At the end of October, we hosted our first charrette in Los Angeles with great success.
Wanting to keep up the momentum, we decided to experiment with hosting these online — allowing us to take the same idea and scale it up; to more quickly explore other pieces of the fair, generate ideas, and start to build a small community around the Fair’s development.
After some experimentation and a couple of false starts (…and help from Cam Kelley), we finally found our groove hosting with a Zoom / Miro hybrid. Since December, we’ve hosted 23 charrettes and had ~70 builders (from organizations like OnDeck, Praxis, 1517 Fund, and Culdesac) volunteer their time to brainstorm and explore concepts we’ll develop for the World’s Fair.
Through these sessions, we mapped the Fair’s core layout, pieced together various ideas into a clear story, and identified the next steps for development. The outputs yielded a huge database of concepts, a preliminary development plan, and planted the seeds of the community we’ll be growing in the coming months.
Like the L.A. charrette, the best and most exciting part was the energy in these sessions. People kept coming back (many more than twice) full of ideas and optimism for the future. As one attendee said, “this feels like the only place I’m able to shamelessly dream big about the future I want to live in.”
Bluntly, these were tons of fun and I’m extremely grateful for everyone who came out to this set of charrettes. We’ll be hosting more in the future as we take a deeper dive into each of the themes and Immersive Worlds. For now, I’m off to the Expo for some market research.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in joining an upcoming session, please let us know here.
Onwards!
Cameron