Although land use regulations are in a continual state of change, the medium used to communicate them has remained unchanged since they were first adopted – paper documents. As the amount and complexity of legal, technical, spatial and visual information has increased, paper codes ease of use and clarity has decreased. In 1994/95 the Penn State Department of Landscape Architecture conducted a year long research project to address this problem.

 

The research team, led by project manager Kelleann Foster, included professionals with expertise in landscape architecture, planning, public relations, land use law, database management, and interactive multimedia. This team developed a conceptual framework for Kelleann's initial vision of an interactive code that would allow municipal authorities and citizens to use multimedia technology to explore, visualize, and understand their community's land use regulations. Once this framework was established, Tim Johnson and Matt Graham developed several working prototypes that were reviewed by the project team and an advisory committee. This feedback was used to develop the first Visual Interactive Code For Findlay Township, PA as a real-world test for the concept. The initial Visual Interactive Code included features such as full text search, keyword indexing, bookmarks, pop-up definitions, and illustrated commentary, which was either a series of still images or a video clip along with a text explanation.

 

This prototype of the Visual Interactive Code was presented at numerous conferences and well publicized. In all venues it was extremely well received and generated much interest from both municipal officials and planning professionals. However it was soon realized that the process used to develop the initial prototype was difficult to duplicate and not ready for commercial use.

 

The VIC Group Partnership was formed to develop a commercially viable process that would allow for more participation by municipal officials, staff, and consultants. The result is a process that uses commercially available software to streamline both the production and revision processes, and allows for distribution via either CD-ROM or a web server.