Thank you for this revealing exploration into Civic futures.
Achieving a balance of human-centered design and creating scalable systems for good civic futures fills up many ARGO slack #channels. Through these discussions, I have learnt to better qualify the terms, “human” and “centered” and perhaps some of this has already been treated in the LEAP Dialogues publication.
First, to assume that the human in HCD, as a singular whole is at best, lazy and at worst, grossly biased. The OXO Good Grips were designed for a specific subset of humans, those with limited gripping ability and whose needs were clearly different from more able humans. The design features of Good Grips scaled elegantly from a minority group to a majority of users and fondly reminds me of meditations on Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things which establishes certain rules for the design of consumer products.
Second, pandering to and exclusively centering on monocultural human needs feels like a gooey, one-size fits all approach. It varnishes over the inherent fallibilities, messiness and complexity of human needs, choices, decisions, and desires. Perhaps a Human-Peripheral Design approach that consciously approaches civic issues from the margins and scales from the outside-in rather than inside-out is a way to go?
Drawing from a rich history of automotive retro-futures, I find some telling marriages of design and scale that could help inform better civic futures that are in some shape or form are going to include Autonomous vehicles.
While Henry Ford’s sentiment of “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” championed scale over design by consciously ignoring measurable user needs may have been the initial spark that fuelled gasoline-car manufacturing and ownership, the doubling down on it was clearly counterproductive to Ford as observed from General Motor’s and Alfred P. Sloan’s “A car for every Purse and Purpose” which successfully responded with an emphasis on changing needs and design over scale. Here too an over reliance on that mantra led to multiple crisis that plagued GM for decades. (The parallels to the Microsoft, IBM, and Apple personal computer battles is too tempting).
What both approaches shared in their initial success was an intuition about designing for specific human needs at a specific time that scaled very well throughout the marketplace. This measurement of intuition for human needs at specific times has been gleefully codified into what startup land likes to call the product-market fit.
Here, I feel, are important lessons to be learnt for designing civic futures that include end-users (city officials & municipal managers that administer some civic asset) and end-beneficiaries (you, me, and others equally consuming and hopefully enjoying the civic resource). ARGO hopes to design civic futures by centering on end-users while being keenly aware of the needs of end-beneficiaries.
What the HCD of industrial-systems and design complexes needs to bake into their formula is a design vocabulary to scale from the outside-in and adapt to changing human needs.
As a quick aside, one of our hardest challenges in marrying design and scale was when we prototyped Learnr, our collective vision in demonstrating a civic future where skilled people like you, me, and many others could volunteer their skills and connect with after school programs as easy as *ahem* calling an Uber. The intent is towards designing a scalable learning experience and moving the needle on social mobility through experiential learning.
We think there is enormous, untapped potential for a scalable digital experience that allow the haves and the have-nots exchange social capital. We are open to feedback, ideas, and collaborations in this space.
Coming back to physical mobility, I believe than an eventual Apple-esque car, similar to like the original iPod, will be less about the CAR and more about the mobility experience, the same way the iPod was less about the MP3 player and more about a mobile listening experience.
In the same manner, I sought out Ford and Sloan to parse the historical relationship of design and scale, future ponderers may reflect on the differences between the competing visions of computing megacorps and how they eventually affected their present conditions.
Apple was amongst the first to demonstrate a happy marriage of design and scale that also fundamentally altered our civic experience by bringing techtonic shifts into how we consume information and services while rendering most of us slouched over our screens and insulated by our headphones.
At the moment, designs for automation futures as a whole appears to be in an anthropophobic phase where startups and their engineer corps are locked in a mad rush to demo their autonomous visions in highly controlled environments where humans are a problem to solve around.
From my perspective, only Nissan’s efforts offer an exception in the big-mobility landscape where they have designed an autonomous mobility system by placing a premium on anthropology and humanology. Nissan has actively used humans as a solution as opposed to actively avoiding them which is curiously pioneering.
One of the many big design choices facing our times for good civic futures seems to be how to evolve from the “I” generation of designing for individual consumption to the “us” generation and happily marry design and scale around shared and sustainable civic experiences.
Resources
- Design thinking origin story plus some of the people who made it all happen, Jo Szczepanska
- Henry Ford, Innovation, and That “Faster Horse” Quote, Patrick Vlaskovits, HBR
- What Does an Anthropologist Bring to Autonomous Driving Design?, Nissan Motor Corp.
- Nissan’s Path to Self-Driving Cars? Humans in Call Centers, Alex Davies, Wired
