Each Design-A-Thon was broadcast in episodes that corresponded to different phases of the design process, about thirty days apart. During the first episode, designers introduced themselves and the project before taking viewers’ calls. In the second episode, designers presented their initial design concepts and elicited feedback from viewers. After integrating public comments, architects proposed a selection of design models in the third episode. The final episodes constituted presentations of the recommended scheme with implementation strategies and development cost schedules. Local television station managers eagerly worked with the architects, going so far as to provide free airtime, because the design-a-thons satisfied a regulatory standard imposed by the Federal Communications Commission that stations devote air-time to “public interest” programming.
The staging of the Design-A-Thons, paired with the nearly instantaneous transmission of live television, turned the act of planning into a shared and public experience. To meet the unique demands of television audiences, Design-A-Thons turned architects into public figures, even showing them sitting at the drawing boards where they sketched out callers’ ideas in real time. Models were built and graphics were designed using bold, flat hues to ensure they would hold up under studio lights and transmit clearly over both colour and black-and-white televisions. Architects were required to adopt a casual tone while translating complex and jargon-heavy design concepts into language their audiences could understand. The programs intentionally depicted the design process as collaborative, exciting, and a little chaotic: phone banks opened lines of communication between designers and the public while caller suggestions were posted on studio walls and screens to visualize the influx of ideas. In reporting on the Design-A-Thons, Architectural Record referenced Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the “global village” and concluded: “Idea-by-idea, sketch-by-sketch, the people and their architects built up an image of their city as it should be.”
Despite these promising initial steps, the potential of television as a medium for participatory design was curtailed in the 1980s with the defunding of urban projects and deregulation of broadcasting under the Reagan administration, which severely limited experiments in both planning and public affairs programming. Even more than political or industry changes, conservative professional attitudes and policies seem to have prevented many architects from turning to television. Floyd credits the biggest obstacle to its widespread use in design as “the straight-laced self-image architects seem to have of themselves.” When he tried to organize a design studio
on the subject of television and participatory design at Yale University, Floyd found that “the majority of the faculty there viewed the topic as inappropriate.” The Design-A-Thons epitomized the social fervour of the 1970s, when architects and planners explored the mechanisms of pop culture to fulfill the mandates of social relevance.
