Space Program

The brief says forty-two spaces and a total. The plan, six weeks later, says something else, and the client meeting is about the difference. The program document is where target and actual sit side by side, space by space, so the difference has a location instead of being one alarming number. This keeps that document.

Scope and limits — read first

What this does. Maintains docs/program/program.md: one row per space with quantity, target area, designed area, delta, and the source each target came from. Captures targets from a brief you paste or type, records designed areas as you measure them, computes deltas and grossing arithmetic with the work shown, and reports where the plan stands against the program.

What this does not do.

• It does not know how big anything should be. No target areas, no planning ratios, no benchmarks per seat or per bed or per student. Every target comes from your brief or your client, with its source recorded. That is the design, not a gap.
• It does not measure your plan. Designed areas come from you or from a schedule you paste. It never estimates an area from a drawing.
• It does not choose a grossing factor. You state it; the net-to-gross arithmetic is shown with your number in it.
• It does not critique the brief. Gaps, contradictions, and unstated assumptions in the brief itself are brief-review's job; this tracks what the brief settled.
• It does not compute occupant loads. design-occupancy-load does, and can read areas from this file.
• It does not do adjacency planning or generate layouts. It records the adjacency requirements you state, as text on the row.

What you need before starting. The brief or room schedule, in any form you can paste, and the unit system it uses. Designed areas whenever you want the comparison side filled.

Workflow

Step 1. Bootstrap if needed

Check whether docs/program/program.md exists. If not, copy assets/program-template.md there and record the project name, the date, and the unit system the brief uses. If the project has no docs/ folder at all, confirm before creating one.

Step 2. Capture the program

One row per space type: name as the brief names it, quantity, target area per unit, and the source (brief page, meeting date, email). A space the brief names without an area gets a row with the target blank; the report counts those. Group rows by department or zone as the brief groups them.

Step 3. Record designed areas

When you supply measured areas, fill the designed column and compute the delta per row and per department, shown as area and as percent. Areas pasted from a schedule keep their stated precision; never re-round.

Step 4. Compute the totals

Net total from the rows. Then, only if you have stated a grossing factor or a target gross area:

Net program          <sum>        [from the rows above]
Grossing factor      <as stated>  [source: you]
Gross                <arithmetic> = <n>
Target gross         <as stated>  [source]
Difference           <n>, <n>%

No factor stated, no gross computed. The report says so instead.

Step 5. Report

Spaces over and under target, largest deltas first, by department. Then the gaps, stated before the totals: spaces with no target, spaces with no designed area, rows whose source is missing. A program that is 96% resolved reads very differently from one that is 96% of the spaces it happened to have numbers for.

Step 6. Track the movement

When a target changes, the old value moves to the row's history with the date and who changed it, and the source updates. The program at any past meeting stays reconstructible.

Rules

• Every target has a source. A target with no source is recorded, marked unsourced, and counted in every report.
• Show the arithmetic on every total and every grossing computation.
• Keep the brief's units and the brief's names. Translation between the brief's language and the plan's room names is recorded on the row, not done silently.
• State the gaps first in every report.
• Never fill a blank target from a similar project, a rule of thumb, or a web search.

Anti-patterns

• Supplying a target area because the space type is familiar. The familiar ones are the ones nobody checks.
• Estimating a designed area off a drawing instead of asking for the measured figure.
• Applying a default grossing factor.
• Reporting only the total delta when individual rows swing both ways under it.
• Overwriting a changed target so the history of the number disappears.

Resources

• assets/program-template.md — the file this creates, empty.

No reference files. The areas come from your brief and your plan, not from here.