Is my project resilient for the future?

Foresight is geographically driven too, notably in Hawkins\Brown’s work for Landsec at Ewer Street, Bankside. The client was keen to define Bankside as a workplace destination on the map, like Mayfair or the West End. Through Hawkins\Brown’s foresight, new data points emerged that hadn’t been previously considered, including around nightlife and the local economy. The outputs were not so much a complete strategy as a set of trends, scenarios and strategic propositions that bolstered Landsec’s arguments and conviction.

Landsec workplace marketing director Lucy Thomas describes the process as “incredibly collaborative and thought-provoking... The insights will continue to challenge our thinking as we progress through the development.”

The Covid-triggered hybrid-working revolution is a prime example of the impact a lack of foresight can have on real-estate decisions. Many companies were quick to change their setups to embrace working-from-home but now find they underestimated their floor area requirements. Two-thirds of companies say they have undercounted how much desk space they need in their London offices. 

Intriguingly, being future resilient doesn’t necessarily mean making buildings as flexible as possible. “Flexibility costs a huge amount of money,” says Hawkins\Brown partner and workplace sector lead Nick Gaskell. “Flexible briefs for life sciences spaces mean that a lot of developments are designed to accommodate a wide range of lab functions. Yet that drives up build costs and drags on viability, so now we’re finding many developments can’t go forward because they’re trying to cater for too many eventualities.” 

Contrary to predictions, the demand for “wet labs” is decreasing and the need for computational labs is increasing, and the requirements for each are substantially different. Foresight advocates being particular about what it is you’re being flexible about. 

Is this the first wave of architects redefining the profession towards designing systems? Perhaps. Would they be treading on the toes of others already carrying out foresight? Likely not. Business management consultancies and marketing agencies offer similar services in other industries, and ask architects when built environment inputs are required. Hawkins\Brown thought: Why can’t we also offer a future-facing consultancy, and all the more because we are “native” to the built-environment. 

“We can offer spatial thinking and a level of granularity that generalist management consultants can’t,” says Chen.

In a time of market uncertainty and economic crisis, many developers (and therefore design teams) are hanging back, waiting for the macroeconomic situation to improve before acting. “Foresight enables future resilience in anticipating risk but also seeking out opportunity,” says Chen. “It’s in economic downturns that you often see the real innovators emerge.” 

Hawkins\Brown’s team includes an economist and social scientist alongside architects, but they also stress their wider network of specialist collaborators: neuroscientists, consumer trend specialists, property data analysts. And of course, AI. The foresight method does involve using AI, but this is “conversationally”, through an iterative back-and-forth between human experts and large language models. The team has instrumentally used these tools in the creation of their Trend Database, a knowledge bank of more than 1,500 data points that maps emergent developments across Hawkins\Brown’s six sectoral specialisms. The human process is important to the foresight outcome, says Chen. “We know that when you bring the client along on the journey to build a body of shared knowledge, they value it and believe in it more by the end,” 

So how close are you to telling clients what they should do? I ask. “We get to the doorstep of that,” says Chen. “We form scenarios and then draw out strategic propositions from them. And those are generally spatial across the wide range of factors that manifest in the built environment.” It’s not systems thinking but it’s systems-like thought. “We’re looking at consumer trends, environmental projections, weak signals … and because we do that across various fields, we start to see the interrelationships between things. We’re looking at how interdependencies might inflect current decision-making; we’re not saying you’ve got to redesign the whole system.”

Who else is foresight for? “That’s the exciting part,” says Chen. “We’re realising that a lot of clients can deal with a little bit more RIBA Stage 0 in their coffee.” Rather than knee-jerk reactions based on current indicators, this is an opportunity to think more widely and creatively about the nature of wider drivers of change. Foresight maps futures, you choose your route to resilience.

For more information or to arrange an exploratory chat, contact darrylchen@hawkinsbrown.com

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