Compare methods

	Visual Preference Survey	Charrette Method
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	2006
Originator	Anton C. Nelessen	National Charrette Institute (Bill Lennertz & Aarin Lutzenhiser)
Type	Survey eliciting community design preferences by rating images	Time-compressed, multi-day collaborative design and planning workshop
Seminal source	Nelessen, A. C. (1994). Visions for a New American Dream: Process, Principles, and an Ordinance to Plan and Design Small Communities. American Planning Association. ISBN: 9780918286888	Lennertz, B., & Lutzenhiser, A. (2006). The Charrette Handbook: The Essential Guide for Accelerated, Collaborative Community Planning. American Planning Association. ISBN: 9781932364217
Aliases	VPS, Visual Preference Analysis, Image Preference Survey, Nelessen Visual Preference Survey	Design Charrette, NCI Charrette, Dynamic Planning Charrette, Collaborative Design Workshop
Related	4	4
Summary	A visual preference survey (VPS) elicits a community's design preferences by asking residents to rate a curated set of photographs — of streets, buildings, public spaces, and landscapes — on a simple numeric scale. Developed and popularized by planner Anton Nelessen, it turns the often vague question of what a community wants its environment to look like into comparable scores, revealing which images people reward, which they reject, and where they agree or disagree. The averaged ratings give planners a defensible visual brief grounded in resident preference rather than professional taste.	A charrette is an intensive, time-compressed collaborative workshop in which designers, planners, officials, and the public work together over several days to produce a feasible plan or design for a place. Codified by the National Charrette Institute in The Charrette Handbook, the method replaces the slow, adversarial sequence of separate meetings with short, repeated feedback loops in which designs are drawn, shown to stakeholders, critiqued, and immediately revised. Its purpose is to compress months of back-and-forth into a few days and to build shared ownership of the outcome.