Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: design team

[katie-henry (katie-henry]

> Has any other group used a team of people to work with the architect? How has 
> it worked?

Here I am again to tell you what NOT to do. When we first split up into teams, 
probably 70-80% of the community joined the Design team. Most of these members 
just wanted to make sure they would like the unit upgrade options and didn't 
contribute anything to the design process. 

What our Design team really needed and didn't have enough of was:

(1) People with experience in building design and construction, or at least 
with the ability to grasp complicated technical and logistical issues. In other 
words, get your engineers and programmers involved. It's not all aesthetics. 
You can always repaint, but a bad trash-management plan will haunt you forever.

(2) People to keep track of the thousands of details and decisions and follow 
up to make sure they got recorded and implemented. Maybe it should have been 
the job of our developer/architect -- he's not exactly a detail guy -- but we 
continue to pay for our lack of record-keeping. In retrospect, since we didn't 
have anyone who would do this, we should have hired someone to attend our 
design meetings and take notes.

Katie
Eastern Village Cohousing
Silver Spring, MD