Pages Posted, Hell Is Still Toasty

Sounds like a headline from The Onion^®.

The other night I posted 3 pages, thus starting the "How to Design Houses" section on my website. Really all I accomplished was an introduction to the program, which is the list of things you want included in your design. In software terms, it is the customer's requirements, both functional and non-functional. We would also call them 'design constraints'.

Of course, the list is incomplete, but that's not a bad thing. No one can think of everything. Actually, the fact that I need to go back and add things to the program is indicative of the real life process. And in this particular case, it highlights the benefits of using an iterative approach to the design process. Since we don't expect to get it right the first time, it lessens the pressure simply to be perfect and allows us refine as we go without being unnecessarily restrained into insisting that everything be perfect, all the time.

I dunno, I have this tendency to want everything just so. It gets me into trouble, and it also keeps me from finishing things when I want to. I just keep revising, and revising, and ...

I think I'm going to post edits to the pages as addendums at the bottoms of the pages, with inserted bookmark links where I've made changes. I will strike out deleted things (as long as that's practical) and when I revise images, I'm going to keep the 'before' version along with the 'after' version. That way everyone will know when I've changed my mind. And as well, everyone will know that design is a process that is (probably) never complete.

Stay tuned.