the interview process

Before we were spoiled by digital 3d modeling,
a perspectivist had to be judicious about choosing views.
If a proposed view was rejected, reconstruction could take hours! To avoid redraws, I developed two steps: the interview and view selection. Despite a technological revolution, this prelude remains crucial to creating useful presentation tools for my clients. It's still time-efficient to avoid redraws, but the unintended benefit of these steps is an awareness of the viewing context.

It's short-sighted to ignore the intended audience of an illustration. A concept illustration aims for a particular business outcome. I make every effort to interview the person who will be showing the drawing, the person "taking the heat" -- who is not always the designer. I question aspects of the design that will inform the illustration: should it reflect the visitor experience, the owner experience, the tenant experience, the customer experience, etc? What are the speakers' goals for the presentation? Are there any discussions we don't want to trigger?
What kind of light will best reinforce the presenter's message? What acoustic qualities of the space can be disclosed with visual cues? Who'd be in this space and how are they using it? The answers are not always what's assumed at first; this process examines the designer's objectives relative to those of the presenter.

A computer model does not perform this service.

As computer-generated perspectives became widely available in the 90s, I expected requests for hand-drawn renderings to disappear. Instead, a steady stream of commissions began: to re-create digital presentations that failed! Like structural engineers who visit earthquake sites or roofs collapsed by snow, asking why failure occurred can be very enlightening. On digital re-do projects, the interview process often turns up answers.