Can Better Building Insight Help Us Design Places That Bring People Together?

How Architecture Can Combat Loneliness Through Better Design

Loneliness is not a new problem, but it has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Reports now describe it as a public health concern. Policymakers frame it as a social and economic challenge. Architects and planners increasingly link it to the way we shape our towns, neighbourhoods and buildings.

A home can be warm, efficient and structurally sound, yet still leave its occupants feeling isolated. The same is true of offices, campuses and later-living developments. Good design has always been about people, and the industry is beginning to ask how buildings can support human connection, not just technical performance.

At first glance, this feels like a question rooted in architecture, planning and sociology rather than technology. But if we step back and consider how buildings are actually used once they are occupied, a new opportunity begins to emerge.

What Twinview Offers Today

Twinview is a digital operations platform that connects the design, construction and ongoing management of buildings. It brings together building information with live operational data, giving owners and operators a clear view of how assets, spaces and systems perform over time.

Today, Twinview is firmly grounded in practical outcomes. It supports maintenance planning, compliance, energy management and asset oversight, while also providing insight into how space is used through occupancy and utilisation data.

In other words, Twinview focuses on how buildings perform in the real world. Yet within that operational insight lies a quieter layer of information with broader relevance.

Listening to Buildings, Quietly

If a shared lounge in a residential development is consistently empty, that tells us something. If a workplace canteen is only used for a short window each day, that tells us something too. If students on a campus spend most of their time alone in private rooms rather than in shared study spaces, that is also a signal.

These are not just utilisation metrics. They are clues about how people experience space, where they feel comfortable and where they do not.

By reporting on how spaces are used, Twinview already helps teams understand patterns of behaviour inside buildings. It does not measure emotions or intentions, but it can reveal where spaces succeed, where they are overlooked and where design assumptions may not match lived reality.

A Future Direction: From Performance to Belonging

There is an opportunity to think more broadly about how operational insight could support better placemaking. Consider a build-to-rent development. Alongside managing energy and maintenance, data could highlight whether shared spaces are genuinely being used. If a communal kitchen or rooftop terrace remains quiet, the issue may not be social, it may be visibility, comfort or layout.

Similarly, in a workplace, insight into how spaces are used can highlight areas where people pass through but never pause. Small, thoughtful changes, adding seating, improving daylight, introducing planting or improving acoustic comfort, can then be tested and refined over time.

The aim here is not surveillance or control. It is feedback. Used carefully, insight from real use can help designers and operators better support the kinds of interaction they already hope to encourage.

Continuing the Design Conversation

None of this replaces good architectural thinking. Instead, it extends it beyond handover. Buildings continue to speak once they are occupied, and operational data allows us to listen more carefully.

Rather than relying on assumptions about how a space might be used, teams can learn from how it is used, and adapt accordingly. In this way, buildings become part of an ongoing conversation between designers, operators and the people who inhabit them.

Where Twinview Stands

Twinview is not claiming to solve loneliness, and that would be an unrealistic ambition for any technology. But it already offers a practical foundation for understanding how buildings shape experience. It connects how a space is designed with how it lives. It brings operational data into a form that is usable by owners, designers and operators alike. And with continued development, it could also help explore questions of social value alongside performance and efficiency.

The built environment is ultimately about people, and data should serve that purpose. Used responsibly, digital twins have the potential to quietly support not only smarter buildings, but also more human ones. The next step is simply to stay open to that possibility and continue exploring what buildings can teach us.