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Computerized visual simulations usually have better, more true-to-life effects than hand-drawn scenographs and therefore are the choice of most amateur landscape designers. In fact, the computer has indeed been playing quite a positive role in getting the general public involved in environmental design projects. However, professional designers usually turn to computerized visual simulations only at the final stages of the project, namely when they are already working on the presentation part and are just a couple of steps away from completion, which means the public would be offered little choice if they started their participation at this point of time. With this research, the author hopes to establish a more applicable model where more opportunities are offered to allow real dialogs between professional environmental designers and the general public.
To serve the purpose, the author has come up with the idea of modularized computer visual simulation, setting up a number of ready-made modules in advance by using some 3D modeling software and 2D image processing software for the participating general public to choose from. After that, animation-making software and webpage production software can be used to display the ready-made modules on an Internet platform. Finally, the general public can send back their preferences digitally through the Internet, and the raw data can be statistically processed so that the opinions of the general public can be taken into consideration at the earlier stages when the professional environmental designers are to determine the general direction of the whole design.
Due to the fact that few directly related researches and case studies could be found from the literature concerned, the author could only consult the definitions of the key terms and try to develop related criteria by which we could evaluate our working performance.
In the course of this research, the author once had difficulty finding clearly defined principles to follow when translating landscape design elements into visual simulation modules. Fortunately, complete principles were found among the references, and some suitable principles were extracted to evaluate the effectiveness of this research.
Finally, the proposed model was tried out on the design of the alley next to Dali Elementary School (a part of the landscape reform project of Mengjia Avenue, Wanhua District, Taipei City) to see how well it could help integrate both the facility users’ opinions and the landscape designers’ professional points of view. According to the result, the proposed model is quite effective.
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