Juno Design: Systems Light the Way

As long as I’ve been an architect, I’ve had a penchant for gnarly, complicated problems lacking straightforward answers. Throughout my career, I’ve gravitated toward the most intricate design problems I can find. And throughout these endeavors, the opportunity to design and create systems that bring clarity to seemingly irreconcilable constraints has fostered a deep sense of joy and fulfillment — allowing me to cultivate a deep expertise in design computation in the process.

Bringing Innovation to AEC

I’m blessed to have been part of extraordinary projects and organizations. During my dozen years as an architect, I’ve led computation, strategy, and design efforts for ambitious, award-winning projects, including the Shanghai Astronomy Museum, the transformative Empire Stores in Brooklyn, NY, and, most recently, two years leading the cross-functional Architecture discipline at WeWork. Late last year, I joined Juno, a new real estate platform on a mission to transform cities through a human-centered, technology-powered model for ground-up development, as Technical Computing Director.

I’ve always had a deep, insatiable desire to operate at the frontier of the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. I believe that the architecture discipline and AEC industry writ-large can and must push themselves to create new, innovative pathways of bringing value to the built environment. Further, I fervently believe that deep cross-functional collaboration, far beyond what is typical of the industry today, will play a central role in many of the expanded pathways ahead.

But so what? What significant challenges, rooted in the collective human experience, are guiding the dogged, difficult work of disrupting the status quo? It’s the confluence of all these issues and queries that solidify my belief that Juno is precisely the type of organization where I belong.

At Juno, we’re on an audacious journey to reimagine both the development of multi-family housing and people’s relationship to the places and communities they call home in cities across America. We’re examining the full life-cycle of housing and leveraging cross-functional expertise to design an exceptional building product and forge the design and delivery systems that facilitate a reimagined resident experience.

The Challenge of Scale

To be clear, this is profoundly challenging. Innovative tactics and strategic positions are often obscured and, at times, counterintuitive. If there is one critical driver of the complexity in making buildings, it’s variance. The response to variance in the design and construction process results in the vast spectrum of built responses to strikingly quotidian factors. There’s no doubt that there are countless extraordinary buildings within this spectrum. However, across the development value-chain, variance translates to ambiguity, which translates to risk, which always translates — in some form — to capital.

If our goal were to make one great building, perhaps we’d focus on leveraging computing systems to manage the complexity in that specific project — think parametric design, mass customization, or old-fashioned simplicity. In other words, accept the inherent variance in the project’s parameters and work to mitigate any additional risk. A curious facet of this proposition is that it sets a considerably high floor for risk and variance.

However, at Juno, our goals extend far beyond any singular building. To reimagine people’s relationship with the places they call home, not just once but consistently in cities across the nation, we must focus on the role of variance across the full development life-cycle. Further, we must design the necessary systems to minimize it. In essence, we are lowering the proverbial floor that is the baseline for any Juno building.

Reimagining real estate development

At Juno, we can fundamentally rethink the instruments, processes, and relationships of development because of the unique lens that emerges at the intersection of a productized building design approach and technological systems.

• In what ways might we gain design, cost, and schedule clarity exceedingly early in the development process?
• How might we codify product and deployment knowledge to minimize the ramp-up necessary for a growing number of partners?
• How to target design and delivery information to undercut the ambiguity and associated risk inherent in traditional development?
• In what ways might we streamline on-site and prefabricated design and production flows to enable a frictionless deployment process?

It’s these types of big challenges that drew me to the journey that Juno is on. Each question is pointing to the pursuit of systemic approaches to reducing variance and delivering on our mission. Here on our blog, I look forward to sharing more as we continue advancing our solutions. In the meantime, I’ll unpack one of these questions and the scope of inquiry it necessitates.

Reducing variance through integrated information delivery

At Juno, we must rethink the foundation of how we communicate building information — drawings and models — while striving to reduce stakeholder ambiguity through targeted design and delivery information. We must retool the anatomy of a building’s drawings for a more synthesized delivery framework.

Typically, architects avoid the third-rail of means-and-methods (precisely how a contractor executes the design intent), and for good reason. At Juno, however, we’re weaving together several distinct workstreams, permutations of where things are made, who makes them, and who installs them. In this context, drawings and models must reflect this unorthodox yet tightly integrated approach. At the intersection of the permutations above, we believe it’s our responsibility to make each user’s jobs substantially easier. We accomplish this, in part, through how we communicate design and delivery information. Building Information Model (BIM) data, with inputs tied to the full development value-chain requirements, combined with custom tooling and cross-functional integrations, enable systemic strategies for increased clarity.

The promise of systems

Juno’s foundation is an exceptional product imbued with a vision toward the future. The network of systems that guide our product is the bridge that brings us closer, with each incremental step, to the thriving, vibrant residential communities we believe are possible across America. They propel us to pursue ambitious advancements in what we build, how it’s made, and the experience of those who call it home.

In other words, this is the exact type of problem that gets me fired up! And I am enormously fortunate to be part of an extraordinary team that is equally ignited by the challenges and opportunities we are seizing. If this sounds like you too, join us!

Michael Caton, AIA, is the Technical Computing Director at Juno.