Green Set
The Green Set makes density easier to understand by connecting numbers and metrics to the physical qualities and lived experience of places.
Moving across scales—from neighborhoods and housing typologies to building massing and individual homes—its visualizations and interactive tools help users understand existing conditions, compare alternatives, and explore possibilities for comfortable density.
Know Your Density
A comparative tool for understanding density through familiar places, connecting housing typologies and neighborhood patterns with measurable density.
Density Alphabet
A visual tool for comparing how different building forms, amenities, and design decisions can create a wide range of density possibilities.
Design Your Home
A collection of flexible dwelling layouts for exploring how different household needs and ways of living can shape the design of a home.
Plan Your Neighborhood
Real-Time, Metrics-Based Urban Design
Plan Your Neighborhood was developed through a close collaboration between the Holistic Housing Lab and KPF Urban Interface, the research and development group within Kohn Pedersen Fox’s New York office. Building on KPF UI’s award-winning Scout platform, the teams worked together to adapt its computational design capabilities to the diverse conditions, housing patterns, and development contexts found across the Hawaiian archipelago.
The resulting application allows users to generate and compare thousands of neighborhood-scale design possibilities in real time, ranging from rural and suburban conditions to increasingly dense urban environments. As variables such as density, transit, and clustering are adjusted, the application makes the relationships and trade-offs between neighborhood form, development patterns, and everyday experience immediately visible.
The collaboration also introduced walkability as a new metric within the platform. As users modify a neighborhood, Plan Your Neighborhood dynamically connects those changes to the amenities that different densities and development patterns can support, making abstract measures of density more tangible through the places and activities of everyday life.
KPF Urban Interface
Luc Wilson, Director
Snoweria Zhang, Urban Innovation Architect
Brandon M. Pachuca, Urban Data Analyst + Web Developer