The Urban CoCreation Lab—An Integrated Platform for Remote and Simultaneous Collaborative Urban Planning and Design through Web-Based Desktop 3D Modeling, Head-Mounted Virtual Reality and Mobile Augmented Reality: Prototyping a Minimum Viable Product and Developing Specifications for a Minimum Marketable Product

Both policy and research highlight the importance of diverse stakeholder input in urban development processes but visualizing future built environments and creating two-way design communication for non-expert stakeholders are challenging. The present study develops an intuitive and simplified 3D modeling platform that integrates web-based desktop, virtual reality and mobile augmented reality technologies for remote simultaneous urban design collaboration. Through iterative prototyping, based on two series of workshops with stakeholders, the study resulted in such an integrated platform as a minimum viable product as well as specifications for a minimum marketable product to be used in real projects. Further study is required to evaluate the minimum level of detail in the 3D modeling necessary for good perception of scale and environmental impact simulation.

Virtual Environments as Medium for Laypeople’s Communication and Collaboration in Urban Design

<p>The distance between urban design processes and outcomes and their communication to stakeholders and citizens are often significant. Urban designers use a variety of tools to bridge this gap. Each tool often places high demands on the audience, and each through inherent characteristics and affordances, introduces possible failures to understand the design ideas, thus imposing a divergence between the ideas, their communication and the understandings. Urban design is a hugely complex activity influenced by numerous factors. The design exploration process may follow established design traditions. In all instances, the medium in which the exploration takes place affects the understanding by laypeople. Design tools are chosen, in part, to facilitate the design process. Most urban design community engagement does not use Virtual Environments (VE) as a means of communication and participation in the early stage of the design generation. There has been little research on how the use of VE for urban design can engage laypeople as contributors to the design process. It has been suggested that VE instruments can allow laypeople to express, explore and convey their imagination more easily. The very different nature of perceptual understanding of VE and its capability to produce instant 3D artefacts with design actions may allow laypeople to generate meaningful design ideas. An experiment setup has developed to leverage laypeople in authentic design collaboration. This thesis examines in the context of New Zealand’s National Science Challenge ‘Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities’ the drivers of change that contribute to the shaping of places, development and design of future neighbourhoods. A series of experiments have been conducted in the site of a neighbourhood to investigate the relative effectiveness of immersive VE to facilitate people in collaborative urban design. The findings support the hypothesis that VE with the generation of 3D artefacts enhances design communication for laypeople to design an urban form for their neighbourhood. The thesis concludes by discussing how New Zealand’s future neighbourhoods can be shaped and developed with VE assisted participatory urban design.</p>

Virtual Environments as Medium for Laypeople’s Communication and Collaboration in Urban Design

<p>The distance between urban design processes and outcomes and their communication to stakeholders and citizens are often significant. Urban designers use a variety of tools to bridge this gap. Each tool often places high demands on the audience, and each through inherent characteristics and affordances, introduces possible failures to understand the design ideas, thus imposing a divergence between the ideas, their communication and the understandings. Urban design is a hugely complex activity influenced by numerous factors. The design exploration process may follow established design traditions. In all instances, the medium in which the exploration takes place affects the understanding by laypeople. Design tools are chosen, in part, to facilitate the design process. Most urban design community engagement does not use Virtual Environments (VE) as a means of communication and participation in the early stage of the design generation. There has been little research on how the use of VE for urban design can engage laypeople as contributors to the design process. It has been suggested that VE instruments can allow laypeople to express, explore and convey their imagination more easily. The very different nature of perceptual understanding of VE and its capability to produce instant 3D artefacts with design actions may allow laypeople to generate meaningful design ideas. An experiment setup has developed to leverage laypeople in authentic design collaboration. This thesis examines in the context of New Zealand’s National Science Challenge ‘Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities’ the drivers of change that contribute to the shaping of places, development and design of future neighbourhoods. A series of experiments have been conducted in the site of a neighbourhood to investigate the relative effectiveness of immersive VE to facilitate people in collaborative urban design. The findings support the hypothesis that VE with the generation of 3D artefacts enhances design communication for laypeople to design an urban form for their neighbourhood. The thesis concludes by discussing how New Zealand’s future neighbourhoods can be shaped and developed with VE assisted participatory urban design.</p>

A study of the potential for digital platforms to achieve design collaboration between homebuyers in the development phase of multi-user-oriented housing

<p>Urban development and densification are increasing rapidly; this fact has been globally reported. According to a 2014 United Nations report, the world population will increase by 25% in the next three decades. This significant growth means urban density will also increase drastically, creating an increase in high-rise apartment living quarters to cater for the population growth. Subsequently, the development of housing has been advancing - especially around construction techniques which are becoming more efficient to meet the demand of fast-growing urban populations. This thesis proposes that simply supplying housing is no longer sufficient to address the requirements of citizens. Denser living environments result in increased dissatisfaction, especially among those living in high-density housing. This research looks specifically into enabling homebuyers to voice their needs and design their living space. In this context, the social paradigm of high-density housing has not progressed much. There is still more a notion of supplying the needed quantity and homebuyers accepting the housing without question. Homebuyers, the main users of the housing, are often absent from both the planning and design process. Recent studies have shown that participation in their community is one of the key themes towards social sustainability. Many public participatory projects and platforms only allow participation in large scale urban developments and planning processes. There is a significant lack of initiatives that include homebuyers in the context of high-rise, high-density housing. The aim of this research is to explore how a computational tool within a virtual environment can facilitate and support design collaboration and interactions – not only between architects and homebuyers, but among individual and collective homebuyers too. The methodology of the research includes using focus groups to examine how digital tools can support and contribute to the collaborative design process of high-rise, high-density housing. The study is then tested with the public to determine if such design tools facilitate and support design collaborations. Three studies were undertaken: The first is a pre-tool development study. It uses a focus group to understand the factors necessary to engage homebuyers, and those factors that hinder such process. A digital tool for collaboration was then developed, based on analysis of the focus group results. A second study determines if the factors identified are sufficient for design collaboration within a digital environment. Based on this analysis, the tool was enhanced and integrated with third party visualisation software to enable the desired digital collaboration. A final study involves the public, examining whether such a design tool facilitates and supports their design collaborations. Throughout the research development, gamification techniques were introduced and adopted to further explore driving factors and to enhance design interactions. The target audience of this research is homebuyers, who are laypersons in architectural design processes and techniques. Gamification is, therefore, an effective technique to simplify the design process and enable homebuyers to immerse themselves in a collaborative design process. Virtual Reality is used at the final stage to immerse homebuyers further into the design environment and give them clearer feedback about their design decisions. The findings of the research confirm the benefits this novel collaborative design process has on the overall outcome of high-rise, high-dense buildings. It demonstrates how a virtual design tool can influence the process of consultation and procurement for homebuyers. A metadesign framework has been developed to provide a guide to the decision-making support necessary for such a collaborative design process. Finally, the research explains how such an enhanced communicative design operation can achieve the kind of synergies that break out of the current housing paradigm and take a major step forward in urban development.</p>

A study of the potential for digital platforms to achieve design collaboration between homebuyers in the development phase of multi-user-oriented housing

<p>Urban development and densification are increasing rapidly; this fact has been globally reported. According to a 2014 United Nations report, the world population will increase by 25% in the next three decades. This significant growth means urban density will also increase drastically, creating an increase in high-rise apartment living quarters to cater for the population growth. Subsequently, the development of housing has been advancing - especially around construction techniques which are becoming more efficient to meet the demand of fast-growing urban populations. This thesis proposes that simply supplying housing is no longer sufficient to address the requirements of citizens. Denser living environments result in increased dissatisfaction, especially among those living in high-density housing. This research looks specifically into enabling homebuyers to voice their needs and design their living space. In this context, the social paradigm of high-density housing has not progressed much. There is still more a notion of supplying the needed quantity and homebuyers accepting the housing without question. Homebuyers, the main users of the housing, are often absent from both the planning and design process. Recent studies have shown that participation in their community is one of the key themes towards social sustainability. Many public participatory projects and platforms only allow participation in large scale urban developments and planning processes. There is a significant lack of initiatives that include homebuyers in the context of high-rise, high-density housing. The aim of this research is to explore how a computational tool within a virtual environment can facilitate and support design collaboration and interactions – not only between architects and homebuyers, but among individual and collective homebuyers too. The methodology of the research includes using focus groups to examine how digital tools can support and contribute to the collaborative design process of high-rise, high-density housing. The study is then tested with the public to determine if such design tools facilitate and support design collaborations. Three studies were undertaken: The first is a pre-tool development study. It uses a focus group to understand the factors necessary to engage homebuyers, and those factors that hinder such process. A digital tool for collaboration was then developed, based on analysis of the focus group results. A second study determines if the factors identified are sufficient for design collaboration within a digital environment. Based on this analysis, the tool was enhanced and integrated with third party visualisation software to enable the desired digital collaboration. A final study involves the public, examining whether such a design tool facilitates and supports their design collaborations. Throughout the research development, gamification techniques were introduced and adopted to further explore driving factors and to enhance design interactions. The target audience of this research is homebuyers, who are laypersons in architectural design processes and techniques. Gamification is, therefore, an effective technique to simplify the design process and enable homebuyers to immerse themselves in a collaborative design process. Virtual Reality is used at the final stage to immerse homebuyers further into the design environment and give them clearer feedback about their design decisions. The findings of the research confirm the benefits this novel collaborative design process has on the overall outcome of high-rise, high-dense buildings. It demonstrates how a virtual design tool can influence the process of consultation and procurement for homebuyers. A metadesign framework has been developed to provide a guide to the decision-making support necessary for such a collaborative design process. Finally, the research explains how such an enhanced communicative design operation can achieve the kind of synergies that break out of the current housing paradigm and take a major step forward in urban development.</p>

Design in a Virtual Innovation Ecology: A Cybernetic Systems Approach to Knowledge Creation and Design Collaboration in Second Life

<p>Design innovation makes a substantial contribution to the global economy, however there is a challenge to modern design praxis as design teams face difficulties when it comes to collaborators who are geographically distributed and unable to easily meet face to face in a physical context. This research undertook to interpret the knowledge creation life cycle of design innovation, and adopted a second-order cybernetic approach to describe the design process in the virtual world Second Life (SL). The researcher applied a cyber-ethnographic methodology to collect a bricolage of evidence in SL including observations; interviews; blogs; surveys; and conversations ‘in-world’. The research considered three case studies of groups in SL: Sloodlers, Studio Wikiitecture, and Design 2029 – The End Game. Three models were proposed to help describe cybernetic regulation of the design innovation ecology in SL: the spectrum of fidelity; indosymbiosis; and Lessig’s four modalities of cybernetic knowledge regulation. The first two of these were developed specifically for this research. In addition, a design innovation organism or ‘inogism’ was proposed using a biological metaphor to describe the design innovation ecology in SL. The primary research question considered how Lessig’s four modes of architecture, the law, the market, and norms all interact to affect the design ecology within SL. The secondary research questions considered how tacit knowledge creation and design collaboration could be inhibited or enabled through simulated face-to-face meetings. This research describes how the virtual ecology of SL can enable tacit knowledge creation and design collaboration and therefore contribute towards improved design innovation. It also suggests future research opportunities that could assist innovative design outcomes in other virtual worlds.</p>

Design in a Virtual Innovation Ecology: A Cybernetic Systems Approach to Knowledge Creation and Design Collaboration in Second Life

<p>Design innovation makes a substantial contribution to the global economy, however there is a challenge to modern design praxis as design teams face difficulties when it comes to collaborators who are geographically distributed and unable to easily meet face to face in a physical context. This research undertook to interpret the knowledge creation life cycle of design innovation, and adopted a second-order cybernetic approach to describe the design process in the virtual world Second Life (SL). The researcher applied a cyber-ethnographic methodology to collect a bricolage of evidence in SL including observations; interviews; blogs; surveys; and conversations ‘in-world’. The research considered three case studies of groups in SL: Sloodlers, Studio Wikiitecture, and Design 2029 – The End Game. Three models were proposed to help describe cybernetic regulation of the design innovation ecology in SL: the spectrum of fidelity; indosymbiosis; and Lessig’s four modalities of cybernetic knowledge regulation. The first two of these were developed specifically for this research. In addition, a design innovation organism or ‘inogism’ was proposed using a biological metaphor to describe the design innovation ecology in SL. The primary research question considered how Lessig’s four modes of architecture, the law, the market, and norms all interact to affect the design ecology within SL. The secondary research questions considered how tacit knowledge creation and design collaboration could be inhibited or enabled through simulated face-to-face meetings. This research describes how the virtual ecology of SL can enable tacit knowledge creation and design collaboration and therefore contribute towards improved design innovation. It also suggests future research opportunities that could assist innovative design outcomes in other virtual worlds.</p>