WHAT IS A CHARRETTE?
Adapted from century-old architectural practice, a charrette is an intensive collaborative process that aims to bring the entire system of stakeholders physically into a room together to create a range of new solutions for a given challenge. The emphasis is on moving between small work groups and the entire collective in fast, iteration-focused, and feedback-driven cycles of idea development.
As an outsider, but with a deep love of the place and respect for the community, Jean persevered, looking for opportunities to broaden the conversation, for reasons she explained:
There is no place more beautiful or soulful to me in the world. I feel so fortunate to be able to spend time here and so grateful. I believe that we care for what we love, and that is my motivation for the work that I do.
She learned that the IwB, with which she had worked in Dublin, was investigating rural areas and seeking a research location.
I thought the Iveragh Peninsula would be an ideal place for them to study, and I saw the opportunity for Iveragh to benefit from it. I also believed that this might be a way to enable the local communities to embrace a bigger picture and give them the opportunity to experience design thinking as an approach to problem solving.
She approached a fellow committee member, the former school principal Michael, and introduced the idea to him. Together, they approached the chief executive of the Kerry County Council, Moira Murrell, to explore the possibility of working on a project with the IwB. The council secured a small grant from the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland to invite the IwB to Kerry to make a presentation to Moira and her senior team. The IwB facilitated a workshop called Imagining Iveragh, which used a design thinking approach to explore the challenges of the region and to work collaboratively to define themes for the IwB’s research. It was organized with the help of Noreen O’Mahoney from the Kerry County Council and Barry MacDevitt, CEO of Design TwentyFirst Century. They invited more than fifty people to attend, from the various communities as well as from state and university sectors, and Moira gave the go-ahead for the IwB to utilize Kerry in its 2015–2016 research.
Having seen the combination of design thinking and the charrette process before, in a project for the Dublin City Council, Jean was enthusiastic about the power of coupling these two methods:
I have evidence to see that design thinking works; I have seen it firsthand. Taken together, design thinking and charrettes give people the opportunity to work through complex problems together in a short period of time. My experience is that some extraordinary things can come out of even a week’s work using the methods of design thinking combined with the charrette.
The IwB director and dean of the Centre for Arts, Design and Information Technology, Luigi Ferrara, analyzed the Iveragh situation:
In Kerry, you have the classic condition of an agrarian area, developed in a magnificent way in that agrarian era. It’s a spectacular setting full of history, suffering the effects of global centralization, with the resources of agrarian life depleted. The industrial era has passed it by; the postindustrial is passing it by. We’re trying to work with Kerry to reimagine projects that would reenergize and revitalize the region and actually bring new flows of global interaction into the region. We’re trying to redesign the relationship of the local and the global to make it a favorable relationship, instead of unfavorable.
Helping Communities Move Forward
The question of how to help communities come together to address challenges has been of interest to researchers and community organizers for decades. The complex and interrelated problems they face make the challenge of fostering productive, in-the-moment conversations that nurture sustainable improvements problematic. As early as the 1950s, social activists were experimenting with bringing community members into complicated conversations around issues such as public health, transportation, and economic revitalization. Methodologies like community search conferences and, more recently, World Café surfaced. All share with the charrette method an emphasis on broad participation within a structured and intense conversation format. But many of these efforts have been stymied by predictable challenges: achieving cooperation across entrenched interest groups, bringing coherence and closure to conversations that can go in circles, and creating local ownership of solutions to maintain momentum.
To improve these results, design thinking contributes a set of tools for structuring the conversation that encourages a strengthened sense of community, along with alignment, local ownership, and action around a particular new future. Together with a charrette format, it has the potential to build momentum and optimism around new designs, rendering subsequent implementation of the proposed solutions more likely.
We have emphasized that one strength of design thinking is its insistence that we immerse ourselves in the problem space and ask What is? in ways that allow people with diverse perspectives to come together to develop a less parochial, more nuanced view of current reality. But communities can become so mired in discussions of problems that it can be a deterrent to moving forward; it is possible to stay too long in the conversation about today’s problems. Design thinking also insists on movement from What is into What if and a discussion of testable solutions. In this way, design thinking advances the conversation along a specific timeline, forcing a search for alternatives and an action orientation to pursue them. This focus on generating new possibilities, rather than just endless analysis of problems, pushes people out of theoretical debates and toward action. This focus on action is, in Luigi’s view, critical:
One of the reasons I think charrettes are so successful is because you have to produce something. That forces your thinking. It is easy to stay safely in the debate space and never have your hypothesis interact with reality to get feedback about whether or not it is true. This is what makes everything slow down. It’s what paralyzes bureaucracies. You can debate forever. This is where design gets interesting. You have to translate your sentiment into an embodiment that others can see. A fundamental part of design is making things sharable in the world. That forces collaboration, because you have to agree on an output. And that changes the thinking. You can say we want to be the world’s best city, but that is really empty until you confront the design challenge: operationalizing the value. So what is the best city? All of a sudden, a bunch of qualities come out, and those qualities need to be shared.
As he pondered what made his experience with the IwB different, Michael noted exactly this dynamic during the Imagining Iveragh project:
This was a very interesting exercise that made us think in a different way. We’d been analyzing and defining the problem for years. This conversation was about solving the problem. It meant that there could be a solution. Maybe our problems weren’t just an inevitable part of society evolving that we just had to accept. In those previous discussions, we had been concentrating on our difficulties rather than our strengths. This focus made us think about possibilities instead. There were reasons for the children to come back! It showed us there were things we could do.
Luigi added:
When you are in a charrette process, you have to commit. You have to go beyond “I want to make nice things for people” and show them how. This moves you beyond good intentions into the world of effects, where you can gauge, measure, and get feedback. That’s the super power of design. Otherwise, there’s no evidence; there’s no test of whether anything works. You just remain in an endless loop.
Chris Pandolfi, IwB academic lead and faculty member, described a charrette as the opposite of design by committee, where people react and comment on the design of others. In a charrette, designers co-create and become invested in the project. It is “design with stakeholders,” he explained, as opposed to “design by experts.” Design experts have solid input, but so do government officials, students, businesspeople, seniors, journalists, and marine biologists, as in Kerry’s case.
The Charrette Process
In July 2015, a yearlong collabo
ration began between the IwB’s faculty and students and the Kerry community. After a series of charrettes and continued iteration of ideas, Kerry locals and the IwB faculty and students created a strategy for addressing the region’s troubles.
Preparing for the Charrette
The IwB works behind the scenes to make their charrettes productive and to keep momentum going throughout the process. Heather Daam, IwB academic project coordinator, explained:
The co-design and feedback from the locals come in a lot of different forms. You get so many different perspectives, and then, as soon as you go out and speak, new stories come out. In approaching people who haven’t been primed or networked before, their reaction offers a lot of input.
The IwB argues that formal training in design skills is not needed to produce a successful conversation. Luigi explained:
Design is done by everybody. There are acts of design in everything you do. There’s an act of intention when you structure the world around you to achieve certain things: the choice of clothes, where you live, how you live. Design is embedded in everything. It’s like the fundamental shared language. That’s why it is so invisible. But when you force people to engage and to work together to design, their hidden design skills emerge.
IMAGINING IVERAGH PROJECT TIMELINE
July 2015: IwB faculty travel to County Kerry to meet interested parties, including the Imagining Iveragh steering group, and to learn how locals envision their own future. From a one-day workshop, the IwB begins developing a design brief, identifying four areas of opportunity.
September 2015: IwB students in Toronto are introduced, via Skype, to Kerry policy makers and begin studying existing data. Over the next two months, students design proposals as part of their curriculum modules and simultaneously develop the Kerry charrette’s design brief, based on the project opportunity themes identified in July.
November 2015: A dozen IwB graduate students, supervised by IwB faculty members, spend eight days doing field research work via meetings with local Iveragh stakeholders at area tourism and economic sites, including archeological sites, schools, and tourism businesses, and a bus tour of the famed Ring of Kerry. Next, undergraduate students from two Irish universities join the IwB students, and a five-day charrette process kicks off with a short trip to four specific sites, one in each of the four opportunity areas. Students meet with interested local residents, policy makers, and businesspeople. Assisted by locals at key moments during the charrette, the students brainstorm ideas and conclude the charrette with presentations to all.
February 2016: At the Toronto International Charrette, an annual IwB event that brings together more than two hundred students, faculty, and industry experts from organizations around the world, the Kerry charrette concepts and curriculum module are further developed, alongside new ideas, into detailed project proposals for sustainable economic development in Iveragh.
June 2016: The IwB produces final concepts and presents a detailed proposal to representatives of the project partners.
The outcome of deep preparatory research is what the IwB refers to as the “brief,” a detailed document that includes an itinerary aligning charrette teams around specific opportunities and guiding them through the process of generating innovative ideas. An IwB brief includes guiding principles for making decisions and working through potential solutions. As participants build on prior data and ideas, thinking is expected to evolve, requiring new briefs.
Imagining Iveragh Kicks Off
Beginning in July 2015, the IwB held a one-day workshop in Iveragh to kick off its design process with key stakeholders, active residents, and other state and academic individuals who might be interested in or have expertise to offer the project. During this time, they also invited any and all into a weeklong design session with international college students, later that fall. Jean was impressed by both the variety of participants and their enthusiasm:
We had parents of young children; we had academics, farmers, and people from county council who, when we identified problems, came in with funding. We were absolutely delighted. The county CEO and her team and others, like tourism-focused Failte Ireland, came. They saw the bigger picture and heard ideas that they hadn’t thought of themselves.
Luigi offered:
It’s enthusiasm that generates the most innovation. It’s the commitment. If it was just expertise or intelligence or knowledge, then the most successful people in the world would be people with the highest marks in high school. What makes people truly successful is lack of fear and the willingness to commit. If you’re not committed, you don’t succeed. The willingness to go beyond your comfort level and create together is crucial. No one becomes successful on their own. That’s very rare.
Attendees shared some of their perspectives on both the pain and the joy of their reality in Kerry, each unique to the individual. “In the rush to industrialize farming, we’ve lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity,” one farmer told the IwB.
“Even after decades of seeing the same scenic views, when you take a moment to stop whatever it is that you’re doing and just look upon the water, sometimes it feels like you’re seeing it for the first time, and I love that,” a housewife offered.
“It’s ironic that hotels and restaurants don’t support and buy from local farmers and want to increase tourism at the same time, when what the scenery tourist comes for is highly dependent on farmers grazing the land,” a bartender pointed out.
On the basis of these initial conversations and the results of the workshop, the IwB faculty identified four areas of opportunity to be explored:
1. County Kerry as a destination. Imagine County Kerry as a destination rich in history, cultural events, and ecology that entices different types of visitors and tourists. The notion of County Kerry as a destination will be explored, with a strong focus on lengthening the tourism season, creating an environment that entices young people to settle in the region and establish roots.
2. Science and ecology in Kerry. There is a timely opportunity to create a systematic plan to make County Kerry a leader in research and knowledge in the field of science and ecology, and to capitalize on this role with ecotourism. Harnessing the region’s ecological importance can result in economic development at both the public and private levels.
3. Culture and heritage in the Kingdom of Kerry. County Kerry is an important archeological and historical area. The region’s cultural and heritage assets can be used as a catalyst to make County Kerry an important site for the development and appreciation of Irish history and culture. Harnessing the value of the history, folklore, language, and traditions of County Kerry will empower the community and set the stage for cultural and economic development.
4. Innovation and new industry in Kerry. There is an opportunity to explore the assets of the county and how they can be used to develop new types of industries, such as in the areas of energy, farming, communication, and technology. Sustainable economic development in County Kerry requires better interregional communication and more partnerships with the rest of Ireland, Europe, and the world.
Running the Charrette
Part of the IwB’s facilitation goal is to set a high bar. The faculty want to create a vision for transformational change while also managing expectations of what is possible, what it will take, and the time frame for implementation. Key to facilitating good conversations during charrettes are a simple set of engagement rules: respect for each other, a commitment to working together as equals, and a focus on a purpose larger than oneself. Facilitating a dialogue and setting the stage are key. For example, on the first day of a charrette, no one can say no. Team members are reminded that they can arrive at “no” later but also that minds are often changed and a higher-order solution based on the original idea may emerge.
In November 2015, the IwB returned to conduct field research and the first of the charrettes
. In this, each twelve- to fifteen-member team of IwB and Irish college students was dedicated to one of the four designated areas of opportunity. They then divided into smaller groups to analyze the area and share thoughts. All team members participated in the original definition of the problem, discussion of the design brief, and presentations to the larger student group and any interested locals. The IwB faculty felt that it was important to identify any interpersonal communication problems surfacing in the teams. Teams were reminded that everyone was working together, that ideas were welcome from everybody, and, finally, that difference makes life more interesting and produces a richer solution. As in other community-based methodologies, titles and hierarchical roles were minimized during the charrette process. Deep listening was the goal.
Brainstorming
A charrette’s intensive brainstorming sessions encourage participants to think outside the proverbial box. The IwB provides tools to keep participants on track without stifling creative thought, with each team selecting what works best for them. They offer no formula, just a variety of ways to nudge reasoning toward innovative but realistic possibilities.
The IwB suggests numerous tools and techniques to help participants think practically yet creatively. Many of these tools, like storyboarding and creating personas, are familiar design thinking tools. To kick-start brainstorming, the IwB emphasizes four tools in particular:
1. The flip. Flipping involves understanding the barriers that need to be overcome, making a list of them, and then identifying a bad way to deal with each one. Brainstormers are then asked to flip and identify the opposite approach. Besides providing fun for participants, flipping forces people to see things from different perspectives and gets creative juices flowing.
Design Thinking for the Greater Good Page 15
