Design technology is changing both architectural practice and the role of the architect and related design professionals. With new technologies and work processes appearing every week, how can practitioners be expected to stay on top and thrive? In a word, Superusers.

Superusers: Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice will help you identify who they are, the value they provide, and how you can attract and retain them, and become one; what career opportunities they have, what obstacles they face, and how to lead them. Written by Randy Deutsch, a well-known expert in the field, this is the first-ever guide to help current and future design professionals to succeed in the accelerating new world of work and technology.　

Providing proven, practical advice, the book features:

• Unique, actionable insights from design technology leaders in practice worldwide








• The impacts of emerging technology trends such as generative design, automation, AI, and machine learning　on practice








• Profiles of those who provide 20% of the effort but achieve 80% of the results, and how they do it








• What will help firms get from where they are today to where they need to be, to survive and thrive in the new world of design and construction.

Revealing the dramatic impact of technology on current and future practice, Superusers shows what it means to be an architect in the 21st century. Essential reading for students and professionals, the book helps you plan for and navigate a fast-moving, uncertain future with confidence.

Adapt As An Architect: A Mid-Career Companion is the only book that helps design professionals to navigate the vast heart of the architect’s journey. It serves as a roadmap: a career GPS that provides options for architects getting from where they are today to where they really want to be. The focus of this optimistic, engaging book is on continued relevance, professional engagement, perseverance, and career longevity. It argues that mid-career is the lynchpin of the architect’s career, and provides the guidance and support that practices themselves are missing for emerging professionals, who are often left to their own devices to find their way as they approach the middle of their career. This book means architects don’t need to navigate these years on their own.

Do you know how to think like an architect? Do you know why you should? How do you make sure that you have the critical thinking tools necessary to prosper in your academic and professional career? This book gives you the answers. 

Architects have a valuable and critical set of multiple thinking types that they develop throughout the design process. In this book, Randy Deutsch shows readers how to access those thinking types and use them outside pure design thinking – showing how they can both solve problems but also identify the problems that need solving. To think the way the best architects do. 

With a clear, driving narrative, peppered with anecdote, stories and real-life scenarios, this book will future-proof the architectural student. Change is coming in the architecture profession, and this is a much-needed exploration of the critical thinking skills that architects have in abundance, but that are not taught well enough within architecture schools. These skills are crucial in being able to respond agilely to a future that nobody is quite sure of.

The first book devoted to the subject of how BIM affects individuals and organizations working within the ever-changing construction industry, BIM and Integrated Design discusses the implementation of building information modeling software as a cultural process with a focus on the technology’s impact and transformative effect—both potentially disruptive and liberating—on the social, psychological, and practical aspects of the workplace.

BIM and Integrated Design answers the questions that BIM poses to the firm that adopts it. Through thorough research and a series of case study interviews with industry leaders—and leaders in the making out from behind the monitor—BIM and Integrated Design helps you learn:

• Effective learning strategies for fully understanding BIM software and its use
• Key points about integrated design to help you promote the process to owners and your team
• How BIM changes not only the technology, process, and delivery but also the leadership playing field
• How to become a more effective leader no matter where you find yourself in the organization or on the project team
• How the introduction of BIM into the workforce has significant education, recruitment, and training implications

Covering all of the human issues brought about or exacerbated by the advent of BIM into the architecture workplace, profession, and industry, BIM and Integrated Design shows how to overcome real and perceived barriers to its use.

“In this comprehensive book, Professor Randy Deutsch has unlocked and laid bare the twenty-first century codice nascosto of architecture. It is data. Big data. Data as driver. . .This book offers us the chance to become informed and knowledgeable pursuers of data and the opportunities it offers to making architecture a wonderful, useful, and smart art form.”

—From the Foreword by James Timberlake, FAIA

Written for architects, engineers, contractors, owners, and educators, and based on today’s technology and practices, Data-Driven Design and Construction: 25 Strategies for Capturing, Applying and Analyzing Building Data

• addresses how innovative individuals and firms are using data to remain competitive while advancing their practices.
• seeks to address and rectify a gap in our learning, by explaining to architects, engineers, contractors and owners—and students of these fields—how to acquire and use data to make more informed decisions.
• documents how data-driven design is the new frontier of the convergence between BIM and architectural computational analyses and associated tools.
• is a book of adaptable strategies you and your organization can apply today to make the most of the data you have at your fingertips.

"There is today a pronounced and accelerated convergence in architecture. This convergence is occurring by doers not thinkers; in practice not academia; in building design, fabrication, and construction. It is about solution-centric individuals engaged in real time problem solving, not in abstractions. The nature of this convergence, where things are converging and what that means for architecture, is the subject of this book."
—from the Introduction

Those working in architecture and engineering feel pressure to work faster, at lower cost, while maintaining a high level of innovation and quality. At the same time, emergent tools and processes make this possible. Convergence is about the firms, teams and people who thrive in this environment as a result of their ability to creatively combine and innovate. It seeks to answer several timely questions: What are the tools and work processes that are converging? How are individuals and organizations converging their tools and work processes? What challenges and benefits are they seeing? What is the ultimate endgame of this convergence? What skillsets and mindsets would someone need to develop to work effectively in this changing environment? What are the implications of convergence on the role of the designer, and on design? On how we design, build, fabricate, and construct? On how we work?

The book explains how convergence relates to, but ultimately differs from integration, consolidation, multi-tasking, automation, and other forms of optimization. The practice-based research builds upon the author’s research in BIM and in the collaborative leveraging of data in design and fabrication. As an investigation and meditation on the impact of technology on the education and making of design professionals Convergence explains what is happening in the world of design, and discusses the implications for the future of education, training and practice.