Reflection: Visualization Tool

The Challenge

Recently I participated in a conference and workshop on “Sustainable Cities”. The  overall challenge is that if by the year 2050, there will be more than 5 billion people  living in cities, how can we make cities comfortable, agreeable, and at the same time  sustainable? During the workshop, our task was to re-think what the city of Versailles  (France) could be like in the future. Cities are complex systems with a large number of  different types of stakeholders; hence the idea to use a design thinking approach was  selected. The workshop was facilitated by a consultancy firm and the participants were  representatives of the municipal government of Versailles, local businesses, citizens,  students of nearby Business School HEC and multinational companies with an interest  in the building and insurance fields. We were approximately 25 participants in total.

Selection

The consultancy firm facilitating the workshop presented us with a large (4m x 1m)  drawing representing the modernized version of a medieval painting by A. Lorenzetti,  titled the “The Allegory of Effects of Good Governance”. The drawing showed different  types of buildings, squares, streets, parks, and the area surrounding the city.

Application

Our task was first to learn about Versailles, the particular challenges facing the city, the  special demographic, the current trends, the geography of the city, and the existing  subsystems (e.g. transport, waste, energy etc). Then we had to turn to the drawing, and  using our imaginations we placed ourselves in this “virtual city” and think about what it  would be like if we could get all our wishes granted. Each of us had a stack of post-its  and we walked around the picture placing post-its with the key word of a particular idea  in the area where we thought it would be most appropriate. Figure 1 at the end of this  assignment shows a small section to give the reader an overview. Once we have all put  had our input, we looked for the “wow” factor, and also we noticed that several ideas  could be combined together or become extensions of one-an-other. We then selected  themes for the city of Versailles to experiment with as the next step.

Insight and Approach

Using the drawing has triggered our imaginations in ways that a data-driven or a simple  descriptive approach would never have been able to. Having the drawing in front of us  reminded us that any city is an intricate and complex interplay of different systems and  stakeholders. The fact that the picture we used was not of the real city of Versailles has  allowed us to forget the physical or other constraints that do exist in the real world. The  most interesting insight that came from this exercise, though, for me not related to the  drawing: the fact that we were looking into the future considering a “smart city” did not

necessarily mean that most of us wanted to have more technology. Instead, many of the  ideas we came up with were centered on human contact and community building.

The visualization approach was a perfect tool to tackle the complexity of a city like  Versailles. However, it could still have been further improved if we spent more time on  going through the design thinking process in order to cover all steps – however that was  not the aim of the workshop.

Figure 1: the drawing in use

