Research at Sasaki: 2020-2021 by Sasaki

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Long before the Sasaki Research Grant Program was formalized six years ago, research has been integral to our interdisciplinary practice. This commitment to critical inquiry and pushing the bounds of our knowledge, skill, and practice, stems from the way Sasaki was first established: Integrated practice, research, and teaching is a birthmark of the firm brought by Hideo Sasaki’s dedication to education and practice. The exploration of new ideas remains fundamental to our process and outputs, today. Sasaki continues to sponsor research through annual grants—providing winning teams the time and resources outside of project work to delve into a wide array of topics. In addition, there are countless passion-driven, grassroots research initiatives proliferating at Sasaki at any given time. These research endeavors strengthen collaboration across disciplines within Sasaki, with the Sasaki Foundation, and with external partners in the design fields, academia, and the broader community to push the envelope on impactful design practice. The results of these formal research projects and informal explorations take many forms. We publish white papers, articles, and blog posts; create digital tools and websites; present at conferences and panels across the globe; and nurture new voices inside and outside the Sasaki community to contribute to this broad endeavor called research. This publication is the second anthology of Research at Sasaki. Similar to our first publication, it exhibits a strong interdisciplinary bent and benefits from our diverse backgrounds and broad expertise under one roof—albeit a metaphorical roof this year, given the pandemic’s impacts.

In this unique time, we have had to be creative to stay virtually connected. That creative energy is also evident in the topics explored, ranging from embodied carbon in the built environment, to climate change focusing on parks and recreation spaces in understudied inland cities, to artificial intelligence’s potential in remote sensing and design. Complementary to these three research grants are ten research explorations that emerged from projects, academic collaborations, or other sources of inspiration, organized under themes of Sustainability & Ecology, Engagement, and Strategies. This publication is just a snapshot of Sasaki’s long-term commitment to knowledge building for the design profession and improving our shared environment. It captures the enthusiasm, innovation, and hard work of many at Sasaki in 2020, a year that presented many challenges, but also new opportunities. We continue to identify incomplete knowledge in need of address amidst today’s mounting societal and environmental challenges. While we do not expect the results of the research at Sasaki to provide finite answers to these large problems per se, we hope by sharing our findings, to provoke further inquiry and perhaps inspire new collaborative partnerships. We welcome feedback, critiques, inquiries, challenges, and collaborative ideas from our peers and the public, as this work is only as good as the collective challenges it to be! As ever, we believe better design comes from working together, and we invite you into our collective. TAO ZHANG, PRINCIPAL AND CHAIR OF DESIGN CULTURE MARTIN ZOGRAN, PRINCIPAL

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WITHIN THIS PUBLICATION:

Sustainability As countries, communities, and corporations continue to realize the importance of long-term sustainability and ecological investments, how do we translate ambitious overarching sustainability goals into implementation? In 2020, Sasaki developed and demonstrated new systems, metrics, and frameworks to set targets for our projects and track progress across scales and disciplines. As an interdisciplinary practice, we sought to understand the relationships between complementary systems—from building facades to regional landscape strategies—and leverage the potential of integrated design to address a global challenge.

Strategies The separation between our virtual and digital worlds became smaller than ever over the past year. From advances in machine learning to an almost universal familiarity with digital tools for collaboration, the ability to use data and technology to describe, analyze and imagine physical futures has become increasingly accessible. In 2020, we experimented with new tools and questioned existing design practices in an effort to understand how designers and planners can use data and technology to ask smarter questions and reveal deeper insights.

Engagement In a year where social and economic disparities have come into sharp focus amidst a pandemic which requires strict social distancing requirements, how can planners and designers develop new methods to ensure that we are able to engage effectively with communities and stakeholders? We spent 2020 exploring how to bring innovative engagement strategies online, keeping in mind how we can engage traditionally hard-to-reach populations to ensure recommendations reflect diverse visions of success.

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CONTENTS SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY...................................................................... 6 Research Grant: Carbon Conscience..........................................................................8 University of Lima Graduate Center...........................................................................18 Lakeview Village..........................................................................................................20 Enhancing Ecology + Civil Engineering Rigor in Each Project...............................22 ENGAGEMENT. . ......................................................................................... 28 Research Grant: Climate.Park.Change.......................................................................30 Ideas for Equity-Focused Engagement......................................................................40 Public Engagement: What We Learned in 2020........................................................42 STRATEGIES............................................................................................. 48 Research Grant: Machine Learning for Design.........................................................50 Zaru...............................................................................................................................62 Comfort Hours.............................................................................................................64 Rapid First Person Experience Analysis....................................................................66 Density Atlas................................................................................................................68 THE SASAKI FOUNDATION: GET[T]HERE . . ....................................................70 PARKS & EQUITY ATLAS UPDATE................................................................72 2021 RESEARCH GRANTS. . ......................................................................... 74

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY As countries, communities, and corporations continue to realize the importance of long-term sustainability and ecological investments, how do we translate ambitious overarching sustainability goals into implementation? In 2020, Sasaki developed and demonstrated new systems, metrics, and frameworks to set targets for our projects and track progress across scales and disciplines. As an interdisciplinary practice, we sought to understand the relationships between complementary systems—from building facades to regional landscape strategies—and leverage the potential of integrated design to address a global challenge.

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

DESIGNING WITH A CARBON CONSCIENCE RESEARCH TEAM:

SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS:

SPONSORING PRINCIPAL:

Chris Hardy, Michael Frechette ,Tamar Warburg, Ekaterina Trosman, Shuai Hao, Danielle DeCarlo, Kelly Farrell

Ken Goulding, Timothy Gale, Patrick Murray, Raj Adi Raman

Michael Grove

Background This research project resulted in the creation of a dataset, whitepaper, and web-based analytical tool to quickly compare projected embodied carbon emissions, carbon sequestration, and carbon stored for concept designs in master planning, urban design, architecture, and landscape.

The tool is a web-based design analysis tool linked to a land use dataset that projects probable embodied carbon emissions, sequestration, and storage per unit area. This is a comparative analysis tool to help with decision making and iteration during master planning or early concept design phases.

We understand that the built environment—architecture, landscape architecture, and infrastructure—is responsible for more than half of global carbon emissions, due both to energy usage and to embodied carbon emissions associated with building materials. This project allows us to make educated estimates on the impact our design work on the environment by integrating embodied carbon information into the design process at the preliminary planning and concept design levels, and identifying potential opportunities for embodied carbon reduction strategies.

This research project started with a broad industry application and academic literature review, evaluating existing tools, and compling a library of sources.

We found the existing tools excellent for detailed design phases, applied to Revit models or with projects with accurate comprehensive cost estimates. However, we realized that we needed a tool for integrating architecture and landscape design data into an overall planning tool, enabling rapid iteration that would allow designers to efficiently use it to inform early design processes; a tool for early sketches which brought architecture and landscape together, informed by civil engineering and ecology.

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A range of tools and calculators covering the built environment but divided by discipline. This project brings these tools and research together to inform urban design and planning scales of practice.

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

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Why We believe the earliest decisions in a plan can have the most impact on the ultimate design. These decisions can inform the fundamental future fabric and land use of places and cities. Carbon Conscience is a tool to help us quickly understand the carbon impacts of our designs, compare highlevel land use options, and inform our clients and communities about the implications of design options. This is the first database and design tool that brings together landscape and architectual datasets for a wholistic understanding of the built envirionment for embodied carbon. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, research, and software design, our team has sought to make a tool that blends into existing teams design processes. The more we are aware of our impact, and represent Carbon as an issue with the same rigor and concern as cost and human experience, the more power we have to mitigate emissions impacts from our projects. We see design as an opptomistic action and privledge, but carrying a responsibility for stewardship, kindness, and concern for future generations.

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

Common Factor: Land use After compiling the dataset, the primary struggle in translating that data into a usable tool was the diverse methods, typical units, and approaches to quantifying embodied, sequestered and stored carbon across discipines and industries. The environemntal and life sciences resources generally looked at broad landscape systems, architectural resources at specific assembly composition. In the end, the design team used land use as the common factor - providing a percentage coverage assumptions per land use per assembly and ecosystem, to translate the built environemnt into a dataset that could be mappered per unit area. For full methods, please refer to our draft white paper, available upon request.

ABOVE Cladistically orgranizing landuse by average assembly coverages

LEFT Analysis using existing tools and comparing assemblies for buildings.

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BELOW Key concepts driving factors for consideration for carbon in ecoloical systems.

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

Key concepts driving factors for consideration for carbon in ecoloical systems.

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SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

ABOVE AND RIGHT Carbon Conscience web interface in progress

OPPOSITE In addition to the white paper and web tool, the design team compiled a sumamry of key recommendations for designing with a carbon conscience, that will be shared with the public webpage, and is being used as a reference point to review our standard assembly and specification recommendations.

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Next Steps This spring the research team is testing the beta design tool on Sasaki projects, revising the website interface, and inviting peer review of the dataset and white paper. Upon refinement, the tool will be shared publically for both use and critique, in an effort to promote carbon conscience design across the industry.

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY

UNIVERSITY OF LIMA GRADUATE CENTER Pablo Savid -Buteler, Antonio Furukawa, Sangyun Lee, Nicolas Barrera, Kevin Fu, Minh Dao, Jessica Korthuis, Julie Jaenicke, Cecilia Hardy, Poshan Chang, Letitia Tormay, Katya Trosman, Scott Penman, Ken Goulding

For the University of Lima Graduate Center, we developed a workflow for real-time raytracing analysis, enabling us to quickly study the impact of iterative shading strategies.Our knowledge of Lima’s climate established a clear strategy of minimizing heat gain while maximizing indirect light. While the initial impulses of variably-rotated façade fins and an angled clerestory roof aligned with this need, we took the analysis a step further by developing tools to test various design improvements. This workflow enabled us to take the steps listed below.

Validation of the final result confirmed the dual benefit of this new strategy. Additionally, the process itself— lightweight analysis tools combined with real-time feedback during design—ensured that the intuition behind the result was captured, and established that real-time analysis tools have significant potential in early design.

EMBEDDED ANIMATION

Animations of daylight autonomy corresponding to the two roof strategies; red dots indicate direct light entering the building.

1. IDENTIFY A SPECIFIC PERIOD OF THE YEAR DURING WHICH DIRECT LIGHT WAS STILL ENTERING THE BUILDING Diagrams highlighting period of year during which direct light is entering the building; each orange dot represents one hour.

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EMBEDDED ANIMATION

2. QUICKLY TEST DIFFERENT FIN AND ROOF GEOMETRIES WITHIN THIS PERIOD Animation of a raytracing analysis showing light reflecting off fin geometry EMBEDDED ANIMATION

3. IDENTIFY A STRATEGY THAT WOULD NOT ONLY BLOCK ALL DIRECT LIGHT, BUT ALSO BE MORE CONDUCIVE TO BRINGING IN INDIRECT LIGHT Animations showing how two different roof strategies might impact direct and indirect light 19

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY

LAKEVIEW VILLAGE Dennis Pieprz, Paul Schlapobersky, Sejal Agrawal, Pankti Sanganee, Elaine Minjy Limmer, Philip Dugdale, Lin Ye, Breeze Outlaw, Tamar Warburg, Scott Penman, Mengqiao Sun, Renyi Zhang

Lakeview Village is the transformation of a 177-acre brownfield, formerly a coal-fired power plant, into a district for 20,000 people and 9,000 jobs on the waterfront of Lake Ontario in Mississauga, ON. The master plan involves foundational sustainability goals, including a path to net zero carbon featuring a district energy plant based on wastewater heat capture from the adjacent treatment plant. To transition from master plan into future implementation by multiple developer and designer teams, Sasaki is working with Lakeview Community Partners to develop a set of Sustainability Building Design Guidelines. The Sasaki team undertook research to determine the guidelines with the greatest impact on energy use, customized for each building typology in the project: high-rise residential, offices, commercial spaces, hotels, and townhouses. Each guideline was tested with CoveTool energy modeling software to optimize the variables to reduce Energy Use Intensity (EUI). We identified the most impactful measures on EUI to curate recommended best practices, including envelope strategies such as U-value of glazing, R-value of walls, Window to Wall ratios for each orientation, and recommended building systems and lighting standards. 20

We summarized the results by proposing realistic but aspirational EUI targets as performance metrics for each typology, with prescriptive best practices tested for each program use. The guidelines were customized for individual blocks to reflect their particular urban context and location, including larger windows facing preferred views of Lake Ontario or public parks, smaller windows facing the treatment plant, and independent mechanical systems for the townhouses located far from the district energy plant. The path for Zero Carbon involves investment in the district energy plant and best practices for envelope design, building management, and onsite renewable energy generation to reduce energy loads, with the purchase of offsite green power for the balance of energy needs. The research demonstrated that concise and datadriven guidelines can play an important role in the implementation of district master plans, to translate environmentally responsible urban design goals into a sustainable lifestyle for the people who will live and work in a new, vibrant urban community.

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Preliminary EUI Guidelines: Overall

The energy use for residential buildings in this climate is largely heating-driven. Improving system efficiency and thermal envelope performance is key to reducing EUI. With best practice energy parameters, EUI for residential buildings can be reduced approximately 50% from the baseline model.

Preliminary EUI Guidelines: Individual Impacts RELATIVE IMPACT OF ENERGY PARAMETERS ON EUI (PRELIMINARY RESULTS)

RELATIVE IMPACT OF ENVELOPE PARAMETERS ON ENVELOPE (PRELIMINARY RESULTS)

The most significant impact on EUI is from the Building Systems, notably the highly efficient District Energy Plan providing a four-pipe loop throughout the development.

Improving the glazing U-value from a baseline option to a best practice option can account for over 80% of the envelope’s reduction in EUI. Icons from nounproject.com

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY

ENHANCING ECOLOGY + CIVIL ENGINEERING RIGOR IN EACH PROJECT By Kelly Farrell, Andrew Sell, and Kara Slocum

In the last quarter of 2018, Sasaki’s Civil Engineering and Ecology disciplines convened to create a strategic plan to advance ecologically driven design in all of Sasaki’s work. Since then, the collective has held regular meetings to reflect upon Sasaki’s current ecological and civil knowledge pool; identify gaps in our collective and individual expertise; develop a workflow that more intuitively integrates ecological knowledge; validate the effectiveness of our work through research and quantifiable metrics; and promote what we have learned and developed both internally and externally. During that time, a year of which has been spent in the work-from-home context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the taskforce has learned a number of important lessons that will inform our work and agenda moving forward. 22

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LESSON 1

The More We Share, The More We Gain Increasing the baseline ecological knowledge of colleagues across all of Sasaki’s disciplines makes it easier to integrate ecological, hydrologic, and sustainability principles into a design - indeed many Sasakians already do! Increasing ecological literacy and creating space for conversations help ensure that all projects integrate baseline ecological research and understanding from day one.

Sharing ecological knowledge through formal presentations, informal studio discussions, and hands-on experience is a powerful tool to help colleagues understand ecological processes. Here, Andy Sell and Tony Fettes, two Sasaki ecologists, give lunch-time presentations on pollinator gardens and meadows—including suggestions for year-round resources and habitat—for Sasakians before exploring some of those strategies in a tour of Sasaki’s Pollinator Garden.

Sasaki landscape architects, architects, planners, and interior designers collaborated with artist David Buckley Borden to create a series of pollinator houses, each designed with specific species’ needs in mind, as part of Borden’s larger show in the Sasaki Gallery. The show “Community, Nature: People, Place, and Practice” explored environmental challenges under the premise that ecological awareness spurs community action.

Sustainability in Practice (SIP) was devised in 2019 as a monthly email reminder to all Sasakians to be more mindful of topics related to sustainability within our work and at home. Ecology+Civil Taskforce members helped devise this effort and created information relating to topics like local water sources/hydrology, native plants and ecoregions as well as gatherings for Earth Day.

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY

LESSON 2

Help teams Improve Ecological Performance in Plants While plant selection is an important component of any landscape architecture project, Sasaki’s ecologists have learned to encourage team members to think beyond the aesthetic, helping select plants that augment resources for local and migratory wildlife. By researching local habitats, key plant species, their faunal associates, and interspecies interactions, teams can try to make ecologically-motivated plant selections within the bounds of site conditions, aesthetic considerations, and product availability. BOSTON CITY HALL PLAZA

Knowing that year-round interest was vital for the planting in an urban plaza, and wanting to include season-long pollen and nectar resources for insects, the Boston City Hall Plaza Team worked with Sasaki ecologists to explore a plant palette that would meet these goals while standing up to a harsh urban environment.

UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND, BROOKSIDE STUDENT HOUSING LANDSCAPE

Sasaki’s landscape approach included a palette of locally-sourced native plants from the site New England Coastal Forest Ecoregion context. Preferencing local genotype plants allowed designers to utilize phenology and plant adaptations to create a landscape that would support a plethora of insect life, a building block to regional biodiversity. 24

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LESSON 3

Including Research in Design from the Beginning; Validating it Through the End Having an early touchpoint with a project team helps identify which site-specific factors might be important considerations towards building an ecologically-friendly, sustainable, and resilient design. Identifying these considerations in the beginning and iteratively returning to ecological analysis at various stages of the design process helps to ensure that these opportunities are not missed. IDENTIFYING SENSITIVE LANDSCAPE ELEMENTS

In a project near Austin, Texas, Sasaki ecologists early identified the importance of the area’s geology, dominated by karst, in the cultural and ecological history of the site. The porous karst lets water travel quickly from the land surface to an underground aquifer, leading to both water quality considerations and concerns for the endangered species that are dependent on the caves and conditions created by that flow.

With overlapping regulatory considerations designed to protect karstdependent endangered species and the water quality of the region’s aquifer, Sasaki’s ecologists worked with the property owners to determine the locations of sensitive features and with the planning & urban development team to ensure that there was a flexible open space network that could incorporate karst setbacks while ensuring a successful plan.

JIADING PARK POST OCCUPANCY RESEARCH Water quality improvement was a major driver for the design of Jiading Park and was addressed through a variety of design solutions, including the addition of filtering wetland plant species. A post-occupancy evaluation conducted by East China Normal University compared baseline data and recorded significant improvements in water quality. Samples taken at multiple points over the course of a year demonstrated a 66% reduction of total nitrogen, and a 97% reduction of total phosphorous. This post-occupancy evaluation was funded by a Landscape Architecture Foundation CSI grant.

SUSTAINABILITY & ECOLOGY

LESSON 4

Connect Research, Design, and Engineering

IDENTIFYING SENSITIVE LANDSCAPE ELEMENTS Thorough GIS analysis for an on-going built campus project in Xinyang, China revealed the site’s intricate relationship with the local watershed and topography. The typical approach of thinking about the hydrological corridors -- trying to compare and restore them to a baseline condition -- was confounded by the ancient conversion of the valleys to paddys and fish ponds. Working with our Sasaki civil engineers let the project team determine parameters to create a stream valley that would slow stormwater, create aquatic habitat, mitigate flooding, and incorporate greywater reuse.

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DESIGN RESULTS 1.

Major regrading effort to set back slopes and create a wetland bench

2. Minor grade changes to activate bayou from site runoff 3. Activate historic meanders 4. Earthen dam with culverts (keep needed channelization to mitigate hydraulic jumps) 5. Total length increased by 160%

GREENWOOD PARK Phase 1 of Greenwood Park in Baton Rouge, Louisiana is centered around the revitalization of Cypress Bayou. Detailed hydrologic and hydraulic analysis and an iterative design process led to a cohesive design solution that will play a major role in the future of the Greenwood Park watershed story. The proposed re-meandering of Cypress Bayou will increase the total linear length of the bayou by 160%, create a shallower overall slope, decrease erosion potential, and provide opportunities to restore and maintain the bayou’s rich riparian zone. The strategy will allow the reactivation of historic bayou meanders that have been hydraulically dormant due to previous engineering solutions that resulted in channelizing flow (i.e. roadways, culverts, and dams). This could not have been achieved without collaboration with local experts. Hydraulic modeling was led by a local Civil Engineering firm, CSRS. The flow and terrain models procured by CSRS provided the Sasaki site team with knowledge necessary to build a robust picture of existing conditions, set achievable design goals, and then test the proposed condition in parallel with the overall phase 1 park design. Coastal Environments, the local ecologist, was able to provide information on the creation of wetland benches which guided the bayou realignment, re-grading efforts, and planting schemes. ◆

ENGAGEMENT In a year where social and economic disparities have come into sharp focus amidst a pandemic which requires strict social distancing requirements, how can planners and designers develop new methods to ensure that we are able to engage effectively with communities and stakeholders? We spent 2020 exploring how to bring innovative engagement strategies online, keeping in mind how we can engage traditionally hard-to-reach populations to ensure recommendations reflect diverse visions of success.

ENGAGEMENT — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

CLIMATE.PARK.CHANGE RESEARCH TEAM:

SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS:

Anna Cawrse, Lanmuzhi Yang, Elaine Stokes, Andrew Sell, Kara Slocum, Joshua Brooks, Ergys Hoxha, Jake Parris

Eric Youngberg, Timothy Gale, Raj Adi Raman

NRPA COLLABORATORS:

PARK AND RECREATION AGENCIES:

Jenny Cox, Darci Schofield, Rachel Banner, Roxanne Sutton, Suzanne Nathan, Lauren Redmore (former NRPA), Karl Schrass (former NRPA), Wende David (former NRPA)

Denver Parks and Recreation, Salt Lake City Public Lands, Evanston Parks and Recreation District

Research goal: development of landscape resilience strategies which address climate change impacts affecting development and maintenence of Intermountain West parks and greenspaces.

SPONSORING PRINCIPALS AND ASSOCIATE PRINCIPALS: Ken Goulding, Zachary Chrisco, Jill Allen Dixon

EXPLORE THE CLIMATE.PARK. CHANGE WEBSITE HERE

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Mapping climate change issues in the Intermountain West region

Overview 2020 was the hottest year on record, demonstrating the impacts of climate change are occurring now. Park and recreation professionals, who serve nearly every community in the United States, are poised to advance climate mitigation and adaptation strategies to build environmental and community resiliency through the power of local parks and recreation. However, few comprehensive resources exist to support park and recreation professionals to understand and develop solutions to climate challenges in their community. As part of Sasaki’s 2020 research grant program, Sasaki, in partnership with the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) created a toolkit for resilient parks: Climate.Park.Change. Climate.Park.Change, a web-based platform, compiles data on how climate change affects park and recreation spaces and suggests physical design solutions that address climate

impacts as well as other community challenges. This toolkit is a pilot that focuses on the Intermountain West region, an area identified where research is lacking compared to most coastal cities and towns. The ultimate goal of this toolkit is to give park and recreation professionals the tools needed to create climate-ready parks and build community and environmental resilience, wherever they may be. The toolkit allows professionals to explore regional impacts arising from climate change and discover associated climate adaptation design strategies. These strategies are tailored for the park and recreation profession to adapt their infrastructure to combat the climate-related environmental, health, social, and economic impacts facing their communities. The tool prioritizes strategies that are replicable across varying park and recreation systems, achieve maximum community improvement, and promote equitable investment.

ENGAGEMENT — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

Process DEFINING THE ISSUES Sasaki and NRPA started the process in early 2020 by understanding and identifying the climate change issues, actual and perceived, that are impacting the IntermountainWest area of the United States. To better understand the perceived issues, the team interviewed park and recreation professionals from 13 municipal agencies across the mid-US to hear about their current challenges and understand future needs. The team asked questions about expenditure, community perception of climate change, current response to mitigate the changing environmental threats, and ways they needed support. Parallel to this process, the team researched existing data and white papers to better understand trends and impacts directly associated with climate change. BELOW Highlighted issues derived from oneon-one interviews

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LEFT & BELOW Research conducted while apart

ENGAGEMENT — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACTS After five months of interviews, gathering information, and processing data, the team created a list of major climate change issues specifically impacting the Intermountain-West, including wildfires, landslide and avalanches, extended drought, inland flooding, extreme wind events, heatwave, reduced annual precipitation, extreme precipitation events, poor air quality, diminishing snowpack, erosion, water quality issues, invasive species,

and pest and pathogen outbreaks. The team then studied each of these issues and created a series of “Threat Cards” that define the issue, how it is related to climate change, maps of where it is impacting the region, resources on that particular issue, and other issues that threat was linked to. For each issue, the team also looked at how it was impacting parks and recreation operation and maintenance, ecosystem functionality, and access.

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Issue cards derived from internal research

ENGAGEMENT — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

DEVELOPING THE STRATEGIES After identifying key issues, the team began developing a collection of strategies, tailored to the IntermountainWest, that park and recreation professionals can deploy to address challenges posed by climate change. These strategies were informed by research, interviews with park and recreation professionals, and workshops. The 200+ strategies are organized into three categories: (1) Ecosystem Functionality, (2) Parks, Operations, & Maintenance, and (3) Users & Access. These categories are designed to help users of the Climate.Park. Change. website find strategies that are specific to their challenges and needs. Î Ecosystem Functionality Strategies provide alternatives on planting strategies and species to encourage biodiversity; tools to create water-wise landscapes that consume less potable water; ways to manage stormwater; and methods to holistically enhance a flourishing and adaptive landscape.

Î Strategies of Parks, Operations, & Maintenance emphasize the importance of park management to mitigate climate change. Topics include indicator monitoring, efficient irrigation, targeted turf care, smart programming, pollution mitigation, and education on maintaining native landscapes. Î Strategies of Users & Access focus on climate change public education, multi-functional design suggestions, active park use planning, community engagement, and circulation planning. The team also developed a suitability system to categorize the strategies through tags such as equity, size of the park, the slope of the landscape, surrounding context, and geographic region applicability. Finally, the strategies are meant to be a free, open-sourced library that can continuously grow as park and recreation professionals, designers, and users actively add new strategies through a survey on the webstie.

BELOW & RIGHT The final product of Climate.Park.Change is an interactive website that ties issues to geographies down to a county level, links strategies to each issue, and ultimately showcases how those strategies are implemented with three pilot cities.

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ENGAGEMENT — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

The team collaborated with three cities in the Intermountain West that ranged from small town to urban center. With each city a park city was identified that also varied in scale and current existing condition.

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CASE STUDIES To conceptually test the strategies, the team collaborated through a series of workshops with three park and recreation agencies in the region - Evanston, WY, Salt Lake City, UT, and Denver, CO. Study sites were chosen for their representation of a variety of issues; the three sites—The Bear Meadow (WY), Glendale Water Park (UT), and Westbar-Val-wood Park (CO)— varied in terms of size, use, and landscape features. Sasaki, NRPA, and each park and recreation agency engaged in a two-hour interactive virtual workshop, which brought together the perspectives of park managers, park advocates, and park designers. This two-month process included an initial site analysis, issue identification, strategy brainstorming, and documentation. The information developed from these workshops helped refine the proposed strategies and served as a pilot for how the interactive toolkit can be applied to equip park and recreation professionals with the tools to implement climate mitigation and adaptation approaches.

Using Climate.Park.Change The web-based interactive toolkit is meant to first help users understand the issues associated with climate change and how the issues influence parks and recreation. Secondly, it provides useful strategies that are tailored for specific geographies. Finally, it showcases how this toolkit can be used to identify strategies based on specific challenges through the three case studies. This website offers a look into the footprint of each identified climate change issue through an interactive map as users can switch between layers of data that paints the impacts at the county level. As the site grows, strategic contributions from users will be encouraged through a crowd-sourcing interface, adding further strategies that can be applied.

ENGAGEMENT

IDEAS FOR EQUITYFOCUSED ENGAGEMENT Maria Lucia Morelli

SPONSORS: Mary Anne Ocampo, Jill Allen Dixon, Elaine Limmer What could community engagement look like during a pandemic which requires social distancing and whose most vulnerable populations lack access or feel uncomfortable communicating digitally? As part of a summer internship at Sasaki funded by MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning’s Social Impact Fellowship, Maria Lucia worked remotely on researching and analyzing strategies that have been successful as online methods, while also creating new approaches. Engagement during the pandemic is not only about finding innovative tools to use, but also about acknowledging the problems engagement has faced all along and making sure we are not transferring those into their digital versions. We have to look into more creative ways of meeting the community where they are.

After interviewing fifteen project managers and two principals at Sasaki, the ‘Ideas for Equity-Focused Engagement’ webpage was created. The webpage centralizes external and internal resources to plan for equitable engagement. The eight main sections work as guidelines complemented with links to papers and webinars, and reflections from the interviews on best practices and overcoming hurdles. These resources are meant to motivate us to have difficult conversations about social justice, social impact, inclusivity, and who’s sitting at the decision-making table and who’s not. This questioning should not be a static process but rather bring out our best critics, allowing for flexibility, creativity, and keeping the conversation open.

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The landing page shows the eight main sections. By clicking on any of these, a set of guidelines, resources and excerpts from the interviews will guide a team through the process of planning for equitable engagement.

This section has recommendations on how to conduct engagement during the pandemic. It focuses on leveraging online tools while acknowledging the limitations of the digital divide and the emotional stressors anyone may be undergoing.

The engagement playbook is a five-step guideline meant to conduct a team through an analysis of a project’s direct and indirect stakeholders. It asks who should be sitting at the decision making table, when you should be communicating with them, how you can meet them where they are, and how you can create a multi-channel outreach plan.

ENGAGEMENT

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT: WHAT WE LEARNED IN 2020 Jill Allen Dixon 42

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COVID ENGAGEMENT FRAMEWORK Tools follow purpose. Over the past year, we have been expanding engagement to provide a greater range of opportunities with more flexibility for different participation preferences.

COVID has certainly changed our world in so many ways over the past year, and engagement is no different. Our teams have been testing new and adapted ways to connect with community members. Throughout it all, we have learned the importance of flexibility and being willing to adapt. Despite the challenging year, connecting with others has provided moments of shared joy. Ideas from community members and stakeholders have continued to enrich projects. Our hope is that lessons learned from 2020 can set the foundation for a “new normal” for community engagement that is more accessible, engaging, and fun. Over the past year, our engagement strategies have been increasingly intention-based, focusing on letting intention guide the process, rather than being limited by a prescriptive tools-based approach. We center

our processes on shared goals, and then identify which methods of outreach can be most accessible at that point in time, taking into account the evolving COVID context and community capacity. Providing multiple options for engagement is more important than ever. Many of our projects have pursued hybrid approaches that pair opportunities for real-time virtual conversations (synchronous options) with the ability to access information and provide input at any time that is convenient (asynchronous options). We simultaneously have been seeking to balance virtual engagement with no-tech options. Below are two examples of new methods of creative virtual engagement our team has developed and lessons we have learned.

ENGAGEMENT

FORT POINT RESILIENT OPEN SPACE CONCEPT PLAN:

Storytelling-Based Children & Families Engagement FORT POINT TEAM: Zach Chrisco, Jill Allen Dixon, Elaine Minjy Limmer, Laura Marett, Lanmuzhi Yang, Martin Zogran Special thanks to The American City Coalition, BPDA, and translators Fatuma Hassan and Gabriela Herrera

On February 29, 2020, our team gathered at Artists for Humanity for an open community workshop, listening to feedback about 6 acres of new parks along the Fort Point Channel. Simultaneously, we launched an online survey with the same materials and feedback questions. Over the coming weeks, as we monitored the online survey results and began to analyze what we learned at the open house, COVID quickly closed down nearly all aspects of daily life. Over the summer, in-person engagement continued to remain on pause, so we began discussing how to gather broader input on the parks, focusing on who was underrepresented in feedback gathered so far. We hoped to hear from Roxbury and Dorchester children and their families about what would be desirable in the future waterfront parks. We are especially thankful for The American City Coalition (TACC) who surveyed their contacts to gather input on how a virtual event could be most accessible: a smaller group discussion over Zoom in English, Spanish, and Somalian that would be engaging from the start and not feel like homework. TACC co-facilitated the event with Sasaki and the BPDA. The virtual event became an interactive, “choose your own adventure” style of activity. This storytelling-based approach, brought to life with imaginative graphics, let the audience identify their desired ideal future park. At the end, the audience could see the future park they had designed together and imagine a fun day along the Fort Point Channel.

LESSONS LEARNED: 1. Gather input about how to make the event most accessible and engaging (time of day, translation, platform, group size, how to advertise, participation incentives, etc.). The feedback we learned from TACC’s conversations was instrumental in all aspects of the design of the event. 2. Make it fun! The storytelling-style event prompted a lively, engaging conversation, with children and families sharing what they wanted to see in the future parks. From floating homes to fish (floating wetlands), to a fountain to play in, to large grassy areas to run around in under the shade and with spaces to gather with friends and family, in parks that felt safe and welcoming overall. The discussion brought lots of smiles, laughs, and great ideas! 3. Make it meaningful. Time is precious; ensure input from participants will meaningfully shape the plan and find meaningful ways to say “thank you.” With TACC’s support, participants in this event received vouchers for a future waterfront adventure day with kayak rental. The input from the families actively shaped many aspects of the future parks: creating a place where families could spend the whole day; what activities and programs should be included; the importance of accessible transportation options including free parking; clarity of public access; affordable food options and picnic tables and grills; presence of diverse staff in future public spaces; supporting park infrastructure like restrooms, water fountains, shade, and benches; and importantly a park that would draw and be welcoming to black families.

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“I appreciate that the pandemic didn’t reduce people’s enthusiasm for envisioning their future parks; on the contrary, being apart has made more people realize the importance of public spaces. Various formats of interactive virtual workshops have made it easier than ever for people to access and participate in the discussion.” —LANMUZHI YANG, LANDSCAPE DESIGNER

During the interactive virtual session and discussion, families shared their preferred activities for the new Fort Point parks, with a strong preference for places to enjoy fish/wildlife, play in a waterfront fountain, and relax and have fun with family and friends in shady, grassy areas. A great range of multigenerational activities in close proximity to one another was a common theme. (Graphics by Lanmuzhi Yang)

ENGAGEMENT

Users could scroll between existing and proposed images of campus, and learn more about key ideas by clicking on icons for more information.

The website was an accessible way for both campus and city community members to participate in the planning process. Compared to an in-person open house, the website allowed participants to participate from anywhere and at any time, increasing access to sharing feedback.

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UC Berkeley Virtual Open Houses UC BERKELEY VIRTUAL OPEN HOUSE TEAM: Raj Adi Raman, Kanna Atarashi, Diane Athaide, Caitlyn Clauson, Jill Allen Dixon, Timothy Gale, Ken Goulding, Chanwoo Kim, Kai Ying Lau, Elaine Minjy Limmer, Shannon Hasenfratz, Laura Marrett, Patrick Murray, Paul Schlapobersky, Ann Tai, Eric Youngberg, Renyi Zhang

With large in-person meetings postponed for the foreseeable future, we have been experimenting with how to bring similar experiences into the virtual world. Websites, with some creativity, can offer engaging experiences to share information about a current planning process and gather community input. Over the past year, we have designed two virtual open houses as part of the UC Berkeley Campus Master Plan and Long-Range Development Plan processes. These virtual open houses replaced in-person events that were originally planned. In the end, the two websites made the process accessible to a greater number of people than typically would have been expected to attend in-person open houses. The first virtual open house shared key analysis findings, and the second open house shared emerging “big ideas” for the Campus Master Plan. Both provided a range of interactive questions including: selecting preferred styles of collaboration spaces, imagining experiences along Strawberry Creek, prioritizing investment across potential projects, and designing what should be included in your ideal interdisciplinary hub. The data received from the first open house helped identify key priorities for the Campus Master Plan, including increasing sustainability and resilience, creating a more inclusive campus, providing increased housing, and improving outdoor spaces. The second open house recently closed, and we are now in the process of analyzing the feedback received.

LESSONS LEARNED: 1. Pair interactive design with intuitive navigation: Attention spans are shorter online, so prioritize visual content and bite-sized text blurbs. The amount of content you can expect someone to digest is probably less than you could share in an in-person meeting. Edit, edit, edit! Leverage the online experience to build in interactive elements; animated diagrams or maps that layer in new information as someone scrolls can explain key ideas and hold someone’s interest. The experience of navigating the website should be easy to follow so a user knows where they have been and where to go next to provide their input. We landed on a single scroll design where the user proceeds through the meeting by scrolling down. 2. Design for accessibility: Ensure color contrast is sufficiently high and add alt text to images so website visitors with screen readers can understand visual content, too. 3. Gamify participation: Build moments of fun into the experience. The Strategies team designed the Berkeley website so users collected jewels by participating in each interactive question. Give it a try to see what surprise users found at the end! ◆

TRY OUT THE VIRTUAL OPEN HOUSES: First Virtual Open House Second Virtual Open House

STRATEGIES The separation between our virtual and digital worlds became smaller than ever over the past year. From advances in machine learning to an almost universal familiarity with digital tools for collaboration, the ability to use data and technology to describe, analyze and imagine physical futures has become increasingly accessible. In 2020, we experimented with new tools and questioned existing design practices in an effort to understand how designers and planners can use data and technology to ask smarter questions and reveal deeper insights.

STRATEGIES — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

MACHINE LEARNING FOR DESIGN RESEARCH TEAM:

ADVISORS:

SPONSORING PRINCIPAL:

Raj Adi Raman, Justin Kollar, Scott Penman, Kai Ying Lau, Sourav Biswas

Laura Marett, Jill Allen Dixon, Paul Schlapobersky

Ken Goulding

Introduction As designers, we understand that the sketch and the rendering—alongside a myriad of other representational strategies—often tell the story of the exact same design, only in different ways. On the one hand, we have imagery that is quick, and loose, and focused on asking questions. On the other hand, we have imagery that leaves far less room for interpretation, and is instead intended to convey a particular designed aesthetic outward.

are far more nuanced. How do you add an aesthetic character to an image—a mood, impression, atmosphere, or feeling—and is that a task that can be performed by a machine? Can we use recent advances in machine learning to begin to fill in the blanks between representations, in a way that captures aesthetic character? If so, what role might that ability play both in how we communicate our designs and how we engage the design process itself?

Much of the time, getting from one representation to another doesn’t actually involve adding any resolution to the design—rather, it involves an act of translation from one image to the other. This translation sometimes involves routine tasks—adding color, lighting, texture, or context— many of which designers have already grown accustomed to offloading to algorithms. Other translation tasks, however,

In this research project, we explore this question, investigating what it means to capture a recognizable urban aesthetic using only a sketch. In addition to training a machine learning model to generate the imagery, we also prototype an interactive sketch tool that can be used during the design process to quickly visualize the results of early, exploratory design, in the form of easily-recognizable aerial imagery.

During the typical design process, various representations are used, either to quickly capture a new idea, or to showcase an intended aesthetic. While the representations themselves seem vastly different, they often capture the same underlying design intent.

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Machine learning (ML) can broadly be understood as the ability of machines to learn and improve from experience, without explicit programming. While there are numerous areas of machine learning research, it is often found in situations where machines are making sense of the world by classifying different objects. These models typically focus on fairly easilyclassified objects, such as faces, cars, or traffic lights.

Process EXPERT INTERVIEWS Just how, where, and why machine learning gets integrated into practice, however, requires more than just ease of use. To address this question, we turned to several researchers operating at the intersection of machine learning and design. Through a series of interviews and discussions, we identified several key questions to ask when considering how and whether to pursue the adoption of machine learning workflows. These questions look at both the purpose and the potential of machine learning systems, acknowledging that while all of the necessary data sets and components must be available, it is also critical to understand exactly why machine learning is being used: Î Is enough data available to train? Î Is the problem novel and interesting? Î Does the problem solve a business case? Î Can the problem be tested easily? Î Is the proposed solution open source (not proprietary)? With this list, we created a checklist that enabled us to determine the most viable research direction.

STRATEGIES — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORKS Based on the expert interviews, we devised a decision matrix to help narrow our testing of various machine learning approaches. This highlighted the advantage of focusing on a particular type of machine learning model: Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs. GANs are a relatively recent innovation in machine learning in which two different models are pitted against each other in an adversarial battle. A popular analogy is to refer to these two models as an art forger and an art expert; for the purposes of our context, we will refer to them as a design student and a design critic. In our analogy, the design student generates work, and the design critic evaluates that work and decides if it is acceptable or not. If the critic rejects it, the student returns to the drawing board, creates new and improved work, and presents it again. This cycle repeats until the student is able to generate work that passes the critic’s standards. The two models are competing, or “adversarial,” in the sense that the student is always trying to surpass the critic’s standards, and the critic is always trying to pick apart the student’s work.

GAN ARCHITECTURE The generator (design student) produces synthetic images. The discriminator (design critic) takes images as input and outputs the probability it assigns to the image of being real.

This cycle repeats until the student is able to generate work that passes the critic’s standards. In our project everything remains the same except for the data source, which changes from design to map tiles.

PIX2PIX After testing a few tools and algorithms, we decided to use Pix2Pix, an image to image translation algorithm. Source: https://phillipi.github.io/pix2pix/

An example where Pix2Pix is used to map images on an urban scale.

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GAN TRAINING AND GENERATION The objective of training and testing GANs is to generate new maps without much input. In other words, our goal is to fill in the gaps of a map without providing much detail. To train the GAN, we first picked a map style which we need to train (the minimalistic pink and blue with just streets and roads). Then, we mapped this with corresponding

aerial imagery. During training, the machine learns how to interpret features like color, shape, and textures on a map. In the image below, we see how the GAN is trained, and on the right, we can see how the new imagery is generated. It’s not completely accurate, but gaps are filled—buildings, streets, trees, and even shadows are generated.

DATA SOURCES Having the data & choosing the right data source is vital for our project. Sometimes this can be a challenge, especially in international projects or developing countries. Since we decided to go with map images in our research, we took the same information and represented it in multiple different classification layers, which are spatially aligned. This way it was also much easier to find these data.

STRATEGIES — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

Machine Learning in Practice GAN GENERATING NEW AERIAL FOR A LAND USE LAND COVER MAP The image below shows new aerial imagery generated for a land use land cover map. The model was trained on Boston and applied on Worcester. We can see here how close the prediction is compared to the actual satellite imagery. Housing, streets, open spaces, trees, and shadows are generated. In fact, the original satellite image doesn’t have trees as it was taken during winter, but the predicted image has trees and shadows.

EMBEDDED ANIMATION

GAN generating new aerial imagery for a land use land cover map

SASAKI

Details of the GAN predictions for a land use land cover map

STRATEGIES — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

URBAN BLOCK STUDY: DETAILED COMPARISON

Here the model was trained on Barcelona and tested on Boston. As we can see how the housing pattern has transformed into bigger grids. The pink and blue map’s gaps are filled with the Barcelona fabric. We can even see the colors, texture, and spacing have changed.

GROUND TRUTH

GAN model trained on Barcelona and tested on Boston

URBAN BLOCK STUDY: BOSTELONA The first image below is Cambridgeport, Boston. In the second image, the Barcelonian fabric has been applied on top of it. You can see the trademark grids of Barcelona, the texture, and the city’s rustic color. Again if you look closely, there are going to be a few weird shapes or new patterns, but it does not have to be perfect—the main goal is to generate new impressions. We call this newly generated city Bostelona!

Cambridgeport (Boston)

Bostelona (transformed Barcelonian style)

TEST INPUT

PREDICTION

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CONTEXT WITH BUILDING FOOTPRINTS In this study, the primary variable was the presence of building footprints in the segmentation map. With these studies, the source cities for the training data and testing data were kept close to each other, with the understanding that impressions of these neighboring areas would be similar. The goal of these studies was to determine if adding object-level detail (building footprints) had a significant impact on the generated images. The predictions were close to ground truth. Buildings, street networks, trees, shadows etc. were close to real. While building footprints did add visual accuracy to the resulting urban impressions, they didn’t necessarily make impressions that were more useful than what could be achieved with simpler methods. The specificity tradeoff evaluation here indicates that building footprints add accuracy, but are not required in order to generate compelling urban impressions.

TEST INPUT

PREDICTION

Mapbox imagery—trained on Boston, predicted on Worcester

STRATEGIES — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

Northern and Southern Boynton Beach, Florida

URBAN PATTERN STUDY This study was based on basic geometric, visually-apparent properties of urban fabric, as opposed to categorized and labeled information. Rather than study block sizes, however, we attempted to see if overly “patterned” urban conditions—e.g., highly planned communities with repetitive constructions and little visual variation—would be enough to capture an impression. The assumption in these studies was that while organically-grown cities include a significant amount of variability in their urban fabric, more planned developments are incredibly repetitive, and that these patterns would be easily picked up either by the repetition of shapes in the segmentation map or by the model’s unscripted behavior.

For this study, we focused on the communities of Northern and Southern Boynton Beach, Florida, and used a segmentation map from OpenStreetMap that included building footprints and was color-coded according to low, medium, and high density buildings. The urban impressions fared well with entirely blank areas, such as constructed ponds, and occasionally produced convincing impressions of green areas, but consistently failed to produce impressions of buildings that appeared believable, or interesting. Visual artefacts that might otherwise have gone unnoticed in an impression of a lessregular urban area here became clear signs of artifice.

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GROUND TRUTH

TEST INPUT

Trained on Northern Boynton Beach, FL Predicted/ Applied Southern Boynton Beach, FL

PREDICTION

Low Density

Medium Density

High Density

Water

Roads

Other

The Urban Pattern Studies highlight an important nuance in this work: While open-ended, impressionistic imagery can be useful for sparking creative imagination, it can also easily become too impressionistic for viewers to read or engage with. The results of these studies, while interesting, did not pass the visual quality check, and the resulting discussions around the urban impressions focused on the technical issues underlying the model and the lack of availability of better data rather than the possibilities around urban planning or design possibilities.

STRATEGIES — 2020 RESEARCH GRANT

SKETCH TOOL As the user starts to sketch on a new area the model predicts and generates corresponding aerial imagery. As we can see when the user starts to draw a green rectangle on the Land Cover Land Use map, the model generates an open space. White lines are getting transformed to pathways.

As the user draws green pixels on the map, the model recognizes them as open space, and begins to generate an impression of trees and shrubs. Drawing white pixels along the green space causes the model to generate pathways. Yellow pixels are interpreted as low density housing, leading to houses in the corresponding urban impression. When pale red pixels are sketched, the model recognizes them as commercial buildings. Notably, the urban impression contains nuanced details that were not drawn by the user, such as shadows next to the trees and buildings.

EMBEDDED ANIMATION A demo/vaporware of our sketch tool

SASAKI

A step-by-step sequence of the sketch tool

STRATEGIES

ZARU Ken Goulding, Kai Ying Lau, Alykhan Mohamed

An MCDA performed for Herat, Afghanistan, considers a large number of factors in identifying likely growth scenarios. Weightings can be adjusted on the fly to consider their impact on the model.

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) in GIS has been a powerful way to come to terms with the complexity of urban environments and help discover patterns of use or potential change. However, while existing GIS tools provide robust methods for running MCDAs, many of the decisions can be arbitrary and often have to be made by technical specialists who may lack the contextual knowledge for choosing meaningful values. These early decisions can have profound impacts on the model and subsequent conclusions and recommendations. It is also difficult to know which inputs are the most “volatile”—have the biggest impact on the outputs—and therefore require the most careful tuning (and research). Many iterations may be required to tune the models, but this is a slow process and requires expert knowledge. Zaru is a new system for creating dynamic real-time map visualizations and dashboards. Zaru takes advantage of the latest graphics hardware and leverages tricks for data organization invented at Sasaki to streamline navigation, querying, and representation of massive data sets. Zaru’s power lets us withhold final decisions on arbitrary weightings until we can more fully understand their impacts. A simple web interface removes technical requirements and allows subject experts to manipulate the models directly and understand the implications more fully.

The Parks & Equity explorer allows the relationship between race and income to be compared to the need for access to different park amenities. One can explore which communities have specific needs met. This screenshot example considers being able to bike no more than 10 minutes to a good basketball court and walk no more than 10 minutes to a high quality park. The colored “windows” show who has both these needs met, while grayed-out areas show where one or both of these needs are not met by public amenities in parks.

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EMBEDDED ANIMATION

STRATEGIES

COMFORT HOURS Ken Goulding, Scott Penman, Kai Ying Lau

Our ability to design active public spaces and economically vibrant places assumes that those spaces will be enjoyable to experience. How do we ensure that those spaces are comfortable to inhabit for as much time as possible? Conventional shadow studies let us look at where sun and shade fall on a design. But how do sun and shade really affect the way we experience design? At a basic level, we can assume that shadows are good in summer and sun is better in winter, but many metrics contribute to our sense of comfort in ways that may not always be obvious at first glance. Metrics like the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) are similar to the “feels like” index we know from weather reports, factoring in sun, shade, humidity, cloudiness, and

wind speeds. When we take UTCI into account, we can identify whether a design is likely to be comfortable for the given conditions. This lets us determine a key performance indicator for sun and shade: we simply seek to maximize comfort across the full year. Unlike shadow studies where it’s difficult to know whether one design performs better than another, counting the number of “comfort hours” gives us an easy way to know which option is better designed for sun and shade. Once we can articulate what the targets are for the design, we can provide meaningful feedback on design performance and clear strategies for improvement.

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The first step is to use climate data and our understanding of the likely local site conditions to determine a clear strategy for sun and shade. As these examples show, different cities across the world require varying strategies for sun and shade.

Design strategies can be simply articulated in design tools (Boston shown). Blue points represent shading strategy for the chosen study point on the ground.

Remaining blue points represent angles successfully shaded.

Yellow points represent priority angles for allowing sun to reach the chosen study point on the ground.

Remaining yellow points represent angles successfully “sunned.”

STRATEGIES

EMBEDDED ANIMATION

RAPID FIRST PERSON EXPERIENCE ANALYSIS Ken Goulding, David Morgan, Scott Penman, Kai Ying Lau, Timothy Gale

As designers of the public realm with a broad reach, we profoundly impact the experience of millions of people across the globe. While designing, we try to put ourselves in the environment and think about what the experience would be. However the scale and complexity of many designs makes it difficult to take the perspective of so many potential experiences. We realized that certain aspects of the experience can be measured—for example what can be visually perceived at a given point—and that once we could quantify the views, we could better understand impacts and potential throughout the design.

Our rapid first person eXperience Analysis (XA) takes advantage of modern hardware, clocking around 200 million “looks” every second. We use the Speckle platform to pipe our geometry into the Unity Game Engine and then take advantage of a Compute Shader to count how many pixels of a given “view target” can be seen from any of thousands of study points—each representing a moment of experience. When we can quantify aspects of the human experience, we can take advantage of computational power to increase our ability to empathize more broadly across the design environment, understand the changing dynamics across a site, and adjust our designs accordingly.

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Each point represents a location for an experience—in this case views from likely window positions on each floor of the buildings. The points are color-coded according to how much of a central park (not shown) can be seen from that position (best views shown in green).

Positions along major corridors have been analyzed to understand the experience of approaching the main campus at CU Boulder

All outdoor points on the CU Boulder campus are analyzed to better understand where mountain views are available. Views to large, distant objects like mountains can be hard to guess intuitively given the complexity of 3D obstruction and varied terrain.

STRATEGIES

DENSITY ATLAS Mary Anne Ocampo, Ken Goulding, Martin Zogran, Victor Eskinazi, Alexander J Boccon-Gibod, Julian Osorio, Timothy Gale, and Shourya Jain, in collaboration with Tunney Lee and MIT DUSP

The year 2008 marked the point when the world population shifted from a majority of rural dwellers to urban dwellers. American cities are experiencing a revival of their centers and an exploration of denser suburbs. As discussions of “how dense to build” arise, they often include misconceptions of what constitutes a “dense” neighborhood. “Density” is a blunt expression that misses the nuances of urban design and social elements that contribute to a neighborhood’s desirability. To help the discussion, the Density Atlas was developed as a resource to compare urban settlements using a standard metric and scale system. These comparisons allow planners, architects, developers, and students to understand the implications of population, building footprints, and urban design in residential densities across the world. The Density Atlas has more than 120 case studies of what density can look like in three distinct scales: district, neighborhood, and block, that will help inform decisions regarding our built environment. This study came about partly from discussions in Professor Tunney Lee’s planning and design studios in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP.) Often, faculty and students struggled with defining density for a specific development. In researching the topic and looking for precedents, they found that most studies focus on density at the city and district scales, but few at the neighborhood level. Also, the varying metrics and scales used by each study generally led to ill-informed comparisons and conclusions. In 2019, the Density Atlas was handed over from MIT DUSP to Sasaki for stewardship and improvement. This resulted in a fully redesigned website with expanded capabilities for exploring and comparing case studies. Future enhancements will include new visualization methods as well as the ability to crowdsource within Sasaki new cases based on our own projects. Densityatlas.org is set to go online this Spring.

SASAKI

View the Density Atlas website here

Case studies in the Density Atlas allow users to compare density metrics in cities around the world

THE SASAKI FOUNDATION The Sasaki Foundation fosters equity and inclusion by engaging diverse populations in the design of the built environment. The Foundation sponsors research and public programs to empower communities in design dialogues and processes, and supports design education for diversifying the professional pipeline.

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Learn more about the Sasaki Foundation’s Mobility Innovator initiative Learn more about the Barr Foundation’s mobility projects

get [t]here The Sasaki Foundation, in partnership with Sasaki, created get [t]here. This website explores the challenges of mobility access in Gateway Cities around Greater Boston, specifically in Lynn and Malden. Through an interactive survey circulated in fall 2020, get [t]here provided community members an opportunity to express their mobility priorities and observe how projects and policies can support their needs. The team summarized the results of these needs in an online story map that indicates which priorities, projects, and policies could be most impactful to each community. The team then overlaid existing datasets to the online map to highlight potential strategies and opportunities for improving those conditions. We hope this tool can align expressed needs with investment opportunities and muster the political will to equitably invest in mobility infrastructure in communities that have historically lacked, or been denied, quality mobility infrastructure. get [t]here is part of the Mobility Innovator Initiative, a project funded by the Barr Foundation and in partnership with Sasaki that seeks to understand how to better connect communities of color and low-income communities to jobs, social networks, daily needs, and amenities by improving and augmenting existing and emerging transportation networks. It explores how to better leverage technology to identify gaps in current mobility options, including bike and pedestrian pattern analysis and public safety of mobility choices. The project also investigates how amenity-oriented development can achieve a higher share of retail, food, service, entertainment, and social trips on foot.

2019 RESEARCH GRANT: PARKS & EQUITY ATLAS PROJECT UPDATE Jill Allen Dixon, Kai Ying Lau, Elaine Minjy Limmer, Laura Marett, Raj Adi Raman, Ken Goulding, Anastasia Lyons

Over the past year, our research team has continued to deepen our understanding of equitable access to parks. The pandemic has reinforced the importance of walkable access to quality open spaces and shed further light on the unfair disparities in access in many communities. We have focused this year on mapping access disparities, highlighting areas within communities that are statistically over-served or under-served for park acreage per capita and analyzing who lives in these areas. Analyzing park access in 19 cities, we have found significant disparities in access along racial/ethnic lines. We are now comparing these patterns to historic park system design, former redlined areas1, and current trends in neighborhood change2, including both growing areas of concentrated poverty to zones of gentrification and displacement. We are seeking to illuminate who is enjoying great park access and who is disproportionately left out, while also studying the origins of these trends and ongoing contributing factors. A few snapshots of our in-progress research follow.

1. Data source: Mapping Inequality, a collaboration of research teams, professors, and students from the University of Richmond, Virginia Tech, University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-94.58 2. Data source: Neighborhood Change in the 21st Century. University of Minnesota - Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity. https://myottetm.github.io/ USMapBoxIMO/USLwDispConc.html and https://www.law.umn.edu/gentrification-and-decline-about-web-map-data

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HIGH AND LOW ACCESS AREAS In many cities, races/ethnicities who disproportionately live more often in high access areas are also living less often in low access areas, exacerbating disparities in park access. For example, in Minneapolis and Buffalo, white residents are over-represented in high park access areas by 14% and 43% respectively, and under-represented in low park access areas (-18% and -22%). Meanwhile, the opposite is true for black residents in both cities, who live less often in high park access areas (-15% and -63%) and more often in low park access areas (+26% and +37%). Similar patterns exist in 60% of the 19 cities we studied. METHODOLOGY 1. Map areas of statistically high and low access within each city. Park access is defined as park acreage/capita calculated by looking at the population within a 10 minute walk and the size of the park. It also takes into account if a Census Block is within a 10 minute walk of multiple parks. 2. Quantify the number of residents of each race/ethnicity living in high and low access areas. 3. Compare this to the number of residents expected to live in high and low access areas if the high and low access areas had the same population distribution as the city as a whole. Calculate the percent difference in expected and observed for each race/ethnicity. For example, in New Orleans, 55% of residents living in high park access areas are white, compared to only 32% of the citywide population. This difference is 70% more white residents living in high access areas than would be expected based on the citywide population.3

3. Data sources: ACS 5-year estimates (2013-2017), Decennial Census 2010, TPL ParkServe national database of parks, and Sasaki geospatial analysis of areas within each city with statistically high park acreage and low park acreage.

2021 RESEARCH GRANTS

Campus For All | For All Campuses Team: Gwendolyn Sands, Shannon Hasenfratz, Kanna Atarashi, Sarah Bush, Ilka Lin, Philip Bruso, Rong Cong, Kai Ying Lau

these goals, from the creation of affinity group spaces to implementing campus-wide inclusive design measures that convey specific narratives about what an institution values.

Advising Principals: Mary Anne Ocampo, Caitlyn Clauson

The Campus For All | For All Campuses research project aims to answer the question: How can we make all university and college campuses more inclusive by learning from those that primarily serve historically marginalized communities today? Higher-ed institutions across the U.S. are implementing anti-racism measures alongside making progress toward broader inclusion goals to better serve their communities. There is a role for planning and design in addressing

Universities and colleges that primarily serve historically marginalized or underrepresented communities within higher education have been working since their founding to create spaces, programs, and policies that support diverse campus communities. Campus For All | For All Campuses proposes a deep-dive into understanding how these institutions’ campuses, design processes, and philosophies create welcoming environments. Findings will inform the development of an inclusion framework that may guide all future campus projects.

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Nutrition, Wellness, and Future of Food Team: Kelly Farrell, Sally Ostendorf, Marissa Lisec Advisors: Michael Grove, Bill Massey, Ivelisse Otero, Henry Gordon Smith, Alex Rudnicki, Dr. Dari Mozaffarian, Stu Orefice

Over the last century, the U.S. food production and distribution system has been directed towards the goal of providing an adequate supply of food to our citizens while supplementing staples with vitamins and nutrients. In doing so, we have significantly curbed the rates of starvation and diseases related to malnutrition. However, with that has come the overuse of commoditized ingredients that have detrimental effects to our mental and physical health, as well as harmful impacts to our planet. The good news is the system is currently changing. Food production, food delivery, food awareness and food experience directly impact numerous spectrums of our work at Sasaki. This research initiative will provide an in-depth review of the food industry,nutrition, and the cultural associations we all have with food; we will then examine how this collective understanding of food systems and culture impacts our work, looking at past, current, and forward-looking trends for food policy, production, and delivery.

Our research will be undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of Sasaki landscape architects and architects, and we will engage several industry experts who focus on food policy, farming, and nutrition. We will focus on three specific themes that directly impact our work: Theme 1: Agriculture, Land Use, and the Urban Context Theme 2: Nutrition, Health and Human Performance Theme 3: Community, Dining and Personal / Cultural Identity How can we as an industry positively influence the realm of design specifically as it relates to the integration of food in our work? We will evaluate and make bold predictions (and suggestions) on the future of food, particularly related to the direct impact food has on physical health; mental wellbeing; the balance of our ecosystem;and the physical spaces related to food on campuses, in our communities, and in our homes. The results of our research will inform and improve our work related to dining, athletics, community learning, site design, and sustainability.

A working Miro board displays some of the ideas currently being generated by the Mass Timber: Retooling Design for a Low-Carbon Future team

Mass Timber: Retooling Design for a Low-Carbon Future Team: Carla Ceruzzi, Shaelena Morley Bigelow, Vinicius Gorgati, Matthew Petrie, Marta Guerra Collaborators: Justin Finnicum, Amherst College; Mike Frechette, Bonnet Springs Park; Tamar Warburg

We (and our clients) know that the cross-laminated timber (CLT) structural system has low embodied carbon and can reduce floor-to-floor heights, finish costs, and construction duration; it’s popular in Europe, but is not widely used on the East Coast. Developing our knowledge about this system is the first step towards reaping its environmental and constructionschedule benefits. CLT is seen as expensive and challenging in our market because there are too many unknowns, but we can begin to find answers to some of these unknowns and to confidently recommend and use CLT. The team is using prototypes to study cross-laminated timber and other mass-timber structural systems to better understand their technical and cost parameters and design possibilities—focusing on three areas: MARKET Collaborate with engineers, construction managers, and CLT companies to understand real constraints and opportunities related to cost, schedule, and procurement in this market.

DESIGN Understand spans, structural systems, code, finishes, etc. What is an ideal CLT structure? What are the limit cases at which the system is no longer advantageous? This line of investigation will be overlaid with a typological study of housing (student, market rate), office/lab, and academic buildings. CARBON Use Tally to run embodied-carbon comparisons with other common structural systems, in coordination with Sasaki’s in-house Sustainability Task Force. Architects working on projects implementing CLT, like the Amherst Student Center and Bonnet Springs Park Event Center, will serve as advisors to share real-time, real-life lessons and information on this system. Our ultimate goal is to be able to advise our clients on costeffective ways to incorporate mass timber into a variety of project types and, ultimately, help reduce the embodied carbon of our projects.

SASAKI

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