The design process often starts with an assignment with a specified program of requirements. In terms of a river project for instance a safety goal, sometimes quantified as a target for main high water level reduction, ecological goals, leisure goals, goals for shipping, landscape quality goals et cetera. The design itself must bring these – sometimes wide ranging – goals together to a convincing whole. How they do that might look as a black box.

For some insight how that ‘black box’ might work, we take a closer look at a selection of the design considerations that you met in the video introducing the discipline, the video of the river Aire making acquaintance with landscape architect George Descombes and the interview with landscape architect Lodewijk van Nieuwenhuijze about his work on the Nijmegen-Lent project. We make a list of considerations mentioned. For each review, we add a little subtext or a characteristic question in italic to help you on the way.

A. Hydraulic effectivity/efficiency

o   The hydraulic goals are given in the project brief of course and with the measures you selected in week 2 of the MOOC can meet the target. The design question here could be about fine-tuning and making the solution more elegant: (…) how can you reach the same (hydraulic) effects with less or a minimum of means or change of modalities (raising efficiency); 

B. Ecological considerations

o   How do you see ‘nature’. As something that is to be conserved? Or more instrumental: processes that might work for us (building with nature) or something that is autonomous and has it’s own intrinsic values. Different (world)views

o   What would the resulting increased roughness of the nature development that follows your view on ecology do to the discharge capacity? Can you compensate for this increased resistance somewhere in your river reach? 

C. Livability considerations

o   How is your project connected to its environment. Can you build in more accessibility for leisure?

o   Can your project be built, while minimizing the inconvenience for the environment

D. Practical considerations

o   First practical question is of course, can it be done, can this set of goals stated in the program of requirements be realized in your project area. And can it be realized within a given financial and time budget?

E. Aesthetic considerations

o   Are your solutions in tune with the character of the river idiom. Will you mimic that idiom or chose a different angle, e.g. maximizing the contrast between your intervention and the existing landscape.

F. Cultural historic considerations

o   In landscape you always deal with the legacy of choices and interventions of earlier generations and specific nature development that reacted on these artefacts. Question for the designer is how to deal with these traces of the past: value them, use them, give them a new significance, ignore them: these are all legitimate choices.

G. Economic considerations

o   Staying within the budget is of course the first economic consideration but

o   Could you also generate income for the project (e.g. to earn back some of the investments) by using the real estate potential, by optimizing the soil balance of the project, et cetera.

One might in a simplified way, conceptualize the design process as a series of iterations trying to find a fitting solution by sharpening the design in iterations, adding one argument at the time and let that argument enrich, change or even reject the earlier concept.