Data-Informed Design Democratization: Engaging design stakeholders for creating livable built environments

Fostering an inclusive and democratic decision-making process is essential to developing liveable, socially acceptable, and environmentally conscious built environments. For informed decision-making in this process, stakeholders’ understanding of design data plays an important role, as do the other disciplines embracing data-informed discourses and cultures. However, more work is needed to develop novel platforms for supporting data-informed decision-making in built environment design. Public engagement and town hall meetings are common methods to engage the public. They are often restricted by time, space, and participation scope. The online tools for data democratization in various fields offer opportunities to promote a democratic discourse; although their purpose varies, their characteristics can guide the search for novel approaches adopting a new class of tools for building design. We propose a conceptual framework for evaluating and designing tools supporting data-informed [built environment] design democratization through inclusive discourses called Di-Dem. As a contribution, we demonstrated the application of the framework in evaluating ten platforms offered for similar purposes.