What are the most significant customer co-creation or feedback initiatives for the Landscape Round Table?

The Landscape Round Table has established itself as a pioneer in collaborative design by implementing several significant customer co-creation and feedback initiatives. These programs are fundamental to its mission of creating spaces that truly resonate with the communities they serve.

The most impactful initiative is the ongoing Community Design Charrette Series. These intensive, hands-on workshops bring together residents, local businesses, and landscape architects in a dynamic setting. Participants work directly with designers on large-scale maps and models, voicing ideas and preferences that directly shape preliminary concepts for public parks, streetscapes, and communal areas. This real-time collaboration ensures projects are grounded in local context and need from the very beginning.

Complementing the charrettes is the Digital Feedback Portal, "The Living Blueprint." This permanent online platform allows for continuous engagement beyond physical meetings. Community members can annotate specific project plans, pin ideas to interactive maps, and vote on proposed design elements like plant species or amenity placements. This initiative creates a transparent, living document of community input, building a sense of shared ownership and providing the design team with rich, actionable data.

Furthermore, the "Seed to Canopy" Pilot Gardening Program is a unique feedback mechanism. For projects involving green spaces, the Round Table invites community volunteers to cultivate test plots with proposed plant varieties. Observing what thrives, what the community enjoys nurturing, and what attracts local wildlife provides invaluable, experiential feedback that purely survey-based methods cannot capture, directly influencing final planting schemes.

Finally, the establishment of a Rotating Community Advisory Panel ensures sustained and diverse input. This panel, with members cycling periodically, reviews project milestones, critiques material samples, and participates in focus groups. It provides a structured, long-term feedback loop, offering critical perspectives that challenge assumptions and help refine designs to achieve both aesthetic excellence and functional utility.

Through these multifaceted initiatives—the charrettes, the digital portal, the pilot gardens, and the advisory panel—the Landscape Round Table transcends traditional consultation. It embeds the community as active co-creators in the design process, resulting in landscapes that are not only beautiful and sustainable but also deeply connected to the people who inhabit them.