Charette
A charette (also spelled charrette) is an intensive, time-boxed collaborative design workshop where the design team and stakeholders work through a problem together and produce options quickly.
The format compresses work that might otherwise take weeks into a focused session or a few consecutive days. Everyone who holds a piece of the problem is in the room at once, so questions are answered immediately rather than by email over a fortnight.
In residential work a charette is often used at the start of a complex project, or when a site has a constraint that needs resolving before anything else can proceed, such as a difficult level change, a flood or bushfire overlay, or a heritage neighbour.
The output is usually a set of tested options with their trade-offs made explicit, rather than one finished answer. The value is the shared understanding: decisions made in a charette tend to stick, because the reasoning behind them was witnessed by everyone.