We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Will Martin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Will below.
Will, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s one of the most important lessons you learned in school?
In my senior year of high school, I had the unique opportunity to take a course in economics that ultimately had a profound impact on my future course of study. Leaving high school I jettisoned my previous passions for the hard sciences, most of all chemistry, for what I saw as the applied studies of social systems at the societal scale: economics. Economics had elements (no pun intended) of chemistry’s alchemical magic—the transformations of things from one state to another, from one quality to another. Economics, like chemistry, promised to reveal the magician’s most guarded tricks. Invigorated by the possibility of learning the capacity to design better outcomes for society by mixing a little bit of this with a little bit of that, stirring, and adding heat; I eagerly jumped into my newly selected major. However, it didn’t take too long for me to suspect that economics offered more smoke and mirrors than enlightened transformation. The tricks of the trade felt more oriented toward manipulation than empowerment.
This revelation, however, ultimately lead me to greater insights into the limits of disciplinary knowledge and the importance of transdisciplinary study and pursuits—a lesson that has guided my journey since. A confrontation with an economics professor early in my undergraduate studies punctuated this lesson. In an introductory economics course, I chaffed strongly against one of economics’ bedrock assumptions: “rational choice theory.” At a high level, the theory espouses that all individuals are not only perfectly rational, but they are also perfectly self-interested. How could a core assumption be so evidently and demonstrably false? I went to the professor’s office to call BS and expected to be dismissed (he had written the textbook after all). That did not happen. The conversation that resulted and the lesson I learned has stuck with me to this day.
The professor conceded that maybe I was right. Maybe humans were, at least partially, irrational and other-regarding as I contended. He then issued a challenge: “what are you going to do about it?”, and stressed that great economists don’t have the right answers but that they ask the right questions. Great economists challenged received wisdom and evolved greater understanding. I left the encounter equal parts baffled and emboldened. I did want to be a “great economist” in this sense, but how might I find the right question to ask? What was I going to do about it? That pursuit lead me far astray from the strictures of orthodox economic thought and ultimately to the conclusion that one cannot formulate “the right questions” for economics, or any discipline for that matter, from within the strictures of the discipline itself. Put another way, to be a “great economist” might require being a bad economist, or not even an economist at all. I started to see the value of the outsider and the amateur. More broadly, the lesson I carry with me today is that we as a society will be incapable of asking the right questions, the questions we need to develop a prosperous and equitable future for all, from within the myopic silos of our current ossified disciplines, professions, and practices. To flourish, we must do the hard work of pursuing and evolving alternative and hybridized modes of understanding to realize our collective potential together.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Like many youths today and in the past, from an early age, I hoped to find a career that would align my skills and my passions with my desire to contribute to making the world a better place. I still do! But how? The question remains. Easier said than done. For me, the journey to discover that perfect constellation of activities, what one might call in retrospect a “career”, continues. Previous iterations of roles and responsibilities have never fit neatly within a single industry, profession, or title (evidenced by the apparent promiscuity of my academic and professional endeavors). However, if I were to track and name the underlying nature of this work, it would be “design”. Our firm Studiobvio does many different things, but above all else, we practice design.
“Design” means many different things to many different people. The word as we understand it and apply it in our work is both specific and expansive. For us, design is an intentional and rigorous process for discovering and liberating the potential of nested communities in a place. The manifestation of design might be a business model or it might be a building. Design depends on context. A lot of our work revolves around purposefully rooting our clients within the nested, and often previously obscured, communities of their particular place and resourcing them with the capacity to nourish and be nourished by those connections.
We use the term “resourcing” intentionally. While some might see design as a method for solving a specific problem, we see design as a method for empowering and enlivening potential. This conceptual shift energizes a broader array of possibilities for us to facilitate and co-evolve our clients’ capacities for meaningful self-realization as individuals, families, and communities. We believe that by working this way, we provide a much higher order of value to our clients than the reductive, linear “professional design services” offerings that define the status quo in our industry.
With this frame, a “resource” might include an architectural design of an ADA-accessible accessory dwelling unit that enables a long-term community member to age in place while fostering cultures of non-family-based kinship and care through the provision of much-needed affordable housing. A “resource” might also include an interactive website and database for a local non-profit to connect immigrant families more effectively with dignified work, institutional resources, and other social, cultural, and economic bridges into their new communities. At Studiobvio, our agility as transdisciplinary designers enables us to escape the tunnel vision of a “hammer looking for a nail” that defines the work of too many professional service providers, in pursuit of a process that is more liberated and alive.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
The trajectory of my career to date has been defined by “pivoting”. Pivoting has allowed me to change perspectives and evolve my understanding. For me, one of the most meaningful evolutions of this type occurred during my transition to becoming a father. While I expected (yet could not adequately internalize) the tremendous impact that parenting would have on our time and other valuable finite resources, I did not expect how parenting might alter my self-perception. Parenting has profoundly impacted the way I imagine my own capacity and potential, and as a result, the way I strive to practice design.
There are no “experts” in parenting, yet children (and their parents) become incredible, unique, beautiful, and capable beings all the time. Could we ask as much of a building? of an organization? Within each child-parent relationship is the radical potential for each to co-evolve to previously unknowable levels of personal and shared prosperity. This potential is born of shared individuality, care, and amateurism, not the imposition of expertise. That potential withers in the patriarchal, authoritarian, “I am the expert adult” construction of parenting as domination. This has been a valuable lesson that has led to a simultaneous pivot in my approach to design practice. I no longer imagine my role as an expert with accolades and credentials, with the answer to questions, and with responses to problems, but as a co-dependent partner with co-evolutionary resources for recognizing and realizing the potential in myself and others.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
When first starting our business, we tried to be practical. Like countless small architectural practices before us, we saw custom, residential design work as a logical, safe first bet for our fledgling firm. Residential work, in and of itself, however, wasn’t enough. We wanted to do more. While the more manageable scale and intimacy of residential work seemed an attractive break from the more impersonal, large-scale work we had been doing with a previous employer, our ambition for working on residential projects grew from our desire to apply our skills to directly benefit our local community. Specifically, we wanted to help to address Denver’s housing crisis and the resultant fraying of the neighborhood-based community fabrics. Through considerable research, we landed on accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as a target market with just such potential. This niche market and our lofty goals collided with the unfortunate reality that at that time we had no portfolio of work that might demonstrate our capacity to provide the type of service we were hoping to provide.
Although my partner and I both had extensive architectural design experience, our previous work did little to communicate to homeowners that we, a brand new company, were the right firm to trust with such an expensive and potentially risky endeavor. When your competition has done 10 ADUs and you have done zero, you have to get creative with your marketing. To this end, we developed a strategy that would enable us to develop name recognition as the go-to experts on everything ADUs all without initially having a single built project. Generosity, transparency, and accessibility were the keys to our strategy. If we could provide clear, honest value to the community, the community would eventually return that generosity by taking a chance on working with us. We worked tirelessly to that end.
As with many things in business and life, our plan didn’t go exactly as planned. While we had the privilege of meeting and collaborating with many pioneering homeowners, builders, community leaders, and regulators along our journey, the number of built ADUs in our portfolio remains zero. Despite the lack of built ADU projects, our “marketing” approach has contributed significant community value. Thanks to our work and that of our community partners, awareness and demand around ADUs and other alternative housing solutions have blossomed. Through this process, Studiobvio established itself as a trusted community partner. More often than not, our feasibility studies revealed that an ADU development was not the best path for the homeowner. Our honesty and candor in these situations were appreciated despite the inevitable disappointment experienced by all involved. So while the hyper-targeted market may not have been what we expected, our approach of generosity, transparency, and accessibility opened new and unexpected doors, including policy research and consulting and larger master planning projects, that continue to define our work.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.studiobio.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/studiobvio/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-martin-62034114/
Image Credits
Studiobvio