Foster Dialogue

Foster Dialogue

Designing for Dialogue

Using visualisation to compare perspectives.

Cities advance by working through complexity: balancing efficient resource use, social and ecological resilience, technological integration, and competing public priorities. Because urban environments are shaped by integrating multiple views, needs, and inputs, a viable change depends on bringing potential stakeholders into the planning process rather than around it.

Circularity tools are working to align interests through shared metrics.  When designers, procurement teams, manufacturers, waste handlers, regulators, and communities work from the same dashboard, they gain a common reference point.  But while that sounds promising, it’s difficult to make it happen.

Stakeholders bring different responsibilities, timelines, risks, and definitions of value. A designer may prioritise spatial quality while a recycler optimises material purity. A regulator’s timeline is not the same as a manufacturer’s timeline. A community living next to a sorting facility may evaluate the project on health, noise, and access, while the project operator may focus on efficiency, compliance, and circularity performance.  They want different things, and data alone sometimes is not enough to change that.  These differences, however, are not obstacles but a part of the urban decision process.

This is where visualisation becomes useful; it can support this process by turning complexity into a shared space for discussion and serving as a bridge between different perspectives. It can make different priorities explicit, show how choices affect different groups, and create a shared language for discussing trade-offs. A tool does not need to erase disagreement to be effective. Its value lies in helping stakeholders understand where their positions overlap, where they diverge, and what each scenario asks them to prioritise.

“A tool that succeeds when two people looking at it say: I see what you mean, and I still disagree, let’s discuss.“

This is the aim behind the Circularity Optimizer^[1] tool: a digital tool being developed within the URBAN MENUS framework to support decision-making for circular and resilient urban development. The interface between stakeholders is not the place where they come to agree but the place where they can disagree productively. Instead of collapsing conflicting priorities into a single score, the tool treats trade-offs as a navigable decision space. It places stakeholder perspectives side by side, makes weighting choices visible, and keeps them open to continuous dialogue.

In this sense, designing for dialogue means designing tools not only to present information clearly, but also to examine complexity collectively, where disagreement becomes part of the design process rather than a failure of it. The Circularity Optimizer is built on the premise that for circular development, visualisation can be a way to make better conversations possible.

Laura P. Spinadel and Gina Urazan, for URBAN MENUS Decision Intelligence Lab

[1] TECXPORT Bilateral Cooperation Austria-Jiangsu/People’s Republic of China JSTD 2023, co-funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG

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