Saturday, August 01, 2009

Ramblings on Design Rationality

During school days, architectural designs are cool, reflecting style, revealing thoughts and even treated as a form of art. Later years, structural issues comes in, we need columns, beams and feasibility studies adding a sense of realism. It can be built.
At work, modulation is the basis of building things.300mm, is the figure, to be able to divide or a multiplication of it. Elevations, plans, steps, stairs, tiles, window openings, door openings, storey height works well with modulation. Most importantly modulation reduces cost and manufacturing processes require a minimum number of 100 moles to be an effective process with cost incurred. With floor to wall ratio, we even now succumbed to flat elevations, to reach the most cost effective way of building things.
Flat is what we want. We design it flat, for cost saving, for modulation, for effectiveness, for energy studies, for clean surfaces.
This as industrial design for highly effective industrial manufacturing purposes, it works well and feed the purposes for cost issues.
Imagination succumbed to realism.
Bread and butter job is an industrial process, gaining the most cost effective way, yet as a designer, we opted some spice through the colors, the layout, the treatment and so on with constrains of cost.
For those who complained so much about constrains and feasibilities studies, my advice is - learn to have appreciation for it. Only effective designs are to be built and developed. I hope people nowadays would appreciate more than making complains for their daily work and I am learning to appreciate too most of the time.
Change your angle of view and there would be a different side of world opening up for you.