Drawings

Checklist

I. Analysis

The audience for drawings in the construction industry includes virtually every stakeholder in the project life cycle, including:

• The end users of the project - the client side and their constituencies

• The design team - architects, engineers, surveyors, designers, and all related project design disciplines

• The construction team including contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and especially design/build installation trades (e.g., fire sprinkler)

• Agency stakeholders including all governmental approving agencies

• Finance stakeholders: bankers, appraisers, legal counsel

II. Evaluation

Content

The range of drawing types typically involved in the construction process include:

• • • Diagrams and Graphics - used to illustrate process or relationships, such as bubble diagrams, flow charts, graphs, etc. or to create/reflect/evoke a mood, brand or image

    • Surveys - graphic representations that legally depict the characteristics and limits of the property and its condition(s).

    • Schematic design - rough, approximate drawings with limited detail demonstrating concepts and ideas responding to the programmatic scope.

    • Design Development drawings - more detailed drawings than schematic design, but less detailed than full construction documents that illustrate the programmatic scope and conceptual aesthetic of the project, along with more precise length, width, depth (LWD) demarkation.

    • Construction Documents - detailed drawings of the project reflecting the parts and pieces assembled to make the whole of the project, and perhaps only limited prescription of how the project is to be built (means and methods)

    • Shop drawings - drawings prepared by a supplier/subcontractor reflecting the scope and often minute detail of their contracted work, hopefully in relation to immediately adjacent conditions.

    • Operational drawings - depiction of the ways in which the building systems are to function and be operated and maintained, usually part of a set of close-out and commissioning drawings.

Context

The biggest challenge in communicating with drawings is that not every stakeholder actually understands drawings in the same way as the maker, so choosing the right type of drawing for the level of complexity appropriate to the stakeholder audience is critical. The classic example is that clients and users can see a "pretty picture", but may not be able to translate that picture in a way that confirms how they expect to use the facility - in other words "spatially challenged." To meet stakeholder expectations, it is critically important that the right drawing appropriate to the users likely level of understanding be used.

A highly technical drawing submitted to a user that knows nothing of "reading" drawings needed to describe the space they intend to use is not worth the effort - a simpler way of communicating is needed. Likewise, a drawing lacking in detail given to a contractor will result in many questions and possibly mistakes resulting from a misinterpretation of the intent of this insufficient drawing.

The key: Match the level of detail in the drawing to the users' capacity to understand them.

Format

• • • Drawing formats are largely governed by the creator of the images. In certain circumstances, such as in governmental procurement, the actual drawing standards are specifically guided, such as CAD standards. The more we convert to virtual design and construction, standards will develop that guide the model outputs. However, for purposes of this guide, we will instead consider the application of drawings when incorporated within written documentation.

    • Greater application of digital media (.pdf formats, for example) means that drawings can now be routinely embedded within text or as separate pages of a standard format document. The use of reduced format drawings from their original scale is now quite common, for example, the use of 11"x 17" drawing sets produced for convenience of size and mobility of a hard copy. Care does need to be taken to verify the file size of a digital Image within a document when sending via email. This is less of a concern when uploaded to a cloud-based host site.

Appearance

• • • When incorporating drawings within text or within a hard copy document or a presentation, the most important rule of appearance is legibility - be sure to consider the size and clarity of the image when reduced.

    • If the image is too large and thus to read, consider it as an appended attachment, or broken down into a series of smaller, more legible images.

    • When applied to a .pdf document and the image is contained in text, image clarity is still important due to the inconvenience of re-sizing the image as an interruption while reading.

    • When incorporating schedules, graphs, and charts within text, clarity is again key. Narrative elements of the image must still be legible. Often, a schedule is shown in all its glorious line-item detail, only to be impossible to read within a text document or presentation slide. Consider a summary, or "rolled up" schedule format in a more graphic form rather than the standard scheduling software output.

    • Color and patterns within images is very inconsistent when the same image appears in different formats. Consider how the document is to be used and distributed when color is important. If in doubt, test it out.