Crowdsourcing Feedback and Augmenting 3D Visualizations: Online Collaboration Tools for Gamified Participatory Design Workshops

Abstract

Crowdsourcing Feedback and Augmenting 3D Visualizations: Online Collaboration Tools for Gamified Participatory Design Workshops is an investigation into how digital tools can be designed to facilitate and enhance the participatory process. The participatory process this thesis focuses on is the Block by Block playbook, a 16 step process curated by Mojang, the studio behind Minecraft, and UN-Habitat. The methodology utilizes the simple voxel-based blocks in Minecraft as a “digital Lego” to empower anyone to learn to express their ideas in 3D in a matter of hours or days. The Block by Block foundation funds and educates community organizers to run participatory workshops that use Minecraft to improve public spaces in more than 35 countries worldwide.

Using previous Block by Block workshop participant feedback as a pseudo-needs analysis, this thesis proposes a new external web tool, The Block by Block Expansion Pack, that augments the Minecraft Co-design Workshop Phase with a few logistical changes. The current Block by Block procedure separates the ideation and design stage from the feedback stage which leaves little room for design iteration. The Block by Block Expansion Pack aims to address the participants’ request for more opportunities to converse with the greater community throughout the workshop by creating a web platform that allows anyone to view, annotate, and comment on each group’s latest progress. This extension serves as a medium to incorporate ideas from a more diverse audience, improve understanding of proposed planning changes, and increase sense of ownership of the public spaces created from the workshop.

In addition to the communication features mentioned above, the platform also keeps a record of the design progression and iterations through a version history system and provides an interface to easily compare two builds. This tool has the potential to be used throughout the workshop, from the initial brainstorm to post workshop data collection.