When the Lights Go Up: Designing from the Point of Execution

That exchange was prompted by the Jamaica Gleaner editorial, “What the mining mess tells Jamaica,” published September 27, 2026. Its argument is larger than mining: there is a difference between having laws, regulations, agencies and penalties on paper and possessing the institutional capability to make them produce the intended result. The editorial cites millions in assessed penalties, unresolved rehabilitation obligations, incomplete enforcement records and quarry inspections below target. Its larger question is whether the State can consistently do what it says it will do.

That question felt immediately familiar because it has followed me throughout my professional life: What are we trying to achieve, who actually has to do it, and have we designed the conditions that make doing it possible?

Read the Gleaner article

I was trained as an architect. I got into film totally by accident. At the time I was trying my hand at fashion, and making some progress. A friend asked me to style a music video. I styled the clothes, but I also found myself shaping the world around them... the set, the composition, the visual language. I was doing art direction, not knowing that what I was doing had a name. That video led to more styling jobs. Then somebody on one of the sets remembered that I had studied architecture. Around the same period I was also hustling, designing set fo a TV show, and before long I was designing sets for music videos. That cascaded into art direction for commercials and, eventually, production design for feature film.

The transition happened quickly because I had never stopped thinking like an architect. Whatever the medium, my first question was always: What are we trying to achieve?

First, it was always the blue-sky version. If there were no constraints, and money was no object, what would the idea really look and feel like? Only after that did we confront the practical conditions: How much money? How much time? What materials? What labour? What can we actually make?

If the desired image required an ocean view but the production could not afford to move an entire crew to the coast, the conclusion was not automatically, “Then we cannot have the ocean.” The problem became: What does the camera need to see for the audience to believe there is an ocean? Maybe the answer is a wall, some cheap paint, careful lighting and the right frame.

The intention remains intact. The method changes.

That is the principle: protect the objective, interrogate the constraints, redesign the route.

Film and events then taught me something architecture does not always teach with the same brutality: the deadline is real.

When the gates open, the event begins.

When the director calls action, the set has to exist.

At that point it does not matter why the carpenter was late or the supplier failed. The audience is arriving. The camera is rolling. The lights are going up whether you are ready or not.

Once the end point is genuinely immovable, planning changes. You have to know what absolutely must exist at that moment and what is just nice-to-have. You have to know which substitutions preserve the intention and which just mash it up. You need to know who owns every critical action, where failure is likely and what happens when something goes wrong.

Film production is an extraordinary study in this kind of planning. Huge numbers of interdependent actions happen in compressed periods, with each department depending on the others. Trust is supported by coordination, checks, reporting and redundancy. An associate of mine, a contractor who worked with me as head of construction on a film project, described the experience as eye-opening. What impressed him was not simply the speed. It was the machinery that made the speed possible: a confidence that each cog in the wheel would do what it was supposed to do, reinforced by what I jokingly think of as "watchers watching the watchers."

That always stays with me when I return to architectural work. Architecture has programmes, budgets and construction schedules, but construction time is way more elastic. Extensions, variations and revised programmes are often unavoidable; buildings are complex and sites are full of uncertainty.

But elasticity can also hide indecision. If something can always be moved to next week, discussed in another meeting or solved in the next phase, there is less pressure to define the intention clearly enough at the beginning.

I also discovered that, on architectural projects, I tend to side with the builders.

That does not mean the architect or engineer is unimportant. It means I instinctively look at the project from the point of execution. At the end of the day, the architect is not going to lift a hammer. The engineer is not going to push a barrow. The client is probably not going to take up a paintbrush. Whatever we draw, specify, calculate or imagine eventually arrives in the hands of somebody who has to physically make it happen.

Yet, the builder is often the least consulted person in the conceptual process.

We talk about programme, budget and specification, but much less about physical effort. How many people are available? How heavy is the thing? Can somebody reasonably perform that operation for eight or twelve hours? What happens when the person is tired, the proper tool is unavailable, or an elegant detail on paper is awkward or dangerous to execute?

These are not just construction problems. They are design problems.

If a solution depends on somebody repeatedly doing something physically or operationally unreasonable, then the solution is already flawed. The same principle expands almost perfectly into systems and public policy. A policy can be beautifully conceived in an air-conditioned room, legally sound and rational. But somewhere downstream an actual person has to make it real.

An inspector has to inspect. A bailiff has to serve the notice. Somebody has to drive across the country, visit a site and produce a twenty-page report. Somebody has to follow up when the person being regulated does not respond.

Did anybody ask whether that person has a vehicle? Fuel? Staff? A functioning computer? Authority? Training? Time? A reasonable caseload? When implementation fails, we often attribute the failure to the person at the bottom instead of asking whether the system handed that person an executable task.

That is why I tend to design from the point of execution backwards. Who actually has to do this? What exactly are they being asked to do? Do they have the tools? Do they have the capability? What happens when they are tired, undertrained, under-resourced, rushed or simply not especially imaginative? In less polite moments, I call this “designing for stupidity.”

But seriously... the underlying principle is serious.

A good system should not require exceptional people behaving exceptionally every day in order to function. If success depends on everyone understanding the entire strategy, remembering every instruction, exercising perfect judgement, working beyond their physical capacity and improvising around missing resources, you have not designed a system. You have designed a hope. I beleive that the intelligence has to reside partly in the structure itself.

The correct action should be easier than the incorrect one. The workflow should carry people forward. The drawing should communicate what needs to be built. The system should tolerate ordinary mistakes and not depend on every participant understanding the big picture. Film projects exemplify this kind of thinking.

The carpenter does not need to hold the director’s entire creative vision in his head. The lighting technician does not need to understand the costume strategy. Transport does not need to grasp the emotional arc of the script. Each person needs enough information, resources and authority to execute his or her part reliably. And the sophistication lies in the system that turns those individual actions into a coherent whole.

This, more than anything, is what moving between architecture, fashion, film, events and production taught me.

Architecture taught me to define intention.

Film taught me to deliver against an immovable deadline.

Construction taught me to respect the physical reality of the person who has to execute the idea.

And all of them taught me that the space between intention and outcome is not administrative debris around the design. It is part of the design.

That may be the simplest explanation of my practice today. I am interested not only in designing what should exist, but in designing the conditions that allow it to exist. What are we actually trying to make happen? Who has to make it happen? What would prevent them from doing it?

And what must we design — physically, financially, logistically, institutionally or procedurally — so that when the gates open and the lights go up, something real is actually there?

That's all I'm saying.