A charrette is an intense generative exercise that takes place over multiple days, and involves a multi-disciplinary group of participants. The purpose of a charrette is to efficiently generate design solutions for a project while considering diverse viewpoints of the stakeholders involved.
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Stakeholders from every facet of the project, including designers, developers, user experience engineers, marketing professionals, Subject Matter Experts, and intended primary users collaborate and attend a charrette; there may be 20 or more people at the meeting. Throughout the course of a meeting day, the main group breaks into sub-groups to work on solving a smaller chunk of the design problem. The sub-groups spend about 30 minutes brainstorming and diagramming potential solutions, then all the sub-groups merge and share their findings. This main group votes on the most feasible and desired solutions and then divides into new sub-groups to work on another design issue. Each sub-group is a fresh, multi-disciplinary collaboration. On the last day of the charrette, the entire group determines priorities and general timelines for the most popular design solutions that were suggested.