Collective Maintenance in urban space

Speculative lens for designing Home IoT -map interface

Introduction

“Draw a map of where you live now.”

Even if you are living in the same city or even in the same apartment, you will create a completely different visualization compared to others. According to the research in mental mapping in behavior geography[1], recognizing the city’s impression and the composition of nodes, edges, districts, paths, and landmarks are different depending on an individual’s unique experience and perception.

Diagram by Kevin Lynch

According to Kevin Lynch, who is the author of The Image of the City[2], He mentioned most often our perception of a city is not sustained but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all. Moreover, his workshop that asked participants to make a rapid description of the city to a stranger showed all the main features in the map reflect their mental model of the urban community interacting with locational data and image.

As such, an individual’s perceptions of physical space are complex and multifaceted. Therefore, the need for objective indicators has become the background for the emergence of “map”. Along with the layer of transportation, the map emerged into a practical tool, and it has represented the topography and physical locational information that citizens and the entire human race could agree on. And the development of technology has evolved to capture the details of additional facilities and complex transportation systems in addition to more precise measurements and topographical information.

Currently, giant tech companies like Google and Apple offer map applications and GPS information that are used worldwide. And location-based information and features are utilized in various service sectors. So how this location-based service affects our perception of the urban community? To look at the category of services offered around the map UI, there are transportation, delivery and logistics, activity, and maintenance services. Especially among them, the maintenance topic is interesting to look at, because historically it hasn’t been revealed to the public compared to other sectors. Nevertheless, it is an important layer that shows what is needed for the city’s environmental circulation and what people value.

Background

Centre Pompidou | Paris, France

In 1977, when the centre Pompidou, designed by architect Renzo Piano was built downtown in Paris came as a surprise to urbanites, the history that we have recognized and expressed the essential core of space is short. In fact, the infrastructure is the basis of the city, and as like considering not to reveal the exterior of facilities as an aesthetic in the architecture field, It has stopped to conceal its existence and came closer to people along with the development of location-based service(LBS); software services which utilize geographic data and information to provide services or information to users [3] such as a maintenance reporting application.

LBS example diagram

Urban infrastructure requires a continuous maintenance process. It serves as the basis for the citizen’s pleasant living space and updates their facilities in the modernized form. To summarize, city maintenance encompasses all the tasks related to cleaning, repairing, and maintaining city structures, roadways, and other public areas[4].

And the relationship between urban management[5] and urban citizens helps to ensure people’s safety and build the trust of institutions like local governments. It also plays a role in attracting new industries and retaining existing networks.

From a broad perspective, such as urban landscape,[6] it can be seen that most public areas from the country courthouse to the post office require constant care from managers and workers. More specifically, government agencies and public buildings required to check their daily utilities working well, and public works such as roads and streets need appropriate responses based on weather and circumstances. Also, parks and landscapes always require facility management and basic seasonal care. In other words, the city maintenance aims to upkeep citizens’ living bases of a public domain in good condition by utilizing the collective support system.

Casestudy and Method

Then what would be different if citizens, besides managers and workers could be directly involved in these city maintenance process?

From an individual’s point of view, the sector of maintenance has reached the level of reporting non-emergency issues from an urban area, and systemically managing individual’s requests from initial finding and to problem-solving.

In this context, the example of SeeClickFix platform[7] is an interesting example of city maintenance. This allows individuals to participate in addressing urban-scale issues and at the same time has intentions of grass-rooted participation[8]. Therefore, people can easily demand public repair issues that they find in their daily lives and also get the information requested by others which leads to creating collective maintenance approach.[9]

Also, the nature of the platform is interesting from the societal lens. The service manages significant urban maintenance while encouraging citizens to participate in small but significant parts of the city.

Rayven _IoT maintenance platform

On the other hand, there is an approach to focus on the infrastructure itself that needs to be repaired rather than people. Based on high-tech AI and IoT technology, the system predicts issues of agriculture, water, and facility management, asset tracking, etc thereby reducing budget and preventing potential problems.[10]

Discussion

Those examples show a wide spectrum between managing the urban-wide infrastructure with an AI-driven system and encouraging an individual’s attention and highlighting some connection between societal groups.[11]

The spectrum of property regimes

I wondered what other methods would be possible to create a sense of community through their involvement in the maintenance of the environment around them. And not dividing the border between private and public space but simultaneously gaining the identity as a part of the community by joining the discourse of city-living space maintenance.

Furthermore, it was interesting that people usually have different perceptions while requesting maintenance issues of their private and public space and using different platforms accordingly.

Private space / Public space maintenance reporting platform

1. For private spaces, such as houses and apartments, residents report some issues directly to the management office or utilize the online integrated facility management system.
2. At public spaces, such as schools and offices, issues are often reported by individuals or monitored by the manager in charge. Unlike private spaces, some issues found in public spaces shared within the community and requests are selectively managed depending on their urgency and budget estimation.

Findings

Scope of approach

For creating design intervention, I wanted to explore what would be a multifaceted approach that located between the various city-maintenance solutions. Also, I wanted to explore the way to access the large scale city maintenance from the individuals’ private space. In addition, I summarized what would be critical insights that can be helpful to set the design direction.

• In the case of city infrastructure resources, the maintenance system is evolving to reduce its uncertainty by preparing in advance by using precise sensors or predictive algorithms.
• People tend to separate from the outside world when they are in private space; the city’s basic and smallest unit. In this context, why don’t we look at the new possibilities of home IoT in city maintenance?
• It is able to look at this problem area from the perspective of location-based services like transportation, delivery & logistics, leisure activity. What is the effect of aggregating the maintenance sector on everyday services?

• Considering citizen participation and community as a theme, services such as Nextdoor, Craigslist, and Carrot market are consequently affecting the revitalization of urban communities.[12] It might be beneficial to consider the values of responsibility, interest, or empathy and how it plays in the maintenance work process.

Conclusion

In conclusion, modern citizen’s consciousness of the community has arisen with the development of technology. Today, with a richer understanding, interpretation, and accessibility to the physical space within a city, it has become easier to understand where you live and create an attachment with the community. And because managing our environment and problem-solving are areas where citizens must participate with responsibility, maintenance reporting has the potential to strengthen the urban community.

Again, urban maintenance issues have a large spectrum from tiny grass-rooted participation to AI-based solutions for prediction. And the SeeClickFix platform occupies a unique position between these spectra, especially civil participation in public spaces.

The future cone (The Taxonomy of futures according to Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, the authors of Speculative Everything book.)

Therefore, I think there is a way to present new stewardship through the combination of various approaches in this spectrum. In particular, I would like to mention the value of a speculative design angle; design method addressing big societal problems and looking towards the future and creating products and services for those scenarios [13] which can utilize the abundant resources of existing settings while connecting the gaps between the context of personal space and public space.

Artifact

How city maintenance can play a role in connecting private and public space and encouraging citizen’s stewardship in urban areas?

Method smart home IoT, speculative design, map application platform, interaction design

Introduction
It is a smart IoT device that operates in a home setting and provides multiple location-based services. Users can get information and use convenient services from four different categories; transportation, delivery, leisure, and maintenance. Especially in the maintenance part, they can report the issues from private/ public space and look around other issues that are happening in the outside neighborhood. By using map UI, the user can easily relate themselves to the environment that surrounds them and get a customized version of map visualization that reflects their perceptions.

Concept and Design direction

Interaction (features)

1. Home-Maintenance: Along with other location-based services, users can report and check close maintenance issues.
2. Personal space maintenance & communicate with neighbors: individual maintenance issues at their home will be automatically reported and users can do a virtual tour -look around neighbors and district environment with the general topic of maintenance
3. Public space maintenance: The user’s vehicles or digital devices will detect some maintenance issues while they across the problematic sites outside. These issues will be pulled out when they arrived home and ask them whether to report.

UI Prototypes

References

1. Mental mapping — Wikipedia. Retrieved October 19, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_mapping
2. The Image of the City — Wikipedia. Retrieved October 19, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image_of_the_City
3. “Location-based service — Wikipedia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_service. Accessed 25 Oct. 2020.
4. “Maintenance Applications — UpKeep.” https://www.onupkeep.com/learning/maintenance-applications. Accessed 25 Oct. 2020.
5. “APWA Resources — American Public Works Association.” https://www.apwa.net/MYAPWA/Resources/MyApwa/Apwa_Public/APWA_Resources.aspx?hkey=f2acc764-62f5-4b92-9dc8-d7c0f70d0c84. Accessed 25 Oct. 2020.
6. “Industry Resources — Association of Professional Landscape ….” https://www.apld.org/industry-resources/. Accessed 25 Oct. 2020.
7. “SeeClickFix.” https://seeclickfix.com/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2020.
8. Yong, C., Chelmis, C., Lee, W., & Zois, D. S. (2019, August). Understanding online civic engagement: a multi-neighborhood study of SeeClickFix. In Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (pp. 1048–1055).
9. Mergel, I. (2012). Distributed democracy: Seeclickfix. com for crowdsourced issue reporting. Com for Crowdsourced Issue Reporting (January 27, 2012).
10. “Rayven IoT: Enterprise IoT & Predictive Analytics Platform ….” https://www.rayven.io/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2020.
11. “The spectrum of property regimes (Part II) — The Construction ….” https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/construction-of-property/spectrum-of-property-regimes/BD8F8FD60F0D9F79C5F0E30390199A21/core-reader.
12. “Nextdoor.” https://about.nextdoor.com/. Accessed 25 Oct. 2020.
13. Raby, Fiona, and Dunne, Anthony. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. United Kingdom, MIT Press, 2013.