In Search of Quality

Over the past 25 years, architects, engineers, builders, and fabricators have faced increasing demands to deliver more with fewer resources. As buildings become more complex, owners and stakeholders expect more space and amenities in less time, for less money, and with reduced labor. These mounting market pressures, both explicit and implicit, often compromise quality in its many forms—resilience, durability, craftsmanship, performance, aesthetics, sustainability, technical proficiency, and process.  

The design and build teams are both the creative force and the stewards of excellence in the built environment. If we genuinely believe that our buildings, structures, and spaces should enrich the human experience, how might we reestablish quality at the heart of the built environment?  

With significant challenges to tackle, along with emerging tools and evolving practice cultures, could cognitive computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced automation be the transformative catalysts we need to achieve a systemic recentering of quality and the human experience? If we look beyond automation, artificial intelligence's value in design and construction lies in its potential to enhance human capabilities. What new doors and possibilities does this open in our industry? 

Let’s take a different perspective from the usual design and construction space as we consider paths forward. For the last few years, author and professor Cal Newport has been shaping a critique of the modern knowledge workers’ notion of productivity and time spent on meaningful work. Though initially aimed at a broader audience, his insights are relevant to our industry and our question of quality. “Today, we're not nearly as comfortable with this most fundamental of activities. We talk a lot more about information — how we can get more of it, how we can spread it faster — than we do its processing. We see this in education systems built more around content than training the meta-activity of making sense of content.” (Cal Newport - In Defense Of Thinking – March 2021). In particular, the thesis in his new book, Slow Productivity, frames an inquiry, critique, and ultimate conclusions that are hard to imagine in architecture and design in our current frameworks yet compelling sketches when contemplating a future in which AI augments our work. 

First, we must understand what Newport calls "pseudo-productivity," which describes the pervasive busyness that often masquerades as productivity. In this modern era, knowledge workers tend to measure productivity by how busy they are, often without measurable outcomes like in traditional industrial-era labor. The variability of effort and the abstract nature of open-ended tasks make measuring knowledge workers' productivity challenging. The crude proxy of visible activity over useful effort leads to the overvaluation of seeing people working in the office and thus looking productive. This can drive frenetic days to be overloaded with a sense of pride in a packed schedule. This to-do list martyrdom sacrifices our innate desire for results that matter, often rushing important work to check more off the list. This slow drift in focus in company culture, and arguably as a society, should compel us to reevaluate the importance of quality over sheer energy. This is easier said than done, as no company or individual sets out to sacrifice quality for "pseudo-productivity." 

As Newport argues, we are at our best when working at a natural pace and maintaining focus for longer blocks of time, often the antithesis of the contemporary workplace with the river of emails, Slack messages, and meetings, breaking our concentration, our control over our time, and our ability to maximize our time in the 'flow state.' This more 'natural pace' he advocates for organizes a physical and cognitive framework for enhancing work quality by establishing sustainable rhythms (strategic breaks in our work throughout the day/week, sprinting at times, and avoiding constantly working at a frenetic pace) and seasonality (longer breaks every few months for dabbling in adjacent spaces, unstructured time and other pursuits for new insight and perspective when we return), yielding more creativity and thoughtful work.  

For Newport, the key to making ‘doing less’ and ‘working at a natural pace’ productive and not an adversarial relationship to work is an “obsession over quality.” Quality is the creative engine and driving force, and thus, slowing down is not about doing less or sacrificing output for well-being; it's about sacrificing overload for effectiveness and scattershot for intentionality. In other words, the often sloppy and frenetic is only an illusion of productivity. However, when we consider an approach of less with higher quality, the net benefit usually yields a more satisfying result.  

This balancing act of speed and quality is particularly acute in architecture and design. Our work requires frequent communication, collaboration, and individual focus time. We need unstructured time for exploration and discovery, as well as structured time for productivity and intensely focused work. We also often shift between these modes of thinking and making non-linearly. How might we redesign our relationship to time to prioritize quality in everything we do? 

The recentering of quality in our work lies in our pursuit of simplicity. As Bruce Lee famously said, "One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity." Our goal should be to remove distractions, noise, and inconsequential things so that we can work more deeply and profoundly. Reducing the noise allows us to see new patterns and opportunities as the signals become clear. While we have known this conceptually for some time, it has never felt like we could overcome the entropy of the status quo. 

This is where artificial intelligence presents a unique opportunity. This is a chance for systemic change, not just in terms of effective production but in expanding our capabilities and creating time for each of us to work differently. What if we could reduce the repetitive and tedious work in our day to allow us time to focus on what truly matters: greater care, intentionality, and mastery in our work? Our intuition tells us, along with Newport's research, to avoid the impulse to fill the vacuum of time created with more busy work, expanding our to-do list, or rushing off to the next problem to be solved. Instead, let us be intentional with this opportunity to increase our time to think, process, edit, and develop ideas to accomplish better work. 

The contemporary architect constantly juggles the emergence of unique yet familiar, but not quite the same, tasks that are simultaneously specific and generic. Imagine a future where architects and designers have a highly effective, seamlessly integrated AI support infrastructure. This would allow us to reorganize our time and expand our expertise, focusing on ideas and our work's creative, emerging, and unstructured aspects. At the same time, AI simplifies the more predictable and structured data and tasks prevalent in design. The critical part is the individual and collective agency for people to do more of what they want and less of what they don't, based on the project's specificity and context, our human critical thinking, and situational intelligence. 

In this reimagined future, our vision, empathy, and creativity are enhanced, not replaced, by AI. Instead of turning off our imagination because of generative AI, it becomes the catalyst that unlocks it. Combine this with the increasing lack of quality in the modern design and construction processes and their outcomes as pressure mounts to do more with less. To tackle these issues and to protect any time gained back, we must transform the timeline and economics of projects to allow the workflows to enable professionals to engage in more impactful work. This shift involves changing the fundamental calculus of WHAT we work on, HOW, and WHEN we work on it. By evolving our work culture, mindsets, and environments, we can capitalize on these emerging tools and methods to improve our quality of life and the quality of our built environment. 

Of course, this transformation will not be easy and will take time. After all, the volume of work, people and conversations, decisions, duration, the scale of the risks, the many unknowns, and the dynamic data that flow from design to construction suggest an impossibility for significant reorganization. It is more complicated in design and construction than in most industries, especially when we cannot see past today's organizational structures. 

However, the emerging changes swirling around us all make these seemingly impossible paradigm shifts more viable, in theory at least. Of course, the technology needs to be developed more so it is easily accessible, works fluidly in practice, and adapts to the variability, scale, and nuance of tasks in our profession. We know deploying consequential tools and methods without making cultural changes to leverage them is a waste of intellect and energy and can sink a company. To effectively move forward in a measured way, we must be proactive designers of our own workplace. We should use this time to imagine a culture and mindset with quality at the center, giving the time and space for the technology to be thoughtfully designed and integrated. 

This is why the beginner mindset is vital for architects, designers, and builders to embrace as we scrutinize our practices. It is also the distinct advantage people outside the AEC community have for finding ways to provide a better process, product, and possibly value. While we are still determining exactly how all this nascent change will manifest in the near and extended future, we must prevent the ‘hardware,’ ‘software,’ and their ‘features’ from leading the way. We cannot inherit a process designed by technology in search of a customer. We must remain human-centric, focusing on the quality of experience and places we create for people to improve their lives and let technology serve these goals. 

The search for quality in the age of AI is not just about adopting new technologies; it's about fundamentally rethinking how we work and what we value. At this time, we should be less concerned about the specificity and more concerned about the trajectory. In other words, be clear on the vision and loose on the details to ensure we aim in the right direction, aligning our resources, intellect, and grit with the flexibility to correct course as the technology develops. We should embrace our agency and our capacity as designers and builders of the future to shape our destiny. This is not a top-down or bottom-up endeavor but a collective effort that should leverage old and new thinking across intergenerational collaboration for an equitable impact on our professions. 

“This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way. We’ve become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.” Cal Newport - Slow Productivity - 2024)