We consider how an advanced handheld and networked device could connect people, place and method in purposeful collaboration. See Flutter Client
We choose the specific application of sustainable urban design but suggest tooling that could apply to projects ranging from industrial to artistic.
# Patterns
We hypothesize a rich information context where freely shared information and long-term feedback processes support a cultural genetic infrastructure. We speak of this as multiple interconnected pattern languages.
Patterns of sound urban practice collected and curated by academics and architectural institutions.
Patterns of city planning specific to a region collected and curated by environmentalists and urban designers as non-partisan complement to building code.
Patterns of intentional neighborhood redevelopment selected and approved by property owner cooperation with city government on a project by project basis.
Patterns applied in context to produce design guidance and in many cases design decisions applied throughout a decade of redevelopment and occupancy.
Pattern discovery and refinement by periodic review over decades of human behavior in each project specific space as built and in response to the global future as it emerges.
# Device
The visualizer would be used by stakeholders, professional and non-professional alike, for the situated retrieval, application, and recording of pattern based urban design decisions.
Partners and clients discuss development potential while sensitive to natural surroundings. With the visualizer they would be looking up recording solutions.
A visualizer operator would choose a situationally relevant pattern, configure it with parameters such as scale and cost from previous decisions, align that configuration with the ambient view, and snapshot the application in an experience similar to taking a picture.
Participating operators swarm through a project neighborhood incrementally adding improvements that immediately become visible to others. Real and synthetic images are style mapped so as to emphasize the essential design properties of the patterns at hand.
Cliques of operators could form and dissolve around design ideas that could be evaluated realtime against sometimes antagonistic goals such as tax base vs. walkability.
# Culture
The visualizer engages enterprise and democracy in the production of culture applicable to the world at large. We consider now some constrains on technology if this production is to be significant.
We use wikipedia as a model for the scale, cost and impact of this project. Although the body of work is substantially different, the nature of the work is similar.
The work, the pattern languages, must be simply represented and freely available in multiple languages.
The tools, the visualizer specifically, must be free to use and realized with affordable devices such as mass-market phones and tablets.
The process, a technology enabled design method, must be supported with sufficient investment to persuade urban design professionals of the inevitability of the endeavor.
# Related
Our work of thirty years has touched on many issues raised here and includes many projects touched by what we now call federated wiki. We cite some here ordered from short and practical to long term and grand.
Walk And Talks as mediated event in an outdoor space considered as part of the Feast festival.
Disgust and Envy of academics to the advances in image processing of which style-transfer is representative.
Neighborhood Charette with all stakeholders participating and guided by patterns.
San Francisco Sketch and related interactive renderings from api data.
Urban Form and GHG Emissions where Mehaffy explains the problem, a solution, and mentions our work together.
Why Wikipedia Works and what other peer-production projects can learn from the experience.
Where is my Flying Car where Uber modelers consider the impact of eVTOL on urban design.
Natural Genetic Infrastructure where Chris Alexander closes his 1996 OOPSLA keynote with an unexpected call to action.