What is a Charette?

BCIT’s School of Construction and the Environment is hosting a Sustainability Design Charette as part of a summit taking place in Vancouver called Resilient Cities: Urban Strategies for Transition Times.

Charettes are a facilitated workshopping process that come from the design world. They are collaborative sessions where groups come together in an attempt to address a design problem. Like World Cafes, large groups come together to participate, representing a diversity of backgrounds and stakeholders in whatever it is that is being planned/designed.

While each charette will be designed to meet the needs of the design problem and needs of the stakeholders participating, the general progression of the process is:

1. Opening speaker/maybe a presentation with content in order to inform the rest of the process.
2. Identification of the design task/design problem.
3. Break out into small groups, each group with a minimum of one representative from each of the representative stakeholder groups.
4. In the small groups, design a solution to the design problem/design task.
5. Reconvene in large group.
6. Each smaller group presents their efforts.
7. Come to common solution, through facilitation, reach a common consensus on a final design solution.
8. Post-meeting, prepare a report.

It appears that the greatest challenge would be the final task of reaching a common consensus on a final design, if that is one of the charette’s goals. The enormous amount of detail that gets discussed, hashed over, and negotiated during small group sessions can be so draining on participants in a small group, and then to have to go through the whole thing again in a larger group must be exhausting. It is for that reason that many charettes are planned over a series of days and/or weeks.

Describing the process:
A Handbook for Planning and Conducting Charrettes for High-Performance Projects

A local charette with a process that didn't require a big consensus at the end:
East Ladner Edge Charrette