origins of archisprint
Archisprint asks the question: What does the future hold for architecture and design? Our starting point was to take tools from other industries like technology and consulting and test them in an architectural practice and on architectural projects.
It all came about when I left our small and busy architectural practice, Ballast Point to do a 12 week full time venture capital incubator program with Antler (my staff were a bit perplexed but they are very understanding people as is my wife). I came back asking questions like: “if google can build a robot in 5 days why does it take us 4 months to design a building?”.
A year later in March 2022 we were doing our first Archisprint where we adopted the well publicised design sprint methodology into an architectural design process. And yep, it did take a bit of convincing (“are we really doing this?!”) with some apprehension from everyone involved including myself. Not only were we going to attempt to condense many months of work (from client brief to documents ready for planning approval) into 3 days but we were also going to do it in the client’s kitchen having decided that the design sprint should happen at our client’s home and inviting ourselves. As far as we could tell no one else had done this before.
The results were very pleasing, we certainly learnt a lot but surprisingly the team really enjoyed the process – particularly being able to focus on one project rather than jumping around. For our second Archisprint in August 2022, everyone was excited and very keen to jump into it. Not everything worked, we had to abandon the kitchen after 2 days because there was just not enough space and the wifi was too patchy for online CAD collaboration but overall, as a proof of concept, it was a resounding success.
Why A Sprint Might Work For Building Design
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My first clue is in the word in common “design”
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Architecture has advanced in the way it is executed, it’s no longer the pursuit of a lonely individual burning the midnight oil over an oversized sheet of paper, or a room full of people drafting and yet the fundamental methodology and structure has not changed
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A design sprint forces us to think differently by imposing artificial constraints which promote creative solutions taking inspiration from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.
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It gives us the opportunity to get out of doing things the way we do them just because “that’s how we do it” so challenging us to think about what we do day to day and how it can be improved.
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Because life and work should be an adventure and to be honest – Because why the f$#% not! We will never know if we never go..
background
So the Design Sprint has been around in some form or another for many years. It came out of agile design methodology but the team at Google Ventures turned it into a systematic and prescriptive approach summed up in the awesome book Design Sprint by Jake Knapp and a whole bunch of resources (see https://www.thesprintbook.com/ for a whole lot more info).
Essentially a design sprint compresses problem solving and design in time and place to create and test a prototype.
The Design Sprint follows six phases: Understand, Define, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Validate. Although as you can see below there are many variations on the theme.
The design sprint has evolved from a 5 day sprint to a 3 day sprint (data apparently showed that the difference between the 2 was margin) and to be honest 3 days felt about right for us and we only realised that the standard had changed after our first sprint.
We learnt even more from our second Archisprint and we will outline our experiences and learnings in subsequent posts.
Why did we create this website?
Firstly because I wanted to connect with other people who may be interested and also to learn from their experiences.
I am also very appreciative of the work done by Jake Knapp and others who have taken an open source approach, I feel that it’s right to share our learnings with others.