"It is immensely hard to help people tell you what they want."
It is immensely hard to help people tell you what they want. Even in the simple practical issues of a building, its entrance, its rooms, its gardens . . . people cannot easily formulate their vision or their desire.
Since we wanted people to have their heart's desire, we must help them and teach them to see their own visions, drawn out by our words and by their own words.
If we learn to do this well, we will help their dreams to materialize. Their dreams will take concrete, outward form.
—The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World Systems, by Christopher Alexander
This is the paradox of all creative activity that involves technical knowledge.
The client does not know what they want; we do not know what they want. If we push too hard to say what we think is "right," then we do them a disservice, by pushing too hard on them.
If we let them make all the decisions, they will make many that we know to be foolish, because of our technical knowledge:
The customer of a luthier wants to use a wood for his guitar that is beautiful, but does not have the right acoustic makeup to work well with the types of strings he wants
A web design client insists on a technology that is extremely difficult to implement because it makes them feel like they will have a great site, siphoning of resources better spent on marketing, and sabotaging their results
The client of a builder insists on a kind of awning that will always leak
There is the most interesting back-and-forth, that must be handled skillfully, asking the right questions; opening up the topic; exploring around, until the whole domain of what the client really needs, is explored.
Priorities are set based on the entire layout of what needs to be done (not just the most exciting parts)
Discoveries are made by everyone, about what the key issues really are, that could be found no other way (except of course, by ignoring them, and finding out after the fact)
The graceful interplay of this discovery work, is one of the most interesting things to me, of the entire process. And—it is a bit of a trouble: Because along with the client not knowing a multitude of important things about the successful completion of their project; they also are (almost always) unaware that they are unaware.
They don't know that they don't know.
So, one must be gentle about introducing it, easing it in gradually, into what they think they need.
In essence, no creative project of any complexity, reveals to us what is really needed, except by exploring around in it for a while. When we do that, then things emerge. Every project is different, and has a different "life" of its own. It's our job, to discover, uncover that form—much like the idea of the stone carver revealing the form that is embedded in the rock. If we do so beautifully, then a new form is created—a coherent, beautiful form, that works in harmony with its surroundings. This is, really, creating new life. New organisms, in a sense.
