Bio
Kåre Stokholm Poulsgaard is Partner and Head of Innovation at GXN and works with applied design research across 3XN and GXN. Kåre holds a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford where his thesis dealt with the impact of digital technologies on human cognition and creativity. At 3XN GXN, Kåre focuses on research and innovation in the built environment, exploring how a research-led approach can enrich architecture, the environment, and business, and what this means for design strategy.
What drives you?
During my first couple of years at GXN, we were building up a lot of expertise in circular economy and behavioural design. This has become our way of looking at how to reduce the environmental footprint of buildings, while also thinking about how to improve the experience and well-being of the people that use them. For many years, there wasn't much of a market for that sort of stuff. We would land externally funded research projects on the subject, but there wasn't really a commercial market, which is why the shift happening right now — where we are seeing a genuine commercial interest in these fields — is incredibly exciting.
The environmental challenge facing the built environment is absolutely massive, but the fact that you can see change happen so fast in the industry right now is exciting.
On a more prosaic level, I find it exciting to be part of building and developing an organisation that can help the industry deal with this challenge; figuring out how to link the needs for a greener and more equitable built environment, with new requirements in the market. We are beginning to see how the research based approach of GXN can be implemented into commercial projects, which increases our opportunity for creating environmental gains massively, and so, considering this alongside our business and organisational development, figuring out how we interact with this emerging field is extremely interesting.
With this new shift in the market and new needs approaching, what are some of the main challenges you see that are holding the industry back from moving forward?
I do think that the industry as a whole needs a proper push. When looking at the different locations where we work, we see very different maturity and bite to the policies at play. We’ve seen policy change the development environment quite drastically in places like London and Amsterdam, so overall I think policy and regulation can and should do more.
‘Sustainable construction’ is sort of a contradiction in terms. It is certainly not something we can get right once and for all but rather something we have to keep evolving the meaning of as our understanding matures, and therefore it is not an off-the-shelf solution, at least not for us. We have to understand the needs and opportunities to push the envelope in each project and use this understanding early on to set ambitious targets with our clients and collaborators.
Not enough people with decision-making power have a good overview of what it means to set an ambitious carbon target and how to get there. Or what it means to take a transformation-first approach to existing buildings to avoid demolition. How to enhance the agency and well-being of wide groups of people through design. Basically, we are in a situation where we have to help decision-makers explore the key issues and build the confidence that they’ll know what to do and that taking action now will lead to a better outcome in the long run.
This knowledge vacuum, coupled with the fact that every building is by nature a prototype, means that it's tricky to scale all the good solutions and experiences that are already out there. But we are seeing more and better examples of will and ingenuity coming together to realise ambitious gains, as there are many different ways of improving the performance of projects.
There is definitely a challenge connected to the knowledge gap around sustainable solutions which has knock-on effects on perceptions of risk. Developers are naturally concerned with managing risks. Which means we can’t expect them to engage seriously in open-ended processes with so many unknown variables. But we need more open-ended exploration to inform decision-making, so thinking about what that looks like while managing risks is key to changing the way we operate.
Case studies that document things like climate impacts, costs, time and challenges are much needed, but at the moment a lot of experience remains siloed within project teams or individual organisations and I think we should all be concerned with sharing knowledge more openly to build a shared understanding of challenges and opportunities.
As risks and the unknown are often the biggest hinder…How do you deal with people that are not ready to experiment or adapt?
This is a key question. You might be asking people to take a risk that could end up costing a lot of money or someone’s career. At least that’s the understanding you are up against. So, from our side, a large part of dealing with this issue consists in talking to people — and getting people to talk to each other. It might sound trite, but a lot of what we do in GXN is premised on creating the space and frameworks that allow us to build trust and align project partners around new ideas. Sure, this requires a lot of technical expertise and project-based knowledge, but implementing open-ended research in a collaborative environment is basically what we do. And it’s also how we get to apply our expertise and knowledge; we help people do stuff that hasn't been done. And I think a large part of enabling people to do something new and take risks is through getting them as excited as we are, or sharing their excitement, and then thinking about how we can align around these new ideas and challenges.
Innovation is in the DNA of GXN, which as you stated earlier is not an off-the-shelf solution. How do we move towards more innovative materials and make it more scalable?
Good question. Firstly, one should probably recognize that there already are a lot of material alternatives out there that are tested and work, and at least for some of them, can be produced at an industrial scale. There is, of course, also a lot of new stuff happening too with very diverse maturity levels and challenges.
As an example, we recently worked on a collaboration with Biomason and the Danish artist Silas lnoue for the Reset Materials Exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary.
Biomason makes biocement. Their product utilises the metabolism of certain microorganisms to form calcium carbonate in spaces between an aggregate. This is currently commercially available as an array of tiles. For the research collaboration, we wanted to make a large column to try and gesture towards what it might mean to develop a structural system based on biocement. But this was of course an early conceptual step and there are many, many things that would have to be solved before being able to introduce a structural product to the market. So right now we're trying to get funding to take this collaboration further.
People want to buy a product with warranties, data, and all that, so when you're working with, let’s say, upcycling, you run into a lot of issues as well. You are basically working with a material that is extracted during demolition, that’s been developed specifically for an entirely different project, and where the exact properties are unknown. When working on large scale commercial projects, contractors are a key decision maker. They take on a large proportion of risk when signing the contract to get a building done — on time and on budget, thank you very much. And in this new setup, with bespoke circular materials, they need to figure out the supply chain.
If you roll up with this new untested product, or some demolition material that you will turn into a product, you are going to have a challenge. One way we deal with risk here is working on two solutions in parallel; on the one hand we develop a baseline solution that is tested and everybody knows and everybody's happy with. And in parallel we work with an upcycled product. The moment the team feels good enough about the upcycled solution, we can let it knock away the baseline and implement it in the project.
With bio-based materials there are questions being asked about fire and insurance. It makes it trickier to be the first to do something if your insurance company is not clear about how to handle it. A lot of players in the industry would probably like to be third or fourth or fifth because that would mean somebody else is surfacing most of the unknown challenges. This, again, is why knowledge-sharing is so important. Showing projects with new functional solutions while also being honest about impacts, processes, and challenges helps everyone. I worry that we often seem to think of sustainability as a conceptual challenge — what’s the next big thing, what’s the new exciting word — while forgetting that the real challenge is to make it practical, built, impactful.
In my experience, people don't kill ideas off because they don't like biogenic materials or low-carbon solutions. They kill off ideas because they seem too risky, tricky or straight up unknown to handle. And we have to figure out how to make those decisions easier by getting better information together at the right point during the development process and managing the collaborative process of getting it together.
Architects do a lot of this stuff already, they are great at running collaborative processes and getting results, but new concerns, such as carbon, transformation, and circularity have to form part of the process. A lot more of this has to happen earlier during the development stage because that is when the key decisions are made. If you want to champion transformation, it will be a lot easier if it has already been considered during the business-case stage, which does not traditionally include architects.
Where should the industry stand by 2030?
I would hope that low carbon design becomes a standard — designing lighter weight buildings, specifying better and regenerative materials, reusing more stuff, transforming more buildings, demolishing fewer.
A key challenge for the coming years is that we’ve got a lot of unloved buildings from the 70s and 80s, 90s, 2000s at risk of demolition. Right now we are in a demolition-first mindset, so I would like to see a shift towards transformation-first.
On the social side, I would love to see us design buildings that are really thinking about all the people who could be using them. Understanding how a building acts in a wider urban context becomes very important. Whatever you build changes a street, a neighbourhood or even a city. Some architects sometimes seem to forget that their project has a whole pre-existing and living context around it, which can be made better or worse depending on the decisions they make.
I also think we will see an expansion from what you might call ‘carbon tunnel vision’ at the moment. Not that carbon isn’t important, it's incredibly important — but it's just one of the many parameters we need to think about when trying to improve the performance of buildings and cities. We have plenty of other things to worry about, so I would hope that over the next few years we get a more holistic view of what sustainability really means, and we don't lose ourselves in optimising for one thing while laying up new problems for the future.
As an anthropologist working at the intersection of innovation and construction, what is your advice for those who strive to make changes?
For people early in their careers I would say, you should really not be afraid of asking people that are doing interesting work to talk to you and share their experience. It seems like such a simple thing to say. The worst they can say is ‘no’, but most people enjoy talking about the stuff they're into, so you shouldn't be afraid to ask. Then of course there is a difference between ideas and their application, so finding work that allows you to get firsthand experience in how to implement things would be important too.
In general, for everyone who wants to make change, it is crucial to think about whose problem you are solving. There's a lot of idealists who are solving the Earth's problem, so to say. And that's good, but we've got to figure out who can actually make change happen in the field we are working in, and what we need to do to make the problem we want to solve and the problem they’re worried about overlap enough to have some impact. Architecture and construction is a team effort. In the end, you have to get a lot of other people on board with your ideas and it’s your responsibility to figure out how to do that.
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