Designing Your Community Game

Led by Candace Roberts

As a part of her graduate work Candace used a form of gaming to obtain information from a group of the oldest baby boomers to find out what spaces they anticipated wanting at retirement.  A design charette is very similar, a form of gaming, in which a group of individuals can work toward consensus.  Gaming had its beginning in community planning.  Her professional interest and practice is in designing spaces for aging and living in community.  She is a tenure track professor at Western Carolina University teaching Interior Design with 20+ years of corporate design prior to academia.  She enjoys working with groups and sharing information and expertise.

The Design Charette: There were fourteen attendees that participated in a brief design charette on designing a cohousing community.  To begin with, identifying activities that will take place translate into space so instead of stating the obvious rooms in a house, activities can be combined and spaces used differently, thus allowing a possible different view of space design.  In today’s homes, the living room has been replaced by the great room.  This is an evolution in the identification of activities and space utilization.

The participants divided into three groups, each with a focus on listing activities in the site, common house, or individual residence.  They made individual lists and then combined into one list for the group.  The items were then written on post-it sheets and placed on a larger sheet of paper, one large sheet for each group.  The common house and residence groups further divided their lists on the final sheet by grouping common activities and separating by need for privacy and noise.  There was much discussion among the groups throughout the process.  The power of this process is gaining consensus on a design project where participants have equal say in wants and needs in living spaces.

The activities identified by the common house include: food prep, food storage (refrig, frozen, dry), meal cleanup, dish/cookware small ware storage, community dining, drinking wet bar, screened outdoor area, business/computer area, mail boxes, group meetings, exercise room, workshop/creative activities, common washers and dryers/laundry, computing activities, small gathering, individual study, meditation, reading, TV area/watching TV, and sleeping area.

The activities identified by the individual residence include three sub areas: noisy, private, and quiet.  The noisy area includes: entertain, guest staying, discuss & conversation, play, transportation, pet care love/feed, dishwashing, music, cooking, watching TV, cooking, cleaning, food sharing, storage, canning baking drinking, and washing drying clothes.  The private area includes: sleeping, massage, bath tub and shower, sex/making love, meditation & spiritual practice, hot tub/sauna.  The quiet area includes relaxing, dying, crafts/creativity, gardening, computer/office, sit/relax/swing, and reading.

The spaces identified by the site group include parking, common house, gardening, pool, and a dispersed housing layout.

The next step would be for the groups to pin up their sheets and each group talk about their list.  The overall group would have the opportunity to add items or suggest that items move from one list to another – for example, if the community agreed that interaction and living very green on the land would include no washers and dryers in the individual living spaces that the common house would have a laundry for everyone to use, this would be a part of the conversation and consensus building for the community.  The outcome could be that space is provided in each unit for a stacking washer/dryer that could be converted to storage space for those who prefer not having the expense of an individual washer/dryer and prefer the interaction with others while doing laundry.  The group could also push the green/sustainable point a bit further and discuss having a cloths drying line outside to save energy.  You can see how a dialogue could be created with this process.

Participants can take away with them that they can use this process in many ways on their own as a tool for building consensus, either with other groups or in family situations.  A true design charette would typically take place over a full weekend, between two to three full days with a facilitator(s).