When place experience design for public space goes wrong

What happens when the?place design of a public space?isn’t user-centred, and accessible for all ages and abilities?

This recent image of an aged, well-worn desire line well-illustrates the consequences for users. It tells the tale of?Place Experience Design not done well, or not done at all.?Sometimes capabilities are best understood through their absence.

In a yarn last week with an an Arup?Experience Design?colleague, to show what happens without an integrated, user-centred approach, I fetched out this photo (taken a few months back on a visit to a much-loved Sydney park).?Note: I've pixelated the person for anonymity. And I won't name the site, because the site is not the point.

Someone awkwardly pushing a ~10kg loaded pram five metres up a slippery ~30o incline is not an easy thing to watch. What can you do or say? This day, the photographer in me came out, and I documented the moment to later tell the story of design delivery gone wrong – my only practical response. Still, it's an image of someone struggling and I've always found it awkward to look at, even as it makes its point about the importance of empathetic, human-centred design methods.

The cause of the problem? The designed ramp is about 10 metres to the right of the stair, and not very visible.

While I'm being critical I should add that the design here is about 15 years old –?done in a time when HCD practices were less prevalent. This outcome would have been hard to foresee way back then (though easy to correct), but once built – while easy to see – is more than doubly hard to fix.

Even so, I'm sure it'll soon be repaired, with a new masterplan coming for the site.

Getting Place Experience Design right

Desire lines tell the tale of design out of touch with user needs.

So, let’s look at it more generally and ask how this might be avoided today. How might an asset owner ensure this doesn’t happen with design done now?

Principles

Principles are the best way to know if your current design approach is robust, and up to the task of delivering inclusive, delightful outcomes for all users.?

Here are our principles for Experience Design (with acknowledgment to the precedent of principles in This Is Service Design Doing).

• Human-centred. Consider the impact on?all people benefitting, and affected, by?the design. The design is inclusive and humane. The design maximises human safety and does least?harm. The pains, gains and jobs of users are understood, as are the drivers?of functionality, performance and delight.?
• Collaborative. Stakeholders of various multi-disciplinary, and multi-agency functions are actively engaged?to maximise value?in the design process.?
• Iterative. The experience design process is an evidence-based, experimental approach, that?iteratively validates problem assumptions and design decisions as the response is developed.?
• Sequential and orchestrated. The human experience is visualised, designed for and orchestrated as a sequence of interrelated touchpoints, actions and engagements.?Orchestration protects the design from gaps, pains and failures?as the human journey traverses business silos and technical design disciplines.??
• Researched, prototyped and real. Human needs and behaviours are researched in reality, designs are prototyped and validated in reality, and the value delivered is?realised in tangible physical and digital ways.?
• Holistic and multi-scalar. Design holistically considers the multi-scalar system of people, processes,?products, services, operations and governance involved in the delivery of human value. Investment is understood in a system context.?
• Sustainable. Products and services are designed to sustainably deliver value over the entire experience, across the business, and over the lifetime of the asset.?

Capabilities

Next, by hiring an integrated multidisciplinary place experience design team that includes one or several of experience design, human factors or pedestrian planning alongside architects, landscape architects, urban designers, wayfinding designers and civil engineers. In this way the owner will ensure safe, inclusive and desirable outcomes for diverse users.

At Arup:

• Place Experience Design would align designers for a common understanding, and a shared vision for a desirable user journey, based on researched insight into users and use cases, that would influence outcomes from concept design through to realisation. At Arup get in touch with Glenda Yiu or myself Adrian Wiggins.
• Pedestrian Planning would design out the problem by placing the ramp near the stairs, and would inform the design by modelling the flow of people, and provide a wayfinding scheme to match. Here, chat with Eric Rivers.
• Human Factors would check any ramp for accessibility, incline, the likely loads for people with encumbrances (eg: prams), so that there is a safe and inclusive experience for users of all ages and abilities. Arup's Matt Holman can help you out.
• Landscape Architecture?and Architecture?would bring the capabilities together together to create a unified, place-based response. Check in with Vince Chan Kun Wa?and Ella Lochhead-Sperling.?
• Design Research will ensure that design is informed with observational insights about the needs of users. Iterative Design Validation as?concepts are developed will test that the?design achieves its aims of inclusive design that provides delight. Here again, I can help you out.

Aim of effort: Do no harm. Create delight.

Place Experience Design at Arup

Place Experience Design at Arup?is an integrated multidisciplinary approach to delivering safety and delight for people of all ages and abilities, at all times of day and night, in the planning and design for place and public space in cities, precincts and infrastructure.

Let’s talk

What’s working where you are? What are the challenges? I’d love to hear?…?

Let’s have a yarn. You can contact me at [email protected]

And get in touch if you’ve worked with Arup before and you’d now like to run your next place design or public space project using Place Experience Design. We can do it together…