Cooper Hewitt - Design For Transforming Cities

I originally published this in the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Winter Journal a few months back.

https://www.cooperhewitt.org/

A little over a century ago, mass-produced automobiles began crowding the streets of American cities. Engineers, urban planners, and civic decision makers were captivated by the innovation. They were also incentivised and encouraged  to help the car succeed. The needs of citizens, communities, existing mass-transit systems, and the environment were all but ignored. An emerging technology of its day that quickly scaled up before cities could adapt, cars revolutionized personal transportation and created new economies.

They also caused confusion, congestion, and an increase in fatalities. It took cities decades of experimentation to enact safeguards, such as traffic signals, better street signage, and emissions regulations. To this day, cities continue to struggle to keep people safe from cars. A century later this once-new technology still presents challenges for seamless integration.

We are now on the cusp of another mobility revolution. This time, it’s a wave of digital technology innovations transforming cities. The convergence of high-speed connectivity, cheap hardware, intuitive software, and personal devices has influenced every aspect of civic life. This includes how people live, work, shop, and move through our urban spaces. While change is expected in cities, this rapid transition is overwhelming many residents and the policymakers tasked with understanding the civic impact of the emerging digital landscape.

I’ve contributed to this change as a design lead focusing on technology- enabled products in cities. My work has helped shape civic products such as Link—the largest free municipal wi-fi kiosk network in cities across the United States and the United Kingdom—as well as numerous mobility products for transit authorities in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

It’s an advantageous moment for designers, whose skill sets are in demand in both the private and public sectors. The design process—rooted in understanding human needs, addressing business constraints, and making technology user friendly—is ideal for helping cities make sense of changing human behaviors, leveraging new technologies, and experimenting with new ways of solving civic challenges. Designers, armed with these tools, would do well to go beyond the studio and immerse themselves in the everyday realities of living in our magnificent, ever-evolving metropolises.

UNDERSTAND HOW PEOPLE ARE CHANGING HOW THEY INTERACT WITH THE WORLD Good civic design considers human abilities and how our behavior changes and adapts in response to the environment. The street experience was designed with an assumption that people would have their heads forward and eyes looking up. But in recent years, we’ve developed new habits. We stare down at our devices and are almost constantly distracted. We use our devices to connect us to somewhere else while we become less aware of where we actually are.

Through observational research and user interviews, you can better understand a person’s relationship with physical spaces and the new technologies that are influencing our interactions. From here you can conceptualize usability improvements and share them with potential clients or organizations who are trying to reimagine cities.

UNDERSTAND CHANGING TECHNOLOGY

Digital technology is mostly unseen, making it harder for average citizens to understand or envision its impact. There’s a constant need to understand how technology is changing and explain the value or risks to different audiences.

While understanding the basics of computer science can only help, you don’t need to be a programmer. You can start by building relationships with people who work across the technology spectrum. Try to understand what excites technologists and the current trends to investigate. Get inspired to tell better stories by studying how others are explaining concepts. Make note of publications or portfolio case studies that explain future ideas in simple terms. Saving interesting artifacts—storyboards, workshop kits, or concept videos—will help inspire you when you need to shape your own concepts. Technologists often struggle to explain the user value of their products in easy-to- understand stories. This is where design comes in. Great designers not only generate purposeful new ideas but convey them in a way that the audience can understand.

Illustration by Woody Nitibhon

LEARN THROUGH MAKING

Often, you need to move beyond a visionary idea or story and make something in order to get relevant feedback. In the civic sphere, adopting rapid prototyping to test new solutions has yielded powerful results. In 2008, NYC’s Department of Transportation (DOT) attempted a new approach for expanding its City Plaza Program, which aims to ensure that all New Yorkers live within a ten-minute walk of a quality open space. In Times Square, an area crowded with tourists and traffic congestion, the DOT tested the impact of converting a busy street to a public seating area. The DOT rerouted cars and, with minimal cost, set up temporary signage and folding chairs. The results exceeded expectations as tourists and locals quickly filled the space. The data gathered gave civic leaders the confidence to install more permanent place-making elements and scale the program across the city. The success of civic prototyping has led to a rise in civic hackathons and design challenges across the country. Like New York’s Big Apps competition, an annual event that “challenges designers, developers, academics, entrepreneurs, and New Yorkers at large to apply their know-how to improve New York City.” These events are a great way to understand key civic issues, demonstrate your design skills, and network to find open jobs in a growing sector.

As the technology innovator and investor Marc Andreessen has said, “time and again, people adapt in unpredictable ways to get the most out of new technology. Creative people tinker to figure out the most interesting applications, others build on those, and entire industries are reshaped.” Embracing new methods helps us to learn, create, test, and quickly get the best ideas to the people.