Fred Schmidt

FRED SCHMIDT | FSB ARCHITECTS

All of us spend our whole lives in the built environment, from our childhood to raising our families to our old age. Therefore, the quality design of the built environment has a major impact on our communities and our personal lives. We are all stewards of this built environment, and we have an obligation to create public awareness about the virtues of a good built environment, and to focus on quality, sustainable design.

Successful design and planning efforts have common threads, and based on Fred’s experience leading projects at FSB Architects, a lot of this success is all about the earliest stages of a project. Fred shared some insights into the early stages of a design process.

Engage in a peer tour: Seek out similar communities and projects that you can actually plan a visit to. Take a group that represents all the stakeholders and implementers who will be involved in your project. Communities will be open to sharing their experiences, successes, and lessons learned, and it will help you learn about the right approach before you begin the project.

Understand the community, instead of the project: We must have a shared understanding of the client before the design project. Where are they coming from? What’s the history? What are the values? What are the challenges? What are the visions for the future? You can help a design team understand your community by planning a cultural immersion event for the team. During one FSB project with the Choctaw Nation, the client helped prepare a 2-day event sharing history, language, culture, foods, stories, symbolism, songs, and dances for the design team.

Meet with a broad variety of stakeholders: Always include brainstorming with many people, and invite them into the process by using interactive, engaging activities. Make sure that you set the rule that there are no bad ideas, and that everyone should take a turn at participating. This is the way to get a diversity of ideas, concerns, passions, and open brainstorming about possibilities.

Define your resources more broadly: Your resources are not just limited to grants and funding. People, businesses, and organizations from your community and other communities can also be a resource to a project.

Capture ideas graphically: During the process, include visual representation of ideas and concepts.