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How can architects use place-specific data on design outcomes to have a meaningful impact in future projects? Rory Bergin of HTA Design proposes a change of approach
‘I
f you can’t measure it, you cannot manage it’ has been the mantra of management gurus, data scientists and engineers for generations, with good reason. The premise is that if you collect data on a problem over time, aggregate it and analyse it for patterns, it should be possible to change the behaviour of people or systems to optimise the outcomes. This thinking hasn’t had as much of an impact on design, in part because designers aren’t generally taught to use data. The question of whether there are ways in which we can use data to inform us in our efforts to design better buildings, social spaces and the networks that connect them, is not generally being asked in architecture education or practice. The type of data that is being used to drive design in London is often used in negative ways to direct design away from something; the sound monitoring of traffic driving orientation of buildings, the temperature data from remote weather stations driving microclimate design, or the demographic data on population growth and immigration driving local or national policy.
Little of this data is specific to the place we are designing for, its people, its character, use patterns and history. The arrival of cheap sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) is meant to enable an explosion of potential in the management of our physical lives. Innovations like parking spaces that tell you when they are empty, fridges that order the milk for you, and other small but useful incremental changes that make our lives easier and reduce what is called ‘friction’, a short-hand term for the bureaucracy of daily life. But so far, these technologies have not fed into the activity of design.
The potential prize from data collection is enormous. If we could get to a position
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK
At the new Hanham Hall zero carbon residential scheme in Gloucestershire, HTA is collecting data on resident satisfaction © Nick Harrison
where we have an evidence base to inform design that is specific to the place we are designing for, it would have a big impact on design behaviour and outcomes. We would move from a world where design is based on the personal ideas and ambitions of designers, planners, and other stakeholders, often based on assumptions or limited personal experience, to a world where design activity could be supported by an up-to-date and relevant evidence base. In my experience the use of data to support design in cities hasn’t been specific enough to the place to be effective. To make data about a place meaningful, the data needs to be rich and specific to the place. Data collection is currently sporadic and patchy and often collected in situations where there is a problem, like crime data in a poorly designed neighbourhood. Data is rarely collected about happy people. When it comes to the use of data for planning policy, data is collected for policy assessment or development, but the lengthy timeframes for planning policy decisions
often means that the societal drive behind policy will have changed before the policy is implemented. Currently, place-specific data is often collected by app providers through our phones as a way of selling services to us. The ranking of restaurants and pubs, the photographs of tourists, the local bus timetable. But the generic nature of many of our apps, which have become the primary means of data collection, means that app users have access to information collected for a specific purpose but not enough access to a wider pool of data created by individuals. Where place-specific data exists, it tends to be held within a specific app, like restaurant rating tools, or exercise apps, whereas to be useful, we need this to be more widely available in a way that we can analyse it and derive meaning from it. If we knew that 10,000 people use a park every weekend to go running, and 500 used it to take their dog for a walk, which use case would we prioritise when we design the movement routes in the park?
ADF MARCH 2024
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