Three things you need to know about working with us...
- We're collaborators, not consultants.
- We rely on charrettes
- Design is a coiled spring, not a straight line. We rely on iterative development.
- We invest heavily on relationships. We enjoy socializing over food.
- We are obsessed with shopping. We travel constantly and we take lots of photos.
#1: We use a collaborative, iterative development process.
Design does not conform easily to the constraints of linear processes. Design projects evolve as the work progresses. This is normal and good. Design methodologies that ignore this reality tend to create more problems than they solve.
We apply results-driven, collaborative iterative development processes and development tools used by Web architects, designers and developers. We find that Iterative development drives down the inherent risks associated with change. It reduces friction and forces the team to incorporate external validation into the creative process. These processes encourage the best work and helps everything hang together with more creative coherence and integrity. The results are more likely to contribute enduring value.
#2: We are big fans of charrettes.
We have a client in Charleston who says a charrette is the way you cook steak on a grill – you char it. Kidding aside, a charrette is an intense creative session that covers a lot of ground in a short period of time.
We rely on charrettes. Charrette is the French word for cart. Designers use the term to refer to an intense, collaborative and cross-disciplinary design effort aimed at breakthrough results. The definition seems to originate from the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, where a charrette was used to collect students’ final drawings. Effort intensified as students rushed to complete their work by the time the cart arrived. More information on charrettes is available here.
Typically, designers and architects only use charrettes in the studio when clients aren't around. But we're not typical. It makes no sense to isolate the people who know the business best from the creative process.
Here is a short story from a recent charrette facilitated by a collaborative team of two Marco Retail principals and three designers with four members of the client team. In one day, the team developed the vision, initial site plan and financial analysis for a new town of about 5,000 permanent residents.
Sketching is a core deliverable. We visualize the ideas with you, and we document the sessions. We include all the principal members of the team, including those in advisory and support roles whose involvement will escalate as the project moves into design development and implementation.
Clients typically say things like, "We're amazed. We got more done today than we've done in years."
You could call these brainstorming sessions if you'd like, but they different in a few important ways we'd be happy to explain.
#3: We think of ourselves as your partners, not your consultants.
We have an owner's mentality. We behave as though it's our business and our money. We become passionately and personally involved in your project. We live by some simple rules, incentives and expectations that have worked pretty well over a decade:
- You are continuously, actively involved and make any and all final business decisions;
- We are accountable for managing the development and implementation of your decisions in the areas within the scope of our services;
- You and we are jointly accountable for measuring, monitoring and reporting the effectiveness of the team's work to your supervisory board.
