Facing increasing population pressures and environmental issues, urban planning plays a key role in shaping and forming the physical and digital city environments we inhabit, and the transition spaces in between. Our research project “Remembering the Past, Imagining the Future” seeks to investigate ‘other ways of knowing’ by embedding narrative and new media in urban planning processes. In this presentation we report our work in progress that aims to overcome some limitations of conventional community engagement strategies. Adaptive and human-centred design approaches that are well-established in human-computer interaction (such as, personas and design scenarios) as well as creative writing and drama methods (such as, Stanislavskian character development techniques and Meisner’s exercises for character development), are yet largely unexplored in the conservative and long-term design context of urban planning. Based on these approaches, we have been trialling a set of performance based workshop activities to gain insights into participants’ desires and requirements that may inform the future design of smaller than average apartments and apartment buildings in inner-city Brisbane. The focus of these workshops is to analyse the behaviour and lifestyle of apartment dwellers and generate residential personas that become boundary objects in the cross-disciplinary discussions of urban design and planning teams. Dramatisation and embodied interaction of use cases form part of the strategies we employ to engage participants and elicit feedback.
Authors: Marcus Foth, Danielle Starkey, Greg Hearn
Event: SF08: Embodied Interaction in Mobile, Physical and Virtual Environments Workshop