A restaurant learns something every night. They hear what people say about a dish, see what comes back on the plate and see the financial impact it has on the books. It's a pretty awesome feedback loop.

But the urban realm doesn't work like that. There is a much longer and less responsive chain at play where the planners, developers, architects, engineers, construction firms, designers, financiers and clients do not have such rapid or sophisticated mechanisms of connection and communication.

An architect can finish their work on a building before moving onto the next project. They don't have the right of return, access to the energy data of the finished project, may well have had the work adjusted in the process and aren't the ones experiencing what it's like to use it.

It's what Bryan Boyer from Taubman College of Architecture  ...