Design Process for a Distributed Networked Practice: A Distinctive Approach to Leadership
Creators: name: Backhouse, Robert
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330108
subject: Interior design

description: This research has involved a critical reflection on and explication of my practice and design process through projects I have been central to and as a part of leading the design Practice I am situated in. In my leadership role at Hassell over the past 20 years my interest has been to foreground design process that supports a way of practising across a distributed networked Practice that enables the pursuit of Conceptual Clarity and diversity in the work with the view to elevate the quality of the design output.

Hassell is a distributed multidisciplinary design Practice with studios across nine cities and currently around 800 staff including architects, interior designers, landscape architects and urban designers. Underpinning Hassell is a shared philosophy that brilliant design is informed by the investigation of and concern for four Design Values: CONTEXT, FUNCTION, ASPIRATION and BEAUTY. These Design Values are engaged with through a shared Design Process and the development of ideas with the aim to establish an articulated Conceptual Clarity. The aim of this process is to support the communication of a design narrative to engage, induct and lead design teams, collaborators, consultants, stakeholders and clients alike.

For many years, my overarching concern has been that a distributed Practice – one that shares a design process and can articulate its shared Design Values as the mechanism to discuss and critique design – can collectively improve the quality and distinctiveness of its design work. This can be distinguished from other models of design practice where a single founder or small number of design leaders determine and direct all, or most, of the design and their collaborators essentially align their own practice according to given design principles or a particular style. Alternatively, at the opposite end, a Practice that distributes its design authorship – operating like a federation of separate practices around a set of individual design leaders – is at risk of producing disparate, unrelated or inconsistent work.

Mapping my own career output as an interior designer has involved the curation of a body of work I have been central to, chronologically over approximately 25 years of practice. This reflection included connecting projects with the people I practised with, the groupings of design process in those projects through different eras of my practice, and the varying leadership roles I played within the design of projects and within Hassell more broadly.

My approach in this research is one of reflecting on the design process within a set of projects I designed, comparing them with a body of work by others I was trained by and who I, through this reflection, see as precedents in the evolution of my own design process and leadership. This approach then involved a forensic mapping and explication of the design process and the resultant material through a series of key projects where my role in the design of these projects can be described as ‘hands-on’ and then later as ‘hands-off.’ The research also involved interviewing 14 key mentors and collaborators whom I have practised for, and with, closely over these 25 years to further investigate my concern for design process in a distributed networked Practice and ways of approaching leadership in Hassell. The PhD, as a body of critical reflection, has also contributed to the ongoing focus on design process in my leadership of Hassell, and the development of a shared Design Process across Hassell in the ongoing concern for networking the design knowledge and practices of the group.

Investigating the key initiatives in my leadership of Hassell has also been a key part of this research. The criticality of design practice and design process at the core of my leadership became evident through doing the research as part of this PhD. Reflecting on a set of these initiatives related to Design Values and Process that were most critical in networking the distributed designers and studios of Hassell – to elevate and develop the consistency in the quality of the design output in a large commercial design firm such as Hassell – manifests a distinctive approach to leadership that encompasses a significant era of my practice. This reflection – to which I have referred in the dissertation as ‘Hassell as Project’ – also offers up a contribution to large and distributed Practice, especially if the aspiration is to network them with a focus on design philosophy.

A shared articulated process is critical to building a thread of expectations, to elevate the quality of the discourse through critique, then around the design output in the network. This thread also informs the shared Design Values of a group, further networking it. The sharing of knowledge and precedent resulting from the Design Process also becomes critical to the networked culture by sharing talent and collaborating with each other across the distributed studios. Demonstrating how this discourse around Design Process, as a way of leading a distributed Practice, impacts the networking of the practitioners in it, and how this enables them to approach design more consistently, is offered up in this research. This way of leading a Practice – by articulating a shared Design Process – enables a large Practice such as Hassell to seek a distinctive but diverse design output by multiple and distributed designers.

This PhD has been an opportunity to reflect on and further understand my practice as both designer and leader. Positioning my practice within a community of practice has enabled me to appreciate how this is a distinctive approach to the leadership of a design Practice and how it enables, supports and fosters a large distributed networked Practice. As design Practices become increasingly globalised, complex, disrupted and concerned with major issues from urbanisation, climate change and digitisation, this research also offers insights and a contribution to other design Practices and the leaders of those Practices.