by Dr Shuva Chowdhury
Ar. Dr. Shuva Chowdhury is a Lecturer of Architecture at Southern Institute of Technology (SIT) Invercargill, New Zealand. His work focuses on spatial innovation in architecture and urban design, virtual design communication and collaboration, smart city, computational design and fabrication, and BIM. He received his PhD from Victoria University of Wellington on VR participatory urban design, funded by National Science Challenge 11, Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities- Urban Wellbeing. Before his study at VUW, Shuva practiced architecture in Bangladesh and taught at American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB). He is a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Architectural Designer New Zealand (ADNZ), and the Institute of Architects Bangladesh (IAB). He is a collaborative research member of the Digital Architecture Research Alliance (DARA). His design works have received awards from the World Architecture Community-11th Cycle, Commonwealth Architects Association (CAA), and Institute of Architects-Bangladesh (IAB).
The design decision prolongation happens due to an individual’s background, understanding of the context, and perceptual speculation for the future project.
The continuous evolution of computation in design communication and tools makes any design process more inclusive and democratic. Participatory urban planning already embraces digital communication tools to leverage laypeople in design decision-making. Most of these tools primarily focus on collecting information for site analyses or collecting votes on predetermined design ideas. These participatory practices deal with spatial planning, not entirely conceived the space in terms of perceptual understanding. The procedures show maximum participation from the end-users. Still, the design decision usually takes on suggestive spatial design ideas, where they cannot design by themselves with continuous instant spatial feedback of their own decisions.
To date, participatory co-design techniques dealing with urban issues have often used paper-based methods and depended on digitally produced images or three-dimensional artifacts.
Besides, such participatory urban design approaches are often sidelined as developers see them as a waste of time and money. The design decision prolongation happens due to an individual’s background, understanding of the context, and perceptual speculation for the future project. One of the reasons for this conflict is the lack of spatial understanding of their design speculations. Due to a lack of useful instruments, end-users find it difficult to actively participate in design processes where they can become fully informed by spatial understanding. It motivates Shuva’s PhD – completed in 2020 at Victoria University of Wellington, to develop virtual instruments to facilitate end-users to actively participate in the design process in an enhanced perceptual environment where the users can interact with the design of 3D artifacts on an absolute scale meaningfully with the other co-designers.
The thesis discusses how New Zealand’s future neighborhoods can be shaped and developed with VE-assisted participatory urban design.
To date, participatory co-design techniques dealing with urban issues have often used paper-based methods and depended on digitally produced images or three-dimensional artifacts. The demand for public participation in the urban design decision-making process allows for accountability on the part of stakeholders. However, the lack of ability to understand the implications of different design decisions and tools in the design process hinders non-experts from actively taking part in the design of the environments they inhabit. Furthermore, conventional urban design processes do not allow laypeople to participate easily in the design ideation and generation stage. So, the research speculates that a Virtual Environment (VE) facilitated instrument enables laypeople to participate actively as designers in the early stage of an urban design process.
The research has been framed to accommodate an urban design task following the design scope of the VE instrument. The study develops a design discussion platform for non-experts to produce urban forms using virtual tools. These tools offer a dynamic virtual interactive platform to visualize and produce iterative design ideas. Shuva discovered that engaging community members enabled them to efficiently work together to create different designs and collaborate naturally, including on important—perhaps less exciting—design elements such as driveways and fences. The findings support the hypothesis that VE with the generation of 3D artifacts, enhances design communication for laypeople to design an urban form for their neighborhood. The thesis discusses how New Zealand’s future neighborhoods can be shaped and developed with VE-assisted participatory urban design.
Bringing the designer’s concept to the non-design expert’s communicative level requires a significant understanding of the communication media.
Bringing the designer’s concept to the non-design expert’s communicative level requires a significant understanding of the communication media. Primarily the design communication depends on the type of tools used. With their pre-set operability, virtual devices limit the designer’s ways of interacting with the artifacts. In addition, this research proposes a framework for designers to interact with non-design experts through enhanced communicative media. The design framework indicates steps of design thinking to develop the interface by understanding the virtual artifacts’ perceptual affordance to the users and the design task. These bring additional arguments on designers’ role as authors of the system design. Shuva is currently investigating the scope of leveraging such non-experts’ design collaboration remotely in the realm of the metaverse world.
(This research is a part of the PhD Thesis)
Contact with the Author:
https://www.sit.ac.nz/Research/Staff-Profiles/Profile/ArtMID/7746/ArticleID/1179/Dr-Shuva-Chowdhury
CV: https://www.shuvachowdhury.com/mee
External Link:
https://www.shuvachowdhury.com/
https://scholar.google.co.nz/citations?user=ZekckRAAAAAJ
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8261-4468
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shuva-Chowdhury
https://sit-nz.academia.edu/ShuvaChowdhury
Images Source: Chowdhury, S., & Hanegraaf, J. (2022). Co-presence in Remote VR Co-design: Using Remote Virtual Collaborative Tool Arkio in Campus Design.
All contents and images are to the credit of the author/authors
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