HyperSpace: Communicating ideas about the quality of urban spaces

Environmental designers must be spatially literate: They must be proficient in reading and interpreting spaces and articulating ideas about the quality of the experience of spaces. To promote spatial literacy among environmental designers, we need an effective medium for describing the experience of real-world spaces and for communicating ideas about such spatial experiences. HyperSpace, a computer-based tool, could function as such a medium. In this article, I first discuss the difficulties of communicating ideas about spaces and specify characteristics of an effective medium for communicating spatial ideas. Then, I describe HyperSpace: how it is used and how a simulation is created. After describing and evaluating its use in the classroom, I conclude with a discussion of other uses of HyperSpace in design and planning education and how it cannot be a completely effective medium for describing spaces.