BUILDSPACE review meeting in beautiful Prague

In contrast to Athens, a year and a half ago, we now arrived in a warm and sunny Prague. The Czech capital hosts the headquarters of EUSPA, the European Union Agency for the Space Program. EUSPA had invited all the BUILDSPACE partners to present their work and progress. So Nazka sent the project manager to reveal all our hard work in the two tasks for which we had major involvement.

The first task we presented was called 'Co-design innovative user-friendly environments'. This task was planned in the early stages of the project and had as a goal to translate all use cases and user requirements into wireframes and designs. As BUILDSPACE contains five separate applications, this was a rather complex enterprise. To end up with a useful result, the first step was to organize a user flow mapping exercise per service. Such a user flow map contains all high-level elements that the application will need. Based on the user flows, common UI elements were defined that could be the focus of the wireframing effort. Furthermore, inputs were gathered during co-creation sessions from both project partners and external stakeholders. All these inputs were processed to get to the final wireframes and rudimentary designs. As an end product, we wrote a comprehensive wireframing guide that explained each UI element. All developing partners could use this guide which resulted in five applications that, although they are distinctive, still share the same look and feel.

The second task is the development of one of the services: Urban flood analysis & resilience, which will be demonstrated in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana. Together with the urban flood experts of our Slovenian partner IMZI, we built a comprehensive and innovative application. The application allows the user to visualize and compare different flood scenarios. For each scenario, a complex cost analysis can be performed on the fly. Based on which land use elements are flooded, a monetary damage value is calculated and attributed. The app allows cost analysis on the building stock of a whole city, as well as on different land use classes. As a source of the land use classification, we use the Copernicus product 'Urban Atlas Cover', which contains detailed land use classes for all urban areas in Europe, allowing this tool to be applicable in the whole continent.

The reviewers of EUSPA were impressed with our progress and developments and were specifically enthusiastic about the continental scalability! By the end of the project, the flood service will be expanded with a decision support tool that will suggest measures to limit flood damages.

Our partner IMZI also had some extra nice words for us that we would like to share:

It's a real pleasure to work with a team like Nazka Mapps! We have found them to be a truly trustworthy and inspiring partner, particularly in their skills in the co-design process, building on the requirements of key stakeholders and making the workflow fluid and intuitive. We can confirm that they are truly masters of mapps that matter!

BTW: In accordance with our mission, we opted to not fly to Prague. With only three high-speed trains and two transfers, we arrived quickly in Prague.