Design Basics

Overview

Good design (computer aided or otherwise) involves many things, but perhaps most importantly it involves paying close attention to the people for whom your product (be it a house, a play or a wiki) is being designed. Listen to your clients. Observe not only what they say, but what they do and how they feel in relationship to the type of product you are designing. What other things lead to good design? The list is endless but a solid understanding of scale and proportion, patterns, materials, forces, and previous successful solutions  are good starting places.

Sarah Susanka, leader of the "not so big house " movement, paid close attention to her architecture clients and discovered two key points. One, many people were not happy with new large houses with mediocre design and detailing. Two, many rooms in these large houses were hardly ever used. Using this information she helped articulate a house design philosophy that advocates building houses with just the spaces that get used a lot, and adding character to these smaller houses through carefully and thoughtfully designed details.

When designing, form should follow function, but make sure all the major functions are taken into account. Emotional and spiritual issues can be nearly as important as material issues.

 

Listening to the Client

(photo from flickr by Son of Groucho)

Frank LLoyd Wright was a brilliant architect but he didn't always listen to his clients. The Guggenheim Museum in NYC is one of Wright's most famous buildings but it is generally felt to be an unsatisfactory structure for displaying and viewing art. Wright battled mightily with the museum curators while he was designing the building. Wright won, and we all won in a sense because Wright created a masterpiece, but the curators lost.  The Guggenheim is a wonderful building but it is not a great art museum.

Listening to the client doesn't mean you must be obsequious. If you are listening carefully from the beginning you will know when a possible client and your design philosophies are incompatible. In such a case you should probably decline to work on the project.

General Plan First, Details Second

Work from an outline. The outline should provide the general framework of your design solution. Delay working on details as long as possible. The best computer for developing the outline of your design lies between your ears. Think through your problem throughly and deeply, contemplate it, talk about the problem with friends, make quick and dirty sketches, and give your conscious and subconscious mind a chance to play with the problem. 

When you start to work putting your design into SketchUp start with as general a solution as possible. The model to the right represents the rooms of a house. The red boxes are bedrooms, the blue boxes bathrooms, the green box the kitchen, the brown box the dining area, and the yellow box the living room. Each box is a group, and can easily be moved and modified without affecting the other boxes. This allows the major organizing structure of the house to easily be manipulated until a felicitous layout is determined. In following iterations any style of windows, ornamentation, and skin could be applied to the functionally correct skeleton.

 

Iterate Toward the Solution

The three images above show how a design can evolve through a number of versions. The word "iterate" is used in computer programming. It means to move to the next version of a repeating process in which something changes in each version. Almot all serious design involves developing a sequence of versions, each ideally a little closer to an excellent solution to the design problem. Note the use of "an excellent solution" instead of "the best solution." Any complex design problem is likely to have many excellent solutions. To reach one of these excellent solutions it's important to not stop after the first iteration -although this is exactly what most beginning design students want to do- because inevitably the design can be improved. The key to improving the design with each iteration is to get lots of feedback and constructive criticism after completing each version.

 

Scale

Proportion

Patterns

Materials

Forces

Previous Solutions