Creative Evangelism (Public post of shame #7)

In his essay The Present City and the Practice of City Design, author John Kaliski discusses the successes and failures of various approaches to everyday urbanism.  During the reading he references Christopher Alexander’s work A New Theory of Urban Design (1987).  Here Alexander offers an extremely democratic solution to urbanization wherein the designer and citizen work collectively to analyze and choose design solutions.  However, Kaliski goes on to explain the shortcomings of Alexander’s practice.  Alexander set out to create organic and collective synthesis with a highly defined set of parameters or preconceived limitations that led to a typical city design.  If a certain typology (Kaliski offers a shopping mall) does not meet these parameters then it is lost in the formula.

The idea of democratic ideation and manipulation of the outcome – intentional or not – is one of constant struggle for designers.  We want to involve various stakeholders in the design process; however, we inevitably have preconceived notions about what the outcome should be.  And of course, we are paid to be experts in creating the unimagined and making creative connections from ordinary circumstances.  The consumer, user, owner, etc., often draws more from experience than imagination, and they are very good at telling you what they already know.

As moderators of a participatory design process our role should be to objectively guide an audience in an undetermined direction.  Perhaps our true work as new urbanists is giving stakeholders the ability and tools to imagine unfound solutions.  There are of course entire creative agencies that do just that – walking a client through an innovation process toward a series of design solutions that meet their needs.  As designers we are obligated to be creative visionaries.  However, our work should look less like creative dictatorship and more like creative evangelism.