Room data sheets provide systematic overviews of the building’s requirements and play a crucial part in planning and design as well as project development. They aid in communication and quality control as well as assist in managing change.
They are generally created during the briefing (architectural programming in the US) phases of a project in order to convey the client’s requirement for each type of space. They are then utilized to create specifications that help design teams and contractors to determine what the client would like from the space and make sure that any proposed solution meets their requirements.
Typically architects create room information sheets by conducting interviews with their clients and other stakeholders. They are often a work in progress and may remain a living document’ until the design team have reached an agreement on them.
When creating a data sheet to the space, it’s important to to categorize everything as general or “specific”. For example, a general requirement might be that the office must be soundproofed to a certain degree, while specific requirements might include things like:
With Layer’s standard digital rooms template for data sheets and pre-defined list of picklists, you can record all the necessary information in a simplified and efficient manner. This helps designers think systematically and consider all requirements, reducing the chance of forgetting or omitting something. When you connect your data sheets with an IFC floorplan it is possible to create adjacency charts to understand how requirements are transformed into spatial solutions.