169: ‘Shaping an Innovation Culture’, with Matthew Krissel

169: ‘Shaping an Innovation Culture’, with Matthew Krissel

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode I welcome Matthew Krissel. Matt is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a Principal at Perkins&Will which is a global interdisciplinary architecture and design firm. Of course, you already knew that. In 2023, Matthew co-founded the Built Environment, Futures Council, a diverse multidisciplinary group that advances design, technology, and artificial intelligence in architecture and construction with actionable leadership and insight. He also founded and directs Creative Lab 3, an innovative research and design platform, focusing on architecture, writing, and photography to catalyze and shape ideas and research that inspires change to transform our collective future. Before joining Perkins&Will, Matthew was a partner at KieranTimberlake in Philadelphia. And his [00:01:00] design work over nearly 20 years at KT helped shape the firm's most significant and impactful projects, including iconic institution defining architecture and small homes with big ideas. He regularly shares his work methods and ideas speaking and publishing nationally and internationally on architecture, design, and the intersection of technology and the built environment. As an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture, he is invested in developing the next generation of design leaders.

Today, we talk about his extensive 25 year journey in the architectural field, including his history at KieranTimberlake and now at Perkins&Will. His new design leadership course at Carnegie Mellon in which his students design new business models for architectural practice, integrating AI in architectural education, creative friction group dynamics, the power of questions, the role of safe spaces for creativity, the impact of organizational structure on creativity, re-imagining digital practice in architecture, [00:02:00] the importance of presentation skills, encouraging entrepreneurship and architectural education, re-imagining workflows with AI, and the impact of AI on architectural education and practice.

As always, I would appreciate your help in giving this podcast a boost in the vast media landscape by subscribing, wherever you listen.

And if you'd like to receive an email, when new episodes are published with all of the links and other information from the episodes as they come out, sign up at trxl.co.

This was a great conversation with Matt and I hope you'll not only find value in it for yourself, but that you'll help add value to the profession by sharing it with your network.

And now without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Matthew Krissel

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Evan Troxel: Matthew Krissel welcome to the podcast. Great to have you. Finally,

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. Thank you, Evan. Great, great to be here. I know we [00:03:00] bumped into each other at the convention

and it was one of those moments where I've been a long time listener of the podcast and, uh, you just kind of came alive in front of me and we had a chance to chat, uh, in person. It was wonderful to get to finally talk to you and, uh, chat a little bit about some of the things on your mind and what you're up to.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. And, and, and before you make this about me, I want to make it about you. So the, the idea of, of this podcast is really around, or that the topic is really around this course that you're teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in the School of Architecture, which I think is in the Department of Fine Arts.

Is that what it is?

Matthew Krissel: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: Okay. and you have a lot of other things going on in your life as well. So. Before we get to that topic, maybe you can just give us a bit of let's just call it recent past, your history here, your trajectory of, of what you've been working on. I mean, I think we've probably known of each other for a decade or something, maybe even longer, but online only until we, until we saw each [00:04:00] other in DC at the AIA conference.

But give everybody

who's listening an idea of, of who you are and what you've been up to. Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: So I have been in practice for a little over 25 years.

My story began in architecture, really, at the University of Buffalo, where I went for college. Uh, four year degree program. I moved to New York City, 1997. Incredible time to be in New York. Incredible time. The economy was booming. Uh, I joined Skidmore, Wings of Merrill. I jumped on a bus with two duffel bags, moved to New York City, didn't know anybody, threw myself into the work.

I was there for about a year and a half and then transitioned to Cone, Pettersen, Fox. I was there for about four years and then the opportunity to go to graduate school presented itself. I applied to the University of Pennsylvania and began there and moved to Philadelphia at the end of 2002 and was there from really in the program from 03 to 05.

And that was that incredible time, Evan. You know, just remember that period of that transition [00:05:00] from, so when I was in college, we were hand drawing still.

Evan Troxel: Yep.

Matthew Krissel: I moved to New York. I've got to learn AutoCAD. I transitioned to ComparisonFox. They're using MicroStation. Halfway through my time there, they retrained the entire office to AutoCAD.

And then I go to Penn and it's all, you know, the emergence of Rhino and 3DS Max and Maya and all these other tools. You know, before Autodesk kind of bought all these things, things like EcoTAC,

these like, These, like, abstract, these odd programs on the periphery, these fundamental drawing and modeling programs.

And so early on, I was getting this sense of how you kind of start over that, that importance of being data nimble and kind of tool agnostic, as I describe it, that there's, you know, the ecosystem of architecture is going to be one that's always dynamic and always changing. And so Penn, you know, was transitioning from kind of a traditional pedagogy to this incredibly digital forward in that period of 03 05 that I was there.

[00:06:00] While I was there, I got introduced to some folks at KieranTimberlake practice here in Philadelphia. And I started working there as a summer intern, and I had, you know, in New York, I was working as skyscrapers all over the world, and I joined this incredible practice that was just really starting to take off in terms of some notoriety, some wonderful projects.

But what was fantastic was they had just published the book, Refabricating Architecture. And what I found when I got there as both a summer intern and then I joined full time in 2005 when I graduated from Penn was that they were a place invested in, uh, at the leadership level all the way throughout the culture, this idea of fostering exploratory behavior.

And so it was a little bit of reading that book and seeing it come to life in the sense of, uh, integration of research, of computation, tools, technology, and the value of looking outside of architecture. So. Through the book, it looks at the shipbuilding industry, the carbon, how can we look at other people to see [00:07:00] how might we think differently about fabrication is one way or the way we draw, but we organize ourselves.

So that's hard to plant another seed. So one is starting to become more nimble. Two is starting to look around outside architecture. And so when I show up there coming out of Penn, I was one of the few people who could model and render at the speed of design, as I like to describe it. I could actually change the workflows and how we were working and thinking, not just as a production tool, but as a design tool.

And so there's this wonderful, opportunity and confluence of starting to see what it means to integrate technology and research into every design project, uh, throughout. Um, and of course, James and Steve, the founders, James Timberlake, Steve Caron, the founders, recognized my propensity for an interest in technology and computation and research.

I was involved in the research group. I was involved in all the competitions. I was at the kind of forefront of a lot of Really interesting, speculative, sometimes proactive work that was going on in the practice. [00:08:00] And so that was the first key thing within my kind of 20 years that I was at CUNY Timberlake, was that first, that kind of leadership investment, and that shapes and drives the culture, of course, of that interest in kind of exploratory behavior in integrating research and technology through everything we do.

The second big milestone as I kind of reflect on my time there and how much that's shaped my point of view was in 2008, they hired Billy Faircloth to be the research director. And she came in and just completely, so I was part of the research group. It was a little bit of a wild west. We were jumping on all kinds of interesting things.

It was, um, extremely exciting and fun and a dynamic place to be. She came in and just brought a clear vision, intentionality, new energy, and focus, and accountability to a way that research could shape practice in a fundamentally different way than, you know, And

Evan Troxel: Right.

Matthew Krissel: this concept of [00:09:00] transdisciplinary design and started to set a course of how to hire and aggregate talent with all these different backgrounds to create a core group of people that then, as she and I began to work together on things, we'd start to figure out ways to deploy all these different skill sets on different teams.

So whether it's computational backgrounds, ecology backgrounds, creative writing backgrounds, and you're putting them into design teams that normally would just be full of architects, and then you'd have your kind of, you know, usual kind of consultant collaborations. So that was the kind of a second key thing as, as Billy came.

And so we really reorganized the fundamental trajectory of what it means to be, you know, a research integrated practice where there weren't that many models and architecture, really, it's more common now, but at the time, it was certainly at the forefront. And how much that changed and started to create a different sense of agency.

Uh, in practice and what you could do and what you could accomplish and then really again focusing in on how you [00:10:00] think of the way we organize ourselves as an active design, you know, to do great work, we have to design the relationship to each other. as much as we design the things around us. So that was the second kind of pivotal thing that really started to shape a point of view and an interest in, uh, this thinking of organization and the people we surround ourselves with and how critical it is to have that kind of diversity and multi dimensional, uh, thinking.

The third one was this opportunity that was presented to me, um, so coming out of the Great Recession, firms starting to build up, as I mentioned when we when I started there. 2005 was about 30 people. Uh, at its peak, it got up to about 130 people. When I left in April of 23, it was around 100 people.

So at this time, coming out of the Great Recession, we're starting to build up.

We won the U. S. Embassy competition that I was working on, and work was starting to come in. We're building the firm back up, and James Timberlake pulled me aside and challenged me to kind of re imagine digital design at KT. What might this be? [00:11:00] You know, they'd always been at the forefront of this. Uh, through the, you know, the challenges of the economy and everyone trying to keep the firm together and running, you start to, you know, those kind of initiatives can drift and the investments in those can start to drift.

And here we had a chance to refocus, re, reinvest, really reimagine. And he gave me complete flexibility to come up with something, see what he can come up with. And. So I set it back and this is one of those first chances I had, you know, chance to kind of rethink an entire structure of a firm and what were some of my observations, what might we do differently?

And one of the observations there's, you know, this A lot of people like to write things down, create plans, strategic plans. And so the way I've phrased it back was how about instead of a plan, we just build a platform. We need something that's less about writing things down that you can never keep up to date.

We need to just start putting people in conversations with each other. If we want to move ideas effectively, through an organization, we've got to be [00:12:00] faster, more fluid, uh, more organic discourse. And so I pitched this idea of we had a research group, communications group, and architectural teams, uh, about creating a new digital design platform.

Involve these kind of three key components, which was the visioning group, which brought together people from communications, graphic designers, architects, different, um, diversity of age and experience and research group members. There were times where to have strategic conversations once a month, there were times I'd bring in a summer intern, you know, who's there for a couple of months, have a strategic conversation, anything you could grab onto to get a different.

Perspective, different idea, pulse of what's going on outside the organization as much as what people are seeing inside.

So I had a chance to start to set up these kind of monthly strategic conversations. And then the second tier of that was we established these unique task teams. And one thing we learned was you really need to be.

Um, for digital design, you have to be addressing day to day needs. There's so many day to [00:13:00] day needs in an organization.

Um, but at the same time, you also have to be thinking far out into the future. You can't just be so focused in on putting out fires all the time.

So we created this range of taskings that eventually consolidated over time.

But in the beginning, there were so many conversations that people wanted to have. And on the far end of the spectrum, Billy and I co created this group we call Near Future Practices. And this set up a, a bi weekly conversation where again, all the different disciplines firm would come together and have a conversation about what you're seeing out in the industry.

What are you seeing outside of the industry? Um, what are some of the great ideas you're seeing in projects that are just getting crushed into the, The, the weight of deadlines and, and all that kind of, um, you know, value engineering exercises, a space to pull things out of project based exploration and get into another space that could have a different timeline to it.

We can nurture it differently. We could talk about it differently. And because the firm had always built [00:14:00] in a way for some proactive work, we had an opportunity to then actually engage and develop out ideas, just at least to get a little further. And it's amazing how many things spun out of that. Um, that the firm was involved in and just how that then feedback feeds back into the firm and practice throughout different projects.

The third component of that was, again, to get the entire firm conversation going. This was creating more robust knowledge communities, which, again, sounds really common now. But back in 2012, 2013, just wasn't happening as much. And this was monthly conversations. The whole office got together at one o'clock on Fridays, everybody.

And again, if the leaders show up

the room and engage in discourse and conversation, and it gave a chance to really create a forum of really robust design discourse and debates and, um, Demonstrate tools and workflows, demonstrate something on a project. We started a group. I'm going to refine that into themes, but basically all those parts working together began to redefine just how [00:15:00] ideas and knowledge flowed through the practice.

And so that was a, um, those are kind of three things. And when I really think about those 20 years that I was at Cure in Timberlake, were pretty crucial to starting to set up this, this mindset, um, and this way to kind of work and operate. So in April of 23, I decided to leave. Karen Timberlake. And I was, uh, made a partner in the firm in 2015, and I've been working on remarkable projects.

I was getting involved in all these initiatives from digital design to the research group to hiring, um, and leadership opportunities on various projects. But I found, and I know you've talked about this too at times, it's a little bit of this kind of restlessness starts to settle in. And, uh, as amazing as it was, and I'd reached the pinnacle of the profession in many ways,

it was also

I was getting very comfortable.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: And it's, uh, it's one of those things.

Evan Troxel: I'm thinking of this whole idea of like, it's an [00:16:00] interesting struggle to, your whole life as an architect, being an architect. Comfortable with being uncomfortable. And then you get to a point where you're comfortable and you're like, Whoa, like, and a lot of people stay there, right?

Like, be honest, right? Like a lot of

Matthew Krissel: Yeah.

Evan Troxel: at that point in your career, it's like, you've earned it. And

then on some level you kind of feel like that. And then there's, there's people like yourself who are, you're, you're thinking like, I kind of don't like being that comfortable and you have this, this discomfort with comfortability all of a sudden.

you want to, you want to kind of flip that over again.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. And to go back to, you know, where I began with all this constant change through my career, whether it was tools or just cultures or different elements, I, and just in my normal, non architecture life, all my hobbies and other interests. I enjoy new things, starting things over, building something from scratch.

And so here is getting a little restless, feeling a little comfortable. I know that to do great work, you kind of have to be [00:17:00] uncomfortable. It helps if you're really trying to stretch yourself, being uncomfortable is a wonderful way to do it as, as difficult as that can be. Um, so I wondered, was I losing a little bit of an edge?

Was things getting a little too easy?

and so I started, I just started an open conversation with my partners and, uh, they were in full support. I decided to, to depart. My projects were in a great place. The firm was in a great place and I just needed a, a change really. And so I stepped away and I honestly had no specific plans.

Evan Troxel: mm

Matthew Krissel: fortunate to be in a financial position that my wife and I and my family could take some time and, you know, consider my options

and really just step back and reflect. And so I stepped away in April of 23 and there are a couple of things that I did. So one I, I started to just re engage with so many people that I'd lost touch with, and you know, when you're in the AAC community long enough, you forget [00:18:00] how many relationships and just people you've met, people you've worked with over the years, whether it's really intense on a project and you haven't talked to them in a long time, or old friends from New York that I worked So I started to reconnect with people, talk to people who started their own practice, listen to their origin stories, see how they were doing it.

Randy Deutsch and I co founded a Futures Council, the Built Environment Futures Council. So I had this idea about, um. Everything that started to bubble up in 22 and 23 about artificial intelligence, it was very academic and there was no one really talking about what it means in practice. my natural inclination at my point in my career is when I see something, I just want to get some people together and let's talk about it and see if we can make it better.

Can we take a crack at it? Can we do something? Can we engage somehow? So my instinct is to build a group. And so we, uh, in this period of where I, where I, after I left KT, uh, Randy and I started [00:19:00] a conversation about building this national, diverse, transdisciplinary group of design and construction leaders.

And it was specific about this conversation around artificial intelligence, uh, bring our leadership, bring our insight, um, and make it specific to, to, you know, issues in practice. And because we had so many relationships, we were able to get Uh, landscape architects, people in robotics, people in software, authors, uh, people in construction, fabrication, um, and architects at all different scales of companies and organizations.

And we met once a month for a year and just started to continue. We did two hour workshops and just got a conversation going and we would connect us. What have you seen? What have you heard? What are you working on? And we took the approach within that. It was kind of a ground up infiltration into practice about, uh, synthesizing all these conversations.

So, so I step away. I've got the flexibility and freedom of time. I'm having [00:20:00] conversations. I start this futures council. That's great. The other thing it is. 1 of the folks I called was Omar Khan at, uh, Carnegie Mellon. And this is where this kind of feeds into this course. He and I met back, he was at the University of Buffalo before.

I'd given a talk up there. He'd run these wonderful ceramic workshops with Boston Valley, bringing outside partners in with the school. I have a really nice relationship. And so one of the things I did was I pitched a few ideas and it gets back to this opportunity I had that as I was reflecting on, you know, what I've accomplished, where I've been, the kind of work I've done.

There's a chance to say, you know, I've got a lot to give back.

And in this moment of pause and reflection, I could figure out a way to get back to, you know, teaching and

really sharing, sharing what I've, what I've learned and what I've,

Evan Troxel: was that instigated by you or was that prompted by him? Or how, how did, how did, uh, who, who, who knocked first

Matthew Krissel: uh, I called him, uh, he had seen the news that I had left and was curious as to what I was [00:21:00] up to and I said, Hey, you know, I'm in Philadelphia, Carnegie Mellon's in Pittsburgh. It's about 5 hours away. I've got family there. I did a project there and I know the campus very well that had just finished up as I departed.

And so I said, Hey, look, you know, I'm interested. I've got a couple of ideas. Can we have a conversation? I want to see if this gets any traction. And so I pitched this idea of this course, this idea of creating cultures of innovation and design leadership and agency. And with the. content that it was this conversation around something that was not trying to, well, within the professional practice realm, which has so many things they have to do for their accreditation and topic areas, there was a whole bunch of reality of practice that just doesn't fit into those boxes you have to tick that a typical professional practice course has to land.

So I pitched it as this idea of a seminar, uh, something that would bring [00:22:00] unique guest speakers and find sources of, of, uh, reading and listening, um, and really kind of reposition. a conversation about putting people intentionally at intersections, putting people at crossroads to look outside architecture for inspirational models of working.

And so I kind of loosely pitched this idea. He said, gosh, that sounds great. Why don't you work on it, build something up? How would you do it? So this is, you know, spring of, of, of 23, wasn't, wouldn't have time to do it by the fall. So I had till the spring of 24 semester to develop this out. And so I spent some time with him to develop these ideas and concepts out, which we'll, we'll get into a little bit more.

So in that year, I start to build this class. I am reflecting and having all these conversations. I decide to launch my own practice. I had a couple of opportunities bubbling up. So I launch. I practiced, which was called Creative Lab 3, and I got a couple of projects out of the [00:23:00] gate, doing some concept designs, doing some work, institutional work, some residential work, um, got this wonderful, uh, master plan at a museum to work on.

I started to, I brought, uh, a person on to work with me, and after about a year, things were going pretty well, I was actually at a point where I needed to start to grow. And had to really start to, again, I was at a crossroads of, okay, you know, right now I'm bankrolling everything out of my savings and,

uh, and anything that came in, just reinvesting it into the practice.

And it was at this point of, okay, if I'm going to grow, that's a whole nother kind of financial investment, intellectual investment. Well, I'm in this kind of crossroads and opportunity bubbled up and this was a conversation that started with the folks at Perkins&Will. So I had a conversation with the managing director from the New York office, um, about this opportunity to, they had, uh, uh, just the beginnings of a filled office studio.

And, you know, would I be [00:24:00] interested in doing what I'm doing now, which is building a practice from scratch, going and getting work, hiring people, building a culture of design and innovation? Would I do it with them instead? And, At first, I wasn't quite sure. I had already invested so much and started my own practice.

As I started to really think through, um, you know, if it was 10 years ago, maybe I'd have the energy for doing, continue to do everything myself. And when you're running your own practice, the chance to, um, really, um, a mature practice and infrastructure, the opportunity to be entrepreneurial, still build something in Philly, shape culture, design, talent, clients who we're going to work with within this incredible global interdisciplinary firm.

It became something it was almost too good to pass up. And so

as I'm having conversations now, I've never, you know, I haven't, I hired hundreds of people, but I haven't interviewed for a job in 20 [00:25:00] years. I'm in a totally different position. It's a principal level position. It's so it's just a very different process that I was kind of learning on the fly.

So you're having a lot of lunches, dinners, and you're meeting, just having conversations, you know, is this a good fit? And so some of my criteria of, okay, they do outstanding work. Do aspirational work, check. The other big one is at this position in my life, I just want to work with great people.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: you know, I need to be surrounded by outstanding talent and people.

And so the folks in New York I was meeting, and then the woman, my counterpart here in Philadelphia, principal of the firm, her name's Laura Morris, super talented, smart. Uh, met with her and had a really frank conversation about what, what the opportunity really was. What does it mean to build a new studio within this, you know, a place of 32 studios around the world.

And we had a great conversation and, um, Again, just became an opportunity is too good, too good to pass up. So I had to make the difficult decision to wind my practice down over the [00:26:00] summer, uh, begin to phase in at Perkins&Will. I said, I'm just kind of getting started. Um, so a lot of business development, a couple of projects I've been able to jump on.

Um, but that's where I am right now in October, 2024. I'm at the frontier of this new chapter with this incredible practice that I'm still getting to know and learn. Um, and the opportunity to really kind of build up the talent and growth and aspirations to reach for something, this capacity for positive impact that I just couldn't do building a practice from scratch on my own, you know, boarding this kind of rocket ship that's already in motion and the infrastructure and talent already in place,

um, it allows me to kind of pair and sync up with where I'm at and what the opportunities really are for, for impact.

Evan Troxel: Your career potential is what you make of it, right? Like, this is one of those things where it just kind of illustrates that it's like, what can [00:27:00] you do for your country kind of thing, right? Ask

your country can do for you. Like, what, it's like, what, what can architecture do for you? Or

what can you do for architecture?

And it seems to me, like, if you have the motivation and the will, like, there's so many ways that you can do it. Make an impact in architecture, right? And I think we'll, we'll talk more about your course and what you're trying to do with that, but it really seems like is a great example of that. And, and I imagine that this also makes for some great storytelling, uh, with your students that you have in the course, right?

Because you've, you've lived this. I imagine that there's, there's a lot of great information that becomes part of this, this course that you're teaching at Carnegie Mellon. Mm

Matthew Krissel: yeah, the idea that I, you know, joined a practice that had this incredible robust idea that I was a big part of shaping the culture over 20 years, to then going out on my own and having to build something from scratch and all the facets that entails, and then now [00:28:00] joining a place with a chance to build something from scratch, but now with a whole different set of infrastructure.

It's almost every possible way you can imagine. Different ways to begin, um, and, and develop over time. And

Yeah.

it's an incredible opportunity, great moment, and I'm excited to share it and develop it into this, this course.

Evan Troxel: It's interesting to think of you teaching this course that is really about the All of these outside influences and looking for maybe new ways to operate, new ways, different ways to build teams. And, and you're, you're doing that in a larger construct now at Perkins&Will, which is a stat, like how old is Perkins&Will, right?

It's

old, right,

Matthew Krissel: in 1935. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: right, right. So 90 years

almost. Right. and, and, um, It's, it's interesting to think about, and I've been through something similar, the firm that I was at was probably close to 85 years old now. Um, And, and developing something in, and it's not like every, nobody in the firm has been around that [00:29:00] long, right?

It's, it's obviously, but they've been there a long time and there's behaviors, there's,

there's just ways of working

that are embedded and so hard to break free of.

You do have a little bit of a different scenario there where you're in a new location for them, right? You're in,

where you are, you know your, you know your, area probably better than they do in some senses, and in other ways they have so much expertise in these different market segments, and you're trying to kind of merge something. Pulling all of these things together again, though, in a really established place and, and innovating in an existing environment is not easy, right? Like, I've been through that. It's, it's really difficult. Um, I, I'm just curious to kind of, obviously they're open to that. And so maybe before we get to your course, I mean, if you have some words around building intrapreneurial ship, right?

Like doing something inside of a firm. versus doing something outside of a firm where you are [00:30:00] starting your own practice and you have a complete carte blanche, right, to go off and do whatever you want. I'm just curious, like, what your experience or advice you could give people about doing that kind of a thing inside of an existing organization and how it might be different than starting fresh.

Matthew Krissel: can just say, you know, when I interviewed, that's part of what I pitched,

you know, there's plenty of people, 20 plus years of experience who just needs, you know, somewhat competent to go get some work and run a technically sound studio. But if you want somebody who's interested and you've seen my background, like.

Project experience and the kind of things that I've done, the other spaces that have been involved in. There are a few other things I didn't quite mention in that quick overview, but, um, if you want all that, you know, within this, this framework, um, then let's talk because that that's interesting to me.

And in fact, the challenge of. Um, merging those two spaces when you have a very mature practice, there's a lot of momentum there that [00:31:00] sometimes can be an uphill battle to untangle. Um, but if you have people that are actually open and receptive, you can then wire that energy in the right direction and just kind of reoriented to a different trajectory.

So, the key thing for me was, uh, so, uh, associated with the New York studio and New York studio leadership. And then I got to meet people throughout the corporation. But those early conversations were all around, uh, there's fresh leadership. Throughout the organization, um, there is a desire for fresh ideas, for what it means when you bring new people into a place, uh, to intentionally agitate, to stir a little bit of a different direction, and, um, you know, what I was bringing was mutually beneficial.

I was bringing, you know, a totally different perspective and a way of working and a way of thinking. I'm still just getting started. So we'll see. I haven't hit a lot of resistance and roadblocks. Actually, what I found is if you have really great ideas and you've demonstrated it, you've got a track record for it.

People are open to it. [00:32:00] Um, at least as, as where we are now, um, it's, it's, it's. It's been well received and exciting for, for the kinds of folks that have been able to meet. But it is different. It's a place that is, you know, very, uh, market sector and practice based. I'm a generalist. And so, one of the ways I framed it was, you know, we've got all these folks in the Northeast.

Well, Philly can be this generalist practice that then actually fits in as a great collaborator with all the other studios by virtue of being a, you know. organized around horizontal thinking and less about kind of the vertical thinking to compliment that we don't need to duplicate and start competing with all the other studios in the Northeast by trying to build up these, you know, highly specific, uh, market segment areas.

But I've got experience across a lot of these spaces and therefore it works really well to combine those. So that's part of the big picture strategy we're starting to map out. And now it's about how to actually execute that. And then, you know, the goal and purpose of this is to do better work by

That kind of, [00:33:00] uh, alternative organization, you know, the non status quo

version of practice is ultimately to do better projects, the create a better process.

Uh, the clients like it better. It's more enjoyable. The build team likes it better. It's more successful. The, the execution, the ideas, the innovation,

the whole purpose of all that intellectual diversity

is to actually ultimately create a better outcome for people.

Evan Troxel: Well, let's talk about this course that you've got. Um, the, the idea behind it. I, I want you to introduce it. Um,

but, but the, the name of the course is design leadership, creating agency, a culture of innovation and fostering entrepreneurship in the built environment. Right? And you were kind enough to share with me your syllabus and some other documentation that happened, I guess, from the first time that you put this course together, like you mentioned, last spring.

And you're gearing up for another round of this course, um, just to kind of set the table here for what it was. And, and so it's all architecture students. [00:34:00] Is that

correct?

Matthew Krissel: So it's, yeah, it's in the graduate program at Carnegie Mellon, all active students. It was about 23 students. Um, when I pitched the idea, that was, yeah, essentially the title and then the high level was, hey, you know, I want people to essentially design a practice of what it can and should be. Um, and I will lead them through with guest speakers and other types of conversations, um, and get them introduced to new ways of thinking to start to find new gaps to start to find new ways to think organizationally.

I found a couple of things when I kind of critiqued. Academia is the, there has to do so much and architectural education is incredibly complex. When you think of everything you're trying to prepare someone for.

Evan Troxel: The word that comes to mind is rigorous.

Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: I mean, you think about, you know, everything you have to do for accreditation, everything you have to do.

If you're just trying to design something, you want people to graduate with all the things you want to expose them to and get them interested in. There's an enormous amount of ground that has to be covered. The reality is the professional practice [00:35:00] course has a lot of. boxes it has to check right to meet accreditation.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Matthew Krissel: those are all important and real things that you need to at least have a sensibility around from the contractual issues to zoning to just all the kind of elements that are fundamental to a professional practice course. What I pitched was, okay, There's another part of professional practice that probably doesn't have boxes to check as part of the NCARB accreditation of the program, but are actually vital.

And so there's an awful lot of, um, uh, gaining of knowledge. There's an awful lot of kind of implementation and architecture program, but there's not a lot of people talking about how you organize. And organization, when you think about Cultures of innovation is that third stool element of great ideas, and I can execute, you have to actually know how to organize people, get people in the right place, get the right people working on things.

So I wanted to develop something that would get people to think about that truly as an active design. Not as, again, [00:36:00] just a kind of, um, a subset of their circumstance or an outcome of a circumstance of which they feel they have no control over. I got to put on this team or I joined this firm, it was the only job offer I got, whatever it was.

It's just the kind of

flipping that around to see that as

something you have agency over

and to organize that in a different way to think about, you know, how we did it. So the opportunity here was to say, okay, at the scale of practice, if you were to design a practice,

how would you do it?

Because students certainly have a lot of opinions about the profession,

they certainly have a lot of opinions about what's missing out there and things and territories they feel they should be involved in, or why are architects involved in this?

Why aren't architects involved in that?

Evan Troxel: Well, yeah, and graduate students are coming from a variety of backgrounds, right? They're not coming from architecture all the time. They might be coming from finance, or they might be coming from engineering. It could be a number of things, right? And so, curious just of the make up of the first cohort, what did you see as kind of, like the thing that you were just saying, architects should be involved in this, they should be [00:37:00] involved in that, and maybe or maybe not, they have any exposure already to architecture, working in firms. I don't, I don't know where these students are in their curriculum, but have they had any experience? Have they already identified some gaps that exist in practice or are they coming at this with fresh eyes?

Matthew Krissel: Uh, some are pretty fresh eyes. There were a handful that just went straight through undergraduate to graduate. Maybe they've done some summer internships. There were a number that had worked for three or four years, so had a little more exposure, worked on a project, maybe got something built even.

Certainly some had different backgrounds in architecture.

And so that already is like the first great mixing chamber, right? The fact that you already start with something that's evidencing where we're trying to go, which is, you know, great work doesn't come when everybody's the same, right? It's coming from us, uh, and, and being able to leverage our differences.

Um, so that's an important part of the, uh, the initial starting point was that, yes, we already had something to kind of, kind of work with. And [00:38:00] it's funny, I, um, so there's a couple of things I initiated as part of this, which is, um. Um, You know, I remember being in graduate school and I hated any time, you know, it was a group project or, oh my gosh, you know, and

Evan Troxel: then you graduate and, and guess what, right?

Matthew Krissel: everything's in groups and people.

So,

so I do acknowledge that. Okay, look, you're going to work in groups. And I realize that half of you probably really don't like that. Um, but it is essential and essential skills. How do you work well with other people? Because

Evan Troxel: absolutely.

Matthew Krissel: is something that requires not only other people in your practice, but obviously the team you build, the broader team, the consultants and groups, but when you get into the build teams, it's more and more that becomes integrated,

Evan Troxel: don't forget the clients. the clients are on your team too.

Matthew Krissel: yeah, so it is, um, you are always working with other people for sure. So getting people, um. Yeah. So I asked them to design their own group. So I start the class actually with a kind of workshop, freewheeling workshop and and first couple of podcasts. I have them listen to and we'll come back to why I do podcasts, [00:39:00] but.

Um, it was all about like the importance of diversity of groups and diversity of thinking. And of course, all the students are always thinking about,

uh, these questions of diversity, equity, inclusion, all these kinds of conversations are happening. So then I asked them to form their groups, the next class would come together and look at the groups and like, wait, you guys all just made groups with your friends.

Like you just listened to a podcast about the importance of designing a group by finding people who have complementary skill sets. They're not like you, there might be creative friction and the strength of that, you know, that it was kind of funny to see already the first task was like a fail because you go back to your old habits.

But,

Evan Troxel: But,

of course, you, you expect that as well, right? I mean, that's, it's a great learning moment, teaching moment, because you know it's going to happen,

Matthew Krissel: yeah, you know, it's going to happen. Are they already like, oh, yeah, you're right. We probably should have taken our own advice.

Evan Troxel: We just go, we just went with the path of least resistance, right? It's like, where's, where's the comfort lie? Let's do that. That, that's how we'll start.

Matthew Krissel: Right. So there are a couple of things I set up within this. So when I pitched this, I'm like, gosh, you know, there's this whole sense of [00:40:00] like, how we organize it seems to be missing. And there's some, some things around the edges of what I would consider professional practice. I'm just never going to fit into the standard template of all the stuff you got to cover.

Um, and to, you know, Omar's credit, uh, a wonderful, uh, person, a visionary, a great thinker. He's always kind of, uh, interested in thinking about collaboration and new modes of thinking. He got excited by it too. And it's like, Hey, this sounds great. It's exactly the kind of stuff we're, we're always talking about.

We just haven't had a place to kind of stitch some of this together or make it kind of coherent. And so I organized this around a seminar style so that it would, foster conversation. Um, and because I'm not a lifelong academic, you know, I also probably taught it a little bit differently than most people would.

I, I organize this all around, uh, podcasts, as I said, because to me, that's the contemporary mode of how you get great information in a kind of conversational way. It's, it's unrealistic to ask students to read a book a week.

and come back and be ready to have a conversation around. [00:41:00] You know, if we have a book by an organizational psychologist that you're going to read as a way to just think a little differently about how they see the world, that's in practicals.

But an hour and a half long conversation in a podcast after they just published the book is a great way to get the deluge of ideas, but get them to kind of really, um, in a, Fairly quick, but, um, more engaging way because of the nature of the back and forth that helps contextualize the information. Then again, if you just kind of read it, you get a little bit more of the background story.

So, what I did, what you were referencing before this, this giant Miro board, that's another thing in practice, you know, we use, you need collaborative. You know, infinite whiteboards to share and gather work. I organized this around this idea of this being one giant kind of class diary of ideas and observations.

And so I would issue a couple of podcasts a week. There were occasional chapters out of a book. Cause there wasn't anything you could listen to that they had to read. But for the most part, it was, it was listening. But the thing I did with [00:42:00] that, I don't know, was the other key thing I've learned as an architect this time that I just don't think it's Is taught or it's kind of hard to teach.

So maybe you have to do it through something like this. It's a couple of things in our case, you have to be able to frame a great question. Build a culture of how you ask questions as an active design and you have to be able to make observations and be insightful on your feet because you're walking a site with a, with a client, you are,

uh, everyone in the room looks at the architect and say something smart, you know, when you're like looking at something and no one knows what to do, or you're at an interview trying to get work or you're, you know, just kind of, you know, the nature of how business development works.

Um, so I, what I thought was, gosh, you know, how do you listen to these things? And every week we're going to have this giant mirror board where you have to formulate, you know, one to two questions and one to two observations, and it's got to fit on the little mirror sticky. So it can't be long. You have to be succinct, and you're going to see every, you're going to see everyone else's questions, and that's why I tried to show you a couple snapshots just so you [00:43:00] got a feel of it.

One, you see how incredible this just idea and conversational board becomes as a collection of thoughts and observations and questions, but two, because they see each other, they also force them to also think about other facets of what they just listened to, so they're not all asking the same questions.

And through that repetition, I hope they got, you know, they ultimately became better at asking questions. I think they did.

And just being more insightful, how you just take something, listen to it, distill it down to

two or three key themes that were most compelling to you.

And you had to write it in a way that became generative so that we could then talk about it.

So then I would, the conversation, I would use that board.

I'd put a few dots on some of the interesting ones and we would start the conversation.

in the seminar the next week about, you know, what they basically produced as a way to frame the conversation.

Evan Troxel: just the act of practicing asking open ended questions is a huge skill for anybody in that position to actually have. [00:44:00] If, if It's a great role play to do in a small team when you're prepping for an interview, for example, is, is to number one, just ask questions that, like, try to figure out what questions the clients are going to ask you.

I think every firm probably does this, right? They go through the, what objections are the clients going to have with this presentation? What could they ask us so that we can pre address it internally

so that if they actually ask it, we have an answer, right? But, but even. Reversing that and, well, so you become the question asker, but learning how to ask open ended questions to get more insightful, just, just more context to work with as the designer is huge, right?

I mean, it's one of those skills that is, most people aren't even aware that the questions that they're asking are yes, no, green, blue, like, what's the answer?

I'm not just looking for the answer. I'm looking for.

the next sentence in this conversation. I'm not looking for the answer. I'm actually looking for [00:45:00] where this could go, not knowing where it could go, and that's where these open ended questions really come in handy, right?

Because If you don't know what to say, ask a question and get the other person to do the talking. They're happy to usually,

right? Everybody loves to talk and talk about themselves. And as an architect, that's exactly what you want

them to do is talk about themselves, talk about their issues, their challenges, their problems, their What are they endeavoring for? What's not on your website? Like what are, what are some,

there's, there's so many ways to kind of engage people in a conversation like this course that you're talking about and coming up with new ideas, I imagine that can really only happen through the conversations that are, it's not just through my observations of what I heard in a podcast, it's like, it's the actual conversation.

It's the actual unfolding

with those people in the cohort. Having that conversation together and one idea sparks another. I mean, it actually now come to think of it, like in the Adam Grant video

that you link [00:46:00] to in your syllabus, where it's like a TED talk podcast, and he's talking about with the creators of the daily show.

And they talk about this idea of what they call it burstiness. I had never

heard that term. Right. But this idea of it's kind of like the ideas just start popping out. And so when

you're talking about organizational structure and who should be on the team, And creating a space where creativity and innovation can happen.

You really need to foster the ideas of, I think Adam calls it psychological safety. I've always just called it a safe place, right? But psychological safety is a great way to, to really hone in on it because you, you are more likely to put forth Possibly absurd ideas, knowing that, like, it's just for the sake of, like, this brainstorming session, and it doesn't, it's not going to get shot down, it's not going to get stomped on immediately, but having these conversations in an educational environment, the academic environment that you're talking about, I can imagine, led to A bunch of things that people didn't write [00:47:00] down through the conversation.

And it's all about kind of this open ended conversation, continuing and snowballing as it goes to really create a creative and useful conversation to inspire, to spark insight and, and, and new ideas.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, and that's, you know, the essential thing is how do you make it generative and action oriented because that's exactly right when you're doing programming, you're meeting with a client, you're trying to understand again, if you're doing service oriented stuff, and you're just trying to, you're just building your first draft, you probably just take whatever they say, and you just go do it, right?

But if you're talking about doing transformational architecture, we're talking about actually making significant impact. You have to dig beyond what people are saying. So even in the initial conversation and you're learning about how they use a place or you're touring an existing space that they're using a couple of things I've learned.

One, people will tell you one thing, but they'll act differently. A lot of times in these programming companies, people will describe kind of how they think they work. And, or even sometimes how they imagine where they're trying to get them. Um, but it's not [00:48:00] necessarily how they actually are. So you have to always complement it with kind of observational reads.

You have to like actually go and go, go show me your desk. Let me go see your storage. Let me see what's going on. How do you actually do this? And you start to read between the lines and you're starting to fill in the conversation through the observational side. But it's an essential part of digging deeper.

And so starting to get them comfortable with not only debating design together, And design discourse, creating that creative friction, but how to just use, you know, question asking as a fundamental infrastructure for doing great work. And, you know, there's a simple thing like the, you know, ideas tool, which is always, you just start everything with the, how might we, how might we, and it gets people already shifting their, their thinking into a future action oriented way.

How might we do this? It just, it changes the nature of what you can get out of, um. The environment that you need, the people you need, your understanding of place, and it starts, that incredibly starts to spark things. There's like two things that I see consistently crush innovation. There's probably, there's definitely a lot [00:49:00] more, but two of the most common ones are, you didn't ask the right question.

Right? And people converge too quickly. And those two things tend to, tend to crush, crush innovation. Um, in architecture, so if you're not asking the right question, of course, you're, you can continue to do things that you're just going in the wrong direction. And the other component is, you know, gosh, design problem.

So architecture tends to be fairly lean on the margins. So your innovation and your exploration tends to happen through projects. Now a lot of places can have incubators or separate research groups and spaces that can explore outside of projects, although I think they all should. It's a, it's a worthy investment.

But when you're only using your projects for that, they also get crushed because it's the timelines, the pressures, the reality of a product. You just can't get to all these things and do high quality design and technically competent work and be trying some new tools and be trying a new material and be prototyping something over here and be trying to convince them to try, you know, something that's never been done before.[00:50:00]

It's very, very hard. So these are the kinds of things that, okay, these weekly rhythms of asking questions and forming observations around material that you've never heard before.

And I'm glad you brought up the one about Uh, the Adam Grant one, because I thought that was wonderful kind of parallel to think about how architects like the design process.

So this is one where he, he basically is an organizational psychologist and he goes in to learn from Trevor Noah and the team. Hey, how do you create a show every single day?

Evan Troxel: Right.

Matthew Krissel: required. You have such a short turnaround time. It makes an architecture phase, a schematic design phase of three months seem generous, right?

You know, what if you only had 12 hours, right? Sometimes we only do, but, um, but I loved it because I got thinking about when I, I loved about how he talked about, um, how they come together for these kind of brainstorming conversation, that burstiness where everyone's getting excited at the same time. But then at the same time, he talks about how important it is to then step out of the big group and a smaller group comes together to do the editing [00:51:00] and the refining and the final polish of the idea or the joke in their case, the comedic part.

Ultimately, Trevor has to deliver it. And so he has to kind of put it in his voice and dial it all in. That's a beautiful way to think about how to, you know, Reorganize the way you think about design and the design process, and what it takes when you bring a group together,

and the, all the issues of group think and problems with brainstorming,

um, but that point of when you think about editing and refining ideas

and how you can reorganize the group, split off, go into smaller groups, do interesting stuff, you might come back together.

So it's a great one to, to kind of think about, again, through this other lens, if someone had to create through a different way that we can

think about as architects, how we might change our own design process at a different pace with a different type of ideation.

Evan Troxel: It reminds me of a talk that's on YouTube. I'll try to find the link to it to put in the show notes, but John Cleese has a wonderful talk on creativity

and he talks about that highly [00:52:00] creative time, but also the really introspective polishing time that you just referenced, right? It's like you, you have to have both and sometimes one might be bigger than the other, but it's relatively impossible to be creative on the spot. Right? You, you, this is something you show up and you do the work every day and, and that's what flexes that muscle so that maybe someday you actually can just be creative on

the spot, but like you were talking about earlier when you're walking the site with a client and you need to have kind of insightful comments on the fly, um, that comes through having done it a lot,

right?

Um, but, but this idea of actually kind of identifying creative time and putting in the work. You know, I think a lot of times that was with their group, you know, with the, when they were making Monty Python and, and coming, it's, it's very much kind of probably like a daily show writer's room kind of a thing, right, where it's everybody's just throwing out. absurd [00:53:00] ideas, right? And making people laugh and, and, and, and actually noticing what are people laughing

at? What are people interested in, in an architectural context? It might be, it might not be laughter, right? But it might be, you still need

a

Matthew Krissel: good idea. Yeah.

Evan Troxel: you can throw absurd.

I think it was Bjarke Ingels who, During it, maybe it was the Netflix abstract series, the episode on Big, um, if I'm remembering correctly, but he talked about like this, having a safe space for creative work to actually happen and, and, and he actually used the word absurd, right?

You have to have a place. Where people can have absurd ideas, because it's not until afterward, when you actually go down

that path, that you can look back and think that

that thing actually made a lot of sense, but in the beginning it made no sense at all, right? What do you mean we're gonna do a, a, a waste plant with a ski hill on it, in a, in a flat area? you know, in, in Copenhagen, right? And talking about what's the name of [00:54:00] that? I think it was called Copenhill,

right? It's like, It's this energy plant and recycle, like waste recycling, and they put a ski hill on it. And that is a, if you think about it without the context, like it is a completely absurd idea.

And yet it's a reality and everybody looks at it. Maybe not everybody. I'll generalize a little bit here, but it's like. What an, what an innovative idea to make multiple uses out of something that nobody would ever think of doing, right? Um, but having a design studio

where those kinds of ideas can even be proposed. A lot of places don't have that,

right? It's, it's too much check the box. And I think Adam Grant says it in the beginning of that, that podcast. He's like, large groups are where creativity goes to die,

Matthew Krissel: Yeah,

Evan Troxel: It's not a creative place. And yet here's, here are, here's, here's the daily show. Here's John Cleese and his troop of comedians.

And here's Bjarke Ingels group, right? Where they, they, they have a group. of people and they come together [00:55:00] and through their wide range of experiences can come up with extremely creative ideas and then execute

on them and and do what they need to accomplish with those because they have built a culture of creativity and psychological safety,

but also have the execution behind it to back it up.

Matthew Krissel: yeah. I mean, that's where I try to begin the class, which is where do good ideas come from? And just having a conversation because that kind of combinatorial thinking and approach that you just described is, um, one of those that again, you have, that's an intentional act. You have to put yourself at crossroads and intersections.

You can't just be in the constant flow of the way it's always been. Um, so that changes who, again, who's in the room, who are you hiring? How do you make a team? You know, what skillset and background do they have? Um, and then who are you bringing on as consultants and of course, who you're selecting in terms of your clients.

If you're in a position to be selective, um, all those things need to come together, but you have to design the process and the organizational thinking to allow those things to happen, create the culture for you to have people to speak [00:56:00] up, to be able to explore, to engage, and you have to still do it. And meet all your usual timelines and deadlines for architecture.

So it's, it's a beautiful design challenge of people and place and culture of how you kind of bring all those things together. But it's a, it's a wonderful, to me, it's, it's so much of the world is becoming more of that mixing. We want spaces that do more than one thing. We need spaces to do more than one thing.

Whether it's through the lens of sustainability and adaptive reuse and resilience, we can't have things that just do one thing anymore. I mean, some, some things you have to very specialized spaces, but most things you want that kind of adaptability, that transformation, it can do a couple other things, or has value

beyond its initial purpose.

We add that kind of 4th dimension of time to all these things, and you're starting to use that again as part of the design process and the way of thinking that that is a, um,

a wonderful driver to kind of instigate.

Again, this question of how we kind of think about the organization of people.

So it's, [00:57:00] yeah,

Evan Troxel: coming up with a balance in that group, right? Uh, because I think, you know, it's something that I think they addressed in that, in that video again, but, but this has come up many other times, right? If you have an overbearing or an extremely talkative person. Maybe, maybe they're a leader in, in that room. Like a lot of things just defer to that person because they talk the most or because they're the boss or whatever. And so

in your, in your class, you're that person, right? And So maybe I, I would be curious to hear how you handle You know, this, this discourse of ideas, but all the students are pretty much on a level playing field.

So maybe there isn't necessarily, there's like, there's no corporate structure in academia when it comes to the student body. Right? So, but in, in, when you're in practice, professional practice, there definitely is. And something that I've also heard about. And I could be incorrect about this, but like, there's this Japanese meeting culture where, um, the idea is that the, the junior est people get to speak [00:58:00] first, and the senior est people get to speak last, so that those ideas come out, and they're not just agreeing with something that a senior person said or completely deferring, because that naturally happens, right?

In these kinds

of organizational hierarchies that people are in, and then, and then they just don't say anything at all, or they just nod their head and agree, even if they think it's a terrible idea, because politically that's the right thing to do, you know?

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, that's the designing your culture and sometimes you can influence this. So if you're again, meeting with a client and you can or a user group and you're trying to manage a stakeholder engagement with all these different personalities, you can set up the exercises of engagement to allow that kind of free flow.

I think so you don't get. You know, through either anonymity or through other sorts of kind of games, interactions that you can design to get, you know, to break down those, those barriers, um, in our own internal organizations. I mean, this obviously is something that's plagued architecture because it's [00:59:00] for a long time and built around a cult of a personality, right?

It's the singular lone pollinator, the lone genius who moves around the room, sharing and tapping on the shoulder with a great idea and sending you off your way. And so part of this is, you know, how do you create a culture of collective fluency? How do you shift that, that model radically? And these are a number of things that I got to experiment with at Kieran Turmer Lake when I was there.

And I went, as I was moving through the organization, I had this wonderful opportunity to just re imagine the entire digital practice, coming out of the great recession. You know, there's, everyone was just kind of trying to hang on, you know, and there's this chance where James, Timberlake pulled me over and was like, Hey, you know, we need to, we used to be a leader in this.

We need to really reimagine some of this, you know, and it gave me a chance that it was one of the first opportunities I had to sit down and really think about, Hey, if I could design kind of hive of activity, how would I do it? And so I, I pitched him this idea, like, gosh, you know, there's a couple of things I noticed is, you know, we've got [01:00:00] people in the communications group are doing something, you got architects doing something, we've got the research groups, we use similar tools, we have similar challenges, but no one's talking to each other.

So we devised this idea, like, developed this, what we call the digital design visioning group. And it was intentionally, I had to go around and select people there and you made sure you had, you know. extremely inexperienced people in the room, extremely experienced people in the room. You had people from the communications group, the research group, the architecture, you had technical people, you had the kind of blue sky thinkers.

And so we made an intentional kind of Petri dish of all these mixes and created a space for that kind of conversation to happen. And so we would meet regularly. And one of the groups we devised was called near future practices. And every week to build discourse, it was about. All the things you're thinking about, the stuff that was getting crushed in projects, but you had a great idea, needed a space to move out of a project and just survive a little longer to get a little nurtured a little bit, and it spun out so many wonderful things.

And of [01:01:00] course, the firm, you know, we were set up to do software, hardware, design buildings. I mean, do all kinds of amazing things, remarkable infrastructure in place. But part of it, that opportunity, this was 2012 when I had a chance to kind of re imagine this. It was my first chance to like, not only just think of it, but then deploy it in practice and see it actually work.

So some of those things then became essential for my own development about ICON. you know, how I run a stakeholder engagement, how I organize people to make sure you're in a place where people can speak freely. But even in your own culture of design, how do you shift from a place, you know, again, around the call to personality to a place about ideas and, you know, really about the best ideas are going to be what moves forward.

Sometimes, like I said, you still have to have maybe a smaller group kind of eventually kind of edits and helps refine and select, but at least creating the space for that kind of exchange and dialogue Discourse to happen. So, so vital. Certainly what I saw in practice, certainly what I've carried forward [01:02:00] any place I, you know, go and operate at any scale.

And so for this class, you know, how do I, so one of the things I did, um, and it kind of is, it solves a couple of things. Every class I start with it just didn't ask me anything.

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Matthew Krissel: what I realized, one, it helps diffuse the, the, uh, any kind of sense of hierarchy in the space to some degree in terms of just like, Hey, I'll talk about anything you want to talk about and it kind of relaxed, calm way.

But it also gave him a chance again. I had this opportunity. For everything that I have done, I had a chance to share in ways that they just don't have the platform for that kind of communication. So I would get questions about writing cover letters, you know, because I did all this hiring, like how, how do you write a great cover letter?

What are you looking for when you open an application? What, what, you know, uh, to negotiating salaries to, um, when you present complex environmental. information to a client group that doesn't understand how have you been successful in driving these, you know, unique innovations. And [01:03:00] we talk about visualization and presentation skills and things like that.

So there's a chance that you kind of just diffuse a little bit and then ease into it. And for me, I, maybe it's my personality, but I try to just stay as conversational as I can. I'm not there to lecture

there. I really am just hosting a conversation.

And if you treat it more as a,

Fireside chat. We're all sitting around camping.

It's a different kind of conversation in unity as opposed to me standing out. I'm the expert. I'm going to lecture to you all.

Evan Troxel: Yeah,

Matthew Krissel: there to just, I'm just guiding a conversation. I'll, I'll,

you know, try and draw people in who are a little quiet. I'll try and reshape it or reorient it if it gets off track a little bit, but

Evan Troxel: I want to take that a little bit further, and that is, uh, I mean, that is a, an amazing strategy to employ, because I think most architects are in the position of interviewing or presenting to win work, or, you know, most of the time where, where this comes up, where they're [01:04:00] leading a presentation, and it really is kind of a one way, until maybe the last 20 minutes is then opened up for Q& A, right?

A lot of times when you're, when you're presenting for work, it goes to that, but. I've done talks like about the kind of topic that you just talked about, which is just engagement. How do you engage people as an architect, right? And it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier about asking good questions. But the key is engagement, and that is how do you get the, whoever you're talking to, to be engaged in what we're talking about today, and starting your course off with an Ask Me Anything is a great way to just immediately make this a conversation, right? It's not just me delivering on a topic today, and I've, I've talked to AIA groups about a digital, you know, connection like the one we're having today as we have this podcast, right?

We're doing a remote recording here. And a lot of times, you know, especially during COVID, it was done this way. This was how interviews were handled. And, [01:05:00] and even today, like just let's cut out the travel expenses. Let's cut down on, you know, flying somewhere or driving somewhere to do something. Let's do it remotely.

And how can you engage? And still, it's, it's not like by showing drawings and screen share and showing renderings, it's, it's by asking questions, it's by within the like the first six minutes, I think, is what the research shows. You have to engage the audience within the first six minutes or else. They're going to pick up their phone, and they're going to start doing email,

right?

And they're going to start doing other stuff, because you're actually not talking with them. You're talking to them, and maybe they're interested, but probably they're not, right? And they've got other stuff to do. Everybody's really busy. And so, I think it's an interesting strategy. For you to kind of open up the, the discourse for that week to do the ask me anything and just say, you know, like, I'm not here to tell you something, let's have a conversation about whatever you want to talk about, you know, that's a, that's a great way

to, because if it's, if it, if it's them [01:06:00] driving it. They're invested, right? And, and they're going to actually get more out of it because they might have a little bit of a different angle than you're proposing for that, for that day. Right. So I'm really interested to hear like, what, how long did that ask me anything go on for? Like, did you have to stop it?

Did you have to cut it off because it just kept going or was it,

Matthew Krissel: I let it go as long as if we want to spend the whole two hours.

That's

fine with me. If it's only 15 minutes and we get on to, you know, the mirror board and the conversation from the, you know, the, the, the assignment, that's fine. Um, the other thing I will say that I think really resonated and again, I'm in a privileged position to be able to do this.

Um. Because of the projects I've done, but also the opportunity that because I happened to design and built a building on Carnegie Mellon's campus and it just opened, I also use that as a way to everything we talked about each week, I tried to bring something from practice

Evan Troxel: Hmm.

Matthew Krissel: to just evidence. This is how this is.

This is why this is [01:07:00] important. This is how it has real impact. So I guess the first class way I kick this off as I do an interactive workshop. So I. This is how I would design a stakeholder engagement. I'm here to learn about you. You're here to learn about me. And so I ask questions like, what, give me three words that define your principles of who you are and that drive your actions, right?

And you got five minutes and they have little post its and they got to put them up on the wall. We talk about them. Then I tell them the three words I did. You know, these are how I, you know, define myself. And then we go through, you know, three or four questions like that. And I share my, my own version when I ran it essentially by myself to myself to test the questions.

But I already start to open up and try to connect through some of that. But the next week when we came back, I do a short lecture on, okay, I'm going to show you. So for this Carnegie Mellon project, I'm going to show you the, uh, process we did in terms of some of the interview, how we won the job. Uh, some of the insight we brought so they got a sense of like the slide deck of, you know, how you kind of present and think when you just have kind [01:08:00] of an RFP environment.

Um, but then I showed them the, the, the engagement we developed with, uh, faculty, students, builders, and the kind of, um, users we assembled to a day long set of interactions. And I showed them a number of them. What we did, the questions we asked, the outcomes, and then I showed how it changed the program and how it actually changed the project so they could

Evan Troxel: Hmm. Mm

Matthew Krissel: the activity to like actual impact.

It wasn't just some icebreaker exercise that seems kind of silly and ridiculous. Like, these are, these are real acts of design that shape. You know, rewrote the program, changed opportunities within the building, re centered priorities based on real faculty and user and student feedback on what the building could be and how vital that is.

It goes back to what we were talking about earlier. When you just get the program, it's a bunch of numbers in an Excel file. You start with just these really high level questions and you have your own observations of a building type. That's very similar. Precedent research gives [01:09:00] you a kind of a roadmap for some of these.

building types go. But to get to that next level of specificity, intentionality, real context and history and place and what it means to be a mechanical engineering building on Carnegie Mellon's campus at that corner of that site in this year, at this time, with everything going on in the world,

um, these are the things, you know, that's how you get to that next set of layers of intentionality and purpose.

That just make the work so much richer and compelling. So, so part of it, I think too, is that diffusing a little bit, shifting that, that hierarchy and sense of hierarchy,

but then really being able to evidence,

uh, some of the things that we're talking about that might seem a little bit on the periphery to show how you've been able to deploy it in practice.

Evan Troxel: That, that's really cool that you're able to do that, right? And they're, they are there in that space that you know so much about to be able to

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, we can just walk over to the other side of campus. At the end, I give a tour of the building, uh, and they can hear it directly, some of the [01:10:00] anecdotes and some of the stories.

Evan Troxel: That's cool.

Matthew Krissel: But the other thing, oh, go ahead.

Evan Troxel: yeah, go. No, you go ahead.

Matthew Krissel: I just said the other thing you brought up that I thought was interesting is the question of, um, uh, you know, how you build trust and relationships and whether this is a staff interaction or a client or a user group, you know, in order to get people to open up and to talk and be more kind of vulnerable and clear about what they need and want.

Um, you have to kind of establish some of that. And some of that too is that the kind of mentoring and trajectory of developing a culture of design over time. And it's interesting because through that kind of COVID period, when we shifted to all online, it demonstrated we can do a lot of things. Um, it did shift a little bit of the nature of how you build trust, uh, the people you had relationships with before COVID happened and you shifted online.

It was very different than when you meet a new employee. virtually, if they just joined the organization. Uh, the how design discourse, designer views through a zoom lens versus being in a room. [01:11:00] Um, it's amazing how the technology has opened up more opportunities for some of those. And it's also showed us in my mind, the value of why we still come together.

and the purpose of convening and when it's, it's, it works and is appropriate for, for being able to handle and do things virtually. And it's amazing to me to see the kind of, some of those patterns about, you know, one on one, I think virtually works really great. I think even sometimes when I was working with just a small team, like three people, two people, the virtual interface, you can have that kind of exchange or space for people to talk, space for people to iterate.

As the groups get bigger, it gets harder and harder through that format because you just can't have the simultaneity of the conversations the same way. Um, and the nature of just the way the room behaves versus in reality, if you were all there and the conversations before the meeting, or you go out to dinner and kind of all the other stuff that builds relationships that happen around at the times we convene and gather,

but this art of gathering.

Uh, and one of the podcasts is this woman who wrote this [01:12:00] book on the art of gathering and she's talking about through the lens of social interactions, uh, weddings, uh, corporate events, like the nature of gathering in a different way.

Again, you can begin to see that through how we internally in an organization, in a company come together and why and when that value of being in person versus when we can facilitate it in other ways.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. That, that's, I, I agree that that is one of those things where, especially in, in an environment where you are doing brainstorming and there's a multitude of ways, it's not just through conversation that it's happening. You might be sketching, you might be pinning stuff up, you might be pulling stuff up on a device, you might have stuff already on the wall. Um, but, but all of those things also, there, there's other layers to it that are body language and initial reactions that you will notice that somebody will have when, you know, a page is turned. That is really difficult to do, uh, through a screen, right? And, and having that kind [01:13:00] of, I don't know, it's, it's almost like you're an anthropologist on some level and you're there and you're, you're interviewing, you know, live in person.

And, and you're actually seeing. the the behavioral reactions and just the, the, all of those subtle things that we can read as humans, that's really difficult to do through a, through a 2D screen. So

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, and the passive learning part, you know, it's hard to go back and think about what it was like when I had two years experience and didn't know anything and was just trying to like pay attention to everything going on around me and what's happening. Um, but as we, you know, again, develop these cultures of innovation, the question of how you really grow wonderful talent and ideas through an organization, how good ideas spread through a place,

um, how people develop their own sense of professional development.

And you get the complexities of architecture. There is a part of passive learning, just being in the environment, surrounded by creativity, that, that hive of stuff [01:14:00] happening, um, in the spontaneity around it and the impromptu parts of it

that, uh, it's fascinating to me as we think about the future of the workplace, how we begin to continue to develop and balance those as, as technology and the kind of analog space of reality, the physical space.

Continue to push and pull until we find this, you know, each culture has their own,

uh, kind of, uh, equifinity of where it's, where it kind of lands and, um, what that feels like and what it should be. And that's, you know, those are some of the things you talk about when you're developing a place is what are we going to be?

How are we going to interact?

How do we gather? Are we spread out around the world and that gives you a certain reach capacity? Um, are we all together? When are we together?

Evan Troxel: Yeah. Well, let's talk more about some of the specifics of this course. So, generally, you've kind of laid out the idea, and then you have like a series of case studies, and podcast listenings, and video watchings, and all four. Like, [01:15:00] where are the students going with this information that they're kind of working their way through?

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, ultimately, there's a couple of things along the way. And so one is to create these unique collisions. So getting them introduced to new people, new ideas, new ways of thinking, and bringing things together that may seem separate, but suddenly when you start talking about it, you realize there's a lot of, a lot of interaction.

So along the way is a couple of milestones. One is the ultimate goal is they design a practice and they have to develop an actual mission statement. They have to actually develop sense of organization. They have to develop design principles. They have to define. You know, what's the change that they seek?

They actually have to be able to describe that and what they would do, the kinds of projects they would work on, the kind of people they want to work with, um, and some, you know, landed in kind of traditional architectural, let's say, um, outcomes, but with unique ways of how they wanted to get there. And some are already shifting into uh, user experience and technology and different kind of media and in a sense of bringing the [01:16:00] built environment and digital media together in a way that was kind of a hybrid between let's say a graphic design, a kind of user design and architecture firm kind of space, right?

So it was funny to see the, or interesting to see kind of the range of, um, total outcomes that came in terms of the products they imagined they would produce. But to get there along the way, they do a gap analysis, you know, starting to understand what's out there, what aren't people talking about. You know, what are, and so started getting them exposed to all these other unique design environments and people is for them to start to see these hints of things that might be new territories architects could operate in or spaces that they could certainly draw into a kind of traditional architectural outcome like a building.

So they're starting to do some kind of gap analysis, start to get them to look around. They asked him to identify a company can be any company doesn't have to be an architecture firm. Um, that they admire and why and have them really kind of study a place and think about what is it about when you just evaluate a [01:17:00] place, what is it that you really admire about them?

Why do you like them? Why are you drawn to them? What are they doing that's so interesting to get them to think about how you kind of present? yourself, uh, to the world and how you organize yourself in that way. Um, and then, so they have to, along the way, they make an elevator pitch, uh, and I help guide them and refine them when it's open for everyone to kind of give feedback to.

Uh, along the way, they also study, uh, places that have fostered innovation. So I do want to bring it back to some point, uh, there's a conversation around the physical environment that helps enable all this, this great ways of thinking and working. Um, so I, you know, task them with a set of case studies and get them talking about.

It was amazing. No one had heard about Bell Labs. No one had heard about. MIT's, Building 20, so there's like the one which is no design and like chaos, but it created all this incredible innovation and outcomes, Building 20 at MIT, then you have the like high design of the time, both [01:18:00] mid century incubators, you know, the Bell Labs and the Saarinen, uh, kind of overlay to the whole thing, you know, everything was so specifically designed.

to create those kind of interactions and spaces of innovation. This year I'm going to introduce a few other ones that are more contemporary that I want them to kind of look at. So I do want to have a conversation then around the kind of spaces to get them again going back to how you think architecturally about our environments, the physical environments, um, and the spaces that we can create that can actually help enable these.

These kinds of ways of thinking

Evan Troxel: Very

Matthew Krissel: and so then the other component to this I've realized is, you know, coming in again from the outside, uh, students, it's, uh, writing, writing and presentation skills are challenging again. It's something that isn't taught. Um, I don't know how students are expected to do it because no one's teaching it, but 1 of the most essential skills and practice is communication.

[01:19:00] You have to, you have to be able to write to clarify ideas. You have to be able to write to communicate to the world. Um, you have to be able to present. and pitch and get people excited in really succinct and clear ways. So the other component to this is I'm going to, I can't solve, I can't solve all those things.

So, okay, let's, let's try and just help them improve their presentation skills. So through this, each of these things are going to be less writing, more presentation. So get them to get things down 15 minutes. So group of five people, you got 15 minutes to do a case study at 15 minutes. Pitch your, your firm, your organization idea.

Um, and so even the final project

this year, I'm going to get rid of the final paper,

um, and just get it, just focus on delivering a great presentation because ultimately

their stage when they go into practice, if they can at least present, whether it's internal design dialogue or they do start their own place and they got to go pitch somebody an idea.

Um, let's see if I can help them on their presentation skills. Just get them more [01:20:00] comfortable and, uh, yeah, how you kind of organize ideas, pitch ideas. Okay.

Evan Troxel: Nice. A lot of this is reminding me of a book I read a long time ago. I'm looking over here on my bookshelf, but it's probably here still. It's Simon Sinek's Start With why, And he cites a few companies as case studies as well for kind of the types of places that they have where they've, these interesting things have come out of, you know, he talks about Apple, he talks about Nike, he talks about Southwest Airlines, he talks about Harley Davidson. And because all of these companies had a why, um, maybe they've strayed off course since then, maybe they haven't, maybe

Matthew Krissel: hmm.

Evan Troxel: they've been really successful with that. But, but I think that that was always interesting, right? It's like a lot of companies get, you know, Here's what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to do it, right?

Especially in a service

industry like architecture, right? It's usually an extremely complex checklist, right? Of, you know, you've got to get these people's approval, then you've got to [01:21:00] get these people's approval, then you've got to do this set of drawings, and then you've got the bids, and then you've got, and it's just like thing after thing.

Milestones and project management is just information management on steroids. It's insane, right? But it's the big idea is what you're talking about.

Like what's the big idea and how that

all the decisions have, it's like a party diagram and architecture, right? Here's the big idea and all of the decision making supports staying on course with what's the party say that we're supposed to do, right?

It's, it's, it's like an overarching set of guidelines that we can say, it all makes sense if you look at it from, from this origination point. That whole idea of start with why,

why being the most important, why does this company deserve to exist? Why do we exist? Why do we operate like this? Why do we speak the way we do? The why question is so, so, so important and I, a lot of architecture firms, Maybe start out [01:22:00] that way, but it's, I think it's difficult to stay on that course if you don't continually, I mean, and you're allowed to rewrite the why at

some point, right? You can totally have a revolution or an evolution in your practice, but I think a lot of that gets lost over time and just becomes like, this is the way we do it because this is the way we've always done it.

And here's, here's the checklist because it's all about efficiency and productivity and managing that part of it. And, and. Then it kind of waters down the creativity, and it waters down the innovation, and it waters down the impact that it could potentially have.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, and even just the connection. I mean, you know, when you go after enough work and you lose enough work and you get feedback from people, they didn't select you, you start to hear some of these common themes and it happens a lot in architecture because we're so fascinated with process

and because process is so critical.

To be able to do what we do,

um, but it's not that interesting to most people when they just need a building that does something [01:23:00] really great or they're trying to create a great teaching space or a wonderful place for students to live. Um, and so that whole, it's exactly why that, those kinds of, I, I, I, um, bring in Simon Sink's book, The Infinite Game.

Evan Troxel: Mm

Matthew Krissel: recommend that book. It's fascinating to think when you think.

Evan Troxel: Mm

Matthew Krissel: about, you know, architecture is not a game. It's not something you win. Um,

Evan Troxel: There's no end. Yeah, it's

Matthew Krissel: no end, the, the rules change, people come and go.

Evan Troxel: and there's no there.

Like, it's just going to go to the next thing

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. And why you don't focus on your competition, which is part of like, don't just look at other architecture firms and wonder how I'm going to do a little bit better than them.

Or these are all the people going into this interview because then you just become this kind of diluted version of essentially an averaging of everyone you've just been like.

Evan Troxel: Reactive.

Matthew Krissel: over you instead of really getting to what are we doing? What is our purpose? And so that start with Y is exactly that too, which is trying to really think of what exactly we're doing.

So you, so I actually start the first, the first line of the syllabus.[01:24:00]

There are some great quotes, uh, that I think help, help bring, give people a sense of the range of the way I want them to think, but the first way I start was we imagine a world where meaningful, transformative building spaces and ideas are accessible to more people in places, inspiring change and enriching individuals and their communities.

And then start with, okay, you're going to design a firm and we're going to meet every week and da, da, da, and oh, by the way, you know, it's like just, just the changing it around, putting it back to where you're trying to go

Evan Troxel: Mm.

Matthew Krissel: know, and inspiring people in a way. Um, but really the biggest thing is just talking about what they actually want and need and putting it in terms that they understand.

Whether again, you're pitching an idea to your own team. teammates, where you're trying to go, that, yeah, the party, the clarity, the big idea, because then everyone orients and gets behind it. You get everyone pulling in the right direction, everyone that the trajectory is set, and now you're aligning resources and intellect immediately towards a common place where If you're all over, [01:25:00] these things that are all over the place and people are imagining all kinds of strands and tangents, it just becomes an incoherent mess of the people in the room, what's going on in their, their brain right now.

And, you know, we talk about collaborative cultures and you can have, so you can invite all these interesting people to the room, all these different backgrounds, you can do all that hard work.

But if you, if at the end of the day, the space itself isn't fostering it,

It's pointless.

They're all just, they're all drifting and they're on their phone.

They're not following you. They have no idea what you're talking about. They you're using a piece of technology. Nobody can engage. It's why simple whiteboards are so great. Everybody can jump up and use it. Um, so you could, you know, half the people in the room can't collaborate. It's not a very collaborative environment.

So.

Evan Troxel: Right. Yeah. So you've talked about kind of this idea of identifying gaps in practice. What kinds of gaps have they identified that they are willing to maybe take on, at least in this course, as a thesis for the project that they're going to be [01:26:00] doing?

Matthew Krissel: Uh, in some ways, the.

There's a lot of conversation, certainly housing is one that is that people are talking about. Uh, that's fairly common. It's certainly resonating through academia and schools. People are understanding the concept of reimagining intergenerational housing, different housing needs, and that potential, a lot of conversation around adaptive reuse, about resilience, what that means, um, people paying attention to all these empty buildings around.

And getting kind of excited, you know, seeing those as opportunities. How do you reimagine those? Um, there's, and partly because I think it's Carnegie Mellon, there's a lot of people thinking about technology and technology spaces. Some either getting into literal software development, uh, or how you begin to bridge

digital and physical environments and the kind of relationship between them.

Whether again, you're kind of a media company that can work comfortably in buildings and spaces, or you're building spaces that are augmented with media

Evan Troxel: [01:27:00] Mm

Matthew Krissel: different unique ways. So certainly some of those are coming out as kind of focus areas from the first class, first set of groups in terms of the thing that they wanted, the change they were seeking to, to impact.

Evan Troxel: Randy Deutsch wrote a book called Adapt as an Architect, and I'm sure you're aware of it.

Um, but he talks about, right, you're, you're in the profession. What kind of entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial things could you do, or innovative things could you do in a practice that you're already in, or, or outside of practice, but staying in the profession? in architecture, I think is kind of the main idea, And it sounds to me like this course is pretty similar to that in the overall idea, right? It's like, you're bringing this back to designing a practice, identifying opportunities

within architectural practice for innovation, and then building these projects around that.

And, um, There's a lot of people in architecture in the last decade that have left architecture to go pursue technology, [01:28:00] maybe, you know, for, for a variety of reasons, right? There, there's work life balance, there's pay, there's, there's

all kinds of things behind that. You know, like how long it takes to, to ascend the ladder in, in a corporate structure, architectural, right?

Because of the business, the way that they're designed. And I'm curious, like, If you're intentionally steering students to stay in architecture within kind of the context that you're, because you're giving them a lot of outside influences, I would love to talk about the sources that you kind of, that you drip throughout the class

to them, for them to, to expand their view and get other ideas from, but are you, Are you really honing in on keeping it inside of architecture, quote unquote, like the profession or AEC in general? Or are you allowing them to go outside of that as well?

Matthew Krissel: Uh, certainly for this, this course, they're allowed to go anywhere they, as long as they can make the case and they can [01:29:00] get up in front of the class and defend it in the first go around. And if it survives the pitch, I'm here to help them with great ideas and great opportunities and great prospects. Um, the architectural education allows you to do so many things well, and the world, we need hope.

We need to see this manifested in whether it's the buildings we do, or if you, you know, whatever your kind of entrepreneurial spirit, you know, uh, sees a path forward to make the kind of improvement that we need to see around us. I certainly am here to help guide and edit and, and, and, and prompt and get them excited.

Ultimately, I would love some form of, um, helping to describe the shape of what, what we're doing. What is architecture evolving towards

and where is this all going because traditional practice, there's still a lot of traditional stuff happening, but it is definitely, um, under pressure to change, uh, you know, [01:30:00] some of the things I talked about in the syllabus, this, this need to redefine even what a project is, you know, the pressure points that we are constantly under to operate differently.

The relationship of time and money to outcomes are real and things need to shift and change and grow. So for architecture to. survive as an idea, um, we need to also evolve what we produce when we get involved. How do we get involved, you know, before a project begins? How are we still valued and, and able to produce wonderful things after a project's done that's still relevant and useful to the world as part of that project?

That initial vehicle and platform. So moving from kind of product thinking to kind of platform thinking, allow things to kind of survive and evolve and change. Um, but all of those things are a part of, um, getting it to think more entrepreneurially sometimes. You know, and you've got a range of personalities.

You've got some people who really just are excited to go design a house and build a house. I just got to [01:31:00] get it out of my system. And then there's people who are really like, I don't know, I'm in this architecture program. I'm not even sure I want to be an architect. So, the other thing through this course is I bring in guest speakers and.

All these wonderful people I know, I get an opportunity to invite them in and give talks. And so I had, last year I had a venture capitalist come in and talk about, they're one of the largest venture capitalists in the AEC industry. So in terms of how they think about innovation and how they identify, uh, people in the space to what to fund.

within architecture and construction. I had, uh, you know, a woman from, uh, mass design, a design director there talk a little, it's such a unique practice and how they're organized and their origin story is beautiful. Um, there's a different way of thinking that is it, And for all intents and purposes, an architecture practice, as anyone would imagine, but they do such different and unique work and are meeting different needs around the world and in a really beautiful and special way.

So, so [01:32:00] through guest speakers, this next one, I've got a software developer

coming in. I've got, um, uh, in academia, uh, we're teaching and creating frameworks for, for that next generation of where. The teaching pedagogy needs to go in a conversation around that. So I do try to draw in, uh, you know, the, the listening and reading allows me to draw on really.

different influences to help build that big pool of ideas for them to draw from to do interesting stuff. And then the guest speakers are a little bit more specific, but they're often people that, you know, what I asked them to do, I give them pretty, you know, a lot of flexibility to develop whatever they want for a presentation.

And then. Carry a conversation with the students. They often tell 'em, just start with your story.

Just tell your trajectory. And I, it really helps when students hear that not everybody just goes, gets the job and just works there for, you know, 30 years. Uh, a lot of people, they move around a few places.

They're not sure what kind of architecture they [01:33:00] wanna do. Like you said, some drift out of it, but they're on the edge or they're still servicing it. Um, but a different way, um. And then some have left it, you know, kind of entirely or never really were an architect like this venture capitalist, never really trained as an architect, but now is a critical part of innovation in architecture and construction because they are working on a financial side of how you make ideas happen.

So it's a, um, it's a nice combination of guest speakers that again show reality about how some people have developed their trajectory and that there's lots of opportunities around that.

My hope, you know, as someone who's deeply invested in the built environment, I want the smartest and brightest people working on the buildings that shape our world.

Um, so I hope the great talent stays within it and they just find the ways in which, as the profession continues to evolve, they become real

leaders in shaping the evolution of it.

Evan Troxel: Yeah. I'm curious, are there I assume you maybe did a little bit of research about the overall [01:34:00] idea of this course. Do you know if there are other courses out there? Because I think this is a topic that came up in my episode that you have a link to in your syllabus with Ian Janicki. And we talked about kind of the scratching your own itch and entrepreneurship Um, trained as an architect, but kind of maybe, maybe doing any number of things from that. And really talking about entrepreneurship in. Architect, architectural education, because a lot of it really isn't a lot of architectural, it's just about design, or it's about whatever that school's kind of Purpose is, and, and most, most of the time it seems like that goes back to teaching people how to be, become great designers. But there's so much more opportunity out there, and, and it seems like there's probably a dearth of, of classes around entrepreneurship specifically because we've got so many other classes that we, so many things that we have to check off because of accreditation and things. Do, do you know if other ones exist and, or,

Matthew Krissel: I, I know, I know it's a, it's [01:35:00] a kind of buzzword that a lot of people will say, you know, whether they're actually able to execute it as, as an actual course, as opposed to maybe as a one week topic in a, in a space or a conversation. Um, certainly I, I got to imagine a lot of studio briefs are shaping around that, you know, the studio professors probably developing a way to kind of think as a product or something new, something different and try to try to expand the thinking.

So that's a great way to compliment. You know, if I'm talking a lot about organizational side, then you have the kind of, uh, you know, the building manifestation side of that through a studio, uh, course is a great way to visit. But when you look around at all these amazing universities and you see there still aren't the kind of cross pollination you might expect or desire, like why?

You know, you have like, uh, like University of Pennsylvania, I don't know, just the Wharton School. Ever really, could you get a Wharton student on your studio project as a collaborator? What would happen if you could convince someone to work with you for two weeks on an idea, [01:36:00] or could you actually develop some things that actually start to link with a business school program or with, you know, some of these other spaces where people are talking about similar things in terms of forming ideas to make big change in the world.

But they all have different skills and means how they want to do it. So it would be wonderful to see not just within the programs themselves, but how you kind of start to de silo even the kind of architecture schools. If again, the goal is to try and do this at the, that point of, of education, certainly in practice, in the real world, we can, we can, we can do that.

We can create those relationships, foster those kind of conversations. In fact, the story of mass design is a beautiful, that origin story, if you're not familiar, um, and I'm paraphrasing, uh, but the way it was described to me was, you know, the founders essentially went to a lecture in the medical school, and, uh, this doctor was talking about all these things that, For there, these two architecture students were thinking, Gosh, this sounds like a lot of [01:37:00] architecture happening in here.

They went up to him afterwards and said, You know, who's the architect you work with on this?

I don't work with an architect. What are you talking about? I've never even talked to an architect.

Hey, could we be your architect

Here's what we can do for you. You know, those kinds of, um, just even getting out of the architectural, let's say, lecture circuit.

and figuring out what's going on in the other programs, whether you're a professional or student still,

uh, you will find ways to start to build relationships and connections that will start these kind of cross disciplinary,

uh, moments and that kind of combinatorial thinking.

Evan Troxel: Yeah, I would say any, any, any organized group would benefit from having an architect in it. Like any board of directors for, any kind of organization because we are trained a little bit differently than almost any other kind of professional organization. S uh, you know, outcome, uh, it's like architects are problem solvers, but in a very different way than most people.

Like if you, if you had a group [01:38:00] of, like you're talking about a board of directors at a, for, it could be a city, it could be a healthcare, it could be law, it could be real estate, it could be anything. And I think. If you had an architect on there, they would have such a different point of view when it came to the challenges that they were dealing with and how to go about solving some of those that they would be like, Whoa, and you don't have to even be talking about architecture. It doesn't have to be an architectural answer, right? It could be just how do we go about figuring this out? And to me, I think there's so much value in. the training that we have, like you said earlier, can be applied to so many other things. And that, as an architect then, gives you inroads

to become the go to person when any one of those people and, and beyond has a, a challenge that they need kind of architectural thinking applied to. And it builds amazing relationships and opportunities.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. And it's one of those things I think we take for granted. We forget that, um, [01:39:00] because we are so used to working with uncertainty, we're so used to operating years in the future. Our whole life is a simulation, right? All our work is, it doesn't exist. I'm designing a world that doesn't exist. I'm constantly in a simulation, right?

Evan Troxel: Right. Living in the future. Yep.

Matthew Krissel: And even just how to operate comprehensively and holistically, just like how to really step back, reframe, think more broadly, make sure you're thinking downstream, all the simultaneity of complex problems, uh, if you, we take that for granted, I think, unfortunately, that that is a rare set of skills that a well trained architect, uh, can't have.

who's done a few things in their career,

uh, does bring a different mindset and capacity and wherewithal to, uh, engage, keep a couple plates spinning at the same time, uh, be open minded,

Evan Troxel: Micro, macro at the

Matthew Krissel: thoughtful, yeah, moving and changing scale seamlessly. And again, that kind of comfort with knowing when things are [01:40:00] hard and complicated, but solvable.

So you don't have to worry about that right now. People get wound around the axle around things that are like way out of sync with the first order problems you got, the first principles you got to hit.

Hey, that's hard. We'll get to that. We've got time later. Let's just focus. These three things are where we need to get to today.

That is a, uh, it's, you know, and that's not a universal skill of every architect. Obviously there's lots of diversity in the profession, um, but the training itself is geared towards that way of thinking.

And, um,

yeah, there's, there's value in the hardest part, I guess, is probably that people just don't have time.

So

it's, it's the other age old problem in the profession is how do I find the time to go

Evan Troxel: Find more time. Yep.

Matthew Krissel: be on these boards and start engaging with these volunteer groups or, you know,

uh, so if only we could get the, you know, the broader societal appreciation and interest in that,

That cross pollination.

Evan Troxel: Well, we'll talk about that, the value of an architect and where you spend your time. Like, like, [01:41:00] yeah, okay, you do have to find, maybe you have to find more time. Maybe you can spend less time doing some of the incredibly mundane stuff that architects are tasked with doing. Automate that stuff, right? Like outsource it to, Yeah. a computer, right? Whatever you, however you want to frame that. But, but then really applying your time to where the value of an architect is to show people, show others around you what the value of an architect is. Like that seems like a self fulfilling prophecy on some level. It's like that's the kind of work we should be doing and that we want to be doing. How could we facilitate that happening? It's by actually taking the step forward. to start to do that, that then starts to become more of what you do. And, and, the, the, society's perception of what an architect does has nothing, usually is incongruent with what we actually end up doing, right? And, and there's all of this You know, hand wringing around nobody understands the value of an architect and the fees are [01:42:00] keep getting lower and lower and it's like, well, because what are you doing about that?

You're just continuing to do the mundane stuff that somebody can outbid you for because it's a race to the bottom. You know, fees just keep going down for that kind of stuff because it doesn't, it is a commodity. Like that, that part of it is commoditized. You need to focus on where the real value is. It seems to me like, Participating these kinds of things, finding the time, making the time to participate in these kinds of things are actually where the value is created. It's like, if you

give somebody a way to do something that they thought was impossible, and for you it was like, that was impossible? If you think that's impossible, you should see what we do, you know,

Matthew Krissel: all day long, yeah,

Evan Troxel: all day long. all the time.

Matthew Krissel: goes back to

asking the right question is so critical and the other great skill I find architects do that a lot of people aren't as capable is, you know, when to kind of expand the problem or when to redraw the boundaries of a problem, uh, just [01:43:00] because you start in one place doesn't necessarily mean you have to actually, you know, did you, did you really, you know, kind of reorganize things?

And this is, you know, going back to what we, Yeah. The earlier part of the conversation around the, that kind of frontier period of 2003, four or five, all the emergence of these new tools with the promise of all this efficiency gains. And then you'd hear all the kind of the folks who never really engaged the digital tools, but were.

Plugged into the amount of work, how many people it took to do a product. Hey, there's been no efficiency gains. What's going on? The project still takes 10 people and I'm this and we're not we're getting all this technology. Where is it?

And when you really start to think back to that time period, you know, living through that and being one of the ones in that production mode through those tool sets.

You start to realize, like, I remember when we would make these huge leaps in gains, you know, when a rendering would take a week and now it would take three days, now it took one day, we never stopped to ask, hey, what do I want to do with this time? We gained. I just made more options. Like I [01:44:00] did more rendering.

So, so we just, we filled that vacuum with busy work. We filled it with

now. Part of it is when you do great projects, you say, well, maybe. You know, seeing the problem or being able to see more parts of the building, be able to cut more sections and walk through the building at some point and probably made the project better.

I made the design better. I saw things I would have missed or I was able to develop an idea in a different way because I could see it in a new way. So there were probably there's a threshold somewhere in there where it wasn't all a waste of time, like the extra 5 days. I never got back just by generating a bunch of strop and options.

Um, But I don't know where that line was somewhere in there made the project better and somewhere it probably was too much and we could have dialed it way back. We didn't need 10 options. We needed 3 really good ones, right? That's it, you know, refocusing your time to think through what are the 3, what are the 3 really good ones, you know, that are actually going to set this project up for, instead of just generating a bunch of stuff, just filled up the screen.

So I sit there and I say, you know, where we are now, we're on this next frontier. [01:45:00] We're on the precipice of another radical reorganization of our relationship to time. Right. So we think about artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and automation, all these other things we, we think we can do part of the excitement.

After the novelty of all the goofy image making wears off is this question of, Hey, can I really reorganize my time and what would we do with this time if we get more time? So what I don't want to see the pressure to do what happened 20 years ago. We just filled the time with busy work. We filled the time with just more and more and more and more and more because we're already getting asked to do more for less, right?

The fees are getting tighter. The time is getting tighter, but we have to draw more in order to meet. You know, all that kind of insurance and liability issues and more risk gets shunted, you know, onto the design team to draw more, put more details in and all that. But this question of if we start to change our relationship to time of what we're actually doing.

What do we want to do with it? It's a real question. I want to see the profession tackle, because it could be, hey, that now allows me to do [01:46:00] these three other things. It allows me to do these things that expand my business development opportunities. It allows me to make the project better by doing something other than just iterating, for example, um, or it allows us to take on some of the other, you know, Larger systemic challenges of the profession, burnout, too much time, you know, overtime, the pay issues, just a number of things.

And the kind of frivolous nature of some of the work that happens,

you know, if we can let some things go and architects, it's hard to let things go. Sometimes we are used to being in control and having, you know, a lot of precision and, and, and, you know, pulling all the strings to gain some things. We're probably gonna have to let some things go.

And so that question of what do we want this to be, you know, this is that embrace our agency to be changemakers and let's design what we

Evan Troxel: It is a design problem.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah,

let's just not let,

Evan Troxel: think about our businesses as a design problem or our, our, our, approach or, but it is, it,

it's all a design problem. yeah.

Matthew Krissel: yeah. And that's part of what I want to get the students in this class to think about. Part [01:47:00] of what, when I talk about, you know, we talked about, we've been in these kind of lecture circuits in the same orbit for a while. Part of the things I've been challenging folks in this space is to think a little bigger, think a little broader, but also really be introspective about how we're operating, how we're using our time, how we're organizing ourselves, uh, to really embrace this moment

and and not.

Just, you know, get swallowed up with all the demands of projects and running a practice. That's easy to take those efficiency gains and just squander them again. And then it just, then it just becomes the new norm. Now everyone's expecting a thousand, you know, renderings and all these kinds of things instead of more thoughtful, more intentional, more useful, and actually just move the right ideas at the right time by just aligning our resources differently.

Evan Troxel: So what kinds of outcomes have you seen come out of this course that you were excited about? Um, it seems like we keep talking about outcomes. And we talked about kind of identifying gaps and looking for opportunities. [01:48:00] I'm curious if what came out of the first run through in this class that you thought was really interesting. hmm.

Matthew Krissel: it was the, um, the conversations that I knew were just not happening in any other space. So there are people talking and debating about design and ideas and things that were important to that. There just was no other real space for that kind of

the full graduate program to kind of have that exchange as opposed to just in your studio or in a small group perhaps.

And some of the feedback I got from the students were like, gosh, this was, this is, you know, one of my favorite courses. This was so great. I just, we just,

Didn't have access

the same way to the kind of conversations, but even just the, the way I was able to bring some of, um, real world examples in and

Evan Troxel: Well, because it's a haystack out there, right? And finding the gold in there is it's difficult. There's so much content, there's so many books, there's so many podcasts, there's so many YouTube channels. And so you've curated [01:49:00] a lot of this over time. Maybe before you finish your thought there, you could just list some of the people that you are drawing from to feed to these students.

Matthew Krissel: yeah, well, yeah, so the, uh, the quotes I put on the cover was, uh, one from Bruce Mao, a designer, Seth Godin, who's an author, but really in the marketing space, Ryan Holliday, who's an author, but writes about stoic philosophy. Sarah Lewis, who's an art historian up at Harvard. Ed Catmull, who's um, co founder of Pixar, but he really kind of started, he wrote a great book, Creativity, Inc.

Really started as a computer

Evan Troxel: another one on my bookshelf

Matthew Krissel: my gosh, so good.

Adam Grant, as we talked about, an organizational psychologist. He teaches at Wharton. Uh, and then the one, Kind of architect, Molly Hunker is an architect and Kyle Miller is an associate professor at Syracuse. They have a wonderful book, Building Practice, which they just spent some time meeting all these young practices and really talking to them about where they're trying to go, where are they seeing, [01:50:00] you know, opportunities and really focused in on.

The not the same old space, the same old firms that always get talked about, uh, as the ICONS of the profession. Um, how do we get out of those echo chambers? They did it. They went out and talked to other people doing interesting work that aren't getting the same kind of traction, uh, in traditional media.

So those are some of the folks that use these quotes in terms of the podcast world. Let me pull some of these up. So, um, so Steven Johnson, Uh, gosh, he does the one where the great ideas come from, wonderful TED talk. He's got a couple of amazing books. Farsighted is one of the, one of the great books

Evan Troxel: Mm hmm.

Matthew Krissel: Uh, Your Podcast with Ian, which is great. There's such a good conversation around entrepreneurial. He has a certain idea and approach how to do that, execute that. Uh, Wes Coates is, is a writer. She talks about building a culture of rigorous thinking. So how authors build, A culture of kind of thinking and how they can operate in a great conversation.[01:51:00]

One of my other favorite books, David Epstein wrote this book, um, called range and it's about kind of skill stacking. And he,

it's a, it's a cool conversation around specialists and generalists. And he gave us this great example where he was, you know, kind of a young scientist and he kind of put scientists in quotes and when he was in the space of scientists, he was kind of marginal at best, but the moment he went to and said, I'm going to be a sports medicine kind of scientist.

I want to talk about what's going on through the lens of science in sport. All of a sudden he's a genius. He's the smartest person in the room in that topic area. And he talks very candidly. Um,

uh, and this is, I think this is the Chase, the Chase Jarvis, which he is a photographer, so he actually talks a lot about creativity through the lens of photography and other people in that kind of space.

But, um, David Epstein, that book is just fantastic. Highly recommend it. Really about kind of how you, if you just transfer your same skill set [01:52:00] transferring into other places, you can go from being marginal to fantastic pretty fast. Uh, but it's a great discussion. It does a whole compare and contrast of Tiger Woods as kind of the specialist.

And, uh, Roger Federer as the kind of generalist where he, like, didn't really focus on tennis until much later and how it just cultivated such a different kind of person and the way he still reached the, the peak of his, his, uh, profession. Um, uh, there is Tony Fidel, um, who was a long time designer at Apple, wrote a beautiful book called Build, wonderful book about just getting to execution, how to bring products to market.

Wonderful, wonderful book. Uh, Ellen Lupton, she's the chief curator of the contemporary Cooper Hewitt, Adam Grant, Simon Sinek. As I mentioned, you mentioned the book Why, I think the book The Infinite Game, highly recommend. Sarah Lewis, as I mentioned, she wrote a book called The Rise. Blind Spots and Grit are two chapters in that [01:53:00] book I asked the students to read.

And then there's a podcast, which talks about she's an art history historian background, um, Jim Collins. So this was, uh, Tim Ferriss's. He does really wonderful, uh, interviews. He's focused a lot on kind of entrepreneurial, uh, discussions. Jim Collins is kind of the, he wrote the book, Good to Great,

and he does this one about the flywheel and just talks again about kind of organizational thinking in a really unique way through the lens of kind of business.

Seth Godin, as I mentioned, he's got a book called The Practice and, uh, through the lines of it, more as a marketer, but he talks really about how you just got a delivery, talks about like, um,

one of the things he debunks is like writer's block. It's like, you ever notice how

there's no such thing as plumber's block?

Like a plumber doesn't show up and just say, you know what? I can't, I, I, I

don't know. I can't, they just go, right? They just go. And so sometimes how to like break through some of those blocks,

you just got to get comfortable with doing terrible work.

And so it's not writer's block. [01:54:00] You're actually just, you're afraid to do bad work.

So you don't start.

Evan Troxel: Stephen, Stephen, I think he references Stephen Pressfield quite often. They, I'm sure they have some kind of relationship, but he has a wonderful book called The War of Art, instead of The Art

of

Matthew Krissel: yeah.

Evan Troxel: right? And, uh, it's about, and, and another one I think called just Do the Work. It's just, that's the, the title of the book, Do the Work.

And they're, they're very much about showing up and doing, like trudging through the things that you have to do, so that when the moment arises you're already there, like you're ready for it.

But you, it's, if, if you don't use those muscles, they atrophy, right? And so you have to actually consistently build those muscles so that you can show up and do the work.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. The last

class I'm going to do this semester, there's two things I want to focus on. One is Ethan Mollick's book called Co Intelligence. Fantastic book about artificial intelligence. It's beautifully written. And he actually references some architecture in there.

Um, and I want, so I want to do a class on collective intelligence and Co Intelligence and have a conversation.

So,[01:55:00]

Adam Grant's book, um.

Hidden Potential, Chapter 8, Collective Intelligence. Beautiful chapter about how you see this kind of collective intelligence, which to me is how an architectural practice should be organized.

So I want to have a conversation around collective intelligence and co intelligence

as we think about technology augmenting

Evan Troxel: Nice.

Matthew Krissel: people in the room.

Evan Troxel: Well, let, let's start to wrap up here and talk about artificial intelligence. So I know you're, you have a piece in your syllabus about the use of generative AI. And I'm also, I'm sure this is something that. kind of dovetails into maybe some of the hesitancy or, uh, I don't know how you would describe it in, in your practice, but maybe there isn't any hesitancy.

Um, but, but just kind of this over, this new technology, this new wave of things. And, and I thought it was interesting that

you say in this course, you're expected to use generative AI programs. And I would, I'm very curious to hear why you say that. Um, and then, and maybe how that Dovetails between [01:56:00] academia and practice because you're, you're on both sides of that as well.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. Um, so I will say I had the benefit of when I went out on my own, it was also when I was able to start to explore with a lot of these tools. So one, it gave me time, but also meant I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. I just did whatever I wanted to do. So I built my own research, uh, work.

Uh, I developed the Built Environment Futures Council with Randy Deutch.

She and I co founded that with 15 folks around a national conversation that we met once a month for over a year. debating this about what's happening in practice. What are people seeing? So I spent a good year where I had essentially no constraints around. I could explore and experiment in doing this course.

I expect people to do it because that's what people do.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: The cat's out of the

Evan Troxel: you're

you're basically giving them permission to do something that they're already doing, right?

Matthew Krissel: what I do is I point them to, I would say Carnegie Mellon has some really well written ways of how to engage, um, incite the work. And so, of course, what I want people to do is [01:57:00] use it if it makes you smarter and better and allows you to do other things, or you can, you can query it and ask questions.

So it makes you, you know, again. More kind of comprehensive in your thinking, if you're seeing the problem differently, the thing I just want them to do is start to learn. Okay. Now, how do I cite that? How do I talk about that? How do we frame some of this? So there's some guidelines that Carnegie Mellon provides for that.

Certainly things that are that are written or image generated, but certainly in the conversation, I want to be able to talk about, you know, if they're using it for research, they're using it to kind of. I mean, ultimately, this is where a lot of this is going is you've got five humans in the room and there's going to be three or four non humans participating in a conversation and iterating work and whether it's someone guiding it through prompts and interacting live in a kind of design review kind of environment, or you've done something outside of it and brought it in, or you're using a chat bot as a kind of conversational tool.

I'll be using it for [01:58:00] role playing conversations, you know, in the world of architecture, it's a great opportunity for role playing. You're thinking about you know, work in an area or a neighborhood or an area of expertise you don't know yet. Um, you can play, you know, uh, devil's advocate with it to get it to ask you different questions, take different positions than you can.

Um, so that, that is happening. It's already out there. People are doing it.

So I'd rather create an environment where people, as long as they talk about it and are open about it, we could figure out how to do it ethically and openly, um, not pretend like we're not using it for something.

Evan Troxel: Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: Um, let's acknowledge it and let's see how can we make ours all better through it.

I've also dialed way back on the, the kind of, so they're not writing essays and things like that, where it gets, it's very complicated if somebody, you don't quite know what everyone says. So the fact that people have to get up and present work. You know, if they generate things, they use it for a lot of research, and even if it helps frame some of the things they might say, they ultimately have to stand up and defend the work and talk about it [01:59:00] and they have to answer questions.

So, once you put it in a back and forth, you have to own it in a different way. You can't just pass it off like the way you can just write something and publish it. And who knows, you know, if anyone can ever have a back and forth about it. So,

so part of it is the framework allows it to be utilized, I think, in a, in a productive way.

And, uh, useful way,

uh, and, and to be honest with you, it's just acknowledging that it's already happening, so let's figure out how to teach people to use it the right way or a productive way.

Evan Troxel: It's an interesting arms race, right? Because it is just a race to be the commodity. I think it's, it's like BIM in that manner, right? for architects. It's like, everybody saw this as a differentiator. Maybe it was some other design technology. Maybe it was 3d modeling. Maybe it was some real time rendering, whatever it is.

Like now everybody does all those things. Right. And, and it's, it's another tool in the tool box. And it. All of these companies are really competing with each other for your [02:00:00] money to ultimately just be the tool that everybody has, right? It's kind of interesting to think about it that way, but to your point, like, it is the elephant in the room, only if we never talk about it, right?

It's like this thing that is, if you're totally transparent and say, this is a tool that we are leveraging. And, and maybe it's to our advantage. Maybe it opens up something that we didn't think about and maybe not, right? But it's still a valuable conversation to have in this environment and even talk about how it can be leveraged for other, other, in other ways.

I don't know. It's a, it's a, it's a, it is interesting to me how many people are shying away from that conversation.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. I find it, you don't know what it's good at and what's not good at until you actually use it. And I think part of the things, you know, once the, as you start to experiment with its image generation or using, you know, large language models, um, or really useful things like upcodes and some of those where it just natural language interface for [02:01:00] complex things, or just uploading a complex PDF and be able to just communicate with it differently.

Um, what you start to find, and this is another, I, I didn't integrate this into the course, but another great book for your listeners to check out, there's a book called, um, Filter World, and it's about the kind of cultural flattening that happens

from algorithms, essentially, guiding so much of our thinking through the world of algorithms.

So, so much of the media that we consume has been pushed forward by a series of decisions of which we didn't necessarily make, but actually a fairly small group. And so the reason why he gives one example, why do all the coffee shops kind of look the same? Everyone's got a Bayer Edison bulb and the reclaimed wood chair in the corner.

And

he's like, whether I'm in Japan or Brooklyn, they're like, they're all the same. Design

Evan Troxel: vibe. Yeah.

Matthew Krissel: because the, you know, that the kind of culture is all accepted. This is what a, a new coffee shop looks like. This is what a third way of coffee shop. Like that's that look and feel I want. So everyone hands their design or the same.

mood board, right? [02:02:00] And then the designers, they get that, that's all kind of been assimilated. Oh, this is what new and good looks like, right? So to me, I, I, I listened to that, or I read that and I go, okay, this is pretty interesting. If you, if you now take this one step further from, let's say the algorithms of social media and other sort of things that are pushed to us.

We think about that through the lens of artificial intelligence. Now we're the director. I'm guiding the image generation. I have to be aware that ultimately this is going to just average out to something mediocre. And in one of the talks I give, you know, you just do a search of AI. architecture, Google image search.

And you start to, God, it all looks the same and your eyes blur on you. Okay. Cause it's, it's, everything's kind of promoting the same things and responses, right? To me, this gets me excited about this is if you see it opportunistically, you say, okay, and this gets back to some of the value of duration, guiding, editing, learning how to do some of that is that a lot of this is just going to make really [02:03:00] mediocre, really bad stuff, mediocre, and a lot It's just averageness.

It's gonna kind of even out in terms of aesthetic or writing style. It all kind of gets Somewhat bland and repetitive, but you don't, at first it's so dazzling. You don't see that until you do it enough, but then you realize, Oh, wait a second, I still have a lot to add here. I can actually make this a lot better.

Yes. This rewrote it in a really interesting way, or allowed me to put it in the voice of someone differently, or critiqued it for me in a way that I couldn't get that feedback any other way, or on the image generation, I could quickly experiment with something, it would just take too long to generate any other way.

But at the end of the day, I'm still seeing immense. value of that human interaction. With that, now this is, we're nearing the end of 2024, that will change. Right. And that our role and relationship with all these will continue to evolve. But to me, the best way to learn is you've got to experiment and, and start using it, um, in practice.

There's more [02:04:00] challenges to that. Um, I use it in my own practice with real people. projects and real clients in effective ways by inverting certain workflows to kind of reframe goals and aspirations at the beginning of a project. I could capture it a certain way. I could create the interaction a certain way to make it useful and expand the way you'd use a precedent study, for example.

But anyways, it's a, it's something, so I expect people to use it. I want to be able to talk about it. Let's put it on the table and hopefully

Um, you know, people get excited about the, Hey, wait a second, I could actually make this better. Or, this is all, this is nice, but it's not. It's just,

again, a kind of averaging of everything around it.

And you see that opportunistically as a designer.

Evan Troxel: yeah, it's a great starting point beyond nothing, right? So, because typically we're starting from a blank page, right? It's like you, you start with the asking good questions or putting together that, that mood board, you know, whatever it is, like you're, you start to, it's a, [02:05:00] a recent interaction that I had was, uh, I was, I was just down in San Diego for Autodesk University.

And on the way back, I got to stop and talk to some friends while I was in Southern California where I used to live. And, uh, one of my friends said, Hey, so have you ever had a conversation with ChatGPT? And I'm like, well, like, what do you mean by that? Because of course I've used it. And I've, I've, I've had, I've typed something in or I've said something into my phone and then it gives a response.

And then I, I, I might ask for, you know, okay, with this feedback, what would you do differently? Like, and so, so maybe it's like one or two or three or four back and forth. But. He's like, I just had like this mind blowing experience where I had a 45 minute long conversation with ChatGPT while I was driving down here. And he said, I would just challenge you to do that and

see what happens. And so I was going to be driving for two hours to Palm Springs, two and a half hours from San Diego. And, uh, and so I decided, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to give that a try. And I, [02:06:00] I ran some ideas through it and it asked me some very interesting questions as I did it.

And it was this really interesting conversation and it forced me to think about things that I hadn't thought about when I was presenting this idea to it. And then it gave me feedback on my

answers. And. I thought it was genuinely useful

to kind of come away with that with what I would call a starting point.

Right? It's not an endpoint, it's a starting point. And what's even better about it is, at the end, it can give me a list of action items. And it can give me a summary of the things that we talked about. And it can give me, like, here's some next steps, here's some homework, basically. And I thought that was so entirely useful.

And so I would just throw that out there to the listeners of this audience. Try that out and just see what happens. Like, of course, there's no guarantees that

it's going to be insightful or useful at all. I think it

You'll get out of it what you put into it. Right? It's one of those things where it's like, if, if you really [02:07:00] try to do some challenge, think through something rather challenging, it'll give you a direction to go if you don't know which direction to go, at least as a way to start, you know?

And I thought that that was really a, a useful thing for it. It was pretty cool.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah.

seeing it as, again, just another person in the room, another person on the team. It's not the end all be all, you're not jumping to the finish line without doing the work. But if you see it as a collaborator,

somebody that's offering a different point of view, it phrases things in a different way, organizes information, it finds things that you maybe never would have found,

which is really useful actually.

And just as another facet to the whole discourse and dialogue, it's still up to you to, to reorganize, repackage, extend it, do something unique with it, um, as a kind of broader design set of tools and resources. I mean, we've used precedent research all the time in architecture

Evan Troxel: of

Matthew Krissel: and, you know, whether you're getting, you know, oh, here's this great Tom Pfeiffer, [02:08:00] Pavilion down at Rice University and like Kengo Kumano over in Japan.

But gosh, I'm doing one up in Maine. It's so different. And so the fact that we can now hybridize, iterate, reorganize through the media that architects are really useful, which is visual. If you think of it as just a faster way to sketch or to test something, I just want to, I need a building on a city street with a big landscape in front, just so I can scroll through it.

Sketch on it. You can use it just to create even a quick framework as an underline. It's, you know, not as the final solution, but I just need something with some proportion and reality to it

that I can just draw on top of.

That, um, allows you to just work differently. So what I love is it goes back to what we were talking about before, the chance to reorganize our relationship to time, but our workflows too, and, you know, kind of how we're going to work together and, um, really reimagine, which hopefully is part of the, part of the excitement can really get us past some of these other hurdles that we're seeing internally and externally to the [02:09:00] profession.

Evan Troxel: is there anything else that we haven't covered, Matt, that we should, that you wanted to cover today?

Matthew Krissel: We've covered a lot of ground.

Thanks, Evan. Really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation with you today. Of course, I wanted to. Thank Omar Khan and the faculty at Carnegie Mellon, giving me the opportunity to create this course, uh, teach it last year. You know, they took a chance on me on something I pitched a unique idea.

Um, the feedback's been great. I'm excited to be back again this year and hopefully subsequent years to continue to shape, refine it,

develop it out, um, and see where we can really take this together. Um, I'm going to go ahead and wrap I'm hoping that,

Evan Troxel: I'm hoping that other people who are hearing this will, will be like, every architectural education curriculum needs to have something like this. It's just, it's really incredible. And while you're thanking people, I'm just going to thank you for giving back to the architectural profession in this way.

It's, it's really amazing what you're doing there.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah, thank you. It's, it's been great to [02:10:00] reconnect and, you know, take so much of what I've learned and be able to have a forum and a platform to share that Yeah. Totally inspiring. Yeah, thank you. Of course, I, um, I wouldn't, this kind of point of view, all this background, this experience, I also just want to share that, uh, you know, my time, Karen Timberlake was really pretty incredible and as I mentioned earlier, I've come to really appreciate how special that was, especially at this midpoint of my career, that kind of late 20s to mid 40s period, the opportunities that were presented there, my partners, the, and the support, um, being in a place that just really challenged everyone at every level to integrate research, to think about technology, uh, reimagine different ways in which we could work.

Really shaped my trajectory and pointed me in a unique direction and I couldn't think of a better place to have been. So really wonderful. I want to thank all the folks there to you that have helped and supported me along on the way. And of course, the opportunity at Perkins&Will [02:11:00] now, where I am just just getting started, um, but certainly my partners there, um.

And this chance to help build out the Philadelphia studio, grow culture, create a place of innovation, uh, and be a part of defining the future of architecture and wherever this goes in this next step of my, my career.

Evan Troxel: You had this really incredible first act, right, that you just talked about it, Karen Timberlake, and you had this really tiny second act. Now you've got the beginning of a third act, right? Like, this is kind of how it goes in, in lives and time spans and stories and all these things. And I mean, who knows if this is really the third act or not, but, um, it's, it's incredible to have witnessed, uh, You know, what I've watched over the last probably 10 years of the things that you've been up to, uh, here and there, the things that you've posted online, and then through the, like, this lecture circuit that you did with the AI stuff, and now that you're teaching this course, and, I mean, it's just, it's, it's really cool to see architects like you, [02:12:00] I mean, and, and here you are. putting things out like that to really challenge people to think differently and to think about the profession differently than, you know, the, the common trope of this is the way we've always done things. Right. So, uh, I, I appreciate that and that you have had the, the serendipitous, you know, chances of being in the places that you have to, to be where you are now, like all of that you look back and you can see the path, right?

You could

never have seen it. I've seen it back then, right, but it's, uh, it's pretty cool to, to have

been somebody on the outside looking in on it as well.

Matthew Krissel: Great. Well, thank you very much, Evan.

Uh, I will say, you know, there are things that, uh, as I've critiqued this course, things I, I need to do better. I gotta continue to expand, um, the resources, the people diversify, some of the, the, the, the reading and listening I'm organizing. Um, it's a continual, um,

kind of curation effort that I'm, I'm working [02:13:00] on.

So I'm happy to share

where I'm at. Uh, please don't see it as the end all be all. I'd love to hear. You know, in the comments or other ways that people can give me feedback, um, you know, other great things that should be, would participate well within this context of how we as architects look beyond architecture and outside of these usual echo chambers of our practice to find inspiration.

Uh, so that would be really helpful to help.

Evan Troxel: well, so speaking of feedback, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you and, and provide feedback or have a conversation? Mm

Matthew Krissel: Uh, certainly on LinkedIn is helpful, uh, in terms of the messaging that is one easy way. Um, I do do some stuff on Instagram, more through my interest in photography, which I know you and I have a passion for photography. We'll have to do another conversation around. I love photography and through the lens of how I've become a better architect through photography and the way we think of photography.

Um, that's a conversation for another day. Uh, my, the firm that I started, I've now kind of transitioned to just kind of a research platform. So I've got a [02:14:00] new section on that that I published a couple of my,

uh, essays I wrote about some thoughts on artificial intelligence, some other things I try to keep up to date there.

So that's creative lab 3, number 3.

com. Uh, that's certainly worth, uh, if you want to look at any of that stuff, but I would say probably LinkedIn would be a good way to get a conversation going.

Evan Troxel: All right. Well, I will put links to all of that in the show notes for this episode. Thanks so much, man. This has been a fun conversation and thank you for doing this work. I think that it's extremely important and, uh, I'm glad that Troxel podcast has a couple of footnotes in your, in your syllabus so that students can get a little bit deeper insight into what other insights people have around architecture that they've shared on this podcast.

So thanks for that. That, that's been a cool thing to see and I appreciate what you're doing.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. And likewise, thanks for everything you do. The other one is Daniel Davis's that I've used from yours. You host wonderful conversations. All this is, you know, comes from all these different [02:15:00] inspirations and these conversations. So what you're doing is a big part of, you know, again, how we move the broader conversation forward.

To me, this is just a way to begin. I'm happy to share anything and hopefully more folks are able to pick this up and run with it.

Evan Troxel: Awesome. Thanks, Matt.

Matthew Krissel: Yeah. Thanks a lot.