Workspaces 101
Ria Noche avatar
Written by Ria Noche
Updated over a week ago

What is Workspaces?

Workspaces is a scenario modelling and analytics tool that draws on insight from urban experts to help you make better decisions that lead to more sustainable, liveable, and productive cities.

Kinesis concepts

Workspaces

In Kinesis, analysis and collaboration happen in workspaces. A workspace is a central place where you build scenarios, use apps, and visualise data for a particular project. They give everyone a shared view on the assumptions and results you're working towards.

You can create as many workspaces as you need — they could be focused on a master plan that you're working on, an initiative that you're exploring, or even maintaining your portfolio that others can import from.

Scenarios

At its most basic, a scenario represents a specific possibility. A scenario consists of a certain combination of locations and their attributes. For example, you could model how a region develops over time or how different policy measures affect the built environment.

Baseline scenario

Every workspace starts with a baseline scenario. Your baseline scenario is your reference point and might represent the current state or a minimum standard, from which you can test and compare future alternatives.

Alternative scenarios

You can create multiple scenarios within a workspace. Each new scenario starts as a duplicate of the baseline scenario that you can make changes to, like changing land use, timing of developments, or adding infrastructure or services.

Locations

Locations are any point or area specified in a workspace. They can be buildings, lots, precincts, cities, or any geography. Locations are what you create or import when you first construct your scenario.

Location layers

Each location belongs to a layer, that represents a particular level of geography level such as buildings, lots, development sites, zones, cities, states, and so on. Layers are used to define the relationship between locations.

Attributes

Locations have attributes — a structured way of describing the properties or characteristics of a location in a scenario. Examples of attributes are:

  • Position — the geographic position of a location

  • Usage — how floor space is utilised and defines different dwelling typologies and yield

  • Services — benefits provided by amenities such as restaurants, parks, public transport, and others

The attributes available in your scenario are driven by the apps in your workspace, or you can add your own.

Apps may use a location's attribute values and its settings as inputs in their computations.

Attribute values

Attribute have values that refer to what characteristic a location in a scenario has, or how much of an attribute it has, at a given point in time. For example, the number of studio apartments a location has.

Attribute settings

Settings are the underlying assumptions of the attribute values, and are set on the scenario level. For example, what is a studio apartment? A studio apartment has zero bedrooms, an average space of 40 m², LED lighting, and so on.

Apps

Apps help you explore and solve problems within a specific domain like sustainability, accessibility, or resilience by providing expertly curated data or predictive models. Apps also help guide your analysis and decision making process by presenting information in a logical manner with pre-configured boards, and provide recommendations around what to do.

You can add apps that you have licensed to your workspace. Apps are created by Kinesis and other 3rd party experts, and you can browse them in the Marketplace.

Boards and blocks

You can explore and analyse data in your workspace, or tell a story with boards and blocks.

A block is a single piece of content added to a board. There are different block types — visualisations, text, images*, and more*.

*Coming soon

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