DW Legacy Design^® Method

DW Legacy Design® is one of the defining characteristics of Design Workshop. It is a commitment to more than land planning and landscape architecture in the traditional sense. It insists on a level of inquiry that is elevated and a design envelope that tackles bigger issues than the project and its mapped boundaries. It insists that the work reflect the critical issues facing the planning and landscape architecture professions and society.

To demonstrate thought leadership and to deliver design of extraordinary quality, our project approach is based in the following foundational principles of Legacy Design:

• Defining and documenting the challenges, vision, purpose, and direction of the project and creating a transferable project story that aligns the sponsors and stakeholders is essential.
  
  
• Comprehensive thinking from the beginning in four categories of sustainability - environment, community, economics and art - yields outcomes that integrate the fullest range of possibilities and metrics for performance.
  
  
• Measurement of project performance using DW Legacy Design^® metrics goals set early in the design process is required to deliver real value and truly sustainable solutions.
  
  
• Inclusive conversations with the full complement of team members and collaborators result in more thorough alternatives and broadly validated solutions.
  
  
• Transparent decision-making allows all parties to understand thought processes resulting in a more resonant and broadly embraced vision.
  
  
• Accountability to goals set early in the design process is required to deliver real value and truly sustainable solutions.
  
  
• Large and complex projects benefit from the workshop pattern of repeatedly breaking down the component parts and then synthesizing the results again. We call this process of iteration Rapid Cycling.

The DW Legacy Design® approach builds a collective intelligence that can be leveraged to discover the potential of a project. The process facilitates complex design and decision-making in a timely, cost-effective manner to achieve comprehensive, high-quality and innovative results.