One thing that makes charrettes fun and creative is that you never know where the best ideas will come from. A recent and now famous example is the story of the “Katrina Cottage.” Six weeks after hurricane Katrina ravaged the gulf coast in 2005, hundreds of national and local professionals and community members participated in [...]

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People need to be able to see a drawing to understand it. This sounds pretty basic. With the advent of digital scanning and photography, combined with LCD projectors, it is getting easier to quickly enlarge drawings. However, it is not uncommon for a designer/planner to be stuck in the position of presenting a drawing at [...]

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The use of charrettes is not necessarily limited to public workshops. Charrettes can be very effective processes for project sponsors when working “in-house” to develop a project vision before going public, or in testing concepts after a first project public meeting. Whether held publicly or in-house, a charrette requires careful preparation. The core management team [...]

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It is not uncommon for charrette teams to include a mix of people who are used to working together as well as those who are not. Consulting firms often have a group of professionals who regularly do charrettes and augment them with subcontractors. The addition of outside professionals provides a fresh viewpoint on the project [...]

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Members of a charrette team should be experts on all base data concerning their project. It is the responsibility of the charrette team to make sure that all members of the community (in addition to the other stakeholders) are given access to all of the base data. In a charrette, the public flow of information [...]

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Often, first-time charrette sponsors resist holding a charrette for more than three days when a minimum of five to seven days is usually required. When a sponsor has not been through a complete Dynamic Planning process it is difficult for him/her to understand the benefits of giving it enough time. The sponsors are concerned about [...]

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Chaos is a part of any intense creative process. Most people have experienced this phenomenon while writing a term paper under a deadline in college, putting the finishing touches on a portfolio, or writing a song. There are three phases that one goes through. The first phase is one of anticipation, excitement and creativity. This [...]

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One way to mitigate charrette costs is to utilize volunteer design professionals, university professors, and students as part of the charrette design team. Using volunteers can be very positive and cost-effective, but in order to be most useful the volunteers need to be carefully recruited and handled. Often, volunteers can require a considerable amount of [...]

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As you know, the charrette studio is open to the public virtually any time the design team is working. The great overall advantage is that this affords the maximum number of opportunities for people to participate according to their personal schedules and time constraints. It also allows the design team to create and foster relationships [...]

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Proper charrette scheduling is a very important component of the charrette planning process. For example, the more complicated a project, the longer the charrette needs to be. Therefore, charrettes that last less than seven days should only be used for simple, low-controversy projects.  NCI has developed the following list of basic rules of thumb for [...]

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