Some books describe you before you have the words to describe yourself. Randy Deutsch's Superusers: Design Technology Specialists and the Future of Practice (Routledge, 2019) did that for me. It maps a class of people inside architecture—the ones who automate, script, and build the tools everyone else uses—and it argues they are undervalued, hard to keep, and quietly becoming the profession's next generation. I read it not as a critic but as a case study: I am one of the people this book is about, and I have already made the move it only predicts.
The moment a field engineer became a Superuser
My origin story is small and unglamorous. I was a site engineer on a project of repetitive buildings. Modelling in Revit wasn't even my job—I did it to understand the project better, to sharpen communication, to feel the thing I was helping build. But repetitive buildings breed repetitive work: creating and naming levels one by one, regenerating grids, rebuilding and renaming families. So, in whatever time I could steal from my actual duties, I wrote Dynamo scripts to kill the repetition. Then I posted one on LinkedIn. The response was larger than anything my "real" work had drawn, and that pull—more than any job description—turned me toward this field.
Deutsch would recognise that instantly. His Superuser doesn't wait to be assigned the clever work; they do it unbidden, "for fun" and to save people time, often without self-identifying as anything special. Nobody made me a Superuser. Like most of the people in his book, I made myself one, and for a long time nobody asked me to.
What the book gets right
Deutsch is sharp on the uncomfortable economics. The Superuser's value is real but invisible: it rarely shows up on a billable timesheet, so it gets taken for granted. You can't hire these people through ordinary job ads—firms often have to poach them—and, crucially, you can't retain them with the usual levers. Money and status don't hold a Superuser, because what they actually want is a supply of new problems, autonomy, and room to learn. Deny that and they leave, usually for a startup that appreciates the skill set.
I am the proof of that thesis, uncomfortably exact. When I moved from AEC into an AI company, it wasn't because a firm failed to pay me enough. It was the pull Deutsch names precisely: new problems, autonomy, learning. Ian Keough, in his foreword, goes further than the book—he suspects this exodus toward startups is the profession's natural renewal, describing Superusers as the "harbingers of a new era of building." I read that line as a description of my own doorway out.
Beneath the traits, one principle
Where I want to push past the book is on why these people matter. Deutsch characterises the Superuser through a long list of attributes—a set of "C-factors," from curiosity and computational thinking to communication. It's a useful portrait, but a list is not an argument, and a person is not a bag of traits.
Look closely and two of those C's carry the weight of all the others: connectors and capacitors. The Superuser is the person who links people, tools, and data, and who stores knowledge and discharges it into the team at the right moment. Strip away the vocabulary and the Superuser isn't a collection of skills at all. They are a function: connective tissue.
That reframing clicked for me through an idea from outside architecture entirely—the shift the neuroscientist Türker Kılıç calls connectionism. His claim, put simply: meaning isn't carried by the parts—by the individual neuron—but by the pattern of connections between them. The whole emerges from the parts and then organises them. It's a lens, not settled science, and I hold it loosely. But as a lens it is clarifying, because it dissolves a tension I had carried for years.
Belonging versus scale—and the way out
As a site engineer, you follow one project. You watch it change shape every day, growing like a child; you see a space move through time; and when people finally live in it, you feel a bond that makes the work deeply satisfying. Every construction project is singular—even an identical design is unique, because its location is. That singularity is its aura.
Computer science is the opposite instinct. It classifies, groups, abstracts—because grouping is what lets things scale. Our age rewards scale: write something once and it runs in a hundred places, even while you sleep. That pull is real, but it seems to come at a cost—trade the rooted, singular building for the placeless abstraction, trade belonging for reach.
Connectivity is the escape from that false choice. The value was never only in the singular part (one building) nor only in the stripped-down universal (the generic class). It lives in the relations. You don't abandon the aura of the particular to gain scale; you build the tissue that connects auras. And that is exactly what a design technologist does: BIM coordination federates models; Speckle moves data between tools that don't speak; IFC, IDS, and BCF connect disciplines through a shared language; product work connects AI to a domain. I don't design—I build the tools designers use. I am not the part or the universal. I am the bridge.
There's a smaller confession here that fits the pattern. Deutsch advises keeping "a minor alongside your major"—one main craft plus a hobby that keeps you fresh. I don't. I keep two majors: BIM/GIS/automation, and structural-environmental parametric design. It looked like an inability to specialise until connectivity reframed it. I don't hold a major and a minor; I hold two domains and bridge them. The bridge I build between my own two halves is the same bridge I build for everyone else.
Where the book dates, and where it doesn't
Superusers was written in 2019, before large language models rewired what "automation" even means. Its Superuser scripts in Dynamo; mine works next to LLMs. The book also worries, in its epilogue, about "automation and its discontents"—the anxiety that we are automating ourselves out of relevance. I don't share the melancholy. There is always something new to connect, some new seam to close. The discontent Deutsch feels is, I think, a symptom of standing inside a firm watching the value leak out. From the other shore, it just looks like renewal.
The verdict
Superusers is the rare professional book that names a real, under-narrated class of people and takes them seriously. Its limitation is the flip side of its method: by cataloguing traits, it stops just short of the principle underneath them. The principle is connectivity, and the Superuser—the design technologist—is architecture's connective tissue.
The book's own diagnosis contains the cure. The Superuser's value moves from invisible, to grudgingly proven by results, to—at best—quietly acknowledged. If you wait for the profession to narrate that value for you, you'll wait a long time. So narrate it yourself. This review is me doing exactly that.