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PLANNING WITH RESIDENTS: LINKING SIMULATION WITH COMMUNITY NARRATIVES

New York City, NY — People + Technology Lab (Supervisor: Graham Dove)


This project started from a very personal moment. At a community workshop for the Manhattan Detention Complex, I was sitting inside the room listening to officials calmly walk through slide decks full of environmental simulations. Shadow, traffic, and air-quality models were presented as evidence of a careful, data-driven process. When I stepped outside during the break, I ran into local grassroots protestors—many of them long-term Chinatown residents—holding handmade signs and chanting that the government was not listening.

Standing between those two spaces, I realized that the problem was not only political but also cognitive. The simulations themselves were technically sophisticated, yet for older Chinese monolingual residents, high-dimensional indicators and dense dashboards were almost impossible to connect to their embodied experience of home, light, and air. Data fail not because they are inaccurate, but because the form in which they are presented creates a technological and cognitive barrier. That frustration is what pushed me toward human-centered civic technology.

  • Interactive Urban Visualization: I designed a multilingual platform where residents could manipulate shadow, traffic, and air-quality layers and relate them to their own routines. The focus was not technical precision, but enabling people to translate data back into lived experience and test their own hypotheses about neighborhood change.

  • Participatory Deployment & Evaluation: The next step is to move from prototype to participatory evaluation. We are currently preparing a series of co-design workshops with Chinatown residents, planned for February–March next year, to test how the platform and voice agent actually influence civic engagement and sensemaking in practice. I am in the process of securing IRB approval so that we can ethically collect and analyze interaction logs, qualitative feedback, and design suggestions from participants.

What mattered most to me here was not just accessibility, but the reasoning traces that emerged through conversation: how people moved from confusion to partial understanding, where their mental models diverged from official narratives, and which parts of the simulation they instinctively trusted or doubted. These traces have become some of the most valuable data for my research, because they reveal how interface design shapes the stories people build about urban change.
    Official and grassroots materials
    from the same community workshop
    told completely different stories.
    Most of the people who came to this workshop were older Chinatown residents. After the main presentation in the large first-floor hall, they were guided upstairs into a much smaller “Chinese session” room instead of remaining in the central space where discussion continued. The primary language and agenda stayed English downstairs, led by government staff rather than community representatives, quietly limiting how much Chinese-speaking residents could participate in the core conversation.