De Bouwplaats
What?
De Bouwplaats is an augmented reality citizen participation tool that has been developed in collaboration with the municipality of Eindhoven in favor of the development of KnoopXL. The tool makes use of a dual perspective approach: the explorer is a single participant that wears the VR headset and is immersed in an Augmented Reality experience. Within the virtual world, the user can adjust the parameters of the city by repositioning the value of the sliders. Based on the slider configuration, the algorithm will procedurally generate a city for the explorer to explore. The observer is a single or group of individuals that are provided a birds-eye perspective on the creation of the explorer through a secondary screen. While the procedurally generated city focuses on providing the participants and facilitator with leads and topics to talk about, while the dual perspective approach aims at provoking and supporting the discussion between the participants in the session. The goal of this tool is to support citizens and visitors of the city of Eindhoven to discovering their preferences towards the future of KnoopXL and facilitating the discussion about these preferences with urban designers and planners, through an immersive experience where participants are able to respond and reflect on the ever changing visualizations.
What did I contribute?
Brainstorming and ideation
Seeking for collaboration and preserving this contact with experts and companies
Setting up and executing the interviews, co-design sessions and user tests
Developing the XR application in Unity froms cratch, with its according algorithm
Developed skills
Soft- & hardware development
UX design
Modeling & mockups
(User)research
Presenting and project management
Reflection and reporting
What were my main takeaways?
XR and citizen participation are now at the core of my vision
User testing in the field is harder and needs more preparation, but does yield more accurate and interesting results and overall gives more satisfaction.
By constantly reflecting on my process, I could take steps back and analyse a problem from afar, before diving into realization.