The Team & Design Process

If you’re doing placemaking right, you’re essentially embarking on creating something that has never been done before. Each place and project is unique. There is great wisdom in learning from the past, but great boredom and missed opportunity in trying to recreate a place that already exists. So how do you go about making a new place happen?

 

The team

Remember that Round Table? If you can gather creative people who are able to put their ego in the backseat and genuinely listen to each other’s point of view, what can’t you accomplish? Here are the initial and core roles we need for the placemaking table:

  • “Naturalist” - Understands how nature works. Able to observe the goals and needs of the natural world in systems in that specific place and be able to design biological systems that enhance flourishing, balance, and diversity of life without discrediting human needs as part of nature.

  • “Entrepreneur” - Understands how finance and development side of placemaking works. Able to think creatively about how to create and operate a financially viable structure for the project without relying on how it’s been done in the past or prioritizing maxing out their personal profit from the project.

  • “Artist” - Understands how beauty side of placemaking works. Able to understand the deep principles of beauty that apply to all as well as the ability to see and maximize the specific assets and limitations of the project before them. They must be able to dream big and push for better without letting good be the enemy of great.

  • “Champion” - Understands how people work. Able to foster healthy work culture, communicate the vision, recognize what skills are needed for all the jobs that come up, recognize, respect, and draw that talent out of others, and keep all the plates spinning without loosing site of the big picture.

 
 

The Process

Spend plenty of time dreaming, designing, and building. Depending on the scale of your project, the duration of each phase may vary greatly, but it will always pay off to take enough time to reach clarity at each stage before hitting the bulldozers and bricks. Go slow to go fast. (Because we know how much it costs to try to pivot once you’re building or worse, how much it costs to have built the wrong thing.)

 

The first critical step is to spend enough time around a table (conference tables, dinner tables, picnic tables all count) until you reach a quorum of members who align on a specifically WHY and generally WHAT you want to build.

In Loonshots, Safi Bachall advises we start by separating the “artists” from the “soldiers”. The artists are the WHY and WHAT oriented people. They may be designers, architects, philosophers, artists, visionaries, and entrepreneurs who will ideate, innovate, and take risks. The soldiers are the ones who are in manufacturing, engineering, marketing, product design, or product delivery. They are the ones who are responsible for getting products on time, on budget, and on spec consistently. For soldiers, risk is a bad thing.

“People responsible for developing high-risk, early-stage ideas, ‘artists’ need to be sheltered from the ‘soldiers’. Early-stage projects are fragile.”
— Safi Bachall, Loonshots


Bachall advocates that we must equally value the artists and the soldiers but we must protect the artists from the soldiers before they kill all the ideas while they’re still in the messy stage. Maslow pointed out that creativity revolves around the absence of fear. And Pierluigi Serraino, author of The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study says, "Creativity is at the margins of the norm. When [creatives] are forced into the norm, they become less invested. Their work is downgraded."

This is the time to ideate. Your collective vision will likely expand and contract many many times in this stage and that’s fine. Take the time you need here to set the best direction. Bring in the best “artist” minds you know to bounce ideas around together and refine the vision. Bachall notes that this phase is a great time to consider “outsider” perspectives as well. If you can, hire a Creative Director who is experienced in this dimension of the process and design thinking. Even if they don’t have direct experience in placemaking, they will know how to lead the WHY and WHAT conversation.

Dreaming

 

Designing & Rapid Prototyping (Building)

Once you’ve reached clarity and consensus on roughly WHAT you’re building and WHY you’re building it, it’s time to figure out HOW to build it. Now that you know loosely what you want to build, you can go out and find experts in exactly what you need—the technicians, specialists, and HOW people.

This is the time to bring the soldiers to the table with the artists—and your target audience or users. This can be a really exciting and fruitful stage! For the best outcomes, at this point you don’t want to bring just any soldiers in, you’ll want to bring in soldiers who are great with the HOW but who are also willing to be open-minded and innovative. Not the “this is the way we always do it” type.

With all three perspectives represented—the artists, soldiers, and users—you will have the best opportunity to come up with the most innovative, efficient, and meaningful ways to build.


This is when you’ll hear simple and brilliant revelations sparkle around the table like: “I just need a place to wash my dog near there.” “And wouldn’t it be beautiful if it were made out of ______?” “Well, ______ has a new product that just came out that would do that and is actually cheaper than what we’ve been using…and it’d save us a lot of time if we put it 4’ to the right because then we wouldn’t have to mess with the gas line. Would you mind if was over here?” “No, that’s fine for me!” “Oh, great! And could we make it arched to echo the arches over there?” “Well, I’ve never seen that done before but it’s totally possible. We’d just have to move that light fixture but that’s not a problem.”

It’s not that you have to reinvent the wheel, but you want people in this stage who are fulling willing to. After this round of innovating the HOW you will be able to walk away with solid plans for the lead soldiers to pass on to the rest of their soldiers.

And if you really want to get the most out of this phase, you’ll want one more person present: the “champion”.


Bachall describes the champion as someone who can speak to and value both the artists and the soldiers equally. The champion needs to praise both the loonshot genius, the strategy genius, and the perpetual tweaker. And the champion needs the skills to facilitate and manage the process. This role and the value of clear prototyping (in placemaking this can be as simple as napkin sketches or as elaborate as VR) is found in the Marshmallow Challenge (seven minute TED talk). It’s worth watching.


** In case your operation involves a full staff: Tom Wujec touches on the idea of incentives with the $10k prize for the tallest marshmallow tower but in Loonshots, Bachall takes it further. He argues, “culture may eat strategy for breakfast, but structure eats culture for lunch.” And shares fantastic insight on how incentives need to be carefully considered in order to foster rather than kill innovation.

 
 

Summary

The Round Table approach to placemaking starts with naturalists, entrepreneurs, artists, and champions working together to come to the project with fresh eyes and egos in the back seat. They listen closely to and partner with locals and residents and test prototypes as often as possible to fearlessly design the best outcomes for their specific projects.