Using data to drive design, with Bonnie Shaw
Throughout her career, Bonnie has leveraged emerging technologies and machine learning, community-powered innovation, and experience design, to drive transformative change. Trained as a landscape architect and urban designer, with deep expertise in technology and product, Bonnie is Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder at Place Intelligence. She is focused on delivering automated location and audience intelligence tools to provide analytics and insights for better city decision making.
What do you love about cities?
I love the fact that people have come together and created the cities that we live in over hundreds of years, and we are continually creating them over and over and remaking them every day.
Tell us about a project you’ve worked on that has been most important to you?
It’s the one I'm working on right now. Place Intelligence is using the largest datasets available to support practitioners in the built environment to make evidence-backed decisions.
How did this project/s shape your professional practice?
We live in a VUCA world: it’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We need to use bodies of evidence to support decision making and long-term thinking in the built environment. Data allows us to set ambitious goals to address the massive challenges that we're facing, and then make incremental changes to the plan over time to adapt and hit that goal.
What are the outcomes you strive for in every project?
Like most people, I really want to have an impact in the world and make a difference in people's lives. It's my objective to support practitioners with strong evidence to help them justify decisions and investment in design and high-quality outcomes.
What are the key practices you draw upon to help you achieve these outcomes?
I think about how you bring toolset, skillset, and mindset together at once. So, toolset refers to the data and the tools that you might use to make effective change. Skillset talks to the skills and capabilities to effectively use those tools, and then mindset is looking at the culture that will value the outputs of that work and act. If you have two of those but are missing the third, you run into some major challenges. Also, identifying this in the beginning of a project can save you a lot of pain in the back end.
To be a great ancestor for future generations, what does our sector need to focus on today?
Back in my days in gaming and interactive theatre, we would often use the idea of a future historian as a storytelling device. You can shape the actions of today through the lens of someone coming back and studying your behaviour. It's a wonderful way of putting things into context and perspective. To be a great ancestor for future generations, I think the sector needs to do two things. Technically, we need to cultivate data-based decision making and the use of evidence in planning and design. And, as individuals, we need to manage stress, both in our urban systems, but also in ourselves. Our rapidly growing urban systems are stressed by the climate emergency, the pandemic, and economic pressures. Personal stress, which drives fixed thinking, aggression, and less empathy, needs to be addressed so we can work collaboratively and flexibly and solve our common problems.
“Data allows us to set ambitious goals to address the massive challenges that we’re facing, and then make incremental changes to the plan over time to adapt and hit that goal.”
What has to change or be amplified in our system to make these things a priority?
To build data-based decision-making skills requires a willingness to get started. You don't build muscle by watching someone else lift weights. Pick a low-risk project and have a crack. Frame it as a learning opportunity and anything you get out of it on top of that is gravy. Then do more with people who are smarter than you and keep doing it because it is like any practice, you need to practice. In terms of addressing these big systemic challenges, we're going to need to bring together large coalitions of individuals, organizations, researchers, business and community groups. To make decisions together around common goals – despite vastly different frames of reference, power bases and agendas – will require new collaboration structures and a willingness to face complexity.
What's one piece of advice you would give to emerging urban leaders?
Be curious and open to new things. One thing leads to another and the small decisions that you make today will take you on a path and every day new decisions will slightly alter your path. If you can set a big audacious goal for the future and then make small changes each day, it will help you reach that path.
