Our Practice
For us, planning and community design work is a practice – solving client issues, yes, but always a learning opportunity, enriching our practical understanding and capacity to address future work. Here’s to sharing thoughts and observations from our perspective, freshly learned from those with whom we work!
Why, What, and then How
Great planning and design begin with a simple question: “Why?” We seek to understand both need and motive, helping animate and direct progress regardless of shifting conditions, means, or needs. Knowing “why” ensures better outcomes – whether as products, services, plans or strategic recommendations.
The distinguishing “why” in our work is about creating lasting value in what we do. For this, client and community engagement are critical, helping us to uncover, interpret and realize real client needs.
No Silos
Planning and design flow from the general to the specific. Our work embraces specialized expertise, but we first explore client ideals, and they seldom nest precisely in a single discipline. Our broad-based approach establishes, an over-arching basis for expert energies, shaping outcomes that are more on-target … and more effective..
Approach
Context
Planning and design must always be context-aware, tuned in to regional and local needs, influences, policy, and trends. While each site and study area will be unique and rich with characteristics and potential, an awareness of setting will guide our early understanding. No community is an island, unless, of course, it’s an island. We’ve worked with plenty of those, too, and there are still outside influences that establish the field of play.
Systems
Our communities act like living organisms, with multiple systems working in concert to keep them operating. Sometimes, our plans anticipate levels of systemic change. Sometimes they don’t. Understanding how systems work -and how they may need to adapt to achieve community goals – is a key part of our approach.
Resilience
Our work meets immediate community needs, but it also must endure. For that reason, we root our recommendations on meaningful, values-based community conversation and a long-range perspective. Our plans and designs blend successful implementation with capable adaptation over time. Shift happens, and a plan based on high-level community aspirations, anticipation of a changing climate, and an abiding commitment to quality of life can last.
Details
While context, resilience, and systemic understanding contribute to our plan’s technical success, it’s the details that make them exciting. Whether it’s the way in which we listen to community hopes, the sensitive treatment of a public space, or the simple elegance of an effective implementation strategy, details matter.
The Design Process
We tend to work best in communities where there’s conflict to manage, trust to rebuild, challenging problems to solve, change on the way, and an awareness that effective community conversation is an essential part of it all. Here’s how we typically take a project from start to gratifying finish.
