The Enduring Legacy of DEGW – with Professor John Worthington and Dr Hiral Patel

Hello and welcome to the Purpose of Plays podcast. I'm your host, Despina Katsukakis. We're going to take a journey into the enduring legacy of the pioneering and innovating design consultancy dgw, which I had the privilege to call home for nearly three decades of my career. And I think it's fair to say that work and the workplace has changed dramatically over the past years. But the concepts and principles that DAGW created continue to endure and be ubiquitous across most of the innovative workplaces we find around the globe. So I am delighted to have the two of you here today. One of the founders of DHW, Professor John Worthington and Dr. Hiral Patel, who led the curation of the DHW Living Archive at the University of Reading. Welcome, John Miral. I was hoping to start from John and this idea of organizations and place and time and how the building and the layers of the building support the changing use over time. Well, I went on to really define what we were doing is the meaningful and elegant allocation of resources. So when you say meaningful allocation of resources, and I think one of the elements is the role that DHW had in recognizing very early on the importance of facility management and activation of space to create experience. Where did that really come from? John? Utilization and budgeting. The utilization part was to say what at the level of thinking about meaningful allocation space, that was an understanding, not just, okay, I've got a bunch of space, but it was actually understanding the values, what it stood for. And this will vary depending on the types of people coming in. But that happens down at the level of the inside. And the facility management bit was really about the budgeting, the allocation then of where the money is. We actually talked about how are we going to allocate the space, how much money are we going to put towards the cafeteria? And you said, these have a monetary value which shows how important they are to you. Which of course now has come full circle as we look at the role of experience and the importance is building. We're looking at now we're recording today in London in 22 Bishops Gate, which is the largest and most sophisticated office building in Europe. And it completely embodies many of the principles and concepts that we developed at DHW and brings them to life in absolute. So it's inclusive. So it goes from the inside space to the outside public space. I'm looking at a Dublin tree just outside there in Crosby Square that I can get to very easily. I fly at the ground floor. What is space? I think there's an important definition Here between accommodation and space. Space tends to think you back only to thinking about. But actually much of what that concept of those three types of space around is actually accommodation. Because you're saying I'm going to be going into somebody else's building and using it because I could do it afternoon. I think this layering of ownership and time and space is incredibly important. If you think back at the work we did for Shell and Holiday Inn in the Netherlands where the Shell Learning center became a Holiday Inn on the weekend. And basically the building was used 24 7. It had three different investment partners. And it was really about a space that was designed to be used as in a combination of an extension of a fixed environment, a flexible and on demand environment. I think that dynamic use of space is incredibly important. Particularly as we look to a much more flexible way of working. A much more blurring of zoning of work life and uses. Tell me a bit more about how technology started shifting the thinking. 1980, exactly. Of course, yeah. The desktop IBM. Absolutely critical moment that was digitization, the first element. And I needed lots and lots of wires and things to make it work. So we said there, oh, you can meet raised force. Ten years later he suddenly had the laptop. We didn't need all that that went. But the basic fundamentals were there. We talked about technology in a way where technology is a partner supporting the organized lifestyles and the work which was then done within it. Whatever work is. Yes. And how work process changed. So it's interesting because I joined DHW in 1983 at exactly that moment when the question was how many of these desktop computers are we ever going to have in the office? And of course by the time companies got to one to one, as you say, the technology had left the building. So tell me more about this idea of software. Thinking about the building as moving a building value, moving from the hardware to the Software. In the mid-80s we were doing orbit exactly Office building technology. That led us on to be more precise the smart buildings were those kind of things coming in. You know the kind of thing with the gizmo is we were doing was really asking three questions is about how adaptable it is. So that was really a first stage. And that in terms of smart is it had a lot of common sense about it. It wasn't something you added up all the buoyant things it could do. Right. And it was going to be a really clever building. And that's three layers we have. We have the building. Yep. As if you like the framework. And that's what Common sense is we had a well developed idea about where you place cores, how you do it. And that was a waking for people. People had not thought about where they put their tours. And of course it actually then in any fixed things relate to the spaces left over around them. We then went to the second stage, which. Which is actually then what are the bits that are important of how the business works? Are organizations fundamentally around what the context and what sort of organization they are? Are they youthful, are they mature? Yeah. Are they open or closed university is having a big impact on of how they use that building and what they want to write. Yeah. So the issue is to understand how you could add the appropriate technology which can then upscale later. Go on. Absolutely. So, you know, the Portoires, again, smart buildings was all about having more and more same at the. So asking the why the why, why do you need the technology? Realizing that would change. Yes. So that was happening all the time. And the third element we had was then how do you manage it? Yes, how you manage the sales process, not just internally, but actually, of course, what are the organization using the building to help it send messages out about what sort of organization they are. So one of the interesting aspects about technology, of course, and we touched on it a little bit, was that when technology left the building with the laptop, we started exploring this idea that the technology was enabling you to suddenly used the city as an extension of the office. And in turn the office could start looking more like a city. This is of course a very something close to your heart as an urbanist. You've got to think about it as a case and what is place now when we did the work a bit later in the 80s and 90s, in terms of I view values, efficiency, effectiveness, expression. Since then, of course, we've added the fourth key one, which is experience. Now you kind of merge that to start with expression and experience, but they are distinctive actually because the expression is the neighbor, barely things which a very sick fixed experience is a moving target. It's changing day by day, but more and more at port. And of course there's parallel with that then is to think that in a digitized world. So what you're really saying is how did this go from 1980, which was before the digitized world? Digitization was really 1980, with that leap in 2000 when we suddenly get actually the whole thing of the Internet, which was open, but what questions were asked were in virtue, what is the virtue case? And then you have to ask yourself is what is work? Back in the 1980s, we were already definitely talking about people who were working at home at some of the time, especially actually growing out of the information technology itself, people who were in software development. So there's nothing new about this. So it's interesting because I suppose it raises the point about where does value sit? So you talked about efficiency, effectiveness, expression and experience. And certainly historically, real estate value is measured around efficiency. It's how do you maximize the utilization, how do you maximize the cost ratio? And we're seeing that even today with all of these mandates that CEOs are sending out to get people back to the office to maximize efficiency. But what you're talking about, John, this idea of lifestyle takes it to a whole different level. So is value really about the cost of the square foot, or is value really about people feeling inspired to do their best work? And is that work meaningful in the first place? Because a lot of the work that we're seeing, people commuting in and out to do is pretty meaningless. Yes. It doesn't add anything really, and probably leads to the resistance of people wanting to commute and to do it. So I think one of the important principles that we always talked about was the intentionality of why you are designing a particular type of environment. What are you going to do in this space, and how will the space and the technology support you? And I feel in some ways we lose that in the debate today that we talk about the office or the home, but we lose the idea of the why, the intentionality. And that was very strong in DHW's thinking. If we move from innovation to, or rather inventing to innovation, it's quite important because inventing, of which many people would say that's the creative process of the designer, starting with a white sheet of paper and say, this is what it is, is a moment in time. It's no use at all unless you've got. The second part to capture that, which is innovation innovating, is that you make the organization to be able to carry something to go. And which we do, which means you have to have many different interest points coming together, or certainly pp who are open to listening to many points of view. And of course, what was unique about us, we were not, in fact, just listening to the people on the supply side of the business, but the man side, we were interested in the people who were going to inhabit those buildings and own those buildings, which is very different. And I think that that dynamic relationship, an iterative relationship between the demand of the end user and the response in the design and operations of the Supply side becomes a really critical element that certainly flows throughout all of the work that we did over the years from the mid-80s, the mid-90s, we got quite involved in Japan. Well, so I think one of the most fascinating aspects of the work we do in Japan and a particular piece of work that you and I did, looking at the patterns of work and how physical space was trying to change or improve or not the patterns of work, is that we discovered that the traditional Japanese office layout, which in photographs looked archaic in terms of very old style furniture, but it was an open bench with the manager on one end, meeting tables around it, and a meeting plaza at the end, fostered enormous amount of collaboration, learning and knowledge sharing. And what was incredibly frightening was that at that moment in Japan, the American furniture manufacturers were coming in and introducing cubicles which were breaking down that collaborative environment into individual desks where teams no longer had that serendipitous informal collaboration, but had to plan and go into very formal meeting rooms. We did a book about it actually, which was myself, a Japanese Nick Kinsaki. Yes, Thomas Boycott from Germany the three. And it was just called the Human Office. So it was the starting point really of that in 85. So which then took us forward into the 90s. And of course we learned a lot out of that, I think. So, John, what would be some of the key takeaways from you for people thinking about the future? You've got to rethink who is the client in a way. And do you wait for somebody to bring you a job. One of the most important things we did early on was did a thing we call multi client studies. In that case we got key people from organizations, mixed organizations, both on the demand and the supply side often. And that was a way of actually thinking about ideas which you were bringing out. And secondly, I realized that actually these were often leading edge, most interesting companies. And know we would continually being what I call the advisors. And the advisors aren't somebody who is kind of saying, I know all the answers. It's somebody who the client can trust and who you have an ultimate feeling that they need to be taking the responsibility. It's their decision about what's in a building. It's not my decision, it's their decision. And that I think is really fundamental. Let's take you away the concept of thinking about creating your own work. And in a way, not that it's just because you want to go and build a new building, therefore you do so, but fundamentally you want to make things better, do things what's fascinating about going back to the multi client studies. What I found so exciting about working on many of those at the time was that you were co creating the solutions with the clients. So effectively we were creating a safe space to innovate in for us and the clients and then we were sharing the information publicly. So this idea that you do the innovation and the research and you create an open system of exchange of ideas, we weren't holding onto it. And I think that very much relates to where the world is going to be much more open and sharing of intellectual content and innovation. And yet at the same time we've got a technology which can actually grab it and capture it because they can take the data away, which is really yours. And you talked about virtual space and I think that's really interesting. Is it virtual, that space, or is there something more important about it? It's about how you actually use that space. Of course, the link is what you need every stop. And this is where, of course, the whole final thing of the experience comes in direct. We can have the virtual space if you like, by doing a zoom or team across continents. The most important thing is then following it up with that place which is where the experience. Bonnie, because there's nothing can be. I can actually see you, touch you. You know, that is incredibly important because we've built confidence, trust in each other. Absolutely. And it's. So what is going to be important future is loads of ideas. And what's about trust? Well, trust is about first of all, be open with what your values are to each other. Yeah. And then actually say, I'm not just doing this for me. It's what I call. I'm giving, first of all, I'm giving it to people because I know I'll get back something later. What that is, of course, I mean, giving opportunity to see other things and it comes back. So give to start with, to get. That's a principle. Yeah, that's a really important idea. And in that kind of shift. Hiral, can I come to you? Because I think you have been just incredible. I think from 2016 to 2019 you led the Living Archive development at the University of Reading. So tell us a bit about what is a Living Archive and what makes the DGW Living Archive special. Dgw, if we think about it, what is dg? Dutch? My interpretation of the organization that it was is really. It's a network of people. And that didn't just include people employed or working at dgw, but that included clients, that included collaborators. And what we were talking about in terms of an organization which is open or closed. I. I felt when I was going through the docunise meeting people that DGW was actually one of those open organizations which hosted people from a range of different disciplines, sectors, that people come from all those different disabilities. And so for me, this idea that an archive isn't just a set of documents, it was to capture that network of people. And that's what Living Archive is, is the combination of the documents and the community sort of coming together. And the other aspect of Living Archive is that the ideas are not stagnant and they are continuously moving and they are relevant. And maybe we need to make them relevant by reinterpreting them every now and then. But I think what you were discussing before just shows how some of the key concepts and principles are so relevant to the work that's happening now. Well, there's no doubt that the DHW diaspora is incredibly vibrant and active around the world. I believe strongly there's lots to be learned from the archive. The concepts that we talked about today, layering typologies, the types of organizations and how they change over time and how buildings adapt alongside that, thinking about space as a continuous sort of experience, rather than constrained within buildings and constrained in silos. Those sort of concepts, we can see of trace them in the archive going back to 1960s, 1970s, and they're still relevant today or maybe more relevant today. And I think my future plans are to work with DGW community and yourself and John to, to open that archive as a learning platform and to get keep all around arXiv, discuss and debate the ARXIV question as well. Because what I also found was that the concepts weren't stagnant even within dgw. They were questioned. They were evolving continuously. And I think that sort of what we call triple loop learning is questioning your assumptions is something we could potentially do with this archive as a learning resource, so to say. Now the two of you are completing another book, so tell us a bit more about that. We started off this book during the lockdown thinking it would be third edition of the previous, a revision of the previous two editions that have John and Alistair has written on briefing. And that book remains one of the seminal texts when it comes to briefing. Now we went into the lockdown and then we started doing the sounding panels, inviting people from all sorts of different background experts in their fields, helping us to really question the relevance of some of the key ideas in the second edition. And over the course of three years, four years, that we have been working on this. We realized that we, we need to completely shift our thinking and conceptualization of what briefing is. Firstly, moving from brief to briefing and really embedding the process as the key thing rather than a document. That was the biggest shift, I think in terms of the second. And the book that we are currently working, we're no longer calling it third edition, we are calling it a brand new book and we have changed the title from Managing the Brief to more towards Integrative Briefing. But it's bringing different thinking, different values, different professions together. But what we're also doing is moving from the unit of analysis as a project to a program which aligns very well with dgw. Because for dgw, the project wasn't a building, the project was a client. Absolutely. And you had worked for various clients over the years, wasn't it? The majority of the clients I worked for at DHW were relationships of over 20 years and some I continue to work with, which I have found more with corporate clients than with landlord developer clients, which is that they seem to have this challenge with corporate memory. So they reinvent ideas that were done 10, 15 years previously as if they never happened. So I'd be very interested if you're kind of addressing this. There's a tendency to forget the past so that whatever comes in can be claimed as something new or novel. And I think the forget forgetting might be purposeful or it might not be purposeful. And I think increasingly we are finding that we are moving at such a fast pace, looking at the future, there's no time to really look back and see where we are coming from. And that's one of the key gaps, so to say, in our knowledge about workplaces is where are some of these concepts actually coming? And tracing their origins is so important really the management of continuous change. So change is probably the other big important word and probably the only thing that remains constant. And I think, and I think in the same way that DHW's principles and concepts are everyone's and it is always a joy to see how those concepts remain so resilient and so ubiquitous in just about everything that we come across today, I think that might be a nice point to thank you both for really taking the time and sharing your thoughts and your ideas was very insightful. It's always great to see you, John and Hiral. So thank you both very much. Thank you for having us both. Thank you.