July 16, 2010 – Customers…and clients
The iterations of business sustainability subjects as the recession grinds on for architects and designers seem to be reaching, finally, that point of difficult decisions. So many firms in our area, and firms I have been associated with in the past, seem now to be confronting the need to restructure. Large firms, especially large architecture + engineering firms, grew to handle big projects for big clients. Most are now finding that the big projects are not materializing, and may not any time soon. Resources have been spent holding on to critical staff, and there is now no source for interim funding. Project opportunities with fees in six figures used to be avoided, but now are celebrated, cautiously, as big wins.
Our own agility has been helpful in gaining opportunity to discuss alternative paths to collaboration. It feels as if there is a move to p-time, as the necessity of alternative strategies opens up the professional space to more and multiple synchronous conversations.
Because of these collaborations, a couple of things this week had us reflecting on the differences between our profession’s approach to clients/customers and our clients’ approach to customers, wondering why there is such a difference and why clients don’t calibrate architects and designers to their philosophy.
Our clients have generally evolved to reflecting deeply on the experience that their customers have with their products and services. Architects and designers, however, despite claiming a dedication to long-term relationships, still call what they do “projects” and still measure their work by the acclaim given the physical place or space by peers.
In between the two, and perhaps the reason for the perpetuation of the abstraction, are the internal and external agents responsible for the selection of architects and designers and the delivery of their work to their constituents. In most cases, it appears, their metrics and their own approach to their “customers,” the people who will use the space, remains in the “push,” or control, mode of service delivery – “Here, use this space.”
As we’ve noted elsewhere, in between a business and its customers is this space where its people work. Overcoming culture and paradigms of practice to make the connection between purpose and place, never easy, seems more difficult in times of reduced resources, times when it seems the pursuit is more critical. We’ve reignited some thinking we’ve done about “creation spaces” in the past and are beginning to think about independent development as a means to prototype a model and prove our thinking.
