The Charrette
A Uniquely Effective Way of Defining A Proposed Projects' Viability
What Is A Charrette?
The word charrette was
originally derived from the French name for the cart a master
artist would use to collect the daily work of their apprentice
students.
A charrette is a team-based, idea formulating technique for developing and planning a project. It involves bringing together a group of experienced professionals from different disciplines into a session to jointly concentrate on, stimulate and formulate workable ideas, and develop the guiding criteria for a project’s further development. A charrette is a group management tool, and the first step in a long process, that is designed to quickly establish a project’s concept, vision, and governing criteria. A charrette is not just a brainstorming session. It is a carefully orchestrated event where the participants, the schedule, and the location are chosen to encourage a focused creativity within a structured framework.
What Is A
Charrette Good For?
A Charrette concentrates on pulling the right people with the
necessary skills, together to make a decision within a relatively
short period of time; saving substantial time and money. The
final result of a Charrette is a concrete plan; which allows
key decision makers to visualize and understand the practical
implications of a project’s concept. It helps them catch
an over-arching vision of the project outcome and the critical
steps needed in achieving that vision. It identifies fatal flaws,
improving the effectiveness of the key decisions about its viability
or concept before investing. Answering the key questions of “what
is this project?” and “is it worthwhile?”.
How Do You
Have A Charrette?
Here are the steps necessary to creating and running an effective
and successful Charrette:
1 SETTING UP THE CHARRETTE The critical factor at any Charrette’s beginning is the selection of a facilitator to manage the charrette session. A facilitator isn’t required to have any specific background but must have an overall understanding of the charrette process. This means a facilitator must be able to: 1) leading the group in finding their way in uncharted territory 2) recognizing what constitutes progress; 3) balancing careful analysis with flash-of-insight creativity. The facilitator is responsible for setting the pace of the meeting, acting as moderator, analyst or creator, ensuring that time limits are adhered to and channeling everyone’s contributions into productive results.
Next, selecting and preparing the right number and types of people to participate in the charrette. Then establishing the optimal time and place of the charrette with a purpose and desired outcome clear to all invited. Picking the right people, 8 to 12 in number, will help to ensure a Charrette’s success. They should have divergent areas of experience and expertise and are usually from such areas as feasibility analysis, design, operations, etc. Make sure they cover the needed expertise demanded by the project. Avoiding people with an ax to grind and inflexibility. They must be willing to sometimes lead and sometimes follow. They must be willing to contribute their best thoughts to the group’s efforts without care for defending their ego. It will then be the facilitator job to forge these selected people into a temporary workable team.
Then the session’s defining criteria needs to be established and sent beforehand, coupled with a packet of helpful information, to all the people attending the session. This packet lets everyone know what to expect with an clear and easy-to- read agenda (with time allocations), background materials on similar, comparable, or competing projects, and basic contextual facts surrounding the project. Just the materials a prepared attendee should know to help them make important patterns, approaches, or idea relationships later emerge. This session’s defining criteria is only a few pages with other support materials taking less than an hour or so to read. Conciseness, clarity and brevity are at a premium here. Participants don’t need to be overloaded, just prepared.
Finally, you must select a place conducive to the sometimes-opposing demands of both creativity and productivity that will hopefully occur in the charrette. Holding the session at work always allows for the imposition of outside demands; interrupting the group’s chain of thought.
Allow enough wall space to paste all the
team’s thoughts on. This space must be visible to everyone
in the room with its collection of various sheets of paper showing
in words, pictures, and diagrams where everyone is at any moment.
These visuals help to concentrate the 
group’s
attention and facilitate relational thinking. A nice environment
with big open walls and away from the interruptive demands of
work, typically functions best.
An important point: the more you have the right people working
in the right place in the right way focusing on the right problem,
the more effective your charrette will become.
2 BUILDING “THE BOX” Much is written about “thinking outside the box” but to achieve the Charrette’s goals thinking is “inside the box”, but it’s a new one. Parameters must be placed on all participants, and on the project itself, like that of “a box” to hold their ideas and set the governing criteria for the project. Without a box, a charrette is just another idea session. Building a box, within which all the ideas generated must fit, requires an understanding of ridged and flexible box criteria and the size and type of ideas to be placed. This involves physical, emotional, financial, scheduling and even political constraints.
Creating a box means creating boundaries that describe what factors about a proposed idea or concept will and won’t work. Remembering, the clearer the constraints (the box) the more powerful the final concept will be. A box that will not hold new ideas will just recreate old problems.
This is not an easy task, but requires a kind of unjudgemental judgement. Remembering, the clearer the constraints (the box) the more powerful the final concept will be. A box that will not hold new ideas will just recreate old problems.
Common sense says “allowing more time will generate more ideas”, but setting an optimal time frame will achieve optimal results. Since a charrette is limited by time for idea generation and analysis, it is critical to place the right amount of pressure on participants to stimulate thought and ideas. Plus, setting game rules early gets everyone involved and establishes a sense of joint ownership. Any successful Charrette has the single strong expectation of “taking apart a project” then reassembling it into “something more”.
3
FILLING THE
BOX WITH IDEAS Creativity is typically
thought as the generation of wacky and off-the-wall ideas”,
but within a charrette this creativity is bound within the economic,
social, political, etc. constraints dictated by the project.
The fun of idea generation is channeled by a need for practical
results. The group dynamics should focus on fitting the ideas
into the defining boundaries that have been established. If the
box doesn’t seem to work, place it on the shelf temporarily
and build a new box, adjust and combining both as the work progresses.
Combining both creative and analytical thinking polarizes a bad
team into becoming stuck, but it unifies a good team into producing
a successful solution.
The utilization of idea generation techniques is initiated, but
in a Charrette the ideas generated tend to be in a set direction.
Within these limits, idea volume and quality is the driving force.
More is better and nutty, crazy ideas are just fine. Then, judge
not, because evaluation of these ideas is always separated and
placed in the next step.
The dialogue during this stage is very
open, with people constantly suggesting ideas without limitations
on who may comment when. Ideas put forward are born from both
original thoughts and experience but also collectively building
and combining on the groups combined wisdom and skill.
In addition, this kind of creativity requires conceptual thinking,
visual images and the ability to be inspired by the ideas given
by other members of the session. During the charrette, the members
skilled in rapid visualization provide and collect verbal ideas
from all the participants and create visual images to convey
these concepts. These visual descriptions of ideas unite the
group around the image in a way that using only verbal or word
concepts cannot. 
4 TESTING OUT THE IDEAS There is another level of analytical creativity
that requires the process of successful working within a framework,
while beating up the ideas to prove their performance. Creativity
is seldom thought of as ideas generated in a targeted direction
and limited by time and output. Seeing if these ideas fly. Checking
out how they will do in the real world by seeing into the project’s
future. Walk through and test out every idea to some degree.
5
SELECTING
THE BEST CONCEPT This is the stage
of picking the best concept for that optimally produce the desired
results within the constraints of the project and one that will
insure the best investment in the project’s final success.
Sometimes it is best to lay your top ideas out in front of everyone.
This allows a better comparison between each idea and makes the
input from everyone involved much easier. Restate to everyone
the purpose and defining constraints for the charrette then collectively
struggle for a consensus in selecting that one best idea. This
stage is when the reason for the charrette comes to fruition.
The time when everyone is tired but their joint success can be
measured in their productive results.
A Charrette
Is A Powerful Tool To Use When Beginning A Project
A successful charrette is a small price to pay in the beginning
of a project’s development that will save huge amounts of
investment in money, time and resources later. Instead of hurriedly
rushing a project towards its final creation, just stopping the
project’s momentum for a short time and having a charrette
can provide a major boost towards making the entire project realistically
work and work well.