Designing spaces that build human connection

At a time when communities are increasingly lonely, civil and environmental engineering researchers at Carnegie Mellon are developing new ways to measure and model how people interact in shared spaces to help strengthen social connection.

Globally, an estimated one in six people experiences loneliness, a trend with far-reaching consequences for public health, economic opportunity, and community resilience. In the United States, this challenge has been dubbed the “loneliness epidemic,” where a widespread lack of social connection affects roughly one in two adults and is linked to increased risks of dementia and heart disease. Communities with weaker social ties are not only less connected, they are proven to be less adaptable, less healthy, and more vulnerable when disruptions occur.

Social capital – or, the ties, trust, and norms enabling collective action – plays a central role in how communities form resilience, and much of the connection needed to form these ties happen in what sociologists call “third spaces.” If home is a person’s “first place,” and work is a “second place,” third spaces encompass libraries, gyms, cafes, parks, and other environments where people gather informally and build relationships over time.

Like safe roads and reliable utilities, third spaces have long been recognized as essential to healthy community life. But unlike these well-studied systems where engineering principles guide design and operation, how third spaces function is largely shaped by intuition and qualitative guidelines, which is hard to quantify and nearly impossible to predict. As a result, decisions about design and programming in third spaces are often based on rules of thumb or aesthetics rather than clear, data-driven evidence. 

To address that gap, Katherine Flanigan, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, Mario Bergés, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and their students — with support from an NSF Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) grant — are developing new ways to measure and model social interaction in social infrastructure. Using LiDAR and other privacy-preserving sensors that capture movement and spatial relationships without recording identifiable images, the team is collecting data and building the theory that links how a space is designed to how people behave and generate social capital within it. 

 

This approach allows them to observe patterns of interaction while preserving privacy, capturing where people gather, how they move, when interactions occur, and what those interactions mean. Paired with voluntary surveys to better understand how individuals experienced the space, the data offers a more complete picture of how people engage with their environment and, ultimately, with one another. 

“The project centers on one fundamental question: how do specific design choices influence whether and how people connect with each other?” said Flanigan. “Social infrastructure is one of the most powerful engineering levers we have to build social capital. If we can design and program these spaces as deliberately as we engineer our bridges and water systems, connection becomes something we can shape by design.”

That work is already underway on Carnegie Mellon’s own campus, where Flanigan’s team has established a living testbed inside Hunt Library. Using the same privacy-preserving LiDAR sensors, they are capturing how the campus community moves through and gathers in one of the university’s busiest third spaces, in real time, and at full scale. The resulting raw data — visualized here as the paths people trace and the places they cluster as they move through the library — turns everyday activity into a detailed, quantitative portrait of how a shared space actually brings people together. 

This work is developing predictive models that can estimate how people use space, bringing the same level of scientific analysis to social infrastructure that already exists in other types of conventional infrastructure. These tools will help inform everything from the design of new buildings to the reimagining of public spaces, enabling architects, designers, and cities to make more intentional decisions about how environments foster interaction.

While the research is rooted in addressing the national decline in social connection, its implications extend across many critical areas of societal importance. In related work, funded by a Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation seed grant, Flanigan’s team is also examining how social capital can be cultivated across social infrastructure and community centers to improve resilience in coastal gulf communities. While traditional resilience work is about activation – building physical infrastructure that supports communities when a disruption occurs – social capital shifts the center of gravity to cultivation: building resilience every ordinary day, in the “calm between storms,” so the relationships and capacity are already in place when they are needed.

“A large-scale study of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan found that – even more than infrastructure or wealth – social capital was the strongest predictor of survival and recovery, with more socially connected communities experiencing lower mortality and more effective self-organized aid,” Flanigan explained. “We’re looking at how we can better understand and strengthen those networks before disasters happen to enhance both formal and informal response mechanisms when communities face disruptions.”

Together, these efforts point to a broader shift in how infrastructure is understood. Once considered intangible, researchers are redefining social interaction as something that can be measured, modeled, and designed for – ultimately enhancing public health, economic growth, and community resilience by promoting human connection in an increasingly disconnected world.