A Second Conversation with Method Design
Method Design was one of Arazoo’s earliest adopters. When we asked them last year why they took to it, they told us they desperately needed a more efficient solution to track all the building products they had researched and used on previous projects as well as a way to save new products they discovered. Their decision to adopt Arazoo was largely based on the realization that they had been spending far too much valuable time and wasting their design fees reinventing “product knowledge” on every project.
In our prior case study of Method Design last November, they described how they had collected and tracked their product and material knowledge before Arazoo. Like many firms, that system consisted of manufacturer catalogs, cut-sheets in three ring binders, and a file server organized by project folders. The problem was those catalogs quickly grew outdated and took up valuable office space, as did the three ring binders. And no one in the firm could easily find product information on the file server unless they were already familiar with the prior project where the product had been specified. Instead, it was far easier to search online to find products, bookmark them or save them as a PDF on the file server. In either case, no one else in the firm knew where the information existed. This process, while expedient in the moment, ensured that the tedious task of searching for, collecting and organizing product information had to be repeated from scratch on each new project, which resulted in an enormous collective waste of time. And more importantly, this system could not capture lessons learned and institutional knowledge that was accruing to Method Design as they used these products and materials in their projects.
“Arazoo has proven to be the platform we needed to enable us to more efficiently research, collect, and protect the valuable knowledge we create with every project.”
We recently checked back in with Method Design to see how their team has benefitted from using Arazoo since our last conversation. Co-founder Demetrios Comodromos stated, “Arazoo has proven to be the platform we needed to enable us to more efficiently research, collect, and protect the valuable knowledge we create with every project.”
Even though Method Design works on a lot of unique “one-off” projects, Co-founder Reese Campbell emphasized the importance of how quickly and easily Arazoo enables them to see what products and materials they’ve used on past projects. “We’re a small, design-intensive firm, so everyone is expected to work nimbly and efficiently on multiple projects and tasks at once.
Before Arazoo, we often found ourselves frustrated by how much time we spent reresearching product information instead of designing and creating,” stated Campbell. Demetrios added, “We also teach, and Arazoo has become the place where we collect our academic research on new materials and custom products and assemblies. We make sure our team uses Arazoo to access that information from one centralized location.” By adding new products to their Firm Library whenever they come across something interesting or useful online, Method Design has increased its collective product knowledge within their firm, enabling them to become more organized, more efficient, and able to spend even more time focused on design.
Of course, we’re thrilled that Arazoo has helped Method Design build a valuable firm asset and resource. By making product and material research easy, any firm can do the same with Arazoo!
