In my past life I made a lot of stuff. Big stuff. 400,000 square foot stuff that was all over Europe. As a former planner and architect, with several million square feet of buildings that grew out of the ground in places like Stockholm or Madrid, who is now sitting around writing frameworks on how other people need to make stuff, I find myself sometimes missing the old days where productivity was measured in tangible, physical stuff. And in my case, concrete, steel and wood. But, then maybe that is why I chose to come to Teague and to grapple with the challenges facing the aviation world.
You see, one of the cool parts of my job is that I am part of the group that works with Boeing. And you guessed it. They make pretty damn big stuff too. Complicated and gnarly stuff that at hundreds of thousands of pounds has to still go 5 to 7 miles miles up in the air while at the same time enable a flight attendant to deliver hot tea without it spilling on you. Combine these two situations, me the former architect and me the strategist, and the fact that I get to work with folks who build and test the latest and coolest plane interiors and you’ve got a pretty excited hombre.
I am also a grad from the Institute of Design at IIT (ID) in Chicago. It is a pretty cool school that is producing some really great thought pieces on design strategy and user-centered research. The ID is also investing heavily on the part of the process that requires making; they call it prototyping. A couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to spend some time at the school. For about a month prior I worked with Anijo Matthew, a professor at the school, on an event that would engage the students. As we threw some ideas around, we talked a lot about making things to learn. What became apparent was that Teague is really unique in what it does for Boeing. We are stocked with designers, electricians, model makers, carpenters and CNC operators that saw, route, cut and fasten foams, wood, steel and aluminum into impressive platforms to test our ideas. We design systems to quickly look at different options for cross-sections and features. And unlike your average consultancy that mostly works at a scale usually no larger than say a nurses station, we at Teague make and test at really big scales like entire airplanes.
In order to test and compare how that process compared with other design groups that make at scale we set up a panel discussion with a couple of other alumni. We brought in Lawrence Abrahamson from IDEO and Cindy Coleman from Gensler, so that the three of us could to talk and debate the topic of prototyping for spaces. The format was set up so that Lawrence and Cindy would talk about architecture and planning while I got to give the smack down from the airplane making point of view. As it turned out, we ended up with a packed house.
While we parried and debated that night we touched on topics like scale, time, money, and culture. As a panel we agreed that the topics of scale and time were seen traditionally as constraints that strained budgets and that the realities of schedules often cut out the ability to really test the spaces we were trying to create. With past realities cleanly out of way, the debate shifted. We were asked what was on the horizon for firms like ours. If there is the need to create more quickly, with more focus at real scale, what would that mean and how were our firms shifting their practices? Lawrence highlighted how his group was transferring their well-known practices of user-focused design in the product world to the built environment work they were doing, Cindy took us through how Gensler was practicing prototyping in both computer analysis software and the built environment, while I spoke on the issue of integration of research and design at a scale and volume necessary to be relevant in the aviation industry.
A key difference that emerged was that the work of my fellow panelists is often on one-off projects such as a set of hospital rooms or office spaces versus the mass produced airplane interior products that we design. That set up some interesting questions such as “Are there are fundamentals of thinking through making that cross over between the different industries?” and “What are the impacts of mass production on the need to test and make prior to manufacturing?” While I cannot say we came to consensus on all of the questions, I would say that I left the evening believing that design firms need to understand how and when to make big and at what fidelity and resolution are best at any given point in the process to get the right answers. I would also say that time and budgets are simply excuses if you really want to create solutions at scale that meet the needs of the users and the business models of your clients. Large scale environmental making that helps us learn has to develop into a norms of design just as user research and other design methods have become table stakes within the design process.
In the end, what was best about the evening’s event was the realization that while prototyping at scale is still relatively new, Teague represents the forefront of not just the idea of prototyping at scale, but of really making it happen. And we do it because it brings value to the process. Compared even to the most expensive buildings in the world, the square foot costs of an airplane dwarf any of them by huge factors. If we make a mistake, it is huge. Knowing and understanding through making is what enables us to design for the right reasons and test our presumptions.
Like a colleague recently said to me, Teague must “Know how to make things.” And dammit, we do.
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