Archinect - News

Amazon to re-program human workforce

2019-07-11T16:42:00-04:00

Amazon has increasingly turned to robots and automation technology to fetch products from the shelves of its warehouses to ship to customers. Now the company says it needs to help its workers adapt to the rapid change. The e-commerce giant said on Thursday that it planned to spend $700 million to retrain a third of its workers in the United States, an acknowledgment that advances in technology are remaking the role of workers in nearly every industry.

Amazon is planning to spend $700 million over the next five years retraining 100,000 human workers to help smooth a transition toward greater automation in its operations.

“When automation comes in, it changes the nature of work but there are still pieces of work that will be done by people,” Ardine Williams, Amazon’s vice president of people operations, told The New York Times. She added, “You have the opportunity to up-skill that population so they can, for example, work with the robots.”

The retraining effort, according to The New York Times, will include software engineering classes, part of the company's plan to fill a growing need for data mapping specialists, data scientists, security engineers, and logistics coordinators.

Is age just a number when it comes to a career in architecture?

2019-05-08T18:27:00-04:00

Architect and urban designer Matthew Frederick states in his book, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, "architects are late bloomers. Most architects do not hit their professional stride until around age 50!" Taking Frederick's statement into consideration how does age play into an individual's job decision and transition over time? How does age affect individuals exploring a new career in architecture?

Peak Age for Job Switches: Teenage and Twenties. Image © Nathan Yau | Flowing Data (View full graph here)

Statistician Nathan Yau uses his professional experience with data and data visualization to create a graphic exploring the correlation between age and 100 common jobs individuals switch to overtime. Ranging from age 15 to 90 each job is listed on its own timeline. Any peaks within the timeline reflect the age where individuals are most likely to make a job switch. With this data, Yau then organizes the graph ranking jobs people are more likely to have when they are young...

According to WeWork "Buildings equal Data"

2019-03-02T13:08:00-05:00

There are T-shirts floating around WeWork’s New York City headquarters that say “Buildings equal data.” The nano manifesto hints at a conviction that architecture should be shaped by a methodical study of how people utilize spaces instead of unique aesthetic signatures. More than that, correlating digital information with physical structures is good business—it has quickly become a core strategy for the eight-year-old, $47 billion company racing to expand its footprint globally.

Architects today are very familiar with data and its influence over design, construction, and feasibility. However, what else can data teach us? When you're a massive billion dollar company like WeWork, opportunities for turning data into teachable tools coincides well with the company's progressive ethos.

Say what you will about the company, regardless of your views their intentions of transforming the tools and perspectives of real estate, architecture, and design is reflective of the decisions they've made thus far. For WeWork, data isn't just a tool but an asset to the company's overall growth and success. "It’s hard to overstate how essential data is to WeWork’s operations. Specifically, architectural data. Nearly four years ago, the company underscored this dependency when it acquired Case, a BIM consultancy whose expertise WeWork relied on even in its early years (it was founded in 2010). With David Fano, Case’s co-foun...