The “Tavolo Luminoso” How to built a new tool suitable for supporting representation, communication and participation

The tool we present aims to facilitate the understanding of urban design projects and their implications to a wide public in order to support public participation. Towards this goal we developed the “Tavolo Luminoso”, an interactive tool that allows to combine different forms of representation together. 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. Some studies are going in this direction. We have analyzed theories and prototypes that occurred over the years that originated tangible interfaces; in particular we 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 a combined use of digital graphic displays and interaction, aiming at designing a new interactive tool. 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 the “Tangible Bits” by Hiroshi Ishii from the MIT MediaLab. The aim of this 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 could train students and citizens, making them interacting in real-time through physical objects, such as a 3-D models, with the rich content that the computation is able to provide; it make possible to analyze in real-time some impacts of a design project supporting the communication between the different actors involved in the decision-making process.