Traits: Revolutionary Ideation Tool for Designing Spaces

Challenge

The need for placemaking is rooted in the requirement to ensure public spaces serve the citizens who inhabit them. When people are excluded from the design process, environments often fail to foster the health, happiness, and social connection they were intended to provide. Effectively, a public space must be designed by the public to be sustainable; high-quality community input ensures a site is better used and looked after, preventing the resource waste of future redesigns.

However, the fundamental problem in implementing this practice is the ‘blank canvas’ effect. For a non-professional, visualising a future park or square from a two-dimensional map is a daunting task. During community input sessions, we observed that the lack of a shared, easily understandable spatial context leads to fragmented discussions. Furthermore, the visual quality of an idea often dictates its reception; a poorly drawn sketch might be dismissed, even if the underlying concept is brilliant. There was a clear need for a tool that combined the democratic nature of sketching with a well-defined, realistic context — all while remaining affordable and easy to deploy for local councils with limited budgets.

Process

Our journey began with a two-month period of deep community engagement in Finsbury Park, London. Working alongside partners Golant Innovation and Furtherfield, we explored how residents interact with the concept of ‘change’ in their local environment.

We quickly discovered that the success of any ideation session hinges on how context is delivered. Traditional tools, like top-down maps, often create accidental barriers; they are not intuitive for everyone, leading to a fragmented understanding of the site. We realised that for a session to be truly inclusive, spatial context must be immediately legible, ensuring all participants work from the same foundation.

Our research also highlighted a significant tension between 2D and 3D mediums. While 3D models are visually striking, they are often inaccessible and ‘over-determined’. Architects confirmed that high-fidelity renders can force rigid decisions too early, leading stakeholders to critique trivial details, like the exact size of a tree, rather than the overarching vision. Conversely, while 2D sketching is the gold standard for quick input, many people feel ‘blocked’ by a lack of drawing confidence.

From these insights, we established three core pillars for our solution: Contextual Clarity, Visual Quality, and Space for Ambiguity. Our breakthrough came by combining the immersive quality of drone footage, an underutilised asset already common on building sites, with digital doodling.

After refining this experience with over 40 participants, we achieved a ‘zero-minute induction’. This allows any citizen to pick up a tablet and immediately contribute context-aware ideas, successfully balancing technical urban design with the lived, emotional experience of the community.

Traits

Traits is an interactive application that merges the power of real-time 3D rendering with the techniques of a traditional movie compositing pipeline. From the user’s perspective, the interface is as familiar as a standard video player. The innovation lies in our ‘creative compositing’ technology: as a user sketches or writes on a paused frame or a playing video, the application treats the input as if it were an object in a 3D environment.

When the video resumes, the sketch tracks perfectly with the drone’s movement, maintaining perspective and proportions intuitively. This allows a novice to ‘draw’ a new playground or a seating area into a park and see it immediately integrated into the real-world site. By merging the creation and rendering phases into a single, playful experience, Traits removes the technical skill requirement usually associated with spatial design.

Impact

Traits has demonstrated a profound ability to level the playing field for participants in the design process. This contribution was recognised with an iF Design Gold Award 2021 — the highest distinction of the iF award — which is only granted to a select few projects for exceptional design excellence. During the Finsbury Park redesign trials, 77% of users rated the tool highly for ease of use, and 70% found it to be a compelling way to discover the ideas of others. The qualitative impact was perhaps best summed up by world-leading artist Jonathan Yeo, who noted that the tool avoids the over-complication typical of ‘art tech’, allowing for immediate, sophisticated expression.

Beyond the trial, the value of Traits lies in its sustainability and efficiency. By capturing high-quality community input before formal design begins, projects are more likely to result in spaces that are well-used and cared for, reducing the need for expensive, resource-heavy redesigns in the future. As a tool for remote collaboration, Traits ensures that community voices can be heard from anywhere, turning a video of a site into an eternal canvas for collective imagination.