Charette

Charette is a hands-on workshop, that refers to an intensive face-to-face process designed to bring people from various sub-groups of society into consensus within a short period of time. It can be used to bring together practical ideas, stimulate working together and facilitate consensus-based decision making. One of the goals of this method is to capture the vision, values, and ideas of the community. Through the participatory process this method will help you assemble ideas and viewpoints, encourage input and collaboration of many participant at the beginning of the process, facilitate decisions on difficult issues when the process is ongoing and resolve indecision or deadlocks between groups at the last part of the process. Charette can also help built projects upon citizens input and identify potential funding sources. Usually the method is applied in the development, design or planning projects at the level of local community, but can be adapted to various topics and geographical areas. This is a method that can be adapted to last for couple of days or couple of weeks – typical the participants have the accommodation for the night. It can be staged for group of 50 to groups of more than 1000 people. Anyone from the community can participate, but the method also relies on the expertise of professional designers, planners, architects etc. It is essential that local decision makers are present in the process. Some of the weaknesses of this method are that it can raise unrealistic expectations about the final results or that it may be dominated by the experts, which requires skilful facilitators. On the other hand this is highly creative and dynamic process that encourages collaboration between groups that usually do not work together, allows new options and scenarios to be explored, and gives locals an opportunity to be actively involved in designing solutions for their local community. Charette consists of three stages: Pre-Charette, Charette workshop and Post-Charette.