Placing Stakes Together / Walk It Out
"Dr. Ryan told us, after his clinic was built, that this one week he spent with us, shaping the building, was the most important week he had spent in five years the week in which he had felt most alive... The simple process by which people generate a living building simply by walking it out, waving their arms, thinking together, placing stakes in the ground, will always touch them deeply. "
There’s something immensely powerful in designing things together with the people who will actually be using the thing and the people who will actually be building the thing. Some of the most memorable highlights of my career have been the times where I was working directly with stakeholders and users of the actual thing I was building and riffing off a hundred “wouldn’t-it-be-cools”.
I once built some software for salespeople to streamline the quoting process for a Gazebo-building company. I wasted a week trying to “gather requirements” before I finally drove over, sat down and asked someone to “sell me a Gazebo”. And we quite literally “walked it out” through the showroom floor and I got to see for myself what the actual difference between wood and composite flooring was.
The farther you get from the user, the more sterile your “requirements” become.