DesignOutcome

Part 1.

A case for facility assessment and its applications to architecture

I start with two observations:

First:
I have observed that, an organization’s facilities are like a website. Sound bass-ackward in a post dot-com reality? I don’t think so. That’s because they both can and should be broken down and examined for usability - their responsiveness to the end user.

Second:
Architects are design professionals who struggle year after year among the same group of competitors, in the same commission races. Outside of some marginal competitive edges originating from differing design styles, and advances in building technology and materials (available to all competitors), there seems little in the way of business value differentiation among the firms. The lack of thought leadership of the value of business return attained through satisfying end user/customers is ‘weak sauce’ as we say in Houston, Texas.

How can this be?

Architects are trained as problems solvers to solve client problems. Yes, they do that, but perhaps they need to solve the client’s customer problems instead.

Firms, who specialize in a deeper understanding and including the client’s end user, tend to be engineering-based analysts, or architectural programming specialists, or marketing companies functioning as project consultants – for example, the ‘macro’ end of land planning that extends backwards toward architecture. For the ‘micro’ end of the scale, if you are a large retail chain you probably hire marketing analysts as part of your facility development team with architectural knowledge of the user environment to assist in store layouts. So, this is really a few and far between case.

What’s lacking?

Well, it’s in architecture, ‘the mother of the arts’. Architectural practitioners used to be holistic purveyors of the built space. They handled it all: site location and planning, the exterior, the interior, pretty much all the hold-it-up-and-cover-it-up stuff.

The most brilliant of these had keenly intuitive senses and composed from a holistic concept. They walked the site and could mentally sense people walking around and through the finished structure with them. They built the structure many times in their minds, trying to satisfy the user and those ghostly people providing them with inspiration. And this happened long before they organized a team of masons to begin the build. Then things got complicated and most practitioners decided specialization was required to provide adequate services at reasonable profit.

Enter the poor user/customer

Today’s enlightened marketeers have dragged ‘user/customers’ into the spotlight as ‘experts’ who know exactly what they want and need. This is fair and unfair. They may know what they want, and by extension, what they might commit money to, but probably don’t know the affects and impact of their desires. How does a purchase translate in a world of building materials to a ‘friendly shopping environment’? There are many interpretations, and some of them end up being right.

Parallel to this, and just as confused, building owners strive to meet the customers’ physical needs but have trouble translating them into facility needs. They go to architects for help.

As we saw in the 90’s many new virtual organizations sprung up around web sites with their products and services delivered electronically. The new physical product businesses were re-fitted to JIT inventory and delivery processes. In the brave new world of personally-delivered services, businesses organized around a facility that allows them to deliver specifically on a promise of service by providing the specialty technical and physical functions to do that. Fast service auto lubrication is one example.

Whoops wait just a second, there. Am I implying that there should also be direct user cause and affect connection from facility to the organization itself? Am I implying that business follows form?

Yes.

That's what originally happened for FedEx (different story now with Kinko's is joined at their hip). Isn’t that what happens for the fulfillment function of Amazon? Of course, so why shouldn’t this be the norm for service delivery businesses and their facilities in a face-to-face environment?

Here is a gap that needs filling. Architects should consider grabbing it before someone relegates them into an even smaller paradigm.