Given the scale of the climate change challenges that our cities face, it’s vital that everyone is democratically involved in design and decision-making as we attempt to shift into a more sustainable future. A key part of this public engagement challenge is how to visualise and explain what’s possible and desirable – and new technology has a valuable role to play here.

Arup has developed YARD, an augmented reality public co-creation research tool to help clients and communities expand their thinking about the problem area and understand a solution’s benefits and interdependencies through co-design. 

YARD offers a visually engaging and interactive experience, creating virtual models of possible scenarios of a project long before anything physical has begun. The tool’s goal is to prompt deeper and wider level conversations about the latent challenges that communities are facing, and to bring people into the design briefing process. It’s visualisation that powers co-curation. 

YARD has iterated and matured since its initial development in 2019 and we have tested its effectiveness in a wide range of project contexts. These include improvements to public spaces for vulnerable urban communities, and more recently, co-designing nature-positive solutions that increase climate resilience, restore biodiversity, and enable healthy relationships between people and nature. Recent examples include:

An iteration of YARD created in 2022 aimed to embed sustainable drainage solutions  (SuDS) in our cityscapes including local communities from the start. SuDS are nature-based solutions that make urban environments more porous to reduce flooding risks, improve water quality management and increase biodiversity. These solutions alter the places where people work, live and play, and they need the community’s involvement to maintain them after implementation. YARD co-creation sessions foster stewardship through making water technology more accessible to citizens, empowering them to actively shape the place experience while addressing flooding issues, and prompting conversations on current real concerns to bring wider benefits into the projects. 

We designed the digital assets using different visual styles, ranging from hyper realistic to cartoonlike versions, the goal being to ensure that the tool was fun and interesting for all age groups to use and consider.

The digital assets we developed included snappable garden modules and other urban furniture like benches, an animated representation of the water cycle in heavy rain conditions and visualisation of the increased biodiversity that urban gardens attract. YARD gave ordinary people a chance to understand for the first time what goes into effective urban drainage and how high quality place experiences can bring benefits for all.

 The ReWild version of YARD was adapted to allow children and other users to co-develop and visualise solutions for rewilding their neighbourhood. The project brought together Arup’s expertise in child-friendly design, community engagement, digital tools and biodiversity, with The LEGO Group Sustainability Team’s expertise in learning through play and children participation. 

This new iteration of YARD aims to build knowledge and awareness about links between human and natural wellbeing, and about climate change and biodiversity in cities, and seeks to enable a co-design process that brings nature back into our built environments. 

Key new additions include a storytelling feature that teaches about the principles underpinning rewilding, through the use of different key natural and urban elements that can be used to rewild the urban environment, including bat and bird boxes, insect hotels, nature-based play games, and green and water landscape elements. 

Through iterating YARD in different project contexts, we have tested how augmented reality can allow for more effective communication and active participation, easing potential challenges such as language barriers, lack of confidence, creativity blockers and opinionated voices in the room; opening up a more inclusive space for dialogue, co-creation and innovation. We found that the conversations sparked can be just as valuable as the visual output, helping designers to prompt questions to better understand the intent of the design vision and helping citizens to provide more informed ideas. YARD proves that meaningful engagement is more effective when implemented from early stages and has to be done in an accessible and inclusive way. Future adaptations of YARD could be looking into gamifying interactions and enhancing positive storytelling features to invite more people to imagine their own climate futures and inspire quick action.