Designing Beyond Buildings: An Architect’s Strategic Shift
Stepping Outside the Wheelhouse
Trained architect Zubair Bhaidani takes design to another dimension—from built environment to lived environment—with an M.S. in Strategic Design Leadership.
Zubair Bhaidani (M.S. Strategic Design Leadership ’25)Zubair Bhaidani (M.S. Strategic Design Leadership ‘25) had been working as a licensed architect for nearly a decade when he reached a turning point. While managing complex, multimillion-dollar projects, he began to recognize the limits of solving only for physical space. What he craved was upstream strategy—design that reshaped the systems operating within buildings, not just the buildings themselves.
“As I was working through these projects, I realized I wasn’t just navigating design challenges—I was managing ecosystems. There were cross-functional teams, competing stakeholder needs, code constraints, and budgetary pressures. I loved the complexity. But I didn’t want to keep solving only for buildings. I wanted to solve for the systems people live and work in every day.”
He found himself asking overarching questions, such as “What is architecture facilitating?” and “What are we serving?”
“To get in front of the ‘why’ and ‘what’ we build,” he says, “I needed to move upstream—toward people, not just spaces.”
After getting his undergraduate degree from Illinois Tech’s College of Architecture in 2016, he led award-winning hospitality and residential projects with firms such as Brininstool + Lynch (now ParkFowler Plus) and GREC in Chicago and R2L in Washington, D.C. His portfolio includes notable developments such as BARDAVID in Chicago’s Hyde Park and The Waller in Austin, Texas.
Still, he felt constrained.
“Architecture as a discipline has been slow to embrace user research or strategic metrics,” he explains. “Too often, we’re not speaking the language of business or designing for the end user. Without being able to quantify the value we bring, it’s hard to earn the trust of future clients.”
At the Institute of Design, Bhaidani found both validation and acceleration.
During a business innovation course, he built the roadmap and minimum viable product (a proof of concept, of sorts) of a digital platform for Hosperience, an industry partner that was exploring ways to share the orthopedic care process with patients’ family members and caregivers.
And during an Organizational Models for Innovation course, Bhaidani worked with a financial holding conglomerate in Latin America on a more innovative operating model that integrates artificial intelligence, open governance, and cross-subsidiary alignment by combining user research, speculative design, and data analytics.
“It was definitely out of my wheelhouse and comfort area—in the best way.”
Finally, in an Innovation Frontiers course, Bhaidani co-developed Resonant, a social media intervention app that would inform families of the emotional patterns in their children’s web browsing and suggest empathy-building and emotional literacy tools and insights to help guide browsing habits.
Now approaching graduation, Bhaidani has a clear vision for what’s next.
“I’m no longer only looking at architecture. I’m looking at designing systems—platforms, services, and operations—where design drives measurable change. Where people can experience more clarity, dignity, and agency.”