We Design Together Therefore We Design Better

What's the schedule?" Kelly asked.

"On Thursday, you, me, Jimmy and Nicole are all going to Taliesin West."

My face dropped, I was not part of the group that day. Everyone looked at me with pity.

"And Rachel is going to, oh," Shawna snickers " She is doing the Who's Left Out Charrette."

The thing with charrettes, at least for me, is that I enjoy being part of a team more than I enjoy being part of a group.

My charrette team included three other incredible women, Jennifer from Tuskegee University, Monika from University of Maryland, and Emily from Drury University. The goal of the charrette was to address social issues such as education, inequality, homelessness, obesity, poverty, food and agriculture and social media through design. We had four hours, a pack of Sharpies, a computer lab and over a hundred years of combined life experience.

We had four hours to bond as a group, brainstorm, develop a program, design a solution and present our idea digitally. Here is what we created.

Our design focused on creating market with a central forum so that people can share their talents. One of the central premises of our design focused getting student involvement in the market. The purpose of this involvement is to integrate students from different schools (magnet, private and public) with the greater community. The students would have booths to sell vegetables from school gardens, artwork and ideas. Another important premise of the market is getting the students and the community to the place. Proximity to schools, residential areas, and public transportation is essential to keeping the market equality to all soci-economic classes. Finally, we wanted our solution to not only address the problem of inequity in the education system, but also to address other problems synergistically.

I considered this charrette successful for many reasons. We acknowledged each woman's area of expertise and incorporated her preoccupation into our process. For example, Jennifer was interested in the inequality of the educational system and Monika had just finished an "Urban Market" design studio, Jennifer was interested in giving form to content and my interest involved dissolving the separation between issues. I think I learned so much from working with these women and this experience strengthen my interest in social issues and architect.

Finally, I should say, that I did not know that one could "win" a charrette, but my team did win a prize for the best design. This win reiterates my belief that when we design together, we design better.

Stay tuned for the video which is on my iphone, but I am having problems getting the video from my iphone to my computer because the file is too big.