One method in six stages, whatever the trade.
This is not a recipe, and what fills each stage changes depending on whether the subject is a house, a website or a text. The order does not change.
1. Read what is already there
The place, the people, the history, the previous attempts, the constraints that will not change. This stage is not the taking of a brief: it is what determines whether the project is feasible as it has been asked for.
2. Name what actually matters
A project rarely arrives with its real priorities already sorted. Telling them apart from the stated ones is often the most useful service we provide.
3. Make it hold together
A project brings together requirements that contradict one another: budget and quality, speed and durability, use and heritage. The work is to look for the solution that satisfies them together, not to negotiate what each must give up.
4. Think in ten-year terms
What has to last is designed with lasting in mind. That rules out passing fashions, technical solutions nobody will be able to maintain, and deadlines nobody will keep.
5. Look at the consequences beforehand
What we do has effects on a site, on a neighbourhood, on people, on a future use. We examine them when the decision is being made, not when they show up.
6. Hand on rather than deliver
The end of a build or a project is not the end of the relationship. We leave behind enough to understand what was done and why, so that whoever comes next can make use of it.