Introduction to the project

Information technology and new visualization methods are transforming approaching strategies for urban and territorial planning processes.  In particular, they play an important role in transmitting, organizing and analyzing large quantities of notions related to territories. Due to the relevance of these new works, a continuous evolution and experimentation of methodologies, tools, and platforms is needed.

In this scenario, the objective of this research project is to conceive and develop new methodologies to communicate urban and territorial data in visual and interactive ways, enabling experts (architects, urban planners, city managers, etc.) and non-experts (students, citizens, etc.) alike to participate in the discovery and analysis of physical and geographical data located in a shared information space.

The Unfolding Venice prototype

These subjects and purposes have been realized designing and developing a prototype for tangible and interactive exploration: the Unfolding Venice tabletop application. The tool gives the possibility to interactively browse the territorial data while transmitting in a visual and non-mediated way both the information of data itself data but also the existing conceptual relation between data.

This instrument, able to combine different knowledge levels in a single georeferenced information space, propose an original methodology to read and interpret the urban environment tanks to an intuitive navigation between notions based on ideas association. Our research results are a new way of reading and interpreting the urban text of a city and/or of the territory, with the aim to move exploration activities towards more creative processes by extending and tracking a nearly infinite number of possible navigation routes, consequently increasing the quantity and relevance of discovered notions.

look at the video of a browsing session

Documentation

In the documentation page you can dowload materials about the project.