March 7^th- Design Day

On Friday we had our design day in Allendale. The design day was divided into 2 groups, the Sugar Hill group and the USC Salk group. I participated with the USC Salk group. We had a large group of Allendale/Fairfax high school students and community members took part in the charrette. It wasn’t like a typical charrette that I was use to because it felt as if we were still discussing problems rather than coming up with solutions. There was a lot of input from the community, but after working with this community now for almost an entire school year, it seems like everything going in circles and no answers are being produced.

Aside from the lack of production, I did gain experience with organizing and running a charrette group with community members. In the training day there were many individual examples of problems that could occur while over seeing the group, but they were presented one by one, it’s a completely different situation when they all occur at once. The whole thing was a series of alternating chaotic and organized moments, which in the end we were able to make sense of it all. I would have just liked to produce more documents from the day though.