consensus design - socially inclusive process

[...]... consensus in decisionmaking Methods such as Community Appraisal, Participatory Strategic Planning,18 the Delphi Technique and its relation the Community Consensus Survey, Nominal Group Process1 9 and gaming methods such as ROLE20 all mention consensus in their process description But there is a key difference, Day would argue, between the Consensus Design process and all other design participation processes... Near picture (day-to-day experience) Blinkers Day-to-day experience Overview and larger issues Users of professionals: no one group sees more than half the picture Why not: shouldn’t professionals lead design? 17 horses in the tower-block apartments in which a tidy-minded state has housed them, or ex-country-dwellers keeping a kettle boiling all day on a gas stove as though it were a peat-fired range... with many design participation methods, the consensus process begins with study of place The four-layer structure provided, allows study of the qualitative as well as the quantitative; not only the physical, but also layers which give meaning.23 The themes that emerge from the place-study stage are crucial ingredients of the design work that follows What Day seeks through the Consensus Design process. .. accessible design method able to include more people Yet others simply see participation as a means to make their designs more responsive to their users.15 Where does Consensus Design fit into this picture? Consensus Design Consensus Design was not consciously built on the historical strands of participation, instead evolving in parallel through the direct experiences of Christopher Day in designing... community itself 14 Consensus Design: Why? Conventional process Participation Client Client Architect Architect Consensus group Client Users Architect Consultants Consultants Client Consultants Users Client Users Users Users The design process Who is involved? When? How integrated the result? And how satisfied are the users? Notes 1 2 The roots of crime have been much studied Early place-based crime prevention... waive all responsibility in the design process, giving this solely to ‘the people’ Design professionals need to be clear about what it is that they offer, or Preface: Consensus Design in context xv as Habraken puts it: ‘The better we are able to formulate exactly what is our irreplaceable contribution, the more effective we will be …’33 In his conception of Consensus Design, in the principles which... learning anything from it I had to concede, however, that it was an interesting process of observation, and it was certainly striking how we always reached consensus Interesting, but only interesting, until it occurred to me that perhaps we could do the process backwards We now followed each four-stage journey-study with a mirror process What should the place say? What moods would support the place’s message?... much been one of technique, rather one of moving from being a solitary designer, convinced of my brilliance, to freeing myself from any individually sourced ideas and letting designs slowly condense out of the 6 Introduction consensus group process Now I can’t design on my own – or at least, I think I can’t and certainly won’t ‘My’ designs these days are not ‘mine’, but the product of a group Different... Literature From the Life Science Trust touring exhibition, 1996 (Life Science Trust, Gifford, Scotland) PA R T T W O Consensus Design: Why? Participants’ comments: My first exposure to Consensus Design was when I was working with Christopher Day designing the proposed ASHA Centre, north London The process lasted for four days and involved all the parties interested in the end result I found the procedure novel... direct discussion of style through focus on process, instead inferring that ‘a certain vernacular will emerge effortlessly from the process of collaboration because that is what people Preface: Consensus Design in context xiii most naturally relate to’.24 While the emphasis of this book is necessarily on process for the sake of replication by others, the process itself has been shaped primarily through . in the Consensus Design process. Just as with every other participant, his knowledge, skills and expe- rience feed into the process. But the process doesn’t demand that he, as design pro- fessional,. Day would argue, between the Consensus Design process and all other design participation processes. Where other processes – includ- ing others founded on a consensus basis 21 – encourage the expression. co -design The roots of co -design are often traced back to the 1960s when a number of differ- ent forces converged to produce a climate conducive to community participation. Preface: Consensus Design