5 Ways Architects Help Their Clients Innovate

Architects, like us at DS,  that want to help you innovate understand our role is not that of being the innovator alone. It is working with you to create an environment that encourages and supports innovation from everyone. We do our part by:

1. Challenging

We challenge you to consider options and keep an open mind. We challenge your brief. We challenge what has come before. You may have an idea for a solution – we use our experience, inventiveness, creativity and design skills to develop and consider possible solutions through a divergent design approach so that we can converge on the solution that will exceed your expectations by improving on what has come before.

2. Engagement and support

We engage with you to get a meaningful understanding of your processes and goals, and then use our creative skills to build a vision that will meet your requirements. We’ll work with other experts, and you, to work out how to make that vision achievable. Some projects may show no innovation in the building itself – the innovation may be in the process of getting to the solution. It may be in what happens in the building – the receptacle that holds the innovation. It may be in all of these.

3. Research

We research precedence and identify the good and bad of past work. We research materials and procurement processes. We research you. We apply what we’ve learnt to your work to improve on what has come before – one of the goals should be that your work becomes the precedent for future work. We problem solve and show you the difference between what can be done and what should be done. We help you understand the difference between standing still and innovating.

4. Skills

Ours skills are a mix of practicality and creativity. Practicality ensures the functional needs of your project are met; creativity helps us think about your work in different ways so that new and better ways are developed. We combine these skills so that your project is designed to be better.

5. Emotion and Pride

We use our emotions. A passion for what we do and a pride in our work we believe helps you too engage emotionally with the project, and gives you courage to not accept what has come before as good enough, but to work with us to push boundaries to do better.

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!‘
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
(Percy Shelley, 1818)

We don’t live in 1215 BC. What we build now must have purpose and a reason for being. Working with you to understand what that purpose is, brings a sense of pride to the work, knowing that what is being created is worthwhile and is moving us forward.