Presentation drawings

These are the drawings through which designers
 communicate their work to clients and others from
 whom they may need some agreement, consent or
permission to continue.
They are characteristically intended to communicate
decisions about the design to others who may have
had no involvement at all in the design process.


 In some cases of course clients and users may have been involved to greater or lesser extents. However, the main purpose here is to convey information about the current state of the proposed design. This may be at what is expected to be the completion of the process or at some intermediate stage.
Thus the drawings are primarily intended to explain what the final building or product would be like when it was completely made and in use.
Examination of such drawings and their use suggests that designers may have two possibly incompatible intentions here. They might at the same time perhaps wish to reveal and yet also conceal. They may wish to convince the viewer of such a drawing that the design is at least satisfactory or, more hopefully, excellent.

The drawings presented in response to a design competition are most likely intended to impress, persuade and convince the jury.
 Drawings presented by architects to town planners in order to obtain planning approval might be expected to have similar objectives. We may assume that such drawings therefore are kinds of propaganda intended perhaps also to conceal weakness as much as to convey strengths in the design.
For these reasons for the purposes of this book, these drawings are of least interest since, by the time
they are produced, the design process is more or less complete, and because they may be the least reliably revealing of all the drawings produced.
Increasingly we are seeing that designers use computer techniques for producing these images. Such techniques, as we shall see in Chapter 6, often require a deliberate process of inputting information in a manner rather divorced from the process of thinking (Fig.2).

The example shown here in Fig. 2  is of a design proposal for a Hard Rock Café Hotel in Port Dickson
in Malaysia by the architect Ken Yeang.
 The computer model rendering has been carefully calculated to communicate particular and selected kinds of knowledge while remaining mute about others.