Perfecting the Ride
In 2015, Philadelphia transformed into a city for cycling with the introduction of Indego — Philly’s self‐service, bike‐sharing scheme. This is the story of how I made a positive difference to everyday life in Philly.
2020 / TUM, Munich. Teammate Rong Peng
Overview
As the residents are more eager to voice the genuine needs of their community, the traditional architecture projects should include discussions with future tenants. This is the story of how I made a positive difference in motivating participatory design in building a community together.
Problem
Traditional architecture projects tend to exclude residents, relegating them to passive roles as mere observers, while decision-makers take the lead. Also, lacking effective methods to include residents in design process: inflexible face-to-face meetings, limited materials for large groups, make it difficult for residents to attend and engage meaningfully. These issues hinder the potential for inclusive and impactful residents’ involvement in architectural projects.
Solution
A game-like interactive design platform, where architects and residents could participate in discussions about sharing space in collective housing projects together. It provides very intuitive operation for the residents and optimize the process of information collection for architects.
My role
I was responsible for the experience strategy and design of the Windows app on the platform Unity. I lead the UX work, producing all major deliverables and presenting these to the client between May and July 2020.
Award
The work received the second prize at the Auf IT Gebaut 2021 awards.
Link: Die Preisträgerinnen und Preisträger im Bereich Architektur – Publikation – aufitgebaut.de.
Key Interface
The interface of our application is like a box stacking game with neighborhood. The operation interface is divided into four areas.
1.
The middle of the interface is the main interactive area, where users can see the main information, like the floors of the building, the urban context, the location of the cubes, etc.
2.
On the right side of the interface is a menu of all cubes, where user can drag and drop different cubes, representing different facilities, into the map.
3.
The upper left of the interface shows the way users interact with others, and there are votes for each cube’s likeness and weight.
4.
At the bottom left of the interface are the assisting functions to help users place the box more easily and precisely, such as rotating the lens and zooming the lens.
Interactions
Selecting desired facility
A library of most common facilities under different categories. The facilities are simplified as boxes or surfaces. Each contains basic information such as area, cost, capacity etc. to help users make decision.
Dragging facility to desired place
By dragging a facility, the related facilities near the neighborhood will show up to provide necessary information for users to make reasonable master planning.
Voting and communicating
Through the interaction panel, users could interact with the facility selected by themself or other users, to vote for it or deciding its location.
Reviewing
The view control panel provides an “explode” mode for the model or the option to rotate the camera. This aids users in examining the facility and its placement within the entire building.
Summary of final agreement
At the end of the box-dragging game, we would have an architectural diagram, which will show some unique needs of community residents, and their relative positions hoping to be placed.
Research
In order to understand the users’ needs and the challenges of the participatory design process,
I have researched the existing project in Germany about how they conducted the protocol and what kind of method they used to collect data.
1. Case Study: PlanBude
A successful co-designing street blocks organized by PlanBude in Hamburg, Germany, named “ESSO Häuser”, achieved a high level of citizen’s participation with the concept as a negotiation platform. The team is an interdisciplinary team from the fields of urban planning, architecture, art, urbanism, social district work and cultural studies.
Methodology
A highly accessible and inclusive participatory design process emphasizing accessibility, model-like representation, democratic principles, open-endedness, inclusivity, and on-site coordination.
- Accessibility
Installed a container ensemble at Spielbudenplatz, visually marked and staffed by team members in PlanBude attire. It opens seven days a week to provide a high-quality space even during the construction phase. (Source: St. Pauli selbermachen 2014)
- Model-like representation
Offered a scale LEGO model at 1:50 scale equipped with 3-D models from residents and drawing materials, clay as well as cameras.
- Information for response
Exhibitions showcasing interim results and a small urban library attract both the curious and reserved. Visitors can gather information and find inspiration in documents, planning materials, and a wish archive from questionnaire.
2. Case Study: Wagnis
WagnisART is a housing project for self-organized and self-managed housing communities. It rewarded with the Deutscher Städtebaupreis 2016 (German Prize for Urban Design, 2016). Wagnis members are renters of their own properties. Its funding model is the social housing subsidization by the Munich city government.
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Collective vision
In their project development, the role of the architect becomes a kind of game master. Everyone can design, but he cannot design his own apartment. Everyone pays more attention to the common spatial quality. For example, how do people enter residential groups, how to get there from public spaces, and finally enter their own apartments?
- Material for expression
Around 200 foldable and removable shoe boxes for the workshop brought by architects, allowing people to create what they want to do. Writing and drawing are also encouraged by taking questionnaires and sketching.
Analysis
Both projects used physical spaces for discussions. One uses a meeting space that is only open at designated times and is not flexible. Although another dedicated discussion space has been built, it is still not easy to maintain the operation of the space.
Although making models using Lego models and shoe boxes is simple and easy to use, it lacks the accuracy of information transmission and is not easy to save. This brings challenges to subsequent information collection and analysis.
Traditional surveys are highly practical, but large amounts of handwriting information are difficult to analyze and lack effective interaction.
Challenges
From the case study analysis, we summarized 4 points that are challenging to solve.
- Managing Diverse Perspectives
Incorporating the input of various stakeholders with different backgrounds, experiences, and opinions can be complex and may require skilled facilitation.
- Documentation and Analysis
Shoebox models are hard to preserve and analyze. Also, if there is any modification after demolition in further design steps, users need to rebuild the model.
- Time-Consuming Process
Engaging stakeholders in the design process can be time-intensive, especially when trying to reach a consensus among a large and diverse group.
- Navigating Conflicting Interests
Different stakeholders may have conflicting interests or priorities, which may require careful negotiation and problem-solving.
Our improvement
Our approach is to design an intuitive digital tool to encourage people involving architectural participatory design. Based on the research, we keep the following key questions as our guide through the evolution process.
- How might we avoid the constrained by location?
- How might we create an easy preservable and modifiable model system?
- How might we reduce time consume of the design process?
- How might we balance the participant influence?
Storyboard
We took a top‐down approach to defining the overall structure of the experience.
Sketching and storyboarding, I generated stacks of ideas about the arrangement of UI,
functional and data elements, and interactive behaviours.
Starting broad, our vision began evolving into something tangible.
User Flow
Based on my user research findings and storyboard,
I decided to focus on the interaction of expressing personal preferences on facility type and its location,
because they seemed to be the most marketable and desired aspects of the community design discussion.
The framework
Our application is trying to be more intuitive and easier for understanding and operating. So we keep the game process and interface simple and clean as much as possible.
1. Select a facility box from the category “Catering service”.
2. Click on the box, operators will pop up: “like”, “dislike”, “add” and “lose weight”.
3. Operating. For example with location, people could add weight to this box to dominate its location.
4. Finish discussion with a result of desired facilities in satisfied places.
Prototype Co-Design community step-by-step
Usability testing
Reflections and next step
We have some functions to be implemented that will make the whole process more complete. Firstly, this game is a website game for multiplayer, so it needs to add a controlling component, for example network manager in unity.
Also we would like to add a feedback function and a rotation function to adjust the digital model. If users want a larger space or have a common extra need for a certain facility, the feedback system could inform architects to improve the design.
Lastly, we want to develop the step two for residents to discuss their sharing of apartment space. Each user has a unit to merge or stack with others in the same unit. If enough people have chosen and stacked the same unit together, the merged volume would be established as a space and then joint with other space.
After residents submit feedback, they could engage in a collaborative discussion or voting process to collectively refine the architectural diagram. This iterative feedback loop allows for continuous improvement and ensures that the final design reflects the preferences and needs of the community.
This diagram will be passed on to the architect for processing in profissional modeling software such as BIM system in order to communicate in the construction stage.
CongLiu Design 