243 - TZL - Reg Prentice

the side of kind of humanism, and I think to the extent that a firm produces deliverables with no creative input, I think that's an area where they may want to be very careful because AI might be able to do that pretty well. 0:37:37 - (Reg Prentice): But I'm guessing for the listeners of this podcast, they mostly perhaps wouldn't put themselves in the category of having no creative input. But to the extent that a firm works with their clients to understand who they are as people and to come up with a spatial solution to what that person needs, I think that part of being a designer won't be replaced by AI. So I think of what an architect does as understanding the unexpressed desires of their clients and being able to come up with a spatial solution that meets the needs of their client, even though the client didn't express those needs. 0:38:25 - (Reg Prentice): And that comes from experience and knowledge and just empathy. And that's where I see the value of the design line. And if it's a smaller residential project, it might be quite a simple client organization. It might be one person is the client. But often designers work in situations where the client is incredibly complex, like the users are not the same as the owner, who may not be the same as the person providing the money. 0:38:53 - (Reg Prentice): And so it's an incredible skill that designers have to be able to listen to and integrate all the needs of these diverse populations, even the community at large, and the environment and our customers in a way of affirm. And I think if you do that well, I don't think you have anything to worry about when it comes to AI. I mean, slowly AI will help you produce drawings and it'll help you do all kinds of pragmatic things. 0:39:24 - (Reg Prentice): But I think your value as a design firm won't change, and that is understanding the needs of a client, even though the client can't express those needs. 0:39:34 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah, I agree with you 100%. You did say one thing that stood out to me in our previous conversation that I wanted to bring up before we close. You said, and I'm paraphrasing here. You noted that digital tools have made mentorship and collaboration more abstract and difficult to engage in with files stored in folders rather than visible on a board. And mentorship has always been a big thing to me. 0:40:03 - (Randy Wilburn): We used to talk about management by walking around and just physically interacting with people. And now with all this data and information being stored in these places that we can't even see, one of your hypotheses has been that it does create a challenge for mentorship. How do we overcome that and do you have any recommendations for our listeners in this area? Have you found that TonicDM can help overcome some of that or is it just an issue that you're still trying to find a solution for? 0:40:36 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah. As a very skeptical person, as I was working in firms, I was trying to understand the downsides of computers as much as the things they're beneficial for. And that's something that did strike me as quite a big change when CAD took over from hand drafting, was that you couldn't see it anymore if you were walking around the office. So you can

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