Architects don’t listen to people
Christine Outram left the architecture profession because, she says, architects “don’t listen to people“.
“The truth is, most of you don’t try. You rely on rules of thumb and pattern books, but you rarely do in-depth ethnographic research. You might sit at the building site for an hour and watch people “use space†but do you speak to them? Do you find out their motivations? Do your attempts really make their way into your design process?
The world is changing. You have all these new tools at your fingertips. New tools that I don’t see you using and quite a few old techniques that you could get a lot better at.”
Well, the case in the article is more about interior design than architecture.
And in most cases fails in architecture is more about clients fooling around and overriding architect’s vision than architects behaving like asses.
We worked with architects at Experientia and they don’t have the methodological, participatory and co-creative tools to involve their end-users as constructive design resources in their processes, so they came to us. There is definitely a challenge.