Each year, the Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards celebrate the top talents in design and business, honoring innovative creativity and exceptional problem-solving that improve our world. This year, Sasaki’s digital platform Dashi was a finalist in the Data Design category and earned an Honorable Mention in the Urban Design category.
Dashi is a digital platform that turns complex, siloed urban planning data into a collaborative decision-making environment—helping city changemakers plan for decarbonization, capital investment, and long-term sustainability. Designed and developed in-house by Sasaki’s interdisciplinary Strategies team, Dashi is helping cities, universities, and real estate owners navigate the immense complexity of organizational alignment and sustainable development.
What makes Dashi unique is its combination of human-centered data design that supports communication across disciplines. Within the platform are scenario planning tools that integrate emissions, cost, and time into strategic tradeoff modeling, and a flexible data model that is adaptable across specific project scales and contexts—from citywide park systems to university decarbonization roadmaps. Unlike many planning tools built for technical experts, Dashi was designed for the full coalition needed to drive urban change. Its interface emphasizes clarity and accessibility, presenting complex inputs through interactive charts, 3D models, and timelines that support real-time exploration and feedback.
Dashi wasn’t built in a lab. It emerged from Sasaki’s real-world planning work where decisions must be made amid complexity, urgency, and limited resources. Today, it’s supporting multimillion-dollar planning efforts, helping institutions cut through complexity and take bold, data-informed steps toward net-zero futures. Over the past year, Dashi has supported high-stakes planning efforts at the city, campus, and portfolio scale, most notably in advancing energy transition at a major research university and supporting system-wide resilience for the City of Denver Parks.
Read the Fast Company’s full list of honorees in the data design category here.