About Fred Bartels

	Some Examples of my SketchUp Work
	This is the first draft of a beach house design by my sister. I took her design and translated it into SketchUp. This draft really isn't very good but it allowed us to get to the next iteration, shown just below, which is fairly interesting.
	I include these two images to illustrate that designing always involves a process of iterating through a series of solutions, each iteration leading to a tighter more coherent design.

Email:fred_bartels@rcds.rye.ny.us

I'm the head of the computer department at Rye Country Day School where I've been a teacher since 1984. I've been teaching a one semester CAD class since 1998, and have been using SketchUp with the class since 2002. I discovered SketchUp at the 2002 MacWorld Expo at the Javits Center in NYC. It was love at first sight.

I've been interested in architecture since I was kid. My father worked in urban planning and had a number of architect friends. I remember very clearly when one of these friends spent the night after having just visited Falling Water. The friend was aglow with enthusiasm for the building. He drew a quick sketch of the house which amazed me for two reasons. I'd never seen anyone draw a realistic picture so quickly and beautifully and I'd never seen such a fascinating house.

I considered pursuing architecture as a career but didn't because I felt my drawing and math skills were not strong enough. In the many years since I made that decision computers have transformed many aspects of our world, including the field of architecture.

I've played around with house design ideas since I was a teen. As personal computers started opening up powerful digital design tools to lay people I played with some of those tools to create increasingly sophisticated and realistic models. I also started reading steadily increasing numbers of books about architecture. It was this thread of interest, and my growing competence with CAD software (VectorWorks), and better understanding of the field of architecture, that led me to offer a CAD class.

An architecture book that strongly influenced me is A Pattern Language by Chris Alexander. Alexander's work is hugely influential and you will see it referenced often in the writings of architects and designers. I first saw it mentioned in one of those articles where famous, talented and influential people are asked what books they are reading. The great graphic design guru Edward Tufte said that he kept A Pattern Language on his bedstand and frequently dipped into it for inspiration. That was recommendation enough for me.

What I found most compelling about Alexander's work was his emphasis on the needs and desires of human beings. Always his work references back to what works for people. This resonated strongly with me. Partly because it humanized architecture but also because of my work teaching students computer programming and my own experiences in building computer programs. (I've since learned that many computer programmers find Alexander's work compelling.)

I'd lived through the whole development of graphical user interfaces for computers. I was awestruck when I first saw the Macintosh interface of windows, icons, menus and a mouse driven pointer. Here was a computer interface designed for human beings. That interface, and Bill Atkinson's HyperCard program, allowed me to move my own, and my students', development of computer applications to a much more sophisticated level. I now had to think of the design of an entire screen. Where to place buttons, where to place fields, what font to use, what size all these things should be, where they should be in relationship to each other, what should be in menus, what should happen on different screens, how consistent should elements be, etc., etc., etc..

All of these are design decisions, and the touchstone for making good design decisions is always "What works best for the user?" Not only are these design decisions, they are design decisions that would be familiar to anyone doing design work. In other words, no matter what is being designed there are many fundamental similarities in the design process.

In the past 10 years most of my computer interface design work has been done within the database program FileMaker. (HyperCard, unfortunately, was allowed to wither away by Apple.) My work with FileMaker has reinforced my belief in designing for people. I think that in the next 10 years much of my software interface design work will be with wikis like this one. Along the way I plan to keep developing my CAD skills with programs like SketchUp. I look forward to being able to increasingly combine the two interests in my design work.

Building as sculpture, building as statement, security, power and status.

Form should follow function, but make sure all the major functions are accounted for. Emotional and spiritual issues can be nearly as important as material issues.