This pedestrian count was part of a larger multi-year project designing the new Kenan-Flagler Business School building expansion. I'm highlighting it here because it showcases my field research and graphic abilities, but this work was ultimately part of a sophisticated circulation analysis that helped us justify our plans for new building entrances, pedestrian connections, parking, and public transportation stops.

The idea was to map existing circulation patterns through direct observation. This involved a team of three people (Robert Pratt, Daniel Yaussy, and I), stopwatches, clipboards, a notation strategy, and coordination. We stationed ourselves at different vantage points across the site.

The methodology sounds simple: watch people move, mark it down, count. But it turned out to be harder than I expected.

When classes were in session, it was easy to count. There weren't many people. I could track individual pedestrians, note which direction they were going, keep track of vehicles and their types. But the more I looked, the more I realized how limited my notation system was. I couldn't be super detailed unless there was only one person or one group to pay attention to at a time.

Then class changes happened. Everyone came out of the buildings all at once and my whole methodology had to shift. Suddenly I couldn't track individuals anymore and I had to think about overall flows, densities, patterns. I remember thinking that using a camera would have been more accurate. But we didn't have that. Instead we had three people with clipboards trying to capture as much as we could.

After spending the morning in the field, I spent the afternoon digitally plotting our data. I came back to the office with everyone's annotated plans and translated those observations into the circulation maps you see here. We studied our findings and noted points of concentrated pedestrian activity, frequency of path use, existing site access points, and most common modes of arrival.

We noticed that a lot of people were arriving by car, either through the parking deck or the existing drop-off area. This dependence on cars seemed directly related to the business school's physical disconnection from the rest of campus. The data revealed the problem clearly: limited connections meant limited movement options.

Beyond counting pedestrians, we mapped arrival sequences—the specific paths people took from the moment they arrived on site (whether by car, bus, or on foot) to when they entered the building. These sequence diagrams revealed how disconnected the existing experience was and helped us propose better entry points and circulation routes.