243 - TZL - Reg Prentice

0:03:19 - (Reg Prentice): So my background is from architecture school. So I'm a graduate of architecture school, but not a licensed architect. Even at school, I was very quickly the computer nerd in the computer lab, as we had. And for the initial firms that I worked for, that was when CAD was just coming to be a standard thing in firms. So that was my role. I became the person who knew about CAD and helped the firm with that. So right from the beginning of my career, it was about design technology for me. Immediately, my brain went into information structure and how firms were organizing their files in the network drive and putting some structure around that CAD, just the structure of the CAD files themselves and layers and all those kinds of things. So pretty quickly, it was about information for me and information management. I think the flow of information, just the amount of information that the individuals in the firm had to deal with. 0:04:33 - (Reg Prentice): I think right from the beginning, that was a problem that I saw and was trying to work on, making life easier for the staff and the firms. 0:04:42 - (Randy Wilburn): So you got your architectural degree, you didn't get a license, and you saw a need, I guess I would say, based on your experiences as you matriculate through the university, as we like to say, what's the best way to express this? You kneeled in and focused on that one thing and said, hey, how can we do this better? And based on what you shared with me in a previous conversation that we had, you've worked with some pretty stellar firms, and you cut your teeth, if you will, in this design industry space, in this area of information management. 0:05:23 - (Randy Wilburn): Can you talk just a little bit about that? 0:05:26 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah. The first full-time job I had was with Frank Gehry, which came from work I was doing at university, research work with Mark Barry, who is an architect on the Sagrada Familia Gaudi's church in Barcelona. So it was an interesting one because we were in New Zealand, I was at University in Wellington, and it was the early days of the Internet. So Mark was able to hook up to a server in Barcelona, and we would do work, and he could even print on their printer. 0:06:01 - (Reg Prentice): So that was kind of early intro to computers and 3d modeling specifically, and script writing, analyzing Gowdy's models using Lisp routines and AutoCAD. And so that is what led me to Frank Gehry's office, who was also working on complex shapes using similar kinds of software that we were using at the University in New Zealand. So that was a great connection to make and then I spent eleven years at Gary's office, and it was a journey. 0:06:34 - (Reg Prentice): When I started, it was really about cad management and writing Lisp routines. But I think over time it was the information and the flow of information, which I gravitated towards, just how things are organized, how they're structured, how people share and that kind of thing. So information flows. And I ended up writing some, like the extranet and the intranet, and even the public website for Frank's office. 0:07:03 - (Reg Prentice): And then I went to Gensler, which again was a really interesting experience. I was there for nine years, so it was a very long journey. It wasn't getting to the point

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