In a diagram, a room can be a rectangle with one word in the middle. A door can be a gap. A person can be a dot, if the drawing needs people at all. These shortcuts are useful. They let us hold a large arrangement on a small sheet of paper and compare one possibility with another before anything has to be built or moved.
The difficulty begins when the shortcuts become easy to forget. A wide arrow looks like movement, though it says little about carrying a box around a corner. Two adjacent rectangles look conveniently connected, though one may need a desk, a cupboard, and a place for someone to stand. A drawing can establish a relationship without showing what it will take to live with that relationship.
There is a point in a design conversation when it helps to stop improving the diagram and start following it. Choose an ordinary reason to enter the space. Imagine bringing in a package, looking for a colleague, or setting down a wet umbrella. Keep the drawing open and trace the route at the scale of those actions. The exercise is simple enough to do with a finger on a page. It can uncover questions that a cleaner version of the same diagram would continue to leave unanswered.
