The “Tavolo Luminoso” How To Built A New Tool Suitable For Supporting Representation, Communication And Participation

The environment has been displayed and presented to the public to promote design projects and to compare different determined design options. Over the last decades, different design environments have been developed to support stakeholders engaged in design processes by enhancing communication, facilitating shared understanding, and creating better artifacts. Each graphical representation, although much closer to reality, is always an interpretation and therefore an attempt of explanation of reality itself: it is filtered by culture. Therefore, it can influence the debate around the representation that can arise during a process of participatory planning. The best form of representation in a participatory process would be the use of multimedia products (like pictures, drawings, photomontages, videos, physical models) resulting from different types of analysis and tools. Only in this way it would be possible to give back the sense of complex environments such as the urban ones. However, through millennia of human evolution, we have developed sophisticated skills for sensing and manipulating our physical environment, most of which are not used when interacting with the digital world where interaction is largely confined to graphical user interfaces. The objective of this research is to combine representation and interaction between atoms and bits, making the digital data easy to be processed, transferable and flexible, guided by the vision of Hiroshi Ishii, MIT MediaLab, “Tangible Bits”. The aim of the research is to build a tangible user interface: a user interface which supports a more collaborative and comprehensible way of interaction making digital data tangible and using physical objects as controller of digital information. This new interface should train students and citizens, making them interacting in real-time through physical objects, such as a 3-D model, with the rich content that the computation is able to provide; it should analyze in real-time the impact of a design project supporting the communication between the different actors involved in the decision-making process. We have analyzed theories and prototypes that have occurred over the years that have originated tangible interfaces and in particular we have focused on the Luminous Planning Table (LPT) and similar tools. Considering that the demand for interactivity to support public participation in decision-making processes is growing, we try to combine the themes of visual representation of places with innovative technologies that make use of graphic displays and interaction, aiming at designing a new interactive tool. In this process, tangible interfaces are fundamental because people have the possibility to change the environment in which they are, thus helping them to visualize and face problems: with small physical objects (controllers) you can create a framework by placing and moving them in space, and adapting them to changes occurring during the decision making process. Therefore, tangible user interfaces are close to our behavioral habits, give an immediate feedback and are easily manipulable by several users at the same time. Our table is a tangible user interface open to a wide number of deployments in terms both of functions and of techniques of interaction design. The following questions are open: how to use materials and spatial properties in the design of both physical interfaces and interactions between users; how to manage the complexity of urban interactions trying to keep interfaces simple and transparent.