Crystal Wilson helps designers of the built environment make visible what is otherwise misunderstood, unseen, or only imagined.
Crystal Wilson founded PlaceVision in 2001 to help urban planners and architects communicate effectively online with stakeholders and communities. She helps clients make visible what is otherwise misunderstood, unseen, or only imagined. She has recently been appointed to co-chair of the Communications Committee for AIA TAP where she helps to maintain the TAP Knowledge Community site and content.
By the age of 12, she already learned how to write programs and use graphic software to create art, announcements, banners, and greeting cards. The need for effective communication has been a constant. Previous job positions as a tech-savvy planner, Main Streets intern, and historic preservationist placed emphasis on the need for user-friendly tools, which help planners collaborate and publish information.
She received her Master’s in Urban Planning from University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), concentrating in Electronic Visualization in a way that merged her interests in technology and sociology. She later became the Assistant Director of the University’s Great Cities Urban Data Visualization lab working on projects for the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and Northeast Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC now CMAP). The CTA project involved constructing DVD’s from photos taken along the route of every CTA train and from many stations. The purpose was to allow planners to visualize without taking the ride themselves.
Crystal has the ability to explain technology in plain English. She is currently writing a book that demystifies web-based tools for firms and prepares them for what’s to come. She has established a social networking site that makes the book’s contents interactive through educational tutorials. For clients, she translates needs assessments into technology blueprints then implements them.
To make zoning ordinances easier to understand, she recently developed a SaaS (Software as a Service) web application that provides immediate answers to questions about zoning. Community members can quickly find zoning and development guidelines online then visualize them in Google Earth.
Prior to PlaceVision she worked as a multimedia specialist and web designer for local governments, historical commissions, and planning firms. Projects included downtown revitalization work with the Alabama Historical Commission while an undergraduate at Auburn University; building the web site Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House And Its Neighborhoods under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant; and building a 3-D model of the Kenosha, WI downtown district that showed alternative uses for available lots in a redevelopment area.