Enquiry by Design Session In Action
Our highly collaborative workshops provide rapid stakeholder engagement and results driven outcomes to solve complex design problems.
Workshop Models
We understand that every project is unique and involves many different people. We use a variety of design workshops as an effective way to get everyone involved and achieve great results.
Both Peter Edwards and Peter Richards are widely recoginised urban design leaders and Queensland’s most credentialed Enquiry by Design (EbD) workshop facilitators.
Enquiry by Design
This small group collaboration is a focused design session that drives the broader EbD process. The group sits around a single table, the discussion is chaired by the designer/ facilitator and the ‘minutes’ are recorded as diagrams and notes on a plan of the study area, sometimes with different coloured felt pens. The meeting can focus on a range of outputs: verify local issues, discuss opportunities, formulate design objectives or ideas and record concepts and priorities.
The design challenge is to lead the participants through the issues, responding to their important priorities and bringing in issues which are related.
This work requires high level of design and drawing skills and an ability to understand design problems and processes, within short timeframes.
Design Workshops
Design Workshops offer a fast-paced, collaborative approach to solving complex design problems. Through the charrette process, experts from various fields come together to explore creative solutions and broaden the project's vision. This method allows clients to gain deeper insights while remaining at a distance, enhancing project understanding and fostering civic engagement.
Our workshops come in various formats, each with its own merits, to meet different project needs. Tailored to your specific timeline and requirements, these formats engage stakeholders in an inclusive, trust-building process.
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Half Day Launch Pad
This process is a focused, expert-led session aimed at crafting strategic solutions to specific issues. The more diverse the participants, the more innovative the outcomes.
An experienced facilitator guides the discussion, ensuring a productive and insightful process for all stakeholders involved.
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Two Day Charette
The term 'charette' originated from a practice at France's Ecole des Beaux Arts, where architecture students had to quickly finish their design projects within a tight deadline. They would rush their drawings to school in a cart, sometimes even continuing to sketch while en route.
Today, the term refers to a focused, time-limited session where design professionals brainstorm visually to solve design challenges.
Issues + Design
Workshops
This design workshop approach involves multiple sessions, enriched by ongoing research, testing, and analysis. The aim is to make the design outcome more robust.
Our process follows a cycle of gathering information, shaping ideas, testing them, and then reviewing the results.
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Urban Sketching Workshops
Peter Richards is a design leader, author, teacher and advocate of urban sketching, demonstrating how freehand drawing can inform design processes in urbanism and architecture. Peter facilitates Urban Sketching workshops as a method to prepare drawings and diagrams to analyse, synthesise, generate, and explain ideas.
Peter facilitates urban sketching workshops with the community to identify the qualities of place (through drawing and talking about drawings), and using them as a resource for broader consultation.
Engagement Through Collage
This approach within the Enquiry by Design process uses collage to explore possible futures of a place. This is an engaging and gentle way to address controversial and challenging issues and to reconcile potentially divergent opinions.
The collage uses local sourced imagery of landscapes, places, buildings and activities of a local area in relation to the urban form and place making. The wide variety of images can include housing types, single storey homes, townhouses and units with varying characters and densities. A wide variety of urban design elements include streetscapes, trees, dining and other activities.
The process is hands on with a range of pictures, scissors and glue provided. Images or parts of images are selected, discussed and pasted on a base map. Any additional images needed can be quickly drawn by the facilitator or participants. At the close of this activity each table articulated the key themes described by their collage.
A strength of the exercise is that all attendees can participate, and the time spent reviewing images and cutting them out is used for discussion and consensus building.
