Architectural Firm Infographic

6/26/2016

One of the key influences on Architekwiki is the amazing complexity of what architects need to know or at least be conversant with. When I started my own firm I struggled with keeping tabs on all the topics that arose and which I needed to learn about. Pretty quickly I decided that everything fell into four broad categories - Administration, Production, Marketing and Finance. I don't like those terms any longer, but my filing system dictated that I keep using them.

Nowadays I use the terms Management, Design, Business Development and Finance. But that is only the tip of the iceberg.

This is the graphic that I used on Architekwiki's home page back in 2012 to illustrate the complexity of architecture. 18 topics. My grade: "Could Do Better".

That effort was replaced by a Word Cloud that you can still find on the ABOUT page. It looks a bit better (I think); but, even though it contains twice as many topics, it is still way short of the true list of topics we need to master.

That brings me to my latest effort. I was playing around on my iPad with a new tool called iThoughts, a mind mapping app. (Very well done app BTW.) This time there is another doubling of topics - or more - and additional organization. If you would like a copy of these, click here to download a zip file containing all of the images.

Clicking any of the images in this post should enlarge them. This download is four versions of the new idea as PDFs.

I am certain to have overlooked something. Let us all know in the comments. If I get a moment, I will update the images.