Technology, people, place and space

At the RUDI’s knowledge-sharing event on technology, people, space and place, MIT PhD candidate and US Director of Space Syntax Noah Raford gave an overview of the implication of real-time data collection on urban planning and design: “Real time data collection methods, parametric modelling at the urban scale, and remote control urbanism“. Noah grounds his work on space syntax techniques and Evidence-based urbanism that is making decision based on advanced available research and practices. The term is borrowed from medicine

“Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decision about the care of individual patients.” Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine

However, currently land use and space activity data are collected still through very traditional means (e.g. students sent on the street to perform manual counting) that limits the emergence of evidences from the statistical relations between variable (e.g. What is the effect of spatial layout on movement? how does it perform?). With the increasing availability of “intelligent bricks” or “spimes”, the process of data collection is improved and reveals new (real-time) aspects of the city (e.g. cabspotting, real-time rome, subway smell map, searchable cities (mapdango), mobility on demand). However will the interfaces giving access and communicating the analysis of these data helps decision makers in improving citizens conditions?

Relation to my thesis: Even though Space Syntax do not represent the traditional urban planners, it is a clear signal in favor of my work that they become interested in unconventional data sources. Noah suggest that urban designers have always been interface designers. I would humbly argue that for the type of “remote control urbanism” he describes, the interface between technology and people requests other practices and methods that urban designer have applied to place and space so far. As a consequence, they should start to get help from software engineering techniques (e.g. quality assurance) or interaction design methods (e.g. involvement of “users”, ethnography). Related to Report on the Real-Time Cities Round Table.