McCall Design Portal

San Francisco-based McCall Design Group’s bread and butter work is high end retail and hotel interiors for national chains. They needed a Web-based tool for communicating with clients and consultants spread across the country. After trying several of the subscription-based extranet solutions, which they found slow and feature-bloated, they turned to an open-sourcemanagement portal software package called Zope, which runs on multiple operating systems, including, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Senior vice president John Chan, AIA, “couldn’t believe how powerful it could be—and it’s free.” He customized the basic Zope package to McCall’s requirements, creating a design portal that centralizes all project communication. An issue tracker feature lists all items under discussion between the design team and client. Double-clicking an item opens the entire thread of communication on the issue—email, fax, and telephone—all in one place. Design team members are able to exchange and markup sketches, photographs and drawing sheets. A database within the system serves as a document repository and archives the project history.
The system even allows Autodesk i-drop objects to be dragged and dropped from project folders into CAD drawings.

Chan says you have to be “a little bit geeky” to develop such a system in-house, but once completed,the system runs at no cost and shares the same server (and some of its content) with the firm’s public Web site. Most important, the portal preserves the firm’s own image and brand with its distinctive aesthetic. Compared to commercial third party solutions, Chan says their homegrown system “allows us to control our own destiny.”

McCall Design Portal

Web-based visual preference surveys

James Constantine, an urban planner and principal with Looney Ricks Kiss of Princeton, NJ, uses Web sites to conduct visual preference surveys for communities as diverse as Las Vegas and Denton, Texas. Building on the pioneering work of Anton Nelessen, who devised a system for citizens to choose between paired images of urban scenes, these surveys allow community residents to indicate preferences for streetscape and public open space design and even architectural style. In an intriguing synergy between the firm’s planning and architecture practices, LRK leveraged the same technology to assist its housing developer clients to identify style and feature preferences of potential home buyers even before preliminary design began. Such online “focus groups” have provided valuable insight into location-specific market demands. Constantine said “We’re able to find out what kind of Green features people are willing to pay for, for example, and what kind of tradeoffs they’re willing to make.”

Large-scale public consultation

In this era of discretionary land use planning, uncertainty about public reaction to development proposals is a major element of risk for developers, who invest a great deal of time and money without knowing whether their proposals will be approved. The Web has been an effective vehicle for increasing the transparency and efficacy of public consultation, while bringing in citizens who don’t have the time or inclination to attend meetings in person. A truly interactive Web site can help build trust among stakeholders, and offers developers a way to anticipate and prepare for community objections early in the design process.

Kim Kobza founded Neighborhood America an onnline tool to help communities and real estate developers manage land use and public planning projects. His Web-based system integrates the internal communications of the project team with the public process of stakeholder consultation. As a veteran land use attorney and participant in many a heated late night public hearing, Kobza saw a sometimes chaotic planning process that left developers, neighborhood activists and planning agencies equally frustrated. Kobza said “I knew there had to be a better way to manage communication at a public level.”

Neighborhood America provides the Web infrastructure for Imagine NY, an advocacy effort of the Municipal Art Society to engage the public in sharing ideas and visions for rebuilding lower Manhattan. The Web site records the history of this remarkable process and became an online gallery for the comments and sketch ideas of thousands of participants. When workshops for public comment on the nine proposed designs were held in January 2003, about 300 people attended the live sessions at St. John's University, but more than 6,000 others contributed ideas and sketches to the Web site. Comments and graphics are fed to a relational database which can be sorted by theme and viewed online.

ImagineNY: the Web site allows people to share their ideas for lower Manhattan with text and graphics www.imagineny.org

Information is Power

The Web’s ability to offer public access to sophisticated planning tools such as geographic information systems (GIS) and virtual reality techniques offers a tantalizing vision of a more informed and democratic urban visioning process. In England, the Slaithwaite virtual decision making system, a project of the University of Leeds School of Geography, gave residents of this West Yorkshire village the chance to access and interact with a wide array of social, physical and environmental information mapped to the familiar geography of their neighborhood. Users can zoom and pan colorful maps, ask questions about specific buildings, and then leave comments for planners.

Like CAD, GIS works with layers called “themes,” datasets tagged with information about geographic components, such as census tracts, seismic and flood zones, neighborhood association boundaries, or property tax assessments. One of the most ambitious online GIS projects is Neighborhood Knowledge California, a project of UCLA’s Advanced Policy Institute, funded by a grant from the US Department of Commerce. Users can map an area by drawing its boundaries online and can even upload their own data into NKCA's mapping system. A Koreatown parents group, for example, uploaded data about the location of child care facilities in that Los Angeles neighborhood and saw where gaps needed to be filled. Community groups and small businesses gain access to a wide array of public information and the tools to use it, helping to bridge the “digital divide.” UCLA professor and NKCA director Neal Richman says, “I’m excited about using this technology to share information, and therefore share power.”

Neighborhood Knowledge California

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