What are the options?

Recently we developed a scheme where we didn't show the clients or the planners any design options, and they approved it. In detailed design, we showed the client a couple of design options for a particular tiny detail, thinking they would see so clearly why the one we preferred would be better than the other, only for them to all like the option we thought was worse, and with no logical explanation as to why.

Recently we presented a scheme that, we thought, had a strong logical response to brief and difficult site conditions, and an attractive design presence, only for the planners to ask us for lots of other design options because they didn't 'get' why it was designed as it was. We duly prepared a lot of other design approaches, but because the underlying premise, brief and site constraints, and the designers working on it were, of course, the same, they all had a similarity. The planners still didn't like them. In fact, they liked the version that we thought was worst, against all the criteria of performance such as overheating, noise, construction complexity and quality of life for the residents, let alone the banality of the architecture. The client asked us to 'optioneer some more', to 'think outside the box'. We aren't working on the project any more. 

Recently a major scheme on a rural site has been published for consultation (not by us). The design has a bold landscape presence and an imaginative response to what could be very banal functional brief. The local authority have asked for design options so they can assess why this design was chosen. So the team behind the scheme may have to spend time and money developing a set of fake plausible options in order to justify the approach they have taken. It seems impossible for the planners to just take a view on the design as a thing, as presented to them, without being sure that there's not a magically better option out there on a menu they've not been shown. (I'm a planner, I'd take a view, but so many seem unable to do so.)

We spend a lot of time unpacking and explaining the thought process behind our designs. Why something is the way it is, how that has emerged from the investigation of site and brief, the practicality of minimising carbon and minimising cost and making things work for people with disabilities and children and furniture layouts and not seeing the WC pan from the kitchen sink if someone leaves the door open. We're not saying that there's only one way that this building could possibly be designed - of course, a different team would come up with a different and equally valid answer - but this team, us, with our priorities and hangups and, yes, taste, we can't think ourselves into a completely different way of designing. 

If our clients or planners don't like what we've come up with, which happens all the time and it completely within their rights, we try to unpick with them why they don't like it. What is it that doesn't chime, is it the colour or the shape, is it the materials, is it too plain or too fancy, does it remind them of something they don't like, do they think that users, buyers or tenants won't like it, or do they just not care that you can see the WC from the front door if that's the trade-off for having a better net:gross?

We try to understand if what they want is internally consistent or not. If they tell us they want a low carbon building but they also want lots of concrete, if they are on a strict budget but also want expensive flooring, we try to understand the rationale behind their thinking so we can align ourselves. Sometimes we have to point out the inconsistencies and challenge the thinking of our clients. Sometimes we rip it all up and start again once the real priorities of the client are shown to us through this process, and we have all learnt that they aren't what the original brief set out. There's something very cathartic about doing this - I think for both client and designer. You've journeyed together, you've learnt, you've discovered the unexpected.

But for all this, it doesn't really matter what the process is that led to the solution. What matters is whether the solution is a good one, and people will rarely agree on that. Projects are judged by the people who use and encounter them as things in the world, and it doesn't matter what design narrative the designer had in their mind. Different people will go to the same building and read completely different narratives according to their point of view, their past experiences, their needs, their politics. They don't see the possible options that might have been. 

Good design isn't made by committee, and it's not made by evaluating all the possible options and picking the bits you most like from each. It needs an internal logic - even if that's a logic that some may disagree with - and a sense of itself as a thing, as an artefact in the world, that can be seen and experienced as a whole. Making this wholeness is incredibly difficult and often painful, requiring designers to balance and integrate a huge amount of complexity into something that feels natural and effortless.

So that's why the wrong option chosen, for even a small part of the scheme, can feel so frustrating and saddening. We have to respect our clients' wishes and, ultimately,  either do what they ask or walk. One doesn't wish to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so we tend to sadly acquiesce. But the more of this process I see, the more anti-options I get. I regret showing options for that tiny detail. I should have shown the idea that worked, and if the client didn't like it, ripped it all up and started over again.