Abstract
This thesis describes the design and evaluation of a collaborative urban
planning support system for an interactive multi-touch tabletop display. The
system facilitates the design of spatial patterns of proposed development in a
co-located collaborative manner. We worked closely with faculty in the School
of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British
Columbia and employed an iterative, user-centered development process to create
a tabletop system to support landscape architect's primary urban planning
steps. The prototype system is designed for use by urban planners,
stakeholders, or private citizens: users with a variety of backgrounds and
expertise.
The collaborative urban planning support system was designed for use on a
multi-touch tabletop following lessons learned about considerations for
planning support systems, tabletop applications, and encouraging
collaboration. The system contains a limited yet adequate set of functions for
arranging various building types on a development site map. It has an intuitive
and highly interactive interface and uses input data that comes directly from
the elementsLAB team.
A primary focus of the pattern creation application is ensuring equity of
collaboration among users. Urban planners believe that it is important that all
members of a group contribute equally to produce a neighbourhood that meets
predefined quantitative and qualitative targets. We conducted a controlled
experiment that investigated how varying the number of simultaneous touch
inputs in the application affects collaboration and output quality. We tested
hypotheses that users would (i) collaborate more, (ii) produce higher quality
output, and (iii) complete their task faster with a multi-touch application
than with a single-touch application. We also tested the hypothesis that (iv)
multi-touch interactions with application elements will be preferred over
traditional single-touch interactions.
The number of touches accepted did not affect the amount of collaboration,
output quality, or time. However, participants perceived the multi-touch tasks
to be faster and to produce neighbourhood patterns of higher
quality. Participants seemed to be more cognitively absorbed in the multi-touch
tasks and they significantly preferred the multi-touch application over the
single-touch application. In addition, all multi-touch interactions were
significantly preferred over single-touch interactions.
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