The model
represents a variant of a process employed by architects and builders
the world over. It consists of seven stages which architecture typically
applies to the built environment. For purposes of this workbook, the
stages will be looked at from the vantage point of the transition
manager.
The
Design Formation process is one of education-not of one expert educating
an ignorant potential user, but of co-designers pressing against
the boundaries of intuition, meaning, and logic, to uncover what
they truly know and what they don't know. Discovering that you don't
know something is the first step to knowing it.
Design
Formation includes the following elements:
- Bringing
intention to the process of invention.
- Asking
the question, what is it that asks for shape and form.
- A
shared sense of exploration, surprise and discovery among all
the members of the design team.
- A
process of bringing something into being.
- The
actual thing brought into being.
- A
model about modeling.
Here
are the stages from the vantage point of the transition manager:
Program.
Listen for, envision, recreate stories that reveal broad themes.
Search for patterns in the complex web. Follow pathways of beauty.
Embody archetypal journeys and characters. Uncover what matters
to you. Love deeply and risk all for that love. Discover passion
and the elemental forces calling you forward. Listen to the drums,
your own heartbeat, the breath of the universe. Choose to live to
be alive on the raw edge of apprehension. Be still. Then consider
what you are being called upon to create and answer with truth and
strength and intent.
Schematic
Concept. Draw one hundred sketches. The axiom says, in every
adverse condition there are hundreds of good solutions. Work rapidly
like an artist who's sketching a live model who changes position
every minute or so. Capture the essence. Strive to embody the patterns
and themes in simple, strong, confident strokes. Or write one hundred
songs. Or paint one hundred masks. Or act out one hundred scenarios.
Improvise. See the thousand faces of your truth and intent.
Preliminary
Design. The schematic and the program are engaged in a dynamic
and sometimes fierce dialog. If an AND solution (an Infinite Game)
can be found at this time, the final creation will be alive. If
the design is compromised by too much attenuation, the final creation
will not be alive. Loop back to the program via Evaluation often
in order to reacquaint yourself with the truth of what was revealed
to you.
Design
Development. Purpose and intent made sharp and clear, deliberate
and decisive. Revealing the hidden patterns that will allow the
final creation to breath, grow, evolve, expand beyond itself into
its own expression. The synergy between all components becomes apparent
and the flows are natural.
Contract
Documents. Precision. Detail that approaches infinity. The revelation
of a factual and recursive design. [recursion: a system whose successive
manifestations are generated by applying the essence of the system
itself to its previous manifestations.] The most living, vibrating,
clear expression of the vision that can be made. Something that
at once inspires and instructs so that many can be employed with
as little direction as possible. At this point the team is bound
by their own laws to deliver the program as a living system.
Production
Management. What care do you bring to your skill, to your tools,
to your team, to the ideas that have come this far? Span the space
between the idea and the physical manifestation. Assert mastery
by serving your art. In rapid, on-the-spot, spontaneous fashion,
you will be called upon to improvise, reconsider, reprove, improve.
Evaluation.
At every stage of the process you have the ability to enter this
sacred space. And why is it sacred? Because upon the moment of initial
evaluation you face your creation, you face what has drawn you to
this point, to this day, to this end. In the early stages, the creation
may lack clear form and substance, but consider that even a program
is a creation. You may reach out a trembling hand and embrace it.
And in the encounter you will learn something of yourself and of
life, a gift of value beyond measure. Don't just take a clinical
look, open your eyes and see. Take this gift and let it lift you
to the next stage and on to an ever-expanding and uncompromising
vision.
(source)
