Creating and maintaining standards for your next commercial design project.
As a commercial design professional, you’re likely familiar with standards – established guidelines or specifications that help ensure health, performance, safety and brand identity goals are met on interior design projects. Using standardized products and materials can help streamline the design and construction process, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Standards might be as simple as a list of preferred brands and manufacturers that a firm uses or as detailed as a hospitality chain that has preselected sets of finishes that give their hotels a familiar look no matter where in the world you visit them.
However, organizing and maintaining a library of materials that fits your firm’s or client’s standards can be challenging. Below are some best-practices for setting and maintaining commercial interior design standards.
Part 1: Setting a purpose or a goal for your standards
If you do not already have a set of standards for your finishes and products or are looking to rethink and refresh current standards, here are a few ways to get started:
Identify any non-negotiables.
Consider any pre existing guidelines or sustainability commitments that your firm has in place. For example, if your firm has committed to going PVC-Free within the next 3 years, starting now to build a standard that is free of PVC products is an easy and necessary step to achieving that goal. Some firms have committed to increasing the amount of materials they specify that are from certified minority women owned businesses (MWOB) – so making sure you have a representative amount of materials in your library that are from MWOBs would be critical.
Another unfortunate, but realistic “non negotiable” might be a specific vendor or manufacturer who’s quality or service you’ve found unsuitable for use on future projects. While you might not want to write them off forever – having a record of poor performance can be helpful when curating a preferred list of manufacturers for your standards.
Refine goals for your standards by vertical.
Often standards have specific technical requirements that are set by local governments or associations – for example, if you were setting up standards for hospitality projects, ensuring that the drapery you include in your standards meet NFPA 701 guidelines and any additional restrictions that local building codes or ownership group may require. Creating sub-catalogs of standards tailored to the verticals your firm works in the most is often helpful to newer specifiers or designers who are often overwhelmed with options. For example, K-12 Education Standards often include materials that are highly durable, easy to clean and maintain, and contribute positively to the health and safety of students and teachers. A materials library for these types of projects often includes sports flooring, lockers, steel doors and even theater curtains.
By focusing on each vertical and their needs and commonly used materials, you can help create a set of standards that ensures the right products are being selected for the right applications.
Seek guidance and inspiration from other professionals and organizations.
There are many great resources to help you create your first firm standards for specification – from professional trade associations like International Interior Design Association (IIDA) to conversations with your local manufacturers representatives.
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When setting your goals, consider engaging with groups who will be actually using the space or type of space you are designing for early – find out what’s working or not working for them and think about how to create solutions for this group before specification truly begins.
Part 2: Building out a library of your standards (digital + physical)
Now that you have a goal or objective for your standard(s), it’s time to start putting it all together. Below are steps to help you materialize your design standards:
Creating a digital library of your standards.
There are various ways you can document your standards and give your team background on the “why”, what types of projects it should be applied to, etc. When starting to create your digital catalog you can use Source to build out a searchable digital catalog that your whole team can access.
Source’s “My Catalog” feature allows you to quickly build out your own digital catalog by selecting brands, series, attributes or individual products you want in your catalog. You can then search within your catalog to begin adding products to a project or ordering samples. Your whole firm will be able to access the catalogs you create (or you can keep them private if you prefer!).
🔔 Learn more about “My Catalog” from Source here!
Organizing your physical materials library by standard.
Now that you have your standards documented, reflecting that in your own physical library is an important step to help keep your team on track with specifications. The simplest way to begin is to organize your physical library by application or product type – then within those top-level categories you can begin to create a system for organizing by brand, attribute, or specific set of standards.
Some firms will choose to only have items within their libraries that meet a set of standards (i.e. a PVC free library) or others will use stickers, labeled shelves or other easy-to-read indicators to mark the samples. This is a great project to consult with your local sales representatives on and enlist them to help you conduct a review of their current samples and refresh or label their samples as necessary. Source’s Rep Connect database allows you to contact all your local sales reps in a quick 1-to-many message that you can use to help you quickly schedule these updates with reps.
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Part 3: Updating and maintaining your standards regularly
Conducting regular reviews of your standards and ensuring you add new products to your digital and physical library is an important step in the process. Below are some suggestions on how to make sure you stay on top of updates and maintenance:
Regularly review new materials that fit in your existing standards.
Set a monthly or bi-monthly time on your calendar to review your standards. If you are using Source’s “My Catalog” feature to manage your digital catalog you can simply go to your “My Catalog” page and see when you last updated your catalog and use the refresh button to bring in all new products that meet your selected standards to that catalog.
You can also stay updated on new products or learn more about changes to certificates and labels by attending trade shows, attending product updates from reps (like our weekly 20 minute Source Snack Breaks), networking with peers and being involved in professional associations or reading industry publications.
Be open to change and document exceptions
As much as you try to adhere to a set of standards, there will certainly be times when it’s not possible to do so – whether it’s due to product availability, clients requests or budget. When these situations arise, it’s important to make sure your firm has a process for how to document these exceptions and obtain written approval for them. If you are creating your projects on Source you can easily add notes to your specifications to indicate why an exception was made. During your reviews of your standards you can also set aside time to review exceptions that have been made and see if there's a gap in your standards or recurring set of exceptions being made that you want to address.
In Conclusion:
Writing and maintaining standards can help you have more consistency in your work, provide guidance to new team members who are making specifications and ensure your projects are contributing positively to the well-being of those who will be using the space. Source is here to be a resource for you to use to build out your standards, easily search and sample within those standards and ultimately help you bring your projects to life.
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