Publications

A Case Study of Script-Based Techniques in Urban Planning

This paper introduces the use of parametric design tools in the domain of large-scale urban planning. The 253-hectare site in Moscow, Russia, was selected as the study case of the methodology. Through the exploration of a differentiated urban order functioning within a framework of overall coherence the site is interpreted as an informational data field. In the particular example, a data field represents a set of points distributed on the site. A manipulative set of input parameters is derived from the contextual forces around the site – such as 1950’s socialist housing, the new urban Moscow City and the Moscow river - while output variables incorporate a distance value for each important point on the site to those of the surrounding elements. Using script-based techniques, values are translated into the urban and formal responses of building typology, height, connectivity and directionality. These data-holding elements then cumulatively outline the pattern and grain of the site. The use of multiple transformative building typologies creates an urban tapestry bringing about diversification within the urban field, whereas the negotiation and continual shift between singular and plural building masses becomes the premise of the architectural condition. Hence, the design process focuses on the formal resolution of the multiple juxtaposed patterns that emerge from the site. Diversity within the field is amplified at the component scale where dynamic building sub systems exhibit a spatial flexibility and changing image idea.

A Conceptual Participatory Design Framework for Urban Planning

This paper focuses on the definition of a conceptual participatory design framework for urban planning. Traditional planning methods can no longer satisfy the growing demands on sustainable urban planning in regard to factors such as complexity, problem size, and level of detail and these limitations make the development of new approaches necessary. Expert knowledge as well as insights from stakeholders and community members needs to take part equally in the decision-making process since they are responsible for a broad understanding and acceptance of final planning decisions. Therefore, a participatory framework is presented in the following, which integrates needs and requirements of stakeholders. In order to enable diverse groups of stakeholders to act conjointly, we propose the application of interactive decision support tools, which will leverage general conclusions especially to solve crucial planning decisions.

Components for parametric urban design in Grasshopper

The main contribution of our work is in combining the methods for parametric urban design of highly specialized software such as CityEngine and general-purpose parametric modeling platform such as Grasshopper. Our work facilitates and prompts the use of parametric tools by architects and planners for urban design. In this paper we present a custom grasshopper component for street network generation and block subdivision. The component was developed in C# using the RhinoCommon SDK. We used Grasshopper for the development of an urban design proposal at a teaching exercise. To meet the requirements of the urban design project, additional functionalities had to be added to the range of existing Grasshopper components. In particular, we needed components for street network generation and block subdivision. To develop the component we implemented the street expansion strategies described in (Weber et al., 2009) and the methods for block subdivision described in (Vanegas et al., 2009). Additionally, we adapted and enhanced the strategies to meet the NURBS modeling capabilities of Rhinoceros.

Responsive Illuminated Architecture

Accommodating Varying User Roles in Participatory Urban Design

Urban Visualisation Beyond 3D: Behaviour, Dynamics and Interactivity

Das Planen von Zukunftsstädten und das Streben nach Lebensqualität

Integrated Energy Monitoring and Visualization System for Smart Green City Development

SUPat – Sustainable Urban Patterns, Progress Report NRP 65

A Crowdsourcing Urban Simulation Platform Using Mobile Devices and Social Sensing

Cities are among the most complex entities created by humans. Even though humans are the designers and main users of these entities, we are still trying to understand and transform the urban environment in order to improve our well-being and enjoy a better life. In this context, we suggest the novel idea of simulating this complex world by adopting ‘social sensing’ and ‘crowdsourcing’ concepts which have the potential to initiate a paradigm shift in urban simulation design. Based on the concept of crowdsourcing, we present a human-agent based urban simulation, which directly feeds citizens’ intentions and activities into the simulation in real-time. This work is based on previous research dealing with urban sensing. We integrate previous ideas to our platform that simulates urban sustainability by sensing user activities. The specific research tasks of our simulation environment are: i) sensing inhabitant’s acceleration and location data, ii) transforming the raw data into CO2 emission information, and iii) designing user interaction in order to induce mass participation. To secure the mass participation, we envision the user interaction using diverse social network services and enhancing a user-friendly interface, and adopting a gamification idea implementing entertaining elements.

Integrating Natural Resource Indicators into Procedural Visualisation for Sustainable Urban Green Space Design

Future Cities

A grammar-based procedural design guideline visualization diagram for the development of SVA Masdar City

A Conceptual Framework for the Formulation of Stakeholder Requirements

We need to face challenging needs for the planning of sustainable future cities. New methods in urban simulation enhance significantly the early urban design phase. However, these promising methods will only be sustainable if they consider stakeholder participation from the very beginning. Therefore we propose a conceptual framework for the formulation of stakeholder requirements, which enables the iterative modification of an urban model inside participatory workshops. A special emphasis concentrates on environmental, social and economical factors. The requirements posed by the stakeholders are instantly transferred into urban design patterns. Each single pattern stands for a solution for a specific problem that is integrated and visualized in a procedural model. Our goal is to create a participatory process that takes advantages by the use of comprehensive urban design patterns. The results are integrated within an interactive procedural model that communicate the most important guidelines for the planning of sustainable future cities.

Agent based Emission Evaluation of Traffic in Dynamic City Models

Energy Monitoring and Visualization System for U-ECO City

Procedural Modeling of Urban Green Space Pattern Designs Taking into Account Ecological Parameters

Grammar-based Encoding of Facades

In this paper we propose a real-time rendering approach for procedural cities. Our first contribution is a new lightweight grammar representation that compactly encodes facade structures and allows fast per-pixel access. We call this grammar F-shade. Our second contribution is a prototype rendering system that renders an urban model from the compact representation directly on the GPU. Our suggested approach explores an interesting connection from procedural modeling to real-time rendering. Evaluating procedural descriptions at render time uses less memory than the generation of intermediate geometry. This enables us to render large urban models directly from GPU memory.

Augmenting Generative 3D City Models with Behavior-based Agents

The ETH Value Lab and Two Software Tools for Knowledge Creation in Teams

This article discusses three tools that allow making collaboration and decision-making more effective. It presents insights from working in the ldquoETH Baugarten Value Labrdquo, a new research space with five touch displays. First, the article introduces this lab. Then, it introduces two software tools to support communication and group decision-making. The first tool is targeted at urban planners, the second at managers. We found that (1) the lab fascinates and engages the users, (2) that not many software tools are available for such a setting and that those tools are not very user friendly, (3) that people underestimate the time to design suitable workshops. We have found in various workshops that our two tools seem to go in the right direction, which states that ldquoless functionality is morerdquo.

Value Lab

The Hellenistic City Model Inspired by Koolhaas

In this paper, we suggest a generic city description model suited for purposes like semi-automatic city modeling and urban layout evaluation. The generic city model refers to basic vital functions of a (computable) city. Feature patterns are used to extend the generic city model with global and local characteristics. The Hellenistic cities serve as a platform for a first implementation to test a semi-automatic city model generation. As a result four cities are reconstructed as a first example of our ongoing work, Miletus, Knidos, Priene and Olynthus. Future work will deal with the application of the generic city model to the performance simulation of contemporary urban layouts.

The Sensitive Tapestry

This paper presents ‘The Sensitive Tapestry‘, an interactive installation using body-input as a nontraditional user interface. The technical basis for this kind of media-enabled environment is a thermal imager that captures the activities in public areas at a large scale. The installation has been developed as a prototypical example in architectural education at the ETH Zurich, Science City. The aim of the project is to generate a novel experience, which shows the potential of merging physical architecture and digital information. The article newly develops architecture as an interface that reveals information about the building itself, its occupants, and/or its environment. It describes the research that employs design experimentation and information visualization with the use of computersupported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition. This questions the way in which one perceives the own body spatiality and motility in physical and augmented environments and how the particular experience created by this juxtaposition evokes one’s awareness of the motility in the public. The paper suggests that introducing this kind of display in a social scenario can enrich the casual interaction of people nearby and this might enhance social awareness and engagement.

A Visually Supported Interactive Risk Assessment Approach for Group Meetings

This paper introduces a new process-oriented visualisation method for risk assessment in groups. Today, in corporate risk assessment there is a lack in visual facilitation methods for collaborative assessments of risks. Existing visualisation methods emphasize analytical purposes. However, they are not useful for the facilitation of risk assessments in a group, such as the board of management. The described risk visualization approach offers a visual dialogue oriented approach to improve the quality of organisational risk-assessment in groups and goes hand in hand with already established risk management processes and systems. Secondly, this paper introduces the “ETH Baugarten Value Lab”, where we tested the tool on touch displays.

Evaluation of 3D City Models Using Automatic Placed Urban Agents

We present a method for populating procedurally generated 3D city models with crowds of artificial agents. It is targeted towards the analysis, prediction and visualization of occupant behaviour in urban planning. We simulate and quantify correlations on the following aspects: functions of buildings, number of people and fluctuation in density. Potential practical applications are for example a) to determine bottlenecks in public transit, b) to identify possible problems for evacuation scenarios, c) to evaluate the demand for and the accessibility of amenities as well as d) the stress of pedestrians to evaluate quality of life indicator for a given urban region . The occupants’ location data – represented by the agents - and relevant semantic metadata are encoded inside a grammar-based city modelling system. This information is used for the context-dependent automatic placement of occupant locators during the procedural generation process of the urban 3D model. Most of the underlying parameters are interconnected with each other. For example, the number of resulting agents corresponds to the size, function and location of one specific building. Once a 3D city model has been generated, occupants are represented by agents using a) a commercial fuzzy logic system and b) pre-animated 3D avatars. The agents find their way through the city by moving towards points of interest to which they are attracted. Each individual agent draws specific paths while interacting with the urban environments and other agents. Every path describes a set of parameters, for example speed, space available and level of exhaustion. The ensuing visual diagrammatic representation shows the resulting agent paths in correlation with the virtual environment. This offers the opportunity to investigate parts of a city and optimise corresponding aspects with minimal interventions on the urban level. We show the application of this method to evaluate planning interventions in the urban fabric and monitor the correlating effects.

A Novel Camera-Based System for Collaborative Interaction with Multi-Dimensional Data Models

In this paper, we address the problem of effective visualization of and interaction with multiple and multi-dimensional data supporting communication between project stakeholders in an information cave. More exactly, our goal is to enable multiple users to interact with multiple screens from any location in an information cave. We present here our latest advancements in developing a novel human-computer interaction system that is specifically targeted towards room setups with physically spread sets of screens. Our system consists of a set of video cameras overseeing the room, and of which the signals are processed in real-time to detect and track the participants, their poses and hand-gestures. The system is fed with camera based gesture recognition. Early experiments have been conducted in the Value Lab (see figure 1), that has been recently introduced at ETH Zurich, and they focus on enabling the interaction with large urban 3D models being developed for the design and simulation of future cities. For the moment, experiments consider only the interaction of a single user with multiple layers (points of view) of a large city model displayed on multiple screens. The results demonstrate the huge potential of the system, and the principle of vision based interaction for such environments. The work continues on the extension of the system to a multi-user level.

A grammar-based system for the participatory design of urban structures

We propose a three-step participatory design cycle for the early urban design phase that can be integrated into the digital design chain. Step one involves a visualization method that is implemented as an interactive card-based interview technique for the collaborative requirement specification of urban designs. In step two these specifications are a) translated into simplified GIS data and then b) implemented into a grammar-based system together with the corresponding design regulations. The final outcome is a generative and iterative urban model, which includes buildings, building blocks, transportation networks and open spaces that visually communicates spatial impacts of urban design proposals.

The Potential of Crowd Simulations for Communication Purposes in Architecture

This article discusses an early stage of research on the potential of crowd simulation tools for (marketing) communication purposes in architecture and urban planning. We argue that today, in architecture and urban planning, agent-based simulation tools have been primarily used for analytical purposes, such as the simulation of pedestrians or fire escape scenarios in buildings, and only rarely for the creation of videos for communication purposes, for example for marketing purposes. We found that even with the best available software tools the cost-benefit ratio for architects is not yet optimal and that architects might – from an economic point of view – today be more effective if they outsource such a task to an animation specialist.This paper is relevant for architects, urban designers, communication and PR experts and for researchers in the fields of architecture, knowledge visualization, communication science, agent-based simulations.

Using Shape Grammars for Master Planning

This paper describes the application of procedural modeling methods to automatically derive 3D models of high visual quality for a highly detailed and quick visualization of complex city models. We discuss the applicability of a procedural modeling pipeline of shape grammars in urban planning to derive meaningful 3D city models. Therefore we analyze CGA shape, a novel shape grammar for the procedural modeling of CG architecture, for its usage in architectural planning processes. Our system gives rise to three exciting applications in the field of city modeling and city visualization enabling a quick decision making and iterative design workflow: modeling of master plans, evaluation of built environments and planning of urban open spaces. It is capable to produce building shells with high visual quality and geometric detail. Context sensitive shape rules allow the user to specify interactions between the entities of the hierarchical shape descriptions. Selected examples demonstrate solutions to previously noted challenges.

ETH Value Lab

In this paper we discuss how the planning of complex urban systems can be supported by combining (a) dynamic, complimentary visualization software toolkits for planning, project management and visualizing neighborhoods, (b) interactive real-built information architecture, (c) multi-touch, large format display devices and (d) collaboration techniques into a tool for modeling and designing future cities called Value Lab. Finally, we show comprehensive examples from research, application, and teaching.

Crowd Simulation for Urban Planning

This paper presents a semi-automatic visualization method for the evaluation of urban environments that is based on artificial intelligence. It proposes the use of agent-based crowd simulation software on a mid-scale urban planning level for design evaluation. The information on agents’ movements is noted in standard raster images. The results are maps that are easy to understand. These maps show movement paths of the agents and density and give further conclusion on bottlenecks in planning contexts. Key measures, like the occupant movement in a given district, until now relied greatly on empirical knowledge or data that could be only gathered after an urban design had become built reality. Our method focuses on the adaptation of common software technology that is originally situated in film and TV productions. A practical workflow shows how our method can be easily integrated in daily design tasks. Keywords: Artificial intelligence; agent-based; crowd simulation; urban planning; design evaluation; occupant movement.

Sustainable master planning using design grammars

Successful sustainable urban planning has to deal with existing demands in urban design connected to a highly complex system in every direction of business a planner could think of. Furthermore, reality frequently overtakes ongoing planning. These circumstances are especially severe for the urban planning of mega cities, where sustainability must be in the focus of interest for several reasons. “Green lungs”, as one example supporting sustainability within urban environments enhance the functionality of cities to balance humidity locally, to shade buildings and sites and to enable public recreation as well as to reduce air pollution directly and indirectly. This quantitatively and qualitatively less explored branch of urban design requires complex and time consuming modeling tasks even on a master planning scope. In this paper we describe a novel method to create sustainable urban vegetation designs automatically as a kind of early simulation step, which can be used as a guideline for following master planning tasks of high-density urban environments. We had formalized sustainability criteria available in current planning knowledge into CGA shape grammar, which had been introduced by [1]. Additionally, we extended these urban planning rule sets with defined urban landscape patterns. We use these patterns with a procedurally model rule-based distribution and placement of vegetation as well as landscape objects to generate sustainable urban environments. We also show how to use a shape grammar in combination with procedural methods that iteratively develop an urban design, automatically creating more and more details in order to plan sustainable cities more effectively. We link the use of patterns [2] and the design possibilities of shape grammars to plan sustainable design. As results, we present the simulated master plans of different sustainable urban environments in different climates. This paper evolves out of a recent paper [3] of the authors with a strong similarity in section 1-5. Exception: The contributed work is extended by the use of design grammars suited for sustainable design. The extensions adhere especially to the application of design patterns in the context of sustainable master planning and are focused but not limited to vegetation scenarios.

Visualize Desires, not Cities

Bildungsraum Science City ETH

Informationsarchitektur

Bildungsraum Science City ETH

Visualising future cities in the ETH Value Lab

This article discusses how the use of complementary visualisation techniques can contribute to improve planning, understanding, and communication of future cities, especially when different stakeholders are involved. First, it describes a framework to structure visual representations. Second, it introduces the ‘ETH Value Lab’ as a tool for designing future cities. Third, it introduces two applications that can be used for two urban planning processes: planning and project management and visualising neighbourhoods. Finally, it shows scenarios for education and learning. This article is relevant for urban planners and visualisation researchers, because it points to the emerging field of visualising future cities and for professors, teachers, but also school administration and ICT-experts who want to invest and use state-of the art mixed reality infrastructures for teaching and research.

Value Lab

Visualization of huge data sets for activities in business worlds, entertainment industries and extended visualization in sciences are one of the most exciting chances in architecture. They can result in interweaving physical spaces - physical architectures - with electronic data spaces - virtual architectures. Places and localities with distances in geographical, intercultural and economic matters do not need to exist separated any longer. The networking concepts shout for the use of new architectural languages. Architectural interfaces in physical and digital spaces deliver associated communication, collaboration and learning - breaking up distances in time and geographic spaces. Inside this paper we will discuss how information architecture could be set up in existing buildings with the Value Lab as an example and which methods can be used to develop and to design physical architecture. We present the Value Lab as a recent prototype for Information Architecture.

Visualization Summit 2007

At the first international Visualization Summit, more than 100 international researchers and practitioners defined and assessed nine original and important research goals in the context of Visualization Science, and proposed methods for achieving these goals by 2010. The synthesis of the whole event is presented in the 10th research goal. This article contributes a building block for systemizing visualization research by proposing mutually elaborated research goals with defined milestones. Such a consensus on where to go together is only one step toward establishing visualization science in the long-term perspective as a discipline with comparable relevance to chemistry, mathematics, language, or history. First, this article introduces the conference setting. Second, it describes the research goals and findings from the nine workshops. Third, a survey among 62 participants about the originality and importance of each research goal is presented and discussed. Finally, the article presents a synthesis of the nine research goals in the form of a 10th research goal, namely 'Visualizing Future Cities'. The article is relevant for visualization researchers, trend scouts, research programme directors who define the topics that get funds.

Procedural Design of Urban Open Spaces

This paper presents a novel approach for the automatic creation of vegetation scenarios in real or virtual 3D cities in order to simplify the complex design process and time consuming modeling tasks in urban landscape planning. We introduce shape grammars as a practical tool for the rule-based generation of urban open spaces. The automatically generated designs can be used for pre-visualization, master planning, guided design variation and digital content creation in general (e.g. for the entertainment industry). In a first step, we extend the CGA shape grammar by Müller et al. (2006) with urban planning operations. In a second step, we employ the possibilities of shape grammars to encode design patterns (Alexander et al., 1977). Therefore, we propose several examples of design patterns allowing for an intuitive high-level placement of objects common in urban open spaces (e.g. plants). Furthermore, arbitrary interactions between distinct instances of the vegetation and the urban environment can be encoded. With the resulting system, the designer can efficiently vegetate landscape and city parks, alleys, gardens, patios and even single buildings by applying the corresponding shape grammar rules. Our results demonstrate the procedural design process on two practical example scenarios, each one covering a different scale and different contexts of planning. The first example illustrates a derivation of the Garden of Versailles and the second example describes the usage of high-level rule sets to generate a suburbia model.

Course digital art techniques

Digital art has become a respected art form, and interest in this very interdisciplinary field is rapidly growing as more and more contemporary artists start employing computers for implementing their own creative work. This course focuses on techniques for creating digital visual art; in particular on the case where custom, not off-the-shelf software tools are applied. The attendees of the course learn how distinct techniques are applied in order to achieve specific artistic goals. They will further learn what consequences and requirements result from given artistic ideas in terms of realizing effective digital art software components.

Three conditions for successful campus planning

Visualization Summit 2007

At the first international Visualization Summit, more than 100 international researchers and practitioners defined and assessed nine original and important research goals in the context of Visualization Science, and proposed methods for achieving these goals by 2010. The synthesis of the whole event is presented in the 10th research goal. This article contributes a building block for systemizing visualization research by proposing mutually elaborated research goals with defined milestones. Such a consensus on where to go together is only one step toward establishing visualization science in the long-term perspective as a discipline with comparable relevance to chemistry, mathematics, language, or history. First, this article introduces the conference setting. Second, it describes the research goals and findings from the nine workshops. Third, a survey among 62 participants about the originality and importance of each research goal is presented and discussed. Finally, the article presents a synthesis of the nine research goals in the form of a 10th research goal, namely 'Visualizing Future Cities'. The article is relevant for visualization researchers, trend scouts, research programme directors who define the topics that get funds.

Visual representations in knowledge management

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to explore the potential of visualization for corporate knowledge management. Design/methodology/approach – The employed methodology consists of a taxonomy of visualization formats that are embedded in a conceptual framework to guide the application of visualization in knowledge management according to the type of knowledge that is visualized, the knowledge management objective, the target group, and the application situation. This conceptual framework is illustrated through real-life examples. Findings – The findings show that there is much room for knowledge management applications based on visualization beyond the mere referencing of experts or documents through knowledge maps. Research limitations/implications – The research implications thus consist of experimenting actively with new forms of visual knowledge representation and evaluating their benefits or potential drawbacks rigorously. Practical implications – The authors encourage managers to look beyond simple diagrammatic representations of knowledge and explore alternative visual languages, such as visual metaphors or graphic narratives. Originality/value – This paper consists of two elements: first, the systematic, descriptive and prescriptive approach towards visualization in knowledge management, and second the innovative examples of how to harness the power of visualization in knowledge management.