Rethinking the Workflow: How Radhika Parashar Narain Sees Architecture’s Digital Future

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, startup 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're exploring what happens when someone from outside the architecture world steps in with fresh eyes and big ideas. My guest, Radhika Prashar Narayan, is a head of marketing at Arkleg, a software company reimagining how architects design and collaborate. Radhika comes from the world of SaaS, or software as a service and design technology with a background that includes time at figma, where she helped make design accessible to everyone.

A Now she is bringing that same energy and curiosity to the architecture industry, a field she describes as fascinatingly complex, creative, and overdue for better tools. In our conversation, we talk about what it means to approach architecture as an outsider, the challenges of introducing new technologies into a profession rooted in tradition, and how democratizing design can empower more people to shape the built world. If you ever wondered what it looks like when the mindset of Silicon Valley meets the craft of architecture, this episode is for you. Hi Radhika, welcome to the show. So glad to have you on Practice Disrupted.

B Thank you so much for having me, Evelyn. It's such a joy to be here. I have listened to quite a few episodes and I'm just grateful for the space and the opportunity.

A One of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on is because I'm seeing a lot more people from outside of the industry end up engaged within the AUC industry. And I always love to get kind of what is the outside perspective and how are you adjusting and adapting and learning about what we do as architects? So why don't we open up by you telling a little bit about your story and how you became the head of marketing at urql.

B Yeah, so I have always kind of been at the intersection of creativity and technology. That's really my sweet spot. I have spent the last over a decade now working at various companies, largely on the sales enablement strategy side, as well as a little bit of product marketing, which funnily enough just led to a lot of really interesting conversations that got me closer and closer to this idea of design really being a massive differentiator for lots of organizations. And most recently, I worked At a company called Figma, which really is kind of focused around making design accessible to all. And while I was there, I was always curious about architecture. I in general really love the idea of space and the built experience and sort of what we, what we put into the world, across the world. And I travel a fair amount. And so architecture is something that allows me to really connect my experiences from an artistic and creative perspective to what I'm experiencing in any new city.

B And when a few Figma engineers moved over to Arkhold, that was the first time I got to learn about the space a bit. I started doing my research on aec and I think what was so interesting to me was just how cool it seemed. I mean, just at the outset, as an outsider looking in, it's like, oh, wow, so you're taking something that's two dimensional and you're adding the third dimension to it and you're thinking about the complex geometry, the way that this is actually going to be able to be built. And this is all very much with the intention of serving people and serving communities and serving capitalism, but also just allowing for all of us to kind of be in that space together. And so coming in from sas, I, I saw how empowering creators with better tools could reshape the practice. And that's really the opportunity that I saw with arcol, where there are not too many companies that are really thinking about this challenge of making AEC and architecture more accessible from the standpoint of technology and from the standpoint of the resources that something like technology can bring in terms of building community and spending money on marketing and being able to spend time with creators and practitioners in their fields while also improving their ability to do their jobs.

A I want to go a little bit deeper on what ARCOL is and what our call does, because I think you've piqued some of our listeners interest just by the last statement you made. And I am so grateful that we have such an enthusiastic individual joining architecture. Kind of on the architecture side. I feel like a lot of people, when I talk about people coming into our space, they're like, oh, they're coming to kind of disrupt our space. I feel like you're really, you know, true enough, technology is a disruption, but you're really here to help us collectively build and be better, which is amazing. What were some of the surprising challenges you kind of have run into now that you've, you've been inside our world, our sphere a little bit?

B Yeah. I mean, I think the most interesting thing for me was speaking to actually A friend from my university, from Berkeley, who is now a practicing architect and designer, she shared with me that in her social circle of friends and architecture, they hadn't gotten laptops until 2020. She was really surprised that I didn't know this fact. And she was just really like. She was like, oh, I mean, you're taking all of this for granted. Like, we literally just got laptops recently. And I think coming from the tech world, where we really do come from, a world of abundance, in that sense, it's a bit surprising that incredibly complex, incredibly technical buildings are being built with technologies that are incredibly outdated. And I think that was the most surprising thing for me, is that the tools that exist right now, there's so much abundance, but there's really no coherence.

B Tools are piled on top of each other. There's no connective tissue. Oftentimes, people have these incredible workflows. I honestly salute architects who are sitting there working through five different tools to get the final render right and still managing to produce these incredibly magnificent buildings. But also things that are functional and usable, aesthetically pleasing. But as an outsider, it's really hard for us to understand this is how it's been as an answer. Like, when I speak to architects, they're just like, yeah, of course it's cat, of course it's Rabbit. And I look at their workflow, I look at them importing site context, and it's taking, like, a solid 15 minutes, and it's boggling my mind.

B Or people who are putting layers of maps on top of the buildings that they're building and trying to, like, figure out the opacity. And I'm just like, oh, my goodness, surely there's an easier way for this. So that, I think comes from, again, my own naivety and my own inexperience in the field, but has been the most surprising for me. And so I just see so much opportunity, I think, from those friction points and sort of the coordination, the communication, the speed, the agility. There's just so much to be done still.

A You talk about our workflow. I feel like in architecture, workflow is synonymous with process. Even if it's us moving through various different softwares, it's like, this is my artistic process that I've adopted that makes me special and unique. We do these certain things, even though it takes us through seven different things to get to the final rendering. How do you then go about talking to architects about what it means to not necessarily break, but give them back some of that time when they're so inherently drained in the old ways of doing things.

B A lot of it just comes back to the idea of good design, which I think most architects can appreciate. Right. When you have something that's designed well and you have something that has efficiencies kind of built in, you instantly see the value of that because it's allowing you to. Perhaps there's an artistic process, like you said, that you might have, that has all of these steps, but if there's a way to streamline this or make it a bit more efficient and also bring that joy back to building and bring that sort of energy back where you're able to. I mean, another interesting thing for me in speaking to architecture students specifically recently has been how much emphasis a lot of programs have on conceptual design and using RHINO to model these really complex, beautiful buildings. And they're almost shocked when they get into the real world and they're doing feasibility studies and they're having to do this grunt work, for lack of a better word, which is all part of the process, to your point, and I don't want to denigrate that at all, but there's just so many tools that exist that have promised to deliver value and reduce that friction and maximize efficiency, and I sincerely haven't found one that's actually alleviating that patchwork problem that we have, where there's Revit and Rhino and there's Miro boards and someone's doing something in Figma and Pinterest. Everyone has their process, but I think that in the conversations that I'm having, I'm really trying to find a way to show them that. Show folks that there's actually a better, more simple way.

B And I'll be honest, I mean, our call at this stage that we're at is still just tackling feasibility studies in the early phases of design. We have so much to build, but that's part of the process for us that we have to kind of go step by step to get every step of the way right. So we're not just plugging in random APIs. We're not just bringing in AI where AI doesn't have a place. We're actually very thoughtfully investing the engineering hours to build something that actually does what it says it does and allows for high fidelity to be a big part of what we're designing for the people who are designing the built world. So that's a big part of our ethos and what we value at arkoll. And in terms of craft, well, we've.

A Danced a little bit around arcol, and you've alluded to feasibility studies right now. So why don't you explain to us where ARCOL is now and then we can expand on where you all hope to go.

B Absolutely. So the way we're looking at ARQL right now is kind of that sort of communication layer in design, very specifically looking at keeping your model, your measurements and your presentations all in one place. We are a design tool that's really just trying to make that early stage design process fast, collaborative, accessible, so that firms have an opportunity to make better decisions, to improve their workflows, to strengthen their client relationships without having sort of bits of their process flowing around all over the place. And so I think what we're anchoring on right now is really being that communication layer between all of the different layers that people have in their process to alleviate some of that fragmented tool problem that we've just kind of touched on.

A Is it then replacing any tools or is it bringing them together? I ask this from the standpoint that I feel like a lot of tech companies are well prepared to increase their tech budget on an annual basis as all of these tools come online, whereas that's a really hard sell to architecture firms. So where do you all fit in kind of this space? And are you replacing any current tools?

B We are replacing legacy sort of early design feasibility study tools that exist right now. So a lot of the manual processes that people have, that's really where our sweet spot is right now in the future and sort of on our roadmap is the ability to then sit as a communication layer between RQOOL and Rhino, to be able to do complex modeling within RQL itself. But we acknowledge that a lot of the legacy tools that exist right now have been around with 30, 40 years of development. And so to kind of re architect this, not to be punny, but to really think about this in a different way will require us, I think, to take that time and that care and that craft to get each step of the way right. So to answer your question more succinctly, it would be really just that early design feasibility study space right now that we're replacing a lot of the tools that folks have in place and it's free to get started. So that's, I think the really big thing is like, we want to be able to deliver value pretty quickly. So please do give it a go, give it a try, see how it works for you. And then, and based off of that, if it does work within your workflow, our ask is like, that's, that's when we're able to actually talk about what the pricing plan for a larger organization would be.

B But right now at the outset, we're so new. We just launched in June. It's, it's really about adoption and building something that from a first principles perspective is suited to the needs of the people we're trying to serve.

A So we talked a little bit about the surprise you had regarding the laptops. Arguably I will say that there are architects that said that will tell you that the laptops just didn't have the processing power they needed to run the models that they were running. Are there any other surprises along the way that you've kind of encountered that you thought because we are creative people, we might be more in tuned with or less in tuned?

B I think the silo between the way architects think about technology and what their actual tech stack is, there's just a massive sort of expectation gap. Like it's, it's fascinating to me for people who spend so much time looking at good design and optimizing for really beautiful functional design, the tools that you're using are just, for lack of a better word, crap. Like these are things that are just, they, they do the job but are so hard to use and so not esthetically designed. That was shocking to me. Again, coming from a company like Figma where design is kind of the core, core blueprint of everything that we do, I think that was just a shock. Yes.

A And for anyone who doesn't use Figma, do go check it out. I am a big fan of Figma and a lot of my Slack colleagues ended up at figma. So big fan of figma.

B Oh cool. That ethos of like half the development team is from figma@arkle. And a lot of the conversations that we've had internally are how do we. I mean, Arkle was initially launched by Paul o', Carroll, our CEO, as a FIGMA for bim and that his idea there was really coming from an architecture home and coming from a parent who was a full time architect, he saw how frustrating the processes were, he saw how much work went into it and has such a deep appreciation for the craft of architecture. And oftentimes architects really don't get to spend as much time as they'd like to in the craft of architecture because they're so bogged down by all of the communication that has to happen, whether that's between clients, between consumers, construction, between design managers, contractors, that whole process. There's no real streamlined way to. You talked about Slack. Have a slack for this or something where everything is really cleanly coordinated.

B So that was also super surprising for me because I think my expectations from the outside looking in was like, surely this is a really crowded space with tons of beautifully designed products. And then I come into the space and I was kind of like, oh, okay, good to know.

A No, we are making beautiful things out of really hard to manage products with actually huge learning curves associated with them.

B Huge learning curves. And I think that's also part of the challenge we've seen with adoption for rql too, is that people kind of expect there to be this really hard learning curve. And the thing is, architects are busy. They don't have a ton of free time to go and experiment and try new tools out that are not going to do what they say they're going to do. And so seeing that and then offering a tool that could potentially also flop and asking people to spend their valuable time to try it out and test it out is quite an ask. And that's been really surprising for us. And the more I spend time with folks, the more I realize that you spend years learning Rhino and CAD and Revit and all of these tools either in school or in the field. And so that sort of cost of change is so high that it's really difficult for someone to say, oh, sure, yeah, that looks easier, go ahead and do that.

B Especially when, let me try that.

A Right?

B Let me just go try that. Let me take the time to learn it. And that's something that I'm really focused on from a community perspective is how can I make this process of transition super easy? How can we really, as a team, think about democratizing it, for lack of a better word, to really make sure that there's resources that make it more accessible, that show even the simplest things that just assume a level of, we don't know how to do this, we're going to learn how to do this type of a thing that makes it easy to want to learn and makes that opportunity cost a little bit and that change cost a little less. Costly and painful.

A Yeah. I think architects, whether in their career or in their firm, have this odd notion of sunk cost. Well, it's like it's human, right? I've committed so much time to my degree. How could I ever think about leaving? I've committed so much time to this program. How could we ever think about doing it differently? And I just watched that YouTube last week that showed me how to do do X, Y and Z, because frankly, I don't know a single architect that is like leveraging a tool like revit to its full capability because. And inherently that means there for, for all of the money that we're spending in auc, we are also. There's. There's so much technological debt there because nobody has the time to fully invest in using the tools accurately.

B Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. And to build on that, what we're also seeing is we have lots of people who are very interested, junior architect students who are very interested in a tool like Rqool. They see the potential, but oftentimes it's a principal who kind of goes, we have a flow sun cost policy.

A Right.

B We have a way of doing this. I know how to do this. I want to have a level of fidelity and visibility. And more than anything else, I want to be able to have the security that I know that I know where my file is. I know who has the final version. And we asked the question of what would happen if we move from a desktop to cloud? What would happen if this did become multiplayer? What if we made an architecture software that was truly collaborative so that everyone could be in the same file and we moved from that scarcity mindset around files and models and we were actually able to think about this more abundantly and say execution is really what differentiates between something happening or not. But that's a really difficult mindset shift, and it's one that we're really aware of, and it's not something that we're expecting to shift overnight. And as we build, we're also being really conscious of what's going to happen over the course of the next several years for us to take, you know, what we have in sort of our vision for Oracle into reality.

B And so, yeah, I think it's going to be a step change with the industry.

A I mean, I'm with you guys because I feel like, you know, in a way with, when it comes to business operations, much of the same. Like it's, it's all of it has to come with a mindset shift and a change in the culture that we continue kind of to inherit from the leaders who are now beginning to, you know, as a, as a great white wave or whatever starts to come. You know what it's going to be interesting to see as more baby boomers retire, how and whether or not there is a true mindset shift in the leaders. Apollo.

B Absolutely. And I think a lot of that also has to do with the opportunity that software can give in terms of democratization of opportunity and access. We have people from more and more marginalized or diverse backgrounds who are able to actually participate in this profession and be a part of it. Because there is technology that has made it a little bit more democratic for people to participate in it. And I think that's a big reason for me at least to think about what Rqool's vision is. Because, I mean, SaaS has kind of shown us that power of usability and distribution. And I really do think that there is a possibility of the world getting a lot simpler and easier and dare I say, joyful, if we're able to actually move people to that space of being able to use a tool that actually does what they want it to do and in the process also increases efficiency and cuts down the cost of rework and all of the other sort of challenges folks are facing.

A Let's begin to unpack this a little bit more just because I think you and I are speaking one another's language. But I want to make sure that our audience understands what you're getting at. When you talk about democratizing design, it's a term that I use a lot too. Right. I'm actually really excited about technology and the ability for even the smaller firms now to compete with the larger firms because of what technology enables them to do. So when you kind of infer to democratizing workflows and giving more tools to more people, talk a little bit more about what it means in terms of accessibility and the one person firm or few people person firm getting to do more.

B Yeah, well, I mean, as tools have evolved, as SaaS platforms have evolved over the last decade, there's actually this fabulous article that kind of talks about how SaaS companies, we kind of went through this era of the apps, right. So software as a service company, SaaS companies, we kind of saw this influx of apps in the 2010s. Suddenly there were apps for deliveries, for car sharing, ride sharing, for us to be able to watch television and watch TV shows. Like there are just apps for everything. And in the2020s, I think it was Peter Levine, who is a VC, a venture capitalist, who wrote a really interesting piece about how this is going to be the decade of design. What he meant by that was the fact that there are so many tools that have been created and so many apps that have been created at this point that the standout quality of the one that will win is going to be how well designed it is. That's what we're actually seeing even in now the second era of the tech world, where the second, third, fourth, depending on what sort of generation you're in. Of AI tools.

B It's the same sort of a conundrum in the way that there's so many AI tools that exist, but the ones that are actually adopted are the ones that are the most sort of functionally designed. And when you think of functional design, I often think of Dieter Rahm's 10 sort of ideas for good design and how he says, like, good design shouldn't even be designed. Good design should just be intuitive. It should be the way we think, the way we work, the way we operate. And I think when I talk about this world of democratization, what it really means is that it is so a tool is so easily and sort of intuitively designed that anyone can kind of get started. The cost, the barriers to entry are lowered tremendously because of the cost of these kinds of softwares. When it's built in the cloud, you have access, you don't have to have a desktop, you don't have to be in one place, you can be anywhere in the world and you can still access your models. With rql, I can very specifically say you can have your models, your measurements, your presentations in one place.

B You're not in that. Oh, there's another tool. I have to figure out how to open or have to download this PDF and save it for the fifth final version on my desktop to find it. It's all in one place with your edits and your version control. What that allows for, folks, is that you don't necessarily even have to have native language skills or you don't need to have a very specific sort of pedigree or education. You can learn to use these tools by just investing time in learning the tool. And through that, become a better architect, a better designer, a better software developer, whatever your chosen field is. And that's what I think democratization of design means.

B It means that agnostic of your background, agnostic of what you've done so far, if you choose to put your mind to this, you have an opportunity, opportunity to actually make a real impact and actually do the work that would make you happy and bring you joy.

A So I hope our listeners are already thinking about adding some new books to their to read list. The other thing that strikes me when we talk about SAS and kind of the evolution of software that doesn't mesh well with architect's current way of thinking and their limited funds, if you will, is the monthly and annual costs of what it means to have a SaaS subscription. Over the good old days when I just paid once or twice every five years for like CAD or revit so how are you managing those conversations?

B Yeah, well, I mean, comparatively the cost of software solutions is priced in to be lower than what you would pay over that one or the five year sort of contracts that a lot of these companies have. I know this is another fun insight that, you know, some people are sort of grandfathered into deals with some of the larger legacy providers that allow them to, you know, enjoy really competitive rates way, way into the contract. I think the thing that's interesting also is just how quickly these tools are evolving. So you know, even at arcol, when, when you do sign up for a specific product, you have the ability to also kind of invest in that roadmap to a certain degree. So it's not like you're just kind of stuck with the way things are. You're actually able to kind of see where the future of these softwares can also be. And so when you are looking at the cost of a SaaS tool, a, it's already quite reduced. When I look at how much people are paying for tools like Autodesk and Revit and other sort of legacy tools, the barrier to entry is significantly lower.

B So even with a Rhino, you're a technologist, when you're using Rhino, you need to think and code that barrier into entry is completely lowered with the kinds of tools that we're talking about here. Lastly, it's also about the fact that the barrier to entry, from an educational standpoint, there are so many helpful resources. There are ways for you to be part of an alpha or a beta test of something to share your feedback of, hey, this is working or this isn't working, which you really can't do with in Autodesk. You know, if we, if we were just using that as an example, Paul was at Autodesk University earlier this month and like or earlier last month and some of the things that we saw there, it's what happens when any large organization is trying to kind of keep up with the times. It's really difficult to upend an entire sort of technology stack and redo it so that it's more intuitive or more in, you know, the way the world operates now. And so what you end up seeing is kind of like a little Frankenstein creature of like just random twin tools that are added onto this larger sort of behemoth in the attempt to make it more modern and more democratized. But the reality is half of those things are not actually going to be useful because no one knows how to use them. The barrier to entry is too high and then the interoperability between the core sort of tool and then this new sort of feature that's being launched is so difficult to be able to actually use.

B And so that's something I really do hope that folks who might not be as sort of well versed in the technology space or folks who might be a little bit reticent, I get it, I understand where that comes from, would factor in that a lot of times there's just cost, there's the opportunity cost and there's the educational cost of what you think a company is giving you from a cutting edge perspective versus what you're actually having access to.

A So you've been at this now for nearly six months. Are you just as enthusiastic about the architecture space as you were when you started?

B I actually think I'm more enthusiastic and here's why. I have had the privilege of speaking to a lot of students over the last month. We've just launched a recent ARQL Ambassador program. ARQLE is free for educators and for students. And so partnering with really hungry, really smart, brilliant architects across college campuses in America has allowed us to connect with just such a fresh perspective on why people are in school, what they're doing and how they're so quick to adopt these technologies because they see it so quickly. Like I had someone recently, a student, tell me that, you know, I just told all of my friends in my architecture, I think in his feasibility studies section, he's like, I looked at all of them and I was like, guys, pretend we're not architects in the legacy way of doing things right now. Let's pretend we're just architects who love to build. Let's just be like, we're in Minecraft for a day and just build an Arkhole.

B And it was just so cool to see that moment of people so excited and so ebullient with their feedback and so generous with everything that they're experiencing in Arkle and able to actually reduce their time to build their projects by almost 50%. Like they're like, oh, we were done in a day. And our other sections were still like halfway through the process. It was going to take them another three, four days. And so that kind of thing makes me really excited. And one of the big learnings that I've had in marketing over the years is the importance of community and the importance of actually getting to know the people who are using your software very intimately and understanding what their pain points are. Not as like a one and done sort of an exercise, but as something that is a dialogue that just keeps, keeps kind of increasing with time, increases with trust. And so, I mean, it's one of the things that you've done so beautifully with practice of architecture, and it's something that I really aspire towards is how can we at rql, you know, actually build a community of really invested users who get what we're doing and want to build with us and are willing to kind of take that, that leap of learning how to use this tool and get really, really good at it while we're also building, that's really interesting.

A And it's really key. I talk to architects a lot about their need to get on board with technology because now is the opportunity to build with rather than be handed a tool. I'm sure you guys have your own roadmap, but talk about how you work with users and consider their feedback and what that does and in terms of how you may change where things are headed or how you reprioritize what you're rolling out first.

B Absolutely. I mean, I think we are extremely user centric in that way. And I mean the genesis of building ARCOL from a first principles perspective really was for us to reimagine the way we build a product for architects. And a lot of that came from Mike on our team as our head of product. He is an architect by craft and you know, working with him and having him actually sort of sanity check every step of the way, is this the most efficient, is this the most useful way for us to build a product has been, I think, a huge blessing for us. But working with our customers has also been a massive part of our process. We recently shipped a feature called sloped setbacks to allow, you know, for folks to actually build on mountainside, seaside sort of sloped areas. That was a direct request from our customers in APAC who have that kind of a terrain that they're working with on a regular basis and they wanted to be able to model it more accurately.

B So that's an immediate example of a sort of direct request from a customer to what we've built. We also just recently launched something called dynamic tables which allows you to actually, as you change up a model, your costing in sort of the table that you lay out changes along with the model. And so that was another request from a customer who was kind of sick of having to finagle an Excel spreadsheet alongside all of this and was like, is there some way for you to just build this in the tool? And so being able to have that level of sort of fidelity and feedback, I think one of the big Things for us at Oracle is kind of an obsession with craft, which is every line of code is in service at the end user. And if we actually think of it that way, we have to really be judicious about what we're prioritizing. And a big part of that is listening to what people are asking for. And so that sort of circle of trust that we're building and that level of fidelity we're building is a really core part of our ethos and reinforces every single part of our roadmap moving forward. The last thing I wanted to say about this is just that we really also are cognizant of the fact that architects are not used to this. I think that's the last sort of thing that I wanted to kind of touch on here is when I was at the AIA conference, for example, earlier this year in Boston.

B It was my second week at arcol, so I was brand new.

A Yeah, I was going to say you were like, that was kind of a fire hose week because you guys had your launch earlier in the week. Yes. And then came to conference.

B Exactly. Yeah. So we launched June 2nd, and I believe AI was just June 8th or 9th. And so I do know that Paul.

A Accepted a very nice invitation and I was not able to be there because I was already going to be in Boston, Vegas.

B Yeah, absolutely could imagine that there was a lot to prep for because, I mean, a. What completely blew me away was the size. I mean, this conference was so huge. I mean, the space was completely filled with so many different kinds of vendors. Everything from actual built world suppliers to like SaaS business, but software vendors to everything in between. So that was surprising to me. But then the other part of it is that architects are not used to being heard. And that was so surprising.

B Like, I kept trying to have conversations with people and they're like, oh, it's okay. I'm sure you're not. Like, you wouldn't. You wouldn't care about this. You wouldn't care about this feature. This is not important. Or we had actually, you know, created a whole bunch of swag, which is, you know, just basically materials that we wanted to give out to people. T shirts and stickers and tote bags and actually these little pencil cases that I have behind me that we thought would be like a fun homage to the actual joy of building, which, you know, we have individual colored pencils in there.

B It's got the logo. People can give it to their kids if they don't want to use it. But, you know, why not bring some joy and whimsy into your life. And people looked at me like I was crazy when I was handing it to them, like, why would you give this to me for free? And I was like, wow, I'm really coming from the tech world where we just hand out swag at these conferences and we're so used to, like, oh, T shirts, sweatshirts, whatever you need, you.

A Guys are upgrading the swag. Yeah. Being delivered, definitely. So, going back a little bit to the conversation, how do you really balance? Because part of it is thinking beyond where architects are right now. Right. So definitely the user feedback, but also in all my favorite software platforms are really pushing the architects to kind of rethink things in a bigger way. How do you balance those two?

B User feedback and roadmap.

A User feedback and kind of roadmap and the larger mission and vision of where you think Arcoll needs to head while bringing everyone along?

B I mean, I think the thing that I think about often is we really do want to build something that's a sort of generational tool. And to build something that's generational just takes time because you want to get every step of the process right. You really want to invest in the craft. You want to find the right talent who can actually build the thing to the specifications of the people we're in service of, AKA architects. And so being able to listen to that feedback and actually consider it, not just immediately action it, think about sort of what is a thoughtful approach. Like, what's. I mean, you can say something, for example, like, we really want to build a Rhino integration, or we really want to build complex modeling. But each step of that process of, like, how do you model facades? How do you think about lofting, how do you think about arches? How do you think about all of these things from a complex geometry perspective, from a technical, super engineering, heavy perspective, really helps us prioritize what features are going to come next.

B Because we're kind of building iteratively. We're thinking about one step at a time, what's going to come next, how are we going to make sure that we're able to get to where we want to get without just sort of rushing the process. And so I think we kind of think about that challenge between the roadmap and what users are saying by being realistic about what we can build, but then also taking in a lot of that feedback to prioritize. If there is two, three features that are all kind of at the same level for us internally, how do we decide that one of them is actually going to go to market.

A We mentioned earlier that you're like six months into your role at arql. What is your hope for the profession in maybe the next two or five years as you guys build? And where do you hope to take ARCOL by then?

B I think my hope for the profession is for architects to have as high expectations as we have of sort of the tools that we can foresee and we can kind of imagine can bring that joy back to the process. I can speak for myself, and I know I can speak for a lot of the team in saying that we have so much respect for how much work this is and how critical this work is for the world. I mean, this is the oldest profession. This is the profession that allows for all of us to be able to have homes and for us to be able to kind of enjoy these beautiful spaces. Kind of tying it to what I said at the start of our conversation. And really what I hope is that architects can have a better sense of what tools they're using that can actually allow them to do the work that they want to do and do it more efficiently, do it more joyfully, do it more collaboratively, bring more people into the fold, allow for technology to help them become more efficient and become better at what they're doing. I also really hope that as students and smaller architects and smaller firms are thinking about this or listening to the this, like, don't wait for permission, experiment early. I know that's easier said than done, but really just think through, like, what can you start immediately? Where can you start learning immediately to.

B To make sure that you're. You are on that cutting edge of what's coming and what's new. You know, build collaboration as a muscle. Think about, you know, how do you invite peers into a file, how do you share context, how do you co create? How do you bring that spirit of collaboration back into what you're doing? And really, you know, see technology as a leverage point, see it as something that can allow you to kind of punch above your weight to be more efficient. To think about that democratization point we also talked about earlier allows you to actually have access to a vision and an operating cadence that might be what you would expect from a much larger firm than who you are. So you're working smarter, not harder.

A High 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 practiceofarchitecture.com podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me our speakers and other disruptors in our community@practiceofarchitecture.com community. Our social media handle is practiceofarch. That's practice of ARCH. 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.