Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
20.2.3 Preference Intensities
The opinions expressed by the users of Hokkaido University campus have been
collected formally and informally, in various discussions involving 21 persons
(students, researchers, professors and managers, balanced by gender and national
origin), and ultimately been put together in two focus group meetings organized in
two different areas of the campus (North and South), considering their different
characteristics. The focus group meetings on both the North and South Campus
followed a similar format: after a general presentation of the Plans for the Campus,
an explanation of the participatory process and the assessment domains for the
Campus has been provided and complemented with some essential information
about the performance of the Campus and a set of characteristic pictures with
positive and negative aspects. After this visualisation of a value-based metrics
experiment, an open discussion among the participants took place, oriented towards
a SWOT analysis structure. Photographs and visual material formed an important
input for consensus building.
As part of the Living Lab experiment, the participants were asked—on the basis
of various campus pictures—to write their suggestions for the SWOT analysis,
identifying what they considered to be the most relevant Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities and Threats for the development of the campus. As a complement,
they were asked to propose one or two generic strategic ideas for the future of the
campus, considering the possibility to implement them in the short run and their
consequences in the long run. Finally, each participant was asked to choose three
typical pictures representing the most positive aspects of the campus and three
pictures representing the most negative aspects. All the proposals were presented
and justified by the participants.
This approach was inspired by recent applications of visual assessment for the
development of different types of landscapes and territories, as proposed, among
others, by Arriaza et al. (
2004
) in relation to rural landscapes, Smit (
2011
) in regard
to the choice of location by creative entrepreneurs, and Johnson and Castleden
(
2011
) addressing the design of a university campus. Examples of the pictures
distributed among the participants in our case study are shown in Fig.
20.5
.
After each focus group meeting, a document systematizing all the proposals
(SWOT analysis, strategic assessment and visual assessment) was sent to all the
participants. Each of them evaluated (through a scoring 1-5, with five being the
most important) the importance of each element. After this process, all items listed
in the SWOT analysis and the strategic and visual assessment were organized
according to the four different assessment domains of analysis of the campus,
synthetizing the preferences of the users. From this list of items it was possible to
obtain Preference Intensity Vectors to be used in the subsequent Multi-Criteria
Analysis (Stirling
2006
; Giordano and Riedel
2008
; Schetke et al
2012
), for both
the North and South campus.
This methodology is particularly important for the planning of sustainable
development under uncertainty, as it allows for the formulation of flexible and
viable strategies, combining different sustainability and performance elements.
