Hello I'm Sarah Cooney and I'm presenting toward co-creative tools for tactical urban
revitalization. I'm a fourth year PhD candidate at the USC Viterbi School of
Engineering in the department of computer science, participating in this year's doctoral consortium.
I believe that all residents, no matter their level of privilege or knowledge of design,
should have power to affect changes in the physical design of their cities.
My research therefore focuses on helping ordinary citizens
envision improvements to their urban environments by building co-creative agents
based on expert design knowledge to help them reimagine their urban surroundings.
To that end, I have four ongoing projects each contributing a thread toward this goal of
creating a complete co-creative system. The first project is called PatternPainter. PatternPainter
is designed to show that residents are able to use digital tools to design neighborhood spaces
with little to no training and without experts facilitation. PatternPainter is a 3D visualization
tool built using the unity game engine. Experiments showed that ordinary people were able
to create highly social neighborhood spaces that communicated a variety of intended uses, including
community gardens, small outdoor theaters, and farmers markets. Showing that indeed digital
tools could be a great way for residents to plan changes to their urban environments. Second is the
CommYOUnity Data Project. This project was used to explore the way in which ordinary people think
and speak about their environments, as well as to contrast this with expert designers. During the
summer of 2020 we collected 40 image-caption pairs via the website shown in the second column, asking
ordinary people to share their urban surrounds and describe what could be improved. Through a
qualitative analysis of these submissions and the expert interviews we were able to extract seven
themes to inform the future design of co-creative agents for novice design of urban planning.
For example, we found that ordinary people often use storytelling and personal reflection to speak
about their environments. We felt that this could be used as a strategy by an agent to help elicit
ideas from people who might have trouble speaking these ideas without some kind of prompting.
Third is the 15-minute city game. This project is a mobile game designed to help people
explore their immediate urban surroundings and reflect on what resources they have access to.
The game is designed around the 15-minute city concept from urban planning, which proposes that
all resources people need to thrive, for example food, recreation, work, education, and healthcare,
should be within 15 minutes via walking, biking, or public transit. The idea is to
create more sustainable cities by lessening dependence on private cars. Our game builds
on this concept by asking players to complete missions surrounding these various resources
the benefits of the game are two-fold. First it helps to engage ordinary citizens in thinking
more deeply about their urban environments and the resources which they have access to,
and second it allows us to collect data about access to these important resources such as
food and health care that may be of interest to government and non-profit organizations.
Finally the urban style transfer project explores the technical challenges for
creating a co-creative design tool. This pipeline uses techniques from computer vision such as
image segmentation object detection as well as image editing algorithms
to help residents modify photographs of their urban surroundings and then produce photorealistic
renderings of the proposed designs. I expect to complete my dissertation by weaving these various
threads together into a complete co-creative agent for novice urban planners. Thank You!