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Abstract: From cataclysmic recessions to unprecedented climate disasters, our cities seem awash with unintended consequences borne of complex times. While city administrations grapple with developing systemic supports, our infrastructure, communities and individual wellbeing are increasingly succumbing to the strain. This paper examines a practice gaining recent traction for improving our cities’ sustainable resilience: service design. As an inherently user-centered, reflexive and iterative practice, it develops service systems by drawing upon a range of disciplinary roles – from makers to strategists, and ethnographers to technologists. I examine three New York City-based case studies which each attempt to improve the services its residents use and need. While responding to the complex needs of the same city, these case studies illustrate the vastly different possibilities for improving broken civic services through institutional intervention: housing in civic service design, mobility in private sector service design, and online access, in what I term ‘generative’, community-based service design.
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INTRODUCTION
On October 29, 2012, the grave fragility of New York City’s (NYC) infrastructure was abruptly exposed. As the night wailed with Hurricane Sandy’s ninety-mile-per-hour winds, New Yorkers were swiftly reminded they’d built a city atop islands. Storm surges of up to nine feet devoured shorelines and bloated the city’s belly. Water swelled through underground cabling, the subway system, basements, apartments and streets. Trees reared and fell, while subterranean explosions marked the demise of neighborhood power. The winds eventually passed, leaving only the sound of lapping water. As the full moon’s glow faded and the skies shone blue with a quiet dawn, impossibly, the big city had been silenced. Lower Manhattan, Staten Island, and parts of Brooklyn and Queens were waking up to a sodden, sad chaos. Those who had spent the night in the dark were now experiencing an information blackout, with phone batteries dying and the few functioning cell towers jammed. Communication was broken. NYC had clearly failed to cope with the unanticipated shock of a large climate event. It cost forty-eight people their lives, and left the city’s coffers $US19 billion emptier (Blake et al., 2013).
Sandy was devastating, but not an unprecedented case of city system failure. From climate events to recent recessions, city administrations around the world are struggling to create systemic supports which sustain urban life. Ulrich Beck describes this as the legacy of ‘reflexive modernization’, a phase of modernity characterized by the dissolution of modern institutions. Existing systems are destabilizing, rupturing, and resulting in a slew of ‘unintended consequences’ (Beck, 1994). In this context, a city is best understood as a complex and adaptive system. Rather than a programmatic output of blueprints and policy, it is a whole comprising the ad hoc sum of its parts, and many non-linear, interacting elements (Alberti, 2008; Marzluff et al, 2008). This complexity challenges modernist assumptions of basic predictability and order, meaning that institutions, such as city agencies, need to adapt their practices to account for unpredictability (Snowden and Boore, 2007). Cities can also be resilient in problematic ways. When understanding resilience as the capacity of multiple, stable systems to maintain the same function, structure, identity and feedback while absorbing and reordering around systemic disruptions (Walker 2004), our cities’ resilience actually reflects ‘institutionalized unsustainability’ (Westley et al, 2011).
Fortunately, within destabilized systems lie opportunities for innovation. As cities become increasingly networked and digital information more readily accessible, new forms of knowledge, practice and technologies come together in novel ways. In this paper, I propose that these are also the seeds for more sustainable forms of urban resilience. However, while technological development carries great potential, we need a more sophisticated understanding of the way technology can be positively harnessed. There is a risk in failing to. In recent years techno-centric rhetoric has been allowed a large and loud platform, promising big data and the roll out of the ‘smart city’ as magic bullets for improved urban living (Hollands, 2008). Yet these concepts are predicated upon efficient and smoothly running services (Antirroiko, 2013), which, at least in rhetoric, are hoisted upon the modernist, technocratic strategies now failing us (Greenfield, 2013), thus reinforcing the current state of unsustainable resilience. Moreover, these concepts often abstract the role of human relationships with the city and each other. Recent resilience research has shown that social relationships are just as, if not more important than technical systems for enhancing sustainability in cities. This suggests that resilience should be fostered as an everyday steady state, founded upon strong community networks and city-supported social infrastructure, irrespective of potential disasters (Fullilove, 2005; Klinenberg, 2012).
This paper examines one innovative practice for developing sustainably resilient civic services: service design (SD). While designing services may sound immaterial, services are indeed played out through the lived and material experiences of city dwellers. According to Lucy Kimbell, SD has taken two approaches to achieve this: a service engineering approach (designing the look and feel of a service as end result) and designing for a service approach (a social and material platform for ongoing action) (2011). The latter lends itself to complex system intervention, as the service system acquires value through all of the interactions it encompasses between provider, users, intermediaries, stakeholders, technologies, physical artifacts and other resources (Maglio et al, 2009). This approach reflects the strategic turn made by design fields aiming to tackle the complex ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Weber, 1973) characteristic of this era, and is the focus of this paper.
As a product of these times, SD is a wide field encompassing many disciplines, from makers to strategists and ethnographers to technologists. Design research is at its foundation, informing efforts to holistically design services by taking all components of the service ecology into account, from historically-grounded longitudinal views to the relationships which inform the current state. Therefore, broadly, SD is a user-centered, reflexive, empathic and often participatory process which generates rich data, uses elaborate tools for documentation (e.g. service blueprints and user journeys), and produces system interventions using iterative, prototyping methods (Segeleström, 2009). In many ways it bridges anthropology and design practice by adapting methods from both. Ethnographically-informed social analysis becomes applied, and design is subject to a critical lens for the prototyping of design concepts, as well as implementation. Design ethnography also facilitates collaboration between multi-disciplinary team members and often cross-sector partnerships, as it provides a common point of focus – the system users.
I’ll present three case studies which illustrate how the seeds of SD are taking root in various city sectors based in NYC: housing in civic SD, mobility in private sector-led SD, and online access through what I call ‘generative’ community-driven SD. While responding to the needs of the same city, they demonstrate the range of possibilities for enhancing sustainable resilience through institutional and infrastructural transformation. However, given SD is so nascent in NYC the case studies are not fully-realized expositions of the practice and lie somewhere between Kimbell’s two distinctions. Rather, I tease out their emerging practices, and examine the challenges they face when trying to shepherd the design delivery of complex services: from teams evolving their research and design methods, to working with government agencies and engaging communities. By mapping the design teams’ approaches and weaving in the voices of project leaders I interviewed in 2014, I’ll appraise how modalities of SD can effectively disrupt service systems through user-centered strategies, and ultimately support more sustainable complex service systems.
CIVIC SERVICE DESIGN
Background: Improving the Housing Lottery Odds
For many New Yorkers, stable, affordable housing is increasingly slipping out of reach. Two-thirds, or almost two million of NYC households rent their homes. Rent burden is steadily rising. Almost a third of renters are ‘severely rent burdened’, spending 50% or more of their household income on gross rent. Unsurprisingly, low income renters are struggling most, with 78% rent burdened (Furman Center, 2012:24). The Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) uses a lottery system to distribute affordable housing equitably, however historically, the service has been complex and inefficient. Service providers inherit poorly-filled applications, and many eligible New Yorkers don’t even know to apply.
The Public Policy Lab (PPL), an NYC-based nonprofit organization dedicated to improving public services, and the Parsons Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab, formed a partnership for Public and Collaborative, an international program dedicated to public policy innovation. The team approached the HPD to develop a project, for, as Chelsea Mauldin, PPL Executive Director, explains, they presented the best ‘fit’: “you need an in-house sponsor: an innovation or strategic planning unit which has the job of thinking about the future.” The HPD’s strategy division offered the greatest collaborative potential, as it was “interested in it as an experiment… and were willing to engage in the process in a substantive way” (Mauldin 2014). This included collaborating with the design team and making a good faith promise to implement the proposal. The twofold project goals aimed to assist the HPD in delivering more effective, efficient and satisfying services, while exploring methods of community resident involvement in housing-related services, specifically in neighborhoods with significant public- and private-sector investment leveraged by HPD.
Process: On the Ground Empathy
The project followed what Bunt and Leadbeater (2012) call a ‘creative decommissioning’ process. The team firstly appraised the state of existing services by engaging a range of stakeholders, created prototypes to envision how the service could work, and then developed implementation and scaling measures. The appraisal commenced with an initial three month ‘exploration’ phase comprising loosely structured observations and interviews to refine the team’s ethnographic focus. This became the Melrose Commons Urban Renewal Area, a former brownfield attracting recent HPD investment with plans for affordable housing, a new college campus, and commercial and community space. A second, more formalized and extensive fieldwork phase included structured observations (such as observing a lottery sorting event), ethnomethodological interviews and onsite workshops with HPD leadership, front-line agency staff, staff at community-based organizations (CBO’s) offering housing assistance, affordable housing developers, and current or potential users of the agency’s services. This phase aimed to reveal seeds for possible SD ideas, as Mauldin describes: “all of the work definitely evolved from what people told us about their needs or problems. We really tried to listen in this preliminary and then secondary research about what people are telling us” (2014). Here, ‘listening’ ensured that technical design ideas were borne of empathy and truly reflected user needs. This ‘critical design ethnography’ fosters trust-based relationships, informs socially-responsive design interventions, and supports sustainable change (Barab et al, 2004:264-265). Ultimately, it was this reflexive awareness which helped guide the design process, “figuring out when we hit the point where we’ve heard enough to be able to draw on… and create a construct of professional empathy… You can then go back to the office and do synthesis while holding them in your head and in your heart… And then enough engagement to see if you’re getting it right” (Mauldin 2014).
Following synthesis of their ethnographic work, the team began exploring design concepts through a comprehensive participatory design (PD) process. PD is an iterative method which engages multiple project stakeholders through field visits and collaborative workshops, and invites users to coproduce design ideas through in-context activities. In best practice it is also a reflexive and empathic process. It builds a mutual respect for different knowledge (workers’ and designers), creates opportunities to learn others’ knowledge domains (occupational and technical), enables joint negotiation of project goals, supports the development of tools and processes to facilitate participation, all the while building a sense of shared project ownership (Blomberg and Karasti, 2012). Given that civic SD typically works with disadvantaged communities, PD can be an especially powerful engagement tool, including voices often marginalized in efforts to design the systems of which they are a part. However, as important as reflexivity is for high-quality SD, it also reveals the limitations of project impact, an at times challenging realization: “what does one do about the fact that people have problems and needs that the system can’t actually address, or even accommodate? There’s not much we can do about those terrible stories” (Mauldin, 2014).
One aspect of ethnographic synthesis involves examining the improvisations users make to compensate for system failure. For example, research revealed that some CBO figures were attempting to bridge information gaps by acting as on-the-ground ‘ambassadors’ for the service unbeknownst to the HPD. These figures had deep community relationships, which indicated they could become an excellent social mechanism for localized communications: “We wouldn’t have known about ambassadors if not for observing and then talking to them – and this became a key design idea which is set to be piloted… Let’s build this bridge with these people who are pursuing the same goals, and who don’t currently have a relationship with one another – and facilitate that in a ‘light’ way” (Mauldin, 2014). The team then tested design concepts such as these through co-design sessions, held in-context to approximate ‘live’ considerations and ensure participant comfort: “they should not be asked to be in a context which is not their context. That would feel like a co-design of someone’s lived experience” (Mauldin, 2014).
The PD outcome was a complex service system which provides knowledge-sharing infrastructure. This infrastructure would adapt to the dynamic and reciprocal exchanges of information between residents, community-based partners, housing developers, and HPD leadership and front line staff (Dragoman and Kühl 2013:9). The team produced four multi-stakeholder pilot proposals: new, user-centered informational materials, a strategy for encouraging hyper-local marketing by developers, supporting community-based ‘housing ambassadors’, and forming a street team for in-person HPD outreach. To date, the HPD has accepted all four proposals and is now implementing pilots, with support from PPL Fellows.
Resilient Agencies: Shifting Mindsets
This model indicates that the work of SD is less about designing artifacts than resilient ‘action platforms’, engaging all service stakeholders into “a system that makes a multiplicity of interactions possible” (Manzini, 2011:3). In this way, organizational silos can begin sharing laterally as ‘learning organizations’, producing and transferring knowledge through inclusive and horizontal networks, from communities to personnel. They influence community and organizational behavior based on this new knowledge and related insights (Anttiroiko et al, 2014). Yet promoting organizational change can be a sensitive proposition, especially with legacy institutions such as government agencies. For example, Mauldin noted that “a big finding for us was that agencies don’t have a lot of experience with ethnography”, yet at the same time “tend to believe they know their service users, claiming they hear the same stories and complaints all the time… but this is not the same as deeply understanding the context of these stories and complaints” (2014). The team found that their project partnership model, in which an agency partner works closely with the design team, helped resolve this challenge. Opportunities for informal and inclusive knowledge-sharing revealed the lived reality of the service’s users, while also building trust between the team and agency. The agency’s orientation subsequently shifted to “think about user experience… ways to capture user feedback… creating pathways for communication…That is definitely something that’s now more obvious to people in the agency than it was before” (Mauldin, 2014). This landmark realization allowed the HPD to begin envisioning social infrastructure as a real service strength, and ultimately conceive of itself as a user-centered service system. As explained by Kathryn Matheny, Chief of Staff/Deputy Commissioner of Strategic Planning, Technology & Administration, upon identifying expertise beyond their own, HPD administrators now recognize untapped potential: “Perhaps most important, our partners in this initiative have brought a single-minded focus on the experiences and perspectives of the real experts on the matter of public service delivery – the residents of New York City and the agency staff members who, on a daily basis, work with the public to improve housing conditions” (in Dragoman and Kühl, 2013:6).
PRIVATE SECTOR SERVICE DESIGN
Background: NYC On-The-Go
Navigating NYC’s subways can be a frustrating experience for the most seasoned of New Yorkers, let alone visitors and irregular commuters. From temporary printouts of service disruption notices to incomprehensible overhead announcements, the current notification systems are inefficient for both commuters and service providers. To improve communications for commuters, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) launched ‘On the Go!’ kiosks in five locations in 2011. However they remained largely ignored, unintuitive and offered few compelling reasons for interaction. In early 2012 the MTA put out a request to redevelop the kiosk experience, and Control Group, an NYC-based technology and design consultancy, was selected as a project partner. By mid-summer 2014 fifteen of NYC’s subway stations will be the new home for 90 one-tap navigation kiosks. They feature wayfinding, trip planning, realtime service updates, selected third party content and are enabled with video cameras, microphones and WiFi to facilitate two-way messaging and public communication.