Trained as an architect, Scott Paterson currently works as a Senior Design-Project Lead for the global design firm IDEO, where he helps organizations (both public and private, at all scales) learn and apply the tools and methodologies of design thinking. The goal being, to enhance the user/consumer experience and to develop internal systems for future innovation and growth.

As an architecture student in mid-1990s New York City, Paterson became a member of the emerging media and digital art communities, which led to his work as a principal designer & associate creative director at Frog Design in New York. At Frog Design, Scott worked on large scale, interactive installation projects, and moved to IDEO to focus further on the intersection of technology and space. We first met in late July of last year in Gainesville, FL, where IDEO had sent Scott to work with the City and the Chamber of Commerce to improve the cultural and regulatory environment for entrepreneurs and startups, and make Gainesville “the best city to do business in.”

Within months of our original meeting, I had taken a new position across the country in Denver, and Scott and his colleagues were wrapping up their research and recommendations for Gainesville. We scheduled some time to Skype in between his travels to Bogotá, Columbia (for another project) and my own travels to Madison, WI. In our first meeting, I broached the ideas of the expanding role of design in public and private services, and the strengths and limits of when architecture education’s rubber meets the concrete, and in the following interview, I wanted to continue talking about his career trajectory and how his time in architecture led him to his work today.

Nam Henderson: So, tell me a little bit of your background. I know you went to architecture school. Maybe you could briefly recap your educational [and] professional career?

Scott Paterson: Around 10th/11th grade I took one of those career exams and the suggestions all had to do with drawing. Cartoonist, comic, or architecture. Prior to that I had not paid attention to it as a profession. Changed my high school curriculum, it was a public school but we had a pretty good arts program. Then from that was pretty certain I wanted to go into architecture. Applied to University of Minnesota, went through that program.

For a BArch?

Yeah. In my third year a professor asked me to work for his firm, because of my drawing. So I was already working in the last two years of school. From that, talking to staff and assessing what I was learning, it was kind of nuts and bolts. There was a body of work, that was being done out there, that was completely different. I realized I had to go to grad school to figure that out. Within a year, applied to Columbia, which at the time had a really prominent post-professional masters, for exactly what I wanted to do.

Which was what exactly? What kind of work were you were seeing?

The program I think still exists. A Master of Science in advanced architectural design, very theory heavy, as expressed through design. This is in [the] mid-90s. Princeton was real theory heavy, Harvard was more commercial practice, Yale was a little bit rudderless, the AA in London was an extreme of Princeton, if you will. At the time, [Bernard] Tschumi was running Columbia, it just felt, [I] forget now, but [it] was something appealing about theory and design. Got in, it was definitely a challenge. Was a handful of students (from different years) from my school. We realized we’d had a very practical education. A lot of what was being discussed was new.

This was theory or digital technologies? 

There wasn’t much technology. This was pre-Internet. Or the dawning, ‘95. There were classmates who came from, had worked with offices we were reading about, discussing.

What theory are we talking about? Critical, post-Structural?

Architects love to – either by association or assimilation – look externally for inspiration, rationale, you name it. Which is interesting, that is a skill that has gotten me to where I am now. It was a deep dive into a heavy body, fairly opaque writing. Trying on all kinds of new ideas for how the creative process could work. What form is and how you arrive at form. Anyway, that was huge and eye-opening experience.

Architects love to – either by association or assimilation – look externally for inspiration, rationale, you name it.So how did that prepare you, when you went from this very theory heavy program, were you excited for a more traditional architecture practice?

Altogether it gave me, it expanded my mind in terms of what’s possible to be incorporated into practice. There was this notion...this very different understanding of how the world works and of how cities come to be. Expanding your perspective of what you take into account. Combined with a real pragmatic understanding of buildings (from the firm I worked with in Minnesota). [Rafael] Viñoly was the first person I worked for after school. In the model shop as a freelancer. Just using my craft skills to make models. Even that was interesting because most of the people in the shop were professional model-makers, not necessarily architectural models. Again this is this story about learning about other disciplines and how you work with them and understanding the larger system you operate in. I am realizing, like this is a thread through everything. Also, in graduate school I worked in the slide-library. We were digitizing things, so I taught myself HTML and JavaScript. I became acquainted at that time, with the New Media art community that was just starting to emerge in New York. One of the big draws, was it was young – not young people, but it was new and therefore quite generous, open about idea sharing. Whereas architecture has historically been super secretive. Lot of rhetoric but not generosity. Within the New Media community, it was very easy to become, quote unquote, a member of the community. Slowly over the years, there became actual exhibits of that work.

That you were doing?

That I was part of in little ways. Parallel to the day job of an architect. Over the six years I worked as an architect, I started to get weary of seeing architects put big digital signs on buildings and saying that was a contemporary thing. When I knew that was old and there was a rich discussion regarding VR, augmented reality, even back then. In the process of that search [for a new job], a friend told me there is this firm that creates visualizations, that was super hot and famous at the time. There is a bunch of architects [working there] and one of the founders is an architect. I got hired on the spot. This was the beginning of the first dot-com boom, and within a year the firm went from me (the 20th employee) to 80. So it was very serendipitous but that was when I changed careers, in 2000. Went to doing entirely digital work but conceptually it wasn’t a hard transition to make at all. The medium and manifestation of the work were completely different.

This was a firm that did architectural visualizations? 

No not at all. They created visualizations of relational databases. They were famous for this visualization (Java based, interactive) of a Thesaurus. The software later got branded Thinkmap. At the time it was hot shit.

So that was a complete shift from architecture. From a, not boutique but small firm, to an industry with similar technological skills. 

I and the other architects had an ability to systematically look at the work. The thing to learn was how to code, not conceptually understand what we were doing. It was a very natural transition to something which on the face of it looks entirely different.

So you went from this firm and eventually end up at Frog Design, correct?

9/11 happened. Thinkmap closed for a while, the dot-com boom ended. Now I was in the interactive world, so I became a professor at Parsons (in their MFA design and technology program). Teaching interaction design and art projects. Formally, joined the arts community. Had started a residency at Eyebeam (one of the epicenters of the New Media community). I was kind of done with just doing digital and wanted to fold architecture back in. The way to do that was through installation/exhibit design.That began a four or five year stint as an independent artist/professor. All digital projects, exploring the mobile/personal digital assistant. Looking at what that does and how it mediates our everyday experiences, what kind of cognitive maps we have. The last of those projects was for the Whitney, an alternative audio tour, using a new multi-media hand-held. This was in the old building. That is in the permanent collection. That was sort of the end of the art career. That got a lot of attention of course. I was kind of done with just doing digital and wanted to fold architecture back in. The way to do that was through installation/exhibit design. Which then got me to Frog.

Were you doing exhibit design for Frog?

I was working for one of two top exhibition design firms in New York and Frog found out about me through someone else. Over about a year they [Frog] attempted to lure me away. They were starting to build out a portfolio of large scale, interactive installation projects. Ultimately left there and moved to IDEO.

So in the eight years with IDEO, have you shifted what you are doing and working on?

Yes. The group I joined is no longer in that formation. We are on the third wave of being organized and it is a relatively fluid thing. There is a period where I was quite a generalist – The key thing is you need to have empathy for the folks you are designing for.like designing TV shows for a Korean market, to other things that were more familiar. Went to Singapore for half a year working with government there on a major digital project and came back with a renewed passion for helping the public sector in the US. That has been a big part of my portfolio. If not public sector at least something that is civic or urban.

When we talked in Gainesville we talked about human and user-centered design. Would you say what you do now is helping organizations apply those concepts internally to how they provide services? You must have a pitch. What is it that you do now?

[Laughs] There are a couple ways to answer that. Design thinking is a set of tools, which helps develop empathy for who you are designing for. The key thing is you need to have empathy for the folks you are designing for. Ultimately with, not for them. It's basically a state of mind. While as an architect, you have some degree of empathy for how the people are going to live, work or inhabit the thing you are designing, there is nothing particularly done to explore or capture that. As far as I can tell. They think about it, no question some more than others.

By capture that do you mean by using the specific ways and tools for thinking that you were referring to earlier?

Yes. By and large architecture is too far downstream. By the time it gets to them, some things are decided that shouldn’t be. So these tools that are used to uncover behavior or key performance indicator, if you have them earlier on, you can make sure the decisions are more the right one. Often we are undoing things. They come to us, “we want to do this project with you.” Maybe that is the problem, or maybe that’s not. In the case of Gainesville it was, “making the city more competitive”. There was a notion they should be citizen-centered but they didn’t really know what that meant. In the end I described to the Mayor and Commission, you all need to reorganize yourselves...it is a hierarchy from empirical eras. Then we designed how a department would feel and look and how services would be entirely different based on that philosophy.

Talking about the Gainesville project. I read the Sun editorial, what IDEO recommended. The idea of an “action officer” and a “Department of Doing”. Is that concept about the actual person/job role or more structures and processes?

Why does it have to be either? Why not both?

If it is more about the services represented by the person, seems ratio would be key. Of “action officer” to entrepreneur. To number of new business.

No, that is right. That next thing to answer is how many should there be? This was eight weeks, a very quick project. High touch, with lots of concept and prototyping workshops. It wasn’t really, should there be this team of “action officers” as [in] how are they structured, how many of them. Should University of Florida have their own team? Which kind of makes sense since they will have their own unique needs. That is the easy stuff though. Implementing is pragmatic stuff.

Getting buy-in for the concept is harder?

Way harder. Because when it first got broached. People were up in arms. “We already have an ombudsman.” Or, “you are just making government bigger,” yada yada yada.

So are we talking an idea where people are owned by separate departments, divisions etc., but working together, sharing space etc.? Or where the city would actually rethink/structure existing budgetary or accounting lines?

Our sense of it, is there is obviously a certain sense of complexity that will remain. The nature of some of what exists is complex. Maybe it is naive, I don’t think so, the city government is third largest employer in City of Gainesville, but it isn’t that big. It is certainly The thing we talk about, that is unique to the education, is the systems, the ability to understand a systemic ecological view of things.behind in its processes. As we diagrammed it, there is a feedback loop that needs to exist between policy and the services which result from those policies. That is basically citizen centered. Once that is setup, then the departments are really just there to carry out the process. Whereas now it is a very static thing. There is much more, you are a cog. Your ability to see what is going on elsewhere (if you enter the digital era), you have much better, coordinated teams. I kept using the idea (which was familiar to people) of an electronic health record which allows for more coordinated, if not better care. Right now they don’t have anything like that. It is a bit of a wake-up call to people when we do these. They don’t think of competing against the private sector. However, when you ask people they don’t distinguish pain points between private or public sector, in their life.

Thinking about the idea of a common thread, as you mentioned earlier. How do you think architecture prepared you for what you do now? Is there a relationship there even?

We talk about this a lot here. There is a group of architects (group, not a team) all masters degree people. All of us are doing very different work. The thing we talk about, that is unique to the education, is the systems, the ability to understand a systemic ecological view of things. The other part, is this ability to synthesize other ideas. A lot of what we do is synthesize. I firmly believe that if you leave the profession, that is the skill you bring to other realms.

So, your architectural past prepared you more, not the New Media stuff, for that systems thinking? Was there a linear progression from the beginning?

Sort of, it evolved. Undergrad was the mechanical era of understanding systems. Then in grad school it became digital and non-linear systems. Swimming in this idea of ecosystems. Both huge scale and small.

The micro and macro...

Micro, macro and how they are globally interconnected. Now you have parametric modeling, at least people understand they are now designing within dynamic systems. Choreographing, orchestrating which is a different kind of interaction than, just gesture.

Two last things to throw at you. Earlier this year Liam Young was quoted in Tank Magazine “I advocate for the utter dissolution of the term architect. I think an architect’s skills are completely wasted on making buildings.” How would you respond?

I would tend to agree with that point of view. Sure. I always tell architects the problem is you are too far downstream. It is not on the table, even though architects want to unpack and talk about it. If they are in the world in these other ways, then they can have more influence. They can impact arguably more people.

There is a commonality but everyone [at IDEO] has got their own thing. An “Island of Misfits” in a way.Do you ever see yourself going back?

No.

Were you ever licensed?

No. I am qualified to sit for it, but never did. The more I go the less it seems... I feel my work is much more at the city level. There is an influence of the digital on how cities evolve. Not obvious, but lots of little phenomenons. Ephemeral, dynamic, quite invisible forces.

Well, thanks so much and I’ll stay in touch with updates. If you are ever in Denver and want to get a drink let me know.

I know we go to Denver quite often for research, so if I hear people are there I might connect you.

Anyone that is a friend of yours.

Awesome. It would be interesting for you to meet other IDEO people. There is a commonality but everyone has got their own thing. An “Island of Misfits” in a way.