03 · Practice Resources
Working material, not commentary
Architects are being sold tools faster than the profession is developing judgment about them, and meanwhile the older craft nobody sells you is quietly going unpracticed. This section is for both gaps: things you can put on a desk Monday morning.
Status
5 of 8 published, free to adapt in whole or in part, with or without credit. The rest are committed rather than written.
These are working documents rather than finished ones. If one of them breaks when you put it against a real project, that is the most useful thing you could send me. hello@frankcauthen.com
Craft
The part that was never about production. What to decide, what to leave out, and how to keep looking at things properly.
- Standards sheet · in progress
The Document as Design
A standards sheet for making technical documents worth reading. Type, hierarchy, what to delete, and the difference between a page that was produced and one that was composed. None of it costs hours. All of it costs decisions.
- Field method · in progress
A Method for Looking
How to visit a building or an installation and record what it did to you, in a form that survives into a project two years later. The encounter cannot be measured. It can be noticed on purpose, and noticing is trainable.
Method
How to state what you meant precisely enough to be found wrong, and how to get an honest argument about it.
- Method + worked example
Brief Conformance Checklist
A method for restating a program document as requirements that can actually be tested, so a scheme can be checked against intent continuously instead of at milestones. Five tests, six steps, and a worked example.
Read it → - Protocol · in progress
Running a Design Review
The human version of the critique patterns. How to structure a review so it produces objections rather than agreement, who belongs in the room, and what a reviewer owes the person presenting.
- Pattern library
Critique Prompt Patterns
Eight prompts that make a model argue against a scheme instead of flattering it, each with what to supply, what a useful answer looks like, and how it fails.
Read it →
Practice
The questions a firm has to answer in writing, and the ones the profession has not answered yet.
- Scored rubric
Tool Assessment Rubric
Ten questions to ask any vendor, written from the design side rather than the IT side. Four of them are gates. Scored on the quality of the answers, because the software itself cannot be assessed from a demo.
Read it → - Model policy
Studio Policy Starter
Model clauses a practice can adopt, with commentary on why each is worded the way it is: confidentiality and client data, authorship and review, client disclosure, and what these tools are and are not for.
Read it → - Delivery-method matrix
Delivery-Method Notes
How the four delivery methods allocate the exposure machine-assisted work creates. The standard of care did not move, so the agreement you already signed decided who carries it.
Read it →