Design Communication Tools

A common frustration expressed by many clients during the design process is the difficulty of translating between 2-dimensional drawings and the built 3-dimensional space. Experienced design professionals learn early in their careers how to read drawings and understand the relationship between plans, elevations, and details. For clients this jump can be very challenging, fortunately, there are a wide variety of tools and strategies we use to bridge the gap between what’s on paper and final construction.

“How big is that room actually going to be?” This question, and many like it, is asked often during the design process. The right sizing of spaces is a critical component to design, having wide ranging implications from budget and schedule, to quality and usability. Having a dimensioned floor plan is necessary for construction, but when clients are making important decisions, a little help can be needed for visualizing final dimensions. One strategy we use to understand these “paper spaces” is visiting real world locations. With residential clients, we often walk through their current home to compare existing rooms with new designs and discuss how size differences impact the use and feel of a room. With commercial clients we tour other projects of similar scales, digging deeper into the operational needs of their office or business.

A digital finish board created for an office remodel project, all these material choices come from comparing and selecting physical samples with the client.

Material selection greatly impacts the final look and feel of a project. Often construction drawings are printed in black and white, with materials called out with a note or a representational pattern. While this is sufficient for the contractor to know what to build, it doesn’t communicate to clients what the actual materials are going to look like. To better communicate materiality to clients we go through a variety of exercises. One early on in design is material selection. We do this by curating physical samples of materials in small formats, be it brick, stone, wood, tile, etc. We collect all these options and lay them out to compare how they look in relation to each other. Through this we create a material board, which helps replace those notes on the construction drawings with color or rendered views showing just a little better the final look of the project.

Using full color and notes in drawings creates a hybrid presentation and construction drawing, providing an extra layer of information for clients, contractors, and designers.

Perhaps the most powerful tool in our arsenal for communicating design decisions is architectural rendering. Through 3d modeling and visualization software we can see how all aspects of a design relate to one another. A well detailed model can help engage clients in the design process with new technologies opening the possibility for fully rendered still images, project walkthroughs, and even virtual reality tours for a full visual experience. Through this, clients can give real time feedback on material, space layout, lighting, and many other design aspects hard to visual from drawings. Rendered images can in turn play a role in ensuring project completion, being used to promote projects for investment, fundraising, community engagement and city planning. Having a full 3D model is also a great tool during project construction, providing an additional reference point for contractors to understand the final design intent of a project.

Modeling and visualization tools have created a whole new experience for our clients, giving them the chance to walk through a project before any construction work even begins.