Sprint qualifier—Image credit: Dave Haygarth

Yesterday’s zesty comments on brainstorming have encouraged me to continue reminiscing about my design school days. Anything I still remember after 15-20 years is worth massaging into something we can all use now.

What stands out for me today is the Virginia Society’s weekend charette. As I Remember It (AIRI), the annual event was always exciting, thrilling, exhausting, and disappointing. That last was my nature at the time (unfortunately), and the first three were the nature of the game.

The design guidelines and merciless countdown would have hundreds of students cranking out work all weekend—some without any sleep—and I’m still amazed at what we could produce in 63 hours. Looking back on it, what may be useful to us now is how I learned to manage the task, the ways we executed our solutions, and the competitive community spirit at its best.

So Many Words, Too Little Time

AIRI, we would gather at 5pm on Friday to receive a single sheet with the competition theme, design limitations, deadline, and submission format. The deadline and submission format were always the same—AIRI 8am Monday morning, one 30″ x 40″ board for the final presentation—but the theme and limitations were always very different.

For first year students cutting their teeth on assignments like Egger’s 100 Squares or K. C. Arceneaux’s Organize Three Colors On A Page, real-life issues like people and materials were tough. For older students who were hip deep in year-long projects, the short-lived competition could be a welcome relief or an irritating distraction. What everyone needed was focus, and my then-friend Hunter Pittman had THE answer to limiting the mind to what mattered: a black Sharpie.

Hunter taught me to read through the design problem with deliberate care and savor every word from stage-setting paragraphs like—

“The urban landscape has been erased by a hurricane. The supporting utilities remain, but every house is gone and the 1,546 residents wander…”

to the details of a challenge like—

“Your task is to design a core home plan that can extend or contract to suit the many familial configurations. Consider the recurring storms while ensuring the building materials and design meet state code…”

and then go back through the document with my mighty Sharpie and methodically black out every word I didn’t need.

Because while all of the information was useful and most of it was valuable, little of the text was significant and only a few bits were critical. And you know how Sharpie’s are…once a word, sentence, or paragraph was marked through, it was gone.

And this was ideal because I only had time for essentials. The design challenges were often worthy of a long-term project, but the key to managing the task within the scant allotted time was to obliterate anything that wasn’t necessary for the finished design. And yes, this was highly subjective.

Since then, I’ve found Hunter’s process of darkly eliminating non-essentials can be far more effective than brightly highlighting what’s important. It’s a handy mental trick for whittling down a task list, but when faced with a complex contract—or even my own project plans—I make a copy of the document and bust out my marker, because only Hunter’s original method will do.

Think Before, Think Now, Think Later…Or Never?

After receiving the challenge, it was time to start working…or was it? For some, it was best to start the project before the project started. For others, the solution came before they knew the problem. Here are the ways we approached the solution phase of the competition, and my take on some of them:

The Production Prep Method
If you knew how you were going to produce your work, you could get the jump on the project by preparing your board in advance. This was especially handy for students whose medium required prep work, like watercolorists. These folks didn’t spend precious charette time mulling over how they were going to present their solution, but their early commitment made it hard to change gears if the theme nudged them toward a different medium.

The Concept Prep Method
Similar to my suggestion for Banner Boy, if you preferred to spend your charette time on production and not conception, then it made sense to prepare your design concept in advance. Students would walk into the challenge armed with “light vs. dark” or “materials in their rawest form” or “blue”—anything they had simmered on for a day or two. By Friday, the design concept was an old friend that could ease their approach. The good news was they had much of the solution going in, the bad news was a concept too far removed from the theme meant that one of the two would need to be distorted or abandoned.

The Wait And See Method (WASM)
A majority of the participants didn’t do any prepwork, choosing to spin into action when the challenge was released. Some folks went out for burgers and beer to hash it over, some went straight to their desks, some started working in their sketchbooks right where they stood or sat. But even this standard method had many schools of thought:

—Quick Think, Long Work worked for people willing to commit most of their solution to excellent execution. They would have their idea resolved by Friday night and spend the whole weekend painting, drawing, or rendering. If their solution was weak, winning would depend almost entirely on their strong presentation, and sometimes that was enough.

—Long Think, Quick Work was for the procrastinators and the ponderers. While the procrastinators spent the greater part of the weekend hmming and hawing and gnashing their teeth, the ponderers were alternately sketching and scribbling and pacing the floor. Either way, executing their idea was fast work, and sometimes the brilliance of an idea was lost in a hurried presentation…but not always.

—Middle Of The Road was the balanced system, where you brainstormed Friday night into Saturday afternoon, brought things into focus by dinner on Saturday, and executed the design presentation into the wee hours on Monday.

The Already Done Method
No kidding, a few people prepared an entire project board in advance and submitted it as the response, whether it suited the design problem or not. Maybe they would leave enough room in their solution for customization, but maybe not. A one-size-fits-all (or fits none) answer to whatever question was asked. I always thought this way was a lame cheat.

The My-Way-Or-The-Highway Method
And there were always a few students who wouldn’t participate in the competition if they considered the design challenge unworthy. I used to think it was bold and daring to be so diametrical. Looking back, I think those folks were snarky wimps. Their way or no way? What kind of way is that to approach anything?

So there were lots of ways to work within the limitations or without them, including finishing early so you could enjoy watching everyone else sweat! And although I can’t remember a single one of the design problems or my solutions, I do remember the freefall failure of winging it [my continued regrets, Ton] and doing my best when I struggled comfortably with something I already had in mind.

For all the different methods, we had these things in common: 1) We all worked on the same problem, 2) We all had the same amount of time, 3) We all had the same chance at winning.

My Rival, My Comrade

A notable thing about the competition is that all the Virginia architectural design schools participated. To be fair, the responsibility of creating the design problems fell to each school’s faculty on a rotation…so most years we Virginia Tech students imaginated offbeat solutions to the painfully practical design challenges from Hampton and UVA, and once per cycle the other schools suffered from the mind-melting cryptic sh!t we’d been dealing with since the crib. It was so very fab!

And there were two levels to the competition: intraschool and interschool. The cream of our particular crop moved on to be juried at the state level among the very best from the other schools. So while we spent the entire weekend trying to outdo each other, after our faculty jury made their selections, we all rooted for whoever went on to represent our school.

I still do that in a way, and it seems I’m not the only one. A fellow blogger recently emailed me congrats on my improved Alexa ranking…which he’d apparently been watching. This tickled me because I pace this blog’s growth by his (and other’s) Technorati ranking, and had Twittered him last month about his notable gain there. I don’t care at all about “winning”, but I care quite a bit about keeping up with my pack. A fellow blogger’s advance isn’t a threat to me, nor mine to him. Any win is a win for the group, and that’s as it should be.

What’s In My Pocket

So here’s what I carry with me from these intense competitions after 20 years:

• Tomorrow morning I’ll wish I had slept 8 hours tonight!
• It doesn’t matter how I prepare, so long as I’m prepared
• Friendly competition is the best competition
• Less resources (time, money, etc.) means more managing my (and my client’s) expectations, and most of all

I can do a helluvalot in very little time when I can set, and maintain, my focus

With that last in mind, chew on this…

If you were promised two consecutive, uninterrupted days:

• What could you do for your business?
• What could you do for yourself?
• How would you prepare for that sacred time? and
• How can you make some version of an intensely focused time block happen for you?