On Tuesday I went to the Grand Opening of a rural exception
scheme I had been working on for the past five years. I handed over my “baby”
to a Development colleague in August last year when I changed jobs internally,
safe with the knowledge that the hard work was over with. (The scheme was not
on paper “controversial”, but had met with a minority of local opposition who
had instigated legal challenges in a desperate attempt to thwart development
proceeding. All actions failed. Cost reimbursement was sought from the
defending council. The moral is it doesn’t pay to be a trouble maker purely for
the sake of it).
At that point it was up to timber frame roof level, so to
see it blossom from an unruly, obstinate child into a beautifully mature and
welcome addition to the village was tear-inducing. All I could say when my
construction-colleagues asked me what I thought was that it was “brilliant”, “wonderful”:
I was a little lost for words (highly unusual!)
I was privileged enough to have a look inside one of the
properties, which had by now become the home of a young family. The lead tenant had
grown up in the village, and whilst he had lived with his parents in the village his whole life
his girlfriend had lived with her parents - with their baby - in the city as there was
nowhere suitable (affordable) for them to be living all together. Their story
was the very reason why we stuck with the scheme, despite all the challenges, pursuing it to the very end. Because
it may only have been eight units, but those houses became homes for people desperately in need of affordable accommodation in a community that sees middle-aged
city workers moving into their area for a “better quality of life”, without
appreciating their migration pushes up the prices for those born and raised
there, beyond hope of reach.
But I haven’t written this blog to whinge and moan about the
lack of affordable housing in rural areas. That's another story. Instead, what struck me when walking
around her home was how design decisions I had made early on had contributed to
the delight she now experienced living there. I want to explore this further.
I always drew on my own personal experience from how I live
in my home, the design changes I would make to make my life easier, and brought
that to the table with this scheme. For instance, I decided not to box in the
under-stairs cupboard (as had been done in my home - before I ripped it out)
because it limited valuable storage space with a stupid piddly little door for
access. I could see that this family used it to store their daughter’s pram –
something that would not have been possible if it had been enclosed. In one of
the flats (which I unfortunately was not able to gain access to) I had
installed a sun-pipe into the upstairs landing, because as there were no windows
there would not have been any natural lighting – something I detest in my mid-terrace
house. The Quality Assurance Manager informed me that they really chucked out a lot of light into that area - which is exactly what I had intended.
However, those design decisions were made before I embarked
on my systems thinking learning journey. I made “educated guesses” at what it
was our future residents would want to see in their homes, drawing on personal
and professional experience. I had no way of asking them specifically what they
wanted. It was perhaps by luck, perhaps by intuition that I happened to get
those decisions right, and ended up with a finished product that met (you might say exceeded) their expectations.
This made me consider what I now think may be the
fundamental flaw in lean or systems thinking: we start with defining the
customer and then what value means to them – as in, what we need to do to meet
their expectations. But what if we - and more to the point, they - don't know what those expectations are at the crucial time?
To be continued in #2
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