The most frequent question I ask in meetings is: what would make people join public life and what prevents them from doing that? It seems ridiculous that this question comes from someone who is at home on their computer 10 hours a day.
The most reoccurring feedback I get from public talks is the appreciation of personal vulnerability combined with theory. I try to bring my own shortcomings and awkwardness into my work. I refrain from positioning myself above other people or claiming I would know how they should do their work. I am not offering a five-step plan to frictionless life.
It seems slightly embarrassing to say this. I needed a reminder that I need spend time in shared spaces - commercial, membership-based and public - to do better work on shared spaces.
I carried some of these small moments of discomfort, joy, amusement, and frustration into a client project where we're designing a survey on why people use public spaces and what prevents them from doing that. Based on my recent visits, I asked a collaborator, which one of these options would I choose if I am lazy, or I am in a funk, or if a scent or behavior makes me uncomfortable. We ended up expanding the drop-down menu.
The last few decades have shown me that if we truly are committed to understanding why people open or do not open their front door and join public life, innovation and human-centered design methods can help in this. Public library systems like Richland, Aarhus and Calgary have understood this and hired designers and trained design competencies for their staff.
My strongest evidence on the power of human-centered design in understanding experience is from Helsinki. In 2018 we had just merged our culture, sports, library, and youth services into one division of 1,800 staff members. We were enabling experiences from symphony orchestra concerts to going swimming with your family. While our services were highly different, we were serving the same people. We needed shared language and tools for communications and experience design. One of the ideas I kept repeating was that we have won every time people open their front door - even if they are going to the bar.
Together with a local design agency, our staff surveyed and interviewed Helsinkians about their leisure time. One observation stood out for me in its honesty. I cannot trace the exact wording, but it was along the lines of:
Recognizing this is not an invitation to give up. Quite the opposite. It is an invitation to designing services, programming, and spaces for people in their full awesomeness, awkwardness, faultiness, and laziness. It is admitting that while people often know what is good for them, they just cannot get ourselves to do it. We brought this honesty to the resident profile tools developed for our units.
The result was a package of human-centered design tools based on the insight that the fundamental questions in joining public life were self-efficacy (are you able to to) and curiosity (are you open to). (Available in Finnish here.)
Self-efficacy is a combination of concrete and experienced obstacles to use a service as an equal member of society. Curiosity refers to an attitude to new things and variation. We understood that if we wish to increase openness, we need to create incentives. If we wish to increase capability, we need to remove obstacles.
The work resulted in four resident profiles, which I still carry with me. These are not fixed rather than ways that people approach a service on a particular day. (You see above in the sketch in English and below in Finnish.)
The Pampered: The person is open, interested and capable. They feel like the city is filled with opportunities and are eager to try new things. Due to active engagement and high sense of self-efficacy, they are often critical regarding the quality of experience.
The Ones Needing Encouragement: They have real obstacles, which make using a service difficult. The obstacles range from physical access to not feeling wel
