Prototyping Practices — designing design.

How do we design our design practices?

Architecture and design exist in relation with cities, space, materials, society, yes -- but they also exist in relation to business models, organizational structure, communication practices, client relationships. If a business model influences its design practice, then sharing and speaking about this interrelationship could enable the imagining new forms of practices --crafting spaces, systems, interfaces. Can we critically engage with professional practice to give our profession agency over its mode of operation?

What is our relationship to the design of practices? What are our thoughts on financial models, contracts, collaborative methods, incentives, organizational structures, project management? Taxes, LLCs, pitching, finding clients? How can GSAPP take an engaged and meaningful stance within the innovation economy? As graduates from the same school with interests in constructing new practices, what things could we learn from each other? What educational components could enable academic pursuits to be turned into professional practices? What educational components could enable architects to design new kinds of architectural spaces and systems?

We’ve designed a workshop to begin to answer some of these questions together, and we’d like you to help us. We are holding a workshop prototype at the GSAPP Incubator on Tuesday July 24, 7 - 9 PM -- we’d like to invite you! The workshop will have a dozen participants, all GSAPP alumni. Conversation will be facilitated through a series of activities ranging from short presentations, group consultations, individual thinking and live-polls lasting 5 to 20 minutes.

Our goals for this session are to have conversations around practice that are supportive, curious, and helpful. The workshop is a preliminary session for a longer series currently being developed for the 2018-2019 academic year engaged in the same topic, but with a more durational relationship with alumni and current students.

If you can make it, please RSVP by emailing back and letting us know as soon as possible.

Please let us know if you have any questions!

- Dan Taeyoung and Val Lechêne

“There is a lot more to running a design practice than design” states Erin Reinholdt, licenced architect in Maine and author of ‘Architect Entrepreneur, a field guide to building, branding and marketing your startup design business’ (2015). “When opening your own business, you get fewer hours designing than ever before; [...] you must prioritize learning to be a business person over an architect.”

While it is true that design and business are typically distinct disciplines, the construction of new professional practices seems to present many opportunities for design, innovation and advancement. [further statement with an illustrative example] To further this proposition, the GSAPP Incubator is planning a two hour workshop gathering a small group of recent GSAPP alumni.