Block 5: Trade-off Analysis: The Optimization Worksheet

What today is about

The heart of the assessment. Name what you sacrificed, not just what you gained.

This block is the Thinking and Transfer heart of the unit, and it is where most plans either earn their grade or quietly lose it. You take your allocation from Block 4 and do two things with it. First you quantify: you put numbers on how your plan performs across at least four of the seven objectives, so "this is a good plan" becomes "this houses about 12,000 more people, raises 15-minute access from roughly 40 percent to 70 percent, and cuts permeable land by a quarter." Second you name the sacrifice: you say in plain words what you gave up to get what you gained.

Here is the trap. Optimization makes it tempting to claim your plan is simply better, full stop. But a plan that claims to maximize everything is not a strong plan, it is a plan that is hiding its trade-offs. Real design always gives something up. Density buys housing and costs green space. Permeable land buys flood resilience and costs buildable area. Walkability can raise prices and push out the people who most needed to walk. On the rubric, hiding the trade-off is a hard cap on your Thinking and Transfer score, no matter how polished the rest looks. Naming it honestly, with numbers, is what moves you to the top band.

This is the same discipline you used in Unit 5, where a strong Position Paper had to acknowledge the competing stakeholder fairly rather than pretend they had no case. Here the competing claims are objectives instead of people, but the move is identical: the credible designer is the one who can say exactly what their choice costs.