One in an occasional series
Shepley Bulfinch’s technology department manages tools and culture, with a goal of trying to create the intimate connection between ideas and how we communicate them as much as possible and have these very complex systems run in the background without the designer needing to worry or know about them. We want to be like electricity. Or rather, we want to be like paper and pencil.
The space in design between ideas and communicating them, filled with the casual and formal interplay of tools and culture, is the most interesting to me. People often say that digital technology (tool) has made the design process (culture) easier and more efficient. I would tend to disagree. What digital technology has done is allowed less people to create more complex buildings. In the past 50 years, building systems have risen to account for a much larger percentage of a project budget. More complex buildings and technologies have in turn called for more specialized team members. Where before a team would be composed of several draftsmen and a few designers, they are now a team of experts. As a result, our teams are hierarchically much flatter than before.
Prior to the use of computers in the design process, our tools were intimate; everybody knows how to draw a line on paper. It was collaborative; a group can set around the table and work on a design idea very easily. It was democratic; we all carried pens and pencils and the worked on everybody’s paper.
With computers, that intimate connection between ideas and communicating them now runs through a manifold, in the form of an IT department. Information Technology is different at Shepley than most places. To facilitate this, we have collectively been developing what we call a Shared Platform. This common, yet dynamic, set of tools (software, hardware and infrastructure) is bound with a set of processes communicated in dialogue with the whole of the firm.
Computers are the easy part. How we use them is the challenge.
- Steven Nutter
