urbanLab Magazin 2021 - Transformation

Ways of interaction
CONCLUSION
Although it comes with simplifications
and developments left for the future,
the system showed great potential in
supporting urban design decisions.
The simulation of different scenarios in
the district, by changing parameters of
population demographics and building
use, resulted in a big impact on the calculated
urban vitality of the public spaces.
This response of the model not only
highlights some obvious assumptions
– such as areas closer to connecting
bridges being more frequented – but
also shows surprising results in different
settings – like how easy it is to lose
visitors when removing just part of the
commercial buildings.
Many uncertainties still remain due to
simplifications in the agent-based model
and limited data and technical resources.
Despite that, how the agents
built from the social media profiles
behave in the simulations, from where
and when they go to which mobility
mode they choose, was not very distant
of how real people are expected
to behave. In the future, it would be interesting
to see how adding household
information to the population or more
transportation modes could affect the
results. Modelling a bigger area of the
city and running the model with a bigger
sample of the population could also
bring improvement.
Despite still not have been tested in a
bigger group due to the current social
distancing rules, the tangible user interface
performed well between a small
group of people, being easily understandable,
intuitive and giving almost
immediate feedback to the user when
interacted with. Built with a much more
affordable set-up than similar tools, it
still has the potential of being reused
for different projects, just by replacing
the tabletop and keeping the rest of the
hardware. Also approachable was the
concept of the agents in the simulation
being based on real people from social
media, as noted by a colleague who interacted
with the table. Such feedback
hints at the potential of making citizens
feeling recognized in urban design decisions,
since social media is so familiar to
almost everybody nowadays. Even with
the possibility of privacy concerns raising,
as discussed earlier, people tend
to feel comfortable in having their data
used when they know how, why and for
what it will be used, in which the TUI is a
powerful tool in clarifying some of these
questions and showing to what their
data would be contributing to.
The project was presented as part of
the Detmold Conference Week 2020
and experts from building industry, real
estate management and urban planning
gave valuable feedback. A paper
about it was published and presented
at the REAL CORP 2021 Conference in
Vienna. -
134 STUDENT IDEAS