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Excerpt from original post by Suzanne Labarre, fastcodesign.com:
"The potential applications of this so-called aesthetic capital are vast. The data could aid cities in deciding which urban-design features to invest in. It could be matched with other data sets to show the relationship between aesthetics and, say, crime. It could even be used to create a website that helps us choose where to live based on the ratings of like-minded people.
Think of the site as “hot or not” for cities, says designer and Media Lab grad student Anthony DeVincenzi. Users glance at a pair of photographs side by side, then click which one’s hotter or, in the official terms of the site, which one’s safer or more unique, or more upper-class. As each image is compared, a ranking of safety (or uniqueness or affluence) emerges. The Macro Connections group can then analyze and visualize those rankings to ask all sorts of fascinating questions: Are certain cities seen as wealthier than others and if so, why? What are the ramifications of segregated public housing? Does graffiti actually impact our perception of safety? Or are cities wasting their cash scrubbing buildings, when they could be investing in truly valuable public amenities, like trees?
The site went live a couple weeks ago, so Hidalgo and his team don’t have the answers at their fingertips yet. The goal is to generate a million responses to roughly 3,000 photos of five cities: Vienna, Linz, Salzburg, Boston, and New York. They’re already about a third of the way there (that's the beauty of crowdsourcing)...."
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