Does Design Excellence 
= Workplace Productivity?

Presented at the AIA Conference - 
Form! Function! Future! 
The Expanding Dimensions of Architectural Practice
 Portland, OR
15 October 2000

Introduction

In Managing in a Time of Great Change", in 1995, Peter Drucker writes,

"It is not so very difficult to predict the future. It is only pointless". He then goes on to say: "One cannot make decisions for the future. Decisions are commitments to action. And actions are always in the present, and in the present only. But actions in the present are also the one and only way to make the future." ⁽¹⁾

With that sobering context, this paper will begin by noting that we are embarking in an era of profound changes. One of those changes is the transformation from the Information Age, which we have just begun to understand, into the Knowledge Age, which we are just beginning to identify. We can expect this change to be just as disrupting and unsettling as the changes we experienced with the arrival of the computer.
The second Section of this paper will then deal with defining what is knowledge. How is knowledge created? How do we propagate and distribute knowledge? How do we protect the knowledge that we have acquired? We will explore how the Knowledge Age affects the way we work. We will observe that today's executives are just discovering the importance of knowledge capital and are awakening to the need to manage its creation, distribution and protection.

In Section three, we will analyze how the practice of work is evolving during the transitions from the Industrial Age, which was characterized by workflows into the Information Age characterized by connectivity and Project Teams. We will advance that communities of practice and the formation of teams of teams will characterize the Knowledge Age.

Section four will suggest how the design profession should prepare itself to provide the workplaces able to support the Knowledge Age and its communities of practice. We will suggest how the profession might transform itself to meet the challenges of supporting the workplaces of the Knowledge Age. And if the workplace can be an agent facilitating knowledge growth, then how do we measure this growth in order to design knowledge stimulating workplaces?

The final Section will recommend embarking on research projects aimed at gathering the empirical evidence necessary to demonstrate the link between the physical environment and the creation and distribution of knowledge.

Download the entire 34 page document which was presented in Portland Oregon to the AIA - Form! Function! Future! - The Expanding Dimensions of Architectural Practice on  October 15,  2000 in Microsoft Word format by clicking on the link below.  The article  includes a bibliography of 99 references and 23 web sites.