A whole new way of looking at design

Site: New House

After our horrid experiences with first a Design-Build firm in 2010 and now an Architect in 2013, we had no idea where to go for the design of the expansion (master suite and Endless Pool) at our new house. Expending effort only to find a new architect who would also back-burner our non-million-dollar project at every opportunity was a non-starter. We had to get moving forward. But how?

I decided to log in to Angie's List and poke around for architect-types. Hmm. There's a highly rated firm with a ton of reviews and it's in downtown Houston? Really? Where?

Reading the review, I realize they are not in downtown Houston, but offer design services over the web. Hmm. I read the reviews.

Some people are unhappy with the business model, which is crowd-sourced architecture/design set up as a competition. You, the client, put up a monetary reward with your design requirements and you set a due date. At that due date, you judge (rank) the designs you receive based on how well they meet your requirements and how well you like them. 1st place is awarded 60% of the award money, 2nd gets 30%, and 3rd gets 10%. Then the results become public on the member's side of the website and everyone can see them. It's like hiring multiple designers to offer you solutions to the same issue because that is exactly what you are doing.

The satisfied customers give absolutely glowing reviews and explain that it requires substantial effort on your part, but you get out of it what you put into it. These designers are from across the globe and rely on you to answer questions about site measurements, things you might like, etc. We have no problem with that.

I visit ArcBazar's website. There are some very interesting projects on there, with some very creative design solutions. I'm intrigued. I start visiting ArcBazar periodically, really going through some of the projects to read over the design req from the client, read the exchanges between the client and the designers, and review the winning designs (as well as those that didn't rank).

We watch for a couple of months and decide that this is how we want to design the work to be done on our new house. Time to write up our requirements. Hoo-boy. I spent several weeks working on this in my spare time and then, last weekend, that is all either of us worked on.
We posted our competition Monday night, with a deadline of 8 weeks (we thought our project was too complicated to expect something sooner). As of Friday morning, we have 10 designers signed up from 4 continents. The site says that many designers won't sign up until near the very end of the project, when they know they will have something to submit (as they now get penalized in the points systems for signing up for a competition but not submitting a design). Our first entrant was from Albania. We now have 2 from Albania, 2 from US, and 1 each from Serbia & Herzegovenia, France, Mexico, Georgia (Republic of), Morocco and Nigeria. The general consensus is that 25-50% of the designers will actually submit plans.

Yeah, we're pretty excited about handling our design this way. The average number of designs you'll get is 9, though I've seen a few competitions lately with upwards of 2 dozen designers.

Our competition posting is available only to ArcBazar members, but signup to the site is free. If you are interested, you can create an account and see what we have requested. (If you do, let us know if you see anything that we missed!) It's a neat place to browse around, too.