SEVA’s web-based interactive platform visually tracks, analyzes and displays key performance indicators, metrics and heterogeneous data points in real-time. This comprehensive overview allows decision-makers to answer critical questions, discover key insights, as well as monitor and analyze information from different datasets in key areas.

Technical Significance, Innovation and Impact

With SEVA, we are preparing for a future in which we anticpate all building and development practices will have to account for their potential impacts on the health and well being of future occupants, and well as the irreplaceable regional ecosystems that have been affected by the extraction and deployment of toxic, non-renewable resources.

Current architectural design practice is limited in its consideration and understanding of life-cycle energy flows which comprise multiple phases, from material resource extraction, construction, building occupation within the built environment, and after demolition. SEVA facilitates the acquisition of unanticipated and disruptive insights and discoveries, by enabling comparison across a far greater range of heterogeneous data types and analysis techniques, from multiple scientific and socio-demographic categories and scales — from ‘meta-data’ to ‘micro-data’.

For example, bioclimatic environmental flows interact with the buildings, particularly at the building envelope, making it a rich interface for shaping energy flows towards buildings that are energy self-sufficient with clean on-site energy resources. The buildings we inhabit directly affect the greater built environment which is an inherent part local ecosystems that compose part of larger ecologies at global scales, ultimately affecting the overall biosphere. As a result, the buildings we construct, directly and indirectly affect our economies, the health, and well-being of our societies and our natural environments.

The framework for design analysis offers a more comprehensive ecological analysis than existing sustainability assessment tools by collecting live environmental and human biometrics towards considering the entire comfort cycle. Working with SEVA, Socio-Ecological Visual Analytics, a web tool designed to allow for interactive feedback in real-time, this research investigates the visualization of human data as a metric to analyze the well-being of the environment, which is an inversion of received perspectives.