The Digital Dilemma

Over the past few weeks, I have begun the final lap of the race we call interior design grad school. I have spent hours away from loved ones, my job, my garden, and any sense of tangible serenity. All for a chance at a better future for myself, all while following a passion to create a better future for others through design.

Describing this experience as a race is very close to reality, and lately it feels as though if this is the Indy500, and I'm driving a Saturn Ion and everyone else is driving a V6 turbocharged, Italian something-or-other. Why might I feel this way? Technology moves fast, and the priveledged, the educated, the in-touch millenials all get first dibs. I'm all of the above, yet a little less so. All the design software "the kids" are using today is EXPENSIVE! I am so lucky to have the opportunity to return to school for an advanced degree and have access to this world of sleek, high-speed computer graphics. Yet, not lucky enough to load up the old Dell with these new bells and whistles, take them out for a drink, and get to know them a little more... My school has an excellent computer lab, and I have taken the opportunity to learn this new software in class. Even so, with my new skills learned in the Adobe Creative Suite aside, I needed to figure out how to bring my designs to life without them. As someone who works 35+ hours a week and slips away to attend a few class meetings throughout the week, a majority of my work has to get done in the evenings, after cooking dinner, after the dishes, after doing whatever else needs to get done, like, I don't know, laundy. And somehow before waking up at 6am and starting all over again. Long story short, I had a lot of design work to do, and I needed to do it fast, and I needed to do it cheap. I considered doing what I was used to, building in AutoCAD, then rendering everything by hand. I love hand rendering project visuals, it is something tactile that helps you get to know, through motion, the contours and textures of a space that you have created. I really enjoyed creating this one:

Though, I noticed that all recent graduates have been using solely digital rendering to show their spaces, and if I want to stay in the race, I must do the same. I would like to see what all the fuss is about. But how? Well, I tracked down some free, user friendly software that looked like it may be up to snuff, and went with it! No time to read the owner's manual when the race has already started! You just gotta get in and hit the gas pedal! I went with drafting in AutoCAD, building in Sketchup and exporting to Kerkythea. Here is one of the renderings as a result of this:

So, yes, I do like the way it looks in the end, but I can't tell you how many times I just wanted to print the darn thing out and attack it with a pantone marker. What was nice was that if you made a mistake, all you needed to do was fix it and regenerate the image. Paper was saved. But what about time? This one image above took about 60+ hours to create. That includes about 30hrs (a few weeks) to design and 3D build, about 25 hrs (another few weeks) getting all the colors, textures, and lights placed, then another 5 hrs total spent impatiently waiting for it to create an image, then tweaking lights/textures, and regenerating again. And I'm supposed to crank out about 10 of these things? I could have rendered the same image, with all details and shadows included, within a few evenings at home. And the plants would have looked like real plants instead of robo-plants.

Yes, this seems like a rant, but I want to be clear that I intend to continue to embrace digital rendering and continue to learn more about it. The question I am raising is, are we losing ourselves in this exciting new technology? Are the spaces we are shaping for the well-being of others, really only shaped by the computer technology at hand? Are we losing imaginative desgins, or fostering them? A small example being, I had to change a chair I had selected for the design, simply because there was no 3D block out there for it. It was the perfect chair, fitting into my design concept with its sweeping contours, but oh so difficult to build in 3D myself. So I scrapped it for another Knoll chair block. In my opinion, limits to software abilities should never inform the design decisions, and never impose limits on finding the perfect design solution for each client.

#digital #rendering #interiordesign #gradschool