The Art of Drawing in the Digital Age with Mark Collins

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. Foreigners welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today we're exploring the intersection of design, technology and the human experience with Mark Collins, architect educator and co founder of Morpholio, the creative suite behind popular tools like Trace Board and Journal. Mark's journey spans academia, private practice and entrepreneurship, from teaching at Columbia's Cloud Lab during the early days of Paperless Studios.

A To building a bootstrapped company that now reaches over a million designers worldwide. His story embodies what it means to.

A Blend analog craft with digital innovation. We'll talk about how Morphoglio's founders turned curiosity about the iPad into a decade.

B Long experiment in redefining drawing for the digital age, how staying small and independent.

A Has allowed them to remain deeply connected.

B To their users, and how Mark envisions the next wave of technology, from AI to augmented reality, empowering architects rather than replacing them.

A Let's dive into the conversation about the evolving tools of design, the power of.

B Community, and the art of keeping the human at the center of technology. Hi Mark, welcome to Practice Disrupted. Thank you for joining us today.

C Well, thank you for having me, Evelyn.

B In the beginning we do a brief overview of your bio in the intro, but I'd love to hear in your own words, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do now.

C Well, my background has taken me from the academic world into private practice and now into something like a startup. And I think the shared thread that's connected all of that has been not just computing and you know, what latent possibilities we'll say are embedded inside computation for design, but also trying to find the human in technology and thinking about how computing and really human centered design intersect. So I've been able to do that in a few different platforms and I think what's really special about the one I've been working on this last 10 years, Morpholio, is that we get to do it in such a direct way, reaching out to just many thousands of architects.

B It's interesting because I talk to a lot of architects about tech and the evolution of tech and tech, the introduction or the understanding of where tech works in one's workflow and it always, especially with the older leaders, comes back to hand drawing and the tacticality around that. And they always mention kind of Morpholio as this crossover between the human element of literally putting line to paper or line to tablet as it were, overlaid with digital enhancements on that.

C That's right. When we think about the word technology, our minds instantly go to screens and iPads and now maybe AI, but everything is a technology. We think trace paper is a technology. We think of the design crit as a kind of technology. Anytime we're bringing to bear materials, processes and knowledge to get an outcome, we call that a technology. And so for us, it was about trying to sort of take away that filter and see how design had already incubated a set of powerful technologies that it needed and that it wanted and that had a lot of intelligence in them. And then how do we kind of alloy that with our conventional understanding of technology and these new opportunities that these devices were allowing?

B Yes. You actually just reminded me that my children, my 8 and soon to be 10 year old, always referred to technology as something that was just human crafted and not available in nature. So I do appreciate that broader definition of like, what is technology and how do we apply it within practice? And I just didn't necessarily make the connection until now. So thank you for that. What made you first think about starting Morpholio? Do you have a technology background yourself?

C I will call it a soft technology background. I was always interested in computation, but I was always into drawing too. And that's what I did as a kid. And that's kind of my architect story. Every architect has a reason, you know, that drew them into the profession. And for me it was drawing. And I got very excited, especially around great architectural rendering. And I came into, we'll say, maybe the last generation of architects who were really taught to hand draw.

C And, you know, we had to go and buy $1,000 worth of architectural drafting equipment on the first day of undergrad. And as I started to work with this, I thought it was incredible. It was. I was able to, you know, generate perspectives mathematically, and that was really interesting to me. But I kept getting drawn back into the computer. And when it was time to actually go to grad school, I decided I needed to be at the place where the computer was really being put at the. And so I ended up at the Columbia gsapp and that was where the paperless studios were happening. And there was a lot of excitement around digital architecture and what that would mean for not only what architecture looked like and what it did, but how you created it too.

C And it was very process oriented, which I was very excited about. There I kind of met the network that would eventually become Morpholio, and there's a few special people that I met in that network, which became the four founders of Morpholio. But at the beginning, we were all kind of working in our own little areas and kind of, we'll say, climbing this ladder for me, which started from scripting inside of conventional modeling software, to then writing plugins for those softwares, to then just making my own software that really would become specific to a project. So every time there was a project, there was a new software, and sometimes it would come with a UI and sometimes it wouldn't, but I would use that to kind of drive my design work. So at the same time, we had an opportunity to stay at Columbia because of some things that the dean at the time, Mark Wigley, was doing where he was allowing different faculty to create these research labs. And it became this kind of Cambrian explosion of ideas around what architecture could do and be. And we had the opportunity with my partner Tooru Hasegawa, to found the cloud lab, which was looking at all these different kind of devices and, and this exploding device culture that was happening around fabrication, but also around brain computer interfaces, touchscreens, eye tracking, 3D scanning. So it was a very kind of pregnant moment with all of these devices landing and the iPhone happened.

C And that was a special moment and it immediately caught my, my own attention and many others. And obviously it was a really breakthrough device and a combo of technologies that work beautiful beautifully together because we were already working around so many technolog and what they could do for architecture. We really saw it as this incredible platform just loaded not only with things that could sense the environment, but maybe things that could act on the environment. So we got very excited and I think the day that the iPhone SDK came out where you could actually make your own software, I went out and bought a Mac that day. It was my first Mac that I had ever owned just to develop on this thing. And we immediately started making software. And that drew in at the time, some of my other co founders, Anna and Jeff Kenoff, who were also really excited about this device. And the iPad landed and we knew that this was the moment where a lot of exciting things were going to happen.

C And it was kind of met actually with a little skepticism and we'll say lack of things happening on that platform in its first year or two. I remember some people saying, well, this is just a big iPhone and it's not really exciting. And if you go back to the software culture at the time, there was a lot of excitement around gaming and there was a lot of excitement around location based things. But creative utilities and creative design were not really on the forefront. And we, we thought that was a big miss from the big software companies to not show up there in day one. And that started our initial experiments putting out publishing software on the iPad for the first time. And that was met with such a response and grew and grew into the morpholio apps that we know and love today. Trace and Board and Journal.

B You've talked about the technology side. The other flip side of this is just kind of the start and birth of an actual company and what it means to stand up a company. Did you have an entrepreneurial bug in you? At what point did you guys decide like this could actually be something that supports our livelihood?

C It happened very slowly. I'll say that the entrepreneurial aspect of it was part out of interest in that world. I'll certainly say. We were looking, all of us, I think, to redefine what it meant to be a design professional and thinking about that in a broader way that could allow for more kinds of activities like creating software. And I think it also kind of happened by necessity because there wasn't really a pathway, we'll say, to do this that existed. It obviously was not just a new category of devices that we were especially interested in creating software for. But I think there just wasn't a group of people that we could sort of point to and say we'll follow that path. Right.

C So we just started to experiment. At the time, all of us had really good day jobs. I was still fully engaged with teaching, working with the Cloud lab. I had my own design firm. My other co founders were working in different areas of practice and also education. So we all had something really good going on. But then there was this pool into this new platform of software publishing. And I think we wouldn't have been able to do it if not for, for Apple and the Apple App Store.

C The App Store itself flattened a lot of the complexities of making software and distributing software. I do think it was a kind of democratization moment for software in a way that, you know, you didn't have to sort of come from that industry or be, you know, deeply a part of that industry to make a big impact and to find customers. And that was just our starting point to say, hey, we can actually do this.

B I was looking at your LinkedIn and I applied to GSAPP at the same Time. And we would have probably been for my post professional degree. And one of the reasons that I was interested in Columbia, even though I ended up at Sci Arc, was the Paperless Studio. So now I wonder where I would have been if I were at GSAPP at that time instead of Sci Arc. A little fear of missing a little FOMO happening at the moment.

C It's a good thing to get FOMO over. It's a special place. It has always been and remains, and it goes through, we'll say, different versions. But I was there. I always find myself at these transitional moments. And I was there from the transition from Bernhard Schumi being the dean to Mark Wigley being the dean. And that was wonderful for myself because I kind of got a little of what I was going there to begin with, with the Paperless Studio and some of the blobitecture. But because it was transitional, I could transition out of that and go deeper into what excited me, which was this kind of human computer interaction question and, you know, and go deeply into it with the support of the school and maybe to, you know, speak about the entrepreneurship again.

C One of the things that was happening while I was a student at the school was that we would have classes with the founders of Shop. And Shop was a really interesting firm that was just having a kind of meteoric rise in New York City and New York City development. And they were definitely preaching a new approach to architecture, the business of architecture, and kind of in a similar vein to Frank Gehry of kind of owning more of the actual construction and documentation, getting away from this, deferring everything to contractors and deferring everything to marketers and really taking ownership of different parts of the design process. And they were places that were making their own software too. So we, we thought that was really impressive. And they were definitely evangelizing that in the school and trying to get more people thinking about the conventional boundaries of our profession. So that was definitely in the water as we were there for students and later for teaching.

B I almost think I would have gotten further along had I been in that environment. It just took me a while to find my path, having come from a different school.

C Yeah. I'll just say for myself, I remember in all those early years questioning the path, because that's the tricky part. There's kind of a path you expect to take as an architecture. And if all of a sudden you deviate from that, you are in uncharted territory. And it does feel odd. And you do question a lot what would happen if you had taken this step or that step. But I do think for myself and for a lot of people that end up in these kind of alternative, we'll say, branches of the profession is that it's very validating to get there and find your own unique way. And in some cases, maybe that's the only way to do it.

B No, I'm definitely one of those people that don't believe in regretting my decisions. But it does kind of make me just wonder how things would have turned out a little bit differently if I made a different choice about where I went to grad school at the time. I feel like a lot of people, there's a misnomer around the scale and how big technology companies are. Can you pull back the curtain a little bit and, like, help us understand how big as a company, Morpholio is and how you guys are managing and developing all, like, is it four apps now? Am I saying that correctly?

C It's three apps. It's. Yeah, we call it a design suite. And three is a lot for a small company. So we are small. You know, again, we. We started with a lot of founders. And when you're bootstrapping, you want a lot of people who have bought into the vision because you're very lean at the beginning.

C And to be honest, even as the softwares have become much more complex, I can think back to the very simple things that we were shipping. We'll say maybe about. I mean, we've been doing this 10 years. So 10 years ago, they seem really simple and primitive and almost demos. But we have stayed small. I think it's still under 10 people, and we're spread out all over the world. So there's a kind of constant baton pass over the day of wireframes and bug reports and things that were. And user feedback, and it just gets churned 24 7.

C And it's incredible in a way that we can get out to a worldwide audience and be relevant all over the world with that smaller group of people. But what is amazing about it, too, is that because we're small, we can just directly interact with so many inside of our community. So, for instance, you know, if you talk to us on Instagram, you're talking to one of us. You're talking to one of the people who literally crafts the software. So it's a kind of direct engagement that we have that I don't think could happen in a. In a bigger setting.

B Yeah, it's interesting. My sense of scale definitely changed. Went and worked for a technology company. Like, I have it in my head now that I will never work for a company that's larger than 3,200, because that's roughly where Slack was when we were acquired. And that felt like as big as I wanted it to be and still kind of maintain family. 10 I think in architecture terms is small, but it's kind of the tipping point of what we consider like small to medium size firms. Like, it scales up really quickly in architecture, so it's just addressing the differences in culture and what you're able to do at the variety of different scales.

C And part of that is because we are bootstrapped and we had a very elastic start. So Morpholio kind of mutated from really simple discussions between friends and people who are in a small network thinking about, you know, what. What software should be like in that new paradigm. And then, you know, just organically evolved into small prototypes, then into more sophisticated projects. So I think if we had known how much work we were getting ourselves into, we. It helped that we were, I think, a little naive in getting started. And like I say, that effect of Apple and an app store, flattening a lot of the complexities in terms of distributing the software, really just let us focus on, you know, what features and what technology can we bring into a space that's going to assist design and propel it forward in really substantive ways. And we could sort of remove all the extraneous parts of the process and just focus on that.

C So, yeah, so when we first started, it wasn't a company per se, it was the Morpholio project. And I think the very first software we ever put out there is. It was just a grid of faces and the grid was just our friends. And we click on each other's faces and you'd see what they were working on that day. It was like a really simple app. And we were able, you know, just to grow, we'll say, in layers from that moment and discover the things that were really going to be most powerful on the iPad. And very quickly we found that drawing was, you know, one of the most fantastic things you can do on that device. And just from feedback and from experimentation, we were able to, in a sense, kind of create these three different apps that now have a life of their own.

B So you keep mentioning bootstrapped. And for all intents and purposes, I would say most architecture, especially small architecture firms when they start out are bootstrapped. But in the technology sphere of things. Can you help us understand or even illuminate for me why you didn't consider pursuing VC or under Other funding and why you kind of intentionally grew in a very bootstrapped way, which really just means that you are self funding it. Right. As opposed to other investors coming in and putting in extra capital.

C Absolutely. And I think the, I'm not sure intentional is the right word there. I think there was, if there was an intentionality, it was definitely to preserve the focus on architecture and the focus on drawing and the focus on these things that we were very excited about. And I think there were along the way. I mean, we've been doing this for 10 years. We've had lots of conversations, lots of people that we would like to collaborate with and do things with, people that have wanted to be part of Morpholio's success. And I think just the reality too is doing this for 10 years. We've seen so many of our competitors, you know, explode and then, you know, extinguish.

C We've seen people bought and then, you know, totally languish. And so you do see this kind of churn that happens especially around VC funded companies. And I think, you know, the reality is just, you know, not only do, you know, the founders give up, you know, a lot of the company to do that, but they also accept in a whole set of pressures and timelines and things like that. I think we were able to slowly incubate this thing, like I say, from demos and discussions to sophisticated apps by giving them time and by doing a lot of listening while we're acting and to also let the platforms themselves develop and become a bit more sophisticated for us. I think in 2015 or 2016, when the iPad pro and the pencil happened, that was a major moment for our company. And I don't know if we could have anticipated that moment. I mean, we had been begging Apple for as, as big a device as they would give us because when you're drawing, you want lots of screen real estate. And of course, like everybody had been using giveaway conference styluses for the years before and kind of making do.

C So that moment was terrific. And in a way it created a possibility for our business growing that just, you know, we, we couldn't have done ahead of time. Right. We needed to, to let it evolve. So I do appreciate being able to do it slowly. And when somebody asks me about Morpholi, I usually describe it as a explosion in slow motion. And it is growing every year and is becoming more sophisticated every year. But it does that to the benefit of a long cook time.

B So let's talk about a little bit about the future of Morpholio and how you do make decisions around what app to develop next. I mean, assuming you're taking in obviously a lot of user feedback, but there's also a ramp up of technology with AI and the applications within the built environment, but also even just from an app development capability. So how does your team decide? Where are you going to focus next?

C Well, we have two big advantages there, and one is that everybody on the team is an architect. So, you know, we really started as practitioners who knew the realities of, you know, day to day producing architecture. And I think we all draw on that experience. For some of us now it's getting a few years removed. But you know, we, we aren't just developers, you know, kind of guessing at what the industry needs. So I think that's an initial filter for us. And you know, as we're structured as a business, like everybody's actually a partner in the business, so, you know, everybody is aligned to release things that have a lot of impact, really meet our audience where they are and, you know, propel design forward and know what, how good that can be and know how much that can improve the world when you have design software that helps you. So that's the first advantage.

C And then the second advantage, which came later is community. And you know, when we started Morpholio, we really saw it as a network first. And you know, what we wanted to do was have as many interactions in that network as possible and have a very powerful and growing and active community and network of designers. And in some ways that network has been diffused out. It not only lives inside of the software, but it's diffused out into places like Instagram where there's, you know, a really incredible back and forth between our users and posting what they've made and people posting how to do things. You know, we're very excited about process. So we, you know, do our best to, you know, repost that sort of thing and create this community of people who are sharing how they're making what they're doing. So those same people, you know, can find us through various ways inside the software, outside the software.

C And so there's a healthy dialogue now both internally about how to improve architectural software. And then that loop gets even bigger across the community, which is something like certainly more than a million architects now as part of that community. So it's a powerful feedback mechanism. We tend just to listen to it. I mean, that's when we're at our best, is when we're providing a little. The community picks up on it, tells us where we need to go next with it. And, you know, a seed that can start as a new feature, a new functionality kind of develops and develops and develops into something quite powerful over time.

B How does or what does innovation look like within more folio? And I know I'm saying this from a, from a software perspective, but tech is giving more to people like me who are non technical to do more things, but it still doesn't come without a learning curve. So how do you guys make space for, you know, you just kind of touched on the listening part, but even, you know, building up your own skills and deciding like, what can we, as the current team actually build out? Do we need to bring in other expertise to understand it? And where does that innovation come into the process?

C So the original premise of Morpholio was to fuse analog technologies together with digital technologies. And so it can be technically challenging to live up to what those analog technologies actually do and what they allow. You know, the most visible things right now in the world of digital technology is artificial intelligence and augmented reality and things like that. But just to make really superlative drawing and a pencil that feels like a pencil and a stroke that embodies every bit of intelligence that's coming out of that hand. Eye coordination is really challenging too. Requires tons of technology. So what we've done is we've created kind of a hybrid. We have one part of our app that's incredibly bespoke.

C We have worked for years and years and years on the core drawing engine, which is an amazing piece of technology and is 120Hz, will pick up on every small inflection of your pencil. And the goal is to carry all that information forward into the drawing, because I think when drawing is working and nothing is getting removed, then it's itself an incredibly capable way of communicating and thinking. So we largely just want to get out of the way of that. But it takes a lot of technology to do that. So that is kind of our focus and our bespoke effort inside of this much more complicated thing that is all the apps. And then outside of that, we depend on Apple and some of these big technology companies to be able to flex their muscle and deliver some things into the platform that we can build on top of. So we're standing on the shoulders of giants. So that's.

C For instance, we have this incredible feature inside of Trace called Room Scanner. And you can basically pull out your iPhone or you can pull out your iPad, you can wave it around in a space. It will use the LIDAR scanner on the device which you have a 3D scanner on your phone, and it will make a beautiful model. Very accurate, but also very clean of your surroundings. That will already show up in the trace 2 scale. So you can immediately pull out a ruler and start drawing on top of the space in real scale. That's incredibly efficient workflow. And it wouldn't be possible if we weren't putting together some of the amazing things Apple is doing on machine learning, artificial intelligence, 3D scanning together with our piece, which is this bespoke drawing engine and this ability to manipulate things like sheets of paper and draw on top of them in real time.

C So we've looked for those cases where we can put these things together in really amazing ways for architects. In some ways, Apple kind of puts out some of these technologies without knowing how they're going to get contextualized in different processes. So it's kind of our goal to say, okay, this is what big tech has put out this year. Which of these are going to make the most impact on the architectural landscape? And then for us to start contextualizing them inside of Trace or inside of Order, inside of Journal, and seeing where they then. Where they can then move. With the feedback from our audience, I.

B Want to lean into, you know, Apple not understanding fully how their technology is going to be applied. What are some of the things or some of the surprising things that the people that have been using Morpholio that might have surprised you guys along the way?

C I think we, when we started, we were very focused on architects and very focused on architecture. That's what we knew, and that's the culture that we knew, and it's found its way into the app in many different ways. Obviously, the apps are tremendous for making architecture and architectural workflows, but also maybe they have the aesthetics of architecture. We started to hear from people outside of the architectural world how they were using Trace and some of the people. It was incredible. We were hearing from cartographers, we're hearing from people were using the maps tool in Trace, and they were asking us how they could adjust it when there were hundreds of miles on the ruler, and we said hundreds of miles on the ruler. And they were measuring kind of like national parks or something like that. You know, it was just the scale, this large scale that we hadn't fathomed.

C But, you know, because it's software and it's smart, it was. It was doing it for them. And then on the other side, we started to hear from people in the medical field, and they were going smaller, right? They would be zooming in on A tooth or something like that and using Trace in doctor's offices and things like that. So we did find that if we originally had imagined, well, this is architecture, but it's going to go on to landscape design and engineering, industrial design. It found its way into events, it found its way into medicine, it found its way into cartography. And that's exciting for us because I think we do have to imagine that if we're building this kind of critical mass of tools, it's should become useful for people who care about scale and care about real things. And I think that's what unites all of that. It's like if you're working with something that's going to exist in this world, like I think Trace is the platform you should be drawing in over and above we'll say any other drawing app and that's a place that we can be most useful.

B Do you miss just being 100% in practice at all?

C I definitely miss this feeling of having closure. Maybe, maybe some building, you know, some buildings, they haunt you. Others like you're able to just to do them and get the photography and you have this thing in your portfolio. And I think just, just the other day I was just like flipping through some old portfolios of mine thinking like oh how, how nice was it that I could just make projects and, and then be done with them. At this point all of the apps are kind of ship of Theseus have been made, remade and remade with the expectation to keep doing it. I think Trace is on its fourth drawing engine that we're creating now, each using a different technology under the hood. And as your ambitions grow, you just have to keep packing more into it. So yeah, we, we basically are in a habit of remaking a lot of things and, and working on one project we'll say for, for a very, very long time.

C So that can be challenging. It's not the same kind of milestones that we're used to in the architectural profession, but the upside to that is that we get to correct all of our mistakes so we don't have to leave anything be and can always come back.

B Yes. And you are your own client then in some respect, even though you have many other clients, millions of clients to keep happy too. What is next for. You mentioned a little bit about growing, but you're also a 10 year old company that has stayed to 10 people. So what do you envision next? Or what would you hope to be the legacy of Morpholio when you pass it on to the next generation of leadership?

C Well, I think at this point we are all still, all the people that are making this are very invested in it. We have not reached that point where we think, oh, this a done product. And the, the goal posts are always moving in this profession. Right. Every year Apple will have its developers conference and will, will tell us what's coming this year. And that's like Christmas morning if you're a developer in the Apple platform, because you get to find out what stuff you get for free. You also find out a lot of things that you have to change. So it's a little bit scary too.

C And, and sometimes you find out that your business just became a part of the os, which is a scary moment as well. But, but we see that this is actually a really exciting moment for technology and obviously AI is either here or it's on the horizon, depending on your vantage point. But I think it's going to lead to another moment of reflection in the same way that mobile technology showing up was disruptive and didn't have, we'll say, this clear path of how it was going to impact and everybody could kind of see that there was something there. And me and the other morpholio founders jumped into that pregnant moment and tried to do something. And I think that was an exciting moment that led to an exciting 10 years. And I think we're again at another moment like that in inflection. And I think for us the most important thing is going to be how we navigate this together with our community. So I think there's going to be some incredible capabilities.

C I think there's going to be a lot of intelligence that comes into these devices and I think there's going to be a much higher bar of complexity that is being asked of architects both to generate inside the building, both in terms of documentation of the building and how it's communicated and the communities that they have to pull together to get these very complex projects built. So I think everybody's going to want a little leverage in that process. So I think for us, how to let these new technologies come into the design process in such a way that they amplify and augment the inherent creative potential and propel the design conversation forward and not replace or diminish or automate away design, which I don't think anyone wants to do. So I think it's that moment of, yeah, where, where's the leverage going to be? How is it going to be technologically augmented and how are we going to work in effectively amongst all that complexity? And I think apps will have a terrific role I think software, and hopefully Morpholio will have a role to play there as well.

B What would you say to the current graduate students or the people that are just graduating and figuring out what's next on their path if they're interested in software and app development?

C Well, I think there has never been a better time to create things. And it's a bit cliche to say, but it. It truly is. And I think, you know, there. There is a lot of optimism out there where you look for it. I think my main advice would be just for people to just flat out avoid any kind of defeatism or doomerism that's out there, especially around something like artificial intelligence, which I think is just going to be an incredible boon. But, you know, provided that it's applied in the right way, I would encourage people to just try things. I mean, I had a lot of imposter syndrome, I think, especially in my first few years, trying to do this because I hadn't come up in a conventional software publishing industry because I had to teach one year out of graduating.

C And, you know, at many moments in that saying, like, oh, should I really be doing this? And I think the just trying things and putting things out into the world is so fundamental and you have so many technologies to help you do that. So that would be one piece of advice, just avoid that doomerism. And the second would be kind of drawing from my own experience too, is that there's no better way to learn things than to teach them. So that doesn't mean you have to teach at a university or something like that. You can teach another person, you can teach yourself, but learning and teaching are incredibly correlated, and no one's learning more than the person teaching. Find ways to learn about things, but find ways to share them too. That will have a power inside what you're creating that might take years to show up, but is definitely there.

B Talk about sharing a little bit. I think only because I think in a way, when I look at my time in studio, when I look at my time in firms, there's kind of a lack of sharing that is culturally in red to. I'm doing a very special thing and I don't necessarily want to share what I'm doing out there versus the whole. I go to business school and they tell you to talk about what you're doing because then you can get to the outcome faster because then you can find the right people and partners. You need to test your theory and move it forward. So can you elaborate more on the importance of sharing and community and speed and learning.

C I think one way that I think about this is thinking about iterative design, and that's that you really can't construct anything very well in a bubble. And so it's important to get things out there and to get other perspectives. And I think that's the beauty of architectural culture. Where there is a culture of critique, there's a culture of, you know, pin up and those sorts of things. So it recognizes, again, this kind of distilling architectural technology into its practices. It knew that was a good thing, and it knew that was core to the profession. So it found opportunities to do that, and it found a means of doing that through things like critiques. On the other hand, we make apps that are somewhat very private.

C I think one of the great things about doing mood boarding and morpholio board or drawing and traces, that it is somewhat of a silent environment that's more focused on what you're creating. So I think we do have this tricky dichotomy that we have to manage in design, which is to give something a little life, so not to step on it too early, but then also to put it out into the world early enough that you can learn and change it for the better and evolve it while it's still quite plastic. So. So it's a tricky balance, and it's one that I think every designer has to negotiate for themselves. But we would always prefer a kind of iterative approach where you can try to have the benefits of both.

B What do you want to say to new grads now when it comes to exploring the possibilities that are presented to them by their education?

C I remember in my own education, there was so many voices, and that was partially what was being incubated. There was this incredible plurality of ideas, and it was presented to us as being more than we could ever do or absorb. And so already, in that educational environment, you're having to kind of pick your way through, which is exciting. But it does. You do have a lot of fomo. You do have a lot of things that you can't participate in. And it does sort of cause you to, we'll say, affiliate to a set of ideas or, you know, in. In my own education, it battered which software.

C You know, half the school was 3D studio max, and half of them was Maya. And the Maya people didn't Talk to the 3D Studio Max people or didn't take class with them. There were these kind of odd divisions that are probably less relevant now, but I'm certain they're new kind of fault lines. I Think back to that time, though, and I still try to do this in any kind of design activity of myself, is that the most powerful things was people who could see things in different ways. They would, you know, use modeling one day to see what their design was doing, and the next day they would be drawing, and then the next day they would be writing about it. And they had this kind of multimodal way of approaching design. And I. I think that's, you know, encouraged in.

C In the world of architecture, we have so many ways, you know, cut a section through a building. It's a totally different way of understanding it than a perspective. And so we. We have a lot of different ways of. Of visualizing and interacting with our design work. And, you know, that. That multimodal nature is something that I think everybody should be bringing to whatever they're doing. And thinking through data is a really exciting opportunity right now.

C Thinking through software is a really exciting opportunity. So for people who are adding to their multimodal understanding of whatever they're doing, I would definitely encourage them to look at more of those analytic sides of things and to start engaging, we'll say, with math and geometry at some level inside their design work. And I think if they start to do that, a new dimension of architecture will emerge for them, and certainly some different kinds of skills and different kinds of ways of interacting with software will emerge very organically for them. And I think those skills are just as valuable now as we'll say, conventional, conventional drawing skills or, you know, just design intuition.

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 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 practiceofarch. 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.

C Sam.