Reflection – Visualization

Challenge & selection

Commercial architecture business can be approached in many ways, but in the end it can be  summed up to take a problem, design a building that can provide a solution to it, and sell it.

Typically, the person providing that problem is a business person, who has identified it and has  a remarkable interest in doing business with the solution. We as architects, develop the solution  (this is where design thinking usually happen), but in the particular case we are going to talk  about, we had 4 stakeholders, each one explaining a different problem they believed was the  same.

Since they weren't aligned with what the problem was, they had no idea what they wanted or  needed from us or from our design. So to go further with this project, we had to get them to  reach a shared understanding of the problem to be solved.

As they are a family who had been talking a lot about this subject without reaching any  understanding, we thought they needed an alternative tool to express their perspectives, so we  opted to implement visualization tool. Through visualization we could make them structure their  ideas in such a way that they could express them graphically and more tangible for others.

Application

We were in their conference room. They are 4 cousins who control the family business. 3 of  these 4 people hadn’t made any creative attempts in years, so we were in a room without any  creative tools other than some markers on a large frosted glass table, but we had the need to  get some real insight from this meeting. So we improvised with the tools we had a whiteboard.  We separate them, (to break alliances and instead get more individual insight), each person in  an area of the table, and we gave them a marker of a specific color to graphically express their  ideas on the table. We told them they could choose any type of representation they wanted  (sketches, storyboards, sticks figures, etc.), and we asked them three questions: 1) What is the  problem that your organization needs to solve with this project? 2) Why is this problem  happening? 3) What is the role of our building in this problem?

When they finished we took a short tour around the table with everyone, to learn about the  graphic of each stakeholder. In each one we marked what the group considered valuable. After  that, we redrew a mixed model in the middle of the table, a model that had the contribution of  each one. Each contribution was drawn in the specific color assigned to the owner of the idea,  as well as in the margin, we included any other comments that appeared after this activity in a  different color. All of assumptions made for the cousins, that emerged from this exercise, were  included in the graphic to be tested later. In the end we got a compiled graphic with everyone’s  perspective, one in which everyone knew they had contributed. A graphic that depicted a richer  view of the problem to be solved. A view that everyone agreed with, and that allowed us to  advance in the process.

We made a photographic record of the entire process and the outcome.

Insight & approach

As architects we learn the power of visualization early, so when we started this exercise we  expected it to clarify many misunderstandings among stakeholders, and we were confident that  it would give to them a broader perspective on the problem to be solved. What we did not  expected was that through graphic expression our clients would offer us much more insight  about their business than they did in previous projects. In this experience we discovered, that  even business people can engage with this tool. Surprisingly they were focused and inspired to  express more when they communicated graphically. This tool showed us we can do more to get  insight even if our clients apparently don’t know what to say.

This was the first time we used visualization at this stage of a project, which was generally  problematic when clients came to us without a clear idea of what problem they wanted to solve.  In projects prior to this experience, we used to have several meetings with this client and lose a  lot of work, before achieving between them a clear vision of what the problem to be solved  would be. So if visualization was always an important part of our work in more advanced stages,  now it will be a recurring tool for us from the first contact with a client.

