People

We’re working and designing for people. It’s not just us out there. The clients are people. The inhabitants are people. They have emotions and feelings, and we have to expect complications. People are hard to read. Difficult to understand and impossible to predict. You never know how someone might react to something. I was recently helping out a young couple with some design work. We meet at their home and went over their goals. It was going very well. I did several sketches to get to a scope of work and formulate a design proposal. The communication back and forth was great. When I sent the proposal, it was crickets. Maybe they were surprised by the fee. It was reasonable. You never know how someone will react to what you present. This proposal must have sent them into a spiral of questions. Will they actually make the project happen? This is an interesting lesson for me. If they don’t want to invest in the design, will they invest in the project. Will they do the right thing when it comes to the build out of the space. Most likely not. It’s again, unpredictable. We don’t know. Maybe they’ll do a fantastic job with the buildout but they just don’t value the design. Or they do value the design and they’re thinking about how they can afford it. Either way the communication has gone dark. When it comes to situations like this you can do two things. You can worry and think on it and not do anything or you can reach back out to them and see if they had any questions. Ensure they received it and understand what the next steps are. This is what I plan to do. Don’t let the conversation die. Until they tell you no. This happens all the time with us, we get timid. We shy away from asking the hard questions. Getting out there and selling. You have to push a little to get the actual no. Once you get the no, then fine. That project is not going to move forward until then you have to assume they are pondering the situation. You have answers to the questions they have. So reach back out and see if you can alleviate some of the insecurities they might be having with moving forward.

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People is an episode from Whitewash Studio Architecture Podcast by T. Marc Sawyer, AIA: Architect and Design Professional.

This episode is 2:28 long.

This episode was published on Dec 1, 2019.

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