Author Archives: Ken Snyder

Ken Snyder

Ken is a nationally recognized expert on a broad range of techn­ical and non-technical tools for community design and decision-making. Ken sits on the Board of the National Charrette Institute and is past Chair of the American Planning Association’s Technology Division.

Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Big Data, Collaborative Problem Solving

By Ken Snyder | Published: January 11, 2012

Big Data, Big Business 
Decision support systems that take massive data sets from multiple public and private entities and synthesize the data into valuable cross-discipline information for city and regional decision making is clearly becoming big business. Television, online, and magazine ads are populated with ads from IBM, Cisco, and Siemens, to name a few, [...]

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GeoDesign about process, tools, and interdisciplinary approach

By Ken Snyder | Published: November 9, 2011

Shannon McElvaney at ESRI is working on a book on GeoDesign — a growing movement of academics, community planning and development practitioners, ecosystem managers, and geospatial tool developers interested in the nexus between geography, design, planning, ecosystem management and community decision making. Shannon asked PlaceMatters to contribute to the book, asking us a series of [...]

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Livable streets and driving don’t mix

By Ken Snyder | Published: June 23, 2011

Here is a video from Street Films that was sent to me from colleagues working on the ICLEI STAR Community Index several months back. It revisits some of the pivotal research done by Donald Appleyard starting back in the 60s and leading to his work on Livable Streets. The video uses wonderful animation to illustrate [...]

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Escher demonstrates the importance of perspective

By Ken Snyder | Published: June 13, 2011

Technology

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DIY touchtable using Wii remote

By Ken Snyder | Published: May 5, 2011
3D model of projectors and tripod

This blog entry is a cross-posting of a DIY tool recently added to the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) website. The website is a fabulous resource for activists, educators, technologists, and community organizers interested in new ways to promote action, intervention, and awareness through a participatory research model. PlaceMatters has built and [...]

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Helium Balloon’s Perspective of Life in a Park

By Ken Snyder | Published: April 27, 2011

At the GeoDesign conference in San Diego we heard mention of folks at MIT using helium balloons with cameras attached to take aerial pictures.  Thinking this was a fabulous idea I decided to find out more and see if this was a technique we could easily incorporate into our projects. The MIT connection turned out [...]

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Just One Word: Glass

By Ken Snyder | Published: April 21, 2011

It’s in the top 100 list of repeated lines from movies more than a couple decades old. In The Graduate (1967), Mr. McGuire pulls Dustin Hoffman (as Ben) aside: “I’m going to say one word to you, just one word…Are you listening?… Plastics…There is a great future in plastics.” On the one year anniversary of the [...]

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Rob Matthews on the Seattle “Decision Commons”

By Ken Snyder | Published: April 20, 2011

Here is an interview with Rob Matthews, Project Director of the Decision Commons Initiative in Seattle. The Decision Commons is an initiative put together by the University of Washington, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and the Quality Growth Alliance. The Decision Commons combines high performance metrics with the ability to visualize future land use patterns. 3D [...]

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A new crop of online idea creation tools

By Ken Snyder | Published: April 14, 2011

In Jacob’s April 4th Blog Roundup, he lists the recently published Tools for Online Idea Generation: A Comparison of Technology Platforms for Public Managers by folks at the Collaborative Project. I spent some time looking at the tools to see if any stood out.  Recognizing I only got to test about of a third of [...]

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What to do When Public Participation Goes Terribly Wrong?

By Ken Snyder | Published: March 23, 2011

In 2009 we worked with Ron Thomas, Mary Means, and Goody Clancy to help plan and run a large 500+ person visioning event in the town of Shreveport.  We set up the event the night before with computers at every table for brainstorming and a keypad polling system providing each participant with a handheld device [...]

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