The document arrived on a Tuesday in February: sixty pages, 64 megabytes. It had personas illustrated with stock photographs, eleven competitor audits, a positioning matrix and a mood board of forty-one Scandinavian interiors. Someone had clearly worked on it for months. It also contained, as far as we could tell after two careful readings, no decision that anyone had actually made.

what a long brief hides

Long briefs are usually a sign of care, and sometimes a sign of nerves. When a client is unsure, the brief grows to cover every possibility, and the designer is left to guess which of the forty-one images matter. For nordhavn residences, a housing development on the old container quay in Copenhagen, the brief asked for a brand that was ‘premium but approachable’, ‘Nordic but international’ and ‘timeless but modern’. Each pair was reasonable on its own. Together they described every new building in the city.

So we booked a morning with the client team in their site office, a portacabin with a view of three cranes, and put the document face down on the table. We asked three questions. Who will live here in ten years? What should a visitor feel in the first thirty seconds inside the lobby? What would you refuse to do, even if it sold flats faster?

The answers fitted on one page, and they were more useful than the sixty that came before them.

the one-page brief

The new brief had a single paragraph about the people: families who had outgrown their flats in Østerbro, and older couples moving closer to the water. It had one sentence about the lobby, which should feel like arriving at a friend’s house rather than a hotel. And it had a short list of refusals, which turned out to be the most useful part. No gold. No lifestyle photography of people who do not live there. No names borrowed from shipping lines.

Everything we made afterwards could be checked against that page in a minute. The wayfinding uses the quay’s old berth numbers, painted at a child’s eye level as well as an adult’s. The website opens on a floor plan rather than a sunset. When a stakeholder asked for more gold late in the project, we did not need to argue. We pointed at the page they had helped to write.

what we do now

We no longer ask for briefs in the traditional sense. We ask for a morning. We bring the three questions, adjusted for the project, and we write the brief together before anyone opens a design file. It usually runs to a page, occasionally two. The long documents still arrive, and we still read them carefully, because the research inside them is often good. We just do not let them make the decisions.