Neighbourhood Wizard

How often do we think about the consequences of making changes in our neighborhoods? Using a website called The Neighbourhood Wizard, Jos van Leeuwen aims to get citizens thinking about the viewpoints and needs of all members of society and to help citizens express their needs in terms of solutions. Though the website is in Dutch, I summoned my high school German skills and played around a bit. The website has social and physical tradeoffs built into the equations, and when a user chooses one livability option over another, graphs are dynamically constructed allowing the user to compare her choice to the choices of others. After a few minutes on the site, I started feeling like I was taking an interactive test, and I lost interest (my insufficient Dutch skills may also have been a contributing factor). The test taking feeling might have been averted with a bit of narrative interaction (i.e. a blog for sharing ideas instead of ideas conveyed via bar graphs).

In his paper, he argues that people using The Neighbourhood Wizard began to understand that certain physical changes had variable impacts on different sections of the population. In short, users began to understand the complexity of the urban system.

In Urban Science, we have found similar results through using graphs to represent the indicator values corresponding to a player’s proposed plan. What these comparable results suggest is that interacting with a dynamic model is powerful, even if all you are doing is taking what feels like an interactive test. When you reflect on your interactions, you realize that you understand something about the entire system, not just the parts. What the results from Urban Science suggest is that when these dynamic interactions are tied to the skills, knowledge and values of the planning profession, the end results become part of a way of thinking that players can use to understand problems, issues, and situations in their lives outside the game as well.