How should designers work when best practice is no longer enough?
Architecture depends on expertise. Best practices capture hard-won knowledge about what works, what lasts, and what keeps people safe. However, best practice is necessarily based on the past.
Next Practice asks how designers can use established knowledge as a foundation for exploring what comes next: developing new methods, relationships, technologies, and forms of practice for conditions that precedent alone cannot address.
Why Next Practice?
Architecture is built upon precedent. We learn from buildings that have succeeded and failed. Codes institutionalize lessons about health and safety, specifications preserve material knowledge, and professional standards establish reliable methods for delivering extraordinarily complex projects. This accumulated knowledge is indispensable. However, architecture now operates amid conditions changing faster than many of its conventions.
Artificial intelligence is altering knowledge work. Materials science is expanding what matter can do. Robotics and advanced manufacturing are changing how things are made. Climate change is redefining performance expectations. Resource constraints are challenging conventional material flows. New forms of collaboration increasingly connect architects with scientists, manufacturers, technologists, entrepreneurs, communities, and disciplines that historically sat outside architectural practice.
Under these conditions, doing established things increasingly well will not always be enough. We need mechanisms for discovering practices that do not yet exist.
Best practices preserve what works, while next practices anticipate what will replace them.
Next Practice does not reject expertise or professional standards. It asks what we do at their edges.