The challenge
The City of Wanneroo is Perth’s most rapidly expanding outer metro council. Its population is set to double by 2041, to over 400,000. Improved planning is needed to adequately and sustainably accommodate significant population growth.
The Planning & Transport Research Centre (PATREC) in a joint venture with City of Wannero, analised existing transport hubs in terms of patronage and employment numbers and developed land-use planning models that can inform decision making.
The challenge was to create an interactive tool that would allow Wanneroo’s city planners to make use of these models.
The tool
The Railsmart Planning support system is an interactive planning support tool which analyses the Perth Metropolitan area and predicts future population growth, public transport growth and helps to plan job creation by working out the competitive advantage of Local government areas within the Perth Metropolitan area.
︎︎︎Co-design
︎︎︎User experience design
My role
Building on the first stage of work, where the Metropolitan analysis section of the tool was completed, I worked with a multidisciplinary team of PATREC researchers and Arup software engineers to design the scenario builder.
This section allows a user to test numerous future development options by choosing which existing Perth station they would like a future station to emulate. The required design parameters to achieve this are listed, as well as the future population and patronage numbers. The scenario builder also allows for detailed employment modelling.
In a series of co-creation sessions, we worked through many iterations of potential user flows, moving from low fidelity to high fidelity wireframes.
Impact
The proof of concept tool won the Smart Cities Awards 2019 for Best Integration of an Individual Technology