Built Environment Futures Council

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, start up advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today, we have a special panel discussion on the built environment features council and the integration of artificial intelligence into architecture and construction. The Built Environment Futures Council or BEFC is a multidisciplinary group of thought leaders working to advance the application of AI in the built environment. Our guests today are pivotal members who help drive this critical initiative, including its 2 cofounders.

A First, we have Randy Deutsch, FAIA, an architect, educator, and author. Randy has designed over a 100 sustainable projects and written 6 influential books, including Convergence and Think Like an Architect. He taught at UIC and UIUC, where he served as associate director for graduate studies until 2019. As a book author, international keynoter, workshop leader, administrator, mentor, and educator, Randy aims to help current and future design professionals understand impacts of emerging technology on future practice, to plan for and navigate a fast moving uncertain future with confidence. Next is Matthew Krystle, FAIA, and founder director of the design firm Creative Lab 3 in Philadelphia. Matthew cofounded the BEFC and began teaching at Carnegie Mellon's architecture graduate program in 2024. Before Creative Lab 3, he was a partner at KiranTimberlake, leading transformative projects like NYU's Paulson Center and the Cellophane House at MoMA. Rounding out our panel is Amanda Bridges, a licensed architect at Seal Studios, an adjunct lecturer at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

A Amanda has worked on projects with leading firms like SOM and Karen Timberlake. She focuses on equity, sustainability, and community building through her roles with the BEFC, NOMA, NAACP, and other organization. Amanda holds degrees from Harvard and Yale where she received BEFC's work integrating AI into architecture and the built environment. Let's dive in. So welcome to Practice Disrupted, Randy, Matt, and Amanda. Just to get everyone used to your voices, we always open with an icebreaker question. So is there anything not in your bio that can be completely unrelated to our topic that you might be interested in sharing with our listeners

B Yeah, I'll jump in right away. This is randy. Would say it's the fact that you evelyn have appeared in 1 third of my published books and I hadn't really thought through that or thought of that Prior to our talk today, But you know book writing is very much collaborative And I couldn't have written my books without the insights and efforts of those in the industry like yourself and You know, there's no question about that in any way I just really appreciate the fact that you've contributed as much in all the things you do, but also in helping move my career along.

A That was a very surprising answer. So thank you for that, Randy. I had no idea. Amanda or Matt, do you wanna jump in?

C I was going to say that I'm an avid runner, although I have not yet published any books like Randy. But I would say as an avid runner, I do sort of think of it as a way of seeing the world, a way of seeing buildings, experiencing the city. I currently live in San Francisco and participating in sort of our urban world or architecture in that way.

A How about you, Matt?

D That's great. I mean, I've always wished I was a runner. I just never really liked it. I always thought it's such a great way to, like, see places and do things.

A I'm a short distance runner. I feel like I top out at the the 5 k limit.

D But Yeah. I'll walk fast to, like, a coffee shop or something or on, like, on a city tour. But, I've never got into running. But but interesting enough, I also on the athletic strand. So I've been a hockey player for about half my life. And then the second half, now that I have kids and stuff, I've stopped. But I started when I was 4 years old and played all the way through college, the University of Buffalo. So it was a big part of my life.

D And then I coached the youth team in New York City in my twenties. And it was a big part of my life for a long time. And then it was one of those things where you get to a certain point in your career in time, you just flip a switch. And now I taught my daughter how to ice skate and do other things like that. But like Randy, you being in a third of his work, I was just thinking, like, wow, it's been about half my life. It was a really big part. And now I've moved on to other things. But some people are surprised that I played hockey at

A that level. So That's definitely never have come up

D in any of our conversations.

A I feel like I always learn something new when asking that question as well. So we brought you on, obviously, to talk about the built environment features council, and you 3 are part of the founding members of that council. Can you talk to us a little bit? Tell us what it is and who else is involved?

B Sure, so, you know a little bit of background in early very early 2023 I was being urged by my publisher and others to do an ai version of soup my book super users, and I put feelers out there, reached out to Matt, and Matt had some fantastic feedback. But, generally, the feedback I was getting was that people have post pandemic didn't need another book. They didn't wanna sit down, you know, read another book. And Matt had reached out to me a little bit after that and had a suggestion about starting this built environment futures council. We didn't have the name for it at that time, but it was a fantastic idea and This, you know, especially for me, I've written and published a book on collaboration And I think I'm the only person to do that in our field with only one name on the book cover You know where I actually didn't have a collaborator on the book, which is ridiculous. So any opportunity to have, work collaboratively with others within our industry to help move things forward, to work with the industry Not outside it for example Made a lot of sense and I was really excited by this. It really lit a fire man, and I spent, you know, the summer of 2023, you know, just planning the first workshops thinking about who we wanted involved He came up with amanda, for example, and he has a participant in a collaborator All this was huge. So while this doesn't beat the whole picture There are 15 of us total matt myself and 13 others we come from a variety of backgrounds It was really important to us that this was a national group to begin with if only for, as you even know on the podcast, you know just to get everybody, you know together at one time You're not in too many different time zones.

B It's a diverse group. It's multidisciplinary, which is really important to us. And so we have, you know, people from landscape, from technology, planning. I'm leaving out a number

D of Author's software, robotics. Exactly. Matt, why don't you continue? Yeah. I, that's the impetus. Thanks for setting that up, Randy, because I was thinking, Evelyn, for those of us who experienced the transition from like AutoCAD to BIM and the emergence of Rhino and then visual scripting. I was a young architect at that time, but in practice, and I witnessed just a and there's, you know, this is I think a lot of this is a unique perspective, but a lot of us saw, gosh, this amazing transition and shift that was then kind of deployed in a very kind of unfortunate way. There was a lot of kind of enthusiasm around goofy form making and rations, just kind of really vapid kind of use of this incredible tool. And so the chance here is I was just kinda reflecting on that.

D Boy, we're at this other precipice of something large and big. How can we actually help influence at a more national scale this transition? And my inclination is always to build a group. I I know I have my certain limitations. I know certain things I do well. My instinct is always go find some really smart people. So I pitched the loose idea to Randy. He I started talking and we put our notes together to find some people to essentially design a group that could function in a high level way. And the pitch we made, and surprisingly, everyone said yes, Randy.

D I think we got a 100% agreement. We basically wrote to folks and said, can you give us 6 months? We'll start in July. We'll run 5 workshops, 2 hours a month, you know, 1 workshop a month for 2 hours. And at the end of the year, we have no preconceptions of what we're gonna produce, what's gonna come out of it, or what the next steps are. But at the end of the year, we'll run a workshop on basically what do we wanna do next, and that's what we did up until December. Yeah. Amanda was definitely on my list. She and I worked together when I was at Kieran Timberlake, and I got to know her.

D I knew she was out west. She was teaching, doing all this amazing stuff, so she was certainly one of the first people we reached out to.

C Absolutely. And I appreciate that. I was very excited to join. So I think for me, one of the things that was exciting when Matt reached out and when Matt and Reddy first started talking about BEFC and a group where we could really talk about architecture, technology, AI, but also other forms of technology, other emerging technologies. For me, what was really exciting is that I think people so often are quick to jump to certain conclusions. So for example, to say, AI is gonna take all of our architecture jobs, or AI is going to look like this, or it already looks like this, and sort of understanding what that trajectory of possibilities can be. For me, it was really exciting to be in a group of people, of like minded people, discussing what those possibilities could be, what that trajectory could be, and how we see this technology being used while also valuing everywhere that it came from, this history of architecture in our field, and really understanding practice from a multi multidisciplinary viewpoint. So as as Matt and Randy said, really valuing the diverse range of skill sets and talent and experience in the group.

C For me, As Matt said, I teach undergraduate architecture at Berkeley at Stanford, but I also work in a small firm. And I do think as a youngish professional, it's very helpful to have a full range of perspectives from others who I consider mentors while discussing these topics.

A All talked a little bit about how the members of BEFC came together. And Amanda began to kind of allude to what the mission and vision is. Can you talk to us a little bit about the overall mission and vision? And then, you know, what really were these workshops that you ended up running? Yeah. I will

D say both Randy and I are inherent optimists. And when we first started talking from the beginning, it was important to us to orient the the the mindset and shift differently both in who we brought in, but also kind of set the tone for the conversations. There were so many people in the space talking about everything that was gonna go wrong. We wanted to simply create a group of could we talk about what's possibly could go right? So from the beginning, we set out, I'll read our mission statement specifically bsc is a national futures council to advance the discourse and opportunities for artificial intelligence and design and construction actionable leadership insight and foresight relevant to practice. So the other key thing that we set out was that relevant for practice. So the other observation, early 2023, a lot of people in the space were in purely academic spaces or kind of adjacent creative spaces. And so we felt that the need to not only bring the multidisciplinary component together we thought was unique, but really be able to orient any outcomes or questions we're asking specific to help people in practice. And that was what we thought at the national scale could be something we could actually give back, makes a futures council kind of outcome useful, and they can process that would actually be beneficial more broadly.

B Yeah. And picking up on what Matt's saying about positivity, it was really important. So in the summer of 2023, I had done an interview with a major media outlet on AI and the direction it was going in. But because no matter how they phrase the questions, they couldn't get anything negative out of me. They never published it. It just doesn't make for very good reading. You know, just like with novel writing, you don't wanna read about happy families and happy people. Similarly, in our field, that doesn't make for great media.

B So it was important that AI and the architecture engineering construction industry were seen as despite the inevitable challenges that we have, and we acknowledge those that we see it in a positive light. And, yes, there ultimately has to be actionable insights, and that's a challenge in its own right as well. But we see AI and I wanna speak for everybody as a personal assistant or trusted adviser that augments and uplifts what we do, and it makes you a better version of who you are. We often talk about it being, you know, adding, let's say, 20 to 30 points to, speak for myself, my IQ. But I would also say emotional intelligence, EQ, that it actually improves at 20 to 30 points. In the sense that when you bring disparate voices or different voices together, that is you know, you're constantly seeing things from a different point of view. But AI does that as well when it, you know, summarizes or when it, you know, provides an outline. Inevitably, one of the bullet points or one of the points it makes or 3 of the points it makes are from points of view that I had never considered.

B And so that actually improves, you know, my ability to think like others and communicate better. And, you know, for those reasons, I think this group was a perfect match for the challenges that we have ahead with this technology.

C I can jump in there as well. Actually, I was gonna say with Randy's comment about the capability of AI to actually expand our reach at times, that's one thing that's really critical or crucial for me in this discussion and in all discussions. I'm really excited about the fact that AI is a way to democratize our field and our processes, everything from internal processes to external processes, and we'll get probably in deeper into discussion about some of that. But I do think it's really exciting to think about ways that, traditionally, if you're looking at a sort of listed method or certain traditional ways of doing things, we actually become somewhat limited or restrained by those methods. And I actually see AI and technology as means of expanding our reach in some in many of those ways and diversifying and, again, democratizing architecture as a field. So I think that that's something that I'm always really excited about talking about and pushing forward and seeing where it'll take us.

A I wanna go back to a little bit, but a lot of the conversations that I am having or I'm hearing architects have around, you know, when they talk about AI, starts from the place that you started with Matt, and I think begins to open up as Randy and Amanda discussed. But it's this whole transition from AutoCAD to BIM and Rhino, and then scripting on top of that, and what we did. And for me, you know, that that was kind of an insular moment because that was tools that the industry, the AEC, and you can even throw in owners if that in there if you want. The AECO field was using. But AI is more transformative in the essence that it's impacting everyone and every industry no matter what they are doing. So what are ways that you ensure that you your group or the others can be thinking more broadly than adjusting another evolution of the tool.

B Yeah. I'll jump in here, and I see immediately what is happening in this group. So we have some in the group who are they're not curmudgeons, but they may not look at things as, positively all the time as Matt and myself.

D You always need a healthy skeptic in your group. When you design a group, you need a few healthy skeptics. Right? Right? That was part of the the alchemy of the group design. You know?

B Absolutely. And I think it's really important that we, at least I'm seeing this, I'm kinda zooming in and out of our workshops. I'm rethinking and, you know, the conversations that we have when we meet together. And I will go so far as to say, I haven't really discussed this with Matt, but there's been a lot of pressure for us to produce something, do something. You know, it's in our mission that will, you know, do something actionable. And I've watched other groups over the last 15 or 20 years get together and feel pressure to put out a book or conference or something like that. And I personally am hesitating because I see those as one offs and frequently the group just ends after they do that. So I actually see the work we're doing changing us.

B And I'm seeing it have an influence as the group members are then, you know, part of articles, substacks, blogs, podcasts and so on, panel discussions. I'm seeing their points of view changing. So I think this is a really good sign because as Matt and I have had discussions with venture capitalists and in my case with private equity firms in the hopes of trying to create something actionable out of the group. Until that day comes, I think we're having an influence on ourselves and then we are influencing you know, I'm a full time educator. So there's no question in my mind. The last 9 months of meeting with this group, BEFC has had a incredibly positive effect on my students, especially in classes like design and construction futures where every day we're talking about, you know, not just CAD and BIM, but the direction once they graduate in the coming weeks what they will experience

D Yeah, I'll add to that because I think couple of things that are really unique and just to build off Evelyn what you described. I think one of the big differences is, well, many of us now reflect back on that that early 2000 and feel a little unsatisfied with the the response by the industry by, again, being so punch drunk on the novelty of complex geometry and forcing complexity into projects when it was totally unnecessary, but just because we could. Right? And so I think we're seeing a much more and then you tie that with where we are culturally, people being much more attuned to some bigger social issues, cultural issues. I think people are feeling a sense of, hey, here's a chance something big is happening. Do I want to be a part of that? And do I want to embrace my agency to help shape that? And can we do something more than a kind of self fulfilling, you know, geometry based kind of response where we use the superpower to kind of build up an image as opposed to, let's say, higher quality or more meaningful work, which is the opportunity of any superpower that you gain as a designer, as a builder, whatever it is, as you begin to amplify your skills. So one of the things that's been unique to, tie this to what Randy was describing is because the way we've set this up, the thing that's been different is it's not a conference where you have a great conversation. Everyone splits up. It's not the fact that we meet monthly, we're actually building ideas.

D We're building trust amongst ourselves. We are developing concepts, but we're not creating a hot take oven where we just kind of after every meeting, we go out and scream from the top of the rooftop, here's the latest thing we just learned and heard. It is moving fast, and we're trying to be kind of meaningful with our our thoughts and gathering ourselves in a way that when we do start to engage more broadly, as Randy Randy said, each of us are teaching. Many of us are are obviously, working and practicing in different ways and capacities. So it's infiltrating our influence, our sphere of influence individually, but we're also being careful with, you know, broader publishing. And it's something I wanna talk to you hopefully later too about what could be some of those next steps that would have a really big impact. I'd love to hear some of your listeners' opinions about that too. But that is intentional slowness in something that's moving really fast so that there's a kind of thoughtfulness to it.

C Evelyn, I do think that's an awesome question. It's actually one of the reasons why I really like the title of your podcast, practice disrupted, because it's not practice incremental change again, small thing, small move here or there, which I do think we've all experienced and does tend to happen. It's an interesting challenge to try to predict what the biggest disruptor in architecture could, should, and will be. I do think one example for me was when I was in school and 3 d printing was new, and everyone said, students aren't gonna learn how to make model physical models anymore. They're gonna lose this as a core skill. Now 15 years later as an architecture studio instructor, trust me, students are fully making physical models. If I have any students listening, they know the pain of that and the time and effort required. And, yes, 3 d printing is a wonderful tool to have in the toolbox, but it's used in certain very specific targeted ways.

C And so that's one of those things where that BIM, of course, as everyone has said, and other things, we do sometimes anticipate a greater change or a greater disruption, and we have yet to see some of those really make as big of an impact as we're hoping. I do personally feel like right now we're seeing a wave that really does feel like it can create some larger change, positive change, some questionable things, I'm sure, positive change here. Another industry I actually look to as well, and I know you've discussed this on the podcast before, are things like the entertainment industry. So YouTube and social media really disrupted the entertainment industry in that it changed it from having to be always a top down approach from, say, major production companies or major players in that industry. And it allowed, again, a little bit more of a democratic approach or individuals to really promote themselves. And I think all of those that really was a major industry disruptor. When it was coming along at the time, I'm not sure if when YouTube was starting, we all saw that wave coming. But now, 25 years later or so, it's really evident that that really changed what we all see and how that industry works, which I think is really exciting.

C And so I do think right now, we're probably experiencing a similar kind of wave change in architecture, but only time will tell. And I think that it's sort of up to us also to push that forward and to make that change happen. I do think we're in need of some of that in our field.

B In building on that too, again, we're a multidisciplinary group with diverse voices, but we're also at the BEFC, all volunteers. So we're not representing our individual companies or firms or even schools. And I belong to 3 different futures councils, and I just wanna say that it was really important that this group was made up of tears. We're not self congratulatory. There's no, at least not at this point, any pay to play. You know, nobody is actually selling anything or moving anything. And for that reason, I think, as Matt is saying about building trust, this is all very much trust based. And, you know, number of us have all worked together, you know, as Matt has worked with Amanda, and I think that really makes a huge difference.

B So this slow intentionality is, challenging, but at the same time, I think in the long run, it's really going to pay off.

A Yeah. A part of me is just like, I get your slow intention, but a part of me is we need voices like the BEFC coming out and producing things to help guide everyone else who's also dealing with these questions, who I feel like they don't know who to talk to about these conversations, and they are thinking a little bit bigger. So I understand your slow intention, but I also want you guys to get out there and engage more in a way. Amanda, you mentioned the 3 d printing. I was just at Mississippi State for the first time, and there was definitely models everywhere. Wanna do all of that by hand. And then I was like, oh I wanna do all of that by hand. And then I was like, oh, I'm I'm now I'm one of those people, like the back of my day people.

A But, anyways, neither here nor there. I wanted to go a little bit deeper on the comment, Amanda, that you made around democratization and technology as a democratization tool, and what specifically that can do within architecture. Sam Altman, you know, came out earlier this year and said, you know, there's amongst his little group, there's a a bet to see who's gonna be the first sole proprietor or kind of single person unicorn company. And a unicorn company is a company that makes that they don't make 1,000,000,000. 1,000,000,000. Right? They're estimated to have a value of of 1,000,000,000, and that is because of AI. So what type of impact do you see that having in the profession of AUC? And can you go a little bit deeper when you talk about democratization and access to the tools or how we do business?

C Yes. Absolutely. So I do think there are a number of ways during our BEFC meetings, there are a number of ways we've discussed all of us envisioning technology and AI really having impacts on different aspects of our field, different parts of it, whether it's from the professional practice standpoint, the utilization standpoint, the design process, even post occupancy. So there's a number of things that we can get into, And I'm sure Matt and Randy will wanna discuss some of that as well. One example is that of the democratization, for example. So I work at a 20 person firm or so called Scheel Studios in San Francisco. We're an integrated design practice. And as a firm of that size, typically, when you're looking for, say, a contractor or a consultant or actually when clients are even looking for you, They find you through word-of-mouth or reference from a friend or some sort of referral or sometimes it's a dwell magazine advertisement, something like that.

C And those traditional means and methods of people finding one another, I actually find somewhat limited and somewhat limiting. I think that AI and technology really has the ability to open up new possibilities where one thing I said, for example, is that I could be looking for if I wanted to work with a female GC, maybe of a certain descent, if I'm working on a certain project or with a certain group. And I was like, I really would love to work with a female contractor on this project. And going about finding that, there could be an amazing female contractor with an incredible background, one town over. And if I don't find that person in my Google search or if I don't have someone who's worked with that know someone who's worked with that person in the past, finding them is might actually be not as straightforward as I think for anyone. And that goes for all kinds of things. And I do think that that ability of AI to actually connect dots and reach across the aisle, ways that we haven't even conceived of, is really exciting. And I do think that that really provides new capabilities to all of us.

C I would say the same goes for when you're hiring or looking for a new employee. A lot of us end up firms end up having many employees from the same schools or schools that the principals went to or senior architects such as myself. I do think it's really exciting to think of new ways for us to discover and find each other in practice. And so that to me is one example, but it's actually really more about professional practice and firm practice than the work itself. And so there are numerous examples, but I do think that's one that I'm particularly excited about, again, is sort of the ability to diversify our workplace and field and find new connections through the technology itself.

D Yeah. Parent pairing resources, people, communication, all of that has the opportunity to really and just, again, put us in connection with more people, make opportunities, whether you're physically in a place or not, the remote opportunities that get enhanced. The other thing I've been thinking about, Evelyn, is that there's a lot of people in architecture, engineering, and construction that were trained outside of a lot of these tools and in fact have never been able to actually engage them. They've always relied on a small subset of people in the office or in the field office to open the model, create a rendering, engage in three-dimensional thinking. For the first time, we're starting to see people who don't have that training now able to engage in computational practices that they never really could before because of natural language interfaces, just streamlining and simplifying. I think as an industry we are better when more people can operate three dimensionally. I think as an industry we're better when more people can communicate and and see what we're working towards and operate and experiment and explore in the same spaces that a privileged few who could always do the more complex tools as these things become more accessible, simpler, or at least aspects of it, facets of it become more available to more people to engage from the client side to the user side to just even the internal teams. I think that changes our capacity to deliver great work, manage budgets, timelines.

D So many things and decisions that have to happen and coincide. The more people that are all pulling in the same direction, able to engage in high quality information along the way without all the time to ask permission or get somebody to help you, That agency is important for doing great transformative work.

B And that's a huge point, which is really that there's a low bar to entry for the LLMs and other tools as Matt's saying. There's the lower learning curve. We don't go then, therefore, through the trough of disillusionment on the hype cycle. And because we have these diverse voices, we, you know, Matt just said with better work, richer work. But I am also seeing something happening in terms of UX. So I'm seeing a lot of the start ups right now going in that direction. They're realizing the advantage that these AI tools have in being accessible to everybody. It's really about access.

B And they are starting to come out with versions of the tools and work processes that they've been putting forward in ways that have really low bars to entry, which is huge. So we're gonna see more and more of that as a spin off from what we're experiencing right now.

C I do think, actually, if I could add one more point and sort of working off of what Matt and Randy said, Evelyn, one thing I also wanted to point out is that most of us don't have experience with architects or with architecture necessarily in our lives outside of we're we all, of course, do here in this on this podcast today, but most people so growing up, you know, I had never interacted with an architect or my parents didn't use an architect. I didn't know any architects. And most people, they grew up in a house, and they've never experienced that necessarily what that profession is or how it works exactly. And sometimes when people talk about AI replacing certain kinds of tasks, artificial narrow intelligence, for example, is what you call very task based certain task based artificial intelligence. And so to me, AI replacing some of that is different than generative AI replacing more of the architecture process. However, either way, if some of what architects currently do can be done through technology, I don't necessarily see that as a full job replacement for us. To me, it's actually really exciting to think about more people than having access to architects, if that makes sense. So if we actually don't have to have as large of a scope of work on every project, and our role is really specifically targeted towards helping clients ask the right questions or really certain understanding what their lifestyle is or understanding what their development project is and how we can cater design towards that.

C And then using other tools to, say, create a full permit drawing set from a 3 d model or make renderings. That, I would argue, actually frees us up to then possibly work with more clients or more people, and it could lower the barrier of entry or the bar of entry to something that's more affordable and more readily available for more people. And I don't see how that sort of is a is a hindrance. I actually see that as a great aspect of all of this that could then lead us to living in a better designed world.

A Matt, I I wanted to take what you said and break it down a little bit about accessibility to tools. And for me, an example of that, I would say, is is what Adobe has been doing with generative AI. And the fact that now, you know, before you had to have a really deep understanding of Photoshop to do some of the manipulation of how it works. And now, literally, you can, you know Yeah. Circle a spot in the photo and

D say Remove this.

A Drop in people here. Drop yeah. Move remove this or even drop in people here realistically with the shadows and effects. And I think I think that becomes, like, a more I I just wanted to give a more crisp example of how what you're saying is is being utilized at a variety of different scales. So some of those, the people that aren't necessarily in front of the computer all the time can begin to think, oh, I can I can do things with these these tools?

D Yeah. Or the the capacity of someone who may not have been able to express themselves three dimensionally or through a rendering or through a model in the past now have an opportunity to express themselves visually, which is a big part of the toolkit that designers and builders use to communicate is being able to operate three dimensionally in a simulated world. That's we all as architects, we live in the future. Our entire profession is years out ahead. Right? Everything's a simulation that we're operating in and designing in, and we're trying to bring people into that space and communicate, get them excited, understand what we're working towards, help solve complex problems in that space. So the more of that becomes, I think, easier and more accessible people can engage. I mean, it's fascinating because I do think this is where, you know, Amanda, what you just brought up is there are some of these, like, ethical things we've been wrestling with in the group. And what Amanda just described is one of these things is what do we do with more time? If we have tools that start to create more space and time for us, how do we wanna use it? And, you know, to go back to some of our earlier experiences again, when I was able to suddenly do 5 renderings in the time it took me one rendering, 10 years ago, as the tools got better, the hardware and software got better.

D I didn't use that time to then typically make better drawings and coordinate the specs. I just made more renderings. Right? So we've in the past, we've used the time we gain, the efficiencies, the productivities, for all the critiques we get about the lack of productivity in designing construction. Some of it were real productive gains where we filled the vacuum with just more and more and more and more and more. Sometimes it may probably made better buildings. You got to see more options. You got to see it from a different angle. Sometimes we just created more busy work for ourselves.

D I'm not sure it created more a better building. But we do know it created other challenges. Professional burnout. We have challenges of work life. We have other aspects in the profession that, again, are we gonna fill this vacuum with busy work? As we replace some tasks, we let go of some things, we gain time, are we gonna just continue to fill it with the way we used to do things? Or are we gonna actually be able to step back and say, hey. I can now experiment with something I couldn't do before, or I can do something different. We manage, or we could work on another project. We could do a pro bono thing that we never had time to do.

D It does create opportunity, and it comes back to actually a very human condition, which is what's what are the choices people are gonna make? So for all the fear of what the robots are gonna do without our input, I also worry about what are people gonna do when they have a human choice and an ethical choice of what to do with their time and resources, how they want to align it, and what challenges you want to advance.

A So Randy, throughout the trough of disillusionment on the hype cycle. And I think, you know, some of our listeners might not understand what that trough of disillusionment is and the hype cycle. But I would love to hear your thoughts on on that and kind of the adaptation that this profession has taken with technology. We kind of alluded to this overuse, but I think there's this also, you know, we are I don't consider architects for the most part as an industry first movers, and what does that mean for adoption of this technology?

B Yeah. So just referring to the hype cycle in the real big picture, I think anytime you learn something, even learning how to ride a bike, You're excited at the beginning. You have adrenaline going for you. You have a task at hand that you want to accomplish and Inevitably after a little while you learn that learning itself is hard. All 3 of us are academics and, you know, we see it in our students. I'll speak for myself. I see my students all the time. Things are exciting at the beginning, and then they get a little tough.

B And so do we have the resilience? Do we have the wherewithal to get through this desert, this, you know, time period after the initial excitement to gradually then build on what we had? Habits, of course, take 3, 4, 5 weeks, sometimes longer to go into effect doing things over and over again. And we're discouraged by the world we live in where we have immediate gratification and lots of distractions at the same time that we don't stick with what we do. I personally feel like, sure, Amanda and Matt are tired of hearing me say this. But, you know, as Matt was just saying about one of the uses or advantages of AI is that it is a time saving tool, and we have this opportunity to for our students to address mental health and for our students as well as for emerging professionals and all practitioners, address work life integration. And that is one of the choices we can make, you know, with our time and energy. Amanda and Matt are both in smaller firms, And it makes sense to pour it back into the company to continue to see it grow But for a lot of practitioners, I know myself 20 years ago I can't get back that time that I did not spend with my children when I was putting in 80 or 100 hour weeks And if I had that opportunity today, I'd rather spend it with my family with people take you know self care than, with some of the things the projects that didn't move forward or that 5th or 6th rendering that nobody necessarily needed or asked for. So I think it's important that we learn and continue to learn and grow. And so these tools, LLMs, and others don't have that kind of learning curve.

B Yeah. Can you spend a lot of time learning how to engineer a better prompt? Sure. But even the tools are, you know, they they know what we're asking. And even Google does this, and it throws back at you. Is this what you meant? So I think we don't have as much of a learning curve, currently as we did with previous generations of tools like BIM and CAT.

C I wanna just jump in. I was gonna say when you said how do we really push some of this forward into the the industry or into our realm is some of what I was hearing. And for me, it's definitely looking to the young people and to the younger generation, Gen z. I mean, when if you can imagine that if you're using these tools while you're in school, while you're in studio as part of your process, some people are against that, some people are for. To me, I see it as a sort of wave that's coming and gonna happen, so it's fighting the wave, to put it in California terms, feels a bit unhelpful or and it just feels inevitable to me. So I do think seeing it in studio and then schools as part of a larger toolbox. So whether it's hand drawing, Rhino, Revit, BIM, other all kinds of software programs, all kinds of 3 d modeling, all kinds of Adobe Creative Suite software, all of these things. I do see AI tools as another tool in the toolbox that we can teach students to use with in their process.

C I find Studio very process based learning rather than results based learning. And I do think that as they use that, they will enter the workplace and demand or request or push forward push some of this technology in into it and through it. I've we've seen that again with, I'd say, 3 d printing, even recently with tools like Miro or whiteboarding that students used during the pandemic. We've seen that enter workplaces more frequently. And so I do think that like with many things, I certainly envision them really, really bringing these things forth in a new way into practice.

A Yeah. I'm really excited about all the prospects that this new technology brings. We I think we all know as people who have tried to implement technology in firms at a variety of different scales to that. It's a specific type of mindset switch that we also have to make in order to make things happen. Right? The tools are only as good and as effective as how many people in the firm actually adopts them and uses them. And whether or not there's even and you can go deeper into whether or not there's even processes and policies of whether whether you use them in a in a very similar way, or or people are approaching and using these tools in different parts of the design process itself. I think, you know and then, Randy, you began to talk about that this mindset shift. And, Amanda, you're talking about gen Gen Z.

A And I am so hopeful for the generation coming out of architecture. But I'm also worried about historically, kind of, the the gatekeeping that we do around giving younger individuals access to projects and a voice within just in firms generally. So what do you all see as, kind of, the biggest mindset shifts or changes that firm leaders can be aware of themselves having. That they need to, kind of, keep top of mind when it comes to exploring a greater curiosity around these tools and and this implementation.

D Yeah. I'm I'm happy to start. I mean, this is I mean, first, we all need to acknowledge it's still extremely nascent. It's still emerging. It's gonna be bumpy. There's gonna be a lot of stops starts some things that work some things that don't work They are all mostly oriented really well as kind of task oriented Tools at first it's kind of easy. You can you can sense the kind of improvements. This is easy This kind of this helps to the first kind of mindset is being able to shift from a task oriented mindset to a more growth mindset as this as these evolve.

D But one of the things I've been thinking kind of specific to architecture and the kind of the history of, let's say, where form comes from. And what we're seeing with all these kind of image generation tools, we're seeing creation of form from seemingly nothing. Right? It's not rooted in research, historical, mathematical qualities, environmental response, the kind of things that you've typically learned in school, the things you're executing in practice, studying sites, studying people, studying program, right, where people generating form essentially from nothing. Right? It's just scraped off the Internet, combined in some new way. And wow at first it's kind of exciting At one level as as randy said it can be an interesting prompt to just shake up a certain mindset in the view But this really, you know, this is something Architecture and certainly the way people are trained and certain most people are typically offering that status quo operation You know, there's historical values that have always kind of grounded form creation to people, place, and purpose. It gives it layers of meaning, intelligence, kind of adding a richness to our constructed environments that can feel missing from when form arrives in a very different way. Right? So these are some of the things I think we are wrestling with, which is if it's that big of a disruption in terms of something so fundamental to architecture, Being open minded, kicking the tires, developing these out, I'm excited by that change in workflow. I'm also concerned and worried because, again, I've also seen much like we reflected, you know, 20 years ago, when you become so seduced by the imagery, does it actually become kind of empty, and you lose an opportunity to to think about it differently? So one of the things is while I'm excited to shake up the workflows, I also wanna challenge people to think bigger, be more ambitious, don't get so seduced by by the imagery, Don't give up the criticality that architects bring, the questions you need to ask, how we actually give value to form.

D Don't be so seduced that that ease and speed that comes so easily and is overvalued. We don't want that become so overvalued in the creative flow. So how it changes, how we work, how we think about where form comes from and shapes the world, we wanna be open minded to these, but we also all have to bring those value. You know, what do we learn through all this that can help shape younger generation? We're starting with this new tool set to not lose some of those things about criticality and and giving real meaning to form.

B I have 2 responses based on the audience. So for the emerging generation, Gen z's, those you know, just just to be clear, those born 1995 and after, they already naturally respond. They're not learning from me, their instructor, almost ever. They're checking in with each other and getting responses to questions. Even when I do a pop quiz, it seems like they check-in with each other. So their responses are crowdsourced, participatory. They're looking to add value. And I love this, the fact that our clients, our team leaders, everybody is already trained by AI to answer the question.

B Have you considered? Have you know, you're looking for this, so these are your preferences in the past. So if you consider this, this, and this, and I am seeing because I do require my undergrads and grads to both work with ai in their essays and work that they do that they're they're working that same way Have you considered and so on and then the second group would be the current leaders, you know, the rising generation beyond Gen z's. And when at the risk of, you know, offering platitudes, I would recommend that they be or remain open, and they question everything, and they don't believe the hype. So, again, the media inevitably has these headlines that they take back later, and the headlines are frequently that your job is gonna go away and so on, not to buy into all of that. So don't panic. Don't get anxious. Even if it's something along the lines of AI currently hallucinates, well, it's improving incredibly well. What got me on this bandwagon real quickly is listening to Sam Altman two and a half years ago on a podcast where he was asked point blank when is the chatbot gonna come out for OpenAI? And he predicted by the end of the decade and 9 months later, we saw a chatbot and I'm thinking very quickly We're not going to see, gpt10 in the coming weeks But by the end of the year, he's saying we're going to see a next generation irrespective of what's going to be called and that probably means even sooner and So we should be looking to other markets and sectors for addressing how they are working with ai And if I can make a recommendation to your listeners, I would just start with economists because economists aren't just business business minded in market minded.

B It's a liberal arts in the university economics. And so they're thinking like everybody. And so look for ways to contribute, plan for things moving and advancing faster than you would expect, but think holistically as well and be inspired by other sectors We frequently are not the leaders the ac industry as you point out evelyn But there's no reason we should continue to trail given, the world we live in

A You guys have been creating these really great segues as we've gathered around these this conversation today. I wanna push it a little bit more. I think, Randy, you were talking a little bit earlier about, like, like, user. And I think, in general, we've been talking about user adoption of this new technology. At what point because I see new players in the field creating tools that, eventually, architects will be using, that go beyond Photoshop. Right? There's there's other players that are actually could potentially compete with tools like Autodesk. So at what point and how should we be inserting ourselves in the driver's seat so that we can be active in the voice of the creation of tools that we might ultimately end up using?

D So Randy and I gave a presentation of the early stages of the BFC at the architects newspaper, AEC TIC conference in New York in October. And interestingly enough, at the end, several startups raised their hands and said, hey, how can we get more architects involved in helping us shape these tools? It turns out a lot of folks actually making the tools have little or sometimes they have 1 or 2 people, but oftentimes there's more people with less knowledge about architecture than you you might might imagine. I think we really need to embrace our agency. I mean, one of the key takeaways I've been learning through our our time together is that sense of agency that we actually have, and we can't just sit back and wait for things to come to us. I think we're gonna be a little unsatisfied. And that's typically been the the approach. You know, we're a consumer, and you wait till a product comes out. And then if you like it, you buy it.

D A lot of people are looking for more input, So you can get on these beta tests. You can get involved in ways that can help shape the trajectories of some of the tools. So embrace that agency. If you're an architect and engineer builder, start getting involved. But at the same time, we can't just be so focused on tools and forget people. Culture, people are critical to tool implementation, to big disruptions, to managing, you know, the kind of things that we're trying to do and and elevate our ambitions. So you have to be working on the culture, the process, your workflows, your internal mechanisms, how you work, the question you asked earlier, Evelyn, just, you know, to follow back up with all those kind of things that we are in complete control of. We get to shape that each company, each individual.

D Each individual gets to define their relationship to technology, your continuous learning path, things that you take on. Just because your practice isn't using it doesn't mean you can't explore and create a sandbox for yourself and advance yourself. You can bring those into your culture of the practice that you're in and help shape that and guide that. So the big thing I would say is is embrace your your agency and help shape the tools, help shape the culture, help shape the people yourself and your team around you.

C I completely agree with everything Matt just said. I do think architecture and the AEC industry as a whole sometimes suffers from a bit being a bit of a closed system. Living here in San Francisco, I do think being surrounded by so many industries that are talking about overlapping and disruption through collaboration actually and branching out, reaching out beyond themselves. I do think architecture sometimes can feel a bit siloed. And I do also think sometimes we are taught whether it's in school or from more traditional methods, but you're taught to do the research yourself, conceive of the project yourself, figure out how it's gonna be made yourself. And there are, for example, working on some work, with a committee with the NAACP, we've talked about the fact that, hey, there are experts in in community organization, and there are experts in some of this program building for urban scale projects. There are people who know these communities, or there are people who know this group of people better than we do. We don't have to do all of the work from the ground up all the time.

C And I do think that technology in architecture has sometimes worked similarly where we think, oh, nobody understands us. We're architects. It's so different. No. Our industry is so different than everything else. And it ends in many way in some ways, it isn't, and other ways, it isn't. And I really do think that there are so many opportunities for us to reach out and, again, reach across the aisle and understand how other processes and other technologies and other things that are out there can be applicable to us and are applicable to us and how we can, as Matt said, really drive their not only conception, but development by participating in those processes and by making ourselves a little bit more seen and heard as an industry.

B I teach all these technologies over a 100 different technologies in my courses and one of our superpowers as architects and others in the industry is to this ability to zoom in and zoom out to see the big picture and connect the dots. So I encourage my students, while they are still students and not competitors working at competing firms to reach out to tech CEOs and presidents and others, tech creators in in our industry. And frequently they will meet with them for hours at a time and share with them their vision of where these things are headed and it's really beautiful to not only see that but then connect the dots when they hear from each other the students hear from each other where things are headed and they can start to predict the future the second part of this is in 2019, I went out to Australia on a speaking tour. And when I was there, I met with aitech influencers and creators and heads of tech start ups. And in the Q1 of 2019, it was looking like almost every tech start up was expecting the owner to be the one to use the tools in our field. And and so the the tools were being geared towards the owner. By the Q2 of 2019, not a single one of these tech startups wanted, you know He had a had his tech startup where the owner was even interested in getting involved and you know You could spend a lot of time parsing that and trying to understand what's behind that decision, but it happened all at the same time So there's a lot of fear that a lot of these tools are geared towards owners and clients and the reality is is there's not a strong interest. Even if there's a low bar to entry, even if they can use AI readily, they still want design professionals, the insights that we share, and everything that we bring to a project, including the agency that we have to the project.

B So another reason why I see this as a very positive trend.

A So we've learned a lot about what you are like, the view, I think, of the building environment features council. And I'm imagining that some of our listeners are gonna be like, okay. So when are they going to produce something, or how do I get involved with what they are having conversations about? So what is next for the BEFC? And, you know, if people are interested in even hosting their own type of forums, you know, what what do you recommend if you guys are staying relatively small yourself?

D We are. So as I said, we our first pitch was to get people to sign up for 6 months, and we ran. At the end of the year, we had this big conversation, all the things we could do and wanted to do and try to do, and we tried to find unique ways. So as Randy mentioned earlier, thinking about potential funding streams that could allow us to could we help facilitate fast grants to create opportunities to get people to access and experiment with tools in unique ways and give different people a voice in a platform that they may not have otherwise? Could we find ways to create unique engagements where the BFC could design some unique engagements in a unique place that generates a different kind of dialogue and different kind of conversation. That's one strand of looking at it. The other one is we got the group to sign up essentially for another 6 months or halfway through this next period We just had on Tuesday. I thought an amazing session where, we had 2 other folks, host the 2 hour session, and then we took on the question of what is the augmented owner, what is the augmented builder, what is the augmented architect. And we went through every phase from business development through every phase of design.

D That to me, Amanda and Randy, felt like there was something there that we will be able to turn into something that we think can share and help, whether that's an interactive map, whether it's something we write and publish, whether it's something we continue to share, as we said earlier, just through platforms like this and speaking engagements and through our kind of work practices and that kind of bottom up version. So we are open minded to it, Evelyn, but we are being cautious about not just throwing more noise into the the field of of noise. One of the things we've learned in this is one of the great skills emerging from this is, hey. You're a good editor, and how do we separate signal from noise? So we don't wanna be just contributing to noise. We've got something really great happening here, and we're gonna try and find some compelling but unique and innovative ways to share and help advance more broadly. But this is something I mentioned to you before we signed on. I'd love to hear from people listening to this, ideas of unique ways of engagement Is that in person? Is it 1 on 1? Is it through traditional publishing tools? Is it something we haven't invented yet?

B Yeah, and I'm a co founder of the befc and I'm here to tell you that every time we meet monthly I'm still trying to find ways to get involved myself So I think just showing up at zoom Doesn't just you know assume that you are involved you have to find ways to contribute to add value To move the ball forward and then even as we're creating something like this excellent session or workshop that we had, try to envision how can this have an effect either, you know, from, like, the fast grants with the philanthropic You know point of view Maybe this will lead to new tools and work processes and we want to encourage others to do that So it's constantly looking ahead based on the things that we're working, I think. And I think, you know, that idea of agency as well. You don't have to necessarily be a member immediately of the b e f c. You just wanna look for ways to participate and get involved in any capacity. And then when the doors open, we'll be ready.

C I also just wanted to add that I do encourage people. I think Matt and Randy would agree that right now, many of us have more questions than answers. And I actually think that that's an okay place to be in terms of curiosity and peaking curiosity and questioning and exploring new territory. So I do wanna encourage others who also feel that they're not necessary. They say, well, I'm not an expert in this, or I don't have experience in this. That's not where we are right now. I don't think even as an industry, but BEFC as an organization, I really do encourage people to come with those questions and with those thoughts as well as with ideas and answers.

D Yeah, Amanda. That's perfect because that's something you're right. At this time, it's more questions than answers. So we have published the questions we're asking ourselves on our website, that'd befc.org. Those are great things places to start. And then the I would say the executive summary of that is simply everybody should be asking, what do I want AI to be? What do I wanna do more of? And what do I wanna do less of? And that's the first way to launch your sense of agency. If you can start to edit and bring clarity to those questions as an organization or as a person, that's a great way to start.

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practice of architecture.com/podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community at practice of architecture.com/community. Our social media handle is practice of arch. That's practice of a r c h. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.