July 2, 2014  by

Design Goes Social

What possesses someone to take a picture of their food or to “check-in”? What’s the value in a hashtag or a “like”? The desire to share runs deep in our human experience and with the advent of social media, that desire has manifested itself into a vast collection of innumerous posts, tweets, shares, selfies, and likes. The question I am asking is:

Can this data provide value to RTKL?clay_kagan1_image01

When we talk about Performance Driven Design (PDD), we catalog and judge performance as it falls into 3 categories: Environmental, Economic, and Social. The low-hanging fruit with PDD is, of course, Environmental performance. Simulations can be run during design and construction to accurately predict wind loads, heat gain, light penetration, and many other calculable metrics that help shape our buildings. Economic value is tougher to measure by designers when speaking of construction impact, but we have partners and contractors who have spent their careers and built their companies on the fact that they can estimate and predict construction costs accurately. There are even cost metrics associated with Environmental performance in the way of energy consumption and regional price points of that energy. Two-thirds of the “Triple Bottom Line” is there at our fingertips and should be utilized on every project that goes out of our doors.

The last one-third of the “Triple Bottom Line” is the tough one. How do we measure the Social value of our projects? What metrics exist that are so easily measured? According to the PDD DART, RTKL values Usability, Community, Equity, Health and Well-Being, and Public Health, but none of these metrics are as instantly available to us as wind velocity or light levels. How, then, do we prove that we’ve done what we set out to do on our projects?

Measuring the Immeasurable 

Much research exists on the value of social media, but most of it relies on branding and marketing. It’s easy for Pepsi to keep track of how often someone is talking about their product because people call it “Pepsi”. For architects, it’s rare to find any member of the public who has any idea who designed or planned the space they are currently enjoying. It would be fantastic to find thousands of tweets that specifically reference RTKL.

clay_kagan1_image02

The perfect tweet

Mining social data is not a new concept, but what we are looking for isn’t so easily found with a “search”. The truth is this: in order to ascertain true Social value, we have to dig deeper.

My proposal is simple:
Leverage publicly available social media posts to measure the Social value of our projects.

Do not be deceived, the proposal is simple, the implementation will be daunting. As stated earlier, there is no unified brand or language the public uses when discussing our projects. I would guess that 99.99% of the time, they aren’t aware that they are in an RTKL project. This is where the true work starts. Tapping into the geotags and vernacular phrases people use when discussing our spaces, I hope to create a unified language that ties public consumption of our spaces and places to the stated RTKL values laid out in the DART. My research will seek to show that “check-ins” to an RTKL project can prove a sense of Equity and that, indeed, “selfies” perhaps contribute to Community.

Next Steps

It’s one thing to research a topic show how two things connect. It’s quite another to implement. What I hope to have created by the end of my research is a sophisticated tool that will passively monitor popular social networks and, using my research, automatically populate RTKL’s own PDD DASH tool. What this means for RTKL is that at any given moment, we can see a real-time break down on exactly how and where people are occupying, socializing, and discussing our projects. I think this will provide us with what amounts to a free “post-occupancy survey” on every project in the Dash. This big data will help future projects understand what it is that we did on these projects that made them so successful.

This is a very big topic and one that I am very excited to pursue. I am thankful to the RTKL jury for allowing me to move forward with what I hope will be a game changing solution to a very tough problem.

clay_kagan1_image03What I Need From You

Given the obvious social slant this research has, I’d like to hear from you about your thoughts around the idea of mining social data. Do you think the data will be valuable? What’s the best way to separate the signal from the noise? Follow me and respond @claystarr or in the comments below. I look forward to hearing from all of you.

Connectivity is the subject of The 2014 Leonard S. Kagan Fellowship for Research and Exploration—a big topic kept purposefully loose to encourage broad thinking about the power of great ideas to bring people together. This year’s winning entries showed clarity of vision and tackle various aspects of connectivity—digital, social and physical, respectively—and all reflect an appreciation for the power of connections to give us new insights and greater control over the impact of our work. In the next few months, follow You Are Here to see the progress of these teams as they attempt to better connect RTKL to systems and information.

Cover Image via Wikipedia

CallisonRTKL

CallisonRTKL

For more than five decades, Callison and RTKL have created some of the world’s most memorable and successful environments for developers, retailers, investors, institutions and public entities. In 2015, our two practices came together under the Arcadis umbrella, expanding our sphere of influence and the depth and breadth of our resources. Our team is comprised of nearly 2,000 creative, innovative professionals throughout the world who are committed to advancing our client’s businesses and enhancing quality of life.
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