Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -31
Strategic design, the art of framing, Nina Simone
“Time is a dictator,” Nina Simone says during the spoken preamble to the song Who Knows Where the Time Goes. The recording, embedded below, is one of my favorites to play this time of year, with its ambling melody. When the leaves fall and snow’s coming soon, is there a better track than this?
If it feels like time is dictating our lives, then how do we be intentional with the clock and the calendar? Let’s pick up the thread from previous weeks on interaction design, service design, and extend it by exploring strategic design. What connects all of these? Complementary perspectives on time, which we will dig into below.
But first, if you haven’t listened already, be the dictator of your own wellbeing and listen to the video below.
Hello and welcome to our newsletter about cities, technology, and design. I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan that will welcome its first students next academic year. While we launch the program, we’re using this venue to explore themes and ideas related to our studies. Thanks for reading (and listening).
⏳ Time is a Dictator
In honor of Ms. Simone, we can compare interaction, service, and strategic design by looking at how they relate to time. Interactions are fleeting and they most often last seconds or minutes. Yes, you may be using a computer all day long, but during that window you’ve interacted with a handful of apps, each comprised of numerous workflows, themselves built from countless interactions—clicks, scrolls, menus, windows that you OK or CANCEL.
Services play out over longer periods of time and one of the primary concerns is making sure that multiple “moments of truth,” as discrete interactions are sometimes called, add up to a coherent experience. Think about the public library. You likely have multiple experiences with the library over a long span of time, resulting in memories of the spaces, people, and perhaps artifacts like a library card. Those add up to a “service” and that can be designed the same way a conductor animates an orchestra.
The ultimate goal of strategic design is changing the conditions and context of today so that better outcomes are enabled tomorrow. A fantastic service may improve your day, but a well-designed strategy should improve your life and that of your family. If we bring a strategic lens to the library example above, the question would be how libraries became so normal, so common, and what careful decisions led to making them so? Answering those kind of questions, almost always unfurl slowly. Patience is required.
If time is a dictator, interactions are an insurgency, services are a battle, and strategy is the revolution. Our goal is to have all of these working together. Interactions add up to a service, and both services and interactions should both be informed by a strategy.
🖼 Strategic Design and Framing
To dig into this I’ll share some personal experiences. Previously I cofounded a team called Helsinki Design Lab which was part of the Finnish Innovation Fund, an arm’s length governmental organization that reports to Parliament. At Helsinki Design Lab we were prototyping the role of design in government. What can designers contribute when they’re working side by side with economists, analysts, policy makers, lawyers, and civil servants? We can borrow Helsinki Design Lab’s definition of strategic design, which is that “Strategic design is about crafting decision-making” so that problems are considered more holistically and solutions are imagined more creatively.
That means being involved much earlier than designers often are so that you can help frame the challenge in a productive manner by working closely with stakeholders. To continue with the library example above, the strategic design question about a library would be asking why the library exists, what outcomes we hope the library to promote, and how we define “library” today that may not be the same as how it was defined by our predecessors and ancestors. Admittedly, this can get kind of wooly, but hang in there for a minute and let’s walk through why this is relevant.
The diagram below is something called the Steinberg Funnel and it sheds light on how changing the framing of a challenge enables different possible outcomes. Imagine you are asked to design a chair and then read the “possible framings” A-E from right to left.
If the problem is framed as “we need a chair” the range of possible responses are fairly limited. Red chairs, blue chairs, comfy chairs, tall chairs, but they’re all chairs. If the challenge is reframed as “seating,” you get a slightly broader range of outcomes that could include stools, sofas, yoga balls, and more. But what does seating do for us? Why do we even want seating? As you keep asking “why,” the need or challenge that’s being addressed gets broader. Being able to ask these questions and do the research and collaboration needed to ask them well is what strategic designers spend a lot of time on.
Finding a productive level of precision in how a challenge is framed can be kind of like the western fairytale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears: we’re often searching for a framing that is juuuust right. Frame too broadly and you won’t know where to start working on the challenge. The wide end of the Funnel can be overwhelming. Frame something too tightly, on the other hand, and it’s easy to lose sight of the real goal.
For instance, Designing the perfect chair may be meaningless if you actually care about enabling users of the library to focus, and at the very least it presents the challenge in a manner that will exclude some individuals by default. How do even the most amazing chairs in the library benefit wheelchair users, for instance?
There’s another dimension to strategy which is of critical importance when the context around you is changing, as it most certainly is here in the 21st century. Lawrence Freedman puts it this way in Strategy: A History:
“A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have a different and possibly opposing interests and concerns.”
How do you plan for the unknowns of tomorrow? You don’t plan for unknowns, you prepare for them. Developing a strategy is one of the ways to do so.
🚕 Strategic Design in Urban Technology
To make this more concrete, I’ll share another example from my own work. In collaboration with urban planner and all-around smartie Anthony Townsend, my design studio and I worked with a network of 10 cities assembled by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Aspen Institute to help the mayors of those cities prepare for the arrival of autonomous vehicles (AVs). We asked, how could AVs help you, Ms. or Mr. Mayor, meet the needs of your citizens?
Through a series of workshops we identified a range of possible focus areas to explore, including public health (how could healthier populations be empowered?), public finance (how could public funds be used more effectively?), land use (does automated mobility change how we use the surfaces of the city?) and more. We developed a set of six scenarios that show how autonomous cars, shuttles, buses, bikes, as well as policy changes might be employed to help answer these questions.
Each story is presented in the form of a visual “day in the life” and complemented with a longer narrative (like this) that unpacks the challenge, shows an example of how AVs could be used to meet that challenge, and explores opportunities and potential road bumps for municipalities. For instance, if autonomous vehicles make it very affordable for businesses to operate their own private shuttles, our cities might become crowded with private shuttles like the tech buses of the San Francisco Bay Area.
This could balloon the already large carbon footprint of mobility in American cities, not to mention further splinter collective experiences. Tech buses optimize for luxury and productivity, but could the same basic idea be inflected toward access and environmental sustainability?
With the right intervention, cities could enforce or incentivize shared routes, common stop locations, and fair access provisions to effectively weave a network of private shuttles into an augmented public transit network. That might mean that people take routes that involve switching from one shuttle to the next, but at an affordable price and with a proliferation of travel options.
Would a scenario like this be easy to implement? No! And that’s the point. It’s hard to drive institutional change, which means it requires careful thought and persistent movement toward the goal. That’s a synonym for a strategy.
Technologies like autonomous shuttles are still in development (including right here at UM) which means that the technological context is evolving alongside governance considerations. “Driverless car” makes it sound simple, like the driver disappears and everything else stays the same. But, if we connect back to the idea of the Steinberg Funnel above, once you start asking different questions, the possible answers also change. Some of those possible answers are worse than today, no doubt. But/and with good effort, there are also possible outcomes that would improve on today’s status quo—making future versions of our communities healthier, happier, environmentally sustainable, and more just.
There’s plenty of work to be done by engineers, business people, lawyers, policymakers, and—yes—designers. There’s no question that designers will eventually craft the interactions that one participates in to hail an autonomous bus to take you to work, like on the left in the images above. And designers will no-doubt help connect those interactions into compelling services, implied by the coordination between two shuttles in the image at the center above.
But will those services be equitable? Will they be based on yesterdays biases and assumptions, or will they crack open new and unexpected possibilities based on today’s needs and reality? Will they be developed in a way that incorporates the voices of the community, or will they be a manifestation of what a group of elites think is right for people? Well those questions, dear reader, are why designers need to be capable of participating at the level of strategy. Strategic designers, and that includes our students of urban technology, need to be very good at asking, and quite agile at positing answers to, a painfully simple question: “why?”
Links
🎙 Remember Roomba from a prior newsletter? Well, your robot vacuum doesn’t have any microphones but it can still hear what you’re saying (under the right conditions).
🌳 Trees swallowing no trespassing signs.
🏦 Black Bank Map (UM represent!) “making it easier for people to identify Black-owned banks and credit unions across the country in an effort to leverage Black economic power and overcome the racial wealth gap.”
👁 Virtual Attention Software is “a visual spellcheck” that uses AI to tell you which parts of an image are likely to be focused on by viewers. But how was the AI trained?
⚖️ Can building codes be copyrighted? The story of a lawsuit that surfaces an unexpected contest between laws-accessed-via-books vs. laws-accessed-via-software. What happens when the keeper of the laws is not great at creating interfaces to access that content? That’s a pickle!
🚀 Space X uses a drone ship to receives the reusable Stage 1 of its rocket. On that drone ship lives another drone which waits for Stage 1 to land and then secures the rocket to the deck of the ship. OK, cool, but what will that thing do when someone repurposes the technology on city streets?
👴 Biden expected to spur growth of smart city tech market. Not 100% convinced, but will be keeping an eye on this.
This week: Faculty working group session focusing on degree level outcomes was really productive. Watch out, to-do list items, Trey is a machine gun of administrative productivity! Chat about service design and landscape with UM alum Jennifer Low about designing the design process and designing meetings. A call with JM to think about faculty development and growing a community of supporters around the program. All good and feels productive, but still lots. Time is a dictator. 🏃♂️