Tech Project

Description of the challenges faced by the Tech Project

Public disagreement in different European countries have shown that perusing a thorough planning process is by no means a guarantee for a broad public acceptance of an envisioned urban project. Public planning administration and the public itself need to have a platform for sharing and further evolving projects of common interest in order to perceive each other as partners in a collaborative process. Having this vision in mind, U_CODE aims to be the conceptual, organizational and technical platform for enabling exactly this. Departing from technocratic planning, the shaping of the urban realm will become a democratic process in which all civic stakeholders participate as co-creators and co-designers. From the very beginning of a project, citizen experts will contribute their experience, opinions, and ideas, and keep an active voice throughout the design and development process. U_CODE enables communication and collaboration between large numbers of citizen and professional experts, and thus ensures a substantially more creative, focused, and secure design process for projects of high public concern.

Brief description of technology

U_CODE provides a Public Project Space for non-professional civic users. Here a highly accessible, low-threshold public interface is provided that addresses an audience ranging from school kids to elderly people. For citizens who want to engage actively in the design process by creating design ideas and contributing comments, a “Project Playground” is provided which features highly experiential design and communication tools. Based on gaming approaches and accessible with mobile devices, the tools on this creative play station are easy to handle and entertaining, in order to stimulate maximum participation. Natural interfaces with gesture and motion control allow intuitive modelling, instant visualisation, and even rapid prototyping. Further, the playground provides commenting and voting functions that allow quick assessment of ideas and proposals.

What the project is looking to gain from the collaboration and what kind of artist would be suitable

Creating an environment for urban co-design. U_CODE will design and develop a new kind of participatory platform that enables urban designers, architects, and developers to co-design and communicate their projects with the larger public. U_CODE addresses following two main user groups: • Professional creatives like urban designers, architects, and project developers • Non-professional public, i.e. the general citizenship including non-professional stakeholders. The overall architecture of the environment is to include (a) Project Spaces for professional and public users, (b) a Co-design and Communication Interface between the project spaces, and (c) a Data Platform providing complex data integration and analytics. The environment will harvest and exchange ideas and comments from large public audiences and professional experts alike. It provides modelling and visualization tools to support co-creation and understanding of design concepts especially during the critical early stage of the project life cycle.

Resources available to the artist

We provide a work space including office materials.