All firms, large or small, owes the quality of their work and their professional reputation to the richness of their design culture. As firms grow and stretch their reach across national and international borders, design cultures can get frayed, neglected, diluted, and commodified, making them easy targets for criticism. It’s a lucky thing then, that, as more and more firms consolidate to form some of the largest design practices the world has ever known, the Internet gives designers new ways to build and ferment a vibrant design culture that reaches around the globe.
That’s been the approach for the 2,500-strong St. Louis-based HOK. Their blog Life at HOK is an attempt to create an interconnected and collaborative workplace culture that exists beyond geographic borders.
Their blog is a loose collection of news, product and sustainability information, design and Internet culture, and whimsy. Alongside slickly produced videos of HOK architects talking about the conceptual birth of their designs, there are also music videos filmed in subway trains and MTV spoofs. Many of the postings are somewhere in between, like this entry on greening Christmas decorations, or this video tour of the new Capitol Visitor Center in Washington. Together, the items take on the tone and manner of a chatty happy hour session between colleagues.
“We decided as a group that we wanted the blog to be a place of randomness, freedom, and spontaneity, as those are some of the key aspects to creativity,” says Barry Sutherland, a marketing coordinator at HOK’s St. Louis office who contributes to the blog.
Life at HOK has 32 bloggers (including architects and non-architects) in 12 cities across North America, Europe, and Asia. In order to swell the ranks even more, Sutherland says they want to use the blog as a recruiting tool. The idea here, it seems, is to create an international cool kids lunch table for young designers turned off by this mega-firm’s corporate image. “We’re trying to show the world what life really is like within the walls of HOK,” Sutherland says. “Far too often we’re faced with the stigma that we are just another large corporation with corporate values, statements, and philosophies coming out of our mouths. In reality, we’re a youth-oriented, creative, artistic bunch of people who just so happen to be under a corporate shell.”
Life at HOK bloggers say they’re still waiting for their medium to develop its own content niche. Yiselle Santos, Assoc. AIA, who works at HOK’s Washington, D.C., office, says she simply wants people (HOK employees, architects, and the public) to use the blog as an opportunity to “culturize” about design. John Gilmore, a writer based in the St. Louis office, says the site is a place to consolidate and link all of HOK's considerable social media applications (Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, etc.). And how will the medium of blogging itself affect design cultures? That’s another opportunity for exploration that Justin Zawyrucha at the firm’s Toronto office is looking at.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how this whole blog thing affects the design culture, especially because the traditional sense of an architecture firm is a small practice led by one voice,” he says. “With a blog, it starts breaking down the hierarchical structure that is normally associated with working in an office, and puts a voice to someone that usually wouldn’t be asked."
Comments (1)
Like voices that whisper in the darkness just before we fall to sleep, blog's are typically fragmented bits of the whole with little or no significance. Is a blog merely the random firing of synapses in the brain. But in the aggregate a blog may be harnessed to build unity. A blog is an opportunity to say it the way that it is. To add your voice as an employee is at once opportunity to add value and reveal inequities, to participate is valuable, to create greater cohesion within the organization, to enrich the organization by mining the wealth of it's diversity, to create two directions of communication, to improve communication not just vertically along the lines of the command chain but also horizontally and diagonally through the matrix. It is simply more robust communication, more than peer to peer, to publish internally is a new dimension in the way the works of architectural practice is typically engaged and processed.
There are positive and negative dimensions to change. We have to take the good with the bad. The architecture Engineering & Construction industry should be doing more to tackle age discrimination. HOK is a large practice built over several decades. The question is are the same people who worked with HOK that were in their late 30's ten years ago, still in the company today working as employees in their late 40’s? Is the company transparently too young to be a natural cross section ? Can HOK disclose the math and honestly discuss that in it’s own forum?
Is this a suitable topic for the companies blog? In my opinion this topic is a true test of HOK’s blog as a tool. Where did those older people go?
Posted by Terry L. Walker, AIA | December 25, 2008 11:30 PM
Posted on December 25, 2008 23:30