Adam Greenfield: The City is Here for You to Use
Last night I went to Cooper Union to see Adam Greenfield speak. Adam is a very smart guy whose way of framing people-object interactions is always exciting for someone who designs physical things. He spoke about the “dense, complex love” that people have for cities, why this love is turning to apathy, and what designers can do to make cities lovable again. The talk was called “The City is Here for You to Use: Urban Form and Experience in the Age of Ambient Informatics.” The title points to the part of the talk that was most meaningful for me: the city considered as a product with many users. If you didn’t get to go, check out Trebor Scholz’s great summary.
I was completely engrossed by Adam’s critique of spaces that are hostile by design, the subsequent popularity of escapist devices like the iPod and cell, and how the same (and new) technology can be used to restore a sense of engagement with the city. He never resolved one central question though: if the city is a product for us to use, is it a tool or a toy? Does “good design” here mean ease of use or joy of use?
For a city, I think the two are exclusive – easy-to-use systems are successful if they’re cognitively invisible and forgettable. They free the user to think about other things by disappearing and functioning silently; microwaves, nutritional supplements, and the software update feature in OS X are examples. People don’t form emotional bonds with these systems because they’re forgettable by design; tools whose value comes only from the outcome they produce for the user. A city’s tools are the highways, airports, chain stores, etc. Borrowing a term from Rem Koolhaas, Adam called these unremarkable, function-driven places “junkspace”. He lamented the fact that public places, particularly the streets, are becoming tool-like junkspace: optimized to move traffic instead of foster interactions between neighbors. Yet a few minutes later he praised Naoto Fukasawa’s idea of “design dissolving in behavior”. Isn’t this the goal that leads to junkspace? Design that “gets out of the way” so things can get done with a minimal investment by the user.
Should we use ubiquitous technology to make our cities so easy to use that they become invisible? I don’t think this is what Adam wants (it’s definitely not what Naoto wants), but this seemed to be the logical conclusion of the systems he proposed. As the internet makes location less and less a part of doing good work, living in dense, exciting, expensive places like New York becomes more about using a toy than using a tool. Kevin Slavin, one of the panelists, addressed this shift by saying that stories about the city, rather than more factual information, make spaces lovable.
When I was trying to think of parts of the city that could benefit from less noticeable, more tool-like design, the subway came to mind right away. While New York’s subway is impressive in many ways, it’s cars grind and shutter as they move, schedules are basically meaningless, and its tangled pathways of colors, numbers, and letters are confusing. The layout and textures of the stations themselves are from another era, with drippy black ceilings and platforms that ensure you’re never more than a few steps from sudden death. Yet the subway’s quirks are one of the things I miss most when I’m away. Understanding it, being able to ride without holding the rail, getting frustrated when neophytes don’t move in enough, giving people directions- each is a sign of membership, and each would be meaningless in a perfectly efficient, easy to use tool of a subway system. The subway, like the city, is more a toy than we imagine.
To be clear, the tool/ toy dichotomy is not a judgment of a product’s utility or design merit – in fact I think each of my designs falls strongly within the “toy” category. It’s instead a way to talk about and categorize the goals that informed the product’s design.
3 Comments
April 12th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
[...] Joey Roth Says: April 10th, 2007 at 18.10 UTC [...]
May 19th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
[...] Adam Greenfield and the city to use. “Should we use ubiquitous technology to make our cities so easy to use that they become invisible?” (via amit) [...]
August 22nd, 2007 at 3:55 pm
The city is a tool and a toy.