Virtual Design
Comprehensive, inclusive and effective testing is a critical component behind the success of any planning initiative. By including the opinions of all relevant stakeholders and re-assessing embedded assumptions, the risk of unintended consequences is greatly reduced.
But testing can only be effective if there is a possibility to abandon or correct course if something is found to be flawed or missing. Any successful experiment assumes that the addressable environment is, in all relevant ways, essentially mutable.
However, when it comes to changes on the scale of entire cities and neighborhoods such mutability is impossible. It is simply not practical for a city government to build three separate highways or public transportation lines to test which one would work best. Modern design tools that harness technological advances in augmented and virtual reality, simulations and experiments, might finally provide an opportunity to make planning more participatory, experiential and effective.
One of the most difficult challenges urban planners, designers and architects must overcome is communicating their ideas and vision in a tangible way. This is a problem that manifests itself in a number of ways. Without being able to visualize or “feel” ideas it is difficult for stakeholders to provide reliable feedback even if they are able to perfectly understand the intentions and vision of the designer. With the quality of virtual reality content and experiences now available it is possible to provide visceral experiences of what new neighborhoods or public spaces will look like to residents. More than just making it easier to canvass more reliable opinions, such data is likely to also serve as a better predictor of future user behavior. Of course, this approach does not guarantee perfect results, and a virtual experience still remains a poor replacement for the real interaction. However, it provides an experience that is many orders of magnitude improved from legacy methods that simply do not allow for the possibility to study reactions to ideas that are difficult to visualize in a standardized way.
Another potential technological domain that can be utilized to aid design and planning decisions, is the use of large scale virtual experiments as a proxy for predicting future real-world behavior. If designed well, it can be possible to create experiments that can imitate the impact of certain policies in virtual environments such as Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). The goal would not be to simply recreate physical built environments, but to test the underlying behavioral assumptions that could help choose between multiple alternatives or quantifying their impact.
Finally, such tools can also be used in making implementation more effective. AR experiences, such as those provided by games like Pokémon Go, have proven to be extremely influential in driving people to real-world locations and interactions. This approach can be used as a nudging mechanism to get people to initially visit new places that might not be part of a city’s core historical fabric. Crucially, such experiences can also be used to manage the flow of people in more predictable ways and to avoid the use of new infrastructure or spaces in unintended and potentially harmful ways.
