Is your project reaching its potential?
We can help.
Lens is a design strategy, research, and innovation practice within Shepley Bulfinch.
Lens mission
We design beyond typical boundaries of architecture, utilizing a visionary approach to collaborate with our clients and develop transformative solutions that help organizations, communities, and our planet to flourish.
How we work — an overview
We partner with clients, teams, and communities to address significant, current, purpose-aligned themes that reside at the heart of the design experience — health and well-being, sustainability and resilience, and equity and inclusion. We care deeply about and feel compelled to serve our clients and communities in response to the dynamic changes we are experiencing in architecture and design.
Our approach
Think of us as guides in the process of exploration.
Grounded in our purpose-aligned themes, Lens brings new ideas and opportunities to the surface and helps teams identify, refine, prioritize, and align around their specific goals. From years of experience, rooted in living-systems approaches, we lead design strategy in creative and participatory engagements — custom-designed and tailored for each client and project with the aim for transformative outcomes.
With innovation, inquiry, and intention, we help develop the capacity and capabilities of teams, foster relationships and ideas — and are dedicated to encouraging curious and open minds, learning together, staying research-informed, and honoring the discovery process. As trusted facilitators and thinking partners, we support diverse audiences and stakeholders as they find common ground and aspirations to move forward with a shared purpose and clear action plan.
At Lens, strategy is at the heart of our work.
Grounded in your culture, high-quality customized planning and engagement are the keys to developing a shared vision, identifying strategic priorities, and defining a clear path forward. While every engagement is tailored to our client’s unique needs, our core service offerings are described below.
- Participatory Visioning & PlanningHow do we co-create desired future states with diverse stakeholders?
- Developing OrganizationsHow do we align teams around their organization's highest potential — and build their capacity to evolve together?
- Regenerative Design & DevelopmentHow do we move beyond “doing less bad” to creating places and enabling organizations that do good in the world, leading towards a regenerative future?
- Managing ChangeHow do we make change easier and embrace it as a team-building moment?
- Measuring Design Impact How do we know that design is making a positive difference and learn from past efforts to inform better future outcomes?
Participatory Visioning & Planning
Thriving team, project, and community engagement begins with conversation. At Lens, we start by learning your culture, taking the initiative to understand your decision-making processes and getting the right people in the room. We believe that successful, lasting change is grounded in trusting relationships. Therefore, we structure our engagements and workshops to collaboratively explore challenging topics that align and build communities’ capacities. Curiosity, care, and a spirit of playfulness help us integrate diverse perspectives and lived experiences to understand the issues impacting everyday lives. As we become more involved in the conversation around topics and opportunities, trust between all parties is deepened, creating the conditions to develop an innovative, socially responsive, and contextually specific design strategy. We engage stakeholders to develop a clear and compelling vision of the future, establishing priorities, strategies, and tactics that enable organizations to align their efforts and achieve a common purpose.
Developing Organizations
As large, once-in-a-generation investments, building projects often become a testing ground for organizations’ expressed values and strategic commitments. When these conversations happen at the wrong time or without the right people in the room, they can lead to costly delays or buildings that don’t support their organizations’ full potential. At Lens, we move these conversations upstream of the design process, helping teams to explore what their values and strategic commitments mean on a practical level and building their individual and collective capacities to support change. Leveraging our team’s backgrounds in organizational development and living-systems frameworks, we use a broad toolkit including participatory workshops, educational sessions, and data collection and analysis to support change. We also partner with trained professional coaches and adult educators to deepen learning where warranted. These engagements help organizations become more effective by strengthening alignments between individual mindsets, culture, strategy, and physical environment. Whether you’re building a new team, initiating a strategic planning cycle, or need to address a targeted question that has arisen on a project, our team can help.
Regenerative Design & Development
By working in regenerative paradigms instead of fragmented and siloed approaches, we create more vitality, innovation, and the conditions necessary for meaningful growth. Lens is an experienced resource who leads regenerative design and development for teams and projects seeking transformation. We start with open minds and hearts, curious to understand your culture or essence, and ask: What makes your organization, project, or place unique?
Rooted in essence and focused on potential, we guide project teams through an experiential, effective stakeholder engagement process that includes visioning, alignment, and prioritization, leading to a customized project roadmap. At Lens, we meaningfully engage and empower our clients’ organizations, teams, or projects to reach their highest potential, resulting in transformative, long-lasting outcomes.
Managing Change
At any level, change can be difficult for an organization. It is, however, the key to successfully refining, advancing, and evolving initiatives. At Lens, we help teams navigate change through awareness, education, engagement, and action. We prepare organizations for planned changes, guide them through the transition, and ensure that the stakeholders successfully implement, adopt, and champion these changes. We involve key individuals early on and throughout the process. Doing so allows us to understand what an anticipated change will look on a practical level, empower individuals to communicate their needs and concerns, identify and reconcile constraints, and highlight opportunities to extend the initiative’s impact. Approaching this work from a development perspective, we help individuals understand how their unique roles contribute and grow capacity where needed. The next phase involves engagement to plan and design change initiatives that purposefully support teams, clients, and communities. Through this transformation process, we aim to minimize resistance, and maximize the benefits of the project or initiative.
Measuring Design Impact
Leveraging internal and external collaborations, our teams collect information across our market sectors, project teams, and all project phases to support evidence-based design practices, processes, and documentation. Our research efforts collect qualitative and quantitative information on design, delivery, and systems to better serve our designs, teams, and clients on future projects. Through academic partnerships or internal studies, we strive to better understand design outcomes, industry trends, and the built environment. Pre- and post-occupancy evaluations are one of many leveraged research tools. In these evaluations, we are particularly interested in learning about how buildings — and the process by which they are planned and designed — fuel our collective sense of purpose and generate positive impacts in areas of strategic importance, including health and well-being, sustainability and resilience, and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.
<strong>Participatory Visioning & Planning</strong><span>How do we co-create desired future states with diverse stakeholders?</span>
Participatory Visioning & Planning
Thriving team, project, and community engagement begins with conversation. At Lens, we start by learning your culture, taking the initiative to understand your decision-making processes and get the right people in the room. We believe that successful, lasting change is grounded in trusting relationships, therefore, we structure our engagements and workshops to collaboratively explore challenging topics that build communities’ capacities. Curiosity, care, and a spirit of playfulness help us integrate diverse perspectives and lived experiences to understand the issues impacting everyday lives. As we become more involved in the conversation around topics and opportunities, trust between all parties is deepened, creating the conditions to develop an innovative, socially responsive, and contextually specific design strategy. We engage stakeholders to create a clear and compelling vision of the future, establishing priorities, strategies, and tactics that enable organizations to align their efforts and achieve a common purpose.
<strong>Developing Organizations</strong><span>How do we align teams around their organization's highest potential — and build their capacity to evolve together?</span>
Developing Organizations
As large, once-in-a-generation investments, building projects often become a testing ground for organizations’ expressed values and strategic commitments. When these conversations happen at the wrong time or without the right people in the room, they can lead to costly delays or buildings that don’t support their organizations’ full potential. At Lens, we move these conversations upstream of the design process, helping teams to explore what their values and strategic commitments mean on a practical level and building their individual and collective capacities to support change. Leveraging our team’s backgrounds in organizational development and living-systems frameworks, we use a broad toolkit including participatory workshops, educational sessions, and data collection and analysis to support change. We also partner with trained professional coaches and adult educators to deepen learning where warranted. These engagements help organizations become more effective by strengthening alignments between individual mindsets, culture, strategy, and physical environment. Whether you’re building a new team, initiating a strategic planning cycle, or need to address a targeted question that has arisen on a project, our team can help.
<strong>Regenerative Design & Development</strong><span>How do we move beyond “doing less bad” to creating places and enabling organizations that do good in the world, leading towards a regenerative future? </span>
Regenerative Design & Development
By working in regenerative paradigms, instead of fragmented and siloed approaches, we create more vitality, innovation, and the conditions necessary for meaningful growth. An experienced resource, Lens leads regenerative design and development for teams and projects seeking transformation. We start with open minds and hearts, curious to understand your culture or Essence – asking: What makes your organization, project, or place unique?
Rooted in Essence and focused on potential, we guide project teams through an experiential, effective stakeholder engagement process that includes visioning, alignment, and prioritization, leading to a customized project roadmap. At Lens, we meaningfully engage and empower our clients’ organization, team, or project to reach its highest potential, resulting in transformative, long-lasting outcomes.
<strong>Managing Change</strong><span>How do we make change easier and embrace it as a team-building moment?</span>
Managing Change
At any level, change can be difficult for an organization. It is, however, the key to successfully refining, advancing, and evolving initiatives. At Lens, we help teams navigate change through awareness, education, engagement, and action. We prepare organizations for planned changes, guide them through the transition, and ensure that the stakeholders successfully implement, adopt, and champion these changes. We involve key individuals early on and throughout the process. Doing so allows us to understand what an anticipated change will look on a practical level, empower individuals to communicate their needs and concerns, identify and reconcile constraints, and highlight opportunities to extend the initiative’s impact. Approaching this work from a development perspective, we help individuals understand how their unique roles contribute and grow capacity where needed. The next phase involves engagement to plan and design change initiatives that purposefully support teams, clients, and communities. Through this transformation process, we aim to minimize resistance, and maximize the benefits of the project or initiative.
<strong>Measuring Design Impact </strong><span>How do we know that design is making a positive difference and learn from past efforts to inform better future outcomes?</span>
Measuring Design Impact
Leveraging internal and external collaborations, our teams collect information across our market sectors, project teams, and all project phases to support evidence-based design practices and processes and documentation. Our research efforts collect qualitative and quantitative information on design, delivery, and systems to better serve our designs, teams, and clients on future projects. Through academic partnerships or internal studies, we strive to better understand design outcomes, industry trends, and the built environment. Pre- and post-occupancy evaluations are one of many leveraged research tools. In these evaluations, we are particularly interested in learning about how buildings — and the process by which they are planned and designed — fuel our collective sense of purpose and generate positive impacts in areas of strategic importance, including health and well-being, sustainability and resilience, and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.
Working together
Our clients are diverse, small and large, of all types and backgrounds — and they all share a thread for deep care of their organization’s culture and purpose and for meaningful growth and transformation. We are particularly adept at working with institutions, communities, and other complex, multilateral groups as they envision and build consensus around transformative change. Our national experience ranges from healthcare, academic institutions, cultural centers and museums, historic renovations, workplaces, healthcare, urban development, and academic institutions to work with manufacturers and organizational development for team and leadership engagements and advisement.
Lens finds a way to make our human-driven desire to connect with nature a beautiful part of so many of our projects.
Chris Hellstern, AIA, LFA, LEED AP BD+C, CDT
Living Building Challenge Services Director, Senior Architect & Associate
The Miller Hull Partnership, LLP
Working with Lens is a great experience, they help us see beyond the usual metrics to expand our thinking to what we initially assumed was “beyond what’s possible.”
Richard Piacentini WELL AP
President and CEO
Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens
We took on a big project with lots of unknowns in trying to create a living building out of our 50-year-old home. Lens inspired creativity, sometimes superhuman effort, and, perhaps most important, got us through the inevitable rough times.
Todd Hust
Owner, Loom House
Bainbridge Island, WA
Lens provided an exciting platform to engage with our community during SFCC’s Institutional Master Planning process. The resulting collaboration was so effective and productive that participants have continued to comment on their recollection of the event years later!
Andrea Mueller
Assistant Director Facilities and Campus Planning
Facilities & Operations
Sante Fe Community College
Case studies
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Santa Fe Community College
Fostering 21st century teaching and learning; robust campus development
Participatory Visioning & Planning, Measuring Design Impact
-
Emeritus Institute of Management
Education as key for transformative change
Developing Organizations, Regenerative Design & Development
-
Multiple US-based design firms
Linking healthy culture to employee well-being
Measuring Design Impact, Developing Organizations
-
Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens
A new life: Regeneration meets design
Regenerative Design & Development
-
Confidential university client
Bringing disciplines together at the heart of campus
Participatory Visioning & Planning, Managing Change
-
Donor Network of Arizona
Leveraging change: From new space to reimagined organization
Managing Change, Developing Organizations
Our team
Lens is a multi-disciplinary team of in-house design strategists. We also engage additional resources and outside alliance partners based on specific project needs. We work to help support our clients and communities, specifically responding to their unique needs and aspirations. At Lens, we align our most appropriate resources and organize the optimal team to meet your needs.