Facilitating Communication in a Design Process using a Web Interface for Real-time Interaction with Grasshopper Scripts

Urban design project development encompasses a wide range of disciplines and approaches, which often have separate goals, frameworks, and software tools. Lack of timely alignment of the disconnected expert inputs to the common vision leads to an increasing number of revisions and decreases chances for finding a compromise solution. We developed an intuitive browser-supported interface in order to incorporate various types of expert inputs and ways of representing the information to take a first step towards facilitating collaborative decision-making processes. The current paper describes the application of the developed tool on three exemplary case studies, where the expert and non-expert users' inputs are combined and analysed using Grasshopper scripts at the back-end. Pilot user studies conducted with professionals have shown that the tool has potential to facilitate collaboration across disciplines and compromise decisions, while most of the participants were still more likely to use it for communication with customers rather than the design team. It suggests that the interaction scheme of different actors with the tool needs to correspond better to the interaction of different actors during common negotiation processes. The findings suggest that the type of involvement of different stakeholders should be explored further in order to find the balance in functionality suitable for different parties.