agile cities — dom architectural robotics — medium
DESCRIPTION
taken from Medium.comTRANSCRIPT
7/20/2015 Agile Cities — DOM Architectural Robotics — Medium
https://medium.com/dom-builders/agile-cities-cee4305043a0 1/9
Agile Citiesbuilt to change
Moscow Mobility Analysis by Habidatum International in partnership with Mathrioshka, MegaFon, Thomson Reuters forMUF
Over the course of the last century, urban planners and architects designed
cities as top-down and permanent systems. In Soviet cities, even mid-
level architects could fix locations and exact types of all services and shopsin neighborhoods. Residents had no choice but to adapt to these plans.
7/20/2015 Agile Cities — DOM Architectural Robotics — Medium
https://medium.com/dom-builders/agile-cities-cee4305043a0 2/9
Today we learn to perceive cities and spaces as dynamic, rather static andpermanent systems. Let’s explore how new technologies could help usbetter design and run buildings and cities.
Design Stage: A/B Testing
It’s common to use 3D visualizations and renders to present architecturalproposals. Unfortunately, there is a growing gap between sexy renders andactual building quality. Visualization has become a sales instrument ratherthan a tool for learning about future building performance.
Virtual reality (VR) may soon bridge this gap by helping clients andarchitects truly live in the potential buildings and test different options andscenarios. A number of firms are working on making design in VR asseamless as possible: IrisVR, ShapeSpark, and Floored.
Drawing the city. Le Corbusier and Plan for Redevelopment of Paris.
7/20/2015 Agile Cities — DOM Architectural Robotics — Medium
https://medium.com/dom-builders/agile-cities-cee4305043a0 3/9
Beyond applied design, VR creates opportunity for affordable behavioralstudies and A/B testing of spaces. A/B testing is jargon for experiments in
IrisVR + Oculus (Left), ShapeSpark VR (Right)
7/20/2015 Agile Cities — DOM Architectural Robotics — Medium
https://medium.com/dom-builders/agile-cities-cee4305043a0 4/9
marketing or user interface development. Its goal is to compare userbehaviors in different environments and maximize desirable outcomes.This way, we could rapidly learn without building physical copies.
Post-Occupancy: Real-Time Analytics
After a building is constructed, people have to adapt to it. As time passes,we need to learn whether a space is comfortable for people and is still usedin an efficient way.
One of the first firms working on post-occupancy indoor analytics wasDEGW (acquired by AECOM). The bottleneck of their approach was theconsultancy business model based on human observations. It was simplynot scalable.
Today a number of startups work on automation of post-occupancy spaceanalysis:
Robin leverages workers’ cellphones and beacons to improve the UX ofspace booking and suggest improvements in office scheduling andorganization.
Building Robotics and build.Science integrate into existing officeinfrastructure to aggregate and analyse data in a single software hub.
Learning about how a particular person, team, or a whole company usestheir office will help create more comfortable and productiveenvironments.
•
•
Post-Occupancy: Spacial Reconfiguration
Post-occupancy analytics will eventually suggest improvements to thespatial layout of spaces. These suggestions could change over time due tonew tenants, company scaling, and multiple other new use scenarios.
Unfortunately, existing demountable wall technologies require messyconstruction. Reconfiguration is too expensive to make frequent changeseconomically feasible.
7/20/2015 Agile Cities — DOM Architectural Robotics — Medium
https://medium.com/dom-builders/agile-cities-cee4305043a0 5/9
Frank Duffy, founder of DEGW, in his book “Work In The City” calculatedthat the costs of space plan reconfiguration could exceed constructioncosts over building lifetime.
At Dom, we’re working on a solution for this problem. We develop a newtype of indoor modular system to make spaces seamlessly reconfigurable.
Coupled with post-occupancy analytics, the goal is to make buildingsdynamically adapt to users, not vice versa.
A number of universities have dedicated research groups focused onexperimental technologies for space reconfiguration: Changing PlacesGroup at MIT, TUDelft, and Bartlett Interactive Architecture Lab.
Agile Planning & Big Data
At city scale, urban planners face similar problems. It’s extremely hard toforecast user behaviors before a space is built. Again, people have to adaptto spaces.
Over the last 20 years, the awareness of the need for better pre-planningspatial analysis gradually evolved. Space Syntax pioneered work onsoftware for spatial analysis and visualization.
DOM Reconfigurable Spaces
7/20/2015 Agile Cities — DOM Architectural Robotics — Medium
https://medium.com/dom-builders/agile-cities-cee4305043a0 6/9
Even though these analytical approaches and tools were around for a while,they never became de facto standards in planning and design process. Atthe time, they required installation of special monitoring equipment for aparticular project.
The increasing number of aggregated data from various sources (cellphonecarriers, delivery companies, social media, banks, etc) has potential to makethese analytical tools more sophisticated. Over time these tools willbecome more and more affordable because they leverage pre-existinginfrastructure and data.
A number of firms: Habidatum, CityZenith and research institutions NYUCUSP, UCL CASA, ICRI are working on making tools for urban dataanalytics.
Long term, urban planning should adopt agile practices (by analogy tosoftware development). Plans should become iterative and adjusted overtime based on experiments and factual data.
Space Syntax: Victoria Station Passenger Flows
7/20/2015 Agile Cities — DOM Architectural Robotics — Medium
https://medium.com/dom-builders/agile-cities-cee4305043a0 7/9
Of course, a lot of urban infrastructure like subways, airports, or bridgeswill remain permanent. At the same time, more attention should bededicated to temporary infrastructure and non-permanent uses of space.
A number of startups decided to focus on filling temporary vacant realestate; AppearHere, MeanwhileSpace, and 3Space connect vacantcommercial real estate with pop-up retail shops or temporary art projects.
Big data makes agile planning feasible because it is becoming possible tocatch neighborhood trends early on and prepare for citizens’ value changes.Urban big data can help conduct experiments at a neighborhood scale,consistently measure the results, and learn.
TransitMix bus line planning app
7/20/2015 Agile Cities — DOM Architectural Robotics — Medium
https://medium.com/dom-builders/agile-cities-cee4305043a0 8/9
For example, Habidatum created Moscow emotional maps by analyzingsocial media. They were able to surface neighborhoods where residents feltcomfortable, and by contrast, most insecure at different times during theday.
In Conclusion
We no longer have to pretend that buildings and cities are permanent.Uncertainty and change are inevitable and interesting parts of urban life.Technology can help us make smarter design decisions, better test ourassumptions before construction, learn to support natural human behaviorsin spaces, and discover urban trends early on. Soon cities and buildings willdynamically adapt to people, not vice versa.
Thanks to @latte_drinking, @antonoutkine, @katetoolate, @petr_novikov forreading drafts of this post!
EMOTIONS: Muscovites’ Mental Geography by Habidatum, Mathrioshka
7/20/2015 Agile Cities — DOM Architectural Robotics — Medium
https://medium.com/dom-builders/agile-cities-cee4305043a0 9/9
If you’re working on something relevant, or know about projects & trends thatI’ve missed, please reach out at @fe_novikov .