PlannAR Community Design Tool: Prototyping Participatory Urban Planning
As a thesis project, Product Designer Jessy Escobedo developed PlannAR, a mobile platform for participatory urban planning. PlannAR offers communities the chance to interface directly with urban planners, city officials, developers and other stakeholders in a much more open and entertaining feedback process. The experimental platform leverages 3D and emotive assets to allow citizens to add their input based on lived experience to place-based proposals for their own neighborhoods. Learn more via Archinect.
Assignment Idea: Challenging Design Expectations
Description
The PlannAR project speaks to the notion that urban design is often enacted upon a community, even when cities have the best intentions of being in dialogue with citizens about plans for public spaces. This is not the only instance where design decisions are made via assumptions that originate outside of the intended audience for a space, product or service.
Human centered design is at the heart of PlannAR and is the concept of creating through an iterative process that sees designers in conversation with users through the prototyping stage. It relies on direct feedback and a multifaceted testing process to arrive at more nuanced final products.
Choose something in your daily life that doesn’t seem like it was designed with you in mind. Imagine if you could apply an Augmented Reality (AR) layer to this product or process: What kinds of suggestions would you collect? How would you encourage constructive feedback and defuse complaints? What methods would you employ to encourage participation?
Subject Areas
Architecture, Arts (Industrial Design), Communications, Women’s Studies
Deliverables
- select a product, process or service to re-imagine
- document at least two paragraphs of history explaining (to the best of your ability) the reason why your selection works in the way it does
- outline how an AR layer would be appended to your selection
- mock up a storyboard imagining how a user would find and interact with this AR layer
- design at least two attention getting prompts to encourage participation with this AR design experience (optional)