The Best Design Lesson I Ever Learned From a Mentor

I was twenty, showing a professor my first real floor plan.

I was proud of it. I’d spent three days on it.

He looked at it for maybe ten seconds.

“Where does the light come from at 4pm?”

I didn’t know.

I’d designed a beautiful layout and never once asked what the sun would do to it.

That question stayed with me longer than anything else from that year…

Not because it was clever. Because it was the first time someone showed me that good design isn’t about how a space looks on paper.

It’s about how it behaves, at 9am, at 4pm, in July, in December.

A room is never static! It changes with the hour and the season, and a designer who only designs for the render is designing for a moment that doesn’t actually exist.

I ask that same question now, of my own students, and of myself.

Not “does this look good.”

“What does this room do at 4pm.”

Every mentor leaves you with one question that outlives the lesson it came from.

That one’s mine. Journalising Designers Esha Bhandari