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Gehl Architects: From pen and paper to urban data in the cloud

Client

Gehl Architects

Industry

Architecture and urban planning

Services

UX Design

User Research

Development

Ruby on Rails

Good cities start with looking

Gehl are some of the world's most sought-after urban planners. You might know them from Carlsberg Byen in Copenhagen, but they have also left their mark on Times Square in New York and helped turn Mexico City into a cycling city.

A large part of Gehl's work is observing and studying how people use urban space. That's where we come in.

Every observation was typed in by hand

When Gehl does research in urban spaces, they collect large amounts of data. That could be the number of cyclists by gender and age, or how, where and which groups of people gather.

It used to be done with pen and paper, and afterwards everything had to be compiled in Excel. On larger projects with many observers, that meant a lot of time-consuming work and plenty of manual data entry before the analysis could even begin.

And the amount of data is crucial to how valid Gehl's results are. Collection had to scale, and the data had to be gathered automatically, without anyone sitting and typing it in.

From the field straight to the analysis

The observers carry the system on their phones

The solution was a simple system the observers take into the field on their phone or tablet. A project can have as many observers as it needs. The data flows together automatically in the cloud, where Gehl's analysts can easily keep working with it.

A tool that became a product

The system has made data collection easier and less time-consuming. It has also made it possible for Gehl to sell the tool as a product in its own right.