There’s been a lot of fairly negative but not inaccurate things written about WeWork in the news. As an ex-employee, I look forward to seeing how the company restructures itself to realized the great potential that once drew many to the company.
WeWork’s tremendous growth was powered by a design and construction management operation that is unparalleled in the industry. Opening dozens of locations a month and at unmatched speeds shows us it’s possible. Yet it only shows only the precipice of what a scaled, digitally native design operation can achieve.
WeWork’s first stroke of luck is the fact that it targeted office space, perhaps the easiest space type to commodify and one space type consumers have the least specific requirements for. A desk and a chair, with power and internet connectivity, is all that is minimally required to qualify as an “office product”. Environmental comfort, free beverages, and fun furniture are cosmetics on an underlying product with not a lot of hard requirements to negotiate. The typology serves the needs of expansion by not having a ton of variability globally. The same design management process can be deployed globally, with small changes to serve local preferences.
The same process can’t be easily replicated for say, a residential space, an education space, or an outdoor wave pool, where local restrictions and cultural needs have a much more profound impact on how the space can be designed and built. The inherent complexities of space typologies puts pressure on every step of the value chain.
WeWork’s second stroke of luck is the fact that it vertically integrated a BIM native design process early in its growth. In traditional delivery, the sourcing of real estate, signing of the lease, organizing design, phasing construction, delivery of products, and finally the subsequent selling of space to end users usually occur linearly and involve hundreds of people across dozens of different industries. WeWork internalized many parts of this value chain, and was therefore able to remove massive communication barriers and inefficiencies that are common practice in the industry. Even more valuable, this internalization allows WeWork to perform the steps out of order or in parallel. There is nothing that really requires design to come after sourcing a building, even better, a spatial requirement can be design tested across many buildings, allowing a level of optimization between lease negotiation and delivery to end users. In a BIM native process, this common data environment is readily available to the whole company at scale, allowing decisions that slice across multiple knowledge domains to be made quickly.
WeWork’s third stroke of luck is the pressure of growth forcing innovative processes. WeWork’s design and development teams did things differently because they were allowed the autonomy, but more so because they were forced to adapt. Traditional timelines and processes could never keep up with the growth demands of the company. Reduced staffing overhead for projects, automation of different aspects of the process, and data integrations across domain gaps were developed, applied, and popularized in a grassroots, ad-hoc manner by the same people that designed and built WeWork’s spaces. This closeness between design production and iteration of design process created impactful techniques that resolved real problems, often without requiring the development of new technology.
These three factors contributed to WeWork’s development of a world class digitally native design operation. Expansion to other space typologies is not impossible, but needs to be approached with the same operationalization mindset that pushed the development of process in the classic WeWork value chain. Having worked as both a designer in traditional architecture and a cog in the WeWork design machine, what I saw develop at WeWork only scratches the surface on the impact productionized digital design has on not only space as a product, but the valuation and speculation of space as an asset. By cutting out the fat in the process of transforming a spatial asset and reducing the timeline of the transformation itself, we can change the perception of space from a static environment to a transformable service.