Hub2 uses virtual 3D technology to enable community members to experience, not just look at, architectural designs. The project strives to augment typical community deliberation about neighborhood planning, recognizing that few laypeople possess the technical skills needed to translate inert design documents into vivid spaces. Instead of just looking at and verbally talking about design proposals, participants manipulate avatars through 3D simulations of the proposal, removing the need to translate from design to words and back again. We think of this process as providing a different language for community deliberation.

In 2009 we intend to build on last year’s success with Harvard’s Honan Library Park in Allston. One of the key innovations we will expand is the practice of putting participants into specific roles as a way to test the design proposals. This practice emerged from our realization that abstract interaction with a virtual space, even if bound by an avatar, doesn’t provide most laypeople with a robust enough experience to evaluate the experience, except perhaps aesthetically. Instead we assigned participants to characters who have to perform tasks like walking a dog, buying groceries, signing up for an ESL class, or getting to work. This role-playing serves three purposes: (1) to enable participants to evaluate the appropriateness of the space for these different purposes; (2) to give them different perspectives on the design that may not match their own; and (3) to immerse them in and provide a grounded view of the proposed space.

We began to realize that we were essentially asking participants to play video games as a way to give them some compelling reason to interact with the proposed design. So this year, with the help of MacArthur funding, we are highlighting and enhancing these game-like elements. We’ve been meeting with the folks at MIT’s Education Arcade to design the Hub2-Boston Chinatown project explicitly as a game – a game that is ostensibly about architectural design but really about civic engagement and citizen empowerment.

There are myriad research questions that this project might advance, for example: What elements of game design encourage players to adopt alternate perspectives? What level of realism or abstraction makes a space that is already semi-real believable (see, e.g. Grand Theft Auto IV’s Liberty City or Fallout 3’s Washington DC)? Then there are practical challenges, like what the scope of community input will be given the state of the existing Chinatown master plan, whom we will recruit to the sessions and what will entice them there, and how we will overcome multiple language barriers. (I should mention that I wrote my college thesis on politics and land use issues in Boston’s Chinatown). As with last year, we also plan to retain a retinue of youth “interpretors” to mediate between the computers and less technically proficient participants.

With all of these exciting questions and challenges ahead of us, we’re very happy to have the support of our community partners and the MacArthur Foundation to advance this vital civic engagement project.

Our major innovation at Hub2 wasn’t using Second Life; it was giving clear thought to how to engineer an experience that would lead to useful outcomes.

In this presentation, Professor Eric Gordon (Emerson College) and Gene Koo (Berkman), together with the staff of Hub2, will describe Hub2’s progress and challenges in working this summer with the North Allston neighborhood to participate in the design of Honan Library Park, which Harvard University is redeveloping as part of its larger Allston project. Joining this presentation will be the youth interpreters who have helped less technologically adept neighbors access the Hub2 technology and who in turn have learned to build and code in Second Life as well as understand urban planning.

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Nine residents of North Allston sat down with our staff, experienced the space virtually on both the big screen and their own laptops, and brainstormed how the park could play a role in community life. We asked the residents to pick a theme from among the several that emerged from the formal design process being led by Harvard and the ICON Group. Among these themes were “playful,” “educational,” and “contemplative.”

Because the park is still in the early design phases, we focused on broad strokes rather than specific design, and participants knew we were throwing out ideas, not specific recommendations. Nonetheless, the residents were actively engaged in thinking through how the space might weave into the fabric of the neighborhood, what can realistically fit in the relatively small, L-shaped parcel, and what the community really needs. Among the general ideas were a fitness circuit, ampitheatre-type group space, a covered seating area, and a naturalistic pond.

The outcome of last night’s process will be available to view in Second Life through tomorrow afternoon, when a new community group will come in and do it all again. We’ll be providing Copley-Wolff Design Group, the landscape architects for the park, with these ideas as well as more specific designs later in the summer. If you’re a local constituent of the park, please consider joining us at tomorrow’s brainstorming session:

Harvard Allston Education Portal
175 N. Harvard St
1:30-3:30pm

We’d especially like to thank, among the Hub2 staff, our interpreters — local Allston youth who have been learning more about both the virtual world of Second Life and the real world of park design — who helped residents manipulate their avatars through the virtual space. Our hosts, the Harvard Education Portal, also worked extra-hard to ensure that the computers and network stayed up and running.

We also had a very fun and productive chat with Tufts’ Civic Engagement Research Group on Friday. What interests me is that after so many years of Blizzard, Linden Labs, and everyone else pushing virtual worlds into the mainstream that most people we speak with nowadays “get it,” even if they’ve never experienced a virtual world firsthand. Many of the audience’s questions dealt with the nitty-gritty difficulties of grassroots organizing in general — for example, how to handle diverse communities with conflicting values. This is the reality we’re facing as we begin talking with real development projects in real neighborhoods: Hub2 will not help, for example, neighbors to figure out to balance the contradictory impulses towards helping each other out with selfish NIMBYism. But at least we might help knock out some of the design concerns — e.g. that public housing will be too dense — so that they can get to the values discussion with fewer distractions.

Virtual tool puts residents in the planning process

Too often, the neighborhood planning process turns into an us-versus-them face-off between developers and residents.

But two local educators are hoping to change that by inviting Bostonians into the virtual world of HUB2, a 3-D online depiction of Boston in which the public can help design the neighborhoods where they live, work and play.

The Boston Redevelopment Authority is in talks with Emerson College assistant professor Eric Gordon and Gene Koo, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, to set up a pilot program to enable residents to help shape an aspect of Harvard University’s proposed massive development in Allston.

The HUB2 team is proposing bringing its virtual Boston to Allston, where residents would work with Harvard to develop a city park.

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Friday, 18 January 2008
Northeastern University
Curry Student Center (building 50)
360 Huntington Ave
Boston MA 02115

Each group also presented their projects with much gusto, and I’ll post links to the online videos whenever they’re up. There’s also a video recording of the event — a capture of the live stream — which I’ll link to as well.

While we didn’t get as much media coverage as we’d hoped — it’s hard to compete with the spectacle of 12 inches of snow in as many hours — here’s the Berkeley Beacon’s take on Hub2.