I took some time over this long Labor Day weekend to catch up on some of my blog and other online reading and discovered an Aug 20th, 2007 article in the The Wall Street Journal Online entitled View ImageA Model World: A Floor-Planning Program Proves Addictive,Because It Does and Doesn’t Reflect Real Life which was about an online floor planning tool called FloorPlanner.com.
Then again this morning I ran across an article on the Charles and Hudson entitled Top 10 Virtual Room Planning Tools which describes 10 more floor planning tools including our well known friend SketchUp.
That said while I recall a recent discussion in one of the Journal of Light Construction Online forums here about an idea for online design collaboration in order to provide clients with “free” design my own personal thinking is just having CAD tools or floor planning tools like these does not make a contractor a qualified designer. It just means they have the tools.
But still they are relatively inexpensive and helpful tools so I thought I’d post the information.
Replies
The line in the past that has resonated with me, and that I now repeat, is that I don't do floor planning, I do space planning. Floor plans miss the mark so often that I instinctively cringe when I see floor plans from prospective clients. But we always find ways to work it out. Tools that focus on the floors, to the exclusion of the wall and roof lines; or the shell, to the exclusion of the layout; give the client a false sense of completion.
It'll be interesting to see how the design-your-home-via-a-kiosk sort of stuff will develop over the next decades.
I use SU quite a bit to figure out known issues for my projects, to build working drawings so I'm not on the ladder hanging on by a toe & ciphering and it's also saved money in not wasting lumber during the process. I can draw rooms, walls, windows, things I can already see but it doens't give me the skill to create things from scratch and make them look good at the same time. On occasion I've come up with a good idea using SU but it was purely by luck and not skill.
Architetecture/designs skills aren't packaged with any of the software. Like you said, the software is a tool.