The Measure of Design

A Common Language for Global Design

Communities across the globe face unprecedented change. In change, there is challenge, in challenge opportunity. Design impacts virtually everything that shapes our world. Architects are uniquely able to provide an understanding of these challenges and influence how communities embrace the opportunities. We must help frame a dialogue so that our clients can engage decision-makers and society-at-large in addressing them.

Designing the built environment is about one thing: improving people’s lives. Over time we’ve identified certain essentials that support this goal. More recently, we have codified them into a system that guides our design process. We call the system 10Metrics, or 10M. The system puts all the variables related to a particular project on the table, strengthening our dialogue with our client at the outset.

The ten points of measurement are: 1) Humanism, 2) Integration, 3) Sustainability, 4) Aesthetics, 5) Content, 6) Context, 7) Innovation, 8) Performance, 9) Representation, and 10) Story. In combination, they provide an evidence-based system to ensure responsive design and verifiable value, while limiting our clients’ risk and our own.

Each metric plays a role in everything we design. Three of the metrics are givens, a kind of holy trinity of design for all our projects: humanism, integration, and sustainability. Humanism because of the responsibility of architecture to improve peoples’ lives. Integration because everything in the world is interdependent. Sustainability because the planet can only sustain humanity as long as humanity sustains itself and the planet.

An evidence-based system, 10M tells us how we’re doing, enabling us to measure and adjust design from the earliest conceptual phases through completion. It also allows us to view our body of work objectively in terms of its strengths and weaknesses for the purpose of continuously refining our processes and thinking. The system establishes our design expectations as architects, engineers, landscape designers, and planners and measures our performance on the way to delivering innovative, successful solutions.

Humanism

-- creating environments for people
Our responsibility as architects, engineers, interior designers, landscape architects, and planners is to create environments for people. Humanism in architecture values people above all, but it especially values them within the context of community. As constant observers of human interactions and dependencies, we are led by our continuing discovery and our respect for the shared values and needs of these communities and their members. As designers, we do nothing in isolation, just as people don’t. There is a common thread connecting us all: our humanity.

Integration

--fostering collaboration between all disciplines
Integration is how we make architecture out of disparate parts and materials. For us, integration evolves out of people and a collaboration of disciplines – close, intense, and from the beginning. The intent is to optimize every aspect of design with performance, while minimizing compromises. We know we have achieved the highest order of design integration when architecture and engineering are seen as one – inseparable.

Sustainability

-- striving for indefinite viability
As architects and engineers and planners, one of our core responsibilities is to design intelligently, which is to say, sustainably. We have a history of balancing the design of human systems with the natural environment, one that became more pronounced in recent decades with the coalescing of engineering and landscape design into our architecture practice. As a metric, sustainability is non-negotiable in our design. Wise use of energy, water, and resources in our design is always a goal. So is the investigation of alternative energy and strategies consistent with the 2030 Challenge, to lessen or mitigate climate change.

Aesthetics

-- pursuing meaningful composition, appropriate materials and a thoughtful architectural language
The elements of the aesthetics metric by which we evaluate our design are grouped into three primary but separate categories: language, expression, and judgment. Language is about the composition of mass, form, space, color, and texture. Expression is about the application of balance, proportion, rhythm, movement – in a word, harmony. And judgment is concerned with combining many complex aspects into a holistic and pleasing design. Our clients are the ultimate arbiters of aesthetics. It is our responsibility to give them aesthetic solutions that fall within a meaningful framework.

Content

-- learning a client’s business, industry, or institutional environment and specific project requirements
Architecture is a product of necessity. Our clients have needs and we design buildings and environments to serve those needs. Doing this requires us to familiarize ourselves with the larger universe in which each client operates. Content includes (but is not limited to): where clients fit into their particular business, industry, or institutional field; the goals and metrics that sustain their enterprise; the practical aspects that influence their performance; the nature of their performance goals. Content leads us to benchmarking, research, and professing on similar projects, which helps us identify relevant building systems, performance criteria, and building processes. Ultimately, content drives design solutions that can optimize performance needs and user experience.

Context

-- understanding the obligations inherent in the site
At the most obvious contextual level, design takes into consideration the scale and expression of the immediate physical surroundings of a project’s site. How our architecture relates to its surroundings will be determined in part by our client’s program and objectives. So will the unbounded site obligations. The more complex the world becomes, the broader and more inclusive our consideration of context must be. Today, that reaches well beyond traditional site boundaries to take in the global continuum. Architectural context has expanded as the planet has shrunk.

Innovation

-- challenging conventional thinking for creative outcomes
As part of our culture, innovation pushes us to challenge the way we view a project’s program, design, context, delivery processes, and technical requirements – no matter how many times we’ve been-there-and-done-it before. Ironically, a culture of innovation functions best with a safety net: permission to try and fail and begin again. We back up this culture with broad-based design and engineering disciplines, their integration within the design team, a rigorous discovery effort, and extensive exploration of design ideas.

Performance

-- meeting project needs in the most efficient and optimal manner
Performance is one of the most quantifiable of all the metrics we use. The performance criteria must be identified and agreed upon at the outset of a project, during the discovery and content development stage. At a minimum they include programmatic and functional needs; spatial configurations and relationships; building systems; energy, thermal, and environmental issues; and economics/financial goals, not only for the client but for our firm. We strive for an efficiency of effort and effectiveness of product.

Representation

-- expressing the design idea
From the roughest sketch to the most detailed building information modeling, the tools architects have today for communicating design ideas have never been more plentiful or sophisticated. Our ability to analyze is more complete, our opportunity to show intent more precise, whether through building parti and systems diagrams or representations of hierarchy, structure, massing, plans and sections, building performance, perspective renderings, and 3D visualization. Through these media we explore, test, validate, explain, market, defend, document, and ultimately, build what we are proposing to occupy a piece of ground somewhere in the world and which will, in most cases, impact peoples’ lives for years to come.

Story

-- defining the soul of the project
Every project is a story. Before we design anything, we have to know that story. Only when we know the story have we captured the essence of what our design should respond to and achieve. Our interpretation might be literal, metaphorical, thematic, pragmatic, but it must reflect an understanding of a story that is always an original. In every case, the story has a beginning and a middle. The end almost always plays out well into the future, where new conditions and people inevitably combine to write a new story. Sometimes we help with that too.