Authors: Jeremy Bowes, Manpreet Juneja, Carl Skelton, Sara Diamond, Marcus Gordon, Cody Dunne, Davidson Zheng, Steve Szigeti and Michael Carnevale
The increasing dependence of individuals on socio-technical and technological systems in urban life today, has provided an enormous amount of data that reveals user stories, and provides individuals with choices around how they integrate these systems into the quality of their urban life. Visualization and visual analytics tools can provide critical support for researchers, designers and stakeholders to understand these democratic choices related to human activities. Correlating and representing quantitative data from human actors provides insight, explanations for patterns and anomalies that aid in decision support as a democratic resource.
The iCity urban transport project focuses on the development of data analytics transportation and transit planning tools that could increase individual and community participation to the development, planning, and design of transportation systems interfaces as a democratic resource. Through the combination of social media and mobile data with GIS, demographic, socio-economic, and transit data iCity researchers use tools to develop evidence-based User (persona) and Use types (scenarios) through data collection and form stakeholder and related individual user and community engagement profiles. As an interactive system resource iCity sets out the conditions for individuals and groups to highlight their needs /wants /values, participate in strategic planning opportunities as a democratic resource to realize outcomes.
In this way designers and users can identify requirements, provide expertise around more general and fundamental matters of quality, equity, and social values, and a perspective rooted in the experience of urban systems as human experiences. This paper focuses on the comparative methodology and integration of user needs to create a more democratic system resource.
