Mr. Roboto

Hey hey, how’s it going? You know, you are such a smart cookie. I mean it, one thing I know about my listeners in general, from interacting with them on social media and the email messages they send me, is that they are all super smart, like borderline genius level rockstars. When I first started this podcast I had a long list of myths I wanted to bust, and one of them, maybe the most important of them all, is that interior design is not a superficial process. I know my regular listeners get this. So if you’re new here, welcome and, just know that when I say interior design, I’m not talking about interior styling or decorating, I’m talking about a multidisciplinary system that factors in psychology, art, sociology, construction, project management, and even sometimes a touch of spiritually. Okay - but don’t get scared, we take this stuff one bite at a time over here. And today we are looking at some real nuts and bolts logic oriented stuff that will help translate interior design from the world of the abstract to the tangible realm. We are talking about using data in your design. From collecting information, to processing and synthesizing, data informs the decisions interior designers make in a major way, and I’m spilling all the secrets on how you can use it too.

But first, let's look at the color of the week. If you spend much time on the Internet, you've probably at the very least, seen friends talking or posting about a game called Wordle. And if you're really hip, you've been playing it. Wordle is a daily five letter word guessing game that gives you six chances to uncover the word of the day, starting from scratch. It is deceptively simple and downright addictive. Anytime you guess a correct letter, if it's in the right order, it will light up green. But if you guess a correct letter in the wrong order, it will light up a most unusual color. An earthy variation of chartreuse, a dark golden rod yellow that says “try again, you’re almost there!” Pantone 7751 is a grounding shade that looks modern, bold, neutral, and calming all at once. Try layering tones of this shade using Valspar paint color Bamboo Leaves as an accent wall or a ceiling color, with a Kravet drapery in color 34939-14. This color has so much richness it will make your space feel cozy, homey, and always keep you guessing.

Using data to justify design decisions is a trend as old as the Information Age itself. In the world of large scale office design, corporate executives salivate over hard, cold data presented to them as a step in the process of creating meaningful work places. This takes what can be a fairly creative and intuitive process and supports it with highly cerebral research and facts. It takes art, and makes it look like science. And to be fair, it is a science, and one that I personally happen to be fascinated by, but its important to call it in for what it is - in a world where many people’s whims of “I want a big office all to myself” or “this room should be all white because I like white” data takes the capriciousness out of design. While this is a way of life for the commercial design process, it occurs less often in the residential world, especially when a project doesn’t involve a designer. So, today you get to be your own interior designer and participate in the delightfully stimulating task of data collection about yourself and how you live or work. You can use these tried and true tactics in any space you want to improve.

One of the fundamental parts of the data-to-design process is collecting data in regards to how a space functions, and how it could function. It's common to present pie charts and graphs depicting different ratios of conference rooms to desks, open concept versus closed private spaces, square feet per person, even things like highlighting where the best views on a floor plan are located. The collection process is usually a series of interviews, and the interviews can be anything from a straightforward list of questions about how you behave in the space, what rooms get used the most, and by whom, listing out your problem points, and listing out things that you love about your space as it is. But designers often hold more elaborate workshops that encourage conversation between multiple stakeholders. These are the same types of workshops that are used in business strategy, marketing, and development. We usually try to make these a little bit more on the fun side, so gather together your group of “stakeholders,”  I  recommend providing food because it always makes people feel more comfortable, and ask them to write down answers to questions like what does a typical week look like? When are people coming and going? What rooms are used the most?  Try making a calendar diagram and filling in different types of information depending on the room you’re reviewing. How many nights a week do you cook in the kitchen? How often are guests in the house? 

A really solid place to gleam information is actually in your existing finances. If you use a spend tracking app like Mint or one provided by your financial institution, you can look at spend trends over the past months and years and start to tie them to behavior. If my spending is high for travel during certain parts of the year, it’s likely I’m not home much then. If I’m always buying guitar strings, finding a quiet place to practice could help my music hobby. Maybe I eat at restaurants more than I shop for groceries and I can keep ignoring my kitchen and dedicate it’s storage for other uses. Maybe my Sephora tab is high enough that I might want to invest in a dedicated vanity area.

You could even get so detailed as to have a clipboard with a sign in sheet for every single room in your home and ask the people you live with, including yourself, to sign in and out anytime you’re in that room. This is kind of an old-school way of pattern tracking. In the corporate environment, we will ask people to wear tracker IDs as bracelets that will actually document circulation patterns, over the course of weeks and months, to evaluate when there are rooms that might not be used to their full capacity and the associated times of day with peak use. One non-surprising piece of data from a lot of those studies is that the pantry or lunchroom gets really busy between 12-2pm. One not so obvious data point is that conference rooms are less busy in the afternoon than the morning, which may highlight that the lunchroom can be used for informal internal meetings in the morning, if all the other conference rooms are booked. 

This type of information is also collected observationally, which in the corporate world means someone walks around between rooms, counting the number of people in each room, every hour for at least a few days. You can also set up a time lapse camera in your home to monitor things like how often the microwave is used.

Now like I said, a designer may put together fun charts and graphs for their clients to summarize their data findings, which you can also do if that’s your kind of thing, but you can also come to you own ah-ha conclusions simply by reviewing the data.

The point of this exercise is to highlight that we all have patterns, and those patterns don't always take up every square inch of our space. It can be easy to forget that there might be an unused storage room or a guest bathroom or space in the basement that could be re-purposed in a way that would better support you. It also highlights which rooms get the heaviest use, an indicator of the rooms that would be the most satisfying to update, because you're always in them. Someone who really wants a brand new kitchen, but spends 80% of their day in their home office, may actually benefit from making sure they have the best natural light in their office or even relocating it to a more quiet space or getting a more ergonomic desk before jumping into a full blown kitchen upgrade.

The observations may affect flow and layout of a home, if you’re planning big changes. The suburbs are car centric  and so many people enter their homes by driving their car into the garage, closing their garage door, and then entering their home through an inner door between the garage and their house. This is a pretty common circulation pattern, not everyone does this, plenty of folks still park their cars in the driveway or street and enter through the front door, but a fair amount of people find themselves rarely using their front door. However, the vast majority of suburban homes still have a prominent, decorative, featured front door. The front door is a focal point on the facade of the house. It’s welcoming, it often adds a hierarchy point and a basis of symmetry. People love agonizing about what colors to paint their front doors and what seasonal decoration will be hung on it. And yet, there are people who never use this entrance. In design, making something a focal point always needs to have a purpose. If we make the front door a focal point, it’s because it’s a hub of activity. The same could be said for fireplaces, these served as major gathering points for families in cold months, but many people don’t even use their fire place, but they still treat it like heart of their home. 

Knowing that this is simply a traditional element that has fallen out of function, the opportunity to relocate the front door arrises. By moving or even eliminating the front door gains back precious wall space in the interior living areas. We get better thermal insulation, acoustic protection, and suddenly many new layout and flow options become available. What would a suburban home look like if the garage entrance was actually celebrated for the amount of use it gets? In fact, many modern homes do just this, and have side door entrances that intentionally serve as the main entrance to the home. One of Frank Llyod Wright’s iconic prairie style homes, the Robie House, just outside of Chicago does exactly this. From the street, it’s unclear exactly where to enter the home, but this creates an extra level of privacy for the home owners and supports their lifestyle.

On the flip side, if the person living in a home entertains often, or loves having their neighbors drop by, this may not be the right solution. Guests need a clear and designated entrance, so the front door comes back into play and once again serves a purpose. It’s not that one way is better than the other, it’s about supporting your unique way of living. 

Data can also help us consolidate. You may realize you are spending way more time in a specific room and rarely using other rooms in your house. You may not need to have a TV in your living room and your bedroom, because you realize you are really only using one of those locations. And when a TV is removed an opportunity for storage appears. You may also realize adjacency needs. For instance, the whole idea of having an open kitchen is so that whoever is cooking can interact with anyone in the living room. But if the person doing the cooking likes to stay really focused when they work, having the kitchen open to a highly social area might not be the right way to go. Many of these ideas you may understand intuitively just from day-to-day living, but doing a deep dive and writing it all down almost always reveals new information that can help solve underlying problems.

If you’re data-curious, try a simple SWOC analysis of a single room in your home. Write down the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges for that particular space. This is a tried and true exercise that will help you identify key points that you can use to build your custom solutions. The SWOC exercise is kind of the gateway into the world of facilitated conversations, and these conversations are an amazing way to gather data.

How do you use data in your everyday life? Have you thought about using it to design your spaces? If you enjoyed this episode, let me know by writing me a review on Apple Podcasts and hitting the five star rating - it helps other listeners find this podcast, so we can grow our community.

Keep doing what you’re doing, stay curious, have an awesome day, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.