Designing for cities

Rapid Technology Shifts

There is an urgent need for design and technology to again collaborate on civic challenges. Changes in the form of smart connected objects, services, and platforms have the potential to disrupt how our cities function as well as our individual experiences within them. Buildings, networks, city services, and our own personal devices are being connected to complex software platforms that can analyze and inform decision making. The data gathered through these channels has the potential to influence everything from government policy to the management of daily city services. Ubiquitous connectivity is helping to shape a vision of the responsive city, or a future in which technology will improve a city’s infrastructure, management, and quality of life.

This is not just a grand vision for future cities—platforms in our cities now promote direct and indirect civic interactions. A clear example of a direct civic interaction facilitated by technology is our Talking Transition project for the 2013 transition to a new city government administration. We helped build a technology platform to get a daily pulse of public concerns and better facilitate direct interactions between government and citizens. By arming street teams with digital tools to capture information and interviews from New Yorkers over a two-week period, we changed the topic of conversation each day to capture qualitative and quantitative information about the perspective of citizens. This information was then synthesized every evening in a pop-up event space on Canal Street, where New York influencers, including the newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio, could react to the findings and address citizen input in a timely manner.

But passive interactions and other indirect methods of gathering data in which citizens aren’t actively trying to communicate information are also valuable. For example, Street Bump, a mobile application designed by Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, uses sensors in your smartphone to detect pothole shock as you drive and automatically sends an alert to a service representative, removing the need for you to interact with your phone to make a report. This kind of information allows city stakeholders to quickly understand civic infrastructure and make plans to resolve issues without relying on the constant participation of citizens.

Looking to the future, we can envision cities that use networks of connected devices to create both active and passive interactions that can aid communication and understanding between cities and their citizens. Distributed networks of interactive screens with Internet connectivity creates opportunities for cities to engage in direct conversations with citizens through participatory budgeting, community polls, and opportunities to facilitate open conversations on a tool available to everyone, no matter your level of connectivity or economic status. Networks of sensors can help give the city a real-time look at how the city is working and changing, allowing the city to monitor air quality levels, noise levels, and even natural gas leaks, enabling cities to make decisions on how to focus new efforts, prioritize outstanding initiatives, and enact new laws based on data rather than anecdotes. Understanding how citizens are moving through the city will enable the city to adapt public transportation and public infrastructure to better help people get where they need to go. Making sense of these technological changes and shaping relevant services for people will be a challenge for cities. The outcome of poor decisions will cost taxpayers money, time, trust, and long-term civic prosperity, but, implemented correctly, these applications of technology can create smart cities that can make informed decisions based not on political power but on the needs of citizens through the use of data and democratized communication.

Who Builds Cities? Government or Citizens?

“The city is an evolving organism, that is at once host to, and is constantly being reinvented by, its citizens. Cities that work well, stimulate the creativity of their inhabitants, and also present them all with new opportunities to learn, discover, and improve. A part of the attraction of cities is their ability to inspire, incubate, and adapt to change.”

Joe Cortright

Throughout history, cities have been shaped out of a tension between those with power making top-down decisions and the people attempting to influence change through bottom-up efforts. Starting from early human settlements, cities have served as gathering places, defensive military positions, and strategic locations on trade routes. Over time, in democratic cities, governments and citizens collectively formed the culture and identity of their cities. The European Enlightenment explored new methods to structure and govern society, promoting a consistent grid of streets and boulevards to help organize neighborhoods and allow the state to easily maintain order. These planning methods were influential across the United States as the country expanded and cities struggled to keep pace with a growing population.

In the U.S., starting in the 1930s, top-down planning efforts reshaped the urban landscape. State and Federal governments began altering neighborhoods to make room for housing developments, highways, and commercial zoning changes. After decades of avoiding public concerns and damaging healthy communities, bottom-up activism mobilized to question development decisions, eventually leading to the formation of historic preservation districts, community boards, and the use of participatory design methods when planning civic efforts.

A Balanced Approach

You won’t find an agreed upon answer as to whether top-down master planning or ground-up participation is the best approach to building a sustainable city. Both philosophies can be effective, depending on the desired outcome. The introduction of a forward-thinking grid system in New York was a “master plan” that helped bring order to a sprawling metropolis. Participatory design on the community level continues to help build trust in new development efforts. As large civic decisions loom in the years ahead, citizens and governments must work together to make mutually beneficial decisions.

The following sections cover case studies that have attempted to balance various stakeholder needs for new experiences in New York City.

MTA On the Go

Intersection has partnered with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)/New York City Transit since 2012 to develop interactive touchscreens installed in stations throughout the subway system. This network of “On The Go” communication kiosks presented an opportunity for digital technology to improve the experience of using the largest public transit system in the Americas. Our challenge was to improve the wayfinding experience for subway riders under the existing technical constraints of a centuries-old underground transit system—all while creating a source of sustainable revenue via advertising sales for the MTA to expand and improve its services.

LinkNYC

Once launched, LinkNYC will be the largest network of digital displays in the world. It’s a hugely ambitious project that will bring free WiFi and public services to streets around New York City through the installation of at least 7,500 communication hubs that feature touch screens, Internet connectivity, and advertising. LinkNYC began as a response to a question put out by the City of New York asking what they might be able to do with the space that was formerly inhabited by payphones. Over the years, the value of publicly available payphones diminished due to the widespread adoption of cell phones. Still, the advertising housed on the payphones was bringing around 17 million dollars a year to the city through a revenue share. The city realized that it wouldn’t make sense to replace the system with more pay-for-use telephones, but they didn’t want to abandon the revenue that the space was generating, so the city launched first a request for information, then a design contest. Finally, they issued a request for proposal to bring in public and private suggestions for what they could do next.

Consideration 1: Citizens, Cities, and Commerce

One of the biggest differences between civic design and other forms of design is in how many different people and diverse stakeholder groups need to be satisfied in order for a project to succeed. Projects that are entirely focused on serving the needs of the citizens often don’t get the political support they need to launch nor the financial backing to thrive. Projects fully focused on making money don’t get support of the citizens, nor politicians, as it then becomes a purely commercial endeavor. Projects that are solely focused on pleasing politicians won’t guarantee funding or public interest. We’ve had repeated success in this space largely due to respecting these tensions and designing for the “Three C’s” of Citizens, Cities, and Commerce.

Adhering to the Three C’s ensures that you have the support of the groups needed to build, adopt, and maintain your project. Citizens influence the changes that happen to their city, and if they’re not happy with a change, they have the power to block it. Next, collaboration with the City or city government is essential if the solution is using public space or publicly used programs. If the city government is on your side, they can help push your initiative through challenges as they arise, and overcome blockers that some may put up. To put it bluntly, the city needs to see value, because it has the power to decide if you can or can’t install your project. Finally, not to be overlooked is Commerce. Bringing in a steady flow of money ensures that you can fully build your vision and ensures that you can build a team to construct, implement, and support your product. Commerce and the city have always had a delicate relationship, but more and more we’ve seen the value of a close collaboration; from the revival of Central Park to New York’s CitiBike, great things can happen when a city and the business community can find mutual value.

A large part of why LinkNYC has been able to get traction has been its focus on considering the needs of the city, the citizens, and commerce. LinkNYC’s free WiFi, free phone calls, free mapping, a quick access 911 button, and other resources are features that many see as a valuable addition to the streetscape. But this alone won’t bring success to a project. There have been many projects that aim to bring public WiFi to cities, but many of them have not been sustainable because of a lack of consistent revenue after the initial funding dries up. The advertising revenue that will be brought in by LinkNYC will ensure that the Link’s have the funding they need for updates and repairs, and the access to free WiFi and other services help to ensure that there is support from the citizens needed to dedicate public land to the project. The city, recognizing the greater access and ability to generate revenue, has been a strong supporter and collaborator on the building of LinkNYC.

Consideration 2: Designing for Everyone

Trying to solve for everyone’s needs is usually not advised when approaching a design project. The concern is that a solution will become watered down, and instead of serving all people, it will serve none. But when designing for cities, you don’t get to narrow your market. In order to put a solution in a public space, you must provide value to the entire market; otherwise, citizens or the city will block your initiative. The question then becomes, how do we design for everyone and not lose the project in the process?

One way to do this is by defining a clear vision and purpose at the beginning of the project, and sticking to it. While beginning a project in the civic space, it can be easy to become overwhelmed as you uncover problems that your city faces. Trying to solve every problem will be paralyzing. To ensure that you can solve a single problem well, start with a strong vision to ensure that your product doesn’t become diluted over time. What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? What impact do you want to have? What’s your hypothesis on how to make this work?

Starting with a vision may seem counterintuitive to those with a human-centered background. This isn’t to say that you’ll ignore users’ needs—and in fact, your vision should be based on a deep user need to begin with—but by knowing what you want to do, you’ll be able to better navigate tough decisions throughout the process. This also ensures that as you begin designing, you can adapt your solution to the needs of the people you meet, but it also means that you won’t be swimming in an ocean of needs.

LinkNYC started as a concept for what could replace the payphone system in NYC and bring connectivity and communication to the city in a way that was more relevant to modern times. The vision from the start has been for outdoor connectivity hubs that provide free services to citizens and are supported by ad revenue. Over the course of the project, many details have been filled in, and features and interactions defined and evolved as we learned more about the needs of different stakeholders, but the core vision has remained the same. This strong vision gave the teams flexibility to explore and make decisions while not diluting the purpose of the project.

In addition to creating a vision, it’s important to define what you’re not doing. Sometimes this is even more important than defining what you’re doing. In a project for a city, it can be easy to identify thousands of additional challenges that you’d like to solve for, but if you were to begin pursuing all of them, you wouldn’t be able to get anything done. As your project evolves and you identify additional issues that you might be able to resolve, make a decision as a team about which you are and aren’t going to try to solve. This ensures that your project stays focused and you can better address the task at hand.

Consideration 3: Meet Your Users

It’s impossible to meet everyone you will be designing for, especially in a city like New York, with millions of residents and millions more visitors. With many design thinking projects, designers narrow their focus to meeting a handful of the users who represent the demographic groups that they are targeting. When designing for a city, this is no longer a viable strategy. So how do you get to know your users and ensure their needs are met? By defining the breadth of your demographic, you can identify groups that represent the most extreme needs. By understanding extremes, you can solve for most of the whole. Looking to extremes is already a core concept for many design thinkers, but in this case, we reach really wide to meet groups who represent needs at each end of the spectrum we are designing for.

Once you identify the representatives of the extreme needs relating to your project, you can begin to connect with them. Recruiting and building relationships can take many forms, from on-street intercepts, friends and family conversations, or full-on recruits. Forging relationships with community groups has helped us recruit group members to talk to. Usually we give participants a gift card or other incentive for their time, and it’s a win-win situation for us and the groups as we both share a common desire to serve the needs of their constituents.

Another approach that some designers use to understand the needs of a community is participatory design. While participatory design has its benefits, it risks pointing designers in directions that are too idealized and not feasible to ever accomplish, leading to unrealistic expectations by participating communities. Instead, by developing hypotheses, concepts, and prototypes and testing them with people, you’re able to incorporate diverse needs without losing track of your vision.

For LinkNYC, it was essential for us to design for all New Yorkers, as well as commuters and tourists representing every diverse walk of life. From people who speak English fluently to not at all, people with full mobility to those who are blind or have a disability, people who regularly use technology and own a smartphone to those who have never used a computer, we needed to create something usable by the greatest number of people possible. To ensure that our designs would work for everyone, we needed to understand the different needs that people would have, but we also had to work efficiently to ensure the project kept moving forward. To do this, we built relationships with community groups whose member represented the most extreme range of needs. For example, we worked with the Older Adult Technology Services group in New York City with people who were 65+, many of whom didn’t own a computer or a smartphone and were just now learning how to use tablets to test our concepts and interfaces and understand what was easy for them, what was hard, what they valued, and what they didn’t. We also worked with a group of adult high school students, many of whom recently immigrated to the United States and didn’t speak much English, if any at all. Within this setting, we refined how we communicate LinkNYC’s features and offerings to those who speak a wide range of languages other than English. Learning from and designing for these groups has enabled us to create designs that will serve the most challenging of situations and will therefore also work for the vast majority of people in between.

Alignment

Assuming that the entire team is in agreement about how the project is defined and what the goals are is entirely common. But typically, people have different understandings of the project, and if left uncorrected, the teammates will each head in a different direction. Alignment ensures that the team is moving in the same direction and that the design team can get the background it needs to run in the right direction.

As a designer, you can facilitate alignment through some prep work and a workshop with the key stakeholders on your project. Get the right people in the room to define the goal of the project as a team and determine what you want the impact to be. This alone will go a long way in getting your team on the same page.

Working in Iterative Sprints

After aligning with stakeholders, our teams work in one- to three-week design sprints, concepting ideas for both the larger service experience and the individual touchpoints, building quick prototypes and testing them with actual users. This process allows us to move quickly, keeps the team aligned, and ensures our work will be usable and valuable to users. Because the process is iterative, it’s okay to be wrong—you can make corrections in the next round. It’s also alright if you don’t know everything about the users, as you can make your best guess and use your hypothesis to learn more about the users when you test your prototype. Before each sprint, make sure you clearly define the goals of the sprint, what you’re trying to achieve, and what success looks like.

Concepting

There are ample existing resources about how to run a good brainstorming meeting. Think wide, push boundaries, and generate enough ideas to provide a plentitude of concepts to work with. Diverging ensures that the team is thinking through the full breadth of what’s possible.

During concepting, bring in members from across the team and outside of design whenever possible. By preparing prompts and thought starters based on what you’re trying to accomplish during the sprint, you can facilitate the creation of a large number of diverse ideas as well as understand the underlying desires of the extended team.

Even if you haven’t been able to learn from users yet, it’s okay to start hypothesizing and generating initial ideas, as long as you identify them as hypotheses, and you’re open to them being wrong. The iterative process makes it okay to be wrong, as there are going to be opportunities to correct along the way.

Prototyping

The value of prototyping cannot be understated. Prototyping brings form to the intangible, opens up the process to enable collaboration across disciplines, and moves your project forward.

During each sprint, we review what we need to accomplish, take a look at what we know, what we need to learn, and create prototypes to answer outstanding questions. Many of the prototypes we make start out rough and scrappy. For example, pieces of paper without interfaces, but single words that represent potential features to start conversations with people about what their lives are like and what features they value. With each round of concepting, prototyping, and testing, our prototypes get more refined. We usually sketch out interfaces and load them onto a tablet to gauge initial reactions to features and interactions. For concepts that require a more unique form, we use anything from foam core models to additive printing to create objects or spaces.

Prototypes not only set us up for testing with users; they are also great discussion points for the extended team by giving them a tangible thing to react to. It also forces us to be realistic about what’s possible from the beginning of our project and ensures that the entire team has the end goal in sight.

Testing

At its simplest, testing means taking your assumptions to the people who are meant to use your solution. Testing ensures that what you plan to build will be valuable to people, that the interactions and interfaces are usable, and that experience enables your intended idea.

Most of the time, we have one-on-one conversations, either with recruited respondents or by conducting impromptu intercept interviews in the context of our solutions. For example, with the MTA we conducted testing in subway stations. We start out our user testing with a conversation about who they are, and what their lives are like to get context about their lives outside of the narrow portion we are focusing on. Next, we dive into questions about their experience relating to our project and present prototypes. The questions we ask vary greatly depending on what we’re trying to learn. We use card sorts to understand people’s values, and test interactive prototypes and gauge people’s reactions to know if it’s truly something that they’d appreciate and use if implemented. Later on in the project, we do light usability testing with interactive prototypes, first as wireframes, and then later as fully designed works like/looks like prototypes. Many times we create prototypes that aren’t actually intended to be implemented, but serve as tools to answer specific questions.

Repeat to Move Forward

Coming out of testing, you should have a better understanding of what’s resonating with users and what’s not. Test data gathered can serve as a baseline for future testing rounds and help inform business model projects. Combining this with feedback from your extended team about what’s technically and politically feasible, you can push forward. The benefit of conducting an iterative design process before development begins is to work through many of the user assumptions, kinks, and challenges early on, prior to large development teams focusing on coding. This helps to reduce the risk of developers working on code that will be thrown away.

The next challenge is to combine valuable concepts into reliable and systemic solutions. We balance the iterative process by defining interaction and visual principles and high-level specifications that will provide ongoing direction to teams.

This iterative process continues beyond implementation. After a product is launched, you will continue to learn how people are using your solution and continuously implement updates to make your product even better. Understanding which features are used most can give you a better sense of what aspects of the project the public values and can help you figure out where to focus your efforts.

This process of iterative concepting, prototyping, and testing to inform development efforts provides the insight and metrics needed to build the support, approvals, and investment for the next phase. As many assignments are not isolated features or products but rather more complex service experiences, this approach can be followed by additional teams working in parallel to build complementary touchpoints that come together to form a holistic experience comprised of many features, products, services, spaces, and cities. Once individual experiences come together, designers can use the same methods of testing and adapting to further refine the system.