Foresight
What's your unknown unknown? Let's think about it. Darryl Chen
Intelligent Optimism
Change is happening faster than ever, but most current business planning in real estate is aligned to funding timeframes, rarely looking beyond the next economic cycle. Foresight helps organisations in the commercial real estate and built environment sector to anticipate risks and seize opportunities.
Foresight is structured thinking about the future, setting out multiple futures that are possible and probable - thinking that allows organisations to anticipate uncertainties, evaluate scenarios, and make informed decisions in order to shape preferred outcomes.
We are uniquely placed to deliver Foresight, drawing on our deep expertise of designing and delivering complex buildings and places, and collaborating with our wider expert network to provide insights in the following areas:
- low carbon design and the circular economy
- digital computation and artificial intelligence
- consumer trends and behavioural science
- urban demographics and economics
- property data and business planning
- building legislation and modular construction
Our five-point methodology is the basis of a tailored approach to each client. We start every project with a consultation framing the terms and objectives. Projects typically run between 2 to 6 months depending on the depth of research required and the nature of the outputs. At the end of a project, our final deliverables are assets that can be seamlessly integrated into reports, presentations and other external communications.
Foresight in action
Earls Court Masterplan Futures Research
Timber Square
Earls Court is a 7.5M sq.ft. regeneration project inviting the world to discover wonder at Central London’s largest cleared development site. A masterplan of this scale and impact necessitates fitness for the future, and as such our brief was to future proof into the next century well beyond normal project timeframes. To add to the urgency, the masterplan design work commenced at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the future was more uncertain than ever.
ECDC commissioned Hawkins\Brown with SEW to undertake stand-alone research identifying future trends structured around the themes of mobility, social infrastructure, workspace, living, culture and technology. Our findings helped contribute to a mindset shift among the project team, and informed the development of the masterplan in critical ways.
The study provided valuable insights into the evolving built environment across workspace, tall buildings, sustainability, and technology, enabling us to take a long-term view on how cities will function in the decades ahead.
Landsec are currently planning the second phase of a 920,000 sqft office-led development in Bankside, London. Located in a quickly emerging commercial destination and perched atop disused Victorian rail arches, the second phase required innovative thinking to unlock its potential.
We undertook a foresight project to better define the customer and their impact on the provision of amenity and the marketing of the scheme. Thematic drivers of change were drawn from quantitative and qualitative inputs. These provided the launch points for 4 scenarios that provided generalised pictures of the world within the themes of the future workplace and the values of its customers. For each scenario, a ‘strategic proposition’ provided a direct application of our findings on the Timber Square development project.
Incredibly collaborative and thought-provoking...The insights will continue to challenge our thinking as we progress through the development.