Empowering Communities

Join Adam Sutcliffe (CPO @ Amutri) as he delves into a transformative conversation with Fang Xu, an associate at Foster + Partners. Discover the groundbreaking intersection of architecture, community engagement, and technology as Fang shares the captivating story of Watertown's revitalisation through participatory design. This episode of Beyond Dimensions uncovers how digital tools and 3D visualisation can empower communities, bridge professional gaps, and inspire innovative urban development. A must-watch for anyone passionate about the future of design, community involvement, and the power of technology in shaping spaces with stakeholder co-design.

https://www.amutri.com/

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Beyond Dimensions. Today I am very happy to be chatting with Fang Xu, who is an associate at Fosters & Partners. Fang has some really lovely stories about how the use of 3D visualization at the early stage of coming up with an idea has been used to engage a whole plethora of stakeholders and get them really involved in the co-design right at the start of a project.

So Fang, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. So, would you like to give us a little introduction to yourself and how you got to Fosters, and then maybe we can talk about Watertown. 

Sure, I would love to. I started my career in Shanghai, China. I studied architecture there and then practiced as an architect for a few years there. Then I moved to the United States to pursue a doctoral program in architecture. My focus at the time was on social and cultural design. It's a long story for me to explain how I try to get from that direction, which is more related to anthropology and psychology. Then eventually, I develop a, I found, I found my passion in the field of three-dimensionalization, and then I was later on, I started to teach at two universities and then after that I moved to the UK and started to work for Foster Partners.  And currently, my main role with the company is to lead the development of all kinds of what I call digital narrative tools.

These help our architects explain very complex design decision-making procedures to the client to build trust and help them understand the value of our design services. Wow. And so actually before we get into Watertown, what sort of, in terms of that digital narrative stuff for your architects, what sort of things are you using 3D visualization to help communicate?

We use Unreal Engine. So this is actually originally people think Unreal Engine is about the tool, a platform we use to build up games. But actually, we are actually in this newly-found kind of territory that we can use, the tool to build those interactive 3D apps or gadgets, whatever you call it, that layperson can play with that and they can run on any computer, can run different platforms even remotely, through iPad or smart devices or something.

So that in, we typically use those digital narrative apps during design conferences when our clients came to the office to talk to the client architects, they don't have to just go to the computer screen and then looking at those, for them a little bit, kind of bizarre and confusing icons and symbols, everything.

They can just play the tool, start with something very, it's like a sometime when you start a program, there's a wizard. You can just have step to step follow. So the app would do the same thing, just in a very user-friendly way to help understand what this project is, what we are proposing, what options we have, what important decisions we make.

And these are scenarios like you are having, if you actually make those decisions. And in the process what's important is our client can have hands on it. Actually. They can manipulate certain beginning conditions. Like what if you actually opt for a different decision at some point of design, what the result is, what the numbers will be.

They can find out that very quickly. So instead of in a very linear way that our architects show them slides and images and visualization, all the presentation, is what I call a script, actually. Basically, it's just a one-way communication. Even if you encourage the client to ask questions during the procedure, they would rather not to interrupt. So the communication is not very two-way or very kind, effective by using this kind of interactive platform. The communication is always mutual. And then we feel that the clients are being actively participating. They feel empowered.

They feel they don't have to speak the language of the professions like architects, but then their values or their opinions are valued. Being part of this decision-making process, they heavily feel that they'd be involved in the process. I can imagine. It's interesting, the last podcast I did, which was with Alexandra Powell, she's the managing director of Powell dc which stands for the Design and Construct.

And they're a smaller architectural practice than Fosters. But also finding the same thing in that if you provide that visualization at the start, it just allows people it to understand more greatly what it is that they are signing up for, whereas for, and an inevitable part of that is the fact that it's not, it doesn't have to be linear.

You can go and explore, which makes it even more engaging.

And I suppose that leads into quite nicely the Watertown experience that you told me about. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that Watertown experience and the amazing things that with it. Yeah, the Watertown story started in 2018. So, I was an architecture teacher at the State

University of South Dakota at that time.

And then, so I led a class of students to Watertown first in an undergraduate class about 1918 students. Secondly, a graduate class about 12 students. So Watertown is a small rural town in South Dakota in the heart of South Dakota. But it has a very decent eight-block historic downtown area that has about six-day buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Buildings. So, and the local people are proud of that a lot. But then, just like many small rural towns in the Midwest, they're experiencing a sort of deterioration of downtown area, because more and more people just drive car around and then.

We see fewer pedestrians using the downtown spaces. And then, so they've been talking for over 20 years. They've been talking about how we can revitalize our historical downtown. It is so beautiful. It has so many nice buildings dating back to 1850s, 1860s. And then there was also.

Some cultural events that would attract tourists to the town. But then, people also found that they would try, I mean, the tourists would. Instead of going toward the nice downtown, they would just find a hostel just following the in outskirts of the city, which is a big kind of, I mean, you don't feel people, a lot of people swam to the town during those events, even though there are actually lots of visitors.

So people don't feel there's a sense of celebration if we don't see large crowds of pedestrians using the downtown area. So that's a kind of their initial drive of downtown revitalization. So they consulted lots of planners, architects, and then as a public school, I think it's a responsibility for the South Dakota State University to engage the community there.

So I propose a multi-year sort of plan of so-called community participatory design and Watertown is a place we picked as a base. So we went there many times we start to engage people there, get connected with both political leaders and community leaders there. And then we actually, the idea I proposed is.

I want to build a game. I want to build an interactive design game that lots of regular people can participate. They can have their opinions expressed through the game. We can see the results and then we can modify the without sort of the form generated in the game immediately outside, instantaneously so we can see the change we're making.

And then that way I think it's the best way to communicate because the problem I detect at the moment. Many part so-called participatory design is there is some sort of difficulty in communicating ideas across the professional lines. Many laypersons if not from the design.

Backgrounds. They struggle to understand drawings, especially plans of facades actually. And then they, even if you show them rendered three-D, render the visualize sort of print out renderings, they'll still be imagining what the data should look like from a different angle.

What does it feel if I stand in front of the building instead just looking at 50 feet away. They have those questions. And also they are quite respectful, they respect the architects a lot because these people bring drawings, models, travel miles to their time and then to the presentation.

And then they're just too respectful and then just feel reluctant to challenge the, I mean, some people would say, I just don't like your design. I think it looks awful, but they cannot articulate their language to explain. How it can be improved or what exactly in their mind that they want the building to be like.

So these are all the challenges we're facing. Okay. We're trying to empower these people. We try to really get them involved. We want to consult them actually about what they really think that the design should be. We value the opinions, but then it's hard to pick their voice. So there's actually, we need a translator interpreting in the middle, and then we think the digital tool will build a digital 3D game can play that role.

So yes, it was really interesting just about that piece is the starting point of this small rural town in South Dakota. I suspect not used to seeing three-D visualization. Certainly not used to interacting with it in a gameplay situation.

That must have been quite a fascinating experience to produce this interactive piece and get it out to them and step back and see what happened. Exactly. I'm going to show you later, I'm going to send you a picture of the front page of the local newspaper, just showing an image of the game and also the whole story.

To set up those kinds of community engagement events is not easy actually. It takes lots of logistic concerns to decide what date and time is appropriate in a year. Not too cold and not too warm, not too busy, as I explained, they have this feather hunting season that lots of people cannot attend and they'll be busy having fun.

So we pick those dates, I think it's in late September, early October, something, the weather just mild. And then, pick sometime a bit after six, so that most people will be off work. But still in our first meeting we see 80% of attendees are seniors. They just, I think the people are just freer and then maybe just have interest in things actually, more participatory in a general sense. Where younger generations may not carry that much, but after we use a game, something just amazing happened. You know, when we return the next time we see lots of a full range of age groups start to attend because the children of those seniors attended the first session and their grandchildren.

All swarmed to the nice city council hall and they just wanna check out the game actually. And then they all had fun actually. So I have 12 students in total. So these students form groups of two. They built six games. I also built a game, so we have seven games in total. So we set up like seven booths, just like in a science fair kind of passion style.

And then people just roam around and try different games because they generate different things actually. They have different kinds of setups actually, and parameters are applied in different ways. But all the games have something in common first. So they can manipulate the many detail, the parameters like building heights, how many floors, how many rooms.

Major materials, window proportions, those kinds of things, to generate a building design or there is some template. You can pick like more modern, more traditional, mixture, freestyle, those kinds of things. And then what are the factors you weigh more? Like, for example, you wanna have more kind of materials similar to the neighboring building, or you wanna have some proportions of the window that are actually compatible with the neighboring buildings, or you want to have more street level kind of activities, and then you can enter those inputs and then press a button and then you generate something.

I need to clarify. There's no AI involving this procedure at all. It's all just using the preset matrix and then just set off. Compile all kinds of parameter input, parameters, general form, this is something students can handle. I trained the graduate students who had no backgrounds in Unreal Engine at all, and just by learning the blueprint system, which is a visual scripting system, and then they start to build those amazing products, although the process was not easy, but then they made it to the end.

Then they did a successful field trip and present an engaged the local residents here. So, what is particularly memorable to me is some students told me that in the past when we design what we design, took a design course in school, we were in the very beginning of the semester, we were handed a sheet of paper telling me these are the.

The spatial program of the project. These are room, you should actually include your final design. And then we got no chance to talk to the actual people that who might be influenced by design. The project. Too hypothetical, even if it's a real-world project, we got to talk to people.

It was not very kind of, I just explained earlier, the communication went not two-way. You really just learn something from them people and then you be guessing what they actually meant. Or when you inform them, these are things we're gonna do, people just nod along and without really paying that much attention.

So this game nights actually we had, with the local people really changed everything. The dynamics really kind of encouraging and then just heartwarming. And then, you can learn that from the newspaper reports actually about those events. The people are saying, okay, it's the first time I feel that my voice being heard, or I know I got a chance to say something that those.

Architecture students, although they're doing this profession that I don't understand very well, but I got a chance to explain, explain my ideas, through the game. So yeah. I was gonna say, and also, I mean, what you're also doing is just if,

if children are getting involved, you're inspiring them to maybe even consider design as a career, whether that's architectural design, whether it's spatial design, which is fascinating.

Absolutely. Yeah. How did you take, so you, did you run a number of these nights? I guess, did you, how did you use the data or the interaction with the games to inform the ultimate design? Yes. Actually, the ultimate product is not a specific design. It is to help the city to enact a design guideline for new downtown developments.

So for all future buildings that will be erected in the downtown area, they should have followed those formal rules. Like for example, the number of wind, opening amount of openings on the ground floor, those kinds things. So, through I think the, the most production night is the final night.

And then when we actually, the games were all sort of finalized. Brought to the site and then people had a happy one and a half hours playing those games. And then we generated over 200 most voted, actually, outcomes. And then we print them up in a matrix style and then just sort it, and then post on the website of city.

And then those people who didn't got chance to attend, they continue to vote on those things. We further narrow down to a few kind of options that are most favored, the most favorite ones, and the least favorite ones, so that give us some direction, give us some important feedback. Okay. These the things that people like more.

"These are things people don't like. And then these all and all results are visual. They're not just verbal text. Because verbal text can sometimes be very confusing. It means very different things to people with different backgrounds, but visually, if you agree with that, this is what you want, this is what you want. There'd be no ambiguity in that. So we actually run this through social media, through the city website. There is, after we left the town, this ongoing kind of digesting process of the materials we actually generated. And all those seven games, actually still cut out, sort of transported to the city. So if in future they want to run it, use it, to some extent they can still use it. We pick one particular site on the city it was. Currently, a furniture store, but it was deteriorated as well. So most of the time, it was not open. And then the owner is considering selling it. So the city wants to find a buyer of the property and then, there may be a developer in the future to bid for the site. And then we'll be proposing, what if we build a hypothetical boutique hotel in this area to attract all the tourists, even if they are seasonal, just for the hunting season, actually. I mean, just invite them to stay in the downtown instead of some Motel six, 30 miles outside of the city, so bring people there, give the city a bit feel of celebration and festivals. So that's, yeah. Sorry, go on. I was going to say, what year was this? Did this activity take part? The game nights happened in 2020. But everything started in 2018. Actually, I spent quite a few years there. So did that. So has that brief, or sort of guidelines that came out from your exercise, has that now been adopted? Is that now in place for Watertown and any development within it? Yeah, I'm sorry. I kind of answered that. I wasn't following up after I moved to the United Kingdom. I occasionally had email exchange with the mayor. She told me that we've been making good use of that. I don't know if it just applied a response or that's a fact, but I cannot check out anymore. So, my career changed. Definitely disrupted this process, procedure. Otherwise I would follow up. But that's another story. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating to see. Because that to me seems like such, was not that simple, but such a beautiful and relatively simple thing to do, to engage communities that wouldn't normally would be so far removed from having an opportunity to share their thoughts. But also in doing it because of the way that you've done it, it's accessible to everyone, and not only accessible to everyone, but it creates desire in people wanting to come down and do it. So you're getting, it's like a force, it's like a feedback multiplier. You just, a simple solution has gained, has gained so much traction and therefore so much feedback that you're getting exceptionally rich data from it. That is, that is incredibly valuable. It's, I mean, it, it's something we've, we've got, we, where I live, in Yorkshire. A place called Shipley. There's a market square, which has been in decline. It's an ancient market square, but it's been redeveloped and over the years and the last sort of 15 years, it's been in real decline. And they've got, you know, they've got propositions and proposals about what they wanna do with it. And it strikes me that this would be, in fact, I'm, once this video comes out, I'm going to tweet it out to the mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Broman and see if we can do this because it strikes me as just the, such an obvious and fantastic thing to do. And it'd be lovely to see if it had been used, if anyone else, any other councils in the States or anyone else has adopted it as a result of this. Yep, absolutely. Yes. So one of the things that I always ask people at the end of the podcast is, you know, what their thoughts are regarding how 3D visualization will be adopted in 2030. And I think you've got, you know, you've got quite a really interesting perspective because on the one side you've got this sort of, you know, the grassroots exploration with, with engaging, you know, like normal pedestrians, let's say stakeholders. And then you've got your work at Fosters, which is a completely different set of stakeholders and, you know, massive development. So you've, you've seen both ends of it. What do you, how do you think 3D visualization or the use of 3D visualization will evolve by 2030? What do you think the key things we'll see are? Well,

I think actually the key things is the users, obviously the visualization, especially the designers, they should have changed their opinion about what that is. In the past, they see that as a post-design sort of procedure. Like what my scheme has been finalized to some extent, which are milestones. Something that I still export my three-D model into some visualization platform and get it rendered with certain materials. What I have been promoting all the time is, either visualization in real time or what I call the in-design visualization, like as your design proposal is being involved, the visual, 3D visualization should be in place. This gives the designers some immediate feedback as well. Give them some incentives. And then, ideally this should not be, I think I when I did the presentation in London's next field kind of conference, I emphasize that point again, human eyes are more sensitive to moving objects rather than to if you actually place a 3D object in the absolutely stable kind of still image, there's no way even for people to judge the distance or if it's, if it's not rotating or moving or something. Because your two eyes are constantly in triangulation to determine depths of, of kind of key information. And if the object is moving, even if you just have one eye, you can still fit. It's 3D actually. But then the people actually are in architecture school because just like a, we have this huge past dependent thing. Originally, renderings were created manually as a still image, manually. I used to teach watercolor when I was in China 'cause we render buildings, doing good renderings, know with brushes. Wow. Literally, yes. Literally. Yeah. So, and later on when we actually moved to the 3D environment, what impressed me first is games, you know, I can't recall some famous games in 1990s. By Carmack, you know, the Quake, you know, Doom, those kind of first shooting game. What I impressed me most is you can roam around in foodie environments and see the design in multiple, in different angles at different speed. You know, so that's actually really gave gimme a better understanding what the space is. Actually, it's much better than the still image. And then I think that's when you observe something or you want to evaluate how the space would have. Some, effect on human behavior as a perception. You have to engage the object in a dynamic, 3D kind of setup. You cannot stay at a fixed sort of distance, to the building and then just take a picture. You gotta move back and forth, rotate and roam around, you know, you have to do those things actually, and better from the eye level, a regular eye level, not from a drone's, kind of your point or something like that. So the, these are the key. Elements in the game I build, actually, when people actually enter the game, they would, they can get the actual immersive view from, ordinary pedestrians walking on the street. They can see how many steps I can take to get close to the building. You know, if I look up what I'm gonna see, if I go to the balcony and look out what I'm gonna see, it's always like you're roaming around in the environment. You're part of the environment. You are completely immersed in the space. That, that's the kind of the elements that we should emphasize more actually. While the current, if you talk about barriers, I think on the technological side, actually our, sort of rendering or visualization programs. Most of them, they're still thinking about. We just do the, still producing the conventional sort of, paradigms of still renderings or imagery. Many of them, I don't want to name names, but many of them students thinking about that. Okay. They're not thinking about, interactive space that people can walk into it and start experience it. It's not, at least not their priority actually. That's, I think that people should change actually from, for those people who actually develop the rendering tools, for the people who use their rendering tools like architects, whatever. They should also change their mindset. They should think, okay, you, you cannot just actually do rendering. When you, after a few weeks into design, you, you got to do it on day one. You've got do it on day one in the front, very primitive, massive stage. You should think about, you create something behind a curtain and it's just a, a large volume, and then just, and then gradually you. Make it, add more details to the volume and then turn to something. So it should be a constant procedure. You should, you are doing visualizing every second of the design. Um, so these are two, small observations I can make right now. Well, I can definitely see that sound tools like three Motion is, is sort of.

Moving to that direction, at least you can immediately get some environment you can roam around actually. And then, it becomes embedded into the modeling program. People can, can do, sort of instantaneous sort of, visualization procedure as well. Um, but I feel that, people are not using them enough actually, or more frequently. They're still, thinking this is actually some step I can take later on after I dropped in my scheme. This is all related, also related. To the education experiences they had, in architecture school. Some professors would've, sort of said, telling students, don't do any renderings until you are confident your form is determined. Or you should do some physical models, and then, decide a form and they feel you like it and then you go to computer to render it. These comments were all based their past experiences. Okay. Um, so these advice might have its values in a. Working environment 20, 30 years ago, but may not be that actually, relevant right now. Because that's exactly, I used to be the co-director of, of the design program at Queen Mary, and that was looking at more sort of product and industrial design. Mm-Hmm. And I would say exactly that. I would always say, look, you've gotta start with sketches. So you know, rubbish sketches and then bigger sketches would more be detail and then basic sketch models, and then higher fidelity sketch models before going to a render. Mm-Hmm. And the reason for that. Was that I wanted people to consider the detailing first, but also when you present, if you present a render, there is an expectation that that is a completed thing. That if you, but, and, and that if there's anything that's on there that shouldn't be on there, you're going to, as a, as say a client, you're gonna be affronted by it. And if there's anything missing, you're gonna be, you're gonna be annoyed. But I think that's really a case now potentially of you just need to contextualize it with the audience first and say, look, this is a working progress window. Look, we, we, we, we haven't included this detail. Um, going back to what you were just saying about, about the future, and I think the, one of the things that Amutri.

One of the reasons that Mutri exists is for the democratization of 3D, to make 3D visualization as accessible as possible because you don't need to know Unity or Twinmotion or any rendering package. You could just drag and drop your CAD and it renders it in photorealistic 3D as a beautiful experience. So I think that's one of the issues generally at the moment because the skill sets required traditionally are maybe not available to an architectural practice, but certainly expensive, that hasn't been necessarily achievable. So until later on in the process where you're confident that there's going to be some value add because you're spending a lot of money on it. So hopefully now with Mutri, we can bring that forward. But the other one that I think is interesting is how in your vision of the future, how VR will play into that.

Because if you've got, it's all well and good looking at something in 2D and you can get 2D that's moved, it's 3D, but it's shown in 2D on a 2D screen, you can get an understanding of some of the space there. An even better understanding is with virtual reality. Do you think it's inevitable that there will be a VR play in by 2030, or do you think that there's still an issue with getting VR into the hands of stakeholders and the people that need to use it? I can see there is an issue with current VR Technologies and VR use right now, which is, it does not promote any social interactions at all.

And then, or maybe not really to an effective way to get more people involved in the same virtual environment. Because we did those kinds of experiments in South Dakota as well. We brought a physical model to the community and we brought VR as well. And then more people gathered around a physical model. They pointed at the model and looking at it and then laughed and chatted and everything while when you put on the VR headset, you are alone and other people just guessing what you're looking at, even if they have a sort of desktop projection of the visual images, it's not the same as you can see the 3D in the VR environment.

So during the game nights actually, we had there, because we just use a computer, people just bring laptops there. So I can see people get around and just looking at one person playing a game. Other people just make comments around, they're all participating in the same process. So I'm actually thinking about other technologies, sometimes thinking maybe 3D TV or 3D monitor technologies or hologram technologies, or if there's any way that we truly can have more people comfortably and conveniently be immersed in one virtual space. Sometimes we saw those kinds of publicity, kind of posters of VR. You see the kind of hologram avatars, and in the same space. But actually, it's not exactly what people experience. Actually what you see is a bunch of people in a conference room putting the plastic thing on their head. And then, I actually tried to kind of sell VR technologies and procedures to some clients when I was in South Dakota.

Some people don't like to put on the VR headset. They feel it looks funny. And also, especially I remember there's one female CEO of a design firm. She just always refused to do that. She just felt it makes her look funny in front of her subordinates actually. So there's also some cultural thing about those things.

If you don't try that out or oppress people you don't get those feedback actually. I feel naturally comfortable to wear a VR headset, but many people don't see it that way. So I'm looking forward to see if there's a VR headset that is lightweight enough, and also can be a little bit stylish, feel comfortable to wear. And also, the cable should be wireless instead of connected to the computer or something. And then, we do have those kinds of standalone VR headset said, but then they're not powerful enough actually to run lots of VR kinds of games.

So we are still bottlenecked by technology in many ways. Because I feel that when technology is successful, it was always in a situation when some social needs are being met by the technology. This is the one way actually just brought laptops and games to South Watertown. We saw it was well welcomed because, you know, it's sufficient at that moment. You don't have to do VR. It's vision already. Well also, because it's such a step change for what they're experiencing anyway that you, that's all that you need. Is just this new ability to engage in a way that you understand, that is fun. And I love the gamification of it as well. Found the value. Well, brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time. It's a really fascinating conversation. My pleasure to be here as well. And I really look forward to seeing, we'll probably have more

conversations, but I really look, I'm gonna see if that Watertown experience has propagated anywhere else. Because it strikes me as being a really good thing to get out there. But anyway, thank you very much. Thank you and thank you guys for watching. As ever, like and subscribe. And if you like to join our mailing list, please do go to Amutri.com and sign up. I've been Adam Sutcliffe, the CPO of Bimutri, and this has been Beyond Dimensions. Thank you very much. Bye-Bye.