Essay

Tailoring Your Design Tools

Your architectural design visualization tools help you to expand your design thinking and final design results. But how can you harness the power behind what these tools can do, to help you create a winning and seamless design process?

With the amazing new and ever-improving effects that such 3D visualization software tools provide, there are architectural presentation methods that can easily be seen as hyper-real in the way that they present a building design idea. Yet, these same 3D visualization tools can also be used in very innovative ways, to create presentations that are more about expressing a particular aspect to a building design idea, for example through interactivity (that is not-hyper-real). As such, the use of your architectural design tools should be tailored to what you are trying to convey, and to the audience that will need to understand what design ideas you are sharing.

Digital Tools for Sensory Design

As design visualization software spans a spectrum ranging from the abstract to the hyper-real, it becomes necessary to think about the multi-sensory design qualities of your design. You may ask yourself questions like: Is hyper-reality really the best way to express this particular design quality or feature? By trying to make every presentation hyper-real, is there any information that gets lost, and could be better explained with a bit more abstraction? For example, is the poetic experience and sense of place of an architectural idea best explained through hyper-reality or through a bit of added abstraction? 

Of course, every designer, every client, and every project is different. There are times where a hyper-real representation of an idea will capture and convey exactly what needs to be expressed. But there are other times when hyper-reality can actually detract from your design idea's communication. For instance, does hyper-real lighting truly capture the narrative nature of a building's flow? Perhaps for this case, a rendered animation that poetically guides the viewer through the architecture's flow would be best. (And for this, hyper-real lighting is not needed which, in turn, speeds up the animation's rendering process.)

Add Variety to Your Toolset

As you embark on each architectural design project, and as the years pass leading way to new and improving technologies --- be sure to have a look around at the 3D visualization software market. New tools and new updates are added regularly, and can help you evolve not only the quality of communication that your presentations provide to clients, but they can also innovate the way you actually design architecture itself.

Also, do not be limited by the tools presented to you. If you have an architectural design idea, try using an "out of the ordinary" tool, or develop a plugin to an existing tool, or even develop a new tool of your own. This is how architectural innovation can happen. Add variety to your toolset, but focus on the best tool to capture, convey, and then build your winning design ideas.

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