Urban Technology at University of Michigan week -15
On the semantics of being a "user"
This week we ask a simple question - what do you call the person holding a smartphone? 🤳
Hello! I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan that will welcome its first students in the 2021-2022 academic year. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction. While we launch the program, we’re using this venue to explore themes and ideas related to our studies. Thanks for reading. Have questions about any of this? Hit reply and let us know. BTW, there’s still one week to apply for our open Project Manager / Co-instigator job!
What do you call the person holding a phone?
One of the things we’re doing here is trying to build a language to talk about issues that are approached from the divergent perspectives of the folks who build technology and those who spend their time more focused on cities. Both have such vast and thoughtful literatures and communities of practice that to pretend there’s anything less than a multitude of varying perspectives on either side would be simplistic. Yet if we want to find a middle path, we need to know the poles we’re navigating between—the peaks that define a lovely valley in which we can thrive. I’ve been nurturing a succinct table that serves as our map in this sense. In the spirit of doing what we said we would do and think out in the open, here’s the current draft:
In previous newsletters I’ve harped on scale. Today let’s ask a question about semantics. The image below is an illustration from an old project of mine. It shows a person wearing glasses, sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for their ride to show up. As they look out over traffic, they see euro currency signs floating up into the air, exhausting from the vehicles. What do you call this person?
If we ask that question of an employee at ride hail startup, they might reply that the individual in the image above is a “customer.” That framing gears us toward thinking about the value exchange between the company and this individual. How do we convince them to pay us for our service? What’s the CAC or customer acquisition costs (how much it costs to market to them and convince them to try our service for the first time)? How much will they pay for a ride? What’s the Total Lifetime Value (sum of all transactions over time) we might expect from them? How many customers are there in the Total Addressable Market?
A common description of this person from the point of view of a service provider (whether for-profit or not) is the term “user,” which comes from a Human-Computer Interaction lineage. With that term, our focus shifts toward questions of—no surprises here—use! If one is applying human-centered design methods, a very common approach, then we would want to know about the mental state of this user. What are they thinking, feeling, seeing, and doing when they use the app? What’s their understanding of the service and how do we make it easy for the user to establish a clear mental map? How can we help the user to successfully complete user flows (like signing up, or booking a ride)? What feedback is useful to them at each stage? We might even think about multiple user types, sometimes called personas, and develop different features and flows for each of them.
Understand the individual in the image above as a “citizen” or resident of the city (in the holistic sense, not a legalistic one) and then we ask a completely different set of questions. We would want to know if they have fair access to mobility, including transit and other options, as well as equitable consideration of their mobility needs as a wheelchair user. We’d like to understand if they are coerced into making any uncomfortable tradeoffs while using the service, like unnecessarily giving up personal data or submitting to feckless surveillance. Will the decisions this person is making be durable? Will what’s fair today be fair in a year, or in 10?
Or if we start from an understanding of this individual as a member of one or multiple overlapping “publics” then a different set of questions becomes relevant once again. We might ask ourselves how the intersectional experiences of this individual as a member of multiple publics affect, alter, limit, or enhance their use of the ride hail service. We’d certainly be interested in who isn’t in the image… Which members of the public are not seen here, but should be? We would be concerned from the very beginning with questions of power and how power is exerted by them, or over them. We would dwell on the possibility of unintended collective consequences as a result of individual action—things like congestion, noise, pollution, etc. that come from increased automobile use by few, but affect the many members of the public regardless of whether an individual is taking direct benefit from the source of the harms.
Ask someone in the private sector to describe the person in the image above and they are more likely to respond with “customer,” whereas someone from the public sector might start with “citizen” or “member of the public.” The term “user” ends up being something of a middle ground in an example like this, especially as human-centered (or user-centered) design increases in popularity within governments around the world thanks to the efforts of groups like Gov.UK, Public Digital, Public Policy Lab, NAVA PBC, Code for America and many, many others. User does not come with an assumed profit motive, so it’s more neutral ground in that regard, but it does center the individual and that usually implies some kind of choice.
Human or user centered design is great when you’re designing something that’s used by one person at a time (think: baby rattle, steering wheel, backpack, chat app) but is less directly applicable to challenges that are collective in nature. Design a governance platform for a neighborhood and you’re sure to have different types of users who will, almost by definition, have varying and even competing goals.
Consider this, however: do you use streetlights? While you may be a user of the faucet in your kitchen, would you describe yourself as a user of municipal drinking water? Do you use the culture of your hometown or your native lands? As a term, use helps us focus on interactions between individuals and the material world, but it is more clumsy when applied to shared experiences like a well-lit public realm and other infrastructure or collective history and similarly important intangibles.
So, what would you call the person with the phone in the image above?
Links
🔐 A Twitter thread about how office call boxes use the same key is both magical and spooky.
🚶 Facebook has redone their maps and they’re geared toward pedestrian mobility now (instead of vehicular access). This is a great writeup of the design decisions made along the way “emphasizing sidewalks, trails, and townsquares.”
📹 If making cities safer for walking is your thing, for $35 in hardware and some python tinkering you can monitor the speed outside your window with this very nice DIY project. What happens when 100 people in a neighborhood do this? h/t Kevin Webb
🦉 And if you’re in the habit of pointing censors at the world around you, FieldKit is a beautiful, open platform for monitoring water and air quality. Hey Anthony, what else can we hack this to do?
🚶♀️ Why are Siri and Alexa so surveillant and could the ease of voice interactions be made available through other means? Taking an idea for a walk is how I would describe the kind of writing that Matt Webb is doing in this post exploring alternative voice interactions, and it’s a heck of a walk.
This week: Admissions then calls with Malcolm, Earl, Jonathan, Paige (who wrote a nice article about us), Allison, Joshua, and many others, then admissions. Sensing a theme? 🏃♂️
Nicely succinct way to capture important complexity! We are just at the beginning of realizing the potential of getting some of the "best of both" in combining the perspective of the urbanist and the (traditional) toolkit, and sometimes experimental mentality, of the technologist. To do that justly, equitably, and impactfully of course means to work with or within government.
A question I pose to people: who, in the workings of a city, can actually solve for *global* optima? Only the city and the community itself, or (hopefully!) those working in close collaboration with the civic authorities.
Brilliant! (as always)