Explore the integral roles of various parties within the interior design profession and understand the significance of coordination in preventing design failure. Learn about the importance of efficient communication and smart contract drafting to manage client revisions and ensure smooth project progression.
Key Insights
- Within the interior design business, various parties such as architects, engineers, consultants, and clients play prominent roles. Architect supervises and manages all engineers and often hires the interior designer. Consultants, experts in various fields, are managed by interior designers, and the clients fund the project.
- A crucial aspect of managing clients includes smart contract drafting that allows for a certain number of design revisions without additional charge. An overrun on this limit could lead to charging an hourly rate from the client. This strategy ensures fair compensation for the designer if the client keeps requesting changes.
- Effective coordination and communication are essential to prevent design failure. Advanced software tools, like Autodesk's cloud server, facilitate seamless sharing and reviewing of drawings among consultants, thereby ensuring coordination. Failure in coordination can lead to design fails, such as an electrical socket being placed in a sink.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
You are doing great. Let's continue discussing the business of interior design. Now, we mentioned that you're not the only individual.
Even if you're a sole proprietor, even if when you work by yourself, you're still going to have other individuals, other parties involved. And I would say one of the major parties is the architect. And the architects will create and design the original structure of the building, and a lot of times hire the interior design, interior designer to come in and design the building from the interior perspective.
The architect also supervises and manages all engineers, electrical, mechanical, plumbing. Now, that doesn't mean that you won't be coordinating with them. So as an interior designer, you still will coordinate with consultants, which is the next party, series of parties that are involved.
And what are consultants? Well, consultants are experts in the field who are managed by interior designers. Yeah, you guessed it. You get to manage these consultants, which is kind of a wonderful responsibility.
Some different areas of expertise for consultants, and this is just a small list of many that are out there, is you may hire an audiovisual consultant, someone that's very good with acoustics. You may be hiring a lighting consultant, someone that understands and can do light calculations. Now, you may also know how to do these, but there are experts out there, consultants, that are literally trained just in lighting.
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You may hire a sustainable measures consultant, someone to make sure that you're meeting all those LEED standards, right? Acoustics, right? Or audio and visual. Material performance. There are consultants that are experts in materials, and when we say performance, we're talking about typically usually sustainability or performance related to wear and tear, as in the first lesson that I shared with you.
And obviously, the last party, which is probably the most important, would be the client. And typically, these are the individuals that fund the project. You meet regularly with the client.
It's important, as we discussed in our myths lesson, that the client is updated and not surprised with the work that you're doing. And the client may make changes that require some design iterations. Now, what do you do if the client says, I don't like this? Well, if you're smart, what you'll do is, in the original contract, you will put together a series of notes that explain that if you are making design revisions, the client is allowed to, let's say, make revisions up to a certain amount.
Like there are three or four design iterations that the client could do without being charged extra. Once you exceed these three, then you could potentially move to an hourly rate where the client understands. Because we have to control this.
Because obviously, we don't want the client changing the project 100 times. And I've been there. And if you get to the point where the client is constantly changing parts of the project, obviously, you should be compensated for that.
So this is something you want to think about in the very beginning. And think about in the contract. Now, related to the business of interior design is coordination.
And coordination is really important. Lack of coordination will create what we call a design fail. This can be a number of consultants' concern, whether it's plumbing, electrical, wall panels, there's a number of various consultants that you'll work with that need to be coordinated to prevent a design fail.
The client should be in the loop throughout all the phases. And many drawings overlap. Just think of, just look at the drawings needed to create a residence, right? You have a set of construction documents.
And in those documents, you have architecture drawings, interior design drawings, you have mechanical, electrical, plumbing. Well, guess what? Someone has to manage those drawings and make sure that all the layers are stacking up appropriately, right? If the structural engineer doesn't look at the interior design drawings, he may design a structural beam in the middle of an open area that is not supposed to have a structural beam, right? So it's important that coordination happens throughout the project. And this is why the training that you're going through now will help you understand the various parties involved and allow you to make appropriate decisions that coordinate with the various consultants that you're working with.
Now, there are a number of different ways to communicate. And obviously, we have in-person meetings, face-to-face with clients and consultants. But since COVID, we've opened up a whole new realm of communication as well.
We now have Zoom. We have Teams. We also have gotomeeting.com or anymeeting.com or join.me. We also have file share software.
This is wonderful because Autodesk, the company that makes AutoCAD, which is the digital drafting that you will learn eventually through taking some of these courses at VDCI, has a cloud server where you can share between consultants. So me as the interior designer, I may upload my drawings to the cloud and allow the architect to review those drawings, overlay those drawings with his to make sure that things coordinate. Same for a mechanical or electrical consultant or an engineer who you're working with.
And this software allows us to really keep track of what's happening and just make sure from a project manager standpoint that we are looking at all aspects and making sure that things are coordinated. Now, what happens if it's not coordinated? This is kind of a comical image here. We say, how could this happen, right? How could there be an electrical socket in the sink? Well, you would be surprised.
And it's usually just a small miscoordination. You know, an individual, the plumber or the designer intended for there to be a sink, but then the client also hires an electrical consultant, and he doesn't know that there's a sink there. So he specs, you know, an electrical outlet in this area.
And then all of a sudden, you've got a putting an electrical socket in the middle of an area that could be potentially very hazardous, right? So design fails are real, and they do happen. And it's important for us to think about how all of the consultants work together. In the next video, we will tackle the project phases, and I'll see you then.
