Mike Sewell Senior Strategist
Gresham Smith
USA

BiographyMike Sewell is an owner at Gresham Smith, a full-service architecture and engineering firm, where he serves as the senior strategist for their Studio X incubator. Mike brings more than 20 years of experience in the planning, design, and implementation of infrastructure projects. His work in advocacy led him to be invited to testify in front of Congress in the spring of 2019 where he served on a panel as a bicycle and pedestrian planning subject matter expert. This effort has also further tied him to helping to direct through written correspondence the upcoming transportation bills, which will have a renewed focus on safety for active transportation users. He also co-authored the widely used National Cooperation Highway Research Program (NCHRP) 880, which focuses on providing the appropriate balance of service and safety for all users. His recent work on an empathic data analytics platform focused on user experience won Architect Magazines 2020 R+D award. AbstractI have developed a new platform and process that couples biometric data with location to calculate user stresses in the real world. This is critically important as we try to facilitate the best use of construction dollars to maximize positive impact and perception by the communities and people we design for. This presentation will showcase the visualization of stress' role in our environment. Environments that cause stress can put up barriers, force us into bad decisions, and yield a higher probability of crashes. These environments also begin to tell us a story of how different people with different backgrounds respond to the same setting. We are also now able to begin to register how inequality, modal disparity and cognition influence our transportation systems. This will showcase new datasets and processes that help to identify stress and how we are responding to certain settings so that we can begin to design better, more inviting and safer streets for everyone. For the first time in the history of our professions as architects, planners and engineers, we can now quantify emotional response and stress and start to design better spaces for people to move through and to. We are now seeing scenario cases emerging from the data that helps to explain why people do what they do, and in turn we have a better basis for the justification and defense for specific multimodal best practices. Using data analytics coupled with location from this new process can help to serve as the foundation for safer, profitable and more enjoyable spaces for everyone.