Have you ever looked at architectural illustrations, showing relaxed people happily interacting with their built environment, all distributed evenly across the landscape, and thought; that’s not how our buildings and cities actually look. The truth is that many buildings have one busy entrance/exit and another that is not used; cities have a crowded street next to an empty street, with both linking the same locations. Until recently we designed our built environment with the best intentions and hoped they would be used as planned. We try to anticipate the behaviour of crowds and design to account for those characteristics, but we never know how people will interact with spaces until they are constructed and used. Crowd simulation software may have been around for more than 25 years and is often backed up by academic research and empirical observation, but we still design and hope. However, a recent technology integration gives us unprecedented insight into the […]