Design Charrettes

The Design Charrette Model

Rapidly changing environments mean that organizations must solve problems that did not exist a decade ago, like managing employees’ use of social media in the workplace, creating credibility and reputations in web space, or dealing with mobile, ubiquitous computing by consumers, to name just a few.

Santa Barbara Social Innovation Design Charrettes are a new way to tackle such problems collaboratively. These day-long, intensive design workshops bridge problems faced by business leaders with the knowledge of university experts. Participants, who come from select firms and from a diverse range of academic departments, work together for a day in a structured process of problem definition, emergent and competitive solution-generation, and proposal vetting. The goal is to use a highly facilitated, multi-disciplinary approach to unpack problems, generate alternatives, consider unintended consequences, and equip participants to make informed decisions about how to apply the results in their own organizations.

Charrettes are not seminars with speakers and audiences, nor consulting activities with experts selling recommendations, but collaborative design activities relying on intensive participation, sub-group discussion, and whole-group vetting and evaluation of alternative solutions to problems.

The charrettes are hosted by the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at UC Santa Barbara, based on ten years experience as Center studying how technological innovation is linked to social innovation through the disciplines as diverse as sociology, psychology, media studies, political science, and computer science. Faculty expertise on these topics predates the Center, providing even more depth of experience.

For more history on charrettes, see the Wikipedia page on its history in architecture.

Participants:

Each charrette invites 10-15 business, industry, or non-profit leaders to engage in collaborative problem solving with a similar number of professors and selected graduate students. Charrettes, which vary in size but generally run between 30-50 participants, are facilitated by an expert in the process, and much of the work will be done in smaller groups of 5-8 people.

See more about the 2009 Charrette, Changemakers: Tools and Strategies for Digital Advocacy.