What is a design charrette?

by VigneshArchitecture design, Holistic Industrial design, Integrated industrial design

A design charrette is a collaborative meeting during which members of a diverse team collaborate and sketch designs to explore and share a broad diversity of design ideas.

A design charrette is an intensive workshop involving the participation of all the members. In a complex project, the group is often divided into breakout groups with each having a different problem or challenge. These break out groups sit together and brainstorm to get a solution, which is then presented to the group.

The group comprises of members from various disciplines- often stakeholders of the project, design consultants, domain experts. A design charrette, in any industrial project, is a pivotal step to reach a balanced and integrated design. This forms the start point of a project and helps to achieve a buildable plan.

Best practices in design charrettes usually are collected as a handbook to be used for the future.

Objective:

The objective of a design charrette is to create a solution to the challenge posed.

A key objective of a design charrette is to reduce the time required for planning and conceptualization. A series of brainstorming sessions followed by sketching, and similar exercises and feedback sessions are held. This helps in bringing all inputs, suggestions on the table. Since multiple sub-groups are working simultaneously, the result is often a well-rounded design incorporating the best suggestions, ironing out the bottlenecks.

Time-Period:

The time-taken usually varies based on the size of the project. It usually takes a week to 10 days. The drawing of the plan and working of estimates take a bit longer.

As all the right people are available on the table, decisions are taken efficiently and quickly. The project thus takes off to a better start with minimal changes later.

Who is a facilitator?

A neutral person who focuses on guiding the team while ensuring that the team is taking actions. In other words, a facilitator keeps pushing to try new approaches & to bring about solutions.

What is the role of a facilitator?

The facilitator’s role includes the following:

To ensure that all participants add their inputs
He sees to it that there is only one conversation at a time.
The focus is always on ideas and issues.
A facilitator ensures concept-understanding for everyone, when a person is speaking
He ensures that the group doesn’t deviate from the topic of discussion.
Facilitator prepares a summary of the discussions held.
He helps in building a consensus, with all in agreement
Preparing a final design charrette report
Finally, get a consensus on the next meeting especially for which smaller design charrettes have been planned.

Once everyone is on the same page, the design process starts with

Creation of Design parameters
Site features, schedule
Goals of the project

What are the advantages of a design charrette?

Design charrette a creative process
It gives a kick start to the design process
Involvement of a multi-disciplinary team helps in getting various inputs
It provides an opportunity to discuss on minimizing health and environmental impacts of each option. It helps in getting a sustainable solution
Ironing out bottlenecks the preliminary stage itself
It encourages consensus on project goals
Quantifiable matrices can be developed for the project goals.
It builds consensus on design priorities
Work-out multiple conceptual plans
It is a collaborative process
Helps save time on design iteration during construction.
It builds consensus on project timelines
Planning of project strategies to avoid surprises later
It helps in minimizing resource consumption
Provides for opportunities to discuss specific alternatives and improvements
Moreover, it provides an opportunity to improve and add lessons learnt from the previous project