Stay Agile with your design

Design work is unique in that when you start it out, you know almost nothing about what your final deliverable will be. You may think you know everything you need to know right from the start, but chances are, your initial list of requirements is only a first approximation of what will eventually discover about the project. To be a good designer, you need to acknowledge those initial requirements as your starting point.

As professional designers in any field, but most especially as design consultants in the construction industry, this truth remains a common point of contention. To run an efficient business, one that provides a living for you and your team, you’re going to want a predictable process with predictable and measurable outcomes. A clear set of requirements defined in your contract makes it easy to determine when you have finished your work and deserve to be paid.

You likely will have a short list of requirements for the design and some vague sense for the qualities that your client may want to see in the final product. You’ll know some things about the site and any existing structures or other conditions that you’ll have to include. And you’ll have a general sense for the basic physics of construction that will govern any project. But in no way are these constraints sufficient by themselves to determine the full extents of the thing you are asked to design.

If they were, you could apply an engineers mindset and get to a rationalized solution efficiently and predictably. For problems with fully…