Starling provides insight, strategy and design services for spatial development. We combine expertise in architectural design and urban planning with advanced digital technologies to create regenerative landscapes and resilient cities. We investigate the fundamental issues that will shape the buildings and urban communities of tomorrow, and build the intelligence and instruments to make them a reality today. Based on a deep understanding of the complex systems that will shape our sustainable future, we offer our clients a range of tailormade services and solutions that vary in level of scale and development.
Insight
The systems that sustain life on our planet are complex, interconnected and dynamic. Using systems thinking, we help our clients to better understand how cities work, and how to improve their performances from ideation to end of use. Our insight services and systems approach our environment of wholes and relationships. Mapping these dynamic systems reveal where small interventions can create big changes. We forecast the social, economic and environmental impacts of spatial developments and identify new opportunities for land use, resilience, health and mobility. These insights help us create impactful projects based on real value.
Strategy
Space is fluid concept in which the challenges and opportunities on the smallest level cannot be approached without a wholistic strategy on the system scale, and vice versa. We look for leverage points within systems to create scalable solutions with maximum impact. Using our computational instruments, we make the complex manageable and create strategies that respond to a multitude of needs, guide decision-makers and make ambitious ideas tangible. Grounded in our insight services, our strategies provide site-specific guidelines and principles for sustainable spatial development. Using artificial intelligence and agent-based algorithms, we assess criteria and generate scenarios and deliver masterplans that allow our clients to reach their sustainability ambitions.
Design
Nature-Driven Design! Design is a powerful tool for creating change. We design and develop places that have a net-positive impact and a regenerative effect on our global landscape. Places that enhance how we interact and experience the world around us, and where people feel safe and healthy and can exchange ideas. Therefore, we understand that good designs can only flourish with the right expertise and end-users involved. We have created a collaborative design process that includes the involvement of all crucial stakeholders, working concurrently to minimize risks and cost whilst ensuring a positive outcome.
Clients
Starling works with leading organisations across spatial disciplines and levels of scale to make a regenerative future compelling, impactful, and real.
As our common environments are developed and experienced by a diverse set of entities, our clients span various industries and disciplines. We often operate as a connector research and design, between knowledge and application and between and experiences. We are proud to have a proven track record of helping ambitious policy makers, leaders of industry and innovative entrepreneurs to adapt to the fast-changing context of our environment.
Process
At Starling we have adopted a comprehensive methodology to design resilient cities for a sustainable future. Starling puts a strong emphasis on design research, and we use the Double Diamond method throughout our work. Double Diamond is a process description of design thinking which gives equal importance to defining the problem as finding its solution. The method is formalised in two cycles that include both divergent and convergent thinking. In the first cycle, also called the Research Diamond, one explores, seeks synthesis and defines the problem space. In the second cycle, also called the Design Diamond', solutions are validated and evaluated at scale. `We us this method because it is relatively universal, as it can bridge the spatial and digital design disciplines yet can be adapted to specific project needs.
