Ian D Thompson
Architect

I trained as an architect, and the work still begins the same way: with a spatial challenge. Imagining a space or a form, moving around it in my head before any of it exists, working out how it sits inside its surroundings. That act turns out to be the same one I use on a technical project. You’re holding a system in your head — parts that have to work with each other — and you’re trying to feel where the strain is going to land before anything gets built.

Drawing and code are the basis of what I do. Both are ways of pinning an idea down precisely enough that someone else — a builder, a browser, me in six months — can act on it without having to guess. Documentation is what weaves the rest of it together: the conversation with the client, the sketch, the spec, the function. They’re all the same job in different forms. How clearly you do that part is most of the job.

What comes out of this work sits in two worlds. Buildings and interiors in the real one. Websites and software in the virtual. The aim doesn’t change much between them — design that responds to where it lives. A house has to answer to its site, its climate, and the people inside it. Software has the same problem with different inputs. I move between the two because each one teaches things the other can’t.

Ian D Thompson. RIBA | B. Arch (DBN) RSA