Designers

Design Council

Designers, architects and builders. If ever there was the potential for miscommunication, it must be with this combination. Oh - I forgot to mention the client !

A few mm here, a few cm there, and disaster looms! We had to have a rapid design rethink, as our virtual reality (measurements, paper drawings, 3D CAD drawings, artists impressions, did not match our physical reality. Is this an example of subjective constructions (constructivists) never evolving into social constructions (constructionists) and matching an empirical reality (critical realists). The designers' drawings are what we term boundary objects. They have an element of static reality. They are paper or binary digits representing empirical measurements of what might constitute a real world. They then have an interpretive element; we can make whatever we like from the drawings, our imaginations combine with our historicity and our visionary dreams. This makes us all interpret the plans differently.

The architect talks in terms of space, light, connectiveness, impressions, concepts. The designer talks in terms of features, forms, functions and the 'golden kitchen triangle'. The builder has to build and then discovers by simple pacing around and using common sense judgement that all this subjectivity does not in fact work in reality. He shouts: "Stop!".

A rapid rethink ensues. All's well that ends well however and we hope that we have now socially constructed a better vision of what reality will be like. We now have new measurements, new plans, new 3D drawings. We pace it out, we measure, we think, we rethink. Iteratively, this hopefully will now be a much more tightly knit construction (both social and also physical). Our boundary object has become real, it exercises agency from the embedded knowledge and desires within it. We all interpret it again in our own different ways.

At the end of the day it is only a kitchen !.......or is it.??

M stands and ponders this dilemma. Watch out architects, designers and builders, tomorrow is another day and she is on your case !!