From Doer to Overseer: The Evolving Nature of Architectural Work.
While most of the world has moved on, it often feels like architecture is playing catchup and I asked myself, what would an architecture company that has embraced automation and digitization look like?
Much of the work we do is very much dependent on human labour and skill. Labour which is expensive and hard to scale and skill that takes a long time to acquire and most of all is often incomplete.
Any given task, be it a feasibility study, planning or execution, is only complex due to the number of tasks which it entails. Broken down into smaller segments, mini-tasks, the work quickly loses this complexity and reaches a point where a non-skilled labourer could carry it out. Imagine a highly-skilled watchmaker tirelessly building a single watch compared to an assembly line of workers where a single worker is responsible for placing the hour-hand in the appropriate slot.
While it is easier to replace an assembly worker than a skilled watchmaker, the division of labour still does not entirely address the issue of scalability. If we could automate and digitize those previously described mini-tasks, we could get ourselves to a position, where no labourer is required, only a supervisor to oversee the execution of those tasks.
Besides the cost savings of reduced labour, such a mechanism would then allow for better scalability of the business. If there was a sudden influx of new projects there would be no need for a mad-dash of hiring and expanding the team, just an increase in computing power that would be seamlessly taken care by a cloud-computing provider. Whereas during a quieter period, fears regarding redundancy would be alleviated, because none of us would have jobs anyway.
I could envision a tech company that offers architectural solutions as a product, capable of scaling with demand without the bottleneck of human labour. And if not, what is the alternative?
Notion Planning Software (image generated by Dall-E)
In the spirit of the rambling above, we’ve shifted a large part of our planning to Notion, including the creation of an office Wikipedia, basically work manuals. The idea is simple: most of the tasks we perform are written down step by step, which helps us remember the less frequent ones, speeds up the process, and ensures consistency across the office.
It also makes it easier to share knowledge with fellow colleagues, rather than it being stuck with one person. The moral of the story, as mentioned earlier, is that once any big task is broken down into smaller steps, theoretically anyone could step in, follow the manual, and get the job done. Similarly, it sets out a blueprint for automating some of the simpler tasks – making me a bit redundant in the process! 😉