Bubble Diagrams – A Useful Step in the Validation Process

Bubble diagrams are a useful design and analysis tool.  They help us understand space adjacency, layouts, and relationships, traffic flows, and relative space sizes among other things.  They are a visual tool for representation.  We can use them to help us understand aspects of the design problem we are trying to solve without investing huge amounts of time with complex and detailed drawings.  They can also be useful for ideation.

As a general rule, bubble diagrams are created after space adjacency analysis.  There should be one bubble for each space listed on the adjacency analysis.  The lines connecting those bubbles or the lack of lines are the depiction of the results of the space adjacency analysis.  Dark, heavy lines represent close or high adjacency, dashed lines may represent some adjacency, and no line obviously represents a lack of adjacency.  Sometimes in may be useful to actually sketch out a bubble diagram to help think through the space adjacency analysis.  Seeing the spacing represented as bubbles may help you to think through the relationships between spaces and make decisions as to how strong or weak the adjacency should be.

There are other things you can do with a bubble diagram to make it more useful.  You can draw them on top of a copy of the base plan.  This will give you some preliminary ideas about how the spaces will actually fit into the area you have to work with.  As mentioned previously making the bubble sizes larger or smaller to show the amount of relative space each will require is useful.  You just have to remember that the actual space layout is not likely to be a circle.  I have mentioned another technique in a previous post [Thumbnail Bubble Diagrams – A More Complete Portrayal] where you place a graphic such as a picture or drawing inside each bubble to represent what is actually going to be inside that space.  This technique simply provides an additional layer of visual detail to help with your analysis of how the space will function together as a cohesive whole.  It can also be useful if you are going to show the bubble diagram to the client for clarification or feedback.

With all of the potential benefits of bubble diagrams it is important to keep a couple of things in mind.  First, there are a lot of “rules” dictating how bubble diagrams should be drawn.  For example, no bubbles should touch or overlap.  No line should cross another line or another bubble.  These constraints are intended to make sure your bubble diagram makes sense logically and that the spaces flow or connect in a consistent manner.  It does not mean that your design implementation will follow those rules.

Second, the bubble diagram is a design and analysis tool.  As such you should validate you input into it’s creation and the output from how you use it.  As stated above, the bubble diagram is usually based on the space adjacency analysis.  You should use the space adjacency analysis to check off or validate that you have address every space and every adjacency and non-adjacency.  The same applies going on to subsequent steps.  You might do an overlay of your bubble diagram over various form compositions.  That in itself is a validation process.  The next most likely step is to create functional diagrams.  Again you should make sure that your functional diagram carries forward the adjacencies and other relationships expressed in the bubble diagram.