Designing for People: A Kova PedSim food4Rhino Webinar
3 days ago
3 min read
16 September 2026
On 16 September, we had the opportunity to join food4Rhino for a webinar exploring how pedestrian simulation can help architects and designers better understand the relationship between people, movement, and space. In “Designing for People using Kova PedSim: A Social Pedestrian Simulation in Grasshopper3D,” we introduced Kova PedSim and demonstrated how socially driven pedestrian simulation can become an active part of the design process.
The full webinar is now available to watch on YouTube.
Bringing People Into the Design Process
People are at the heart of architecture, but predicting how they will move through, interact with, and experience a space remains a challenging part of the design process. Pedestrian simulation is often introduced relatively late in a project as a way of validating a design that has already been developed. With Kova PedSim, we are interested in a different approach: what happens when information about human movement and social behaviour becomes part of the design process itself?
During the webinar, we explored how simulation can be embedded directly within Grasshopper, allowing pedestrian behaviour to evolve alongside geometry, spatial organisation, and other parameters within a computational design workflow. Rather than producing a single answer about whether a space “works,” simulation can become another way of interrogating a design—revealing patterns of movement, interaction, occupation, and spatial experience that can inform subsequent design decisions.
Pedestrian Simulation Across Different Scales
One of the core ideas behind Kova PedSim is that pedestrian movement needs to be understood differently depending on the scale and resolution of the design problem. During the session, we walked through Kova’s simulation methodologies and demonstrated how they can be used to explore movement from larger urban networks through to detailed architectural environments. By working directly within Rhino and Grasshopper, these simulations can remain connected to the wider parametric model. Geometry can inform pedestrian behaviour, simulation results can be analysed computationally, and those results can in turn become inputs for further design exploration. This creates the opportunity for a more iterative relationship between design, simulation, analysis, and adaptation.
Designing for Social Behaviour
Kova PedSim was developed around the idea that pedestrians are more than particles moving efficiently between two points.
How people navigate an environment is influenced by the presence of other people, personal and social behaviour, environmental conditions, and the spatial characteristics of the places they occupy. Bringing these relationships into pedestrian simulation allows us to ask broader questions about design:
How might different spatial configurations affect patterns of interaction? Where do people naturally converge or disperse? How does a change in geometry influence not only movement efficiency, but the way a space is occupied and experienced?
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