(The perspective on the questions mentioned below, were jotted down in the initial stage of the studio)
01. What would you do to monitor the efficiency of your design process?
Monitoring the efficiency in design process becomes eminent when there is less amount of cash as an asset into the firm. Mostly the emerging new practices. So here if we talk about model making. Model making could be an efficient way or may not be, depends on the individual and their design process. What i believe is when a person is involved in the process of making model he explores different aspects of design that is eminent in a design process. If one designer refrains himself of that process and makes decision by just seeing the final model is not that efficient.
02. Would you refrain model making in office to save money or rather downsize (let staff go) for purpose of saving cash/ in times of difficulties in cash flow ?
Until and unless this is not a dialectical duality then i would say that both would be followed by me in certain situations. So downsizing of staff would be mine least priority in my office. Which would only occur if there is huge crisis in the world. Model making is a design process which i feel could be altered and the same process could be made efficient enough in this digital world. There are many alternatives to it which is equally efficient to design process. Yeah but making a model practically as i said is a exploratory process. And this also does not mean that i would not be doing model making in my own office. So there is this experience that i would like to share here with you. In my last firm where i worked there was this model exercise where we had to explore a brick jali pattern in an parametric way. So this was the time and situation when no one in the office knew rhino and grasshopper. So this design process became important and eminent which could be explored through physical model. But there was another situation where after completing all the design process of the building. The design is all freeze and ready to be constructed on site. After that the principal architect wishes to make a costly model out of wood just to see how beautiful the aesthetics of the building looked like and there he spent not only on the model but on the person hours of the person who took a week to complete the whole model. So here what i feel is instead of doing this kind of process office should rather pay their employees more. And coming back to the question. I feel design process is not stagnant thing and keeps changing as per the situation and projects scales and sizes. Taking a different route in design process is more efficient than downsizing of the employee in a situation where the firm is low on cash. As non architectural people don't know more and are unaware about us in the society. Downsizing employee somehow i feel would make the profession as well as the design process more stubborn.
03. Which would you prefer? Strong service firms or Strong idea firms??
I am still unclear about this dialectical duality. But much more inclined towards strong idea firm because there are incidences during my working in a firm where i have been designing something which i know is not clients forte. And i feel this is the thing which he/she will like after seeing it. And sometimes it had worked and sometimes not. Even working in one my private project i seem to bend some of the functional, social and human pattern ideas that people have been following from ages. So there i would say not every time i satisfy their needs. I more often put my idea of uniqueness in the project which they have not seen. This might be sometimes small as well as big.
06. Your ideas on collaborative practice? How much control do you want over it?
I have seen myself being a control freak when it comes to design. But i also believe that doing a project in collaboration would increase the quality of design better. So there is this experience i would like to share here. So there was this one time in the firm where the principal architect have assigned me to design the whole project because he was going out on a trip for a week or two. So the project was to be started from the scratch. It was a residential building. So before going he involved me in understanding the brief. And the design process involved some aspects of vastu and basic rational ideas that i had to involve in the design. So i started of with the plan which had these ideas and sketched out some iterations, and then made a final layout of the project which i thought needs to be approved by the principal architect. So after he came we discussed on the design that i have made and based on that he made certain correction which were valid modifying the same design. After that the final layout that he made included some little aspects and concepts of my as well as major spaces and areas changed according to him. Here i was not that control freak as he was my boss. But there was this another experience recently where me and my partner have to design a project from scratch together and there due to mismatch or opposite ideas clashing with each other which ended up being an argument.