Rendering of PLANNAR, in Chinatown, Los Angeles

In our fourth and final installment of our 4-part series Designers in Tech, Alessio Grancini, Prototyper Engineer at Magic Leap and ex-Morphosis XR developer, speaks with Jessy Escobedo, Product Designer at Magic Leap.

Jessy is a community-centered product designer and strategist interested in near and far futures. As a developer of PlannAR, her work intersects technology and architecture considering the opinion of the community first. 

PlannAR is an Augmented Reality citizen engagement tool that empowers residents and urban planners to co-create the future of their neighborhoods, ensuring an efficient, transparent, fun and inclusive process.

You have been investigating Augmented Reality through the making of Markerless App name PlannAR. Can you talk about what PlannAR is?

PlannAR is a prototype of an AR application with a simple drag and drop interface designed for a small sample of long-term, immigrant residents in Chinatown, Los Angeles in the spring of 2019. The project was an exploration of the affordances of using this mobile AR approach, rather than in-person workshops and surveys, to understand and empower residents to project their hopes for the neighborhood through a variety of individual and community-led AR scene creation. A web-friendly social platform would accompany this AR feature, with 2D maps, upload features, and geo-fencing to prevent astroturfing. Co-visioning sessions would be led by residents and occasionally by community organizations, and paid by a variety of city agencies.

The AR co-visioning loop begins when a community organization or development organization introduces a new co-visioning session by asking residents to download the app and participate in a week-long co-visioning session. If enabled, residents are notified geospatially if someone has placed an AR object near them. Once they approach the AR object, they can “heart” the idea, or propose their own on another layer. Once on the platform’s cloud, the objects would remain visible to other residents for feedback for the duration of the session. When a session ends, PlannAR would generate reports and spatial maps that aggregate co-visioning activity for all parties.

How do you envision people, space, and applications will coexist together in the future?

I propose that mobile AR, as a technology with embedded platform politics, can be used as a tool to stretch our socio-political imagination about how we might organize and interact with both virtual and physical space in the coming decades. I’m specifically interested in investigating how mobile AR applications can provide a simple interface for a feedback loop in the co-visioning process between residents and the people who design and govern it. I’ve begun this research in PlannAR, an Augmented Reality citizen engagement tool that empowers residents and urban planners to co-create the future of their neighborhoods, ensuring an efficient, transparent, fun, and inclusive process. When it comes to smart city master planning, which uses simulation and modeling, how are we accounting for the qualitative aspects of the urban condition? If data is the means of representation in the back-end of a smart city plan or digital environment, can we consider qualitative data in the form of user-generated geo-located content about our location as equally meaningful? Could this data act as a 3D representation of participation in spatial co-creation and annotation, and maybe an antidote to our solutionistic approach to optimization and top-down master planning? 

How has a background in architecture influenced your journey in becoming a digital product designer?

As a digital product designer with educational foundations in architecture and an interest in social justice, I believe it’s possible to change our approach to designing both built and digital environments with new tools and principles--and that’s what I’ve started to do. An increasing number of urban design and architecture firms are now experimenting with generative design tools that increasingly position algorithmic imagination as the basis for future designs. Now more than ever we should look at how these algorithms are trained, with what data, and authored by whom. This points to developing design tools that help urban designers design with constituents in digital space, as well as use a system that can aggregate and analyze such designs to gather insights to inform top-down design decisions.  

What is the quality of augmented reality you think is key for an architectural conversation?

One of the distinguishing qualities of AR content is that while this prototype experimented mainly with static evocative objects, future versions could include visual effects, animations, annotations, emojis, and other media that connote meaning when overlaid onto physical space. (No need to be so volumetrically literal!) 

Aside from this ongoing visioning process, a community organization can also organize planned events called “Play Walks” where residents can meet in person at a particular location to co-vision around a specific topic (i.e. tree planting) for a specified time. Multimodal alternatives are available for the elderly and disabled, offering remote mapping or audio recording.

The main affordances of PlannAR in the context of the co-visioning process include: the ability to see future renderings from multiple points of view, living with and experiencing persistent virtual objects over time and seeing added developments from the community, cross-cultural communication by adding a story behind an object, and remote participation or aggregated visualizations of a neighborhood profile so all parties can stay informed of the latest activity. Residents are able to add an existing 3D asset onto the platform’s virtual space, or request a new asset be created, detail its specs, and even provide a description for its cultural or personal significance.

PlannAR is a highly purposeful app for urban design. How would you integrate it into an already existing architectural setting?

The main offering of PlannAR is to generate a much more representative and updated crowd-sourced spatial map of resident input and cultural profile. (This is assuming, of course, that there is a large enough population of the neighborhood who is willing and able to participate.) An urban designer or community organization looking through these spatial maps could gain insight into real-time data about aesthetic choices, cultural priorities, functional needs, or emerging needs that were never considered in previous neighborhood plan updates. A People’s Plan, usually a long word document of policy-speak, could now be accompanied by new, sharable visual representations to circulate among city stakeholders or policymakers.

Prototyping future socio-spatial and political scenarios with our current technological capacity, even simple markerless AR, could help us have a conversation about our preferred renderings of the future so we don’t re-create the hierarchies and disregard for other ways of being that have plagued our urban cities in the past. How we design AR platforms, who we give special privileges to, and who’s in control of the narrative are some special considerations we can use as we continue to develop AR tools that shape our digital and physical environments. As future generations interface with more AR applications, and communicating and expressing through AR becomes a more common language around the world, I feel energized about what other kinds of metrics, data points, and anecdotes we’d be able to collect that might inspire new standards design, around how we use physical space, and perhaps what we can bring into virtual way of being. While the metaverse is coming and developing, the same AR technology can elevate our visions of how it’s built along the way.  

Interested in learning more about the future of architecture and the shift to smart technologies across the world?  Make sure to check out Smart Buildings/ Smart Cities: Integrated Equity & Resilience, February 9 & 10 (8:30am - 12:30pm Pacific Standard Time). Innovators and experts from London, Silicon Valley, New Orleans, and more will present new advances along with Alessio who will discuss his work in "Planning the Digital Through Augmented Reality: Empowering designers in the new city : converging professions, approaches, environments."