Browsing by Author "Rout, Angela"

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    (Big) data in urban design practice: supporting high-level design tasks using a visualization of human movement data from smartphones
    (2021-02-24) Rout, Angela; Willett, Wesley
    We present the SmartCampus visualization tool, representing spatiotemporal data of over 200 student pathways and restpoints on a university campus. Based on our experiences with SmartCampus, we also propose a task-based framework that de-scribes how practicing urban designers (specifically, architects) can use human movement data visualizations in their work. Although extensive amounts of location data are produced daily by smartphones, existing geospatial tools are not customized to specifically support high-level urban design tasks. To help identify opportunities in urban design for visualizing human movement data from devices such as smartphones, we used our SmartCampus prototype to facilitate a series of 3 participatory design sessions (3 participants), a targeted online survey (14 participants), and semi-structured interviews (6 participants) with architectural experts. Our findings showcase the need for location analysis tools tailored to concrete urban design practices, and also highlight opportunities for Smart City researchers interested in developing domain specific, visualization tools.
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    Design of First Nations sustainable neighbouhood housing
    (2004) Rout, Angela; Lee, Tang Gim; Bopp, Michael
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    Smartphone-GPS Literature Review Complete Database
    (2020-04-14) Rout, Angela
    We conducted a two-stage search process to build a database of papers relevant to smartphone-GPS data and human behaviour studies: a key-term sweep of two academic search engines to identify focal papers, and a review of titles of other studies cited in the focal set to gather a second set of related papers. The first search was intended to represent the breadth of the literature, and the second was to dig deeper into a subset of the results to identify work that was pertinent to the research theme. To identify search terms for the first stage we conducted an iterative search for key words using the Web of ScienceTM (Science Citation Index Expanded) and ScopusTM. We developed a keyword search using relevant terms which we grouped into four categories: 1) terms for mobile phone; 2) terms for sensing and tracking; 3) terms for human behaviour; and, 4) terms to identify studies. Search terms were:"GPS" AND ("cellphone" OR "mobile phone" OR "smartphone" OR "smart phone") AND ("sensing" OR "tracking" OR "recording" OR "participat*") AND ("urban" OR "City" OR "behavior" OR "behaviour" OR "human") AND ("data" OR "study"). Search conducted early 2018
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    Using smartphone data to design urban spaces: visualization, modeling, and public engagement
    (2020-05-21) Rout, Angela; Galpern, Paul; Maurer, Frank; Willett, Wesley J.; Tsenkova, Sasha
    University campuses contain outdoor spaces that, when well-designed, can support student well-being. It may be easier to design campuses that benefit students if designers are aware of student movement and campus use patterns. Until quite recently, precise data about how students move around their campuses has not been widely available. However, the near ubiquity of smartphones, and their capacity to collect location data, presents new opportunities both to understand student movements, and more generally, the movements of people across urban areas. While the data are abundant and seemingly available, much work remains to demonstrate the value of this resource in real-world urban design applications. This thesis presents four stand-alone manuscripts that address different aspects of the urban design process, using a single university campus as a model system. The first provides a review of how location data have been used to understand human behaviour in urban settings. The remaining three draw on a data set of smartphone locations collected from 300 students, tracking their individual movements on a university campus. One study, using these data, considers how best to incorporate location data in public engagement. Another demonstrates a tool for visualizing location data intended for use by design experts. And a final study investigates patterns in the use of design features by modelling the data. These studies demonstrate that location data derived from smartphones (for example, smartphone-GPS data) can be used by non-experts in public engagement scenarios, that it can also help architects to understand flows of human movement, and that it can guide designers towards better-informed decisions about design features. The introduction of the thesis provides the context for this research, and provides an overview of each chapter. The thesis concludes by discussing how all four studies provide insights for future researchers and more specifically, to designers of campus plans.