Online Cooperative Design for the Proposal of Layouts of Street Furniture in a Street Park

In the last decade of the twenty-first century, the rapid development of Internet and computer technology has enabled conduct cooperative design through the Internet. Al-Douri (2010) argued that conventional urban planning may lack adequate coverage of the essential design aspects of the built environment, which can be corrected by digital models and information technology tools that may help designers to visualize and interact with design alternatives and correct this problem. Following the work of Carmona and Punter (2002), Ai-Douri classified urban design aspects, such as urban form, townscape, public realm, conservation areas, land use, and landscape architecture. Under the multi-user architecture for team environments, the technical conditions for the implementation of cooperative design comprises both a visual representation and a semantic representation, as well as a shared workspace for shared understanding (Saad and Maher 1996). Meanwhile, research on online design tools has recently appeared in literature regarding coordination, collaboration, and communication in cooperative design (Klein 1995; Nurcan 1998; Okukuni et al. 2000; Wang et al. 2009) using virtual reality (VR). It is worthwhile to explore the prospect of online cooperative design as an application and extension of VR technology. In this chapter, we focus on a shared visual representation and computer-mediated communication (Miller and Brunner 2008) between participants for reaching a consensus on the design of a street park.