Big Data Informed Urban Design and Governance aims to develop a framework to support urban planning, urban design, and urban management with five work streams: urban governance, cognitive design computing, urban complexity, citizen design science and evidence informed urban design.

The project begins with data-mining for various types of geo-referenced data, such as socio-economic data of people, land use, infrastructure networks, mobility traces and emotional responses. Correlations detected through data-mining procedures are added to the urban model to describe the complex urban system in more detail. By investigating correlations between spatial configurations and behavioural phenomena, the project looks for contextual effects for their future usage and function that certain spatial configurations can have.

Big Data Informed Urban Design and Governance fundamentally improves the understanding and utilisation of urban data.

While information derived from Big Data makes urban planners and designers more informed and aware, it will also strengthen the role of design as an activity that sets goals beyond past evidence, in the future. The project supports the formalisation of expert knowledge for the design and decision making processes. On the applied research level, it integrates the methods developed by the team into an interactive planning support system, which, by visualising planning effects differently, provides a tool for designers, politicians, citizens, and other stakeholders.

In the scope of the project, the strategy of Citizen Design Science was developed as a participation strategy for involving citizens in the planning process. Several use cases such as the Waterfront Tanjong Pagar scenario or Keong Saik Design Station have been used to test the outreach to citizens, the application of citizen design science tools (such as the Quick Urban Analysis Kit (qua-kit)) and the evaluation of the crowd-sourced data. The methods range from UI optimisation of tool interfaces to outreach strategies and method comparison for data analysis of Citizen Design Science experiments.

The methodological approach is described in Future Cities Lab Indicia 02 and Indicia 03 book series. Several journal articles have been published describing the theoretical framework, the outreach and data analysis of citizen design science experiments.