Rather than a fancy, technical product delivered at clients, our platform is like a real-world game engine, empowering people to explore, experiment, and innovate within their local environments while connected to a global community, fostering a culture of playful action and collective problem-solving.
Academically speaking …
While the concept of virtual worlds and digital twins are easily conflated with the concept of the Metaverse, the idea of the Metaverse by contrast is fundamentally a social notion concerned with the interconnection of many different disparate instances, for example the bridging of digital twins, simulations and game worlds (Yang et al., 2024) that aims to extend social interaction into visual representations. Therefore it is problematic that current digital twins of cities seem to almost exclusively focus on physical assets and physics simulations (Naderi & Shojaei, 2023) in isolated“walled garden” contexts. Walled gardens in this context mean a closed set of information services provided to members only. While they may be information-dense, richly interlinked and share a common focus, they have little or no linkage to or from the larger network of actors or other infrastructure services.
This gives the already mentioned challenge of limited integration of data, but it also limits the digital twins to the visualisations made available by the provider. If people wish to incorporate other forms of knowledge, or use the visualisations in different ways, through for example a visual canvas, this is hard or not possible.
In this project we provide a different approach, allowing exploration through and by visualisations through the use of the tool as a boundary object, to create a visual canvas of actor landscapes, to facilitate empowerment and agency, allow experimentation and future thinking leading to actions and collaboration. In this way the tool extends agency to collaborate – actors between sectors and with local actors to enhance sustainable water futures.
The canvas enables relational and power analysis, drawing on Bourdieu’s framework to reveal how different forms of capital—economic, cultural, and social—shape stakeholder influence. For instance, it will illustrate how institutional actors use financial capital to shape policy, while grassroots groups rely on symbolic capital like public support. Emotional dynamics will also be mapped to enrich understanding of stakeholder positions. Further, Based on Ferguson (2016) and Czarniawska (2007), shadowing offers deep, ethnographic insight into water governance by capturing tacit knowledge, routines, and emotions which can then be mapped onto the tool, representing non-technical knowledge.
In this project the scenario planning approaches will operationalise transformative change in urban and regional water governance through a foresight-driven, data-informed, and stakeholder-embedded process. The AquaSavvy project enhances and implements the Intuitive Logics approach to scenario planning (Van der Heijden, 2005) by integrating advanced cognitive and socio-emotional methodologies tailored to wicked problems in water systems. It blends self-distancing techniques (Kross et al., 2014) in the scenario development workshops to foster emotion regulation, perspective-taking, and deep reflection.The workshops further incorporate targeted cognitive interventions through analogical reasoning, conceptual combination and dialogue mapping (Conklin, 2005) to visually surface arguments, assumptions, and values without forcing consensus. Theoretical and epistemological lenses such as Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital (1984) and critical pragmatism (Forester, 2012) will ensure this task will reveal how social power and professional hierarchies influence participation and framing, in a reflexive, inclusive, and geared toward practical transformation setting. A visioning step through backcasting will finalise the task, allowing the stakeholders to focus on a future that they deem the most appropriate for their region.