SUPat – NFP65
Sustainable Urban Patterns – A project within the scope of the National Research Programme NRP 65 “New Urban Quality”
Traditional planning methods for urban systems reach their limits, as continuous interactions among people and socio-economic and ecological variables generate increasingly complex and unsustainable environments, which impact human health, well-being and ecological quality. Our goal is therefore to generate exemplary sustainable urban patterns on regional and local scale for selected case study areas in the Limmattal close to Zurich. This requires developing new approaches clarifying design tasks through an iteration of thorough spatial, infrastructural and socioeconomic readings, conceptual interpretations and their testing – guided by design, supported by simulation and collaborative modelling.
The overall goal of the NRP 65 project “SUPat – Sustainable Urban Patterns” is to establish a collaborative modelling platform, which bundles the diverse capabilities and methods of designers, planners, scientists and simulation tools, such as advanced economic and transport modelling tools, ecological process models, and social analyses, to derive at convincing sustainable urban patterns. Overall the collaborative modelling platform will accelerate knowledge exchange between relevant actors and serve as an operative tool to assess the conditions under which specific urban qualities have a good chance to achieve their environmental, social and economic goals.
KTI – Visual Manager
In this research project, which will last 18 months, we will develop a framework and a related Multi-Touch-Software for the visual management of risks and strategies. The applied research project is done jointly with our industry partner vasp datatecture GmbH (www.vasp.ch). Their consultants and visualization experts develop the methodologies and logical designs and prototypes. Based on this input, the software developers at ETH will elaborate a generic framework and a multi-touch-application. On top of that the researchers will envision and implement new forms of gesture based human computer interaction and a practical way for writing text without an external keyboard. Furthermore, an iPhone application will allow accessing the data for example from home or the bus, manipulating and processing the data of the application. This new visual management approach will lead to a new form of discussion, a reduction of complexity, more clarity and consistency, a higher involvement and motivation of people and thus leverage efficiency.
The project can become a landmark for a paradigm shift towards a visual management.
KTI – City planning tool
Computer-assisted Interactive Planning of Energy- and CO2-Efficient Cities
This Project is a collaboration between the ETH Zurich and Esri Procedural AG. The goal is to develop a software system that can help urban planners and designer to design more energy efficient and less CO2 consuming cities.
The Zurich based company Procedural AG develops and distributes the 3D Software “CityEngine”, which uses a new approach for modeling 3D urban environments very efficiently. Real-world data and simulated scenarios can be integrated into new urban scenarios or be used for the digital apparent reconstruction of existing cities.
Compared to present technological standards the quality to create a more sustainable city plan will be drastically enhanced. Furthermore, predictions on apparent energy consumptions and CO2 emissions are more easily accessible along with the creation of optimized design alternatives.
VALUE LAB
COLLABORATION IN SPACE
We are implementing a research lab – the Value Lab, a new collaboration environment for virtual design and planning of architecture. It combines the use of complimentary views on high resolution computer displays with direct multi-touch content manipulation creating a streamlined working pipeline for the evaluation of design. The Value Lab Space currently consists of five large scale, high-resolution lcd-panels and two high-resolution projectors. Three lc-displays are wall mounted in a 1×3 layout interactive display wall and two are realized as one large interactive display table. Both the display row and the interactive table are equipped with multi-touch technology. The Value Lab will be operational with the estimated opening of the HIT building in September 2008. Further information www.valuelab.ethz.ch