NYC as an interface

Photo by Delcio G.P.Filho.

The big apple.

Many say it’s the greatest city in the world. Whether or not you agree, there’s no denying it’s an incredibly dense place with an overwhelming amount of people and things to do. Not only are there over 40 million tourists annually, jostling to see the sights and get a taste of the cultural capital but there are also over 8 million people living here − struggling to manage the tasks of daily living amongst all the tourists. That’s a lot of people with very different goals. How do they all figure it out?

(For those of you not in New York, you might want to consider pressing play for some mood music.)

The usability of cities

I’ve been on the road for the past few weeks and am struck by how some cities are easier to use than others. Since I’m in the business of interfaces I’ve been thinking about it in those terms. Just like software, smaller cities with few features are generally (but not always) fairly easy to use. Once you have a large, complex city with many features − like NYC − it gets much more challenging to maintain that ease of use.

New York City is an incredibly powerful interface with multiple entry points and endless features. One might say it has feature bloat. It overloads the senses and it’s not always easy to navigate and understand, yet people learn to use it effectively and often grow to love it.

In that way it’s like Adobe Photoshop - optimized for expert users, perfect for their needs once they have taken the time to learn how it works, but very intimidating to novice users. Over 40 million of tourists enter the city each year and have to navigate the New York City ‘interface.’ How do they figure it out?

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The Birds Nest & the television experience

Amazement operated on many levels during the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. During each performance, my mind struggled to process what I was seeing. What is this? How in the world did they pull this off? Where does an idea like this even come from?

TV: These small boxes will now take the form of a keyboard, and the keyboard will sprout a peach blossom.
Doug: ... Huh.
TV: Now the small boxes, which have made precise, machine-like movements for the last ten minutes, will reveal that humans have been operating them the whole time.
Doug: ... Wait, what? ... How ...
TV: Now a globe will rise, and dozens of people will fly around it in precise circles.
Doug's brain: [explodes]

In a Wahington Post editorial, Roger K. Lewis recently wrote that NBC didn't once mention the architects of the venue, Beijing National Stadium. Hmm. That's funny. I didn't mention them during the telecast either, but that's because my brain had been reduced to a pre-verbal state.

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Learning from How Buildings Learn

The BBC miniseries based on Steward Brand's How Buildings Learn became available on the Internet a few days ago. It's chock-full of provocative stuff, and lays out compelling arguments about how structures succeed or fail in satisfying the needs and goals of people. (Let's hear it for design on TV! First Mad Men, now HBL. It's a televisual golden age!)

The Ferry Building

As I watched the opening episode, I thought of the quintessential local example of a learning building: The Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco. Built in 1898, it served as a ferry terminal for points around the Bay; as San Francisco changed and bridges eased the traffic burden, it gradually fell into disrepair. In 2004, it re-opened as gourmet food court, serving the prosperous downtown lunch crowd. San Francisco changed, and the Ferry Building "learned" to address a new set of needs. Beautiful.

Is architecture really a good analog for IxD?

Aside from all of the fascinating examples of the ways in which our built environment responds (or doesn't respond) to change, what the miniseries reveals to me more than anything is the limitation of using architecture and construction as models for software design and development. Architecture serves as a helpful stand-in when you're talking about the macro stuff — the planning process, the rough apportionment of the screen "real estate," and discussions around extensibility or repurposing — e.g., Is this thing the first piece of the big structure, or is it the temporary thing that we live in while the big structure is built?

But when you're talking about the way people experience things in a digital environment, architecture is a limited analog. Software is made up of subtle, nuanced interactions and ever-evolving technical capabilities. Interacting with software is conversation between two active participants; it's fast-paced and packed with immediate possibilities. For example, changing context in software seems more akin to a change in facial expression than, say, a movement to a different room. (It should, anyway). The ever-evolving technical capabilities have created a world in which we're all often experiencing some particular digital interaction for the first time; in fact, if someone wrote a book about how software is experienced, it could be called something like, "How Software Teaches Us How to Use It."

Solutions begat problems, problems beget solutions

Of course, there's another side of Brand's perspective that's relevant to our work: Most design projects (at Cooper, anyway) begin with what is presented as a straightforward task: Design a solution for the problem the clients have identified. Architects probably experience a transformation similar to ours, because the real problem is often quite different than what the client has articulated. Brand's perspective is interesting to consider here, because our solution often simply modifies (or modulates) the problem -- makes it smaller, hopefully — but still: Will our solution be able to handle the need to evolve to further reduce the problem? Of course, if anything could learn and teach at the same time, it's software. But software that can learn ... Hmm. Something sounds fishy about that. Remember that part in Terminator where they're talking about how the computers took over?

[Start with Episode 1 of How Buildings Learn at Google Video, and thanks to smashingtelly for the tip]

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

The next step for community design

Community design centers are non-profit organizations that provide high quality design to underfunded and underserved areas of a community. They're usually established as extensions of colleges and universities, and they're intended to positively impact the surrounding community though design — usually through the physical build.

Back when I was pursuing my degree at the University of Cincinnati’s college of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning, I worked for one, with the intention of helping to revitalize one of the more depressed parts of Cincinnati. The focus was the design of a farmers market, an initiative that included contributions from Architecture, Planning, Industrial Design, and my own discipline of study, Graphic Design. The end result of our work is a vibrant, exciting environment, and this experience got me thinking about ways in which my current discipline could take part.

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