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Leadership Edge

The Technology Tax Nobody Can Agree On

đź“° I asked nine AEC tech companies if their software actually frees architects to design, or just moves the tax to a different line item. The answers surprised me.

The Technology Tax Nobody Can Agree On

If your software promises to free you up to design, where does the other half of your day actually go?

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Who this episode is for: Firm leadership and BIM managers who've been told a new tool will "let architects design" and want to know what that claim actually costs, and what it actually buys.

Summary

This is episode one of nine in a limited series I built for this fall called The Next AEC Tech Stack (TRXL 238). I went to the companies building what comes after the tools we use now and asked every one of them the same question, on camera, with no script and no approval over the final cut: does your tool actually free designers to design, or does it just move the technology tax to a different line item?

This first episode is arc one, BIM 2.0. I put that question to Randall Stevens (AVAIL), Matt Wash and Ariel Cooke-Zamora (Bimbeats), Gavin Nicholls, Campbell Yule, Jesper Wallgren (Finch), Holger Kreienbrink (Graphisoft), Marty Rozmanith (Skema), Dimitrie Stefanescu (Speckle), and Clifton Harness (TestFit). Nobody got a soft question, and nobody flinched.

What came back wasn't one answer. It was a set of different definitions of what "design" even is, and a running argument about who's actually eating the time that gets freed up when a tool works as advertised.

This series brought to you by
Graitec

Graitec provides AEC software, training, and expert support to help architects, engineers, and construction teams design, build, and manage projects more effectively.

With support from
AVAIL

AVAIL's content management system (CMS) helps architecture and engineering teams find, manage, and reuse their Revit, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and other technical content in one place.

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Free and paid subscribers are getting the same full newsletter for this series. Normally the full edition of Leadership Edge is a paying-member benefit. For The Next AEC Tech Stack it isn't: all nine editions go out complete to everyone on the list, free accounts included, along with the Field Report that goes with each one. The partners above paid for the series so the industry could actually use it.

If someone forwarded this to you, sign up free and the remaining eight land in your inbox. TRXL+ members also get the ad-free feed, the full back catalog, and all the content that goes back behind the paywall when we return to our regular schedule following this series.
Catch the full episode

What's Inside

  • The 50 percent problem. Randall Stevens estimates half of a practitioner's day disappears into friction that has nothing to do with design, so who's actually built to reclaim that time, and who's just repackaging it.
  • The duplication nobody notices. A documentation crunch at a real firm revealed the same markup happening three times over by three different people, and what it took to actually see that.
  • Reinventing the wheel, on purpose. Dimitrie Stefanescu calls out a narcissistic streak inside architecture itself, one that rewarded the wrong kind of cleverness for years.
  • Cardboard, not replicas. Marty Rozmanith explains why Skema isn't trying to be a one-to-one model of a building, and what that has to do with how Revit was actually meant to work.
  • The finance nobody teaches in school. Clifton Harness argues the real constraint on American buildings was never gravity or zoning, and what that means for what design is actually for.

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