EYE ON DESIGN BY DAN GREGORY

Opposites Attract — at IDEO and Beyond

Contradictions make us concentrate. Look at this image from Heyri, Korea, a new planned city outside Seoul.

Is it a leafy wall or a concrete tree, and how did they build it, anyway? The photo is one of many shot by folks at IDEO, global design consutants based in Palo Alto, California. (Find the image on their website under “Postcards.”) I think it begins to illustrate what IDEO calls “design thinking,” which is a way to derive new ideas from opposing extremes.

The firm’s Chris Waugh and others explained this approach at a fascinating all-day retreat for builders, developers, architects, designers and others that I attended recently. The gathering was sponsored by The Vine: A Conversation on the Nature of Community, which is an offshoot of the Pacific Coast Builders Conference. (Full disclosure: I’m on the advisory board of The Vine.) As Chris pointed out, design thinking is about being comfortable with ambiguity and, in fact, finding new potential in it. The discussion made me realize that design thinking isn’t new; it’s what the best architecture has always been about.

One of IDEO’s current projects is helping the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rethink airport security checkpoints. (What a great idea — up to now these areas appear to have been made up on the fly — so to speak). IDEO looked beyond the detection of objects to the environment of the checkpoint, and they studied human behavior.

Their prototype design, called TSA Checkpoint Evolution, uses informational screens, “Prep Stops,” and soothing lighting as crowd-calming devices in order to make potential  “hostile threats” more visible. In other words IDEO looked beyond the narrow security function and concentrated on how to relieve the stress as a way to make the most serious potential stress stand out. They may also be creating an instant community out of a collection of strangers. So out of ambiguous and even contradictory circumstances and needs  — stress vs. relaxation — comes a possible solution for increased security.

The home is a similar interactive environment, only more intimate, and one hopes less in need of security checkpoints  — The White House notwithstanding. Each room or space has the potential for different kinds of behavior: from gathering to seclusion. A well designed home encompasses these potential contradictions. New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s  insightful new book Why Architecture Matters – I highly recommend it — deftly illustrates this zoning principle in his description of architect Sir John Soane’s breakfast room in London: “with a round table set under a low dome that is not a real dome but a canopy, supported by narrow columns at four corners. Where the canopy meets the corners, Soane placed small round mirrors, so the occupants of the breakfast table can see one another without looking directly at each other.”

(Photo courtesy Livejournal.com) Paul continues: “Soane liked to create rooms within rooms and spaces that connect in unusual ways with other spaces, and in the breakfast room you can see that he is doing it not just as the early nineteenth-century’s version of razzle-dazzle but to provide a kind of psychic comfort. The dome is protecting but it is not quite enclosing, a reminder that while we may feel uncommunicative and vulnerable early in the morning, we need to move out of that stage into the world. The breakfast room functions as a kind of halfway house…it introduces us to the day…a room of great beauty and serenity, perfectly balanced between openness and enclosure, between public and private.”

So how does design thinking inform our house plans? Gregory La Vardera’s latest scheme, Plan 431-12, demonstrates. I asked Greg to explain what he did.

Compact at 1,800 square feet –  for three bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths — “there is no room for hallways or circulation space in the tight footprint,” says Greg.  “So for that reason we arrived at the unusual configuration of placing service spaces – bathrooms+laundry & coat closet –  on the stair landing levels of the house.”

Greg continues: “After wrestling with the floor plan it became apparent that any other location of the bathroom would require more hallway, or require the stair to be located elsewhere in the house. By using the stair itself as the “hallway” to reach the bathroom we gained back considerable space, enough to make the master bedroom suite quite generous for such a small house, as well as the open living area.”

“So the laundry area and bathroom serving bedrooms 2 & 3, and the powder and coat room on the main level are off-set from the floor they serve by 1/4-1/3 level. That uneven division itself may also seem a bit peculiar but it serves two purposes. It gives these functions bias towards the levels they serve – for instance the laundry + bathroom is much closer to the bedrooms than it is to the downstairs – it’s clearly part of the upstairs realm, there is no ambiguity about which floor it belongs to. This is because it’s just a couple of steps down from the bedrooms. On the living level the powder room has a similar but different relationship. Its definitely part of the first floor – you would never have the sense that the powder room is in the basement. Yet because it is a few steps down from the living areas it gives it a distance, both physical and experiential, that serves the design of the house well. You don’t want a powder room right on top of your living spaces. Yet with a small footprint house it is hard to avoid. The house in fact lives much larger than it is because the use of vertical as well as horizontal separation of these service spaces.”

Here an architect, like the designers at IDEO, willingly embraces — but is not bound by — the constraints of his problem.  IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown reminds us in his new book  Change By Design, that this is an approach most famously articulated by the great mid-century modern designer Charles Eames.

As you explore Houseplans.com you can practice design thinking as well by seeing how a particular plan is or is not able  to turn limitations into advantages.