Abstract
The article discusses design communication and participation of laypeople in a virtual participatory urban design process. We speculate that an immersive virtual environment facilitated instrument can allow laypeople to take part actively as designers in the early stage of urban design ideation and generation. We have developed a design communication framework where laypeople can participate in design discourse on a neighborhood's future urban form. The strategy describes an urban design intent, which is informed by the development procedure of an instrument and workflow to engage participants. The integration of the instrument and the engagement procedure enable continuous designing of urban form by laypeople. A protocol analysis has been undertaken to investigate design communication. A coding scheme is applied to investigate, analyse, and understand how laypeople communicate with the design instrument and control design in the virtual environment. Through engaging non-experts, the research impacts on the perceptual affordance created by immersive 3D buildings artifacts and verbal conversation. The protocol analysis validated the setup so that subsequent studies can address the meaningfulness of such design conversations.
Highlights
Participatory design techniques deal with urban issues often used paper-based methods (Al-Kodmany, 2001) and depended on digitally produced images or three-dimensional artifacts (Bannon et al, 2018)
We speculate that an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) facilitated instrument enables laypeople to actively take part as designers in the early stage of urban design process
This article reports on the development and engagement of laypeople in IVE neighborhood design and the outcome of the protocol analysis of the IVE design communication and participation
Summary
Participatory design techniques deal with urban issues often used paper-based methods (Al-Kodmany, 2001) and depended on digitally produced images or three-dimensional artifacts (Bannon et al, 2018). The demand for public participation in the urban design decision-making process brings accountability on the parts of stakeholders (Healey, 1998; Murray et al, 2009). The lack of visual information and tools in the design process prevents the end-users from taking part in design as they inhabited the environment. Conventional urban design processes do not allow for laypeople to take part in the design ideation and generation stage. We speculate that an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) facilitated instrument enables laypeople to actively take part as designers in the early stage of urban design process. The research has been framed to accommodate an urban design task in accordance with the designing scope of the IVE instrument.
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