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Arup’s Research Program
When Ove Arup retired in his 90s, he put the entire company into a trust for the benefit of the employees. The board of trustees has no fiduciary stake in the firm and it has three roles: select the operating board, make sure the conditions of the trust are maintained, and keep the pensions funded. One of the conditions of the trust is that at least 8 percent of our global gross receipts on an annual basis has to be put into research. Ove's view was that we should never learn on our client's time. We should learn out of our profits. So we have a big research campus and we have a design and technical executive who drives research issues within our own firm that are much more practically oriented. That is, we take the best of the available science and find ways to integrate that into the offers we can make to our clients to help them either reduce their cost or increase their value.
For example, we were highly involved in the creation of translucent cement. We took glass fibers and found a way to do the batching of cement so that you can use cement walls for thermal mass while reducing the lighting requirement inside because light penetrates through the concrete.
Much of this research is driven now by a subset of our research program, which is called Drivers of Change. Through the program, we work within the firm and then, subsequently, with people outside the firm to figure out the key issues we must address as designers with our clients to ensure that their problems are solved in the same way and, at the same time, increase the quality of the public experience over time.
In the first year of the program, we looked at climate, water, and energy. Those are huge topics that cannot be covered in a year, so the research on those continues. This year, our research agenda includes demographic change, urbanization, and waste in all forms. Next year, the entire agenda is going to focus on how all of these ideas get integrated so that we understand the relationships between them, so we have the ability to advise our clients how to apply the best levers so you can always solve more than one problem at a time.
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Integrated Design
Our unwritten rule is that we try to solve at least three problems with every dollar we spend on our client's behalf. And you can only get at that idea through the notion of integrated design. All of these highly technical issues are pushing pressure back onto the projects being science-led and engineering-led. It's becoming evermore important that we find ways to team up as the various disciplines as this swing back occurs. As design professionals, we can’t afford to swing back and forth between who's leading these ideas. We’re all in this together. The idea of hierarchy or subservience—in terms of who's the leader, in terms of solving the problems, and in terms of determining who the subs are—is being abandoned because the problems are too complex and the issues are too important. All the disciplines have to come together if we are going to have a fighting chance at solving the problems that vex us most. |
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