Form Follows Tech began because I saw something most architects didn’t want to see: while the rest of the world evolved, architecture stayed still. We entered a native-digital age — an age in which software quietly governs how people move, work, travel, learn, and heal — yet our profession kept behaving as if aesthetics and drawings were still the center of value.
I write here not just to make that shift visible, but to push people to think differently about it — to question the assumptions beneath our work and the identity we’ve inherited as architects.
But with AI accelerating at an exponential pace, thinking alone isn’t enough to safeguard the profession. Architecture faces a real risk of extinction, and survival now requires turning new thinking into new action.
That’s why I finally wrote the book I’ve been wanting to write for years: one that crystallizes a new way of seeing and thinking — and also serves as a guide for how to act on it.
Design Is Dead argues that architects must evolve beyond design-only thinking and into Innovation Architects — master integrators of technology, design, and human experience. Because today, form doesn’t follow function. That wasn’t the full picture, anyway. Form follows technology — and in the age of AI, our survival depends on changing how we think.
My goal with this book isn’t to preach doom; it’s to widen awareness. If architects want a future, we must reclaim the role we’ve abandoned: society’s master innovators.
You can download the e-book free (starting today, November 15, 2025) for the next 5 days on Amazon here (I wish I could make it permanently free). Soon, I’ll make it freely available elsewhere too.
I hope it brings value — or at least a spark of clarity — to anyone navigating this moment of upheaval.
If you want a preview, here it is:
Opening quote:
“Therefore it was the discovery of fire that originally gave rise to the coming together of men, to the deliberative assembly, and to social intercourse. And so, as they kept coming together in greater numbers into one place, finding themselves naturally gifted beyond the other animals in not being obliged to walk with faces to the ground, but upright, and gazing upon the splendor of the starry firmament, and also in being able to do with ease whatever they chose with their hands and fingers, they began in that first assembly to construct shelters. Some made them of green boughs, others dug caves on mountain sides, and some, in imitation of the nests of swallows and the way they built, made places of refuge out of mud and twigs. Next, by observing the shelters of others and adding new details to their own inceptions, they constructed better and better kinds of huts as time went on.”
— Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture
Definitions
Words can have different meanings to different people. In this book, these words have the following meanings:
Aesthetics noun : having to do with the way something looks or feels in the service of beauty, or some notion thereof.
Architect noun : a professional who designs buildings, not software. If you’re an architect of something else, it doesn’t mean you’re not an architect, it just means this book is not tailored for you.
Cultural Technology noun : technology of our time, or technology being used in society generally (both business and consumer), and not specific to design or construction technologies.
Design noun : the act of turning ideas and concepts into design solutions, regardless of whether those solutions are good or bad. Design does not necessarily include innovation.
Idea noun : a concept without value until it becomes an insight or real, and even then value is not guaranteed.
Insight noun : an idea with intrinsic value, like an idea that addresses a problem or a mental model that helps with reflective thinking. Insights beget innovation.
Innovation noun : a new or unique solution that achieves an important outcome or set of outcomes. The process of innovation includes design.
Native Digital adj : a condition where the default and/or preferred mode of human experience is the digital realm, as opposed to the physical realm. Credit to Christopher Lochhead for this term.
Outcome noun : an insight or real solution that has both magnitude (in customer satisfaction and importance) and direction (where and how that satisfaction and importance is applied). Think of outcomes as vectors.
Tech-First Thinking noun : a mindset for architects to leverage cultural technology from the start of the design process to achieve innovation.
Typology noun : a building or structure with a specific function.
Vector verb : the process of identifying and realizing the most important outcomes. When used as a noun, a vector is an outcome.
AI Usage Disclosure
It’s November 2025. I could not have written this book without AI, specifically ChatGPT.
I tried — hard. I’ve been trying since I started on this book in 2020. More than 200 pages of material later — including outlines, manuscripts, and other drafts, but not my hundreds of digital sticky notes — I still couldn’t piece together a singly coherent work. It was painful.
AI helped me clarify my thinking. I prompted AI to stress-test and articulate the insights around “Tech-First,” “Innovation Architect,” and “Design is Dead,” but those insights, categories, principles, and practices are all mine. This book is based on over five years of intentional writing, twenty-five years of unique work experience, and thirty years of thinking like an architect.
AI also helped me overcome my own biases. When it used words and sentences I thought were too simple, I realized they got to the point. When my first draft out of ChatGPT came in at 36 pages, I thought “That’s too short for a book.” Then I reflected, “No one reads anymore — shorter is better.” I learned to focus on delivering my message in the most impactful and concise way possible.
AI is now a partner in my writing and creative thinking. My hope is that you, the reader, accept this of my work, but also reflect on partnering with AI in yours too, if you haven’t already. It can open doors that were previously closed, and create new ones.
As a society, I hope we eventually get over the belief that using AI as a partner in the creative process is heretical or somehow bad. It’s here for good and I’ve assimilated — just like we’ve all assimilated to smartphones and social media. And assimilation is part of our journey, especially if we accept the role of being architects who thrive in the future.
— Jon
P.S. I wrote this without AI.
Preface
“We are three recessions away from becoming extinct as a profession.”
— Evelyn Lee, FAIA (April 2020)
Change Your Thinking
This book is about survival in the face of mass extinction. More precisely, it’s about how architects can remain relevant — even indispensable — in a world that no longer rewards what we have traditionally valued most: form, aesthetics, and even drawing itself.
When I say Design is Dead, I don’t mean that creativity or design as a discipline has no value. I mean that design-only thinking — the belief that our worth lies solely in producing form or aesthetics — is obsolete. The world no longer rewards design as a standalone act. It rewards innovation, integration, and outcomes.
So while the title may sound fatalistic, this is not a eulogy for design — it is a call for evolution.
For most of history, architects were society’s master innovators. Vitruvius codified fire and concrete. Sullivan declared “form follows function” in response to steel and elevators. Corbusier saw industrialization and reimagined the modern city. Each era of architecture advanced by assimilating the most powerful technologies of its time — its cultural technologies.
But somewhere along the way, the world shifted, or we retreated. We ceded the role of technologist and innovator. We became stylists, decorators, deliverers of paperwork. Today, clients often cannot tell us apart, so we compete on fees. We measure our value by the hours we bill, not by the innovation we deliver. And now, with AI codifying design knowledge and platforms like Midjourney generating aesthetics on demand, even the things that once gave us status are collapsing.
Design — at least as the center of architectural value — is dead.
What must replace it is a new mindset: design as a vehicle for innovation.
What clients need today is not more design for design’s sake. They need innovation — outcomes that create competitive advantage, resilience, and abundance. Buildings are no longer just places; they are platforms for innovation. And yet, architects are often no longer even in the room where those conversations happen.
This book argues for a paradigm shift: from Design Architect to Innovation Architect.
The Innovation Architect is not a new specialization. It is a new category — a mindset, a way of seeing the world that begins with cultural technology and ends with human experience. Where the Design Architect delivers drawings and renderings, the Innovation Architect delivers innovation made physical.
This approach is made possible with tech-first thinking: asking, relentlessly, “What can technology do for us today?” It is a way of designing from the digital outward, integrating physical and digital systems into human culture. It is a way of assimilating to our native-digital world. It is also, I believe, the only way architects can reclaim their historic role as leaders of innovation rather than servants of aesthetics.
This is not an academic treatise. It is not a how-to manual for software tools. It is a playbook for survival and a call to action. Some will find it uncomfortable, even heretical, because it challenges the identity many of us cling to. But I write it because I love this profession — and because I fear for its future if we fail to evolve.
I have spent over two decades designing airports — some of the most technologically complex buildings in the world. Along the way, I had an epiphany: the glass, steel, and concrete don’t matter if the building software doesn’t work. The physical world is meaningless without the digital world. That realization has shaped my career — and this book.
The stakes are high. If architects do not evolve, we will be reduced to irrelevance. If we do, we can once again become the indispensable innovators of society.
The future belongs to those who change their thinking.
To download the e-book on Kindle, go here. Paperback is also available.