We all know what a party is, so what the hell is a charrette?
The word charrette may refer to any collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem. While the structure of charrettes vary, they often take place in multiple sessions. Self-selected groups present their thoughts to the full audience as material for future dialogue. Charrettes serve as a way to quickly generate a design solution while integrating the aptitudes and interests of a diverse group of people.
While charrettes are usually held for land use planning such as with the Fast Forward Spokane: Downtown Plan Update, they can also be conducted to draft strategies and ideas for improving the social environment. Here are some of our favorite examples that could be scaled down and adapted to a specific Spokane audience:
Barcamp
If cities like SanFrancisco and Austin are doing Barcamps, why can’t we?
Saturday House
Saturday House was started in Seattle and has been described as a “mini-BarCamp every Saturday.” People work on projects, talk about ideas, and generally conspire and hatch plans. Their first organizing principle is freedom in that there are no required activities. Much like whatever could happen in Spokane, the whole concept was inspired by a blog post that announced “We are tired of emailing each other!” What I like best about Saturday House is their description of an ideal participant:
We desire diversity in knowledge and backgrounds. When we look at people, we ask ourselves questions like, “Does this person love learning? Does this person love ideas? Does this person pursue interesting action? Does this person know something cool? Does this person care about life?
Cre8camp
Inspired by Barcamp, Cre8Camp describes itself as an ad-hoc gathering for creative industries professionals where people can learn, share and network in an open environment with discussions led by attendees. Cre8Camps are non-profit events that can be hosted by anyone for any reason. Their website even provides helpful hints on how to get one of these things started by outlining the typical division of volunteer support:
- Event Co-Planner
- Session Leader
- Marketing/Promotion
- Sponsor Development
- Designer (signage, etc.)
- Venue Setup/Clean-up
- Lunch coordinator
- Check-in Table
- Food Logistics
Affiliated with Cre8Con, a much larger and less participatory event, all these gatherings were orchestrated as part of a “business and culture experience” in Portland that included Inverge: the interactive convergence conference, the Time-Based Art Festival, MusicFestNW and the First Thursday Gallery Walk.
Now It’s Our Turn
In Spokane this kind of thing could take on a variety of forms for different purposes. If the goal were to provide inspiration and motivate new collaborations among unengaged creatives, the vibe would have to be a lot more social and a lot less meeting. Much of Spokane’s talent suffers from “only one in the room” syndrome. They’ve been conditioned to believe they can get things done better on their own as opposed to taking the time and risk to work with someone else to make it happen. This is a fast track towards burnout, and goodness knows there are already enough of those to go around! Moral of the story: young-thinking movers and shakers in Spokane could greatly benefit from learning how to better trust and communicate with each other.
The true purpose of this series of parties would be to create a strengthened sense of community identity among local creative professionals. The cohesion of this talented social group could then be drawn upon to move cultural mountains. While the semantics are open for debate I say a basic plan would be a series of three gatherings. Once a month for three months starting with an almost purely social event, then asking some open ended questions, then seeing how “campy” people are interested in getting. While the results of this little experiment are unknown we stand to loose nothing. Even if those mental wheels don’t start turning like we want them to, at least we can say that we stripped off some rust!
Tags: Breaking Boundaries · Creative Culture · Social Observations · Sustainable Development10 Comments
10 responses so far ↓
Although, I have never been, I have been interested in attending “green drinks,” held at Brooklyn nights monthly. Has anyone here been? How was it?
Ashley-
I am one of the organizers for GD and someone referred me to this blog and your comment. Green News travels fast apparently.
Greendrinks is really casual and welcoming. We have no cost or agenda, although we are looking at starting to rotate locations and showcase local businesses doing good works to engage community involvement.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Cassie
That sounds very interesting. I got the opportunity to attend a charrette when I lived on campus at EWU. We were looking into some planning for residence halls. It felt like a very productive meeting and created great enthusiasm. I hope that some enthusiasm gets started around Spokane and connecting the people here. Let me know when you get something underway.
I am the co-founder of Cre8Camp and would be more than happy to help you have one in Spokane.
There are some things that we do different than BarCamp because we felt they fit better with creatives (BarCamp was specifcally developed with technical professionals in mind).
As one potential next step we could create a page for your event at http://www.cre8camp.org/Cre8CampSpokane. It would start with a Cre8Camp template that you can easily edit. It can be hidden from public view while you edit it and prep it.
Feel free to contact me.
Thanks.
SG
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Steve Gehlen
Co-Founder, Cre8Camp
I am a young entrepreneur looking to get involved in something like this. I’ll keep checking back for updates.
Very excited about this idea – community “think” is awesome, and helps my brain out a lot.
Seen it around a lot in different cities, some even smaller than Spokane, and always wondered why we don’t have cool things like that here. In the words of Keanu Reeves (or at least that’s the voice I’m imagining in my head as I type this), “Let’s do it!”
In reading this post I think the Spovangelist keenly identified a great opportunity: sharing! When high energy folks do a ton of great projects but get burnt out with the lack of teamwork/collaboration it can be daunting to start a new project. Getting people in the same room means allot.
Interesting political concept and new vocabulary words too!
- basically just expressing the importance of having a social foundation to branch out from… not unlike getting everyone together in a room, making ties, and realizing shared goals.
Most people have strong desires to share their passions with like minded individuals. I know there are many decisions one must come to on one’s own terms, and certainly goals that must be reached for an individual sense of accomplishment.
However, if only for the sake of motivational influence people must band together. Because it’s only with motivation that anyone gets their shit done. Damn straight. Let’s get campy-cozy!
I think it would powerful to ask the question of spokanites… Why do you think Spokane is the best place to live on Earth? and see what comes out, and ripples and bounces around.