Overview
Digital citizen participation has established itself as an effective format in democratic societies - it shows great advantages both in activating people and in collaborative work and decision-making. On the whole, however, there are hardly any applications in the field of digital citizen participation that explore or exploit the participatory, design and planning potential of augmented reality (AR).
Participative and urban planning processes should, in the best case, promote the joy of designing. Therefore, we would need to find approaches that better enable such meaningful exchanges, curiosity, and empathy. The promise of such an AR planning tool is that users do not have to reactively cope with a given situation only after the transformation has been completed, but that they can participate early in the process and, like professional planners, grow together with and during the process through active design participation and involvement, while at the same time having a significant influence on the outcome. In this way, people can directly shape their physical environment and identify with it as well as with the group of people involved.
This preliminary project investigates the potential of AR as a design and planning tool in a first practice-oriented step based on the design of Emmenpark in cooperation with the Gemeinde Emmen, LuzernNord, the CityScienceLab in Hamburg and the Planteam. These findings should subsequently enable the creation of a third-party funded research & development project.
