The intrinsic complexity of the emerging challenges human beings collectively face requires a deep comprehension of the underlying phenomena in order to plan effective strategies and sustainable solutions: from the planning of urban infrastructures to rethinking cities and their interactions, from containment strategies for pandemics to the impact of political campaigns to measures against information pollution and misinformation. In all these cases, decision-making processes have to be supported with meaningful representations of the present situations along with accurate simulation engines to generate and evaluate future scenarios. Instrumental to all this is the possibility to gather and analyze huge amounts of relevant data and visualize them in a meaningful way, also for an audience without technical or scientific expertise. Understanding the present through data is often not enough and the impact of specific decisions and solutions can be correctly assessed only when projected into the future. Hence the need of tools allowing for a realistic forecast of how a change in the current conditions will affect and modify the future scenario (what if games).

whatif-machine is a Sony CSL platform aimed at providing users with tools to assess the status of  urban and inter-urban spaces and conceive new solutions and new scenarios. The whatif-machine platform is modular and new layers can be easily added depending on the needs. Below are the first three modules.