Citizen Engagement through Design Space Exploration Integrating citizen knowledge and expert design in computational urban planning

Abstract

A common understanding exists that citizens should become more involved in the design, planning, and governance of the city. Due to a lack of common platforms and difficulties in the meaningful integration of the participatory input, however, the tools and methods currently employed in citizen engagement are often ill connected to the design and governance tools and processes used by experts. In this paper we describe a Grasshopper and Rhino based approach, which allows designers to share a subset of the design space formed by parametric design variants with citizens via the online interface Beta.Speckle. In a user study we evaluated the usability of the tool as well as studied the design choices of participants, which were found to be influenced by preferences for visual order and underlying economic, social, and environmental values. For the future design of participatory exercises, it was concluded that indicators relating to citizens' values and preferences will allow for a more effective exploration of the design space and increase the meaningfulness of results.