Arnaud Grignard – Tangible Interfaces For Urban Spaces

Media Evolution

“The goal is to share knowledge through open-sourced tools, and for people to use them as much as possible”

In his presentation, Arnaud Grignard shared some of the work he does with his team at the City Science group at the MIT Lab, specifically a tool called City Scope. The common thread for all examples was how this tool made it possible to use data visualisation to analyse patterns and potential outcomes when developing cities. By building physical representations of cities, and projecting data onto the city, it’s possible to visualise behaviours on a large scale, such as movements of people and vehicles, and alter them to analyse the effects. One of the shown examples was a project analysing the effects of air-quality on depending on the way people in a city commute, giving a clear visual and physical representation on what it entails to take the car, public transport or bikes.

City planning can be quite abstract and complex and open-source tools like City Scope can help make the abstract more concrete. It can contribute to the democratisation of these types of analytics, and can be used as a way to communicate otherwise often overwhelming and complicated data to new types of shareholders.

But the most important thing that was pointed out, was that since this type of modelling is an open-source tool it’s available for everyone, at any time. These types of tools are available to us, so we should be using them as much as we possibly could in the planning of our cities.