# The Soundscape Hackathon as a Methodology to Accelerate Co-Creation of the Urban Public Space
## 5 Discussion
### Hackathon Outcomes
This illustrates some of the pitfalls of co-creation: firstly, participants may violate the laws of physics due to a lack of knowledge; secondly, some factors might be neglected, for instance the cost of implementing a new design; thirdly, some indirect effects, e.g., the flow of persons in emergency situations, may not be considered adequately due to lack of expert knowledge in particular fields. The use of technology as an evaluation criterium assesses the way the teams made use of the available tools to present their ideas in a convincing way. As discussed in Section 3.4, the hackathon participants had a wide range of visualization and audio rendering techniques at their disposal for presenting their solutions. The results of the hackathon show that (a combination of) the current technologies allow to audio-visually present the redesign of a space in a limited time frame of two days and with relatively good quality. On the one hand, most interventions revolved around adding sounds, which is reflected in the dominant choice of rather quiet (e.g., Montreal McGill University Campus) or relatively confined spaces (e.g., New York City Hall Park or Hong Kong Signal Hill Garden). Added sounds are sometimes visually accentuated during the presentation, such as in the intervention in New York City Hall Park (Noize Makers), where special legend objects guide attention to selected interventions. For the interventions in Potsdamer Platz (Trio Akustiko) and the McGill University Campus (Immensive), accentuation during presentation is less critical, as the added objects are rendered differently on top of the original visual scene and already focus attention. However, these objects may lose appreciation of their added functionality since they visually dominate the scenery. As a result, having a balance between attracting attention and becoming part of the scenery is an important rendering aspect for creating the VR outcome. On the other hand, two interventions involved suppressing existing sounds: the added hills at the Potsdamer Platz (Trio Akustiko), and the dome at the Boston greenway (URCHI). With most audio rendering software or VR engines, new sounds can be added relatively easily to an existing soundscape. Suppressing existing sounds originating from a particular direction poses a greater technical challenge. Given the limited time available, both teams provided a first impression of the effect of their intervention by reducing and spectrally shaping the ambient soundscape as a whole, approximating the physics of sound propagation involved. Nevertheless, in order to allow participants to investigate the full potential of suppressing existing sounds, future soundscape hackathons should consider providing easy-to-use software tools for sound propagation, such that participants can focus on the creative aspect rather than on physics. Another common aspect in all interventions, particularly made possible through the use of VR technology, is the interaction between the user and its environment. Interaction, where the user of a space can to some extent take control of its soundscape, creates a larger sense of presence and immersion, and therefore may make the presentation more convincing. Basic forms of interaction with which the user can shape its soundscape were included in several interventions, such as the sound of footsteps when walking in the Boston greenway (URCHI) or the sound of the gym tools (e.g., the moving water of the rowing machine) at the McGill University Campus (Immensive). In more advanced forms of interaction, users are able to manipulate objects inside the VR environment in order to create sound or alter the soundscape. This requires haptic feedback devices, which were not available in this hackathon. Future soundscape hackathons would therefore benefit from havingsuch tools at the disposal, allowing participants to design sound environments with a higher level of interactivity.