Designing User Experience (UX) to Support Public Participation in Spatial Planning: Case study: Indonesia

In modern-day spatial planning, the implementation of public participation has increased to find a balance between two major actors: the government as the powerholder and citizens as the individual affected by planning decisions. Cities are required to redefine their public participation strategies by adopting modern tools to increase their citizen’s satisfaction regarding the spatial planning process. This challenge has made geographic information system (GIS) technologies invaluable to enhance the place-making process by allowing citizens to express their needs and preferences. On the other hand, developing GIS technology with design or hierarchy left unchecked, could cause usability problem to the user. GIS technology would end up running into an unnavigable ocean of buttons and maps, resulting in users can easily get lost and become frustrated. Therefore, User Experience (UX) can become integral for engaging users with spatial planning products and effectively meeting their aspirations. This thesis aims to develop a User Experience (UX) design guideline together with a mockup design and apply it as a web-based GIS prototype. The focus of the study will be on spatial planning practice in Indonesia. The User Experience (UX) design guideline named ’4PHASE toolkit’ was made with several design phases: Phase 1: Define, Phase 2: Design, Phase 3: Build, Phase 4: Test. The first phase is related to top-down studies about participation in spatial planning process both in general and case study, resulting with the Actor-Network (ANT) diagram for conceptualizing user roles, participation tasks, and space-time setting during the participation. The second phase is related to the design process of the UX starting from building persona, creating user flow, sketching wireframes, and designing interfaces - resulting with the proposed mockup of 4D Musrenbang. The third phase is the development of the prototype based on the mockup design using HTML, CSS, and Javascript to add functionalities to the web. At last, Phase 4 is testing the prototype with real actors who share similar traits with the Persona. Based on the user tests, the prototype itself is considered as good, with usability score of 71%. Overall, this thesis project has successfully created three main products: The 4PHASE toolkit, a mockup, and a geo-web prototype.Geomatic

4D Musrenbang: Designing User Experience (UX) to Support Public Participation in Spatial Planning for Indonesia

Public participation is an important prerequisite for the success of spatial planning. Technology can help improve the quality and amount of public participation in spatial planning. This paper describes the development of the User Experience (UX) design guideline named ‘4PHASE toolkit’. The toolkit was used to create a web-based GIS prototype, applied on the spatial planning practice in Indonesia. In Indonesia the spirit of community involvement is incorporated into the spatial planning process using a bottom-up approach. The so-called Musyawarah perencanaan pembangunan (Musrenbang) is the traditional tool in participatory planning during the plan-making process. Meanwhile, as technology development is used as communication strategy for the government, 4D Open Spatial Information Infrastructure (4D PUPM) has emerged as a modern tool to monitor the implementation of land use plans. The exploration of both traditional and modern tools is done to get valuable information about what needs to be added for building the prototype. Our research resulted in a 4D web-based GIS prototype named 4D Musrenbang, while building on 4D PUPM to facilitate citizens participating in the spatial planning process in Indonesia

A strategic approach for site selection of waste facilities in Mexico: Synthesis project 2020

Open dumping, open burning and burying of municipal solid waste (MSW) can be the cause environmental and public health issues. These practices are more prevalent in developing countries such as Mexico,where proper waste management systems are not present. Considering the environmental and health issues, it is therefore important to minimise the number of open dumps in Mexico. The construction ofsanitary landfills is regarded as the best alternative to open dumping since it is the a cost-effective and environmentally friendly solution.An important part of constructing sanitary landfills is the selection of potential locations for these wastefacilities where investment will be made to build them. In order to select these locations first the weakspots need to be located. Weak spots are areas that do not have enough (proper) waste managementservices. Since Mexico does not have a national solid waste information system, a method to locate theseweak spots needs to be developed. With the use of the weak spots a method can be developed to select the potential locations for sanitary landfills that also takes the social, economical and legal constraintsinto account. The following research question is formulated: What are the weak spots in the current waste infrastructure network in Mexico and, based on this, where should strategic investment be madeto improve waste disposal? By answering this question, information will be provided on the issues withthe management of waste in Mexico with a focus on the areas of the weak spots and the locations where investment can be made to develop new sanitary landfills.To detect the weak spots, a set of factors of different scenarios were developed, scored, overlaid, and visualised in maps. Regions that have the lowest score were detected as weak spots. To select the potential locations for investment in new sanitary landfills a spatial decision support system (SDSS) was developed and implemented as a QGIS plugin. The weak spots that corresponded to urban areas were used for analysis in the SDSS. This is due to the fact that it is more economically beneficial to construct sanitary landfills in urban areas.The weak spot analysis showed that the southern region of Mexico, especially the state of Oaxaca, hadthe highest deficiencies in waste infrastructure. With the output from the QGIS SDSS plugin we are able to determine potential areas for new sanitary landfills in an automated manner.This research has resulted in the visualisation of the weak spots in the Mexican waste infrastructure and the selection of potential locations where investment can be made for the construction of new sanitary landfills. The approach for locating the weak spots of the waste infrastructure can be used to find the weak spots in other types of infrastructure on a state and country scale in Mexico. The QGIS SDSS plugin could also be used to locate sanitary landfills in Mexico that violate the standards and regulations. The approach used to develop methods to detect the weak spots in the waste infrastructure and select potential locations for investment into new sanitary landfills could be used as a model for other countries to develop their specific approaches.Synthesis Project 2020Geomatic