Southside Stories Podcast
Andy talks values, relationships and AI in architecture
Andy's been chatting with Matt Whittingham, podcaster and business coach, on his Southside Stories podcast. Matt and Andy cover a fair bit of ground, including the importance of coming up with values that mean something, championing the four-day week, the role of AI in architecture, and how building real collaborative relationships makes for better projects – like SMCC, our community cricket pavilion in Dulwich.
Thanks to Matt for the insightful questions and a great chat. Tune in on Spotify, Apple or YouTube. And if you enjoyed listening/watching/reading the transcript, check out another interesting convo with Rion Willard over at The Business of Architecture podcast.
Some highlights from the conversation:
Anti-vanilla values
For us, values are about how we show up in the world – a guide and a tool to be shared and talked about, not stuck in the back of a brand book or six folders deep collecting digital dust on a marketing drive. They’re front and centre, always. And they’re not just for us; they help clients work out if we’re the right fit for them. We even turned them into a metric, building them into a spreadsheet.
As Andy tells Matt, “We use it [the spreadsheet] to hold ourselves – and clients – to account. We’re not judging people, but you can tell when someone’s a good fit. We’re talking to a new client at the moment about a new sports pavilion, and he wouldn’t stop talking about the values – it was lovely to see. If someone likes them, they probably really do like them.”
Find out more about our values – Go Together, Seek Joy, Do Good, Get Creative, Push On, Own It – and how we made them here.
Four-day week
Everyone always assumes we’re cramming five days’ work into four, and that’s not it. It’s about being efficient and making the best use of the time we have. We’re trying to shift the pervasive late-night, last-minute, “I suffered so you’ll suffer too” culture in any way we can, and this is us doing just that. We’re not about paying lip service; we’re taking action. Life is hard enough right now and we really do give a sh*t – about people, clients, projects, society.
Like Andy says, “It’s [our studio’s four-day week] counter to an industry culture of working more hours and doing more. The longer you work, the time just fills – it doesn’t move. The most important thing isn’t working, it’s being creative and giving your brain a rest. When we hired someone recently, we told them we want them to relax on a Friday – you can’t put that in a contract, but we’d rather pay enough that people don’t need another job on their day off.”
Did you see us on 5 News and ITV talking about the government’s proposals for a four-day week?
Human vs AI
Yeah, we went there. The bottom line? AI should be a tool that frees humans up to be more creative. It shouldn’t replace us. And we need to stop using it for writing. Writing, like drawing, is how we process our thoughts and ideas. It’s how we express ourselves. It’s what makes us human.
Andy adds: “One line I’ll draw: I don’t like generative AI for text at all. I won’t accept it. It’s sad seeing so much formulaic AI ‘slop’ on LinkedIn – that push to post three times a week resulting in a rubbish long post because there wasn’t time to write a good short one, and it’s formulaic and not actually written by the person. We put a lot into our own writing – I’ve been reading about how you lose certain cognitive abilities if you stop using them, so I’m trying to lean into more writing, reading, and drawing, and stepping away from the computer rather than offloading those things. Difficult tasks are difficult for a reason.”
You can find the full interview on Spotify, Apple or YouTube.
Interested in working with a values driven architecture studio?
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