Structured Public Involvement (SPI)
I am interested in how social theory helps to understand the properties of advanced geovisual and geospatial technologies. This research overlaps geography, planning, decision science and geoinformatics. Structured Public Involvement, or SPI, seeks to improve public satisfaction with planning and design of transportation related infrastructure by fitting appropriate technologies to the social context.This research has been funded by the National Academies and a range of state and local agencies.
Within the SPI framework I have developed and implemented a range of geospatial and geovisual methodologies such as the Analytic Minimum Impedance Surface (AMIS) and Casewise Visual Evaluation (CAVE). Using a modified Analytic Hierarchy Process, AMIS permits evaluation of non-commensurable physical, environmental and social factors and allows these to be integrated into a GIS-based decision landscape for comparison of corridors or line routings across a specific area. AMIS has been applied to highway location problems in the southeastern U.S. and is now being tested for improving stakeholder involvement in electric transmission line placement.
Casewise Visual Evaluation (CAVE) uses a fuzzy logic-based inference engine to decompose visual preferences for complete designs into preferences for individual elements. CAVE helps designers, planners and architects narrow what can be a vast range of public preferences for design options down to specfic sets of elemental combinations that are likely to be preferred. This methodology has been applied to highway design in a rural area in Kentucky's Bluegrass region and to a block-scale transit-oriented development in Louisville, KY. It is now being tested with multidimensional audio and visual preference data for highway noise wall designs.
The SPI agenda seeks to mobilize theory to improve the performance of the geospatial and geovisual methods in real situations. Therefore implementing SPI requires close collaboration with public- and private-sector professionals including State and Federal transportation and land-management officials, judicial representatives, transit agencies, public interest groups including residents and community associations. Also see the recent TRIF/Prop.301 IS/IT Symposium information.