Whiteboarding | Solving the urban sprawl

Logbook musings

Published in

Product + Design

3 min readJul 25, 2020

Problem

Today, 54% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66% by 2050. Projections show that urbanisation,, combined with the overall growth of the world’s population, could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050. Think about a digital product that could help governments and municipalities dealing with this challenge.
[answering whether this trend still stands considering the current pandemic is for another time!]

Why

Cities are getting more and more crowded. They’re constantly extending into neighboring cities. This effectively creates more distance to the center of the city. People moving into cities are looking for more stimulation (movies, clubs, museums etc.) and for job opportunities.

Who

Population growth stems from two groups:
1. People moving to the cities are usually between the age of 18 and 30.
2. New people born in cities.

When & where

Maslow’s pyramid of needs provides a good blueprint to understand these new urbanites’ as well as existing urbanites’ needs [an aside here but a questioning of society’s age-old pyramidal concepts can be found here]. People living in cities need:

1. Physiological: Access to air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing and sex.
2. Safety: Personal security, employment, resources, health, property.
3. Love and belonging: Friendship, intimacy, family, a sense of connection.
4. Esteem: Respect, self-esteem, status, recognition, strength, freedom.
5. Self-actualization: Desire to become the most one can be.

What

A few solutions a digital product can deliver come to mind:

A. An app that helps urbanites find out where and how each of these 5 needs is being catered for in their city.
B. An app to guide people through the 5 stages in order for them to self-actualize. The app could have a mentorship component where people are matched with folks who are “higher up” in Maslow’s pyramid.
C. Assuming physiological, safety and love and belonging needs are being addressed in different ways in cities, an app that helps folks nurture esteem and / or self-actualization.

I’ll focus on solution C and specifically on self-actualization by building an app that helps people become the most they can be. I’ll call it PTNTL. A few thoughts about the app:

1/ How does this solve for “2.5 billion people [added] to urban populations by 2050”. I believe that from a sociological point of view, the central struggle of cities (security, homelesness, etc.) stems from worldwide structural problems (capitalism, stockmarkets’ and pension funds’ profit driven stance) perpetuated by individuals suffering from core wounds (security, loneliness, hyperinflated ego etc.). People self-actualizing would help unlock resources and solutions we’re unable to access today.
2/ The need for guidance around self-actualization can occur at several times during an individual’s life: School, university, mid-life crisis etc.
3/ The app could have a mentorship component as well as a self-paced component. The latter could be composed of questions inviting self-reflection and introspection.

Solve

The user flow would be as follows:

1\ User discovers the app through their curriculum or some other news outlet
2\ User downloads the app and signs up. The app explains that a custom and personal curriculum for growth will be generated for them.
3\ User is asked to describe what life stage they’re at, what their current struggles are (out of a list) etc.
4\ When the user completes that form, a curriculum is produced and a mentor assigned to the user.

The IA would need to echo the 3 jobs to be done: Learn, Connect, Reflect. I can imagine the self-paced portion (Learn) taking one navigation tab whereas the mentorship aspect (Connect) can live in a chat like tab. The 3rd tab would be dedicated to the user’s profile (Reflect).