Consultation drawings

Consultation drawings could be thought of
 as a special category of presentation drawings
 in that they are primarily intended to convey
 information from designer to client or user or
other participant in the design process.
However, these drawings are done not
so much to convince as to elicit a response

  in order to assist  in the  designing process itself.


They may therefore be intended to lay out the bounds of knowledge and certainty about the state of the design so far.
Often such drawings are done in preparation for a meeting to discuss progress. The Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger tells us that he likes to squeeze every available bit of information from this process. (Lawson, 1994):
Clients always ask you to send a drawing one week before [a meeting] so theypresent them myself and open the drawings and look at their eyes to see what their first reaction is and to try to detect what the hard points are, and then trying to listen to their first question.
There is a problem here of communicating uncertainty. Designers it seems need to be comfortable with the idea of differing levels of uncertainty within the design.
 At any one time they are likely to feel more confident about some aspects than others. Typically designers’ drawings indicate uncertainty through style.
A rough sketchy freehand style with a soft pencil is more likely to indicate the lack of definition compared with a more precise line drawn mechanically with a pen. Mark Gross (1994) quotes Anthony Pellechia from
an MIT thesis in which he describes how Louis Kahn used very thick charcoal to sketch vaguely leaving his staff with problems of resolution: he cheated a lot.
 That charcoal line was very thick …He would make everything work and then he’d go away. You wouldn’t see him for maybe the next day, and you were left with these very thick lines that when reduced to realistic wall thicknesses and spaces – you couldn’t put this functional stuff back in.
As Gross says designers tend to work with very thick and vague tools early in the process that make marks easily and quickly without too much precision or commitment and only later turn to a finer level of detail using pens and formal drafting techniques.
 How designers convey varying levels of uncertainty in one drawing, however, is less easy to see and it seems more likely to be done through a verbal commentary during a presentation. A problem here can be
that a consultation is done which arrives at some form of approval based on a drawing that cannot easily be turned into a finer level of detail while still retaining the qualities of the vaguer consultative version.


A further possibility here is the presentation of two or more alternatives done deliberately to elicit a reaction from other participants that will help to arrive at a resolution. [Some designers seem to use a process based on this approach.]
The architects Michael Wilford and Eva Jiricna, for example, deliberately use an alternatives generation design strategy. The drawings shown here are by Michael Wilford and show alternative basic arrangements for discussion with the client of Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore (Fig. ).

This development of alternatives does seem to be very much a matter of personal preference. Other designers, for example Richard MacCormac, clearly feel uncomfortable and prefer to elicit knowledge from the clients in a more abstract way, maintaining a single line of solution development in the mind of
the client (Lawson, 1994).




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