Community Collaborative Decision-making Tools: Determining the extent of Geographical Dirtiness for Effective Displays. Paper read at International Cartographic Conference, at A Coruna

A research programme is underway to build and test a tool for community collaborative decision-making in an urban planning context. The project provides members of the public with a Web-delivered 3D product that allows users to move through their local area and see their local environment and to better appreciate how things like future development will look once built. To test the effectiveness of the product it is being evaluated in three stages: 1. An initial qualitative evaluation with an expert group of users from the general community; 2. Testing with both the general community and professionals to better understand how the geographical dirtiness of the Virtual Environment changes the perception of a space; and 3. Discovering the wayfinding aids needed in the model to support informed searching & exploration. The paper provides background to the research. Then it gives the results of the evaluations from the first two stages of the projec