Design thinking: how to involve citizens in conceiving better mobility projects for their community

Active participation of citizens in the conception of new mobility initiatives planned by the public sector is today a process with still many unresolved challenges. Even if the public sector is today far more sensitive to population involvement than it used to be a few decades ago, public participation is still often regarded more as a necessary bureaucratic step in the process of project conception, than as a real opportunity to improve the quality of projects and to facilitate its social reach and population acceptance.

Traditional planning methodologies rely heavily on top-down approaches: plans are made first and only then are citizens informed about them. Plans made without involving citizens often fail to reflect the problems faced by people on the ground, and consequently, citizens naturally tend to feel a lesser degree of ownership and responsibility towards the maintenance of final public infrastructure.

While participatory planning approaches seek to address these gaps by working with the citizens in understanding their problems, they rarely ‘close the loop’ by seeking feedback from the citizens after the plan is prepared. Thus, the ownership of the plan by the citizens is not guaranteed. Additionally, this also precludes any further refinement of the existing plan.

Design Thinking is intended to overcome such gaps. It places citizens at the core of designing activities, and through its strategy of “thinking by making”, it provides more room for trial and error processes, allowing the testing of new ideas and concepts at lower costs. The flaws of the traditional participatory planning approaches are addressed in the following ways:

• First, design thinking places citizens at the heart of the process. An effort of deeply empathising with residents, by organising household surveys, population interviews, community meetings; all in all it will enable the development of a better understanding of the problems faced by citizens.
• Second, it is an iterative process that motivates teams to transition between problem defining, ideating, prototyping and testing (feedback from user). This iterative process is at the core of what leads to a better final outcome.
• Third, by empathizing and rapidly creating and testing prototypes, the process allows end-users to participate in the process right from the initial stages.

The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation is the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives. The reason to call these spaces, rather than steps, is that they are not always undertaken sequentially. Projects may loop back through inspiration, ideation, and implementation more than once as the team refines its ideas and explores new directions.

“The solutions that emerge at the end of the Human-Centred Design should hit the overlap of these three lenses: they need to be desirable, feasible and viable”

In words of Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, design thinking “is about co-design and empowering people to think and participate in the design of their city. It allows us to test and measure things in an agile way. We try to bring the technologist, farmers, architects and everybody into the same room to start tinkering on things. By creating living labs, we can test things rather than trying to plan everything ahead and deploy a whole master plan, which is how larger city developments are going right now.”

Example: Design thinking process triggered in Balenyà (3.700 inhabitants, Barcelona province) for modifying the section of historic town streets

Collecting ideas: “Through face to face interviews, and community meetings we started to develop an understanding of the problems faced by neighbours of the Ignasi Villarubia Street, thus enabling us to empathise with them. With street neighbours we started creating some napkin pitches, getting the process of ideation started.”

Prototype is about creating a first impression: “on Saturday November 7th a focus group was held with residents to further elaborate and discuss the concepts on the table.

Though we had been getting feedback from the people we were designing for all along, a live prototype is one of the most powerful ways to test a solution. Until now, our prototypes have been rough, and they’ve done only enough to convey the idea we wanted to test. A real prototype, however, gives a chance to stress test a solution in real world conditions. A live prototype is all about understanding the feasibility and viability of the idea.”