Reflection – Visualization

Challenge  I work as a research assistant at an architecture department. As a consequence of this, I often  engage with students and professors studying and researching the built environment. I also  have a design background myself, more specifically in urban design. Design thinking has  therefore always been present during my past academic and professional experiences.  Visualization as an important tool to illustrate information is also something that has been  generally very prevalent in my life, especially during my undergraduate studies. Nonetheless,  the design tools and strategies of design thinking have been taught to me implicitly rather  than explicitly. Hence, due to teaching these strategies very clearly, this course was a true  eye-opener for me.    In order to understand the challenge, it is important to learn more about the kind of research  we do. We are researching ways of sustainably engaging the wider public in large construction  projects. Within this context, we are inevitably touching on other cognate areas, such as  urban planning, political science, creative industries and digital humanities. For this specific  challenge, we explicitly agreed on using design thinking strategies. The aim was to organize a  conference that allowed use to generate data for our research. The venue was an old concert  hall located in close vicinity to a former harbor. We wanted to learn how creative industries  can contribute towards just and sustainable processes of public engagement within large  constructions processes. We invited creative people such as local artists, architects and  musicians, as well as interested members of the general public. The challenge that we faced  was extracting information from the attendees that we could then use for further research.     Selection  As design professionals, we often work with visualization, which led us to opt for visualization  once more. Furthermore, given the circumstance of having invited a largely creative audience  and given the fact that we used design thinking strategies, we decided not to use ordinary  survey techniques based on multiple choice questionnaires on a piece of paper. We had  negative experiences with the aforementioned ordinary survey techniques in the past. The  main problem was that people were generally not incentivized enough to complete the  surveys. Consequently, we agreed on using the design tool of visualization and had to come  up with an innovative form of surveying for our conference.    Application  Since we learned on this course that visualization as a design tool is characterized by making  information tangible and concrete through visualizing it, we developed a mobile application  that incorporated 360-degree videos of places where creative exchange takes place, such as  a library, a concert hall and an art gallery. The survey participants were able to use one of  three tablets that we placed near the entrance to the conference hall and were able to  explore the creative spaces through swiping through the 360-degree videos. They were then  prompted a yes or no question relating to each of the creative spaces, such as “Could you  imagine this to be a place where construction processes could be discussed?”. The responses  were saved to our server and we were then able to evaluate the responses. All in all, we aimed  at making the experience of participating in the survey more fun for the participants.

Insight and approach  Compared to ordinary surveys, for which we used pieces of paper and pens, we received an  overwhelmingly positive response from the participants. On the one hand, this materialized  through a higher rate of participation. On the other hand, we received oral feedback from the  participants, many of whom thoroughly enjoyed the survey experience. Therefore, our  research team decided to further use our visualization tool for future events. All in all, I find  it fascinating that adding visual components to a survey made it so much more enjoyable to  complete. This powerfully illustrates how design thinking strategies can help to obtain better  results.

