Multi-Media Guidelines for Instructing Urban Design Contests

The investigation of novel modalities and procedures to construct and make use of guidelines for urban design contests on the basis of perceptual representation principles is presented in this paper as a result of our research experience and the applications carried out over time. The paper firstly addresses a theoretical framework that highlights the importance of including representation values and tools in design contests; the second part illustrates applications of design guidelines to real case studies, such as design contests and workshops. Findings show that implementing additional information based on perceptual values is feasible, can enrich the knowledge about the design site and lead to more informed design solutions, thus indirectly increasing the overall quality of schemes.