AUTODESK X The Bentway
Can You Measure How Architecture Makes You Feel?
Quantifying the human side of shared public spaces
Two people walk into a park – and experience it completely differently.
What affects how we perceive a public space? Answering this question could help architects design better spaces.
The human-centric building design team at Autodesk Research brought this inquiry to The Bentway in Toronto, where they embarked on an in-person experiment to quantify the subjective way human beings perceive the built environments they inhabit.
Can We Quantify How People Experience Places?
On average, we spend 90% of our lives in designed spaces, however, traditional architecture and design processes rarely attempt to capture occupant experiences – and if they do, they are poorly integrated into design workflows. Autodesk’s human-centric building design team asked, what if architects could flip the narrative and let experience inform design? They hypothesized that if what makes a public space successful is shared experiences, then the design process for those spaces should also be collaborative.
To test this, the team needed measures for human perception of space, an inherently subjective experience. They planned to collect multi-modal data – both quantitative and qualitative, high-tech and low-tech – from a variety of participants for visualization and processing. This work would ideally result in a toolkit for collecting new types of scalable, qualitative, subjective data to inform architectural design.
VIDEO: Autodesk Research and The Bentway are exploring how to transform urban spaces through innovative design and data-driven insights.
One visualization of how human response data was captured during the experiment.
The Bentway
Once an underutilized area under the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, The Bentway Phase 1 opened in 2018 as a community space for public art, events, and civic activities, and the team has recent announced plans for the Next Phase of development. As a “shared backyard” and programming space, The Bentway team is interested to know what cutting-edge sensor technology could teach their organization about the future of public space.
The collaboration with Autodesk has enabled The Bentway to capture data that might help engage their local community more effectively and inform future design decisions. In turn, as a living piece of infrastructure and public park space, The Bentway is a unique site to explore the Autodesk Research team’s human centric building design hypothesis in the real world.
Autodesk’s relationship with The Bentway began with an Autodesk Research Residency Program project in 2020 focused on engaging the public post-pandemic through physical space for experimentation, innovative programming, and insights.
If what makes a public space successful is shared experiences, then the design process for those spaces should also be collaborative.
THE EXPERIMENT – From Steps to Stories
To understand and predict how objective features in a space connect with subjective experiences, the Autodesk Research team built an experimental participatory design platform in collaboration with The Bentway. Participants engaged in “walkshops,” in which they walked the length of The Bentway as multimodal data about their experience was recorded in various ways:
- Quantitative data: Participants wore sensorized data-capture helmets, equipped with cameras that recorded 360 video and footage of participant faces. Helmet sensors captured temperature, pressure, humidity, and luminosity. The team also tracked GPS data of participant paths.
- Qualitative data: Participants answered survey questions along their journey, for example, how lonely or social is the space? How inspired does it make you feel? They were also able to record their spoken thoughts.
Hours of Footage
16
Kilometers Walked
25
Gigabytes of Data
550
To visualize the participant’s facial expressions while maintaining anonymity, researchers ran an algorithm to extract the facial contours and drew them as outlines overlaid on top of the video.
VIDEO: Deep dive into The Bentway experiment and how Autodesk Research visualized the results.
THE RESULTS – Mapping Human Response to the Built Environment
To tell the story of the data, the Autodesk Research team used visualizations to convey the experiences of walkshop participants. They used two distinct datasets to analyze the relationship between spaces and human reactions: environmental features and human responses.
Evaluating the Environment
Using an object detection and scene inference algorithm, the research team extracted notable objects and the relationships between them from the 360 videos. This enabled researchers to repaint a picture of what the participants saw and correlate it with their personal experience.
VIDEO: The research team extracted notable objects and the relationships among them to paint a picture of what walkshop participant saw and correlate it with their experience.
Another view of how the researchers visualized object relationships, based on 360 footage captured on participants’ sensorized helmets
Evaluating Human Response
To visualize the participant’s facial expressions while maintaining anonymity, researchers ran an algorithm to extract the facial contours and drew them as outlines overlaid on top of the video.
The research team also asked participants to evaluate their agreement with statements about the space at certain moments along the route, for example:
- It is pleasant to see this area
- I feel safe walking in this area
- I could imagine meeting with friends here
- This area is full of activity
- The air is clean in this area
Participants were also invited to record their thoughts directly into their mobile devices.
“There’s a lot of green space, but it remains very urban… unique vibe to it.”
Participant 3
“I dislike that there are so many signs of how unequal we are as a society.”
Participant 12
We’re not too far from a future where the human experience will empower design workflows that connect all stakeholders to improve public health and well-being.
A People-First Model for Designing Public Space
While this research is still ongoing, “From Steps to Stories” sets the stage for a future where individual and collective human experiences can empower new design workflows using participatory design methods, moving us towards a built environment that actively builds trust between project stakeholders and improves public health and well-being.
Based on this work, the team hopes the future of public space will be designed much more collaboratively, where design tools become more accessible, understanding and implementing public feedback becomes integral to design workflows, and designers can evaluate the consequences of designs decisions in real-time leading to more sustainable and experientially diverse public spaces – spaces that respond and adapt to the wants and needs of the communities they serve.
Want to learn more?
See a more complete picture of how we visualized data for predicting environmental features and human response – and how qualitative data enriched our understanding of the quantitative.
Associated Researchers
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