Towards interactive sustainable neighborhood design : combining a tangible user interface with real time building simulations

Abstract

An increasingly urbanizing human population presents new challenges for urban planners and designers. While the field of urban design tools is expanding, urban development scenarios require the input of multiple stakeholders, each with different outlooks, expertise, requirements, and preconceptions, and good urban design requires communication and compromise as much as it requires effective use of tools. The best tools will facilitate this communication while remaining evidence-based, allowing diverse planning teams to develop high quality, healthy, sustainable urban plans. Presented in this work is a new such urban design tool, implemented as a design "game," created to facilitate collaboration between urban planners, designers, policymakers, citizens, and any other stakeholders in urban development scenarios. Users build a neighborhood or city out of Lego pieces on a plexiglass tabletop, and the system simulates the built design in real time, projecting colors onto the Lego pieces that reflect their performance with respect to three urban performance metrics: operational energy consumption, neighborhood walkability, and building daylighting availability. The system requires little training, allowing novice users to explore the design tradeoffs associated with urban density. The simulation method uses a novel precalculation method to quickly approximate the results of existing, validated simulation tools. The game is presented in the context of a case study that took place at the planning commission of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in March 2015. Post-game analysis indicates that the precalculation method performs suitable approximations in the Saudi climate, and that users were able to use the interface to improve their neighborhoods' performance with respect to two of the three offered performance metrics. Furthermore, users demonstrated substantial enthusiasm for interactive, tangible, urban design of the sort provided. Improvements to future versions of the design game based on the case study are suggested, but overall, the work presented indicates that collaborative, interactive design tools for diverse stakeholders are an excellent path forward for sustainable design.