Sidewalk Labs
Cities are about people. Whenever Sidewalk Labs improves the human experience, Sidewalk improves the city. Therefore, Sidewalk seek to combine forward thinking-urban design and cutting-edge technology to radically improve urban life, in Toronto and around the world.
Team
Violet Whitney
Violet Whitney is the Product Manager for Generative Design at Sidewalk Labs and also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where she teaches urban data analytics courses. Brian Ho
Brian Ho is a Product Designer for Generative Design at Sidewalk Labs. An interdisciplinary designer with a background in architecture and technology, Brian focuses on making both the built environment and urban systems better for people. Difei Betty Chen
Difei Betty Chen is a Computational Designer at Sidewalk Labs. With a background in architecture, urban design and computation, Betty focuses on using simulation and computation to improve architectural and urban design. Other Team Members
Exhibition
Generating Greener Cities
19 Dec 2019 - 15 Mar 2020
10:00 - 22:00
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THE MILLS
Urban planning and design has to grapple with a plethora of complex issues, it is difficult to design cities holistically or to see a well-rounded view of how a decision impacts many aspects of a city.
By synthesizing diverse data inputs, performing multi-objective optimization at scale, and visualizing resulting urban master plan scenarios in real time.
Sidewalk Labs’s Generative Design tool has enormous potential for creating a holistic sustainable urban planning process. Technically, this project advances the state of the art in several key areas including:
- Enabling dynamic interaction through tangible media and physical interfaces;
- Visualizing complex high-dimensional decision spaces;
- Showing externalities of a design decision in a format understandable across industries.
Practically, Generative Design promotes sustainability by making urban planning: more holistic, more performance driven, more creative.
The biennale installation will emphasize those features—dynamic interaction and real-time visualization—that allow multiple citizen stakeholders to participate in the design of their cities through legible and accessible computation.
