Module Two - Space Planning

For this assignment you are given details of a building together with a brief for a new office space. You have to design the office layout to accommodate a specified number of staff with different departments and the associated utility spaces. As well as the space planning you have to choose furniture and finishes for the space. Your final design has to be explained using scale drawings and mood boards together with a short written piece on the design rationale.

Having studied the brief I first considered the regulations which must be allowed for in the design in particular disabled access, fire escape and health and safety. The government planning portal is a really useful source of information in particular for the Building Regulations. This can be found at http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/. As part of my day job I have access to a wide variety of technical documents associated with buildings via http://www.ihs.com/en/uk/index.aspx  which proved really useful for this assignment.

As the company in the brief specializes in design I started gathering ideas on existing office spaces used by design companies and in particular architects practices. I looked at the type and layout of furniture and the spacial working area individually and as a group. The internet proved to be a great source of images. From this I then looked at the size of the types of furniture needed and started to manipulate arrangements using CAD software.

Another great piece of drawing software is Google Sketchup which is free to download from http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/download/index.html. I used this to produce a 3D drawing of the building shell and tried different partition arrangements within it until I felt the flow through the building worked whilst still meeting the requirements of the brief. In my final document I produced some 3D images using Sketchup to help explain the design.

Other software I tried out for this assignment included Photoshop and Adobe InDesign both of which proved pretty useful once I got the hang of them. Its worth noting that Adobe has great discount rates for students when buying software as long as you can send some student ID.