AJ100 Best Use of Technology 2021 revealed

While the judges did not award an overall winner, Bryden Wood was highly commended for its nascent SPACED (Smart Planning + Automation for Cycling: Engineering to Delivery) toolkit.

In 2019 the practice’s in-house think-tank won the category with game engine-inspired technologies to create a series of tools, including a project allowing teachers and parents to design their own primary school.

This year the company’s creative big data number-crunchers came up with an emerging digital toolkit to help local authorities and masterplanners quickly lay out potential city-wide cycle routes.

The judges praised the ‘ambitious’ and ‘timely’ algorithmic app, which automatically generated a host of possible cycling networks (see image) and was fully customisable, for how it could be used to improve city spaces. The jury also commended how its potential ‘breadth of applicability’ addressed health and wellbeing and sustainable transport from neighbourhood to metropolitan scales.

SPACED by Bryden Wood

The other finalists were Zaha Hadid Architects, HLM Architects and Chetwoods, which had devised a system combining BIM and VR with digital monitoring to ‘capture engagement with designs’ in a bid to ‘understand the human emotional responses’ to completed buildings.