Value of Design : Creating Agency Through Data-driven Insights

In the context of architecture and real estate, the value of design--be it financial or social value--remains largely unmeasured, overlooked, and inadequately researched. By failing to acknowledge the potential of design, we miss opportunities to address the wide-ranging social and sustainability challenges at play today.

This book acts as a platform to bridge the gap between design and finance, using empirical research to dissect design into measurable features through data-driven methodologies, with New York City serving as the experimental research site. Novel analytical tools such as AI, machine learning, and natural language processing, along with new forms of data like anonymized mobile phone data, social media data, and image data, unlock new dimensions for gauging the impact of previously immeasurable design elements of the built environment on human behaviors. These novel measurements, when integrated into real estate valuation models, establish a financial benchmark for design, catalyzing a shift in the industry's perspective on the intrinsic worth of design and ensuring that future projects properly account for the qualitative impact of design on economic value and social benefits. As we uncover and quantify the inherent value of design, it becomes possible to persuade key stakeholders--real estate developers, investors, and policy-makers--about the significant returns of thoughtful, sustainable, and human-centric design strategies. In essence, we aim to explore how the amalgamation of design and finance via empirical research and innovative data-driven methodologies can lead to a more integrated and holistic valuation practice.

Dr. Andrea Chegut (1981-2022) was the Founder and Director of the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab, and was Head of Research and a co-founder of MIT's DesignX venture accelerator. Her work centered on the financial performance and economic outcomes of change in the built environment, stemming from design, technology and innovation. Her research identified product innovation with the aid of data science and machine learning techniques to measure how real estate and planning policy can be aligned across stakeholders to create more sustainable, healthy, socially-inclusive and intelligent real estate.

Minkoo Kang is the founder of General Partner Office, a real estate development consulting firm based in Boston. His practice is informed by his international design experiences and local development expertise. He started as a researcher of urban affairs at Strelka Institute in Moscow, then worked as an architect at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam, Doha, Hong Kong, and New York offices. He received his Master's in Real Estate Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Helena Rong is an urbanist, designer, and technologist, whose work leverages design and emerging technologies such as blockchains and AI to foster collective intelligence and resilience in the built environment. She is the founder of CIVIS Design and Advisory, a design and research practice based in Boston and Shanghai that engages in multi-scalar and interdisciplinary projects. She is working on completing her PhD in Urban Planning at Columbia University and will join NYU Shanghai in the Fall of 2024 as an Assistant Professor in Interactive Media Business.


Juncheng "Tony" Yang is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and partner at CIVIS Design and Advisory. He conducts research at the Data-Smart City Solutions at the Harvard Bloomberg Center for Cities and is a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the intersection of institutional arrangements and emerging technologies in "smart city" governance. He received a Master of Science in Urbanism from MIT and a Bachelor of Architecture from Rice University.