Introduction

Structured Planning is a process for finding, structuring, using and communicating the information necessary for design and planning activities. It is a front-end process for developing concepts.

A number of projects have been undertaken with it and used to continue its development. Among well over 60 of these, an early published project for Chicago’s transit authority (CTA) was Getting Around: Making the City Accessible to Its Residents (1972). In 1983, the House of the Future project won the Grand Prize in the Japan Design Foundation’s First International Design Competition. In 1985, a project on Space Station was undertaken for NASA; in 1987, the Aquatecture project again won the Grand Prize in the Japan Design Foundation’s Third International Design Competition. In 1991, Project Phoenix on global warming was honored as Environmental Category Grand Winner in Popular Science magazine’s “100 Greatest Achievements in Science and Technology” for the year. In 1993, two projects, NanoPlastics and Aerotecture, won awards and were widely publicized in Europe and Japan, and in 1995 the National Parks project developed plans for the future of the National Park Service. As the process has evolved, it has become an increasingly useful planning tool for products, systems, services and organizations. It is now being used commercially.

This analysis provides a general overview of Structured Planning. As the latest version of the description of an evolving process, it uses materials developed in the Meeting the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants project as examples.