Overview

The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) reached out to the University of Hawai’i Community Design Center (UHCDC) and the Institute for Sustainability and Resilience (ISR) with funding to help Mayors and County Offices respond to challenges and opportunities that emerged from our pandemic experience. Grateful for this opportunity, we coordinated this Design Tank, which began by reaching out to Kauaʻi and Honolulu Counties to solicit their needs and priorities. Then we gathered educators, thinkers, designers, and students from the University of Hawai’i and two of the most respected community design centers in the nation, who have enthusiastically agreed to participate. Our deepest aloha and mahalo to all.

What is a Design Tank?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a “think-tank” is “a meeting or conference of experts to provide advice and ideas.” 

The goal of a think tank is to broaden discourse.

In 2007, the OED added a new definition to its entry for the word “charrette,” which derives from architectural instruction in early nineteenth century France, at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In contemporary parlance, a charrette is “a collaborative workshop focusing on a particular problem . . . ; a public meeting or conference devoted to discussion of a proposed community building project.”

The goal of a charrette is to focus consensus.

A “design tank” hybridizes the best properties of these two models. 

UHCDC developed this public-sector process to concentrate professional expertise on a specific spatial and formal problem, guided by stakeholder input and pertinent data, with the express aim of generating conceptual frameworks and alternative design scenarios consistent with agreed-upon objectives.

-Varney Circle Design Tank Report