To mangle an old saw, the stakeholders are NOT always right. But they do have opinions and ideas, oftentimes quite insightful ones. At our peril do we architects overlook, or lord over our clients, and building inhabitants as well, in the design effort. When said stakeholders include citizens wielding the franchise, as is the case with some complex municipal projects, engaging the “others” is not optional.

Once upon a time, in an attempt to distinguish ourselves from better-qualified firms competing for a civic development in Ohio, we managed to invent a new use for television. The project was to redesign the environs of the Great Miami River where it flows through Dayton, Ohio. The date was 1976, and an earlier attempt to create a downtown riverfront plaza had been rejected by the voters.

We offered to staff a storefront office to engage the public in the planning, and the idea went over so well that the city insisted that all competitors do likewise. Having lost our edge, we advanced our concept one step further and took our design brief to the local public TV station. With its help we produced six shows in prime time. People called in live. A local TV personality joined us on the set to represent John Q. Public, asking question and raising objections. We answered all comers and mulled over incoming ideas. It was a cross between a Jerry Lewis Telethon and “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Not only did we get the job, but our version of the plaza – thanks to all of the self-evident transparency that we dubbed “Design-a-Thons – advanced swiftly toward implementation. We were so impressed by television’s impact on planning and communicating with stakeholders that we went on to use it on civic projects in Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and New York. Glitz aside, the storefront office may have been our best source of input from the public, along with a booth and a funky van that we put together for a river festival.

The accompanying images from the archives depict our multifaceted approach and illustrate a time in our professional design development when we were not only leaner but also were learning that while our clients may not always be right or architecturally gifted, they are eminently worth listening to. Seen in two of the photos is Steve Carter (he with the fuller coiffeur than me and the Keystone Cop hat) from Lorenz and Williams, the Dayton architectural firm that joined us in carrying out the project.

Soon after, for more micro projects we developed a workshop process to engage smaller groups of people. We have found that building institutional understanding and consensus for a final design is most often vital to a building’s success.