About briefing. Q&A with Evodia Alaterou, principal at Hassell

In this Q&A, I have the pleasure of talking to Evodia Alaterou , who is leading the design strategy team at Hassell , a leading international design practice with studios in Australia, Asia, the US and the UK. Within Hassell, Evodia and her team are responsible for design strategy, which is all about understanding the needs and ambitions of clients and users. The concept of design strategy appears to have a lot in common with briefing, so I am asking Evodia about the difference between the two. I am also asking her about what makes a good brief in her opinion. Having over 15 years of experience, and qualifications in both architecture and environmental psychology, Evodia is in an excellent position to answer my questions. Here is what she has to say.

JvM: At Hassell, you are responsible for what you call Design Strategy. How does that concept relate to briefing? Is it overlapping, different, similar, …?

EE: Design Strategy encompasses more than briefing for singular projects. At Hassell, we bring big picture thinking to our projects – we’ll often incorporate broader sectoral research and knowledge into our engagements with clients. We help them think through the immediate question (such as “How much space do I need?”) from a broader, more impactful, perspective (such as “How can we empower people to do their best work in this new building, and what role does space play?”).

We also refer to our work as being ‘design ready strategy’, which means we translate an organisation’s higher order aspirations into a spatial direction. Architects and designers therefore know what to design, there’s no ‘gap’ between the strategy and the information needed to start design.

JvM: You have a lot of expertise on workplace strategy, which is a very challenging field at moment given the massive remote working experiment that we have just been through. What do you do to get an understanding of an organization’s future need for space when so much is still in flux? How can one write a solid brief if needs are uncertain?

EE: That is the million-dollar question!

We’ve seen workplaces evolve away from cellular places for individual thinking towards more active and vibrant places for collective activities for decades. The pandemic has accelerated this evolution.

What’s interesting for me is that, in answering the ‘how much space’ question, we’re ‘forced’ to go back to first principles – and ask ourselves “what is the (new) role of the workplace?” And we’re seeing that it’s different for each organisation. While businesses consider the type of organisation they want to be into the future, and how their people will work long term, we wrap the spatial response around that. Often, we’ll model a number of scenarios for the spatial response, so business leaders can get a sense of the options that might address their changing business needs over time.

Flexibility is the name of game now more than ever. We help our clients think through the different ways to make their space more ‘elastic’. The key is about thinking beyond the traditional lease for a fixed amount of space for a fixed (long) term towards different ways of meeting space needs in more immediate and on-demand ways.

This whitepaper deals with exactly this topic.

JvM: What makes a good brief according to you?

EE: A good brief starts with why, with purpose. It captures the uniqueness of the client and the situation. It builds excitement about the opportunities to make a tangible and measurable difference for the people who will frequent and enjoy the space it describes. A good brief is not just about space types and square meters, it’s about starting the process of doing something really wonderful for people.

How do you see the future of briefing? (e.g. in relation to changes in the role of architects and/or the further digitalization of the construction/property industry)

I think we’ll see an increase in use of tools that support the briefing process, for example live data capture and analytics, 24/7 dashboards, chatbots that interact with space users, that sort of thing. These tools have a purpose and are useful for discreet tasks, and over time they’ll probably evolve into very sophisticated supertools. This is an exciting prospect, but I really hope they don’t replace human interaction entirely.

The process of briefing is about exploring opportunities, often random, unexpected opportunities. It’s about questioning and being open to challenge, experimenting, throwing things together, trying new things. Data, and data capture tools, serve a purpose, but if relied on entirely might oversimplify the process, turn it into a formula, and not allow the nuance and the human aspect to come to the surface.

If we want to create great places that have a positive impact on people, we have to continue talking to people and bringing their stories into the process of designing for them as much as in the built form we create for them. ?

JvM: Any recommendations for construction clients?

EE: Give yourselves the time to explore the opportunities before starting to draw or build things. It’s a gift! Buildings are made to last for decades, and sometimes bad buildings negatively impact people’s lives for all those years. I don’t understand why we allow this to happen. Carve off a bit of time at the start of the process to explore and make good decisions that will pay back over and over again in the enhanced quality to people’s lives.