Interior Designers of Canada (IDC) is launching a new awards program this September called the Value of Design Awards (VODA). And for some reason they asked me to be one of their inaugural judges. I think the talented folks at figure3 had something to do with that. Link here.
What’s interesting about VODA is that many or most ID awards focus on design that simply looks cool. The ambition of this awards program is to recognize and celebrate the positive impact that Canadian design thinking has on people and businesses. In other words: How does it actually perform?
To submit your project to IDC’s Value of Design Awards, go here. The final entry deadline is June 8, 2018. So you don’t have much time left.
If any of you are in the business of creating – whether that’s a mobile app or a building – I’m sure you understand that the product or thing you’re working on will naturally evolve and change over time – probably in unexpected ways.
In fact, I usually take this as a positive sign. When I have my head in a project and I’m focused on solving problems, ideas will naturally start to flow. I start thinking of things that I never would have thought about at the outset. That’s why I generally think of creativity as a process, rather than as some divine gift.
But the challenge with all of this is that many of our existing business processes are not set up to deal with this kind of ambiguity. If anything we try and punish these sorts of deviations. If it wasn’t pre-meditated at the beginning of the project, we call it “scope creep” and charge extra for them as “change orders.” These two words equal death in construction.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I completely understand the realities of running a business and the importance of managing scope and resources. It’s a balancing act. Without some structure, nothing would get done.
But the more that iterative lean methodologies and “design thinking” can be embedded into our processes, the more value creation I believe we will see.
My thinking is as follows: At least part of the reason that innovation comes from startups and new market entrants is that the founders aren’t usually sitting around talking about defined scope and laying out elaborate business plans. They’re focused on creatively solving problems and doing whatever it takes to get there.
It’s also one of the reasons that conventional wisdom dictates that tech startups shouldn’t outsource development. It’s too core a competency and you can’t “move fast and break things” if you don’t have that in-house and you’re constantly worried about eye-popping invoices hitting your desk.
I have always seen lots of parallels between startups and architecture. In both of these worlds, the idea you start with is rarely what you end up with (at least that’s the case in architecture school). You research, learn, and iterate along the way and that leads you in new and unexpected ways.
I recently heard someone say, in a pejorative way, that all real estate developers think of what they build as “products.” I imagine this is in contrast to thinking in terms of buildings as spaces for people to live, raise a family, do their life’s work, and so on.
When I heard this I immediately thought to myself, yeah, we (or at least I) do think of our spaces as products. But I also didn’t see it as a negative thing.
In my view, there’s no reason that classifying something as a “product” has to make it any less beautiful, functional, and/or filled with design intent. My iPhone is a product. The wine on my shelf that somebody labored over is a product. The chair I’m sitting on right now is a product. All of these items were produced by people and then I consumed them because I liked what those people had made.
When I was completing my first master’s in architecture and real estate, I used to walk back and forth across campus between the design school and the business school. And in these two places, we talked about bricks-and-mortar in very different ways.
In the business school, buildings were the proverbial widget. How much does this widget cost to produce? How much can I sell or rent this widget for in the market? And how do I scale up my business so that I can sell/rent more widgets?
On the other hand, in the design school we weren’t all that concerned with the cost of the widget or even what people would pay for it. Instead we were concerned with making it something so much more than just a plain old widget. These weren’t buildings. This was capital “A”, Architecture.