What To Expect If You Attend A Participatory Design Event

(The Why, What & How)

In order to generate the best design ideas for the Bennington Agrihood, we’ve decided to employ a series of 12-25 participatory design events . To accomplish this, we’ve taken the standard design charrette and made a few modifications. We shortened each session (90-150 mins) and spaced the sessions out over the course of a year…and a few other details that are too far in the weeds to not bore you.

Our overarching goal is to come up with an innovative and holistic plan for a highly livable community. To help structure our thinking we’ve divided the project into three non-mutually exclusive but (hopefully) collectively exhaustive tracts: Built Environment, Natural Environment and Social Environment. This simple grouping expands further into our 10 Agrihood Livability Domains and those expand further into a list of ~125 design objectives for this development.

(The Who)

Because we want to get this right and tap into expertise, we are partnering with organizations whose missions align with one of our three tracts (built, natural and social environments) to cohost our design events.

At these events we’ll be inviting a wide variety of participants - our goal is to make sure all stakeholders are represented at each event. We take stakeholder to mean anyone who will be positively or negatively impacted by our project or anyone who can positively or negatively impact our project. So if you attend an event you may see people there who provide professional services such as architects, planners, bankers, developers and landscape architects. There may be people who we’ll need to work with such as politicians and neighbors. There will be many people without any obvious expertise, but we believe that because we all live in communities, that we are all experts in at least one way as it pertains to this project.

(The How, again)

Our aim is to create events which draw forth the latent genius that each one of us possesses. This happens as a result of the content and structure of the design events. First, we work with our event partner to choose activities from our Workshop Activity Bank or, in certain cases, we may create entirely new activities with our partners. The activities are varied but at their core, they all are aimed at getting participants to give well thought out responses to the design objectives we pose to them.

Some of the specifics may be a game time decision such as is the activity individual or group? Or we may vary the point of departure so you can choose to work from a blank slate or to react to a complete plan.

Every event involves the participant visualizing their ideas in one way or another. This could include a drawing, AI image rendering, Sketchup/CAD, etc. We are working to provide new modes of design visualization such as 3D topographic maps and potentially VR or AR.

One of our biggest goals with the community is to be the greatest place to live for people of all generations, as such you may see children running around and/or participating in these design events.

(The Where)

These events will take place at UNO CEC, libraries or at the spaces of our event partners. Some events will be held at the farm site itself!

(The When)

As mentioned above these participatory design events run 1.5-2.5 hours and are generally on weekday evenings. But we may incorporate weekends in upcoming events. The events began in Summer 2024 and are expected to run through Fall 2025.

(Why It Matters To You)

Now that you know what to expect as an attendee, here’s a few reasons why we think you’d benefit from attending:

The events are fun to participate in because there are interesting people attendance and the activities are designed with fun in mind. When interesting and curious people gather and are having fun, that inevitably leads to great conversations and new connections. It feels good to be able to flex your cognitive muscle especially when you know your ideas will directly shape the development of a sustainable community. Another benefit is an obvious one: you can get the inside track on your next home!

Below are some photos of previous events and an event schedule graphic