Data is the language of modern business. It is so fundamental to the twenty-first-century economy that some have called it the new oil – a crude by-product of our digital lives that is streaming through our internet routers, sloshing about in our smartphones, and fuelling the growth of the world’s largest companies.
All of this data has one crucial purpose: decision-making. Which news story should be shown first on the Facebook feed? Which investment strategy yields the best returns? What will happen to hospital capacity during the pandemic? These are all decisions that benefit from the empirical evidence that data offers.
Which makes you wonder: if data is crucial to modern business, where does this leave architecture firms?
Most architects don’t have a natural fondness for data. They’re moved by sketches, not statistics. They’re comfortable making decisions intuitively and often look incredulously at the spreadsheets that developers
