We’ve been asking firms about how they use the Framework for Design Excellence (formerly the COTE Toolkit) in their practices -- in project work, client conversations, training, awards submittals, storytelling, and in other ways. We profiled the efforts of Lassel Architects, Opsis, and NBBJ in late 2019; you can find that piece here. Here’s our latest snapshot about how one firm is doing this:
Hastings Architecture | 80 people | Nashville, TN
Erica Weeks, AIA, LEED BD+C, is Director of Sustainability for Hastings Architecture, whose team of 80 is under one roof in Nashville, Tennessee. Since summer of 2018, she says, Hastings “has used the toolkit in house as a means of tracking data and talking about certain criteria with industry standard baselines and specific terminology.” In September 2019, the firm’s leadership engaged in a six-hour charrette to recommit to using the toolkit as a fact-gathering and consistent communication tool. “We wanted to identify targets and align on strategies going into the new year and the new decade,” Weeks says. She reviewed the toolkit through the lens of recent projects, and the leadership group evaluated gaps and opportunities. “This was a recommitment to how we communicate in the firm and how we create consistent ways to talk about and document choices that are made as part of the design process.”
After that session, Weeks met with each of the firm’s eight studio teams to talk about the details of the toolkit and how it can be used to facilitate project kick-off sessions and as a gauge throughout all phases of a project. The response has been uniformly positive at all levels. “There have been lots of questions, and lots of aha moments,” Weeks says. “Many people see this as a strong structure for conversations with the team and a framework for how we capture information about the project. We are holding project teams accountable for asking questions -- and documenting answers -- at each stage of the project.”
Since 2015, Weeks has been presenting monthly lunch and learns and now she uses the Toolkit as the base for these, too: this month’s lunch was Design for Resources (based on Measure 8 of the Framework).
She says that her leadership team realized that the Toolkit is a valuable resource for the firm and for all projects. “The design leaders were the first ones on board,” she says, “because they realized that this is about capturing design intent and design process, not just calculated metrics.”
How is your firm using the Toolkit? We’d love to learn what’s working — and what’s not — and share your story so that other firms can learn. Drop me a line at kiragould@kiragould.com.