Architectural design often feels a lot more like solving a puzzle than finding an inspiring solution. It's what architects and designers call iterative design: we start out with one idea, then build on it, put it aside, try new combinations, constantly evaluating what we have. In my experience, "iterating" is the core of the entire design process. Here, I've taken my trace paper sketches, and broken down the sequence of design I took while working on the layout of my future apartment.

Although the process wasn't quite as coherent as this, I've organized the sketches into Schemes, which are different apartment-wide configurations, and Iterations, in which I further develop the schemes. Although it's a bit tedious, I found it very helpful to develop a taxonomy for how I name the schemes: "Schemes #", iteration (letter), Hyphen as we delve into rooms "1 & 2", then iteration (letter) for each of the sub-room iterations. For example, "Scheme 3A-2C" would be iteration "C" of room "2" in iteration "A" of "Scheme 3." Don't worry, it doesn't actually get that complicated, but some designs can be, so I like having a system that could potentially handle it.

Scheme 0

I started by trying to rework the laundry configuration, an area I knew would have the most restrictions. I wanted to add a changing room to the shower so that it could have separate access from the bathroom. Because the space is so tight, however, every alteration would have to be taken into account. For instance the only entrance to this room would have to move, this in-turn would make washer-dryer access (not shown, but it's next to the sink) very cramped.