Designing for Better Urban Living
How human-centered design can make cities more inclusive.
What does it mean to design cities together? And how can an inclusive design process result in more inclusive cities? At Openbox, we apply human-centered design to improve how our urban environs and systems are designed and built. Human-centered design (HCD) is a method to discover, test, and build design solutions grounded in the context of people’s everyday lives and challenges. Using the methods of HCD, we help decision makers swap top-down perspectives for ground-up views. While redevelopment projects can often prioritize technical or design requirements, we partner with government agencies, design firms, developers, and community organizations to surface people’s concerns, ideas, and aspirations in ways that directly influence and improve the design and decision-making process.
We’ve found that without deep community understanding and alignment from the start, redevelopment projects will not fulfill their full potential for success. Instead of relying on economic data collected at the macro level, such as property assessments and zoning regulations to tell the story of a site or neighborhood, we use ethnography, interviews, community mapping, and other immersive research tools to capture people-centered perspectives. While sensors that count cars and people are useful, they cannot substitute for insights from interviews, activity mapping, photo and video documentation, and other HCD methods that tell the full stories of places and people. This approach marks a critical shift in power — rendering transparent and flexible traditionally opaque and exclusive processes. Through our experiences using HCD to shape our cities — from public libraries to parks — we’re excited to share three principles that we’ve developed for how we use HCD to design for better urban living.
#1. We are people centered.
We start by bringing communities in at the onset of the design process — not as an afterthought or simply to approve designs. We gather insights from the lived experiences of individuals and communities and apply them to directly shape the design of spaces, places, and experiences. We hang out with the people closest to the questions, problems, and challenges at hand. Our sites of research are people’s homes, businesses, commutes, schools, parks, and favorite coffee shops. We make observations and surface insights that inform both pragmatic paths and imaginative explorations for the design process. The result is that people experience design as something that happens with them, not something that happens to them or their neighborhoods.
#2. We are inclusive.
We optimize for inclusion at every step of the process. By elevating the perspectives of marginalized and extreme users, we capture the voices and needs of those traditionally excluded from design decisions. And we stick with people throughout the design process. We never leave our partners with a pretty deck of ideas and best practices. We actively champion people’s perspectives through workshops, prototyping, and feedback sessions from project planning to evaluation. We measure what works and what doesn’t. We use this information to guide design firms and developers to adapt and adjust their strategies. And when needed, we reverse engineer previous design solutions to uncover what went wrong. In all these ways, we prevent the same dynamics of displacement and exclusion from repeating themselves.
#3. We are the city.
We believe that cities are not technical problems, but instead are spatial outcomes of our constant and collective striving for better, shared futures. To represent this complexity, we balance quantitative and qualitative perspectives. We value sensors to tell us how many people crossed an intersection. But at the same time, we know the value of street-level intercepts, in-depth interviews, and photo and video documentation to answer more complex questions like, how can we design this plaza to be more inviting for women and children. (For an example of balancing qualitative and quantitative approaches, see our project on Data & Design for Social Inclusion with Stae for the San Francisco Department of Planning). We know that cities are like people, and cannot be flattened to mere numbers. Through our work, we create better, more inclusive design outcomes for all of us by empowering people to shape the design process at each step.
Tell us how you’d like to place people at the center of your city: hello@opnbx.com
