urbanLab Magazin 2021 - Transformation

Interface overview
dimensions of diversity in public spaces
and calculate their resulting urban
vitality. This benchmark can shed light
on formerly unseen city life dimensions
and help creating vital urban spaces.
It is based on the diversity of people currently
moving, their current objective,
and the pedestrian flow related to time.
Desired is a diverse, continuous pedestrian
flow with little peaks or valleys in
public places. The agents also make decisions
on the mode of transportation.
Taken into account for the calculation of
the urban vitality are only pedestrians
and bicycles, while cars have a negative
influence on the vitality. The urban vitality
is visualised as a heat map on the
model. The surrounding with its buildings
and building uses, citizens, public
transportation, and parks is built up
using data from Open Street Maps and
the Offene Daten Köln - Initiative. Since
the goal is to optimize urban vitality, the
model has two interactive variables:
The building uses of the future district
and the demographics of the future
district citizens. The users can modify
these two variables using the tangible
user interface and get feedback on their
actions.
3 TANGIBLE
The tangible user interface (TUI) breaks
this complex simulation down to
a simple representation, combining a
physical model with a projection. It serves
as a visual feedback-based decision
support model for participatory design.
Therefore, it is important to be particularly
clear and easy in the way of interacting
with it and make sure to give a
clear feedback.
As mentioned by Kent Larson and Ariel
Noyman (2017) from the CityScience
group at the MIT Media Lab, TUIs were
found to be much more approachable
to people. Other solutions for participatory
design such as touchscreen tables
or even paper were still too complex
and abstract for many participants and
are also limited in the number of parallel
users. The interface used here builds
up on the CityScope projects from the
MIT Media Lab (2021).
From a technical point of view, the TUI is
based on a pipeline that detects physical
change of a model, translates it to a
digital equivalent that triggers an action
and connects the resulting digital information
back to the physical object. In
this case, the physical objects are so called
tags and sliders. Tags describe the
use of the buildings; the sliders make it
possible to change the demographics of
the district.
In workshops, different stakeholders
can modify these tags and sliders now
to collaboratively develop the district
and evaluate different situations regarding
the urban vitality of the public places.
Through the projection of the simulation,
the users get a near to real-time
feedback as well as a visual benchmark
of the urban vitality. This helps creating
a game-like experience.
STUDENT IDEAS
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