I have watched every episode of Grand Designs and it’s a show I really enjoy. It’s basically about people building really fancy dream-houses. While watching I have discovered a small trend. The best houses are the ones that are designed by an architect. It is absolutely possible to design your own house from scratch and project manage or even build it by your own hands, the problem is that the result will suck and even the people who built it will realize it sucks once they fall out of that initial love (I have dealt with this problem many times when attempting to be a webdesigner). But if an architect does all the work, the customer is usually somewhat dissatisfied when everything is done because it’s not their house, their identity is not in the house, it’s the architects house. I want to solve that problem as well as provide entertainment to those that don’t want to actually build their own house, but might fantasize about it.
After watching like 13 seasons in a row of Grand Designs last year I wanted to play around with some house-designs myself so I downloaded ArchiCAD which is a professional architecture design-tool that’s really quite complex. I followed some tutorials and stuff so I could do the basic things, spending about 15 hours or so in total to design my humble abode.
Collaborative design by Me and Emma
That’s clearly not for everyone. Especially if you don’t want to break the law and download the software that would otherwise cost you about €2700 (took me like 30 minutes to finally find a retailer willing to actually give the price).
Aside from my fascination with Grand Designs we can see that designing houses is obviously a popular trend, take The Sims for example. That game is just about as much about designing your house as it is to raise and control a family. And it’s sold millions and millions of copies over the years.
So we have a huge market of people who like to design houses, just for fun; not because they actually want to build the house and live in it. And we have a lot of people who actually want to build their own houses but don’t have the competency to create and implement their own designs. But we don’t have any software that will easily let you design something with some what I would call quality of design maintained.
I think people are fascinated by potential, if they are going to thoroughly enjoy designing a house, they want to have the potential to turn it into something real in the future, that’s what I mean by quality of design. You can’t turn a Sims house into a real one because there are no real proportions, there are no real physical rules saying that a free roof span of 50 meters is impossible.
Therefore, I propose building an architecture tool for the common people. Market it like a game, price it like a game – give the potential to turn the results of your gaming-hours into something real.
Obviously it can’t be a real architecture tool because it’s way too complex and as I said earlier people designing their own houses without passing it through the filter of a real architect will produce something awful. It needs to be somewhere in between The Sims and ArchiCAD. It should have a magnificently large number of objects like wallpaper, chairs, lamps and so forth. This gives the player a way to fill the room and see if the size of the room is OK. There should even be people that you can steer around and make them sit and stand and everything so you can see how a human would interact with your design. This is very much like The Sims.
The software should unlike The Sims feature more real construction-methods, options of building walls at angles and level-changes, the user shouldn’t feel constrained with their designs. Most importantly it must feature real-life physics. There should be a very easy way to “box up” your rooms like in the sims, just draw walls and afterwards you can tweak things like wall-thickness, height and type of material. The physics engine will tell you if it’s possible to build like you are doing and will suggest changes (like: put in a pillar between two walls if the distance becomes too long). Objects interacting with the walls should behave dynamically, a painting hanging from a wall should move with the wall if the height of the wall is increased. All things should be completely unobtrusive so you can design your house really quickly and get into the nitty-grittys later-on if you feel like tweaking.
With a physics engine calculating to make sure that everything you’ve built is within a somewhat realistic range and with real materials being used in the drawings, you should be able to export a model of your home, send it to an architect and let them pretty up your design, move doors that are weirdly placed and increase or (more likely) decrease the size of certain rooms or wall-heights and such. Allowing your design to pass through the filter of a real architect with years of experience in how you build a pleasant living-environment but with the core and the heart of the design still representing yourself!
For those not actually interested in talking with an architect, there should be a super-simple way to create a simulation of you walking through your house, showing off different features and doing fancy animations of walls disappearing to reveal a floor-plan and stuff like you see in Grand Designs. When you’ve finished your little video showing off your awesome creation, it is immediately uploaded to your YouTube or Facebook account, showing all your friends how creative you are.
There is of course no limitation on space. When you’re done with one house, you move the camera to an adjacent piece of land and start building there! Feel like designing a sky-scraper? Why not design a whole city? One building at a time.
