PROCESS
We started by observing a workshop and walking tour that explored how the path in question could extend beyond the neighborhood to other destinations. Between responses to a survey we distributed at the event, our observations, and our transcription of the discussion, we built a better understanding of the limitations of the current system. One major problem was the inaccessibility of planning workshops themselves due to burdens such as transportation, lack of childcare, conflicts due to work schedule, and other challenges that made attending a workshop on a Saturday morning difficult. This inaccessibility influenced another problem: the homogeneity of the attendees. The participants were mostly white, older, and members of a local group interested in planning issues. There was a lack of younger voices and a lack of Chicano residents from the adjacent neighborhood Barrio Logan. Finally, another major problem with the workshop was the format of the discussion itself. Many attendees had numerous ideas and opinions that could not be expressed nor documented in the time available.
Our ultimate goal throughout all of our prototyping and design work was to develop a system community organizers could deploy that would allow community members who could not attend an in-person workshop to quickly contribute their perspective to the urban planning process. Our process from here out involved developing an idea, making a prototype, getting feedback, pivoting based on what we learned, and prototyping again. We used paper, Qualtrics surveys, Sketch, Invision, and HTML to prototype different user experiences to refine an experience for development. During this stage, we got feedback from two different community planning committees and attendees at one of their meetings.
With each prototype, we learned more and more about what worked and what did not. We found respondents needed a basic understanding of the project and the high-level design constraints such as the purpose of the project, the location, and the types of ideas sought. If questions were too open-ended they would not get answered, however, phase questions that are too specific may carry little value early in the design. Asking multiple questions about one central idea or topic was more successful than switching from topic to topic. Different people enjoy making different kinds of contributions, such as synthesis, idea generation, responding to someone else’s idea, or rating an idea. Allowing people to skip questions was an effective yet simple method for tailoring the experience to their interests. These insights—drawn from our different prototypes—came together in the design of our final system. At the time, it was hard to see the progress we were making, but once we got to the end, it was clear that with each iteration we grew stronger as a team and gained a better grasp of the design space, making each iteration faster than the one before.
The final system relied upon the insights we gained from creating and evaluating the prototypes and hinged upon a few key qualities that set it apart from its predecessors. Most importantly, the system was generative in how it selected activities for users to complete and how it pulled content other community members had contributed to seek feedback from the current user. This was a departure from our earlier iterations and from existing systems because the tool was no longer a black box nor were the questions canned. Additionally, the final system aimed to involve community members, not only in submitting complaints or suggestions, but in the active improvement and evaluation of their peers’ ideas—tasks often left to professional designers and planners. We were inspired by the IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum, aiming to move beyond “informing” and “consulting” the public to “involving” and “collaborating” with them online.
