The idea of automating or productizing architectural design services is a contentious one and it trickles down to the very definition of architecture. But when it comes to the business aspect of the profession, it becomes clear that many among today’s most renowned architects owe their success to the idea of productizing their services.

Instead of reinventing their work with every new client and repeating the same time-consuming processes, these architects have reoriented their businesses towards creating products. Customer-driven business strategies and the necessity of staying competitive are pushing AEC professionals to become faster, more efficient and convey their work to clients in the most succinct and clear way possible. The latter is particularly relevant to architects, since the nature of the profession has long suffered from the inability to translate services into tangible values that clients can recognize. For too long architectural services have been seen as a cost, rather than value.

Thanks to the huge technological advancements of the late 20th century, the scope of ‘problems’ architects can address has become wider. This freedom allows them to not only expand their field of professional interests, but also choose new, more efficient business models. Designing and selling plan sets, creating apps, generating libraries of BIM components, designing software and project management tools, optimizing manufacturing processes, self-publishing and creating online courses are among the most common methods for architects going into product development.

Albrecht von Alvensleben, founder of Bullenberg

Albrecht von Alvensleben is an architect and founder of Bullenberg, a furniture label based in Berlin. Bullenberg manufactures handcrafted wooden tables using wood sourced from von Alvensleben’s family estate in Saxony, near Berlin. The idea of creating a business had a humble beginnings – a friend was looking for a solid oak tabletop.

Being a trained architect enabled Albrecht to do a lot of the work himself, including designing the website and taking photos of the finished products. Bullenberg is currently planning to move from direct sales to retail and expand the brand’s work to include other types of products. If you want to learn more about Bullenberg, check out the interview with Archipreneur.

Seth Grizzle and Jonathan Junker, founders of Graypants

Architects Seth Grizzle and Jonathan Junker founded Graypants as a company dedicated to making pendant lights made entirely of repurposed corrugated cardboard. Their flagship line Scraplights embodies the team’s interest in repurposing and environmentally responsible design. In 2012, they set up their European office in Amsterdam, from where they started distribution to over forty countries, while the Seattle studio still provides local production for North America and functions as a prototyping shop.

Their portfolio includes public artworks, architectural installations and several lines of lighting, furniture, packaging designs sold throughout the world. Their debut architecture project Garage won the coveted AIA Seattle’s Award of Honor in 2013.

Michael Kohn, founder of Stickyworld

U.K. based architect Michael Kohn has recognized the need for a closer and more interactive collaboration between all the stakeholders in the process of building. He left the practice he worked in and created Stickyworld, a web- and mobile-based tool that enables sharing of projects and multimedia with the possibility of commenting and posting virtual sticky notes directly on images. The software allows more voices to be heard during the design and construction process.

Before creating his business, Kohn collected insights from customers and managed to pinpoint the problems they needed solving. Organizers are offered a suite of tools to prepare and publish interactive content websites called ‘rooms’, supporting different formats of engagement such as ideas forums, consultations or design reviews. Organizers can set the time frame for opening participation, automatically publish invites and also close participation at a set time. It allows interactive content including images, maps, 360 panoramas, videos, PDFs, and Powerpoints.

Edwin Heathcote, founder of Izé

Architect Edwin Heathcote set up Izé in 2001 as a manufacturer of a wide range door handles and fittings in collaboration with different designers and architecture firms. Heathcote has been the architecture and design critic of The Financial Times and author of several books on architecture and design.

Izé has licensed Lina Bo Bardi’s famous horn-shaped door handle design from the Lina Bo Bardi Foundation and received rights to produce them commercially 62 years after they were designed. “It turned out that the door handle was, proportionate to its size, the most influential piece of the building that I could think of that I could get into manufacture,” Heathcote told Dezeen.

Igor Siddiqui, founder of ISSSStudio

Igor Siddiqui, another architect-turned-product designer, worked as a practicing architect before setting up his own office ISSSStudio in 2006. The firm designs and manufactures everything from product prototypes to single-family houses using digital techniques and fabrication technologies. The team explores materials properties, flexibility, mobility and performance-driven design.

Their Tessellated Floorscape is a prototypical mass-customized rug originally produced for Aronson’s Floor Covering. It is based on a digital animation from which a different key-frame is extracted each time a new piece is commissioned or sold. The material is cut in a way that maximizes the intricacy of the contoured shape of each tile, while minimizing waste throughout the fabrication.

Protoplastic is made from biodegradable plastic and the acrylic formwork, while Ceramic Tesssseltile tiles are manufactured through conventional methods of mass-production as a single tile shape that produces the greatest degree of variation when multiplied across the larger field.

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While these five examples showcase design collectives or architects that have dedicated their work entirely to creating products, those who want to keep offering mainstream architectural services can also start by adding products to their existing offering. Turning ideas into products is fun, creative and can be a fantastic, scalable business model.

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Discourse concerning automation and artificial intelligence has really come into the limelight in the last few decades, and we have seen both optimistic predictions and dystopian visions of the future. Are machines taking our jobs away, or are they helping us move away from menial tasks and pursue more creative endeavors? Do architects have any reason to panic?

Technology-driven development is undeniably changing job markets across the world. Taxi drivers, clerks and bookkeepers, among other professions, are likely to completely disappear in a matter of decades. Apps and robots are replacing repetitive activities: drones can survey crops and deliver packages, and self-driving cars are expected to dominate city streets within our lifetime.

Computers are reaching a level of sophistication that allows them not only to perform mechanical, repetitive tasks but also operate on a higher cognitive level. While optimists see this change as an opportunity for economic growth and innovation, others are voicing their concerns over its social implications, such as economic inequality and unemployment.

According to a research conducted by the World Economic Forum, over 5 million jobs will be lost to automation by 2020, affecting mostly white-collar workers in administrative and office jobs.

Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne from Oxford University, authors of The future of Employment, have created a table that ranks professions by probability of computerization, according to which people working in administrative support, factories, retail and service industries are most likely to be replaced by computers.

In the AEC industry, model makers, technicians, drafters and urban planners are at a much greater risk of disappearing compared to architects, interior designers and civil engineers. Frey and Osborne give architects a 1.8% chance of being automated, compared to a 93.5% chance for accountants, a 96.3% chance for restaurant cooks, and 86.4% for real estate agents.

A new McKinsey report suggests a somewhat different impact of automation on job prospects. Instead of thinking of automation in terms of it eliminating entire occupations, the report suggests that many jobs will be redefined rather than eliminated—at least in the short term.

During the 1950s, before architecture and engineering firms shifted from having shared computers to individual machines, companies transitioned from mainframes to ‘minicomputers’. Due to steep prices, these machines had to be operated by specially trained workers. Designers would bring their work to the CAD Department and wait for hours to receive plotted outputs, which would then be turned in for revision before being returned to the designers.

This back-and-forth seems cumbersome by today’s standards but back in the day this new system produced work that had previously taken 10 or 12 people to complete. It also eliminated and introduced job profiles through a process that still continues to evolve.

In the last 15 years, employment for architects has increased by 25%, with significant differences between specific job profiles. Computerization has generated some new occupations within the field of architecture, in particular the mainstream profession.

While employment opportunities have diminished for architectural drafters, other profiles such as BIM specialists, digital making technologists and communication managers are experiencing growth. The chances of the architectural profession disappearing any time soon are slim, but long-term predictions imply that the role will most likely be redefined.

Another important question is: to what extent can machines substitute higher cognitive processes required in designing a building?

California-based company Aditazz uses methods derived from the semiconductor industry to create algorithms that simulate hundreds of viable design options for state-of-the-art healthcare facilities, completely eliminating the need for countless drafts and revisions. They developed an automated tool that offers the possibility of exploring a number of designs and operating options in a fraction of the time it takes traditional methods, allowing for intelligent trade-offs based on real data.

Furthermore, these can be translated into instructions for a robotic system that casts construction components. Aditazz conducts operational simulations that show performance metrics, bottlenecks of efficiency, utilization of key resources, patient wait time, etc.

Amazon and Google are also working on creating automated design solutions. Engineers at Google developed a platform with online planning applications that standardize and automate design and construction processes, promising to save up to 50% in construction costs, and cut project development time by up to 60%. The project, initiated in the Google X laboratories, was later rebranded as Flux.

Are these developments a threat to architects? Not likely. Both Aditazz’s and Flux’s automation tools are solutions based on machine-man combinations. Technology is nowhere near supplanting architects. It can address most of the quantitative aspects of architecture, even some of its qualitative characteristics, but when it comes to dealing with context, taste, aesthetics and negotiation, computers lack the higher levels of adaptability and superior cognitive skills needed.

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Architects don’t need to worry about losing their jobs or becoming obsolete, at least not in the short term. Even in the long term, it seems that technology actually redistributes labor from areas susceptible to automation into other sectors, eliminating certain types of jobs and boosting others.

Economists at the consultancy Deloitte released a study showing that, in the last 140 years, technology has actually created more jobs than it has destroyed in England and Wales. This cycle of eliminating and creating jobs can be painful, but it will hopefully occur at a slow enough pace that will allow workers to adapt and grow.

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