IJUP08 - Universidade do Porto

Interactive Application for Spatial Communication and
Representation
A.Vieira 1
1 CEAU, Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal.
In the urban planning process, especially with the development of urban or architecture
design, it’s imperative to provide an effective communication platform between the
designers and the society. This bi-directional communication channel between the people
more responsible for the design proposals and society in general, has better results when
different types of representation and communication techniques are applied, since they
make comprehension of the design clearer and less technical. Without a proper
communication channel the participation of general society on the architectural design and
development phases is reduced leading to a lack of important information and feedback
from the users. In this context, the information technologies (IT), applied to the
representation and communication of architectural and urban design, can offer the required
tools to develop and provide an intuitive and easy-to-understand communication channel.
This research work had as main objective the critical analysis of a significant set of
different representation methods and technologies that can be applied to communicate and
represent urban design and architectural proposals. Differences and advantages of each
technique, either when used alone or in combination with others are compared.
During the course of this work, coordinated by Pedro Neto 1 a web application IASCR
(Interactive Application for Spatial Communication and Representation) was developed for
the investigation project CCRE (Spatial Communication and Representation Center) with
the main objective of making more clear and efficient representation and communication
of architectural and urban design projects. To test and gather the opinion and interaction of
users were used two case studies:
– E-Learning Café – an architectural project for the interior the interior space of a building
at U. Porto that comprises a dynamic program for all the academic community and where
university students, teachers and staff may exchange knowledge, share experiences and
carry out a wide range of activities;
– Corredor da Memória - an urban design renovation project that upgrades an important
historical area of the city of Porto, considered world heritage.
The paper presents first a concise literature review and computer visualization techniques
to communicate the design. It then proceeds to analyze the results of the questionnaire and
the qualitative provide some positive information about how people perceived and judged
both the content (proposed design) and the form (representations methods and techniques
used for communicate).
1 Pedro Leão Neto -FAUP
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