architectural programing: theprocess, the product & the information gathering

Architectural programing, an applied research and a process of decision making, is an important phase of architectural design process. Thus it must be regarded as “the basic activity” in architectural schools as well as in architectural consulting firms. Success in the design phase: preparing correct selection of spaces with accurate floor areas, appropriate organization of facility sources, defined relationships between the closed and open spaces, as well as suitable companion of the whole project with its context, depends on how the programming phase had been developed. To fulfill this attitude, the architect/programmer must be aware of the knowledge of architectural programming and have adequate professional experience in this field. The architectural programming texts usually consist of many subjects which gives the information about the history of this knowledge, the basic definitions, the literature, the scholars, the process of research, the methods of data gathering, the structure of the product, the other types of research in architecture activity, the programming design interaction in the design process, etc. In this article, the author tries to define three important subjects,” the process of programing”, “the structure of the program” and “the method of data gathering and analyzing the data”. In the first subject, the article defines eight steps which the programmer should take from the first meeting with client, till providing the programs final report and approval, the second subject presents the outline of the program, relying on the functional specifications of design product, and the third one indicates the type of questions, the type of sources and the method of achieving the information. To provide this article, as a part of series of articles on architectural programing, the author relied on universal literature of this field and then discussed it in architectural workshops and programming courses in architectural schools as well as utilizing it in practice in the last two decades, in order to achieve a simple language far from complications and misunderstandings, easy to be utilized in academy and practice.