Design, Labor and Talent in the New Economy

Roger Martin, the former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has argued in the New York Times that the global economy now has three main players: capital, “the owners and investors who provide the means of production;” labor, “the workers who turn invested capital into profits;” and talent, employees who are “highly skilled and portable.” [1] Martin wrote about the lockout of referees by the National Football League to make his point. The NFL owners viewed the referees as replaceable labor, but it turns out that, after some controversial calls by their replacements, that referees are more like the players, with irreplaceable talent in demand by the fans and the teams alike.

Martin’s insightful distinction goes far beyond football. It defines an important dividing line in the global economy between labor, which capital views as an easily replaceable commodity, and talent, which has become prized by capital for the value it creates and also resented because of its portability, which capital cannot control. This leads to the question that every employee needs to ask: how can I become irreplaceable talent rather than expendable labor?

The discipline of architecture provides a particularly useful lens through which to look at this question. On one hand, architects seem to stand clearly in the talent camp because of our creative skills, but on the other hand, capital views most – but not all – of the design community as replaceable labor, with the low fees, job insecurity, and depressed wages that stem from that. As a result, the architectural field reveals some important nuances in the distinction that Martin makes that can help illuminate how to move from the labor to the talent side of the ledger.

Star Talent

To understand those nuances, let’s imagine some different types of architects at the front line of this struggle between capital on one hand and labor and talent on the other. Star designers clearly stand at the talent end of the spectrum: highly skilled and highly in demand, they have greater leverage than most architects to command higher fees. That does not mean that they pay their staff higher wages, since many star architects seem to have highly inefficient operations, but that also shows how many of the owners of architecture firms can act like capitalists, seeking the lowest-cost labor from those who work for them.

Talent can have a limited shelf life and if architectural stars do not continually innovate in ways meaningful to capital, they can disappear from public view. That cycling of talent also reflects the fact that the value of something in a capitalistic economy often depends upon its scarcity, suggesting that only a relatively few architects can have star status at any one time. As Martin puts it, capital is “not amused” by having to pay a premium price for talent and so it will do all it can to keep the number of such people to a minimum. The media aids and abets this process by continually seeking out new stars and often ignoring talent past its prime, playing right into the hands of capital.

            The more talent can boost the profits of capital, the more leverage that person has in terms of compensation. In the design fields, those whose work leads to replicable results – graphic design, interactive design, product design – seem to have more leverage in terms of fees than those who do one-off projects, like architects or landscape architects, who even when famous often have to compete mightily for commissions. On the other hand, architectural talent seems more in demand among one-of-a-kind institutions, like museums and universities, whose value also lies in the scarcity of what they have to offer.

Still, some star architects, like Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid, have expanded their portfolio into product and furniture design, whose replicable results offer capital more potential profit. Indeed, the more star designers get defined as a brand rather than as members of particular discipline, the greater ability they have to diversify their offerings and the more leverage they have with owners and investors. And ironically, the more radical or daring the work of these designers, the more distinct their brand and the longer they can hold on to the slippery slopes at the top of the talent pinnacle.

Labor Becoming Talent

Too many young designers make the mistake of imitating the work of one of these stars, rather than understanding the nature of talent and seeking their own way. Becoming prized talent mainly involves innovating in a way that creates a new demand, meets an unaddressed need, attracts positive media attention, and increases the profits or at least the public profile of capital. You might think that capital would welcome such efforts, but it doesn’t make this easy. As Martin writes, “Capital is outraged because it is being beaten up by talent … and it takes out its anger on the easiest target: labor.”

So we have to earn the talent moniker in the face of capital that wants to treat us as much as possible like labor. Let’s see what this means on the ground. Consider the late-career architects, with higher wages and fewer computer skills, who have found themselves permanently out of a job; or the recent architecture-school graduates, unable to find a job with benefits and depending on a combination of freelance work and non-design employment to pay the bills; or the adjunct faculty members, cobbling together low-paid and often last-minute teaching assignments along with work in a firm or running a small practice on the side.

All of them have talent, but all of them find themselves treated, even by their professional peers, like low-wage, expendable laborers, with little leverage in the market and a great deal of job insecurity as a result. This raises other nuances in Martin’s capital-labor-talent distinction. Architectural firms will compete with each other for talented staff, even while treating others in their office like replaceable labor, and so there exists talent-labor struggles within offices having to do with the type of expertise or the nature of the talent. The more staff members can distinguish themselves in some way critical to the firm’s success, the more they will be able to compete as talent rather than as labor.

Architecture firms, of course, also compete with each other for commissions, and here, too, the talent-labor struggle ensues. Some commodity-oriented clients may not care about creativity or innovation from architects and may make their decision based solely on price, viewing their consultants as interchangeable labor. Too many practitioners accept that situation and lower their fees, sometimes to the point of unprofitability. But there always remains the potential of moving even these clients toward the appreciation of talent. As in an office, so in an interview, talent can get a client to think about a problem in a new way and to see possible profits where others have not.

How, though, can unemployed or under-employed architects move from being expendable labor to valuable talent? As the former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich wrote in the New York Times about this phenomenon, “It’s important to distinguish between entrepreneurial zeal and self-employed desperation,” to distinguish, in other words, between the increasingly portable nature of talent, able to move to where it has the greatest value, and the increasingly dire situation of labor, unable to control the conditions of its employment. [2]       

To the unwillingly unemployed, proving their talent in a tough labor market can seem daunting, and almost impossible to do alone. Reich has proposed some policy ideas such as “earnings insurance,” paid for out of payroll taxes to help buffer the income decline of laid-off employees, or tax credits to match 401(k)’s or I.R.A.’s to help prevent unemployed workers from depleting their savings. While those policy proposals might help older workers who held permanent jobs for a long time, such ideas do little to aid the recent graduate who has yet to get a job or the adjunct faculty member who may have a job one semester and not the next.

Talent Outsmarting Capital

The tension between capital and talent that Martin identifies arises, in part, from the latter’s ability to create value where none existed before and to imagine new products or services never considered before. While that can bring enormous profits, which capital likes, it also means that capital cannot control – and should not want to control – talent the way it tries to do with labor. Talent, in other words, can continually outsmart capital, which offers the best way – and maybe the only certain way – talented people can ensure that they get paid well and that they not get treated as underpaid and easily replaceable labor.

The architectural profession and the design fields generally should excel at this. A design education provides some of the best training available in imagining new paradigms, envisioning better alternatives, and conceiving of that, which does not yet exist. And architects engage in these value-creating activities every time we design a new building, develop a new strategy, and devise a new solution to a seemingly irresolvable problem.

Many architects, however, do a terrible job demonstrating or even talking about the value they create. I have been in too many interviews of architectural firms in which they show their completed work as if its value were self-evident, with little or no evidence offered in terms of how their projects, for example, improved the productivity, profitability, or performance of clients’ organizations or innovated in a way that created a new demand or satisfied an unmet need. As a result, architects and their work tend to look alike, leading selection committees to base their decision on equally shortsighted criteria, such as which architects had the lowest fees or the best presentations. No wonder, then, that so many clients view architects as interchangeable entities and treat us like overworked and underpaid labor.

 This misunderstanding of design’s value on the part of designers themselves starts in school. Most architectural programs focus on developing students’ design intentions and evaluate students’ work based on how well the final project meets those goals. Rarely do schools look at the consequences of design decisions over time, with students documenting, analyzing, and assessing the performance of a completed project and the value it has created for its client and community. This represents a huge missed opportunity for both the architectural profession and the schools. While project fees often do not allow firms to return to their projects to assess the value they have generated over time, architectural schools could – and should – do that work as an integral part of the curriculum, sensitizing students to the need for this information and making it available to the profession.

Talent Stuck in the Past

This hasn’t happened as much as it should, in part, because too many architectural firms and schools seem stuck in past when it comes to demonstrating value. The profession and its first schools emerged in the 19^th century in response to the need for new kinds of buildings and new types of programs, which emerged as the result of the first industrial revolution. Talented architects thrived by providing unprecedented structures – steel-framed skyscrapers, concrete factories, balloon-framed houses – for new kinds of human activities – white-collar office work, machine-based fabrication, affordable worker housing.  In that context, the value of these new types of buildings may have seemed self-evident, with architects simply having to show their work in order to get more of it. And with the rapid growth of the economy and the relatively few numbers of architects, capital paid for the talent of those able to conceive of such innovations.

This also drove architectural education in those early years. Schools focused on developing students’ skills in rapidly developing a building’s layout and massing and on organizing design studios around particular building types, echoing the increasing pace of repetitive machine-based production in the 19^th Century economy as a whole. While that made sense in the context of the first industrial revolution, it remains telling that the curriculum in most architecture schools still follows this format. Most studios, for example, still focus on a particular building type and have the same basic pedagogical structure and even the same Monday/Wednesday/Friday-afternoon meeting times as those in the 19^th Century.

The demand for talent began to change with the rise of the second industrial revolution in the 20^th century. Characterized by assembly-line mass production and the need to boost consumption of an ever-increasing supply of goods, that economy really took off after World War II. Architects responded with the development of modern facilities for mass production and consumption, such as large-scale and often indistinguishable office buildings, factories, and malls. With the standardization of their products, though, architectural firms started down the road of becoming indistinguishable labor, with capital increasingly using competitions and fee-based selection processes to decide which firm to commission. At the same time, other design disciplines – graphic design, product design, and apparel design – began to receive more of the talent pay as they fueled consumer desire in ways that buildings rarely could.

Post-modern Marginalization

Post-modernism emerged in the late 20^th century as an implicit acknowledgement of architects growing economic marginalization. The recognition by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, for example, that many commercial buildings had become little more than backdrops to billboards or neutral enclosures for media-driven experiences highlighted the problem of architecture having become a commodity and its practitioners, an interchangeable labor pool. [3] The architectural profession tended to focus on the aesthetic and theoretical aspects of Venturi and Scott Brown’s perception, while paying relatively little attention to its implications for practice or pedagogy. If buildings had become commodities, for example, then maybe architectural talent needed to look elsewhere for more fertile areas of innovation?

That question has become even more pressing in the 21^st century, as we enter what the economist, Jeremy Rifkin, has called “the third industrial revolution.” [4] This revolution has moved us away from a mass-production and mass-consumption economy to one characterized by mass customization, in which new digital technologies allow consumers to personalize the information they receive, the services they seek, and even the goods they buy or produce themselves. Just as the first industrial revolution saw the rise of innovative building programs and structures, and the second, the rise of innovative spatial experiences, the third has seen the miniaturization and integration of digital technology into almost all aspects of our lives and with it, a disruption of almost every industry that has depended on the making of physical stuff, whether it be compact discs or printed newspapers or, in the case of architecture, retail malls now competing with e-commerce or corporate office buildings now competing with telecommuting.

People still need shelter and places to gather and buildings remain even more in demand with a rapidly growing human population. But the role of architecture has dramatically changed. The third industrial revolution has raised the possibility of people downloading design files and fabricating parts – or even the whole – of buildings themselves using digitally controlled equipment. In such an economy, the value of architects lies in how well we customize a design not only for fee-paying clients, who will constitute an ever-shrinking amount of work for architects, but also for the masses of people who previously had no access to design services. Rather than a scarcity economy, the third industrial revolution also recognizes that humanity needs to move to an economy of abundance, using renewable resources, making information freely available, and leveraging the vast untapped potential of people’s social, cultural, and intellectual capital.

At first glance, this economy of abundance, with much that’s free, may look like the final triumph of capital over talent and a fatalistic acceptance of architecture as a commodity produced by the lowest-cost labor. But that will happen only if the architectural community lets it. Viewed from another perspective, the third industrial revolution represents the ultimate revenge of talent and its liberation from the repressive hold that capital has had on us for so long. How so? Because a digitally enable, mass-customization economy puts the means of production in the hands of the workers, as Marx might have said. The technologies fueling this economy – 3D printing, CNC fabrication, virtual reality, e-commerce – all have relatively low purchase and operational costs, allowing ordinary people to kick-start companies and launch products and services without the high capital costs and organizational structures that the previous two revolutions required.

This has profound implications for a field like architecture, which has suffered over the last century from capital’s success in treating most architects as expendable labor and in keeping the number of high-paid talent to a minimum. With such low capital requirements, the new economy gives everyone with access to these technologies an opportunity to demonstrate their talent and to succeed according to how well they meet the needs of the greatest number of users. Capital no longer guards the gate by doling out funds in ways that keeps most people in perpetual labor with little reward. As we have seen in this socially mediated environment, innovative ideas have gone viral, companies have kick-started themselves to prosperity, and talented individuals have come seemingly out of nowhere to achieve amazing success.

Many of these success stories have also had a design undercurrent, be it President Obama, who once aspired to become an architect before taking up a political career, or Steve Jobs, who mentioned graphic design and typography as his favorite course in college, or Brad Pitt, who also wanted to pursue architecture but chose acting instead. On one hand, such stories may indicate how much architecture, in its current underpaid and often-underappreciated state has lost some of its appeal to talented people. But these stories also show how people with an architectural orientation have taken that design way of thinking into new areas and accomplished great things. Talent combined with a design sensibility can outsmart capital by envisioning what others thought unimaginable (an African American president), by creating something people didn’t know they needed (Apple’s products), and by doing something no one else dared (Make It Right Foundation).

Reimagining Ourselves

We escape the trap of low-paid labor to become higher-paid talent, in other words, not by complaining about our plight or claiming that we deserve it or even by collaborating to join or form a union. As Martin observes, capital has so successfully “worked to diminish the power of unions,” that “labor (has) been forced to capitulate entirely.” In the new economy, talent arises out of meaningful innovation. That has probably always been the case, but it seems particularly true today, in a world very much in need of new and innovative ways of living, working, and making if we hope to sustain ourselves on this planet with over 7 billion mouths to feed in the midst of a changing climate and diminishing resources.

Design offers one of the best educations in innovation. It teaches us how to develop creative solutions to wicked problems and to conceive of compelling ideas that have not occurred in exactly the same way before. But the design community needs to apply its own methods to itself. By not doing so, by adhering to professional practices and educational methods that date back to the 19^th Century, too many architects find themselves getting treated as replaceable labor even as they continually come up with innovative designs for their clients. It may seem as if architects simply need to do a better job explaining and demonstrating their talent and they will get recognized for it and compensated accordingly. But that will not resolve the paradox that many architects face. Architects will cross the line from underpaid labor to higher-paid talent when we finally recognize that buildings represent just one of many ways – and maybe not the best way – to address many clients’ needs.

            In the new economy of abundance, innovation comes from figuring out how to accomplish the most with the least: the least cost, the least disruption, the least impact on the planet. People will still need buildings, but buildings as we have traditionally conceived them represent not only a huge cost, but also a great deal of disruption and resource use. Capital will increasingly pay for talent that figures out how to provide the shelter and gathering spaces that humans still need, with as minimal a cost and impact as possible. This will, in turn, demand that the architectural profession redefine itself as strategic thinkers rather than as now, the designers of buildings. The most highly paid architects in the future will be those who figure out how to meet peoples spatial needs by building as little and as lightly as possible, and maybe not building something new at all.

            This may sound odd to a field that has, for so long associated itself with buildings and been paid according to how large and lavish the building. But as in the past, the new industrial revolution arising all around us promises to overturn much of what we took for granted in the old ones. And in that lies the key to architects being treated as well-compensated talent rather than under-paid labor. The latter does what we already know how to do and what has already become a commodity service. Talent surprises us, doing what we have never imagined before and didn’t know we needed until we saw what it can do for us. The new economy has made the potential of becoming talent available to everyone, and those who don’t take this opportunity – those who remain laboring in the ways of the past – have nothing to complain about.

Notes

1.     All quotes of Roger Martin’s come from his essay: “Talent Shows”, New York Times, September 28, 2012, p. A23.

2.     Robert Reich, “Entrepreneur or Unemployed?” The New York Times, June 1, 2010, p. A27.

3.     Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972)

4.     Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution, How Lateral Power is transforming Energy, the economy, and the World. (New York: Palgram Macmillan, 2011)

An essay published in: The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, edited by Peggy Deamer (Bloomsbury Publishingm 2015)