What happens after you generate your study?
After you provide your inputs in Create Study, Delve will generate up to 100 designs for your site. You will see results appear in the map as soon as the first design is created, usually in about 5 minutes!
You'll get an email when the whole process is complete. Meanwhile, you are welcome to create additional sites and studies.
How long will this take?
Initial design generation can take anywhere from 5-10 minutes, depending on the size of your site. For example, a 100-acre project for a whole new district with many neighborhood will take longer than a 2.5-acre site with two buildings, as Delve will test more combinations of block and building layouts.
If you pick a Yield Study, your study is complete as soon as the street, parks and buildings — including apartment units and hotel rooms for residential and hotel floors — are generated for all designs. This can take 10-15 minutes for most sites.
If you pick a Highest and Best Use Study, Delve will also evaluate each design for a range of additional quality-of-life and (optionally) financial metrics. Highest and Best Use studies can take 20-30 minutes for most sites, as Delve runs the associated simulations and calculations.
How does Delve generate designs?
Delve generates designs by first laying out streets and blocks. This process takes into account existing streets, and aligns new streets for your project with ones outside the site. Large parks are also created here to match your desired green space.
Next, Delve will distribute your development program to individual blocks, following the input targets or range you provided in Create Study. Delve will test different ways to distribute program in each design, with some built-in rules for adjacencies: for example, keeping retail along main streets or residential near parks.
Finally, after distributing program to each block Delve will adapt and fit your selected building types. This includes allocating apartments and hotel rooms to residential and hotel floors. Delve will also create smaller parking and surface parking lots if required.
How does Delve evaluate designs?
Generated designs are evaluated for each of Delve's key metrics: sun and shadows, views and walkability. If your study includes a financial model, Delve will also calculate these metrics. You can learn more about key metrics in Delve and how they are calculated here.