Quién es el sujeto de la demanda

A first experiment in visualising future urban scenarios

from a collaboratively written text.

This project pre-dates my earliest attempts at a definition of Visual Conversations on Urban Futures, but includes many of the elements that have been developed in later experiments. Reflecting both on the visualisation process and on the underlying theoretical approach of the project as a whole contributed to a clearer shaping of the problem area, and to the drafting of the main research question in this thesis.

This 2-months project started in February 2014, when the UK government Foresight Future of Cities project commissioned Prof. John Urry to write a report entitled “Living in the City”, to understand what would be possible scenarios for UK cities over the next 50 years. The published paper is concerned with the nature of city living, looks at how urban lives have changed in the last 40 years, and establishes a range of possible urban futures for the middle of this century (Urry et al. 2014).

In order to explore and question some of the many issues nested within the overarching concept of urban futures, John invited Javier Caletrio and Thomas Birtchnell, to

contribute to the project. In particular, the two researchers were asked to elaborate on an initial draft for a set of four possible future urban scenarios and integrate them with ideas around the future of mobility (Caletrio) and the future of manufacturing and

technologies (Birtchnell). Finally, I was asked to join the team, and was given the task to produce a set of visualisations for the scenarios.

The report sought to bring together different areas of research in the sociology of living the city that are normally considered separately, in order to highlight their

that could make connections, flows, and correlations visible, while at the same time identifying the main features of each future.

Effectively, at least from the point of view of its process, the paper took shape as a conversation on pasts, presents, and future of cities. This chapter describes how such conversations were translated visually.

5.1 PROCESS

I started the process of translating from the written to the visual form by identifying the recurring ideas and categories in the main text. The information coded in this way was then organised in a layout that was used to produce preliminary sketches of the visualisation.

Figure 15 Content analysis (coding) and first sketches of the scenarios

The visualisations and the paper were produced almost simultaneously. Most of the reviews to the text were made through comments and additions to a shared document. While updating the initial draft of the visualisation with the new coded information added to subsequent versions of the text (see the sticky notes in Figure 15), I wondered

whether the visual design of the scenarios could be included in the process of collaboratively editing and commenting.

To do so, I replicated my initial sketches on a shared Draw document on Google Drive (see Figure 16). This particular platform was chosen as a way to involve researchers that are not familiar with graphic design techniques or software. The file created at this stage of the process included all the relevant elements of the visualisation, but in a very simplified way. In an email, I invited all co-authors to contribute to the shared file, by adding comments as well as by integrating or modifying it.

The idea of a shared platform to use for developing the scenarios alongside the

development of the narrative in the text of the report was welcomed by the researchers. However, researchers chose for the most part to only add comments (rather than edits and original content) to the file. Despite its limitations, the shared platform opened up the design process to the whole team, encouraging feedback and collaboration. The platform was also used to review and validate the content analysis and confirm the selection of items to represents.

Figure 16 Shared sketch of the scenarios intended for remote collaboration and feedback

Once the final draft of the text and an updated version of the visualisation structure were approved by the whole team, I proceeded with the design of the visual artefact to include in the report.

5.2 ARTEFACT

Figure 17 Scenarios for Living in the City: (A) The overview of the four scenarios and (B) a detail showing two of the scenarios ('High Tech City', 'Fortress City'). A higher quality image is included in Appendix A.

The design concept for the visualisation was inspired by We Will Be There - A Map of the Future, a visualisation produced by DensityDesign for Wired Italia (DensityDesign 2009). This visualisation was intended as a map to translate a report on possible futures created by the Institute For the Future (IFF) into a visual scenario (see also 2.2.1.1and 9.2.2). The resulting artefact is a semantic map of themes and ideas overlaid to an allegorical

illustration (see Graffieti et al. 2011 for a description of the visualisation, the design process, and the underlying principles).

Similarly to DensityDesign’s A Map of the Future, we decided to combine a set of illustrations of landscapes of the futures described in the main text with a semantic map. In this map, the various elements in each scenario are highlighted and classified into six areas: city type, infrastructure, mobility patterns, energy system, activities, aspiration and

and across the six areas. By spatially organising information, the visualisations transformed coherent narrative descriptions of the scenarios into an explorable map. They allow the scenarios to be read both horizontally (i.e. one scenario at the time) or vertically, by semantic areas. For example, the reader could easily compare the patterns of mobility across different scenarios.

Figure 18 The structure of the visualisation

5.3 LEARNING OUTPUTS AND OPEN QUESTIONS

This project showed how conversations on alternative future urban scenarios can be written visually (Sadokierski 2010), and provided empirical evidence of the ability of the visual language to unveil information otherwise hidden in the written text, by allowing the reader to “see content and form simultaneously” (Dondis 1973).

In addition, the project shows in detail how different semiotic modes – each one with its own affordances – can be used simultaneously to illustrate (literally or figuratively) the multitude of layers and their interdependencies in conversations on urban futures that involve different actors. The written text in the report described each individual scenario, providing the rationale and references to the various statements. The allegoric

characteristics and the mood of each scenario. The semantic map connects, relates, and compares different dimensions and elements across themes and scenarios.

The many ways in which the artefact can be read – glancing, inspecting, exploring, comparing and so forth – were some of the reasons why the visualisation has, since its publication, been used independently from the paper to generate discussions in a number of workshops or presentations to various audiences.

5.3.1 From panoramas of the future to visual conversations?

The report describes four possible futures through the use of predictive scenarios (see 1.3.1.1 and Börjeson, Höjer, Dreborg, Ekvall, & Finnveden, 2006) that could manifest as direct or indirect consequences of the complex interactions of multiple factors. What the report (and the visualisations) does not do is to critically reflect on the role of the authors of the scenarios (1.3.2).

In a way, the four scenarios can be seen as reportages from possible future worlds, visualised through panoramas. The researchers compiling the study did so by analysing emerging phenomena and reporting on their potential future consequences. Altogether, these observations created four alternative worlds that the reader can observe, explore, and discuss, but to which he or she cannot contribute.

It was while designing the visualisations of these scenarios that I started to wonder how to rethink future visions as conversations rather than panoramas.

What became clear at this point in my research journey was that collaboratively created scenarios required a radical rethinking of the process of future visioning, as well as the role of the actors involved: from reporters to participants. It was during this experiment

from the literature review brought me to develop the initial ideas for the VCUF approach17_.

17 _{A first attempt at explaining the approach was published as a working paper in the proceedings of the “Relating System Thinking to} Design 2014 symposium (Pollastri 2014).