Quantifying Quality: Understanding, Evaluating, and Communicating Design Expectations- REGULAR

Quantifying Quality: Understanding, Evaluating, and Communicating Design Expectations

This webinar is part of the RAIC 2023 Conference on Architecture, now available to stream!

Topics: Housing, Planning and Urbanism

Length: 1 hour | What's Included: Video, Quiz, and Certificate of Completion 

Municipal Development Authorities are constantly approving the community plans, infrastructure, architecture and public spaces which collectively form our built environment. A diverse range of factors – contextual, climatic, cultural, technical, economic, and political – are influencing the choices made by owners and applicants around the quality of projects submitted to approving bodies. Building a clearer and more consistent shared understanding among development authorities of what constitutes quality in the built environment, together with consistent communication of expectations, will be one of the keys to achieving higher standards. Building cities and communities which meet public expectations around equity, diversity, inclusivity, sustainability and ultimately quality can only be achieved if we first explore expectations beyond our own. A key to the mission of Urban Design at the City of Calgary is the delivery of quality planning and urban design outcomes. A fundamental barrier to achieving consistently higher quality development outcomes that has become apparent through this work is the lack of a shared understanding of what constitutes a “quality” built environment resulting in varying responses to City policy direction.

The "Quality Project" work included a perception survey of 750 individuals of varied professional disciplines which collected responses to contrasting images of architecture, public realm, and streetscapes, with surprisingly inconsistent results. Underscoring the subjectivity of the topic, this range of interpretations highlighted a lack of clarity around City policy which sets design expectations. To understand whether developing clarified expectations would result in positive changes in submission quality an evaluation system, the “Quality Monitoring Program” was created. Data collected through evaluations (more than 1500 to date) was analyzed by element, typology, date of submission, and even specific applicant to track performance and inform policy and process change to reward or incentivize better outcomes. This presentation will discuss this work and the challenge of establishing clear design expectations while creating metrics which can track design performance and lead to policies and processes which could produce higher quality - in every sense of the term - built environments.

Learning Objectives:

By the completion of this session, participants will be able to:

• Have a clearer understanding of the challenges involved in creating and communicating credible municipal design policies which address public expectations and lead to better built outcomes.
• Consider how differences in the perception of quality between professional disciplines and the public can lead to a lack of satisfaction with built outcomes.
• Engage in methodology for exploring the use of targets and measurement systems to evaluate design quality and the challenges of quantifying such a subjective pursuit. 
• Consider who defines "good design" and how far apart we as architects and designers are from other stakeholder groups in agreeing about what constitutes good design and quality in the built environment.

Subject Matter Expert:

Mr. David Down

Architect, AAA, FRAIC, MArch, LeedAP

Chief Urban Designer, City of Calgary

David Down is Senior Architect and Chief Urban Designer with The City of Calgary. He joined The City in 2005 with a mandate to advocate for higher standards of architecture and urban design. His Urban Design team provides design guidance through design policy creation and application review. Prior to coming to the City of Calgary, David was principal of his own award-winning architectural firm (Down + Livesey Architects). He holds a MArch degree from the University of Calgary and is LEED accredited. David is a registered member (and Past President) of the Alberta Association of Architects, a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Calgary School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape (SAPL) where he is regularly involved in architecture and urban design studios and lectures on professional practice and Asian architecture and garden design.