00:01Well thanks. It's a great pleasure to be here.

00:02My name is Robert Matthews, and I'm the project director for the Decision Commons Initiative…

00:06…at the University of Washington and the Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies…

00:10…and I'm joined here also with my colleague Critter Thompson who's in the audience.

00:15So here's just a quick look at a number of the people who have been great supporters of ours over the last year and a half.

00:22We're currently working under a federal Housing and Urban Development Sustainable Communities Grant…

00:28…and that has really enabled a lot of this work to happen.

00:32So what we're doing is looking backwards at a planning process that took approximately five years to add…

00:40…and plan for the expansion of our light rail system in the Puget Sound area.

00:45And what we're doing is thinking backward at this process and saying, what would it have looked like…

00:51…if we were using geodesign instead of using our traditional planning methods.

00:55So it all started back in 2008 with this reality check exercise where hundreds of executive-level stakeholders got together…

01:03…to play this land and growth allocation game using Legos and, you know, of course this is geodesign in a sense…

01:12…just low tech, and it's very tactile, and the aha moment of course is that we have a lot of growth coming to our region…

01:19…and we take a lot of pride in the beauty and natural aspects of our region and we don't want to lose that.

01:25So how do we reconcile those two things together?

01:28And furthermore, if we look at the study area that we're going to be looking at for this light rail…

01:33…which is where those Legos are all stacked up, the main question was, what would that actually look like in implementation?

01:39What does that look like on the ground?

01:41And how can geodesign help bridge the gap between regional scale planning and implementation where the rubber meets the road?

01:49So here's another look at that study area in purple.

01:52It will expand light rail access from downtown Bellevue to the Microsoft campus in Redmond…

01:59…and this is part of an $18 billion expansion, so a lot's at stake here.

02:05So one of the things we needed to do was think about how we properly objectify all of the things…

02:11…in the built environment and create a data schema that supports that, and we need to be very realistic about market constraints…

02:18…construction constraints, finance, zoning, all of those things, livability, sense of place.

02:25And so that gets to the question of, what is decision commons?

02:28Well it's a facilitation environment that provides really good information for people to learn more and make good decisions.

02:34And it combines smart 3D geodatabase information with a geospatial engine…

02:40…and all of that's packaged up using game engine technology as the runtime visualization environment.

02:46But I'm not going to focus in this presentation much on the methods or the analysis itself…

02:52…but rather on the user experience and what it means to articulate our vision…

02:56…for a real-time geodesign environment that's always 3D all the time.

03:03Okay, so I'm just to play a very quick video that collapses five years of planning into five minutes.

03:08And so one graphic caveat up front, this has been downsampled three times to get it into this video resolution…

03:15…so the graphic quality's a lot better than this. We normally show it at high definition, like home theater projection.

03:21It's really quite stunning when it works.

03:23So you can see our menu system roughly follows the Steinitz framework, explore, create, analyze, and evaluate.

03:31And here again is a look at the Bel-Red Corridor.

03:34There's downtown Bellevue off to the left, and we'll…one aspect of this is that you can explore real-world places using a fluid 3D animation.

03:44It's not an animation, just navigation, so you can be down here at the ground level and see that this, you know…

03:50…area is currently a very industrial character and whatnot, has a lot of development and redevelopment potential.

03:56We can also zoom back out to the corridor and understand the functional adjacencies to the neighborhoods and so forth...

04:02…and continue to zoom out to the regions so we understand the relationships to employment centers, transportation networks…

04:09…and so forth.

04:10Okay, so jump forward a little bit to some early studies and concepts.

04:14The first thing I'll do is talk about exploring existing conditions using just basic standard geospatial information.

04:22So in this example, it's population density, distribution.

04:25You can see that there's a big hole in the doughnut there.

04:27So there's a lot of opportunity for new housing right next to downtown Bellevue.

04:32And next we'll create a simple light rail alignment using simple gestures.

04:36So I'm using a development potential underlay as my base, then I'll just draw a quick alignment using a finger gesture…

04:43…or a few clicks of the mouse, and then next we'll add some light rail stations.

04:49So again I'm just visually optimizing for the amount of land in yellow, which is the most developable.

04:54But of course this is always tied to the underlying geospatial database so it provides all of the normal…

04:59…kind of query power that you'd have through that.

05:02You can view it in 2D or 3D and switch back and forth at will that gives you always the best perspective on the work that you're doing.

05:09We can query that for example to find out how much developable land there is, 53 acres, 95 acres for those two stations.

05:17Okay. Then we can save that and compare it to the other options we've been working on.

05:21So it provides tools for comparison and so forth.

05:23In this case, you can see that option B, which ultimately was the one that was adopted, was the best.

05:30So now we'll zoom forward into scenario development and create some land-use patterns with some simple painting tools…

05:36…very similar to a lot of work that other people are doing.

05:39So I start with a base. I've got a couple of stations, and I'll start painting land uses, just kind of blobs on the screen…

05:46…again using simple finger gestures on a multitouch surface, and these all have a lot of attributes underneath it…

05:53…so we can use that to count up and aggregate up at different scales.

05:58And this is helpful as we move into the official regulatory review process and environmental impact statements.

06:03We can look at the alternatives that we've generated.

06:05And these are all real alternatives. This is all real information, but looking backward.

06:10Then we can compare these metrics and move fluidly between information and design.

06:15So we've got our no-action alternative and our other three alternatives…

06:18…giving some rough order of magnitude information on development potential that's market based.

06:23We can drill down and see some of the details, see the maps.

06:26We could always zoom into the map itself.

06:28We could make edits to the map and the design work and come back and see what the changes were to the numbers.

06:33And of course we can always just support traditional data views to see side-by-side comparisons that way as well.

06:40And we can aggregate a lot of this information up at the dashboard level…

06:44…to connect values of the planning process to metrics and indicators.

06:48But not everything lends itself to that, but a lot of it does.

06:51So we can go in, do some more design work, work with our stakeholders, learn from the community…

06:56…and see how our designs change and move the needle over time, so it's part of the design process.

07:03We can drill down at any time into the underlying methods or the details.

07:06So here's walkability details, here's amount of open space for example, so we can, you know…

07:11…look at the appropriate amount of information for the question at hand.

07:15Okay. Now I'll zoom forward another year into plan implementation.

07:19So this is ultimately what happened with the preferred alternative, but now we need to start getting more specific in terms of zoning.

07:25So I'll turn off the conceptual land use, and we'll start designing and testing some assumptions of zoning.

07:30I've added some streets in there to create a grid network and start painting zoning.

07:36Again, the attributes for the system are in there, and that ultimately forms the basis for the procedural content generation…

07:43…that you'll see in just a second.

07:44So it's obviously an emerging field and very powerful.

07:48So there's my zoning plan for one station.

07:51Now we can connect that to a sense of place by taking it into our existing built environment…

07:56…and then we can see what that might look like if the plan was built out in 2030.

08:00So not a prediction. This is just plausible based on the zoning constraints.

08:04You can zoom down to street level at any time, navigate around to get a sense of how the streets are laid out…

08:10…swap out rights-of-way to see how different profiles look and so forth.

08:15And all this is just live.

08:17So if you're at a meeting and somebody asks a question, instead of not having your presentation panel at hand…

08:22…you can just zoom in to see what you want.

08:25So now we can see how this is powered.

08:27Underneath the hood is a smart geospatial database that lets us work with zoning.

08:32So here we can see simple mapping for 65, 125, or 240 feet.

08:37We can see the architectural expression of those facades as they change through the height changes.

08:44The use also changes the architectural facades, so here's an all office building, here's a mixed residential office building…

08:51…and all residential.

08:53And the rate that that works is underneath that are all of the information that we need from space use.

08:59So that's my all residential building, the mixed building, and the commercial building.

09:04And we can do other things like test developer proposals.

09:06So this developer would come in and say, I want to build this building…

09:10…and we want to understand what the floor area ratio incentive program means in terms of public benefits and so forth.

09:20So that's just a very quick overview of, you know, just a small percentage of the information that we've built into our system.

09:29So I just want to thank you very much for your time, and if you have an interest in talking more, we'd love to chat with you.