The Key to Client Education

By the time we’re adults it’s likely that many of us have interacted with a doctor, maybe an accountant, perhaps a lawyer, or at least we know someone who has. It’s equally unlikely that the general population has purchased or been involved with the services of a professional designer of any kind.  As a society we unfortunately have a limited frame of reference for how design happens or why it’s valuable.

When I was a graduate architecture student in the mid-1980’s I had the good fortune to serve as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate studio in a non-professional degree architecture program. The day before the students arrived for the first class the instructor gathered the assistants together and said something that has stayed with me for more than thirty years. “The students you will be teaching,” he said, “will likely never become architects. But they may very well become clients of architectural services and will benefit from having had this studio experience.” 

The wisdom of this statement changed my perspective on the potential for architectural education. We had (and still have) the unique opportunity to teach future clients – to give them an experience – so that their understanding of what we do and how we do it will elevate their ability to not only value our services but also productively engage with us throughout a project’s design and delivery.

One of the most effective examples of client education was produced by the design consultancy IDEO in 1999, the year I joined the firm. The ABC news program Nightline sent a film crew to the Palo Alto, CA office for a week to document for a mass audience how the multi-stage innovation process works. A fictitious project for reimaging the supermarket shopping cart (a product that hadn’t evolved since supermarkets appeared in the 1950’s) pulled back the curtain on an interdisciplinary group of designers, ethnographers, and engineers involved in collaborative problem solving. It became ABC News’s highest rated episode ever, the DVD sold millions, and it continues to be shown in major business programs and design schools around the world even today.

More importantly, it transformed the perception of IDEO as a vendor of design and engineering services to that of a trusted advisor to executives in every industry imaginable. Why? Because the process and the value delivered were made visible and compelling – much more compelling than the actual shopping cart artifact that was produced at the end of the episode. The program’s true achievement was not its design content but its influence and reach in telling a story about the entire creative journey.

To be an effective partner for your client requires an inclusive level of engagement that can start with such powerful storytelling – but it needs to go much further. As I recently wrote in arcCA (The AIA Journal of California), once they’ve engaged an architect a novice client can find themselves immersed in a whole series of complex and often unfamiliar decision-making activities.

The concept of a “client (or customer) journey” has gained momentum in the world of innovation to improve the service experience in a wide range of industries and it has applicability to the delivery of architectural services as well. Considering the entire experience from the client’s vantage point – from their awareness of what architects do to the process of selecting, enrolling, and engaging a firm – can reveal new ways to improve their understanding of, participation in, and value of their services. Architects should deliberately design those human interactions with the same care that they design the physical environment.