Computers Can’t Design Your House

I see and hear many people ask which design program they can get to design their house. Many seem to expect that if they find just the right program they’ll be able to easily design their own home. This isn’t the case. Computer programs are tools that can be used to help you design your house, but designing your own home is something YOU will do.

What Design Is

*Photo by Bongkarn Thanyakij via Pexels*

Design is a process of analyzing needs, understanding what you want, giving form to those needs and desires, and then creating documents that can communicate what you want so that the design can be built. All of this has to occur withing a cost that you can afford.

Design is a complex process of contemplation, collecting information, and executing ideas. Doing all of this is a human endeavor and is beyond the capabilities of computer programs. As I’ve told many people, designing a house doesn’t involve putting in data and then pushing a button.

Let’s take a deeper look into the complexity of design.

Knowing What You Need

Before design even starts you must know what you need. This requires performing a detailed analysis of the spaces you want, what size they need to be based on what goes into them and the activities to occur in them, and putting that together into a document that will be the basis from which you’ll design.

Read our article “Four Steps to Take Before You Design – Step 1: Determine What You Need” for a more information.

Knowing What You Want

Knowing what you want goes beyond just the list of rooms and sizes. It involves envisioning what you actually desire from your home, from how it feels, what you want your home to say about you, what style you might want, and the materials you desire to make your home unique for you.

Check out our article “Four Steps to Take Before You Design – Step 2: Determine What You Want” for a greater understanding of this issue.

Understanding Your Property

The land on which you’ll build your new house will have a major influence on the design of your house, so understanding all the issues impacting your property is important. These fall into four categories:

Size & Limitations

Your property will be of a specific size. This is defined by the property lines which are established by a legal document and represented by a survey drawing.

Unless you’re building in the countryside, you’ll likely have limitations on what you can build, how large the house can be, how much of the site your house and pavement can cover, and the limits within which your house can be built. All of this is established by the zoning code and zoning category that applies to your property.

Services & Utilities

If you’re building within a community, metropolitan area, or city your property will typically have public services available to you. This can include such things as garbage collection, postal delivery, fire service, and police service. Most building sites also come with utility services such as water, sewage, gas, power, and communications. You need to understand all that is available to your site and where utility services are located before you begin to design.

Soil, Vegitation & Views

Your site will also have unique characteristics. This can include how it slopes, the types of soil which can be easy or challenging to build on, and possibly vegitation such as trees and shrubs that you might want to keep or are willing to remove. The potential for nice views will be an important consideration for how you plan and design your home.

Weather

Weather will have an important impact on how you design. Understanding how the sun tracks across the site from surise to sunset and throughout the seasons can impact where you’ll want rooms to be to take the most advantage of daylight, heat in winter, and shading in summer.

Knowing the temperture ranges through each season will impact how you insulate your home and when you can open windows to enjoy a nice day in your home.

Understanding the directions where rain and snow storms tend to approach throughout the seasons can impact where you put your entries, how you protect the entries, and where you might place rooms. If you’re in areas with the potential for tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes you’ll want to now how best to deal with these events in your home design.

For more information on understanding your property check out our article “Four Steps to Take Before You Design – Step 3: Select Your Property“.

Knowing What You Can Afford

If you don’t know what you can afford you won’t be able to design a home you can build in your budget. Understanding this is critical and is more complex than just asking someone how much it costs to build a house. Project budgets don’t consist of just construction costs but includes an array of other costs which are dependent on decisions you make.

Read our article “Four Steps to Take Before You Design – Step 4: Determine a Budget” to get a better understanding of what it takes to create a project budget.

Analyzing Information

Understanding all of the information noted above takes a lot of effort to organize, analyze, and apply during your design. This is probably the most important thing to understand as to why computers can’t design your home for you. Computers can’t contemplate and understand all of this information, much less put it all together to create a beautiful home. Only people are capable of doing this.

Giving Form to Your Information

To create a beautiful design you must be able to understand all that you need and want, what you can afford, and what your site is like. You’ll use this information to transform your understanding into a design that will be unique to you.

Form involves not just the floor plan but creating a good-looking enclosure and the forms used for the roofs. All of this has to be designed within a budget you can afford.

To do this you’ll need to go through the following steps.

Determine Method of Construction

Knowing what you’ll build your house out of is important to know. For most of us in the U.S. and Canada that will be wood framing on either a concrete or block foundation, and a concrete floor slab for the basement or at ground level if no basement.

However, some may want or need to use masonry blocks for their walls, or might decide on other unique framing techniques such as steel framing or stuructural panel systems.

You should understand the basic framing system you’ll use so that you can understand any implications to the planning and design of your house.

Planning

Planning is the process of placing spaces together. This involves knowing the rooms and spaces you need, their sizes, and how you want the spaces to relate to each other. You’ll also want to know which rooms should get the best views, what spaces should get direct sunlight, and which rooms you could use to buffer primary spaces from noise or weather.

Planning doesn’t involve drawing floor plans but rather playing with room forms, shuffling them around until you get a sence of how you’ll want your plan to be laid out.

Creating Your Floor Plan

Your floor plan will be based on the planning concept youv’e decided on. This is where you start to draw walls, doors, and windows. You’ll also start to layout bathrooms, kitchens, and laundry rooms, along with figuring out where special features such as fireplaces, built-in shelves, and cabinets might be placed.

Turning Your Plans into a 3D Form

You’ll use your initial floor plan as the basis for figuring out the form of your home. This inolves determining how tall walls will be and what the roof form will be. From this you’ll begin to develop the elevations showing where windows and doors are located and where materials will be placed.

Determine Materials, and Systems

As you design you’ll need to decide on the materials you’ll use for the enclosure and interior of the house and where they’ll be placed.

Additionally, you’ll need to know what systems you’ll use for heating, cooling, plumbing, power, and communication (cable and wi-fi) so you can place them in the design.

Creating Documents to Build Your House

Once you have your plan established and the form of the house created you’ll start to create the documents to build your house. These will include all the drawings needed to communicate what’s to be built along with written documents outlining the components and materials that go into the house. The written documents will also describe the quality of installation or materials, fixtures, and equipment, warranties for products, and the requirements for contractors that will bid for construction of the house.

Methods of Designing

There are a number of methods that can be used to design a house. Let’s take a look at these below.

Planning Options

Since planning is a “big picture” process you don’t need to worry about specifics such as walls, doors, and windows. Planning involves the placement of blocks of spaces together in various ways until you get a concept you like.

The most traditional method of doing this is sketching, where you draw crude circles or rectangles representing the rooms and spaces you want. You’ll create several options until you find the one that works best for you.

Another method is to cut out paper blocks of varying sizes representing each space, then shuffling them around in numerous ways as you play with ideas. Each idea can be saved by taking a picture.

You can also do this with computers using shapes that you can easily place and move around.

The error most people make when planning is drawing walls at the start, getting too specific too early. This phase should be fast and loose without worrying about what it looks like. You’re generating ideas, not creating drawings.

Drawing Options

You begin to draw when you take your chosen concept and turn it into a plan. Traditionally this involved drafting, where you take large sheets of paper, tape them to a drawing board, and then use special equipment such as t-squares, parallel bars, and triangles of varying sizes to draw straight lines. Architectural scales are used to draw to correct lengths, with different scales used for different types of drawings.

Today most people use computer drawing programs. This simplifies the mechanics of drawing but takes money to purchase the programs and time to learn how to use them. However, this is where computers can shine, as you can pull together a lot of information into a drawing fairly easily and change things relatively easy and quickly. Drawing programs can also make coordinating the components and systems of the house much easier than by hand.

*Photo by thisisengineering via Pexels.*

Creating Models

Models are used as a way to understand the form of a house. Most people can’t easily visualize what a house will look like from flat drawings, so building something that represents what it will look like makes that easier.

Models built by hand are typically made from thick paper board that’s cut out to scale, with each piece representing a different wall, the floor, or the elements of sloped roofs. Door and window openings would then be cut out of the appropriate pieces.

Today, many drawing programs can easily create a 3D “virtual” model that can show what the house will look like in a “real” sense. These models are extracted by the program from the information created during the design. In fact, drawing programs actually “build” the house as you draw it: a wall is given thickness, width, and height, and doors and windows are set into the walls. Same with the floors, ceilings, and roofs. The floor plans, elevations, and other drawings are actually extracted from the computer model.

What Computers Can Do for You

Computers are very powerful tools that can assist you in visualing ideas while designing a building. These programs are also great at producing drawings that can be used by contractors to build a house. However, they take an investment of money and time to be able to use them effectively.

What Computers Can’t Do for You

Computers can’t understand. The amount of information that must be collected, analyzed, and then formed into effective ideas are beyond today’s programs.

Computers can’t know you. Designing a house is a personal venture involving personality, taste, and vision.

Computers are not able to dream. Design is about taking a dream and making it real. Only we can do that.

Why You Can Design but Computers Can’t

People have the capacity to take a lot of information, contemplate what the information means, and then create ideas from all that. People can visualize ideas and have the capacity to communicate those ideas. These are what make us unique.

Computers, on the other hand, are good at processing data. However, they can’t contemplate, visualize, or create ideas. They can’t dream. This is why computers can’t design.

Computers Can’t Design Your House