The board game was perceived relatively simple to play, and the students were curious about the concept of urban planning represented in it. This project and the feedback sessions delivered valuable lessons concerning the importance of participants’ motivation to engage in a game setting. As the game was seen as an ongoing simulation and emergence of urban patterns, the goal was not explicit to the participants as they were only considered a small part of the whole series of actions. When there is no apparent winner or a loser, or an explicit goal, with seemingly abstract achievements, the participants were not as motivated to continue playing after the initial phase of curiosity. Regarding the perception of what has been played out on the board in relation to the real built environment, the game pieces that symbolically represented urban patterns when placed on the boards were hard to read as an outcome of urban planning with specific urban qualities. The street patterns or the representation of urban districts were too abstract and did not help in trying to ‘design’ a ‘livable’ or ‘desired’ urban environment on the board.
As a result, the need to implement strategies, such as winning or achieving specific goals through collaboration or individually or gathering points through gamification, became apparent during the sessions, as did the importance of visualization of the resulting urban designs for a better perception of the built environment.
5.3.2 Pre-study 2: The Urban CoMapper
In this pre-study, a tool – the Urban CoMapper – was developed to survey citizens’ perceptions of urban areas. The tool used smartphone and geolocation
technology with GPS navigation, open-source data, in addition to open-source libraries with permissive licenses to conduct a real-time, on-site citizen urban perception survey. This section describes the tool and the takeaway from this design research. More elaborate information can be found in Appendix 5.
The Urban CoMapper was designed to survey citizens’ perceptions of urban qualities relating to the compact city, i.e., regarding their perception of the density and diversity of areas where they find themselves at the moment. Based on the smart phone’s geolocation functions coupled with an overlaid grid of 100 x 100 meters over the study areas on the map used for the app, the app notified participants to take the survey when they moved across the grid border lines.
After rating the level of perceived density and diversity, the participants were asked to rate the level of perceived positivity or negativity relating to the perceived density and diversity. For instance, if the participant perceived an area to be dense, and the relating perception was a feeling of liveliness, then the rating on the positive-negative scale would indicate positive perception. If the high density was associated with a perception of crowdedness, then the positive-negative scale would lean towards a negative perception of the density (see Appendix 5).
The resulting data would show what type of density or diversity qualities were associated with positive feelings such as vibrant, walkable or fun, and negative feelings such as noisy, too busy, or crowded.
Subsequently, the participants were asked to assess what kind of zoning category the area should belong to by choosing between five broad zoning categories: residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, and recreational (see Figure 43).
When a zoning category had been selected, a sub-category of the chosen zoning, e.g., neighborhood commercial, street commercial, and central commercial for a commercial zone, was selected.
This part of the study explored a way to assign a zoning category where there has not been any Figure 43. Choosing a perceived zoning category
precedent example of zoning, such as in the city of Gothenburg.
A beta version of the Urban CoMapper was produced and could be downloaded via a web link (as of 11th April 2016, hosted at http://216.66.81.48:8080/
urbaniaWebApp/density). The app was tested in a workshop with a small user group in Gothenburg to examine its functionality and usability, especially regarding the limitations of the urban quality perception survey protocols so that modifications could be made.
The explanation of how to use the tool was perceived rather simple, but the sequences of the survey process and the survey criteria regarding the zoning of the area were somewhat complicated for the non-expert participants. Especially the detailed sub-categories under the broad zoning categories seemed problematic and added to the complication. The user interface for mapping the perception of density and diversity and the perception of negativity or positivity by selecting along a scale of 1 to 5 seemed to be graphically simple enough for participants to use intuitively.
The delayed response of the smartphones’ GPS was problematic, though not so great a concern that it could not be solved on-site. Another concern was the distance between the cells, which seemed somewhat too short to provide different perceptions of the site. Furthermore, the tool should be modified to shorten the survey processes. The participants’ categorization of perceived zoning was too complicated and irrelevant, given their misunderstanding of the terminology used. Also, it seemed irrelevant to assess perceived zoning each 100 meters.
The study sites also need to be scaled down considerably. The problem of distinguishing the view ‘from’ the surveyed point and the view ‘of ’ the surveyed point seen from another location needs to be resolved.
The takeaway from this pre-study was knowledge of various tracking methods that needed to be further investigated for accuracy. The GPS, which is often used for user location tracking, was lagging or inaccurate in short-distance tracking. Also, the importance of managing the time and budget was highlighted in reference to prioritizing tool specifications that were the most relevant for the
studies, so that limitations can be managed for more focused development.