Pre-design, or programming, is the first phase of architectural design. It involves determining architectural and real estate design objectives, as well as project restrictions, and using that data to define the overall scope of work. Pre-design is a crucial step that contributes to the effectiveness and efficiency of strategic workplace planning. It involves identifying your project goals as well as any constraints or restrictions on the project. Here are some of the key factors to consider in the pre-design phase.
Learn how to simplify programming
What is Pre-Design?
A workplace renovation or redesign project typically has five phases: pre-design, schematic design, design development, construction documentation, and physical layout implementation.
The first phase, pre-design, involves identifying your business’s goals and objectives and evaluating your data to determine the project’s scope, cost, and timeline. Some of the factors to be considered include your current real estate portfolio, workplace floorplan, and employee headcount. Carefully collecting and analyzing this data will help you determine the unique needs of your business and create effective objectives for your design.
How Does Pre-Design Work?
Pre-design involves considering key design factors to plan a more optimized, productive, and clutter-free workplace. Here are three steps to include in your pre-design phase.
-
Identify Design Issues
Pre-design primarily involves identifying issues in your current design or layout. These issues could be related to room occupancy, a lack of collaborative spaces, dead zones, or inadequate privacy.
-
Check Project Scope
Based on the issues identified, you can determine the project scope, which includes documenting specific goals, deliverables, tasks, costs, and deadlines.
-
Engage All Stakeholders in Decision Making
When developing the scope of your project, involve your stakeholders in the decision-making process to ensure that their goals are aligned with the design objectives.
Why Do You Need a Pre-Design Phase?
When planning the ideal office space, the pre-design phase is a crucial step for resource-optimized planning that creates a human-centric workplace. Here are some of the benefits of a thorough pre-design phase.
-
Field and Space Data Collection
The pre-design phase is where you collect all field and space data, including available square footage, floorplans, department headcount, and more. Accurately capturing and analyzing this information ensures that your design is based on a thorough understanding of your business and its growth objectives.
-
Align Design Changes with Insights and Data
In the pre-design phase, you can explore a variety of viable options for your workplace. This is your chance to test out different scenarios powered by data without incurring costly design changes.
-
Space Utilization Planning
The pre-design phase allows you to clearly determine the project scope based on the most resourceful and efficient utilization of your workplace, ensuring that not a single square foot is wasted.
-
Improve Employee Interaction with Space
Redesigning your workplace can improve employee engagement and productivity. During the pre-design phase, data about how your employees currently use space is comprehensively analyzed and used to develop goals for growth. The pre-design phase is where this gathering and analysis happens.
Key Features That Help You Pre-Design an Office Space
An effective workplace optimization platform simplifies the office space pre-design process. By leveraging key features, it reduces work hours and eliminates confusion among stakeholders.
An ideal pre-design software augments and automates the process, consolidating data seamlessly and updating it in real time to eliminate redundancies. Improved cost analysis and accurate project cost projections reduce change orders during design implementation, enhancing efficiency.
Such a platform enables you to plan your workplace strategy, perform test-fitting and design, and accurately predict your project’s timeline and cost, ensuring a smooth transition to the design and construction phase.
Optimize Your Workplace With a Comprehensive Pre-Design Phase
The pre-design phase is pivotal for the success of your workplace optimization project. Accurately analyzing relevant data and engaging stakeholders in goal-setting is crucial to keeping your project on schedule and within budget. Early determination of features to make your workplace appealing to employees helps establish clear design objectives.
Utilizing workplace optimization software can streamline your pre-design timeline and provide comprehensive data interpretation within a single platform.
FAQs
Pre-design is necessary because it allows you to identify key decision points early in the process. This phase is crucial for evaluating the impact of potential changes before they are implemented by a design or construction vendor. It enables you to estimate changes, costs, quantities, and project scope early on, thereby reducing the likelihood of change orders later in the project.
Factors considered in pre-design include available space, the number of employees, how they work, and their technological and aesthetic preferences. Analyzing this data using workplace optimization software helps plan the project scope, engage stakeholders in decision-making, and utilize space visualization and 3D architectural rendering.
Yes, a crucial benefit of pre-design is that it allows for greater flexibility in office space design. Unlike the actual design phase, which usually limits flexibility to maintain costs, the pre-design phase enables you to create and test-fit different scenarios and make informed decisions before moving on to design and construction.
Yes, the pre-design phase can include hybrid office designs, especially when using advanced, automated software. You can input data about the number of people working remotely and on-site in each department and space. This software can be integrated with Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS) to track HR systems, room bookings, badge swipes, and sensors, enabling the planning of an optimized hybrid workplace design.
