Analyzing Collaborative Activity – Representing field research for understanding
collaboration, CSCW 2002 Workshop Position Paper
Supporting Informed Debate of Urban Planning Alternatives
A.J. Brush, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
ajb@cs.washington.edu
Alan Borning, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
borning@cs.washington.edu
Introduction
Planning for land use and transportation infrastructure in a major metropolitan area, for
example modifying zoning or expanding roads, is a complicated task. Debates regarding
alternatives are often politically charged, with the stakeholders, from professional urban
planners to citizens, having very diverse opinions. The goal of the UrbanSim project
[Urb] is to allow people to simulate the future effects of different policies on urban
growth and development, transportation usage, resource consumption, and the
environment. We hope comparison between alternatives will foster informed civic debate
and deliberation.
UrbanSim is a state-of-the art land use modeling system that includes a transportation
model. Users can interact with UrbanSim to create scenarios that model policy
alternatives and then run the simulation into the future to explore outcomes. UrbanSim
also supports analyzing and comparing the results of different scenarios. UrbanSim has
been applied in Eugene, Salt Lake City, and Honolulu. The current interface is aimed at
urban planning professionals; its output is primarily tabular results, which can then be
explored using GIS and other software.
While the software development efforts to this point have focused on developing a stateof-the art simulation system available to experts, two longer-term goals have been
supporting a more diverse user group, and evolving the system to more directly support
the inherently collaborative activity of planning and analyzing urban development. We
are using the Value Sensitive Design methodology [FKB02] to ensure human values are
explicitly accounted for in our design process.
Currently, we are in the process of gathering data through interviews and observation to
better understand the urban planning process and role of simulation in that process. This
data will be used in two ways: (1) as empirical data to help determine the important
stakeholder values to support when presenting simulation results, and (2) to design
interfaces to UrbanSim for comparing and discussing alternative scenarios by groups,
particularly for mediation purposes.
As we are gathering and analyzing data this fall, the focus of this workshop is very
relevant for our project. As we discuss in more detail below, we plan to initially use
approaches from Contextual Design [BH98] and Personas [Co99] to represent and
analyze the data we collect. We expect multiple representations of our data will likely be
necessary to capture the complexity of the urban planning process. At the workshop, I
will share our initial representation of the data, and hope to discuss alternative approaches
and theories that might help us to better understand and represent the data.
Research Plan:
In this section, we outline in more detail the techniques we will use to collect data and
our planned approach for analyzing and representing the data. While we are generally
interested in better understanding the urban planning process, our focus on stakeholder
values and determining ways that UrbanSim simulation results could better support group
decision making will guide our data collection and analysis efforts.
Data Collection
We will collect data in two main ways, through interviews and observations of meetings.
The interviews will be with a variety of representatives from different stakeholders in the
urban planning process, including staff from metropolitan planning agencies, elected
officials, and members of advocacy groups. They will be semi-structured in the style of
contextual inquiry. Our focus in the interviews will be understanding an interviewee’s
role in land use and transportation planning, the values that are important to them and
their stakeholder group, what results or indicators (e.g. the number of days air pollution
exceeds EPA guidelines, the cost of new space for startup businesses) they would like
from the simulation, and observing their current use of simulation results if applicable.
In observing meetings of groups involved in planning, decision-making, and discussion
of land use and transportation alternatives, we will take a more ethnographic approach.
By observing meetings, we hope to gather additional data about the values important to
the group to verify and to expand information gathered in interviews. Meeting
observations will also be important for gaining a sense of the culture of the group. In
addition, we will observe meetings between representatives from a variety of stakeholder
groups, with a particular focus on how different groups interact, both in collaboration and
as adversaries. As necessary, we may also use surveys and other questionnaires with
members of the stakeholder groups to collect additional information.
Data Analysis
When analyzing and building representations of the data, we plan to meld two existing
approaches: contextual design and personas, taking into account the goals of Value
Sensitive Design. From contextual design we expect three work models: the flow model,
culture model, and artifact model, to be particularly important. The flow model will help
us characterize the collaborations and communication occurring, the culture model will
help us understand important values, and the artifact model will be important input to
redesigning the UrbanSim interface.
One major challenge is that we will probably need several different sets of work models.
One set to represent interactions between all the stakeholders in the urban planning
process (e.g. communication between metropolitan planning organizations, advocacy
groups, and citizens) and another set of work models for the internal workings of each
stakeholder group (e.g. how a particular advocacy group operates).
Analyzing interview data to determine values important to each stakeholder group is an
important part of our commitment to the Value Sensitive Design methodology. Value
Sensitive Design employs a tripartite methodology with conceptual, empirical and
technical investigations. In our conceptual investigations, we have already identified
three values (fairness, accountability, and democracy) that will be explicitly supported in
the interface. The stakeholder values we identify (e.g. pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods
or minimal commute time) will then all be supported equally in the interface as far as
possible, allowing each stakeholder to select the values important to them when
simulating policy alternatives. At this point, our plan is to represent stakeholder values in
the culture model for that group.
We view personas as an important step in our data representation task. Developing a
persona (or multiple personas) for different stakeholders will help us characterize the
many different participants in the urban planning process. By defining and refining the
personas, we will explore whether multiple interfaces to UrbanSim will be necessary and
if so how many (e.g. one for professional planners, one for concerned citizens). Personas
will also be valuable for focusing our development team and prioritizing new features.
Conclusion
Land use and transportation planning is a complex and politically charged process. We
are excited by the opportunity to support informed comparison of different policy
alternatives using the UrbanSim modeling system. Our initial efforts to understand the
values of different stakeholders groups and characterize the interactions within and
between groups are critical in developing interfaces to the UrbanSim system that will
foster debate and deliberation. The Analyzing Collaborative Activity Workshop at
CSCW 2002 will be a valuable forum for sharing our data representation efforts and
receiving feedback and ideas about other representation and analysis techniques that
would be help us understand the complicated activity of urban planning.
References
[BH98] Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, Contextual Design, Defining Customer
Centered Systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.
[Co99] Alan Cooper, The Inmates are running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products
Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Indianapolis: SAMS, 1999
[FKB02] Batya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn, and Alan Borning, Value Sensitive Design:
Theory and Methods, Submitted for publication, Available at:
http://www.urbansim.org/papers/vsd-theory-methods.pdf
[Urb] UrbanSim web page, http://www.urbansim.org/