How the light moves | Hacker News Reader

How the light moves

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64 pointsjreacher17 comments

This is really applicable to product prototyping. Too low-fidelity and people lose the ability to engage with the idea and/or feel like it’s a real product. Too high-fidelity and people get hung up on the finer details - illustration choice, incorrect descriptive text etc.

>> Wasn’t the point of this exercise that the client get the most accurate idea of what the finished space would look like?

I think what he had was more what the finished space could look like. Interior design/decoration is not what the architect was providing.

I've always wondered why architectural renderings were so austere. This explains it.

It makes a lot of sense, though - interior decorations change (with very few exceptions, e.g. the French communist party HQ, which came pre-equipped with Niemeyer-designed furniture). Light impressions don't and have a lot of practical and emotional effect on how space is used.

I would say there's value in having both kinds of renders - one which focuses on the architecture itself and one which paints a vision of how it might be used. If it isn't too distracting, you could switch back and forth between the two during an animation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headquarters_of_the_French_Com...

See also Subtract by Leidy Klotz, which examines how problems can often be more easily solved by removing rather than adding, contrary to our natural bias.

Yes, this.

> “It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.” - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I suspect this is why everything is grey in the housing market. It's terrible that this results in the loss of so much richly colored and textured natural wood, stone, etc. in all of our older housing stock.

For myself, I actually prefer this, as I can visualize different colors and how they would work, and this is easier if, e.g., the kitchen isn't painted in bright canary yellow.

My real estate agent told me to leave my furniture in the house, but since I would prefer to see it without the clutter, I didn't and took everything out. Much later I learned that people are really, really bad at visualization and spatial perception. I've spent a good chunk of my life looking at floor plans, so being able to see a space from a top-down, 2D view comes naturally. But an awful lot of people cannot do this very well.

This is why architects make 3D images (or, in the past, build physical models). J. Random Client cannot visualize the spaces from a floor plan.

The article is interesting because usually interior design is part of the architectural process, which would include furniture and fixtures and equipment. But I can see where, if FFE is not included in the contract, the architect would prefer to showcase their design alone. But, I suspect, the client probably would prefer to see something in there if only to provide scale. (Oddly, putting a human in the drawing helps, but not as much as seeing the actual furniture. Bad spatial awareness strikes again.)

Too literal.

Does anyone here have a framework for iterating with end-users to determine what their needs really are? Maybe some question phrasing that can be used to extract the core of the user's needs?

Checkout Design Thinking https://designthinking.ideo.com/

If the author kept all the detail in the rendering, there’s a risk the client wouldn’t like and ask to change, even though it’s not part of the architecture’s office job.

I drive past a company called "Architectural Surfaces" - I've always wanted to stop by and see if they sell renderite.

Great post, thanks for sharing!

> The architect designs the building. Nothing more, nothing less.

That can include interior design too, e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright.

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