Charrette syndrome

Last week I had the privilege of being part of a team for a 6-day design charrette that kicked off a community visioning process for the District of Sechelt.

What is a charrette, you ask? Well, according to Wikipedia, it can be any collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem. In urban planning, "the charrette has become a technique for consulting with all stakeholders. Such charrettes typically involve intense, possibly multi-day meetings involving municipal officials, developers and local residents, …[and] promote joint ownership of solutions."

That's a pretty good description of what we did in Sechelt. Our session included several community meetings, two days of one-on-one interviews, and many hours spent distilling the information and classifying it into major themes. The results were then translated by the architect/planners on our team into sketches illustrating possible directions Sechelt might want to consider, and presented back to the community for feedback and refinement.

The project was headed up by my pal John Talbot (see below for an earlier job I did with him), and included his associate John Stark, four architect/planners, and moi as the graphic recorder. Talk about dream teams — I can't imagine a nicer, more supportive, more creative group of people — or more fun! (Ask the staff at the Blue Heron Inn, where we convulsed ourselves and the staff with our, um, high spirits!) As I said to John, if work was always this much fun, everyone would be thrilled to go to work each day. I feel very lucky to be doing work I love with people I love to work with.

Speaking of which, here's what I did at the charrette. Below are the left- and right-hand sides of a piece illustrating the results of interviews with high school students about what they liked and disliked about Sechelt, and their ideas for the future (click on any picture for a larger view):

And here's the piece I put together to illustrate the major themes coming out of the meetings and interviews:

(Sorry about the less-than-brilliant photography. I'm still learning to use my digital camera and haven't mastered the settings yet — and the lighting was too uneven to clean up in Photoshop as I did with the other two. I'm hoping to be able to rephotograph the image and touch it up properly.)

All in all, it was a wonderful and intense experience, and a great learning experience for me. Keep 'em coming!

This is your faithful scribe after the final meeting, where I did live recording of feedback from the participants (as opposed to after-the-fact recording, which the others were). Live work definitely keeps you on your toes, because there isn't much time to think. The trick, I believe, is to hone your listening skills to the point where you just know what needs to be recorded and what doesn't. I'm still trying to get down everything I hear! Well, it'll all come with practice...

Late night musings

A couple of days ago I visually recorded a session in Whistler, BC (am hoping I'll get permission to post the images here). Someone at the session told me that one of the things they loved about this process was the fact that they could see their thoughts taking concrete shape almost as soon as they uttered them. There must be something magical about seeing your words materialize into images as you speak them, because this is something I hear almost every time I do this work. It's not the same when only words get recorded. People do that at meetings all the time, and it doesn't generate the same kind of excitement.

Clearly there's some kind of alchemy that occurs when you add colour, images and symbols to the words. I'm trying to think of what it is (over and above what I said in my previous post) – and the image I come up with is baking a cake. You have your eggs, flour, butter, sugar and so on – but they don't become a cake until you put them all together in a particular way. And when you do – they combine to become something that is considerably more than the sum of their parts!

I hope that's not a totally dumb analogy. I'm hungry, so that might have something to do with it – but it makes sense to me… What do you think?

The picture above shows some of the tools of my trade.