How to Design Human Centered Cities

I teach a design-thinking class at RIT and each quarter we use human-centered design principles to approach a different project. This quarter our project is focused on our city, Rochester, NY. Inspired by a design brief issued by Fabrica called "Looking Back, Designing, Forward," we are surveying the city's recent history and then engaging in what Roger Martin and Charles Sanders Pierce before him calls abductive reasoning. We are asking, “What might be?” The answer to this question will be on display at the 4th annual Imagine RIT festival in the lobby of Saunders College of Business. If you are in the area on May 7, come visit our  "Imagine Rochester 2020" exhibit and let us know what you think.

TECH-CENTERED URBAN DESIGN ALIENATES CITIZENS
As a result of guiding my students through this project, I am thinking almost at every turn about urban design. When I was driving along Niagara Street in Buffalo a few weeks back, I was saddened that I couldn't see the Niagara River just a few meters away. What blocked my view was a wall of rusted out factories, one after the other. It was clear to me that whoever wrote the zoning for this piece of land had a technology-centered perspective and not a human-centered one. Those zoning decisions were now keeping me from seeing a beautiful river valley just a few feet to my right. If the infrastructure along the river-way had been designed with humans in mind, my view would have been very different. The emotions I would’ve experienced toward the city would have been joy and pride instead of sadness and alienation.

TECH-CENTERED PERSPECTIVE RUNS DEEP
My students and I spent the first half of the quarter meeting with visionary systems-thinkers in the city of Rochester. We've met with farmers, educators, clean-fuel producers, green-jobs facilitators, and beyond. All of these people have a grand vision for the future of our city, and while they employ new technology to reach their goals, human interests are at the center of their thinking. Yet, when my students and I came back to the studio to synthesize the data we’d collected, tech-centered ideology showed its face. Students easily rattled off the technological innovations they had observed in the field.

PUSHING BEYOND TECH-CENTERED PERSPECTIVES
For example, we started digging deeper into one student’s celebration of Rochester's technological exports. To bring into view a human-centered perspective, I asked, "What benefits do these exports provide the citizens of the city of Rochester?" The easy answer is that the exports bring more money into the city, but I wanted more, so I pushed them to dig deeper. The students quickly got to the heart of the issue, I think, when they articulated this series of claims: "Exporting brings global firms to Rochester." Good, good. "Global firms come to Rochester because they want to stay in New York State." Very good. "And if global firms are coming downtown, then more people are downtown and a demand for downtown revitalization is created." Bingo.

A CALL FOR READERS TO PUSH BEYOND TECH PERSPECTIVE
Downtown revitalization. We came to it ourselves. It's one thing to read about it in the paper, it's another to start at one seemingly isolated point, exports, and arrive at downtown revitalization. As you locals know, ever since the decline and eventual demolition of Midtown Plaza, America's first urban mall c. 1962, Rochester has been struggling with the question, "What will be our new identity, the new symbol for downtown?" As we ask these big questions, we need to think beyond technology and beyond economic development, lest we line the river with more factories. Don’t get me wrong, technology and economy are essential, but we need to always remember that they are a means to an end. The end is to encourage more people, especially young talent, to stay in Rochester. Certainly creating more jobs will do that, and certainly developing new technology can create more jobs. However, anyone who works in a university incubator knows about the struggles of turning new technology into new jobs. So we need to think about human-centered innovations too, by asking questions such as “How do we engage citizens of the city of Rochester on an emotional level? How do we create emotional ties to the city? How do we engage human concerns like justice, health, equality, and the arts, not just by way of not-for-profit programs, but in plans that integrate economic and technology development?”

These questions about human-centered innovations are difficult to form, and their benefits are more difficult to measure than those of technological and economic innovations. As author Hilary Austen points out, we tend to run like hell from difficult questions like these. But to change our current urban plight, we must face these difficult questions. If we’re not exploring questions such as “How do we create an emotionally engaging Rochester,”  then we won’t change our current state.

Designers Love Their Thumbnails

This past Tuesday, my class and I went on our second field trip into the city, this time to Foodlnk's R&D facility, on Joseph Avenue. It's exciting to be collecting so much great data for the ROC2020 project. However, our ultimate task is not just to collect the data, but to communicate it in an engaging way. How do we get from here to there?

Here's what we found on Tuesday. Foodlink, as you may know, is a food bank in Rochester that provides emergency food to eleven counties in the region. But their long-term goal is to transform the regional food system so that emergency food won't be needed. This means heavy investment in R&D.

We visited their Skunk Works and talked with some impressive people about the transformative work they are doing there. Previously a bottling facility for Pepsi, it holds three social business start-ups focused on the following goals: provide healthy food for school kids; train and place Rochester citizens in green jobs; and convert food waste (of which Foodlink has an endless supply) into green fuel, compost, and animal feed.

To try to make sense of all this data, on Thursday we came back to the RIT Innovation Center and started a knowledge-sharing session, in which we wrote down every current urban innovation that we had discovered through our primary and secondary research. Then we took all of these innovations - each one written on an individual post-it - and began sorting them into an affinity diagram. Then the students each chose two innovations that resonate with them. And finally, we embarked on the task of figuring out how to communicate these innovations in an engaging way.

What may separate design processes from processes in other disciplines is that it generates hundreds of ideas each step of the way. The rationale behind this process is that if we generate hundred of ideas, then we increase the chances of finding a truly innovative one. Think of a photographer and how many pictures she takes to get that perfect shot. Or a film maker and the hundreds of hours of footage she shoots toward the end of delivering a two-hour film. The same principle applies to design. Go for quantity and select the best for further development.

This is where thumbnails come in. At the beginning of a project, designers generate hundreds of little sketches, a visual brainstorm of ideas caught on paper. Thumbnails are small, no larger than one inch by one inch. Once we have enough thumbnails, the next step is to choose a few of them for further development. If the deliverable is a poster, and in this case it is, we choose three thumbs to develop into rough comprehensives. Again, we don't choose one thumbnail that we think is the best; we choose, instead, a few options that show the most potential.

If you look at the photos above, it's not clear that these designers are loving their thumbnails as I claim in the title of this post. That's because making thumbnails is hard. "Art is Work," claims one of my favorite illustrators, Milton Glaser. He is right. It is work. But while generating thumbnails can be an exhausting task, we eventually come to love them as evidence that remarkable ideas don’t just fall into our laps, but, rather, emerge from hard work.

The Roots of Design-thinking

For our first field trip for the ROC 2020 map project, my students and I met with folks from the Good Food Collective to help them sort the very last of their winter veggies. You may be wondering what the heck carrots and potatoes have to do with design-thinking. My students were probably wondering that too as they sifted through the dirty and sometimes stinky roots.

Here's what these root vegetables have to do with design-thinking: they are the product of Good Food’s vision of transforming the regional food system, acquired through a process at the heart of design-thinking called “Build to Learn.” Last fall when the Good Food Collective was struggling with the question of how to deliver regionally produced food year-round in a region, Western New York, that has a mere three-month growing season, they didn’t rely solely on other people’s data. They also didn’t rely on a business plan, and they certainly didn’t let the possibility of failure get in their way (“Fail Forward Fast“ is another process inherent to design-thinking). Instead, they made a prototype: they found a dark and cool space, played with a couple of different types of storage bins, and voila: beautiful, crisp carrots and potatoes in March. By thinking and working as designers, by building and testing their own prototypes, they learned how to get closer to their vision of transforming the food system in Western New York.

This Map is *Definitely* Not the Territory

This quarter my design-thinking students are making a map of the city of Rochester in the year 2020. I'll try to upload a few images each week to track our progress.

Pictured above are the students working on a baseline map during their second class meeting. I gave them one hour to work on it in class and very little instruction. We'll compare this map to the one we make for the festival on May 7. I hope we will find that the map we make for the festival is a little more interesting than this one. Not that this one didn't turn out well. It has its charms, for sure.

Urban Repurposing

I got excited the other day when I heard that Kodak, the company that built Rochester's economy in the early 20th century by bringing photography to the masses, is thinking about getting in to the solar cell business. I got excited because I’m gearing up to create a “Rochester 2020” map for the Imagine RIT Festival and I’ve been making a list of organizations in town who are engaged in repurposing. (To repurpose is transform the stuff that we already have instead of replace it with new stuff.) Sadly Kodak wasn’t on my list - boo! But now they are - yay! If this deal goes through, they will be repurposing their thin-film machines to bring another game-changing technology to the masses, this time solar cells. Go Kodak. Very cool.


I’m focusing on urban repurposing projects bc they are an elegant alternative to new building projects. Even though cities have a reputation for being environmental and social wastelands (thanks Charles Dickens), they are in fact ripe with potential for being some of the greenest and socially innovative places on the planet. As half of the world population now lives in urban settings, it’s important that we design these places thoughtfully and sustainably. 


There’s a ton of repurposing going on in this city, the city of #ROC. I’ve written a bit about Foodlink on this blog as they are already knee deep in urban repurposing and redistributing. They redistribute discarded food to organizations who feed hungry people. They repurpose food-waste into fuel. They repurpose school lunch programs and kitchens so they can serve locally grown food. And just recently they began refurbishing old electronics for people who can use them.

Add to this list the Rochester Active Transport Group . They are repurposing old bikes and old train paths to create a human-powered transport system. And then there are National repurposing organizations that have local sectors like the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. The ReStore gathers, fixes up, and then sells used household parts and appliances. And my very favorite repurposing initiative is called Park[ing] Day, a day in September when artists and activists reclaim urban parking spots by transforming them into mini parks, beach chairs and all.

If you have a favorite repurposing project or an idea for one, then I’d love to hear about it. Comment or tweet me @xanthm

Mapping the Future of Rochester

Innovators enjoy surveying the current landscape of a region and making predictions on what they think it will look like in future. That's why the spring section of my design-thinking class is creating a 3D map of the city of Rochester's near future called "Rochester 2020." We'll start off the project by surveying the social, technological, environmental, and economic innovations that are in infancy at present.  Then we'll visualize what we think our city will look like if these innovations take hold. The map will be on display in the Saunders College of Business for the 4th annual Imagine RIT Creativity and Innovation Festival. 


If you'd like to help build "Rochester 2020," then sign up for Design-thinking at RIT, course No. 0102-421-01. Beyond signing up for the course, there are other ways to contribute to the project. Pop me a note and we'll work it out. 


Follow posts on this project by searching for the tag "ROC2020" on this blog and on twitter. 


Cheers!