Existential Questions for Design
Rants on Smart Transport and Mobility
Background
We have a course at Aalto called “Design Project”, an intermediary course along the track of User-Centered Design. This year’s theme is “Smart Public Transport”. At the start I thought the goal of these design exercises was to learn about improving the user experience (especially with sensor data, fleet management, design techniques and so on), but very soon, the fabric of reality began to dissolve into a blur.
Labour in the Context of Capital
We have a building called “Open Innovation House”, which has a bunch of cubicles for students to use as co-working space. Walk around this space at 10pm, you’ll see second-year masters students labouring away at some technical assignment or project or internship pursuit. It makes you ponder, around Aalto, there are students no less talented, no less active, no less hard-working than workers at Supercell — the cubicles they sit in may not even be qualitatively different — yet one category of activeness is producing infinitely more economic value. That is the real puzzle.
When students are told to work on a “business/design project” or a simulated business case at some summer school, you see these very impressive headline keywords: “Urban Mobility”, “Intelligent Infrastructure”, “Smart Cities”. But what concepts (business idea) do students end up coming up with? A half-way wannabe Google Maps clone.
This year’s theme is “transport”, very close to last year’s theme, “mobility”.
Think about Uber, you open the app, call a car, get in the car, get driven to the destination, get out of the car, for what often costs less than HSL (the Helsinki Region Public Transport). The technical part is a largely solved problem. What about the social part? Think about the human drivers as the pilot testing phase for these companies, in 10 to 15 years, the same problems will resolve themselves when vehicles become autonomous. Working on improving HSL is just as effective as going into a coma and waking up later in terms of arriving at a solved problem. Ergo, ad absurdum.
What are we doing here? What roles are we taking on here? Why not just develop deep tech portfolios or become sub-contractors for the big players? Is that the only future? Sure, maybe you say these questions are too big, but without them, just thrown into a “design” exercise, absurdity is all you get.
That is the biggest issue I’ve encountered with the design courses so far — the framing of what is to be solved. Namely, when McGookin says more sensible design is to get machines to work around humans rather than get users to adapt to bad UIs, we should also notice whether technologies are instigating real change, or just fitting into a straightjacket. If we were building entirely new charter cities with the premises that vehicles are autonomous, roads would be entirely different, streets would be entirely different, the way people live, work, shop, socialise, walk around would be very different.
Or, we just help drivers connect their car stereo to Spotify while sitting in 6-lane congestion. Of course we can do the Spotify thing, just understandably with much less enthusiasm.
Mechanics and Teleology
It often jumps out that Finland has been bathing in the neo-liberal Kool-Aid for some time now. You often hear this sort of illogical non-sequitor even from people who’re supposedly teaching entrepreneurship:
“The world is changing” (sure)
⇒ “A lot of jobs will be gone” (very likely)
⇒ “People need new skills for the future” (so far so good)
⇒ “Voilà, entrepreneurship skills! Create your own job!”
⇒ “Embrace the gig economy!”
⇒ “Everyone creates a ‘business’ for himself!” (a video blog or driving Uber?)
Then from lecturers to startup cool dudes to power-tripping Slush-infused serial-entrepreneur hipster also-DJ-by-night highschoolers start to claim with sparkling eyes and full conviction that Uber or Foodora is some kind of future ideal: “work any time you want on your own schedule to kick-start a career with extra cash, take control of your own destiny!” It’s insanity.
Many Finns really buy into the notion that “pay to ride” is a divine natural order of things. Perhaps it’s part of the “barterer mentality”: “I spent hours grinding those coffee beans, now if you want a coffee, fucking pay me.” Similar to how libertarians insist there’s also moral high grounds in a mode of production. Payment suddenly is not just a facilitating technology, a designed mechanism, but a moral imperative.
Now let’s at least step back to the level of Milton Friedman’s perspective, the production-focused point of view: at least here free market and the exchange of value is viewed as a mechanism. The beans were grown far away, roasted elsewhere, packaged and transported (by ships built somewhere else), the grinding machines are made of thousands of parts, made in unknown villages in Bavaria (cf. Mittelstand companies), then a barista brews the coffee, put it in a mug made again elsewhere — all the workers, from all over the world, who may not even like each other, participate in this massive, magnificent system of economic cooperation, to bring you this single cup of coffee.
The economy is a machine of production for bringing value to consumers. Value is created when you sip that delicious coffee (metaphorically embodying wellbeing and quality of life), everything else is a means for achieving that end. This “economist’s view” provides a lot of clarity when thinking about economic activities.
Institutions and Instruments
Next, let’s add a dose of Marx in the modern context. Look at the post-industrial realities of a developed economy, e.g. Australia:
- Productivity is north of $50K per capita
- A welfare state where 1/3 of public revenue go to transfer payments
- Sophisticated corporate infrastructure of running public initiatives, that is, a public transport or utility company or hospital is run with the practices of an accountable business.
What is ticket anyway? Is it a throttle (like ISP rated throttling) to prevent crowding? Is it a tool of revenue recovery (as a strategy of getting the system funded)? Don’t forget some are always paying more than the perfect share, some are always paying less.
How are the routes planned? Should there be a shuttle between Otaniemi and Töölö (two campus sites of Aalto), because many students need it? And as a society we want to support education? Should late night trains stop running, and just let nocturnal people pay for taxis? The point is, we have already moved away from a profit-maximising user-pay system, to one that is based on cost benefit analyses and the aggregate “good” and value created.
It has become more than a question of production (and organising production), it has become a question of distribution, a question of who should get what, and more essentially what kind of society we want to build, what kind of society we want to live in.
The details of pricing models then sound like full-time work for an applied ethicist. Note how the issue of payment has moved from “divine imperative” to a technology, then to a small puzzle piece of questionable relevance.
Some students brought up B2B cases in the HSL lecture. Helsinki may not have this situation, but in the Bay Area it’s very prevalent: a lot of tech companies are located down south in the Bay (e.g. Mountain View), but trendy workers favour living in San Francisco, therefore the tech companies provide shuttle buses to cover this relatively longer journey. By the way, if you took public transport, it would require several changes from dilapidated metro trains to regional trains to some other shuttle, and take twice as long. It’s not “multi-modal mobility”, it’s just suffering.
Note when employees step onto the Google bus, they don’t buy a ticket. Because for Google it’s not about how to throttle usage or recover costs, it’s about organising the provision of services to delight employees, to attract talent, since the workers create such high-multiples of value to the benefits they receive. It’s a micro-society of ultra-high productivity levels.
The Boxes of Local Optima
There’s a cable car in La Paz, Bolivia that cuts down a trip of more than 2 hours in congestion by car to just about 10 minutes in the air. This dramatic difference is only possible because a cable car is very, very out-of-the-box. One could not cut through the congestion by making a clone of Google Maps.
The title of our first design exercise is to find a “Problem Worth Solving”. What is a problem worth solving? Some residents may want the Länsimetro to run throughout the night. There is no technical problem, right? Many may prefer the HSL to be cheaper or even free (as considered by Paris and many other cities), there is no technical issue, really. How about single-tier pricing system that saves 5 second for each passenger? Technically implementable.
But there is the recalcitrant box.
One of the reasons it is hard to improve public transport in Helsinki is: the public transport here is already quite good! In this bubble one would have little idea how bad it is elsewhere.
Example 1: the urban environment in Helsinki has good density, you can get to shops, cinemas, social gatherings by walking and public transport. In the Bay Area, the same things are 10 minutes away if you drive, nearly impossible to reach (80-minute walk blocked by highways) if you don’t drive.
Example 2: here the HSL buses are in pretty good conditions, the seats and walls are relatively clean, there’s even a basket of newspapers! It’s like how a hotel (or air travel in classic days) offers amenities (little things to show they care) that make passengers more comfortable, giving the impression that passenger comfort matters and the provider wants passengers to feel respected and delighted. If you ride a bus along El Camino Real (along the Bay), the bus looks like it has not been cleaned for 25 years, it’s loud and shaky, timing is unpredictable, and passengers appear to be mostly homeless people dragging large bags of garbage.
Example 3: Los Angeles has arguably the most nightmarish urban landscape, as far as eye can see there are highways after highways padded by parking lots after parking lots, with barely any sign of city life. Sometimes you can whoosh by in the empty carpool lane (by virtue of having a driver and a passenger) past 5 other lanes of people stuck in traffic, one driver in each vehicle. In other news, there are people over the world and in California who spend 2 to 3 hours on commute, each way.
In each situation there’s a hard box, and within it all we could offer is to play some Spotify for those who are stuck in, and are, traffic.
Ontological Second Thoughts
Frank Lloyd Wright talked about architectural negative space, there’s also a bunch of philosophies around “less is more”, creating value by subtraction, etc. Now, what is the nature of this enabling quality that we call mobility?
One dark afternoon I came out of the Länsimetro and looked ahead to see the buildings on the other side of Otaniementie (the major cut-through traffic way), those dark figures of medium-height, with some lights on. The thought that came to mind was: what is this activity, of moving from one place to another, of people going to school, to work, into some building with lights…
There are opposing views on whether autonomous vehicles will make traffic better or worse — one view is that because the cost will get so low, people would use it more, therefore more traffic. People are moving more, because mobility is enabling them to realise more value.
Is there inherent value in moving from A to B? Let’s say Teemu uses transport to get from TechVille to Tennis Palace (a cinema complex), sees a movie, then returns, does this process create some extra consumer value (and enjoyment and good in the world)? Is Netflix at home achieving the same thing? I could find some studies about the impact of commute on people’s happiness, all else held equal, it has a big impact. The longer the commute, the less happy.
Imagine an app idea that does not help people use transport at all, but instead spot commute patterns and use those to give recommendations for people to relocate… Is eliminating the need for transport here also creating value? After all look at the “new worlds”, isn’t a lot of commute artificially created by the suburbia sprawl model built after the automobile-dependent age? What if we just campaign for mixed use planning?
Physics vs. Experience
Today the topic of musing is “distance as a subjective experience”. If you google “Distance from Espoo to Turku”, it says ~150km. Now, from a conventional transport-oriented view, we may say that a bullet train can cut this distance down to 20 minutes, suddenly it’s comparable to going from Espoo to Pasila…
The experience varies with historical and social contexts: the two sides of the Berlin wall used to be not just topologically more distant than its bee-flight distance but practically a world apart. Here, the distance itself has not changed but over many years the context has changed.
Whether it’s considered “far” in the sense of distance as a barrier varies with a bunch of factors: why go to Turku? How motivated are you to go there? What’s happening in Turku? What’s happening along the way?
The experience also varies with the “quality of service” or how convenient and facilitated it is. For example, a chartered bus picking Village residents up from the Village can be a very different experience from going from Metro to inter-city train.
For the same two points of A to B, different implementations are possible. For example, from Berlin to Munich by air (train to airport, go through airport hassle, take off, 1.25hr flight, land, get out of airport), or by a 4-hour train. You can fly from Helsinki to Stockholm, or go on a party cruise, and so on…
At some point, the geo-distance may become a secondary factor. Imagine in 10–20 years, autonomous vehicles can take people from home to work, then park themselves. This would “free up” commute time for entertainment or work, you can even have a nap — perhaps suddenly people find it bearable to live “2 hours away” because the facilitation is so smooth — then housing market could shift tectonically, because “distance” is now a pliable phenomenon.
The same questions apply to the distance between CS building and TUAS building, the distance between Teekkarikylä and CS building, etc. Why are people going from A to B?
Why are people travelling to Otaniemi for a lecture? Or travelling to work in some office near Kamppi? Are they developing a career path towards “self-actualisation”? One idea is to think of mobility or transport as an ingredient or enabling factor (albeit a small facet in a dynamic complex) along these evolving, fluctuating trajectories of the unravelling of life’s story…
Then there’s the various aspects of Maslow’s hierarchy, e.g. sense of community or belonging — and we can even think about how transport can be integrated in serving these needs: e.g. can Metro underground tunnels also shield pedestrians from the harsh element of winter? Can it provide entertainment? Can it help strengthen the social bond?
Thinking from these new perspectives can free us from the frame of viewing transport as the chore that happens in between, as solely conducting people from A to B. When you consider the sight of clusters and lines of people standing in a blizzard or dripping rain along the bus stops on the side of highway-like Otaniementie roundabout, waiting for buses to get them “out of there”, you might see the point.
Value-Mining from Infrastructure
- Coca Cola’s distribution networks can reach more parts of the world than the UN; Australian Post outlets also perform ID checks; at R-Kioski (Finnish 7–11) shops you can buy mobile credit, transport credit, pay bills, in addition to buying candy. Think of these as the capacity for carrying services on top of the infrastructure (with contact points).
- The HSL NFC card already functions as a “Second Factor Authentication Token”, at Aalto we use it for printing, after-hours library access etc.
- By this virtue it is also already a petty cash electronic wallet.
- HSL has a lot of “physical contact points”, namely the card readers, forming a unique type of infrastructure — currently it’s only used for a low added-value function: ticketing/validation. It’s not yet clear what else it could be used for…
- HSL also has auto-teller machines (capable of potentially richer interactions), currently also only used for a low value function: buying tickets and loading travel credits.
- If you google “Iso Omena Restaurants”, that search term has a market-validated monetary value attached to it, which can be captured by Google — mobility traffic is a source of economic value, how can it be captured?
- What marginal benefit does additional precision in billing offer? Is it more profitable to have more volume (e.g. bulk contracts), while ignoring precision?
- In many cases, an honour system operates well and gets rid of a lot of the operational costs — especially if HSL is dealing with local public-sector clients, e.g. schools, a self-reporting model would save a lot of hassle, time, and creates more value in social good.
Mandate Failures
HSL is a company heavily subsidised by public funds, as such it has a public mandate about how the business is allowed to be run. For example, it’s not allowed to compete with the private sector using subsidised resources. B2B charter shuttles seem to be out of the question. Fair enough.
Then it also has some weird incentive consequences —the company does not want to turn a profit, or explore new sources of revenue — because that would just reduce the envelope of subsidies. So all those ideas around “thinking of assets as infrastructure”, discovering new services, new revenue… go puff! There’s an incentive alignment problem.
Whereas, we can still work on dynamic capacity planning and data-driven improvement in logistics, because when there’s a big sporting events, transport is at capacity, chaos and complaints ensue, public image of HSL is tarnished. HSL has an incentive to maintain its reputation. What is within mandate is now confined to an engineering problem, you could be just as well fine-tuning a boiler system of thermodynamics. Or we can work on improving the “user experience”, what can we do there, make the seats softer?
HSL has been brooding on a new zoning and pricing model (currently it costs 11€ to commute across a short bridge and back). The implementation takes many years, if it’s a better model, how much good could have been created during those years? Here we won’t have the out-of-box freedom to experiment with “special economic zones”, say suddenly there are five competing pricing models to see which one performs better…
In highly developed democracies we have the Berlin airport, the Länsimetro, the Australian NBN. These fiascos are the product of purportedly proper procedures. Sure, it’s a lot better than what would’ve happened in a truly corrupt state — and the Elbphilharmonie now stands a marvel—this phenomenon still begs intriguing questions.
Managing Ambiguity and Complexity
What kind of problems are we solving?
- Type I: improving experience/efficiency, imagine we are acting as McKinsey, or design consultant for HSL — this is the easiest, because there are defined requirements and goals and deliverables.
- Type II: new venture creation, creating a viable business, which seems to be what Aalto is pushing for everywhere these days. This is a lot harder. Most startups fail. Most students are clueless in this area.
- Type III: “fix Russia”, many coordinated changes required to change from a bad complex system to a good complex system. Where do you even start? (True story, in the Russian souvenir shop on Bulevardi textbooks are also sold, there is one call “Let’s Improve Our Russian”, sometimes the last “n” is obscured by other books, and makes you scratch your head, like what kind of alternative reality is this book in…)
Prof. Marko Nieminen had some kind of answer to this question when it was posed to him, it was just as indecipherable. My impression of what he was suggesting is: “success is not the goal in this course”, “learn about methodologies and ways of thinking, how to approach a design problem” and so on. But one point he mentioned was quite salient and memorable, in gist:
“There are people upstairs in this CS building doing HCI and usability and other research, and now we are at the point of wondering, what is even a good question to ask in this area…”
Academic maturity is reflected in the ability to navigate ambiguity and complexity, going from fixed questions with fixed answers, to finding out the answers, to finding out the questions, to having to find out what even constitutes a good question — most likely this is the kind of intellectual vigour that university is meant for.
