was not available, a feature of developing
concepts that are genuinely novel. I ask: how do designers translate vague visions from the mind
of the designer into a tangible form that can be interrogated, evaluated, and built upon? To
answer this question, in the first section, construction, I lay the foundation for how designers
translate visions into tangible representations — a fundamental challenge of unlearning within a
project. The four sections that follow explore how generating information where it previously did
not exist, which is learned across projects, occurs in practice. First, in precedence, I explain how
teams start to identify the initial raw creative material to start constructing concepts with when
there is no defined starting point or material to work with. Next, in studies, I explore how
designers generate information where it did not exist before, when there is no prior
understanding of how the idea will take shape. Then, in iteration, I explain how designers
encourage the successive emergence of ideas through constant refinement, when there are no
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bounded moments of insight. Finally, in configuration, I explore how teams distinguish their
ideas, when all other studios essentially have access to the same tools to gather insights.
Throughout the chapter, I show how these mechanisms, which are deployed across projects,
enable teams to unlearn within a project – addressing the fundamental challenge facing creative
project-based organizations: how do you continually innovate?
4.1 CONSTRUCTION: THE TOOLS FOR DEVELOPING NOVEL IDEAS
Following perfectly composed photographs of a completed project, most architectural websites
and monographs include images of models, sketches, and plans. Photos of neatly and
sequentially arranged models depict the linear development of a design.92 Rough sketches
convey the inspiration for the project. Plans show the spatial organization. These artifacts
provide a glimpse into the development of an idea. Yet in these retrospective accounts, there is
no reference as to how teams moved forwards, backwards, and between different models. Gone
too are the markings on the massing models that indicate where changes need to be made. So,
too, are the hastily taped on additions to quickly evaluate an idea. The ubiquitous roll of trace
paper is nowhere to be seen next to the plans, covered in red ink that provide direction on
alterations. All of the failed ideas are missing as well.
Once a building is completed, the intermediary steps that made its production possible are
often forgotten.93 This is most evident in the artifacts omitted from retrospective accounts of a
design’s emergence. The messy and confusing process, as most designers refer to the
development of a design, is backgrounded. It is quickly cleaned away and hidden behind closed
doors when clients visit the office. Yet novel concepts must be constructed. They are not out
there in the existing population of ideas waiting to be discovered.
92 See Richard Meier & Partners Architects LLP (richardmeier.com); Morphosis Architecture (morphosis.com) designer of the Univeristy of Toronto Graduate Student Housing. 93 Latour and Woolgar (1986:63). Even within the literature on innovation, only a high-level overview of tools is provided, with little discussion on the use of tools. This can be attributed to methodological issues, particularly time and embeddedness at the field site. See for instance Hargadon and Bechky (2006); Hargadon (2003). See also Tilly (2002; 2006) on how accounts are truncated after the fact, as well as Vaughn (2002; 2004) on the cultural and organizational reasons why selective accounts emerge after an event.
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This raises a fundamental challenge for producing novel ideas in creative projects. When
teams are tasked with constructing previously unknown concepts, how do they translate vague
visions from the mind of the designer into a tangible form that can be interrogated, evaluated,
and built upon? Unlike refining existing knowledge, where there is a certain degree of familiarity
and understanding of the constituent elements that make it up, constructing novel ideas requires
teams to build concepts that are unfamiliar and lack preexisting information. This challenge is
intensified by the fact that concepts do not appear in bounded moments, where the preverbal
lightbulb goes off. They are emergent, requiring designers to successively generate information
on the developing ideas that compose the concept.
Like Stark and his collaborators (2009:142), I find that the tools used in design are
remarkably similar to Latour’s (1987) definition of scientific instruments as “inscription devices
that shape a view.” Massing models, sketches, computer aided design software, and plans, to
name only a few, reveal properties of an idea, unintelligible when residing in the mind alone.
Rather than searching for novel ideas, I find, like Stark, Latour, and their respective
collaborators, that designers physically construct them — successively translating visions into
reality.
Prior to inscribing a new idea, designers do not know in advance how it will turn out. It is
therefore common for a designer to say “I will draw it, and see what it does,” prior to translating
an idea into a tangible form. As one designer at OAE succinctly describes her role, “I am a
translator of ideas into a physical test.” It is only through the process of inscription that
properties of an idea that are not immediately apparent reveal themselves. The principal “makes
some bad rough sketches about it,” describes another designer, “but it is obviously not going to
be that because once you put it into real dimensions and what it has to do, I don’t know.” Ideas
must be transferred from the mind into a tangible form to provide more detailed feedback. A
cycle of testing that ends disproportionately in failure rather than success.94
Tools, however, are not mere transporters of information. They select, modify, and present
information in ways that shape how a designer sees an idea.95 They are therefore active elements
94 Simonton 2015:12; Fraser 2012. 95 Stark 2009:144; Beunza and Stark 2002:34.
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in the construction of novel concepts. Site models, by example represent the context in which a
project will be located. Using white foam, the surrounding buildings, streets, and contours of the
land are recreated at scale. These models allow designers to understand the context in which they
are building. What are the sight lines? How will the project block another building’s light? The
site model does more than simply answer questions. The site model helps designers understand
how their building can work within the environment. How can the building’s positioning on the
site, for instance mitigate heat buildup from the sun?
Figure 3: Construction
The information selected, modified, and represented is not equal across all tools. They
differentially reveal and conceal information according to their specific purpose and medium.96
As illustrated diagrammatically in Figure 3, each tool represents a lens of information, whose
collective information could not be revealed through one lens alone. After weeks of modeling the
lobby of the DC Premium Space project using renderings, the team builds a scale model.
Crouched around the model which shows all the walls, windows, doors, and fixed elements like
the concierge desk, Aldo is shocked that they have not paid attention to the elevator lobby. The
scale model revealed aspects of the design previously concealed by the camera angles of the
renders. The information revealed by different tools is so varied that to get at the “distortion, and
96 Latour 1986.
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color, and blushing, and all sorts of other funky things” mentioned by one of the DC Premium
Space project’s artistic influences, the team had to travel to China to inspect full scale mockups
of the glass. These aspects, which are concealed in renders, and even the glass samples sent by
the glass manufacturers, are only revealed at full scale. Each conveying only a specific spectrum
of information.
Without prior experience or knowledge of new concepts, teams are limited in what they can
construct with one spectrum of information alone. To develop complex concepts, my case
demonstrates that multiple tools need to be used simultaneously to combine spectrums of
information. This is because “the combination and superimposition of task-relevant structures,”
come to embody “kinds of knowledge that would be exceedingly difficult to represent mentally”
writes Hutchins (1995:96) when describing the tools used for long distance sea navigation.97
With each tool varying in type and degree of sophistication, theorists of science and technology
demonstrate that they only provide a narrow spectrum of specialized information.98 By
combining them, the spectrum grows in depth and breadth, adding levels of resolution and
understanding not possible on their own. 3D models created on the computer “help identify
weird moments,” in the 2D plans, says a designer at OAE. By combining 3D modeling with
AutoCAD plans, designers identify awkward moments where walls impose on spaces, something
that cannot be easily identified in the mind of the designer when looking at plans alone. The
visual and tactile quality of inscriptions is the most common point of discussion in most popular
accounts of design thinking. In the words of Tim Brown (2009:238), CEO and President of
IDEO, visualizations “engage senses beyond what words can describe.” There is good reason for
making this argument. An argument that is ubiquitous and seemingly uncontested across design
literatures (see Rodriguez and Jacoby 2013). As Baynes and Pugh (1981) demonstrated long ago,
industrial drawings enabled a handful of engineers to develop enormous machines that did not
exist, surpassing the scale and complexity previously imaginable. Even Richard Swedberg
mentions visualization as a method to resolve problems (Swedberg 2016:15). 99 For this reason,
theorists of science and technology, like Latour (1986:7), argue, “you have to invent objects
97 See also Latour and Woolgar 1986:84. 98 Latour 1986:3. 99 see also Booker 1982; Latour 1986:27.
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which have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable, and
combinable with one another.” Otherwise the visual and tactile qualities that expose these
properties cannot be interrogated by others and transformed.
Contrary to prevailing perspectives on the role of tools in design (see for instance Latour
1986; Stark 2009; Beunza and Stark 2002), I argue that highly innovative organizations, like
OAE, employ established approaches for translating visions from the minds of designers into
tangible representations. Rather than changing the order and emphasis of tools for each project, I
find innovation is in fact encouraged by the consistent use, emphasis, and ordering of tools,
which is unique to every firm. As an approach that is premised on successively testing,
interrogating, evaluating, and refining ideas, teams are able to move forward the exploration of
vaguely defined visions, whose final composition is not yet determined. This enables teams to
unlearn within projects by continually exposing the qualities of ideas, which my research
indicates creates stronger, bolder, and more novel ideas, by being highly responsive and
adaptable to the new information uncovered. Reorganizing tools and procedures focuses the
attention of exploration on defined acts of reshuffling, reordering, and recombining inscriptions,
rather than the qualities that these practices expose of the ideas. I argue that the unique
configuration of tools and the procedures for engaging them is only part of the explanation. The
iterative and integrative nature of these approaches, which exposes unique qualities of ideas that,
when refined and built upon, is critical for enabling teams to move from highly familiar ideas to
genuinely novel ideas that previously did not exist in practice or imagination. This kind of
approach is premised on building the strongest possible concept by nurturing ideas, incorporating
and adjusting them as new information is revealed.
In the sections that follows, I will explain how precedence, studies, iteration, and
configuration, which are practices learned across projects, are used by teams at OAE to
successively construct and then recognize novel concepts.
4.2 PRECEDENCE: GATHERING THE RAW CREATIVE MATERIAL TO START
How do you start constructing an idea? “I look at what other architects or other people have
done,” responds a senior designer at OAE, “because that is super helpful. You know there is
super knowledge that is out there, why not use it?”
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“When we are starting a new project,” tells the principal of an established and highly
acclaimed architectural practice in Manhattan, “we often do precedence research. So, if it come
to doing a library, let’s brainstorm twenty great libraries that we think are interesting by other
architects and we will use those as precedence.” Like when Pierre flipped through the SANAA
monograph to show a specific project to the Playful Performance Center team, explaining why
certain features are elegant and how they transform the feeling and experience of the space, he
was establishing precedence for the project.
Unlearning within a project requires the team to break with familiar ideas and established
perceptions and start constructing concepts in unfamiliar territory. This uncertainty and
unfamiliarity is heightened at the start of a project when the potential creative material to build
with is almost limitless and the project’s direction is relatively undefined. The problem raised by
unlearning is identifying the raw creative material required to start constructing concepts, and
guide successive explorations. Precedence research is an established approach within a practice
to identify exemplar raw creative material, which serves as the foundation upon which new ideas
are built.
To be creative, de Vaan and his collaborators (2015:1150) demonstrate that teams require
“the requisite diversity of stylistic elements available for reworking.” Borrowing ideas from
others is a method for gathering this creative material. Although de Vaan and his collaborators
focus on networks, emphasizing how close ties increase the distribution of creative material and,
importantly, provide the trust to work with unknown material, I find that borrowing from firms
with different predilections is similar to gathering “unfamiliar” creative material. Designers
typically come out of “schools” of design, with friends and acquaintances at the practices that
they are drawing on.100
Writing in the context of design and seeing issues in new ways, Rottenberg and O’Meara
(2013:173) suggest borrowing great ideas from others as a strategy for gathering raw creative
material. A practice advocated long ago by famed industrial designers Ray and Charles Eames
100 Uzzi and Spiro 2005:462. Although they focus on networks and how close ties increase the distribution of creative material and, importantly, the trust to work with unknown material, I find that borrowing from firms with different predilections is similar to gathering “unfamiliar” creative material. Designers typically come out of “schools” of design, with friends and acquaintances at the practices that they are drawing on.
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who used this approach to successfully transform many objects that previously seemed
immutable. The practice of borrowing great ideas is not exclusive to design. Theorists in science
and technology, like Latour and Woolgar (1986), argue that by borrowing established
knowledge, labs can harness the enormous power of other fields.101
Yet how do teams gather the request diversity of stylistic elements that de Vaan and his
collaborators (2015) find is foundational to developing novel concepts. My research
demonstrates that by drawing on ideas from practices with different predilections, designers
accumulate diverse raw material, which, when recombined, encourages the creative friction that
is found to facilitate novel transformations.102 SANAA’s distinctive signature, which is evident
in how issues and conditions are approached, provides a good source of diverse raw creative
material that when recombined with OAE’s predilections, produces something different
altogether.103 By filling precedence research studies with multiple examples, twenty in the case
of the library, studios introduce a wide range of diversity into their work.104
Precedence research can come in many forms. In the architectural practice where I conducted
my research, it was typically conveyed through images and plans, found online or in
monographs. I visited over 100 design studios in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San
Francisco. In all the studios, there were libraries, filled with monographs from other designers.
Like the walls of books that line most academics’ offices. These walls are filled with books that
provide images and plans of design projects. Designers at the studio where I conducted my
research often took books from the library, opening them to a specific page while working on an
issue. This provides a valuable source of inspiration and precedence for how to deal with an
element.
101 Latour and Woolgar 1986:68; Network literatures also point to distant fields as powerful sources of new information, see for instance Hargadon and Sutton 1997; Hansen 1999; Levinthal 1997. 102 Beunza and Stark 2005; Balazs and Stark 2010; Lester and Piore 2004. Also, when they were not transforming ideas, the designers often caught themselves, remarking that the ideas were too referential – meaning it was obviously ripped from another design without reinterpreting it to reflect the current conditions. 103 An interviewee who had worked at the practice where I conducted my field, went to work at SANNA, telling me “I knew it wasn't for me but it was nice to be in an office where it was all of a sudden about the experiential side of the architecture, about the space, they would never use the word concept or program. It was very freeing in a way because there isn’t just one way of doing [architecture].” 104 Quinn 1985:82.
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Ideas are not referenced in their entirety. “Often we look at precedence for very specific
things, but not the overall,” says Aldo. This is because the circumstances unique to each project
do not allow dragging and dropping ideas. “It is impossible to take something from a different
project at a different time and implement it into the new project,” elaborates a creative director at
a world renowned industrial design consultancy. “It is not going to be relevant. There are so
many variables in between every new project that everything that you know from the past you
have to modify, tweak, and build onto in some way, shape or form.” A principal at a competing
industrial design practice echoed this statement almost verbatim.
Precedence research enables teams to identify the necessary diversity in creative material to
start constructing ideas to generate responses to the unique issues of a design challenge. Like in
the case of the Playful Performance Center project for the school, Pierre only referenced the feel
of the theater space from the SANAA monograph. This was the raw material that started the
idea, which transformed substantially to meet the unique conditions of the project. In my case,
the designers I observed and spoke with start constructing ideas by drawing on precedence
research to: establish reference points, gain footholds, and gather material to build on.
On the first day of the DC Premium Space project, one of the interns on the team is tasked with
creating a precedence study for the façade. With a vague sketch from Pierre, the intern starts to
search for examples of how other architects had applied similar ideas. Within a few hours, a
folder on the firm’s internal server is filled with Google images of buildings with curved glass
façades. Going through the images using the file preview function on the computer, the intern
selects ten examples and puts them into a precedence research package. Next to every example,
the intern draws out, in plan, the geometry of the panes of glass and their modules using
professional publishing software.
Without prior knowledge of how an issue will be resolved, the challenge facing creative
teams is establishing a starting point to generate ideas from. My research demonstrates that to
establish a generative starting point, teams rely on precedence research to find reference points
within the existing body of ideas to start moving the construction of novel concepts forward. In
the case, above, the internet, and more specifically Google Images is used to gather a set of ideas
that serve as the initial creative material from which the final idea will evolve.
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The practice of finding raw creative material is aptly explained by the principal of a boutique
architectural firm in New York City:
“Our research starts off in this very broad sense and then at the same time we are also
looking at specific architectural solutions and precedence that may have addressed similar
issues at another time and trying to understand is there a history of ideas within architecture
that may resonate or coincide with the issues that we are dealing with.”
Like in the example of the DC Premium Space project, other architects have applied similar
façade approaches. The intern is not looking at the aesthetic application of the concept, rather he
is specifically focused on identifying the curvature and module width used in these applications.
Without knowing how the design element will be realized, the intern starts to translate the initial
vision of the principal into a testable form, using computer software, by establishing a foundation
to build upon. By establishing reference points to construct a yet to be defined concept, he helps
to set a vision for the project.
Returning to the Playful Performance Center project, when Pierre challenges the team to
reestablish the ambitions of the project, the team has established reference points using
precedence examples that will not transform the daily experience of the children at the school. In
this case, not only are the ambitions for the project misaligned with the intended objectives, but
also the reference points from which the ideas initially emerged. Without the appropriate
reference points, the team is exploring for solutions that will not arrive at a space that provides
complete transparency between front and back stage. In short, they are not establishing a vision
through reference points that align with the ambitions for the project. Misalignments of this
nature lead teams to develop design concepts that do not meaningfully transform the typologies
they are engaging.
As projects pass through successive phases of development, the team continues to draw on
precedence research to inform their decisions. With the physical construction documentation
drawing set of another building, the team references very specific details when they are stuck and
don’t know how to resolve an issue. In this instance, the drawing set serves as a tool for
resolving questions pertaining to the fine detailing of an element of the design. One designer put
it this way, “I like to know how other architects have solved the problem.” The drawing set,
which serves as a precedence for the project, is only used for reference.
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Albeit enabling teams to start constructing ideas by establishing ideas to riff on, reference
points constrain further exploration and construction of ideas from different vantage points.
Without the luxury of prolonged periods of initial exploration, project-based organizations need
to focus on one approach. Without the ability to vet multiple paths for constructing ideas against
one another, innovation is limited to the development of one path.
Reflecting on the initial days of the Metro Skyscraper competition, Aldo says, “a lot in the early
stages of competitions, when you don’t really have any ideas yet, you are borrowing to get
something on paper.”
Venturing into the unknown, a necessary aspect of producing novel concepts, requires teams
to work with unfamiliar ideas. Constructing ideas where there is no existing information is a
fundamental challenge facing creative teams. Where do you start? In what direction, do you
move? I find that teams employ precedence research to establish footholds into the unknown, to
gain traction and start experimenting and constructing ideas. Revealing properties of the design
within which placeholders are situated, footholds provide the team with additional information to
start developing a novel design concept. This is particularly helpful when a sense of where the
project will end up does not yet exist.
During competitions, when teams often have less than a month to develop a highly resolved
design concept, there is no time to wait for inspiration. This is evident when the Metro
Skyscraper team start designing a multi-story section of the building that is intended to stand in
contrast to the monolithic façade and massing they were proposing for the rest of the building.
Aldo describes how they approach this:
“A lot of times we will use things as place holders. We want this to be an interesting meeting
room, like a labyrinth, so we take something from [a past project] and toss it in there because
it's a place holder, it stands up, we know it is something that we like and can be used again
until you actually design it.”
The final concept is nothing like the elements copied and pasted from the previous project. What
the placeholders provide, however, is a quick reference point for how the idea might read in
general. From the information revealed from these inscriptions using 3D modeling software, the
team develops an array of virtual options. But they all start from the initial placeholder, or
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foothold, which demonstrates the fidelity of the idea. Similarly, in the case of the Playful
Performance Center project, the theater design is only a placeholder in AutoCAD, a computer-
aided design and drafting software. Within a few days, an entirely new concept is introduced; the
initial placeholder provides the structure around which other elements are designed. In both
instances, renderings of ideas placed into the emerging design provide the necessary information
to develop ideas that hold little conceptual resemblance to the initial placeholders. The
placeholders therefore provide a foothold that enables teams to start climbing and moving
forward when the direction is only a vague vision.
Although designers need a foothold in the otherwise insurmountable mountain of potential
paths to pursue, placeholders can constrain innovation. Setting the first step in the journey of an
idea’s development, placeholders are familiar. Given the short duration of time allocated to the
initial concept design, a necessity for creative project-based organizations to meet strict
deadlines, teams may not have sufficient time to iterate far enough away from the initial creative
input. Design concepts therefore may be novel by definition, but will not significantly transform
the typology by radically moving away for existing experiences and expectations. Footholds
therefore need to be deployed by teams as starting points in a journey, not basecamps to rest
upon.
Returning to the quotation from the senior designer at OAE at the beginning of this section: “It’s
because I don't know how to do something so I look what other architects or other people have
done, because that is super helpful. You know there is super knowledge that is out there, why not
use it, and if we do, then we improve it.” His colleague adds to this by stating “I think the way
things are in architecture there is nothing new that is invented, you are just interpreting
something that has been done before.” Designers are drawing on ideas from various sources,
“steeling them,” as another designer describes it, and then building upon them by transforming
them or framing them in a different way.
Although novel ideas are not out there in the existing population of ideas waiting to be
discovered, they are not created out of thin air. Unlearning within a project requires creative
teams to develop concepts that bear little to no resemblance to ideas that have come before. This
raises a fundamental challenge for designers: what do you use as a foundation for constructing
novel concepts. I find precedence provides the creative raw material to build on, providing teams
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with an initial foundation to transform ideas into something completely different and non-
referential to the initial idea.
Theorists of organizational innovation argue that all ideas, no matter how radically new, are
combinations and permutations of existing ideas (see for instance Padgett and Powell 2012:2).
The utility of existing ideas, or precedence as I refer to them, whether from within and outside
the field, is consistent with how sociologist of culture conceptualize the building blocks of new
ideas or strategies of action.105 A partner at an international design consultancy describes how
the idea for an exhibition to showcase the ready-to-wear line by an haute couture designer
emerges, which is considered a novel approach to retail at the time:
Ultimately the strategy led to what we wanted to do, which was the valuation of the product
itself and make it look precious, but you have this series of steps to get there, and a lot of that
has to do with looking at pictures, there were a couple really key pictures for us. There is one
of a natural history museum with this grid of all these dinosaurs and another one that came
from the Museum of Natural History of New York where they have all these drawers.
The exhibition, unveiled in one of the most expensive retail locations in the world, has nothing to
do with dinosaurs or butterflies. It is the means for organizing museum exhibits and the
experiences of patrons that provide the initial raw material out of which the final concept
emerges. “Great innovation means pulling from different reference points and sources,” says the
principal of an industrial design consultancy. In this instance, images are the tools used to expose
ideas and patterns of organization, which provide the foundation for building completely
different ideas. What is important to point out is that these reference points only serve as a
starting point, which the team successively repurposes, recombines, and transposes, to generate
something genuinely novel.
Returning to the moment when Pierre finishes explaining why certain features of the theater
space are elegant and how they transform the feeling and experience of the space, he starts to
draw on these ideas — literally. Tearing a piece of trace paper off the roll, he carefully places it
over the plans of the theater in the monograph and starts tracing the outliner, replicating lines
105 Leschziner and Green 2013.
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from the plans that he wants to build off and omitting those he does not care for. Handing this
piece of trace paper to the team, he asks them to draw them in AutoCAD drafting software to see
how they read. These lines, or reference points, are a start. A foundation that will be repurposed,
recombined, and transposed, repeatedly, until something completely new and unexpected is
created. Throughout the afternoon, the team continues to absorb successively generated
information from this process to continue to build the concept forward.
During the development of the International Performing Arts Center, Reinier draws on an
example from Miese van der Rohe to detail the building’s primary structural columns. Looking
at his in-progress work on the computer, Pierre tells him it is too referential. Without sufficiently
recombining and transforming the initial concept, Reinier is copying the elements — not moving
sufficiently away from the initial raw creative material. With limited time to transform the initial
idea, the practice of building on existing ideas can constrain innovation. Creative project-based
organizations are limited in the time they can spend on successively transforming ideas.
Although an idea might not resemble the initial starting point, teams are limited in how far away
they can move, and, in turn, the ability to introduce radical innovation by exposing previously
unidentified properties of ideas that results in epistemological shifts.
Pursuing ideas that at the outset do not exist in practice or imagination challenges designers to
identify the raw creative material to start constructing ideas with. Exploiting practices learned
across projects for translating visions into reality is critical for moving forward unlearning within
a project. When practices for conducting precedence research are in place to identify raw
creative material to initiate the construction of concepts, my research demonstrates that teams are
equipped to approach design challenge, where an almost limitless pool of creative material exists
to choose from. Rather than limiting exploration by building on existing approaches, in which
the initial raw creative material is clearly defined, precedence research identifies opportunities
for repurposing, recombining, and redeploying aspects from multiple projects. This provides the
necessary diversity of raw creative material to construct novel concepts.
4.3 STUDIES: GENERATING INFORMATION TO EVOLVE CONCEPTS
The project table for the International Performing Arts Center, located across from the team in
the studio, is quickly filling with blue massing models. Covered with models, study packages,
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plans and material finishes, the table, approximately four by six feet, provides the most up to
date overview of the project’s progress. After officially being selected as the design architect for
the 350 million dollar project, the client has asked that the dimensions of the building be
reduced. This will require a significant transformation in the way the design concept is executed.
The team has only a few days to demonstrate its feasibility.
With plans in hand, team members are running between their computers and the conference
room where Pierre and two senior designers, Gordon and Jean, are critiquing and amending
plans. As the plans are updated, interns quickly carve the dimensions out of blue massing foam.
Returning from the modeling studio with three or four iterations each time, the interns place
them in front of Pierre for evaluation. Pierre marks the models and their accompanying plans
with a pen. Taking these notes, the interns produce updated models while the junior designers
update the drawings. By the end of the day, when the team reviews all the models produced
throughout the afternoon, they select a scheme that meets all of their requirements. Sweeping
aside the fifteen other models, they now focus on refining the selected scheme.
Unlearning within a project requires teams to grapple with ideas that are initially vague and
lack substantive definition. The complexity of this is heightened at the beginning of a project
when ideas reside disproportionately in the mind of the designer and have not been translated
into tangible inscriptions. This raises a challenge for project teams: without existing knowledge
of an idea’s exact composition, how do teams generate information on them to further develop
them? Serving as a platform through which the inscriptions of tools are presented, studies enable
teams to test ideas and generate information where it did not exist before.
Until ideas are inscribed — or translated from the mind of the designer — and all the
properties are revealed, the fidelity of an idea cannot be meaningfully evaluated. This is
consistent with how theorists of creativity, and particularly pragmatism, conceptualize the
creation of new knowledge. As Joas (1996:134) writes, “unless new hypotheses are generated, no
progress is imaginable, but of course every new hypothesis still has to prove its worth in
testing.”106 Studies, which are typically highly focused on a single aspect of design, provide vital
106 See also Misak 2013:48; Dewey 1998[1933]:138.
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information that is not immediately apparent.107 Often, “conjectures that seem plausible at first
sight are often found unfit or even absurd when their full consequence are traced out,” writes
Dewey (1998[1933]:141). Conversely, ideas that at first seem “remote and wild are frequently so
transformed by being elaborated into what follows from them as to become apt and fruitful.” In
this sense, studies serve as conceptual tools that expose the properties of multiple ideas through
whatever inscription or tool is utilized.
During the redesign of the International Performing Arts Center, Pierre introduces ideas on
many occasions, telling the team he is not committed to the idea or sure that it would even work,
but wanted them to test it and see “what it does.” This is the “messy side of things” says a senior
architect, where teams “go down rabbit holes” pursuing ideas and getting feedback without any
pressure to commit to them or justify their thought process to the client. Frantically gesturing a
winding path, a principal at a boutique architectural firm in New York City echoes this by
saying, “you need to be going back and forth. Allowing yourself to go on these tangents.” in the
absence of translating ideas, there is therefore no way to say with certainty whether they are
promising paths to follow or not.
Explorations do not always uncover promising paths. Understanding what a team does not
like, and why, is also critical to developing ideas when venturing into the unknown. In these
instances, tests of ideas provide information on why the line of inquiry is not the right path to
pursue. Describing the options proposed for new ideas, Philip, a junior architect at OAE, says
you produce “more options or things that turn out to be well, I don’t want to say nonsense, but
you kind of knew that that could not be the solution, but you had to work on it anyways.”
“Knowing what you don’t like,” tells Gordon when they produce studies filled with options that
turn out to be dead ends, “has a lot of value.” As vehicles for portraying information, studies help
define what you do like. For this reason, the young designer produces options despite having a
sense that they will not work out. The team needs this information to justify not pursuing the
path any further. Janics Robinson’s How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine provides an
interesting analogous example of this. The strategies she identifies for identifying,
107 Once during a review session, the principal at my field site told the team that they had to redo the study and break it up because it was dealing with two different issues at once. He did not want to have to consider different elements simultaneously. If the study is dealing with material finishes, it should not also look at how a wall meets with another one for instance.
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understanding, and comparing the properties of a wine, particularly when you have five wines
from one appellation, is similar to how designers assess studies. First understanding what you
don’t like, and then using that as a reference for better understanding and most importantly
articulating what you do like. This strategy helps develop a vocabulary for describing both the
favorable and unfavorable qualities of ideas, helping to hone in on certain properties of ideas and
not others.
By testing multiple ideas at once, teams come back with new ideas – as discussed in Chapter
3 — that they discover from the process of inscription. For this reason, I find designers at
innovative creative project-based organizations are expected to chase down all the options and
tear them apart, understanding what makes them strong and what makes them weak. During my
interviews, principals and senior designers consistently noted that they expect designers to
interrogate all ideas, no matter how ridiculous. They want to have reference points for why an
idea is selected, and they believe this is only possible by knowing why they didn’t select
something else. Producing multiple options also increases the likeliness that unanticipated
properties of an idea will be exposed, setting the course for further discovery. I find, through my
research at OAE and the designers I spoke with, teams gather information to put in studies
through divergent and convergent thinking, successive development, and combining options.
“I always say our ratio of production of ideas to production of things is about 1000 to 1, so for
everything that we make there are 1000s of drawings and sketches that we do in that process.”
What the partner of an international design consultancy quotes above is describing the immense
amount of work produced to develop an idea. Once the International Performing Arts Center
team selects the new scheme, they are a long way from locking in the concept. It is a constant act
of “refining ten option to one, then blowing one to ten, refining ten to one, until you get it where
you want it and address all the issues you want to address,” says a partners of an interdisciplinary
design studio. In the process of refining and blowing up ideas, teams produce a massive amount
of work. The 1000 to 1 ratio described by the principal above is not an exaggeration, it is a
reality of moving forward ideas whose end points are not defined.
Unlearning within a project requires teams to develop ideas whose properties and potential
value are unknown at the outset. This raises a fundamental challenge for teams: how can a team
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expose themselves to as many qualities and expressions of an idea as possible to ensure they
don’t fall into a path of dependency, chasing down a suboptimal idea? Through divergent and
convergent thinking, teams produce multiple iterations of an option, which provides teams with
choices to select from and more information to construct the strongest possible ideas with.
Simply put, it exposes as many properties of an idea as possible within a limited amount of time.
Drilling down on one expression of an idea reduces the information a team learns about an
emerging idea. By testing multiple competing expressions of an idea against one another, I find,
like Brown (2009:67), “there is an increased likelihood that the outcome will be bolder, more
creatively disruptive, and more compelling.” This process of refining and blowing up ideas
promotes divergent thinking, which, my case demonstrates, is a tactical strategy for translating
the ideas in a designer’s mind into tangible artifacts that can be interrogated, evaluated, and
refined.
During the development of the core for the Metro Skyscraper project, Philip starts by
developing multiple options for the initial core study in drafting software. Playing around with
standard configurations, he deviates, throwing an alternative idea into the study package. When
Gordon comes over to his desk to review the options, he comments that the alternative option is
not efficient enough in how it places the elevators and stairwells. Looking through the options
for a few more minutes, the senior designer tears off a piece of trace paper and starts to transform
the configuration of the irregular option. With the rough outline, Gordon asks Philip to draw it in
the drafting program and “see what it does.” Taking the rough sketch, Philip develops five more
iterations of the new idea, blowing it up so that they can evaluate different ways of executing the
idea. This is an example of how tools are deployed to gather as much information as possible to
provide teams with vital feedback on their ideas.
Had the young architect only produced one option in the study, not diverging, they would
never have realized the potential of an alternative configuration. Although the divergent option
only suggests an interesting direction to pursue, they have to blow it up to evaluate how
properties of the idea will be differentially expressed through various configurations of the idea.
Yet sometimes, quick studies that produce multiple options do not effectively progress a
concept. Late in the afternoon, during the second to last week of the design development phase,
Sheela frustratingly tells me that the day has been unproductive. Despite working all day on
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quick studies, none have contributed to the progress of the drawing set. The ideas tested are to
confirm what is already known, without adding substantive insights to help resolve ongoing
issues.
Albeit encouraging, the revelation of unanticipated associations and connections between
different ideas, producing a lot of ideas, constrains how deep a team can explore any one idea.
By employing this approach to quickly developing knowledge where it did not exist before,
teams are limited in the time they can dedicate to any idea, resulting in innovation that emerges
from a breadth of research rather than a depth of understanding. Creative project-based
organizations are limited in most instances to transforming ideas by exposing unanticipated
associations by exploring a breadth of ideas. Conversely, long term research and development
organizations, without defined deadlines, can take the time to dive deep into one idea.
“If you start with four options then come on, you are narrowing down a lot the possibilities of
something,” says a senior designer at OAE. “You need to start with ten options so you can get rid
of three options. Then you will have seven. From those options the client is going to give you
one or two options.” His fear of producing too few options, artificially “narrowing down a lot of
the possibilities of something,” is palpable in this remark.
When venturing into the unknown, part of unlearning within a project, teams do not have
sufficient information on how an idea will develop. This challenges teams to expose
unanticipated connections and associations within and between ideas, which cannot be predicted
before starting to develop an idea and generating information on it. The successive development
of an idea exposes new raw creative material to further develop and refine an idea that previously
did not exist in practice or imagination.
Examining the work practice of innovators, Grant (2016:37) finds that “many people fail to
achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to
perfection.” Rather than refining one or two options, and prematurely locking in to an idea, the
designer above argues that they need to develop multiple interpretations of an idea, opening the
possibilities for unanticipated associations to emerge. This reflects the flexible opportunism of
robust action, where actors maintain “discretionary options across unforeseeable futures,”
pursuing opening wherever they present themselves (Padgett and Ansell 1993:1263 & 1308).
Recognizing that many of the properties of an idea are not immediately apparent until they are
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inscribed through various tools and presented, he wants designers to produce multiple option to
increase the likelihood of revealing potentially valuable ideas and paths to pursue for the next
round of development. This, in turn, decreases the likeliness of locking in to a suboptimal idea.
By example, had Philip focused exclusively on traditional configurations, the properties of the
divergent concept would not have become apparent to the Metro Skyscraper team. Testing as
many ideas as possible is vital to innovation, because it opens new possibilities that might not be
considered when attempting to perfect an idea. I argue it also frees the designer to an extent from
feeling as if they are married to an idea, encouraging greater freedom and risk-taking in making
associations.
Covering the large conference room table with 22 computer-generated renderings for the
material finishes of the DC Premium Space’s lobby, the entire design team gathers around to
evaluate the printed study package. Using the same camera angle, depth of field, and lighting
conditions for each of the computer-generated renderings, the only variation in the images are
the textures, colors, and materiality of the proposed finishes. Flipping options the team does not
like, a smaller subset of the options remains in place. Discussing what they don’t like about a
particular option when it is flipped, the team continues to talk about the qualities of the options
that that they like. No decision is made, however. Placing a checkmark in the corner of the
preferred options, Stephen returns to his desk to expand on the selected options. An hour later,
15 more options are added to the study for review.
In the end, there are no big moves that reveal the team’s final preference. They develop a lot
of options, successively refining and narrowing the study. The 22 initial visual renderings reveal
qualities about certain materials and their finishes that are preferred, but the team is not sure
about the colors and material composition. Before they can decide what options to present to the
client, they will need to explore further options with the preferred finishes. By exploring many
options, through the successive deployment of tools, properties of certain ideas are identified as
preferable when compared to other variations. By expanding on the preferred qualities, the
desired finish emerges. Something that would likely not reveal itself had the team tested one or
two options.
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Selection is not a zero-sum game. “Most of the ideas in the end come from a mash up of several
options,” states a designer at OAE, looking at a study package. It is rare that one idea prevails,
requiring no further refinement or adjustment.
Unlearning within a project requires the team to break with familiar ideas and established
perceptions, constructing ideas in unknown territories with unfamiliar creative resources.
Developing ideas that previously did not exist in practice or imagination challenges designers to
identify the qualities and properties of ideas that will meaningfully transform a typology.
Combining options is a practice where designers draw on aspects of multiple ideas, across
different iterations of a study, to produce the next round of options, leveraging as much
information as possible.
Without knowing in advance how an idea will develop, it is unclear in what direction it will
go. Properties of an option tested in a previous study package may return, being combined with
new options that make some quality about the initial option resonate with the team. This is an
example of the redeployment of existing inscriptions, repurposing the output of tools in a
different way than initially thought of when placed in an evolved context of discovery. Returning
to the partner who says they have a 1000 to 1 ratio provides a good example of this.
Sometimes, like from past projects that didn’t work before, we are like oh that was a really
interesting idea let’s bring that back. Like there are tons of things that we produce. I always
say our ratio of production of ideas to production of things is about 1000 to 1, so for
everything that we make, there are 1000s of drawings and sketches that we do in that process.
So, a lot of times there is stuff that is cast off that is still valuable to us. And there are certain
projects that become really emblematic I would say and they keep coming back.
Studies are therefore meticulously documented and saved on OAEs internal server, ensuring
access to the members of the team for which the option was produced and also the entire office.
Recall that the multistory section of the commercial high rise project drew on options proposed
for another project designed years earlier. Being able to quickly pull the 3D models from the
server enabled the team to revisit the idea and deploy it in another project by simply copy and
pasting it. Here they are leveraging knowledge gained from another project in the past to imagine
new possibilities for the project the team is currently working on.
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Mashing up several options is one of the most overt examples of reshuffling, recombining,
and superimposing raw creative material to produce novel ideas. Selecting the properties
revealed through the act of inscribing ideas, teams construct novel concepts by recombining
them. It is the resulting transformation of this procedure I find that opens the possibility for novel
concepts to emerge.108
Options tested in past studies are not always reconsidered. “I think most of it is research for
research’s sake in the end,” says Jean when discussing studies, “because unfortunately it doesn’t
usually get looked at enough and absorbed enough.” Under incredible pressure to produce ideas
and maintain strict project deadlines, teams do not always have the time to revisit past studies
once they are in evolved contexts of discover, resulting in a lot of potentially valuable research
not materially contributing to the development of the emerging concept. In this sense, the
practice of combining research across studies in creative project-based organizations constrains
innovation by drawing on immediately obvious connections. Without the time or resources to
dive deep into all of the past research done on a project as new information is revealed,
innovation is less likely to be premised on substantively grappling with all the ideas developed.
Exploring ideas that previously did not exist in practice or imagination challenges teams to
generate information on their emerging composition. Exploiting practices, learned across
projects within the studio, for generating and then conveying information to the team is vital to
unlearning within a project. When practices for producing studies are woven through the
productive fabric of a practice to help identify the features and qualities of new ideas, my
research demonstrates that teams are equipped to start grappling with ideas that previously did
not exist. Rather than limiting exploration to ideas that are highly defined at the outset, studies
identify areas for further explorations, continually gathering information where it did not exist
before.
4.4 ITERATION: TRANSFORMING AWAY FROM THE ORIGINS OF A SEED
How do ideas evolve from the initial raw, creative material to something so transformed that its
origins are not obvious? Reflecting on one of OAE’s past typology transforming projects, one of
108 Kogut and Zander 1992:390; Padgett and Powell 2012:2.
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the primary creative influences recalls the rapid changes that the façade went through. “There are
like fifty or sixty study models of different configurations, different iterations,” of the concept.
Years later, working with OAE on another typology transforming project, the International
Performing Arts Center, Jean remarks, “there were so many studies of ways to go with that
project, strategic things that all had different forms, I mean there must be 30 models somewhere
and in the end, we always came back to the more and more pure and simpler versions.”
Discussing the progress of the International Performing Arts Center project during the weekly
office meeting, one of the project leaders half-jokingly says “we are currently working on
Scheme C, which realistically is Scheme J.” With multiple iterations between each official
project scheme they are presenting to the client, the team has internally developed far more
iterations of the design than they have shown to the client.
Unlearning within a project requires teams to construct concepts that previously did not exist
in practice or imagination. This raises a fundamental challenge for design teams: how do you
construct concepts that emerge over time, which provide little indication of their progress
towards resolution? Sociologists of culture find that novel ideas do not appear in bounded
moments of insight (see for instance McDonnell et al. 2017). Research that stands in contrast to
these finds, arguing that innovation is an ephemeral act, typically relies on episodic research
strategies that do not capture the day-to-day processes of designers (see for instance Hargadon
and Bechky 2006; Hargadon 2003; Sutton and Hargadon 1996; Livingston 2007). Iteration is the
process of successively translating ideas to exposes properties of ideas not immediately apparent
to the designer until they are tested, providing new insights for transforming them further.109
An iterative approach to exploring and constructing ideas requires a certain degree of trust
that the process will yield stronger ideas.110 “In a design firm like ours,” says a partner at an
architectural firm, “you can’t bill for all the time you put into design because it would be insane,
but you still need to do all that stuff to generate ideas that we think are the best ideas.” Producing
over fifty iterations of the same idea, he contends, is necessary to generate the strongest and best
109 See Schneiderhan 2013 for a discussion on emergence of ideas (specifically page 290 for a good review on Dewey’s discussion on the growth of ideas). 110 This reflects Close’s statement that you have to show up and get to work. Trusting that you will uncover something along the way.
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ideas possible. This is because you must iterate multiple ideas to expose qualities that are not
immediately apparent when they reside in the mind of the designer. In the absence of doing this,
potentially valuable qualities will not be revealed.
It is not surprising therefore that when looking at the careers of highly innovative individuals,
Grant (2016:37) finds the highest output of original ideas coincides with the periods in which
these individuals produced the largest volume or number of ideas. If you haven’t explored lots of
options and diverged, Brown (2009:239) argues, your ideas will be incremental and easily
replicable. At OAE, designers do not settle for the first good idea they discover, as all three
designers quoted above alluded to. They are constantly refining, revising, and throwing out
ideas, allowing properties of ideas to cross pollinate, by constantly engaging tools and the
inscriptions they produce to gain new insights and information.
Until designers act, new lines of action for recombining and transforming ideas will not
become apparent to them. Yet not every idea pursued will warrant further development. Many
iterations of a design will become one-shot contributions that quickly lead to dead-ends.111
These dead-end options help to expose the qualities of an idea that are preferred, often not
becoming clear or even identifiable until they are tested and can be evaluated through their
tangible manifestations. I find this to be the actionable interpretation of what McDonnell (et al.
2017:3) describe as “the act of making a cultural object congruent as a person works through a
situation or problem.”112 A process that can be best described as ends-in-view, actively revising
what a designer desires and imagines is possible with each iteration.113 In the example of the
International Performing Arts Center cited above, the team tests thirty iterations of an idea, but
keeps returning to a simple form — an idea, whose strength could only be apprehended by
testing 29 other variations of it. Building on the previous section, it is not enough to conduct one
study with multiple options or test one plan. Teams need to develop hundreds of variations of an
idea to construct it. Something that is made easier through the utilization of computer software
within design. Rather than redrafting an entire drawing by pencil, the designer can copy and
111 Simonton 2015:3; Fleming 2001. 112 emphasis in original. This article focuses on the theoretical aspect of emergence. I add to this by demonstrating how people, in action, can “make” a novel cultural object resonate. 113 McDonnell et al. 2017:4; Whitford 2002; Gross 2009.
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paste the plan, altering the specified lines in the new plan, reducing the process from hours to
minutes.114 Although a lot of inscriptions are still manually created, they are expedited using
software, by example for updating dimensions.
An iterative approach to work enables teams to encourage the emergence of novel concepts.
Rather than incrementally altering the creative raw material that initiated a search, this approach
encourages teams to successively transform the raw material so that it bears little resemblance to
where the team started. Yet research suggests that the undervaluation of persistence leads people
to prematurely conclude their creative work and leave their best ideas undiscovered (Lucas and
Nordgren 2015:233). The designers I observed and talked with transform concepts through rapid
prototyping, speed of development, recognizing no idea is too precious to kill, and there are no
breakthrough moments, which are practices learned across projects. A constant pressure to
persist, even when iteration after iteration bared no fruit, was always present amongst designers,
pushing them to reveal new and unanticipated associations and qualities of ideas.
Sitting on either side of Aldo at his workstation, Pierre and Gordon are commenting on the
drawing on his screen. Sketching over a previous scheme’s plans with trace paper, Gordon is
updating the design to reflect information they received moments before. As soon as he finishes
sketching a potential resolution to the new issue, he passes it to Aldo who is making the changes
in AutoCAD, adding actual dimensions to the sketches. Watching as the neon lines quickly snap
across the black background of AutoCAD, Pierre is asking questions and commenting on how
the updates are “reading.” Pointing out awkward moments that are created by the changes, he
suggests ways to deal with them. As information is attained from drawing the ideas into
AutoCAD, Gordon keeps ripping pieces of trace paper off the roll, making amendments to the
plans, incorporating the new information, and then passing the sheets of trace paper to Philip.
Constructing novel concepts by its very definition implies that existing information does not
exist to evaluate an idea before it is constructed. Rather than developing a highly resolved
representation of the solution, only to find out after a significant investment of time that it is not
viable, I find designers quickly mock up a minimum viable product to interrogate the fidelity of
114 See Kalay (2004) for a thorough overview of the impact of computer-aided design and drafting software on the practice and processes of architecture. Also, McCullough et al. (1991) for a thorough overview of how computers have changed knowledge within design and how it is practiced.
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an idea. This iterative process, in design theory, is called rapid prototyping, which provides
accelerated feedback on ideas, quickly making abstract ideas concrete.115
Making one change and then formally reviewing it is cumbersome and inefficient. Rapid
prototyping enables teams to quickly gather information as they iterate the idea by rapidly
deploying their tools.116 The result is the provision of rough visual feedback on the properties of
an idea and the system within which it is nested, engaging perceptual capacities beyond what
words can describe.117 Rather than talking about an idea, designers draw it, “seeing what it
does.” In the words of Wittgenstein, “don’t think, look.”118
By immediately taking newly acquired information and absorbing it into another iteration,
designers make a lot of small decisions, building an idea forward. Should we continue to pursue
this idea, or leave it for now? The fifty to sixty study models I reference in the opening of this
chapter are not highly resolved, but they immediately provide feedback on the fidelity of the
ideas being proposed. Is this a potential solution for the façade or not? The answer to this
question was largely made possible through the rapid deployment of modeling tools to produce
the rough physical representations of the buildings.
After thirty minutes of rapidly prototyping ideas on how to respond to the new conditions
introduced half an hour before, Pierre, Gordon, and Aldo finally find a solution for the
International Performing Arts Center. This is only the first step. Now the idea must be detailed
and further developed to assess all its properties. This will require successive rounds of rapid
prototyping to reveal these properties, which ultimately helps construct a robust concept.
Yet sometimes, the relentless pace of rapidly prototyping ideas leaves little time to think.
Multiple designers at OAE mentioned that the speed of developing options leaves little time to
work through larger issues. A principal at a practice in New York City states “innovation
inevitably requires an excessive amount of time. You need to allow things to bubble up.” When
the International Performing Arts Center project moves too quickly, Pierre realizes the team
115 Rodriguez and Jacoby 2013:129; Fraser 2012:199. 116 Raney and Jacoby 2013:123. 117 Liedtka and Friedel 2009:191; Brown 2009:238; Swedberg 2016:15. 118 Brown 2009:238.
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requires more time to think through issues. He writes in an email to the team, “we will become
more deliberative, slow, and thought out.” This is the message to the team, signaling they have
more time to work, immediately before pushing an upcoming deadline to give them more time to
find novel solutions to the problems they are grappling with. The team needs the time to
prototype ideas and see what the tangible manifestations of an idea look like, or reads, when
transcribed from the mind of the designers. In the absence of this work due to tight timelines, the
team is liable to miss many opportunities to advance the design.
Unlearning within a project requires teams to constantly generate information, which, for novel
concepts, is not readily available or interpretable at first glance. With only thirty days to develop
highly resolved design concepts, there is no time to walk away from a problem and get a fresh
perspective, let alone sit and deliberate an idea. When principals and senior designers ask to
“quickly test” an idea, they want immediate feedback so that they can continue to identify where
else to explore to gather other necessary information to continue to construct an idea. The speed
of developing ideas is therefore measured in minutes, not hours, to maintain the momentum of
exploration.
In the absence of having any information, teams need to quickly construct ideas through the
rapid deployment and utilization of their tools to keep the information feedback loop generating
knowledge and insights on their direction. During formal design review meetings in the
conference room, team members often leave the meeting to quickly test an idea proposed
seconds earlier. Returning with updated material, the principal and team can immediately assess
the viability of pursuing the modified path, further developing the idea before the meeting is
over. This practice helps maintain the momentum of design and free association of ideas that
often emerges during discussions. Breaking this up can close off promising paths of explorations,
which require just a bit more clarity and definition before pursuing them.
When projects are complex, requiring multiple aspects to be developed concurrently, if one
aspect lags, all the aspects will be slowed down. Like sonar, the faster the team moves the
quicker the sonar needs to scan the topology of possibilities to alert designers of opportunities
and pitfalls on the horizon. It is therefore not uncommon for a senior designer to limit someone
to only 15 minutes to test an idea.
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When there are breaks in the information feedback loops, teams have to slow down to assess
where they are going, a perilous situation to be in when you are in the middle of a competition.
Exploring two schemes simultaneously for the Metro Skyscraper competition, Aldo asks Pierre
what his general feeling is moving forward. “I don’t know,” he responds stoically, giving no
indication one way or the other. Without direction, the team keeps testing similar ideas, not
moving forward with their normal momentum. Yet the speed of development within creative
project-based organizations, limits the kind of innovation they can produce. Due to the episodic
nature of work, teams do not have unlimited time to pursue ideas that require months if not years
of development. Transformative ideas that require significant incubation periods, like disease
treatments, cannot be successfully explored in this type of organization.
“I am not going to throw a chair across the room, because I know we will revisit this [decision]
again. I have been in offices where every decision is just like this, life or death, chairs thrown
across the room and it’s like relax, this is a long process.” Another designer at OAE echoes this,
stating “I recognize that the decisions that I make, in the end won’t matter, because so much is
going to get changed later.”
Constructing novel concepts that previously did not exist in practice or imagination
inherently requires teams to grapple with ideas whose form and definition are unknown until it is
complete. In the absence of a predefined solution, elements are always changing as new
information becomes available. This state of ambiguity challenges designers to keep venturing
into the unknown, and not locking in on the first promising iteration of an idea that they identify.
Recognizing that no idea is too precious to kill or modify, encourages designers to prevent early
lock-in, keeping the possibilities of introducing stronger and better ideas open for as long as
possible.
Rather than detailing and narrowing in on one idea, which Grant (2016:100) demonstrates is
counterproductive to producing original ideas, I find teams are always reassessing ideas. During
a design meeting with the stakeholders of the International Performing Arts Center project,
Pierre, pointing to the plans and renders covering the table, says they would change hourly over
the next week. Despite working on the design almost around the clock for the past eight days, the
team is still revisiting earlier ideas as they learn about the design. No idea at this stage of
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development is safe from being displaced by a new idea. This allows the strongest ideas to
emerge and drive the successive development of the design concept.
Approaching the initial construction of ideas through the perspective that they are always up
for change, design can best be described as a dynamic ensemble, constantly changing as
resolution and insights are gained during successive phases of design. Put another way, the
inscription of tools are rarely static. For this reason, the senior designer quoted above will not
throw a chair across the room to defend a decision. With over twenty years of experience, he
knows that the decisions made early on will likely be changed, requiring the team to reevaluate
the information revealed by an inscription, or completely redeploy a set of tools to produce
something new.
When ideas are held on to, immune to change or being killed, the overall design concept can
be jeopardized. Recall the instance when Pierre refuses to alter one of the International
Performing Arts Center’s design principles, despite another aspect being eliminated due to
budget overruns, which means the overall concept is no longer intact. Rather than revisiting the
design principle, recognizing that one of its key features is removed, the principal refuses to alter
it. The entire team feels that this jeopardizes the fidelity of the project’s argument sequence, and
worse, how patrons will experience the space. This is largely because the team doesn’t have the
time to go back and establish new design principles for the project. In this instance, the design’s
constituent elements lose their fidelity, but the larger concept is not revisited. Without constantly
mapping the dependencies of design concepts and their supporting constituent elements,
designers can lose sight of what needs to be revaluated to reestablish the fidelity of the larger
concept. Mapping these at a high level is an effective strategy for constantly maintaining
oversight of this.
In anticipation of a meeting with a mechanical/electrical/plumbing (MEP) consultant, I ask a
senior designer if tomorrow will be the big day. The day that they found a resolution to an issue
that was plaguing the development of the entire International Performing Arts Center project.
Gordon kindly laughs at my ignorance and tells me they will not find a solution for the next two
months. Finding a solution is a long process. It takes more time and exchanges of information
than can occur in a three-hour design meeting. He does not seem bothered or frustrated by this.
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Before returning to his desk to prepare for the meeting he says, “it is slow because you have to
explore multiple possibilities and know why you are dropping those not selected.”
Venturing into the unknown, which is part of unlearning within a project, requires teams to
develop concepts whose final composition is not apparent until it is completed. There are no
bounded moments of insight in which a solution suddenly appears.119 This raises a fundamental
challenge for designers: how do you know where you are in the process of discovery when you
don’t know what the final end point is? Recognizing that there are no breakthrough moments
when everything falls into place, designers are encouraged to keep making small incremental
steps towards a final solution, rather than attempting to make big leaps.
Without known coordinates, it is difficult to gauge where you are in the process of searching
into the unknown. I find, like psychologists of creativity, that the associative and iterative nature
of design makes it difficult to determine whether one is nearing a creative solution or only laying
the foundation (see for instance Lucas and Nordgren 2015:233). When solutions are discovered,
they are therefore often experienced as unexpected moments of insight. The senior designer with
more than 25 years of experience is not naïve, he knows it is a long iterative process. He trusts
that by going through the motions they will arrive at a solution that meets all the requirements.
Although insights may be experienced as unexpected, it is misleading to attribute the
discovery of a solution to a bounded moment or the immediate steps leading up to these
moments. As Gordon alludes to, you must test and interrogate many options to gather the
necessary information to construct an idea. All of which collectively leads to the emergence of a
design solution, which scholarship on creativity that conceptualizes novelty as happening in
bounded moments does not consider. Describing the invention of the microchip, Robert Noyce
recalls:
“I don’t remember any time when a lightbulb went off and the whole thing was there. It was
more like, everyday, you would say, ‘Well, if I could do this, then maybe I could do that, and
that would let me do this,’ and eventually you had the concept.”120
119 McDonnell et al. 2017. 120 Isaacson 2014:176.
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Noyce, like the senior designer, is describing an iterative process whose progress is only possible
through the incremental production and assessment of information. When discovery is less about
searching for known coordinates, I find that designers cannot take big steps. My findings
contradict what Hargadon and Bechky (2006:484) describe as moments when creative insights
emerge. A finding I attribute to their focus on meetings and milestone markers in projects, rather
than the day-to-day deployment of tools to uncover information about ideas and successively
construct concepts. Put another way, I find that designers who successfully transform ideas into
novel concepts take many steps, very quickly rather than a few, slowly. Rather than focusing on
bounded moments of clarity, scholars and designers alike need to focus on the entire stream of
actions that lead to this moment of clarity.
Without a defined endpoint, explorations can go on longer than necessary. One designer at
OAE stated that when the direction of a project is vague, typically at the beginning of a project,
teams produce far more studies than necessary. Without knowing if they are on a promising path,
teams can find themselves in a state of churn, producing a lot more options in the opinion of the
designer than necessary to move forward. For this reason, it is important for teams to have a
clearly defined project specific argument sequence, as discussed in Chapter 3, and constantly
meeting as a team to move the process of exploration forward, as outlined in Chapter 2.
Employing these practices enables teams to move forward, despite not knowing if they are
nearing resolution or only beginning their exploration.
Developing ideas that previously did not exist in practice or imagination challenges teams
because they emerge over time, providing little indication of their progress towards resolution.
Exploiting practices learned across projects for encouraging the emergence of ideas is critical to
unlearning within projects. When procedures for conducting iterative work are in place to guide
the successive translation of ideas, my research demonstrates that teams are equipped to expose
properties of ideas not immediately apparent to the designer until they are tested. Rather than
limiting exploration to fully articulated concepts, iteration provides new insights on emerging
ideas, which in turn enables designers to transform them further. Designers therefore take many
steps, very quickly to transform ideas into novel concepts, rather than a few, slowly when there
is no guiding mechanism into the unknown.
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4.5 CONFIGURATION: REPRODUCING SIGNATURE STYLES THAT DIFFERENTIATE
Walk through any design studio, and the first thing you will see are the artifacts of constructing
ideas. Covering walls, cascading off desks, piled on tables, lining shelves, standing on the floor,
and propped up against the walls, they are almost everywhere. As you go studio to studio, it is
not only the raw space that changes, but also the types of artifacts, or inscriptions from tools, that
you see. In some studios, the physical models made from blue massing foam, acrylic, resin,
wood, and plaster board litter almost every surface. In others, desks and workspaces are spotless,
only photorealistic renderings covering the walls, with the modeling studio, material library, and
project rooms tucked away, out of sight.
Unlearning within a project requires teams to construct concepts using a set of tools to
translate visions into reality. The imprint of the tools employed, for shaping what the designer
sees, cannot be removed from the product produced. Yet, with few exceptions, every studio has
access to the same tools.121 This raises a fundamental challenge for designers tasked with
constructing novel design concepts: how do you encourage the emergence of novel concepts and
the signature styles they embody? My research demonstrates that the configuration of tools, with
respect to which tools a studio emphasizes and in what order they are used, which is honed and
learned across projects, enables studios to produce dramatically different concepts, despite
having access to the same set of tools.
Latour and Woolgar (1986:65) argue “the strength of the laboratory depends not so much on
the availability of apparatus, but on the presence of a particular configuration of machines
specifically for a particular task.” Some studios start with sketches, water paintings, and models,
whereas others start modeling almost immediately in three-dimensional computer software. My
case, like Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) findings, demonstrates that the design concepts produced
by designers are “thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the laboratory.”122
121 At the time of writing this dissertation, Virtual Reality headsets were starting to appear in studios to provide virtual tours of a building in 3D. This was a cost prohibitive technology at the time of writing, however as with most technology like 3D printers, which are now standard tools, VR will become a prevalent tool within the design studio. 122 Latour and Woolgar 1986; Stark 2009; Beunza and Stark 2002.
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The configuration of tools within the studio enables teams to produce novel responses to
design challenges that are distinct from other studios tackling the same typology. Predilections
— as discussed in Chapter 3 — are necessary, but not sufficient to explain the unique signature
of a studio.123 I find that how predilections are embraced through the tools and procedures of a
studio is part of this explanation. The designers I observed and talked with set themselves apart
from their peers through the unique emphasis and order of tools, as well as how teams present
information for review.
Discussing the tools used to construct ideas, a highly acclaimed architect with offices around the
world says “we start very abstractly.” Sketches and physical models are used almost exclusively
at the start, only visually rendering ideas once they understand their physical properties. Renders,
he argues, along with many other designers, “hide too much.” Like in the case of Aldo who
realizes how important an aspect of the lobby is for the DC Premium Space project only when
the team makes a physical scale model of it.
Without a predefined end state, or even rough idea of the direction of a project when it starts,
a team’s exploration into the unknown is inherently uncertain. The direction the team takes,
constantly changing as new information is learned, is defined as concepts are constructed. The
challenge facing teams is revealing the necessary information to continue constructing a concept.
I find that the emphasis and order of tools determines what properties of an idea are revealed and
concealed through tests, which, in turn, influences the paths of future exploration.
When new members enter a studio, the effects of different configurations of tools is evident
when they are challenged to think differently on how to construct concepts. A senior designer,
who recently transitioned to a new practice after a ten-year tenure at his previous firm, remarks
how different the two studios are. When asked why, his first response is about the new studio’s
heavy reliance on computer visualizations to test ideas early on in their development. Having
come from a practice that starts by physically modeling ideas in multiple mediums to test the
properties of ideas, he is not accustomed to constructing ideas using the new ordering of tools.
Although the studio still relies on massing models, they are not emphasized to the same extent.
123 I think this is like structural dualism — this goes beyond the scope of this dissertation, but they are so influenced by one another, one does not clearly drive the other.
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When the standard tools in a studio’s repertoire and established procedures for employing
them are not followed, it results in failed concept designs. The Landmark competition to redesign
and add an addition to a historical building starts like all other competitions at OAE. A project
folder on the firm’s internal server is filled with the competition brief, zoning information, and
images of the site, ensuring everyone on the team has access to the information. The team goes
from analyzing documents to designing, skipping building a site model or massing model to
understand the context within which they are building or the existing massing they have to work
with. This was the same project, in which Pierre asks the team, two weeks into the design
process, “Frankly, what is the big idea?” Many of the properties of the project are never
understood, leading one designer to complain about all the unresolved awkward moments they
are not dealing with, concealing them by focusing on renders rather than models that reveal these
moments. By skipping the use of site models and massing models the team is not equipped with
the information they typically have when constructing a concept. I argue that when steps are
skipped, information which is typically used to inform the next step in a firm’s approach to
generating design concepts, is not available – significantly disadvantaging the team. They are left
searching for vocabularies of motives that are developed in proceeding steps, which they
typically use to engage the next step. Despite a step in their development being taken out, they
are still expected to achieve similar insight as if it they were following their established approach
for revealing, interrogating, testing, and refining the properties of ideas.
This was a stark departure from OAE’s standard approach to design that initially focuses on
pairing a volume to a perfect shape and then “fucking with it.” Focusing on developing the
perfect image, the team jumps a lot of critical steps for revealing information and, albeit,
producing a beautiful design concept, does not transform the experience of the building. A
strength that distinguishes OAE from its peers, due to its rigorous interrogation of form to
uncover the fundamental properties unique to each project. This is all part of generating the
information required to construct the kind of responses the firm is known for.
Despite providing teams with an established approach for constructing concepts, it also has a
constraining effect on the type of innovation a creative project-based organization can produce.
Relying on an established process precludes teams from experimenting with different ways of
constructing design concepts that may introduce different approaches to transform a typology.
Given that tools have such a big impact on how designers see, mixing up the order has the
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potential to radically shift how teams think. Teams require time, however, to play with different
configurations and understand the implications of the different dependencies of information
gathered, with respect to the tools and procedures used.
Does the way in which you present information, gathered from explorations, influence the way
you search? The following quotation from a designer at an international architectural firm
provides an answer to this question:
The methods we use effect the way we design, because I think that the way you present
things affects the way you design them. For a lot of us at the firm, you think very iteratively,
like you always design options, and you know or learn how to present them to [the principal],
so you learn how to argue [in her style]. But I think all of that influences how you design,
because I never sit down now at the firm and think oh I am going to sketch and make like
what this should be. I always think okay what are all the options, like how can I do this
analytically like 1a, 1b, and what if we did this and this, how can you compartmentalize it
and make it into a nice pretty diagram that you can then explain?
Unlearning within a project requires designers to venture into the unknown and explore for ideas
that previously did not exist in practice or imagination and then present them to the team. The
challenge facing designers is filtering the vast information they gain from each exploration, and
concisely conveying it to the team. I find that how a team presents information for review
influences how designers think and act. Here my research builds on and expands the work of
Latour (1986) and Stark (2009) and their respective collaborators by arguing that in addition to
the configuration and emphasis of tools, the way inscriptions are presented influence how
designers construct and explore ideas.
Every studio has a unique way of presenting information, which becomes part of the
practice’s process of discovery. “The precise mode of representation, the skills at hand, and the
art conventions in use,” argues Molotch (2003:61) “affect the product outcome.” The method for
presenting ideas therefore fundamentally influences what is produced.
Describing his studio’s style, a senior designer states a “lot of the design studies are very two
dimensional. Like very plan and elevation and section driven because there is such an interest in
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precision.” Halfway across Manhattan, yet seemingly worlds apart, another partner describes his
studio’s unique style:
I think that one of the reasons that collage has always been such an important aspect of the
studio and right from the very beginning, is that it has this really process orientated rough
quality to it. It has something to do with the way that we make things; making is very visible
rather than being hidden under some slick surface or something like that. We like things that
are a little bit rough and a little bit ugly or a little bit wrong, so there are certain things that
have those qualities that we hold on to. But that could have many different iterations.
The rough, ugly, and wrong is physically embodied across the studio space. Pinup walls are
covered with ideas, seemingly haphazardly thrown up to see if they stick. Floors are covered
with past iterations, some torn in half, with the other half still on the wall. The contrast cannot be
starker between the two practices. The other studio space is pristine. The monochromatic interior
only has a few photorealistic renderings covering the walls. Tucked away in project rooms,
options are pinned to the wall with laser level precision. The only models in sight are archive
quality, costing more than $60,000 a model.
The approach to resolving design issues is reinforced by the way designers prepare and
present studies. The distinctive signatures of the two studios described above produce work that
differs dramatically in all respects. With a similar affinity for precision, Pierre has a visceral
reaction when a designer suggests resolving a problem by adding one foot to the length of the
building, breaking its perfect geometry. He told the designer that the architecture gods would
scorn his very existence. With spans exceeding over two hundred feet, it is questionable if this
minor deviation would even be perceptible, yet that is not the concern. It is not precise and
therefore not an acceptable solution. In the practice that likes things to be “a little bit rough, and
a little bit ugly or wrong,” this would likely be an acceptable, even encouraged solution. Yet
changing the way information is portrayed to the team is not simple. It requires significant
experimentation and development on the part of the practice to establish new practices that can
guide teams through the tight timelines of a project. Moreover, changes will impact the unique
signature of a firm. This carries the risk that clients will reject design concepts that do not have
the feel of the firm’s other projects, which is why they were selected for a competition or
commission in the first place.
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Constructing concepts with tools, which, with few exceptions, every studio has access to,
challenges teams to develop design concepts that are novel and different from the approaches
pursued by other studios. Exploiting practices learned across projects for deploying the tools at
their disposal is critical for unlearning within a project. When procedures for repeating a familiar
configuration and emphasis of tools is in place, my research demonstrates that teams are
equipped to approach design challenges that multiple other studios are pursuing, without
converging on a similar style or approach to resolving the design issues. Rather than deciding
how to deploy the tools at a team’s disposal anew for each project, designers can focus their
attention on the raw creative material they are working with, trusting that the established
practices of the studio will help them construct novel design concepts.
4.6 CONCLUSION
The competition to design an iconic commercial skyscraper, which opens this chapter, challenges
the team to look at a typology differently. This challenge sets the team on a process of discovery,
exploring and constructing ideas where they did not exist before. This requires the team to
quickly test ideas and gather feedback on an almost moment-by-moment basis to understand
what direction they are moving in and the potential value of continuing down one path and not
another.
The Metro Skyscraper project epitomizes one of the fundamental challenges facing teams
attempting to develop a novel concept: how do you construct concepts that previously did not
exist? A challenge in which “we come to know what we are looking for,” says Stark (2009:175)
“only in the process of transforming the world.” Fundamentally this chapter asks how designers
transform highly familiar ideas into genuinely novel concepts that disrupt taken-for-granted
assumptions and expectations?
Deploying rigidly defined acts to reorder the tools and procedures used by a team, for each
project, does not in itself lead to innovation as popular wisdom and prevailing theories would
suggest. I find that the emergent nature of genuinely novel concepts, whose contours and
parameters are not defined at the outset of exploration, requires an approach to constructing
concepts that continually exposes the properties of ideas and is highly responsive to absorbing
this new information. My case demonstrates that when designers follow an established approach,
which is unique to the firm, they have the structure to successively transform the highly familiar
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creative material that they start with, into genuinely novel concepts, which is critical for moving
forward explorations when the endpoint is not yet defined.
Learned across projects, conducting precedence research, building studies, working
iteratively, and following the unique configuration of a studio enables designers to move
explorations forward into unfamiliar territories. When the foundation within a firm for
constructing concepts is premised on constantly exposing the properties of ideas and then
incorporating this information into the design concepts they are constructing, organizations can
continually innovate because they are not focusing on specific acts or strategies of reconfiguring
tools, which will produce weak concepts.
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Table 4: Construction What How Overview: A highly iterative and integrative process where teams deploy firm specific tools and procedures to expose the unique qualities of ideas, that when built upon, transform highly familiar ideas into genuinely novel concepts. Challenge: translating vague visions from the mind of the designer into a tangible form that can be interrogated, evaluated, and built upon to successively encourage the emergence of novel concepts.
Precedence: the practice of researching and identify exemplar raw creative material, which serves as the foundation upon which new ideas are built.
• Establishes reference points
within an existing body of ideas that serves as a starting point.
• Provides a foothold to gain traction and start experimenting.
• Provides material that serves as the initial foundation to build on.
Studies: serve as a platform upon which the inscriptions of tools are presented – enable teams to test ideas – exposing insights that are not immediately apparent, generating information where it did not exist before.
• Divergent and convergent
thinking to produce multiple iterations of an option.
• Successive development to expose new raw creative material within the same idea.
• Combining ideas from multiple iterations of a study to create entirely new options.
Iteration: the practice of successively translating ideas to exposes properties of ideas not immediately apparent to the designer until they are tested, providing new insights for future transformations.
• Rapid prototyping to accelerate
feedback on previously abstract ideas.
• High pace development to maintain design momentum.
• Fostering the emergence of ideas, not forcing them to appear in bounded moments.
Configuration: the firm specific use, emphasis, and ordering of tools, which enables studios to produce dramatically different concepts, despite having access to the same set of tools.
• The unique emphasis and ordering
of tools determines what properties of an idea are revealed and concealed through tests.
• The unique style of presenting information for review influences how designers think and act.
Outcome: Encourages an approach to constructing concepts that continually exposes the properties of ideas and is highly responsive to absorbing this new information in a way that is unique to a firm.
5 CONCLUSION
Don’t let reality get in the way…
- Principal, OAE
What could an office space be, if the desire is to transform the experience of those working in it?
What could a performance center be, if the ambition is to engage young adults by demystify the
end-to-end journey of theater productions? What could an international performing arts center
be, if the intention is to provide theater directors with unparalleled flexibility to perform in any
configuration imaginable? What could a commercial skyscraper be, if the goal is to flip the
prevailing economic model of commercial real estate on its head? What could a historical
building be, if the ambition is to break down the private-public divide between cities and
buildings? At OAE, design teams start explorations by asking what a project could be, rather
than what it is. In doing so, it challenges designers to venture into the unknown and construct
novel responses to these questions.
These explorations, which aim to meaningfully transform typologies, are not the kind with
known coordinates. The challenge facing design teams is not identifying and pursuing an optimal
route, but rather searching into the unknown, where an endpoint does not exist at the outset of
exploration. Yet in the projects discussed in this dissertation, exploration is not about discovery
in far off, uncharted territories. Each project is about discovering new ground within established
environments, where the introduction of new concepts, experiences, and ideas have the potential
to disrupt established ways of doing and thinking about things.
The need to continually identify new ground in existing territories is a fundamental challenge
facing most contemporary organizations. Unpredictable change, from multiple and often
unanticipated facets of society, require organizations to continually innovate to remain relevant
and survive under these conditions. Ford’s CEO’s statement, “we will not miss the future like
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Kodak,” made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas during the unveiling of the
company’s first fully autonomous Ford Fusion Hybrid car echoes this reality. Mark Fields
realized that Ford cannot rely exclusively on refining existing technologies, bringing them more
efficiently and cheaply to markets, to remain relevant. If Ford wants to exist in another ten years,
they need to continually innovate — starting by asking what the car could be? To answer this
question, Ford needs to venture into the unknown, creating new experiences and expectations to
address emerging behaviors and meanings attached to mobility.
5.1.1 RESOLVING THE PUZZLE: FINDING A BALANCE
To create the opportunities of the future, Ford and most other organizations, are challenged to
balance the scale between exploitation and exploration. Leveraging the knowledge and
experiences gained from the past, while remaining flexible enough to break out of established
rules, procedures, conventions, and schemas underpins the fundamental challenge facing most
for profit organizations. Ford’s CEO wasn’t being alarmist in his reference to Kodak. The demise
of many industry defining companies, like XEROX and Research In Motion, to name only a few,
can largely be attributed to the same problem: tipping the scale disproportionately towards
exploitation — neglecting to consider how the contexts within which consumers are enmeshed
are changing. By neglecting to explore, these organizations produce products and services that
don’t align with the emerging demands, behaviors, and expectations of consumers.
My research demonstrates that project-based organizations are optimally structured for
overcoming this challenge. Benefiting from the knowledge retaining attributes of formal
organizations, and the destabilizing qualities of temporary collectives, project-based
organizations have the structure to balance the twin tasks of exploitation and exploration. They
provide a conducive framework for learning between and unlearning within projects.
Yet their conducive form for balancing these opposing forces does not in itself explain how
creative project-based organizations, whose value and vitality are derived from consistently
generating novel concepts, can do so reliably and over time, without becoming predictable in
their output. Plenty of creative project-based organizations “self-plagiarize,” as the principal of
OAE aptly puts it, producing predictable and iterative solutions. This raises the question that
inspired my dissertation: how do creative project-based organizations consistently produce
innovative responses to the challenges they face?
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Returning to Peirce (1933), I find that to advance knowledge, we must free ourselves from
former perceptions and interpretations and from the false certainty of the past (see also Joas
1996:135). And instead, as Martin (2009:25) states, stare into a mystery to ask what could be, to
construct something new. Before discussing my findings with respect to the challenge of
continual innovation, I will first discuss why pursuing innovation matters in the first place. Then
I will remind the reader what exploration is, to demonstrate the impact mechanisms have on
explaining how knowledge is advanced by designers. Finally, in the last section, I bring this all
together, demonstrating how the work practices outlined in my dissertation are part of a
democratizing force within design that is positively shifting where designers are focusing their
disruptive capabilities.
5.2 WHO CARES: WHY DOES INNOVATION MATTER?
Why does identifying new ground in existing territories matter? The call to innovate has become
ubiquitous. Rarely, however, is a clear rational provided for pursuing novel concepts.
Consequently, innovation itself has become the goal, emptying it conceptually of the
mechanisms and approaches which meaningfully distinguish it from other strategies of action,
and most importantly, how the outcomes of these different lines of action vary.
In profit orientated markets, like the ones the creative project-based organizations that I
observed compete in, the most intuitive explanation for pursuing innovation is financial gains.
Yet as we have discovered, constructing novel concepts is a resource intensive enterprise with no
guarantee of attaining favorable financial returns. If making money was the primary motivation,
the designers I observed and spoke with would pursue different career paths within their
respective fields, where risks can be better calculated and financial returns are greater. As the
principal of a boutique architectural practice in New York City explains, “you can’t bill for all
the time you put into design because it would be insane, but you still need to do all that stuff to
generate ideas that we think are the best ideas.” The capital expenses to explore, simply stated,
diminish a firm’s gross margins, which in turn depresses wages and bonuses. I was constantly
told of friends and colleagues of designers who had moved to firms that produce predictable and
iterative work, and now make significantly higher income. They all relish in the thought of
making more money for a moment, before telling me: “but I wouldn’t do that.” Making money is
a necessary, but not sufficient explanation for why designers seek to innovate. Firms regarded for
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their innovative designs, who struggle to keep the lights on, yet receive hundreds of resumes a
year, is a stark reminder of this fact.
The designers I observed and interviewed are motivated by something far more profound
than simply making money. Their impetus to innovate is evident in the following statements:
Ultimately, it’s the purist of art forms because it is art that you actually have to use,
otherwise you are just making a sculpture, an oversized sculpture, that is self-indulgent. I
think you are contributing to society and that is ultimately our responsibility as a human race
that we think of things beyond just ourselves. So the work that we do, or the labor that we do,
goes towards that, but again you can still have that and do really boring buildings. So being
that I like creative things, I like breaking rules, I love not doing things that everyone else is
doing, architecture fits perfectly for me because it allows me an outlet to creatively express
myself but also have something where I can use that free association, or whatever it is, to
make a living and hopefully contribute something to the world. But in terms of what
architecture with a capital A is, I believe architecture is ultimately art that should be enjoyed,
that should provide pleasure, that should provide memory, because that is ultimately the
essence of the human experience.
Senior Designer, Architectural Practice, NYC
I think that it is fundamentally a social endeavor. I think that is what gives it cultural
consequence. At the end of the day, despite effort we put into the building, which is the
functional thing that people pay you to do, it is the social engagement through the process of
design, and obviously when the project is done, that is what to me makes it important, and
the consciousness of that. It is not just a consequence of what we do, we are very mindful of
that. The social engagement is what underlies what makes something meaningful.
Senior Designer, Architectural Practice, NYC
Contributing to society by positively enhancing the experiences of the those interacting with
their designs is a common response by designers to what drives them to innovate. This reflects
the pragmatist notion of “growth.”
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For Dewey (1988[1920]:181), troubling situations lay the groundwork for “growth,” which is
not an endpoint, but a process itself:
The process of growth, of improvement and progress, rather than the static outcome and
result, becomes the significant thing. Not health as an end fixed once and for all, but the
needed improvement in health — a continual process— is the end and good. The end is no
longer a terminus or limit to be reached. It is the active process of transforming the existent
situation. Not perfect as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing,
refining …
For the designers I spoke with, there is no pinnacle state of human experience to strive towards,
it is constantly evolving, requiring design typologies to grow, improve, and progress. The
designers I spoke with acknowledge that growth is an ever-enduring process that requires
constant perfecting, maturing, and refining. Put simple, what it means to engage society
positively through design is constantly changing. The emerging issue Snøhetta identified in
learning that the library of the future would need to address is emblematic of this. Snøhetta was
not merely iterating on existing ideas, but actively perfecting, maturing, and refining them as
new behaviors in learning have evolved from the technologies introduced into libraries in the
past. Had they simply copied existing ideas, they would not positively transform the experience
of library patrons, because they would not be addressing the emerging needs of the users. Adding
more computer terminals, by example, would not address the advancement in other technologies
that together are transforming the ecosystem of producing, consuming, and exchanging
information, how curriculums are being taught, and the world students are entering after
graduation. Designers can never stand still if they aim to remain relevant.
This ever-enduring process of growth, reflects Peirce’s (1931[1898]:589) notion of inquiry,
which is “not standing upon the bedrock of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and [one] can only say,
this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay till it begins to give way.” To
positively impact their users, design concepts need to be brought to life. This requires designers
to put a stake in the shifting ground and stand still. In the absence of doing so, design concepts
would never be executed, because they can always be perfected, matured, and refined as new
information is gathered. Yet in putting a stake in the ground, designers recognize that it is an
ephemeral state of stasis.
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For firms, recognizing that the incredible hard work and sacrifice that went into a design
reflects a moment in time, and not a concept that can be duplicated to achieve similar social
impact, is what keeps them relevant. It is also what drives them, despite tremendous uncertainty,
to continue to explore into the unknown. The impetus to innovate is better explained by their
desire to meet the emerging social contexts within which their designs will be experienced. If
done successfully, designers will have a hand in shaping these emerging social contexts. Like in
all the projects discussed throughout the previous chapters, the goal is not to reproduce existing
experiences, which would be the less risky move. The ambition for each project is to transform
how people engage with the typologies, with the ambition of meaningfully affecting how users
experience them, by addressing the projects’ perplexing conditions. Even after successfully
designing multiple transformative buildings within a typology, studios like OAE continue to
explore. They do this to understand how emerging changes throughout the social environment —
both from anticipated and unanticipated sources of change — will impact the various user
constituencies of the objects and services they design. Next, I discuss how this drive to innovate
is enabled within design studios.
5.3 FOUNDATIONS OF EXPLORATION: SEEING THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY
By encouraging freedom, creative project-based organizations enable designers to break out of
established rules, procedures, conventions, and schemes, which is the foundation for exploration.
This is necessary for innovation, because truly novel ideas are not waiting to be discovered in the
existing population of ideas. Unlike exploring for objects that are known in advance, like an
address or precious metal, searches for novel ideas are not guided by a defined set of criteria or a
predefined endpoint. Novel ideas must be constructed, which requires designers to venture into
the unknown.
Explorations of this nature, however, are not initiated unprovoked. It is only when design
teams are confronted with issues or situations where pre-existing solutions are deemed
ineffective that designers are compelled to find new solutions. Like in the case of the library of
the future on Ryerson University’s campus in Toronto, established solutions for organizing space
did not address the emerging needs of students. When faced with these situations, an opportunity
space presents itself to break away from how designers have approached these issues in the past.
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For this reason, these challenging situations become rife with opportunity. Yet the possibilities
for reimagining the inherent issues of a project are not limitless.
Designers are situated in contexts that not only frame how they see the challenges inherent in
a design, but also the alternative solutions that immediately spring to mind. Breaking out of these
webs of meaning is critical for designers to see the challenges they face in a different way. This
is fundamental for constructing solutions that previously did not exist in practice or imagination.
Breaking with previous approaches for resolving issues enables teams to productively unlearn
within a project. Rather than marginally iterating on existing approaches, which may only
address part of the challenge, complex design conditions require completely new approaches for
resolving them, due to the number of intervening factors that have changed. Snøhetta would not
have successfully created an integrated experience had they merely reimaged the spatial
organization of books and added more space for fixed computer terminals. The mass adoption of
e-learning tools is increasingly making hardcopy books obsolete. This is compounded by the fact
that highly mobile social learning platforms are bringing students together in ways previously
unanticipated by library designs of the past. To adequately address these new issues, the team at
Snøhetta has to construct an entirely new approach for designing a library that will enhance the
emerging requirements of social learning in a rapidly evolving digitized environment. Rather
than asking what a library is, they ask what it could be. Yet this is only possible by shifting how
the designers look at the core issues.
Shifting what designers attend to in their environment, enables them to see things that they
never saw before, even in extremely familiar environments that seem immutable. In doing so,
they are able to venture into the unknown, revealing ideas through the process of constructing
concepts that previously did not exist in practice or imagination. This is only possible, however,
by rejecting established ways of approaching issues. To do so, designers must engage with
unfamiliar ideas, whose value and utility is not immediately apparent. Through experimentation,
designers construct new ways of approaching the design challenges they are dealing with.
Experimenting with unfamiliar ideas and then identifying their potential value is a messy and
unpredictable process.
No matter how radically new, novel ideas are combinations and permutations of what came
before. It is the recombination, repurposing, and reshuffling of raw creative material that
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transforms it into something novel. In the absence of being able to rely on established rules,
procedures, conventions, schemes, and experiences, the process of transformation is messy and
unpredictable. Because like Peirce (1933) says, to advance knowledge, we must free ourselves
from former perceptions and interpretations, and from the false certainty of the past. This sense
of ambiguity is heightened by the fact that the raw creative material gathered from other domains
carries with it the contextual residue from which it is lifted. The meaning and value of this raw
creative material is therefore not immediately apparent, requiring designers to test it, interrogate
it, and manipulate it to identify how it can be deployed. It is this process of experimentation that
encourages the emergence of novel design concepts. Rather than appearing in bounded moments
of insights, like when dealing with familiar material that comes together in a comprehensible
assemblage, it is only through the interaction of designers, ideas, and contexts that novel
concepts emerge.
5.4 EXPLAINING CONSISTENT INNOVATION: MY FINDINGS
So, given this, what explains a creative project-based organization’s ability to consistently
innovate? Taking the tensions between learning between projects and unlearning within projects
seriously, I find that the organizational form of creative project-based firms is a necessary, but
not sufficient element to explain continual innovation. My case points to the criticality of
mechanisms, which are established from learning across projects, to enable unlearning within
projects — which is fundamental for innovation. Defined as predispositions to ways or modes of
responding, rather than to particular acts, mechanisms provide approaches for designers to move
forward when muddling through an issue when a sense of where they will end up does not yet
exist. This is accomplished by fostering practices that are high flexibility and adaptability to new
information, enabling teams to constantly change paths as new possibilities emerge. When honed
over time and across projects, teams have the confidence to venture into the unknown, where
information is unfamiliar and a direction is not established — trusting that their firm specific
approach will help them move forward. Despite representing predisposed ways or modes of
response, mechanisms are not static. The mechanisms I identify are dynamic, constantly
evolving and changing to absorb and address emerging way of responding to issues. By example,
a notable shift was taking place during my time in the field. With the introduction of augmented
and virtual reality technologies, designers are gaining access to new tools that are transforming
the ways that they gather, interpret, and represent the information of an emerging design. Studios
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will have to evolve how they construct concepts to realize the full impact that this technology
can have on exposing the properties of ideas, and, in turn, how designers see the emergence of
concepts.
To successfully venture into the unknown, three distinct areas of a creative project-based
organization’s approach rely on mechanisms for moving explorations forward, these include:
team coordination, exploration, and constructing novel concepts. In the following three sections I
will highlight how examining the production of innovation in creative-project based
organizations through mechanisms challenges existing theories of organizations and innovation.
Then, in the following section, I will explain how these mechanisms both enable and constrain
innovation within creative project-based organizations.
5.4.1 TEAM COORDINATION
One of the primary challenges of unlearning within a project is coordination. When teams are
tasked with pursuing novel concepts, how do you coordinate the future integration of yet to be
defined work of multiple individual efforts, without forcing predefined points of intersection?
This challenge is compounded by the fact that to successfully unlearn within a complex project,
team members need to produce work independently to introduce divergent thinking and integrate
their efforts collectively to produce a cohesive design concept. Simply put: how do teams work
collaboratively under conditions of uncertainty?
My research demonstrates that when mechanisms for coordination, which are learned across
projects, are sufficiently woven through the productive fabric of a creative project-based
organization, ready-to-use procedures for collaboration can be employed almost immediately
when a team is formed. Rather than emerging anew for each new project, my research
demonstrates that collaboration mechanisms structure the integration of independently produced
work that is not defined at the outset of an exploration. Contrary to existing research (see for
instance Jarzabkowski et al. 2012), I find that despite facing significant uncertainty, ready-to-use
procedures for elastic coordination are made available through work practices like mutual
monitoring, distributed intelligence, agility, and translation. This adds insights to existing
theories on organizations by highlighting the distinction that needs to be drawn between
temporary collectives and established organizations with respect to collaboration. In instances
when individuals work together for the first time, both organizationally and collectively,
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mechanisms to guide coordination will not be sufficiently established and ready to draw on. In
project-based organizations, however, mechanisms evolve, over time and across projects, to
establish ready-to-use practices for structuring collaboration, even if a team of designers has
never worked together.124
This leads to my second major finding with respect to mechanisms for structuring
collaboration: flexibility. Rather than being highly flexible, as existing research argues due to the
uncertainty and unpredictability of venturing into the unknown (Ching et al. 1992), I find that
collaboration mechanisms within the studios I conducted research with are relatively structured.
This was most evident when coordination mechanisms were not followed or breached by
unexpected methods for collaborating. This finding points to the fact that under conditions of
uncertainty, there is a stronger imperative for designers to enact established mechanisms for
coordination. Due to the high possibility of misalignment or complete disharmony when
designers individually produce work, teams cannot loosely coordinate how they will collectively
reintegrate. This does not imply that they are defining points of intersection at the outset of
exploration like work in organizations that is sequentially engineered that relies on specific acts.
Rather, they rely on practices known to successfully facilitate the integration, evaluation, and
future direction of work that is not defined at the outset of exploration. I find that this foundation
emboldens risk taking, experimentation, and free association, by being highly adaptable to the
context of discovery where information is yet to be defined and a sense of where the team is
going does not exist. Rather than eliminating hierarchy and structure within an organization, as
most popular management techniques suggest, firms need to establish practices for structuring
coordination. Principals need to develop, nurture, and most importantly constantly evolve them.
In the absence of this, flatter reporting structures, decentralized decision making, collaboration,
and a casual culture will lead to teams not being able to productively separate and then
reintegrate.
124 Interestingly, after years of analytic research at Google, a team of organizational psychologists, behaviorists, and sociologists came to a similar conclusion with respect to what makes some teams effective and others not. What they discovered was that certain norms, established across projects, enabled some teams to outperform others, all else being equal, except for the absence of these norms that facilitate high productivity (Duhigg 2016). Following an article published about this in the New York Times Sunday paper, many of the principals I interviewed asked me about it, and were curious what was going on within their own practices with respects to norms.
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5.4.2 EXPLORATION
Deciding what to produce and then identifying its potential value is another fundamental
challenge facings teams attempting to innovate. Without a defined solution at the outset, how do
you search for and then identify the value of unfamiliar ideas? Put another way, how do you
move forward explorations along the most promising path, when a sense of where the team will
end up only exists as a vague vision?
At OAE, and other design studios, I find when practices for moving explorations forward,
which are learned across projects, are sufficiently established within the practice, teams have the
confidence that they will be able to construct concepts that transform typologies — even when
they start with familiar ideas. Rather than striving towards defined solutions, my research
provides empirical organizational evidence for the pragmatist conceptualization of action as
continuous, where actors are embedded in streams of action. Faced with challenging situations,
like the ones that opened this chapter, the designers at OAE exemplify actors who hypothesize
“activities — means-to-ends — that might resolve the problem and make predictions about their
results … choosing a best course of action but constantly adjusting it upon receiving new
information about the actual effects of means chosen.”125 The principal at OAE, like those of
other highly acclaimed practices known for innovation and experimentation, refuses to start a
project with an a priori sense of the outcome. Napkin sketches that are enacted architecturally
are considered ridiculous, because they limit exploration before the team has even started. Like
the Medici, designers strive for robust action, in which a “single action can be interpreted
coherently from multiple perspectives simultaneously” (Padgett and Ansell 1993:1263). The
intention is that designers come back with unanticipated associations that they uncover in their
individual explorations, furthering an idea in the process. In other words, designs do not appear
in bounded moments of genius or inspiration.
I find, like McDonnell and his collaborators (2017:4) that “resonance helps identify lines of
action towards ends-in-view, potentially revising designers’ desires and imagining of potential
opportunity spaces to explore. Teams within creative project-based organizations, like OAE, are
constantly assessing new information as it is generated through explorations to determine what
125 Whitford 2002:345; see also Gross 2009:367; McDonnell et al 2017:4; Schön 1983.
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means to select and what direction to move in. As information becomes more resonant, new
paths open for exploration. Yet I find that producing as much information as possible is a
necessary, but not sufficient explanation for the emergence of novel concepts.
Lines of action will not resonate – or become apparent – in large amounts of data alone. A
sheer volume of ideas will not inherently provide the direction through which novel design
concepts will emerge. By example, there was sufficient information for the Landmark
competition, nevertheless a path for discovery did not emerge. I find that project specific
argument sequences are required to form the conceptual scaffolding to build concepts around and
move explorations into the unknown forward. I find that these scaffoldings enable teams to
quickly evaluate the value of unfamiliar and potentially contradictory ideas. My case shows that
this kind of approach enables teams to answer what could be questions, and then quickly
evaluate the worth and utility of the information, and, in turn, how to incorporate it. When the
argument sequence emerges along with the concept, I find it take designers from the highly
familiar, the starting point of exploration, to new territories, which come to define genuinely
novel concepts. It therefore moves designers from the familiar into the unknown. In the absence
of a project specific argument sequence, the required conceptual scaffolding will not be available
to build ideas around, challenging teams to move forward explorations from the familiar to the
highly unfamiliar.
These findings on search, further contribute to the distinction between temporary collectives,
formal, and project-based organizations. Within temporary collectives, where individuals are
working together collectively for the first time, mechanisms will not be sufficiently established
to predictably move explorations forward. When mechanisms are learned across projects, teams
can rely on them to break with taken-for-granted expectations and assumptions, even when they
start with very familiar ideas. Yet the discreet temporal nature of project-based organizations
ensures that mechanisms remain flexible and adaptive. Rather than turning into prescriptive acts,
which are used to successively iterate on existing knowledge, the practices I have identified
come to support an approach that is highly flexible and responsive to the incorporation of new
information. At OAE, like other highly innovative studios, multiple typologies are tackled
simultaneously. Teams, however, rely on the same set of mechanisms to move projects forward.
Members of the studio often work for four weeks on one typology and then transition to another,
yet are still expected to search into the unknown. Moving competition to competition
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necessitates that mechanisms focus on approaches to work rather than distinct acts, otherwise a
studio’s take on a performing arts center and commercial skyscraper will look oddly alike. At
OAE, and the practices with whom I conducted interviews, this is not the case. Each project is
distinct from the others.
Perhaps the most interesting finding from the section on search is that teams are continually
hypothesizing to successively construct concepts. Prevailing wisdom would suggest that teams
start with a hypothesis, gather the necessary information to vet an idea, and then execute it. The
designers I interviewed and observed started with research to establish a foundation — using
very familiar and well defined information — and then successively constructed hypothesis to
move away from familiar ideas towards solutions not foreseeable at the outset of exploration.
Like Joas (1996:135) finds, a hypothesis “if nurtured with loving care — as opposed to applying
force and determination — unfolds according to its own logic until it is finally ripe for testing.” I
find however, that the work practices of teams in creative project-based organizations, move
forward the unfolding of an idea and means selected along the way. Designers do not force the
construction of concepts, but they do not emerge in a vacuum either. By deploying highly
flexible approaches to moving forward explorations, I find innovative organizations are
encouraged to constantly ask small what could be questions, rather than all-encompassing what
is questions. This is critical for generating new information and then, with this information,
constantly reevaluating means selected and ends-in-view targeted, to construct concepts that
emerge organically. With this mindset, designers do not close off opportunity spaces at the
beginning of projects trying to define a terminal endpoint.
5.4.3 CONSTRUCTING NOVEL CONCEPTS
Another fundamental challenge facing teams venturing into the unknown is translating ideas
from the minds of designers into tangible representations that can be interrogated, evaluated, and
built upon. This challenge is heightened by the fact that truly novel concepts don’t exist in
current practice or imagination, posing the challenge: how do you construct concepts that
previously did not exist? Moreover, how do designers transform highly familiar ideas, into
genuinely novel concepts that disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions and expectations?
My research demonstrates that to successfully construct concepts in uncharted territory,
creative project-based organizations, like OAE, rely on approaches, which are learned across
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projects, that structure the deployment and use of tools within the studio. Like existing research,
I find empirical evidence for the fact that constructing ideas is not exclusively a mental activity,
it requires tangible representations that can be interrogated, evaluated, reshuffled, and most
importantly recombined to transform existing ideas into new and novel configurations. Similar to
the scientific labs Latour and Woolgar (1986) conducted research in, and the arbitrage trading
floors of Stark and Beunza (2002), I find that designers use tools to reveal information that is not
immediately apparent. This is underpinned by the fact that novel concepts by their very
definition do not exist in current practice or imagination waiting to be discovered — they need to
be constructed. At OAE, and other design studios where I conducted interviews, I find that
through the practices of conducting precedence research, compiling studies, iterating on ideas,
and following the firm specific configuration of tools, designers are continually exposing the
properties of ideas. This enables teams to quickly test ideas and gather feedback on an almost
moment-by-moment basis to understand what direction they are moving in and the potential
value of continuing down one path and not another.
My findings depart from existing research by providing evidence against claims that it is the
constant changing of tools and the procedures for employing them that leads to innovation.126 In
my case, I find the opposite: teams rely on practices learned across different projects, to move
their explorations into the unknown forward. When teams depart from established practices, like
in the case of the Metro Skyscraper and Landmark competitions, they are challenged to gather
the necessary information to successively advance ideas from the familiar into the unknown,
because gaps exist in the construction of concepts. When this is the case, novel concepts do not
emerge, because their unique qualities and properties are not understood, and, in turn, cannot be
coaxed out through successive rounds of refining concepts.
How the use of tools is structured provides further insights into the distinction between
temporary collectives and creative project-based organizations with respect to how continual
innovation is encouraged. When teams are working collectively and organizationally for the first
time, they must establish what tools and procedures are most effective for revealing the
spectrums of information they require to construct novel concepts. In the case of project-based
126 Latour and Woolgar 1986.
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organizations, practices learned across projects, which have proven successful in the past, can be
drawn on for new projects. Being deployed across diverse typologies provides evidence that they
structure an approach rather than a solution. The same approach, by example, was deployed for
the International Performing Arts Center, DC Premium Space, and Playful Performance Center
project, all of which varied in the first principles addressed to transform the typologies. In this
sense, rather than being structured to produce a single product, these practices are structured to
move the process of design forward by continually exposing and then incorporating new
information about an idea. I believe this distinction needs to be made when examining how tools
and the procedures for deploying them influence the continual innovation within organizations.
The explanatory burden carried by tools is therefore higher than is typically assumed, and cannot
be overlooked when assessing the production of innovation. My experience shows that many
organizations that embark on workforce transformations with the intention of becoming more
agile, collaborative, and innovative, overlook how tools contribute to constant innovation. When
this is the case, old habits resume, despite all the trappings of a highly agile, innovative
organization.
Perhaps the most unexpected finding is that the mechanisms for guiding innovation influence
the distinct signatures that are embodied in a studio’s design concepts. Although families and
generations of products rarely, if ever, exist in creative project-based organizations, there is still
a distinctive signature that ties a design to the studio. This provides evidence that the tools and
procedures for deploying them, in part leave a distinctive mark on the designs constructed.
Despite having access to all the same tools and knowledge for deploying them, the unique
procedures for using them imprints a distinct quality on the design concepts. The two studios in
Manhattan, whose work was diametrically opposed — one obsessed with symmetry and the
other imperfection — both have similar tools, however, each deploy them very differently. My
research suggests a studio’s unique signature can be in part attributed to the kinds of information
that is revealed — shaping what a designer sees in their explorations — and how that
information is synthesized and presented to the rest of the team to help constrain and set the
direction for successive explorations.127 This, in my opinion, suggests that greater emphasis
127 More research will have to be conducted on this specific aspect of a creative project-based organizations approach to constructing novel concepts.
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needs to be attributed to the way that ideas are interrogated, evaluated, reshuffled, and most
importantly recombined within organizations to explain innovation. Looking at ideation by itself
will only expose part of the story. Tools therefore need to be considered as active, rather than
passive elements in design, whose influence in constructing novel concepts cannot be
overlooked.128
5.4.4 A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD: ENABLING AND CONSTRAINING INNOVATION
The mechanisms discussed above are a double-edged sword. For creative project-based
organizations, like OAE and the other practices discussed throughout my dissertation, the work
practices that enable continual innovation — or unlearning within projects — also constrain
innovation. As constraining forces, the practices that collectively make up a firm’s unique
approach limit the kinds of innovation teams within this organizational typology are inclined to
achieve. The enabling and constraining facets of these mechanisms can be delineated across
three aspects of a practice’s approaches for team coordination, exploration, and construction of
novel concepts, including: dealing with uncertainty, producing concepts under pressure, and
identifying previously unidentified opportunities. I will explore these three aspects below.
The context of discovery is uncertain. Evolving primarily as practices for self-preservation,
creative project-based organizations are required to deal with uncertainty to successfully unlearn
within a project. Although innovation can never be guaranteed, like Leschziner (2015) finds with
elite chefs, predisposed ways of responding to situations can be developed that are more inclined
towards the production of typology disrupting concepts.
Yet to enable innovation, mechanisms must inherently bracket exploration to deal with
uncertainty. My research provides empirical evidence for the curvilinear relationship between
cognitive distance and resonance of unfamiliar ideas. “Resonance is most likely and likely
strongest,” McDonnell and his collaborators (2017:7-9) argue, “when the solution offered by the
object is neither too familiar nor too resistance to interpretation or extension.”129 I find teams
within creative project-based organizations limit uncertainty by not exploring in territories that
128 See Latour (2005) for a good discussion on Actor Network Theory. 129 de Vaan et al. (2015:1147), find “teams are most likely to be creatively successful when their cognitively heterogeneous groups have points of intersection.” When ideas are too resistant to interpretation, teams will not have common points of intersect and likely overlook the idea.
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are exceedingly resistant to interpretation. In Table 5, team avoid ideas in the bottom left
quadrant, which are highly resistant to interpretation and are unfamiliar. By example, teams
never venture into distant fields, where ideas would be exceedingly challenging to translate back.
Spaces where the value of raw creative materials is highly uncertain. Rather, they find a sweet
spot in the middle, never pushing too far outside the realm of being able to translate an idea back
to its intended context.
Figure 4: Dealing with Uncertainty
Bracketing in this sense is a strategy by designers that limits the degree of novelty generated.
I attribute this to the necessity of creative project-based organizations to predictably produce
novel solutions for the projects they take on. Venturing too far into the unknown, organizations
take on increasing risk that their attempts will fail because they will not be able to translate novel
ideas in ways that are accessible to intended audiences, or worse, themselves. This speaks to the
question of the difficulty to transform behaviors and expectations to embrace new concepts and
ideas. Convincing the theater consultant of the Playful Performance Center of the team’s
typology transforming concept is an example of this. The apprehension amongst the design team
on the Sunday afternoon in February when they presented the concept to the school’s committee
was largely due to this concern. If the theater consultant, who is exposed to new theater concepts
on a regular basis, is resistant, what would the reaction of the lay members of the committee be?
If the concept was too foreign and hard to demonstrate its positive impact on the design, they
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would have to redesign the entire building. Teams therefore consciously limit explorations to
reduce uncertainty.
One of the primary distinguishing factors of creative project-based organizations is the limited
duration of projects. To successfully develop a design concept within four to six weeks, and then
within five years, complete construction, mechanisms must emerge to produce concepts under
pressure.130 In the absence of these controls, firms are challenged to meet their contractual
deadliness and risk losing projects — a perilous position to be in when many studios live project
to project. The work practices that have emerged to address these constraints also limit the depth
of exploration a team can engage in.
Dewey (1998[1938]:172) states that perplexing situations “cannot be straightened out,
cleared up and put in order, by manipulation of our personal state of mind.” The restoration of an
integrated experience is only possible through “operations which actually modify existing
conditions.” My research demonstrates that to produce concepts under pressure, designers often
do not have the requisite time to think through issues or incubate ideas that are deeply nested
within larger systems of meaning. I find that this limits a team’s ability, within creative project-
based organizations, to modify existing conditions within which a concept is nested. Reverting to
what is more familiar and, in turn, manageable to produce within tight turnaround times, often
limits deep dives into concepts that require more time than allocated, to explore and identify their
potential value.
Introducing strategies of action that are not considered acceptable or even cognized as
possible lines of action in a field is, after all, not a simple task. As Stark (2009:4) states “the
process of innovation is paradoxical, for it involves a curious cognitive function of recognizing
what is not yet formulated as a category.131 My research supports this statement, and, in turn, the
fact that with limited time to think through issues, teams are inherently required to limit their
explorations to ensure they have sufficient time to translate independent efforts — or divergent
thinking — back to the team, to ensure cohesive reintegration of their individual pieces of work.
130 Four to six weeks is a standard timeline for a large architectural project. For other design firms the execution phase is much shorter, potentially only months. However, the concept design phase is proportionally smaller as well, in some instances giving designers only a week to come up with a concept. 131 see also Latour and Woolgar 1986.
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By example, in Table 6, ideas closest to the origin are avoided in favor of those slightly closer to
the middle where ideas are not too resistant to interpretation. Yet teams rarely explore for ideas
in the upper right quadrant, which are highly familiar. After failing to initially identify the
underlying issues of the Landmark competition, a challenge that has evaded most city planners
and architects, the team did not have time to continue searching deeper, they had to produce
something to meet the fast-approaching deadline. These deeper investigations are better
facilitated in organizational typologies that are premised on long-term research, like think-tanks
or research and development, where significantly more time can be allocated to the initial
discovery phase and then translating successive layers of meaning upon which these ideas
depend.
Figure 5: Dealing with Nested Issues
Creative project-based organizations, like OAE, are premised on producing novel responses to
their client’s requests. Evolving to meet the continual demand for innovation, mechanisms are
established within practices to assist in identifying previously unidentified opportunities. Despite
enabling teams to meet the demands of clients, and fulfill their organizational reputation for
producing innovative responses to issues, these mechanisms fundamentally dictate the kind of
innovation that can be pursued.
Identifying a concept within the first four to six weeks of a project, I find teams are limited to
conceptual innovation as illustrated in Table 7. This kind of innovation is described by Grant
(2016:109-110) as formulating a big idea at the outset and then executing it. Experimental
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innovation on the other hand emerges through trial and error, “learning and evolving as they go
along.” The latter of which typically takes a lot longer because innovations are based on years of
methodical investigation, allowing for greater flexibility in the concept as it passes through
different phases of development. Paradigm shifting innovations, like the computer microchip
described in Chapter 3, require incredible amounts of time to evolve.132 I find that this kind of
innovation is not possible within creative project-based organizations due to the necessity to
successfully lock in a design concept within a very limited period of time. Consequently, I find a
degree of path dependency creeps into projects, where ideas that challenge the concept are not
seriously taken into consideration after the initial concept phase is completed. With only four to
six weeks to generate a concept, teams do not have the time to engage in long-term methodical
investigation. They need to generate a vision within this timeframe, and then figure out how to
bring it to life.
Figure 6: Identifying Novel Concepts
132 Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators (2014) provides a great account of the amount of time and successive learning that was required to invent the microchip, whose transformative power can be found in almost every facet of our lives today. This is a radical innovation that could not have emerged under the constraints of a project-based organization.
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5.5 THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF DESIGN: ADDRESSING THE NEW DYNAMICS OF MARKETS
The rising power of small creative project-based organizations is critical in the democratization
of design. Firms with as few as 15 employees can transform billions of dollars in capital into
transformative buildings that reimagine how individuals experience space and interact with their
surroundings. Similarly, within industrial design, small collectives are introducing products and
services that reimagine how the things we interact with daily can meaningfully enhance our
experiences and the way we live our lives. No longer is this exclusively the territory of larger,
traditional organizations. Simply put, small is big and, more importantly, impactful.
Rather than having to focus on the broadest possible audience, smaller organizations can
serve previously overlooked groups of individuals and needs within society. Projects that don’t
make financial sense for traditional organizations to take on are now receiving significant
attention from creative project-based firms, whose flexibility enables them to take them on. With
this shift, has come a change in where the most ambitious and skilled designers work.
While writing this conclusion, I was serendipitously introduced to a young architect by a
friend one afternoon while sitting in Bryant Park. Her impressive background, working at some
of the most acclaimed studios around the world, is not particularly unusual. What impresses me
is the fact that she left a lucrative position to join a boutique practice in Manhattan so she could
design a public school in one of the most impoverished zip codes in the United States. An area
that has been overlooked for far too long, where progress has all but stopped. Projects like this,
which do not pay high commissions or carry with them the cultural cachets to attract press that
might lead to other high paying commissions, are often overlooked by larger design practices
who traditionally were the leaders of innovation. Consequently, these projects have been taken
on by firms who simply want to meet a demand within the market, taking the lowest possible risk
in doing so to ensure the highest possible returns. The soulless, prison like designs of schools,
public housing, and community centers are a stark reminder of this fact.
Yet as the two principals whose quotes opened this chapter make clear, it is social
engagement which makes design meaningful. When designers seek to address the fundamental
conditions and issues within an existing design typology, it has the possibility to enliven a
process of growth within the community it will serve. By asking what a school could be, what
175
subsidised housing could be, and what a community center could be, designers have an
opportunity to meaningfully transform a community by fundamentally reimagining how the
unique issues and conditions of a typology are addressed. Communities that for far too long have
been served by firms that simply want to meet a demand within the market, not considering how
the products and services they provide impact the communities for which they are intended.
The intuitive explanation for not meaningfully engaging with these projects is the meager
budgets allocated to them. Yet my research and the growing number of boutique design firms
successfully tackling these challenging projects points to the fact that it is in fact a lack of
exploration. Armed with approaches that enable small teams to explore for new ways of tackling
existing problems, teams can advance knowledge with the confidence that they will meet tight
deadlines and budgets. As firms refine the mechanisms that enable them to move explorations
into the unknown forward, they are becoming better equipped to successfully engage with
previously overlooked communities and needs. This is critical to providing bespoke designs that
stimulate growth in areas that, for the most part, have remained stagnant, or worse, regressed.
What this process of exploration empowers designers with, is what the pragmatist tradition refers
to as growth.
The process of growth is not exclusive to architecture and industrial design firms. The work
practices adopted by designers to advance knowledge by exploring into the unknown reflects a
different way of approaching troubling situations. It is at its core a different way of thinking
through issues. Rather than forcing these situations to fit with existing expectations and
experiences, the approaches I have identified enable individuals to advance knowledge to
embrace the ever-evolving conditions within which new solutions will be situated.
These approaches for encouraging growth by perfecting, maturing, and refining conditions,
can be employed by teams tackling challenges in almost every field where existing strategies of
action prove ineffective. I find that the highly flexible and responsive work practices explained
throughout my dissertation for unlearning within a project are shifting the dynamics of who has
power to meaningfully transform the objects and services we interact with daily, from larger
traditional organizations to smaller, more nimble and adaptive, project-based organizations.
These mechanisms are critical for enabling entrepreneurial teams, working with limited budgets
and resources, to meaningfully disrupt markets that previously were dominated by larger
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organizations, ones that are too large and slow to adapt to the rapidly shifting environments that
they aim to serve. Beyond providing consumers with more personalized products and services, I
think these practices will transform how we deliver critical services like disaster relief, which for
too long has been plagued by an organizational inability to respond quickly and think differently
about how they provide aid.
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Table 5: Features of Project-Based Organizational Typology Enabling Constraining
Dealing with Uncertainty: the context of discovery is uncertain, given that novel concepts do not exist in current practice or imagination.
• Generate unanticipated
associations by combining unfamiliar raw creative material in ways that do not conform to existing expectations, experiences, or taken-for-granted assumptions.
• Limit uncertainty by not exploring
in territories that are exceedingly resistance to interpretation, to predictably produce novel solutions for the projects firms take on.
• Venturing too far into the unknown, organizations take on increasing risk that their attempts will fail because they will not be able to translate novel ideas in ways that are accessible to intended audiences, or worse, themselves.
Producing Concepts Under Pressure: teams typically only have a short period of time, in architecture 4 -6 weeks, to develop a fully articulated design concept.
• Constantly tackling new design
challenges encourage learning, adaptability, and flexibility within the organization.
• Limits the practice of refining and iterating on existing ideas, forcing exploration and in turn finding new solutions.
• Limits the depth of exploration
teams engage in because designers often do not have the requisite time to think through issues or incubate ideas.
• With limited time to think through issues, teams are inherently required to limit their explorations to ensure they have sufficient time to translate unfamiliar ideas.
Identifying Previously Unidentified Opportunities: due to time constraints, teams are limited to conceptual innovation where big ideas are formulated at the outset and then executed.
• Practices emerge that encourage
teams to think conceptually, creating rough visions and then in bringing them to life, encourage unanticipated associations and ideas to emerge.
• Teams are limited to conceptual
innovation where big ideas are formulated at the outset and then executed.
• Experimental innovation, which relies on years of trial and error and experimentation is not possible.
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Methodological Appendix My dissertation is largely based on ethnographic research conducted at an architectural practice
located in New York City, between June 2015 and May 2016. To answer my main question, I
relied on participant observation, taking “part in the daily activities, rituals, interactions, and
events of” the people in the studio, to learn about the “explicit and tacit aspects of their life
routines and their culture” (DeWalt & DeWalt 2011:1). This allowed me to access the explicit
culture within and outside the practice, which consists of knowledge people can communicate
about with relative ease (DeWalt & DeWalt 2011:1; Spradley 1980:7). Yet despite being
explicit, aspects of studio life, such as explosive acts of conflict between members, were often
brushed aside or not brought up in interviews and casual conversations unless directly referenced
(see for instance Ager 1996). Participant observation also provided me with access to tacit
aspects of studio culture that largely exist outside the individuals’ awareness or consciousness,
which cannot be learned about through interviews or textual analysis (DeWalt & DeWalt 2011:2;
Zahle 2012; Jerolmack and Khan 2014). By example, subtle glances across workspaces and
negotiating meaning, which are part of habitual day-to-day practice, were often not immediately
obvious to research participants until discussed or pointed out (Desjarlais 1992; Desjarlais and
Throop 2011; Zahle 2012). It was only through my participation in the studio and the daily lives
of designers that these tacit and often uncomfortable aspects of explicit culture became apparent
to me (see for instance Musante 2015:254; Ho 2009).
Following Mailinowski’ approach to participant observation, my research focused on
everyday interactions and observations, rather than direct lines of inquiry into specific behaviors
(1967; see also Picchi 1992:144). I attempted as best as possible to move around the studio,
observing everything from the mundane to the exciting. By “being where the action is,” as
Bernard (1996:343) puts it, I collected many different types of qualitative data, including
narratives, documents, and expressions. Employing a decidedly qualitative approach, I focus on
the nature of the phenomena under consideration, not their magnitude or distribution. The latter
of which is best suited for assessing and quantifying the structural factors that lead to innovation
(see for instance Burt 2002; 2004; 2010; Leschziner 2015)
I cannot separate my analysis and “representation of the social reality” of the designers I
observed, from my “own experience in the world of these others” as Van Maanen argues
179
(2011:xiii; see also Emerson et al. 1995:8). To limit the extent to which my experiences and
assumptions would influence my observations, I selected an industry in which I had no prior
experience. Yet during my extended time at my field site and immersion into the social world of
designers outside of work, I inevitably became enculturated into the community (Schensul et al.
1999). Throughout my time at my field site, I always remained conscious of the fact that the
culture I was observing was only apparent to me through “conjecture, inference and a great deal
of faith (Van Maanen 2012:3; see also Wagner 1981). Moreover, I cannot underestimate the
impact of my presence on the social interactions I observed (Emerson et al. 1995). To mitigate
the effects of my presence I conducted extended participant observation, gaining acceptance as a
partial insider after a few months at my site (Musante 2015:265-271).
Using participant observation as a foundation (see for instance Ager 1996), I conducted
interviews with 25 designers. Drawing on the long interview form, which is distinctive in its
“sharply focused, rapid, [and] highly intensive” format (McCracken 1988:7), I added additional
depth to my understanding of the practices I observed at my field site. Following Leschziner
(2015), these interviews also played the role of control case, indicating whether the practices I
observed at my field site were idiosyncratic to the particular design studio, or are to be expected
give the types of explorations engaged by designers with similar ambitions to transform
typologies.
180
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