Real estate marketing, with its glossy brochures, is usually all about luxury, status and exclusiveness.

Yet, after a certain level of comfort, these things have little to do with personal happiness, says Bruce Haden, principal of the Vancouver design firm Human Studio. Personal connections, he says, matter more.

“We know that being socially connected is good for people.”

Haden says it’s not hard to understand that having spaces where people can interact is a good thing. But without a way to measure the potential for social connections, it can be hard to justify extra construction costs.

Haden is working with engineers and psychologists on software that helps tweak designs to see which ones better facilitate “sociability.”

“I’m not a person that believes the entire world should be run by data,” he said. “But nowadays, sometimes you need that (information) to change the game.”

Haden started with seed funding from B.C. Housing and later got more money from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funds public health efforts.

The software, which will be widely available on GitHub, uses video gaming technology.

“You populate (a design) with digital agents, which are avatars for residents in a building, let them run around, and, on a most basic level, you can see how frequently, over the course of a day, are you simply going to have eye contact with your neighbour,” said Haden.

The software records the number of times residents can see each other and are within a certain distance from each other, or the number of times residents have the potential to greet each other, adding varying factors such as proximity and cautiousness.

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