Continuing to live on this planet as a species will mean concentrating into ever-denser cities. Urban planners are already designing the sustainable megacities of the future, with all the features we need to thrive except one: nature interaction.

 

 No matter how technological we become, we'll always have within us an innate need for meaningful time in nature.

 

 But urban designers don't even know how to evaluate authentic nature interaction - forget about designing for it.

 

 Along with the HINTS Lab at the University of Washington, I:
 <ul>
 <li>developed a framework for evaluating urban nature design (greenspaces, parks, riversides, etc.)</li>
 <li>collected hundreds of images of urban nature designs from Google Street View</li>
 <li>labeled images with a qualitative score</li>
 <li>and used them to fine-tune a pre-trained computer vision model that quantitatively evaluates urban nature design</li>
 </ul>

 With this tool in hand, urban designers don't need to be experts in nature interaction themselves to design rich nature experiences. They can use AI trained by experts to generate insights for them.

 

 AI is an inflection point. It'll either lead to innovation, or amplification of the status quo. We need to push for intentional AI applications that create better versions of ourselves, our cities, and the world around us.

How can we use AI to evaluate urban nature designs, ultimately leading to designs that increase meaningful forms of interacting with nature?