Setting up a public participation project using the Urban Mediator tool: a case of collaboration between designers and city planners Joanna Saad-Sulonen
Andrea Botero Cabrera
Arki Research Group, Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki
Arki Research Group, Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki
Hämeentie 135 C, 00560 Helsinki, Finland +358 9 7563 0411
Hämeentie 135 C, 00560 Helsinki, Finland +358 9 7563 0411
[email protected]
[email protected]
ABSTRACT The Urban Mediator software is a web-based framework for sharing, obtaining and gathering location-based information. This paper presents an overview of the possibilities and limitations of this system for end-user development and co-design. The issues are analyzed through the case study of a public citizen participation project that used the software and was set up in collaboration between designers from the University of Art and Design Helsinki, and planners from the City of Helsinki Planning Department, during spring 2008. The collaborative work between the design team and the city planners, as well as the flexible and extensible features of the Urban Mediator, enabled the setting up of a successful small scale urban planning participative project as well as the further development of the Urban Mediator system.
Categories and Subject Descriptors A0 [General]
General Terms Documentation, Design, Human Factors
Keywords Co-design, research and development, public participation, design in-use, end user development, locative media
1. INTRODUCTION Urban Mediator is part of the results of a EU-funded research project Innovative Cities for the Next Generation (ICING) [4]. Our goal in the project was to create "tools" rather than fixed solutions for encouraging public participation in urban issues. The project involved collaborations, amongst others, with city councils in Dublin, Barcelona and Helsinki. The specific context of our involvement was Helsinki, where we have followed an iterative, co-design approach, involving various stakeholders in the design process (city administrations, citizens, developers, designers). All Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. NordiCHI 2008: Using Bridges, 18-22 October, Lund, Sweden Copyright 2008 ACM ISBN 978-1-59593-704-9. $5.00
through the project life span, from 2006 to mid 2008, we have used a combination of co-design workshops, prototype testing and use, as well as in-situ interventions, involving mostly active citizens and local stakeholders [5][1] to advance the design and development of Urban Mediator, as well as to understand the issues at stake. In this paper we focus on a later public trial set up collaboratively with a group of planners from the City of Helsinki Planning Department, where we look more closely to the idea of allowing users to continue co-design through use [5][3]. First, we bring forward the case as an example of a public participation project that was collaboratively designed by city planners and designers involved in the design of a tool for encouraging participation, and the relationships developed between each of their respective roles. Second, we highlight how this collaboration, along with the characteristics of the tool, made it possible for the planners to experiment with new ideas and concepts they were not familiar with and had not encountered in their own work practices. This has given us, the designers and developers of the system, new insight into possibilities of furthering the development of the tool, increasing its flexibility and versatility to include features useful for public participation projects, and which could later be used in other similar projects, or could also be adopted and adapted through other uses [2].
1.1 Urban Mediator Urban Mediator (UM) is a web-based framework [6] that provides a way for communities to mediate local, location-based discussions, activities, and information that are organized according to topics of interests. These topics are set up and maintained by the users themselves on UM. UM uses a mapportrayal service as means for representing the location-based information and complements it with a set of tools for users to process, share and organize this information. The interfaces are available for PC and mobile browsers, which allow the system to be accessed using web browsers, either on desktop computers or, on the go, through mobile devices. The current definition of Urban Mediator was not always evident as such; this reflects its iterative development based on building lightweight prototypes that were used by volunteers and could be quickly modified according to new insight gathered by both testusers and designers. This continuous collaborative development with a variety of stakeholders with different backgrounds revealed the need for developing the language and terms associated with it [5]. The current version of the software (UM v2.0) comprises several core concepts: Urban Mediator (as the whole system), topic, point, tag, user, comment, tools and widgets.
Topics are used to gather collections of Points related to an issue of interest. Anyone logged in to Urban Mediator can set up a Topic by giving it a name, a description, a color scheme, an icon, and select a map area that shows as the default. Contrary to the use of the term topic for forums and BBS software, UM does not, in its present form, encourage discussions: it is rather a place to link many discussions together. Points are used to mark locations that hold information such as location (Where), creator (Who), time of creation (When), explanation (What), and purpose (Why). Anyone logged in to Urban Mediator can create a Point, within the context of a Topic, by marking it on the map or giving a street address, and by giving it a title and a set of keywords. It is possible to add comments to points. Tags are free-form keywords, associated to Points and Topics. The tags subsystem makes discovery of the points or referring to the specific set of points more effective and can allow the exploration of folksonomies. Widgets in the Urban Mediator terminology are web widgets that offer the possibility to extend and embed the functionality and content of UM Topics into any other website. There are different kinds of UM widgets that address different needs; for example the Add point widget, makes it possible for the user to add a point to the topic the widget was created for, directly from another website. Tools in Urban Mediator are part of the Topics’ functionalities and offer possibilities to process, share and organize the locationbased information available. Some examples of tools available in UM v2.0 are the CSV tool that makes it possible to export information gathered through topics in a Comma-separated values format, and the Newsfeed import tool that makes it possible to import GeoRSS feeds, which will automatically create points out of the feed entries, for the associated topic. New tools can be developed in time, in response to Urban Mediators’ users needs.
Figure 1 Main components and features of Urban Mediator In concrete terms, users of UM can 1) create topics of their choice in order to gather location-based information or they can contribute to topics created by others, 2) create and view points (meaning the marked locations that contains information regarding it), 3) search all the information collected though all the
Urban Mediator topics and combine it into new topics, 4) import and syndicate content to and from UM by using standard feed formats (RSS, Atom/GeoRSS, KML, and others), and last but not least, 5) create UM widgets to embed UM functionality and information in other web resources (websites, blogs, etc)
2. THE ELEMENTS OF THE COLLABORATIVE APPROACH 2.1 Engaging city planners From the beginning, our interest was in finding productive ways of involving city administration employees in the co-design activities. This proved to be difficult to arrange during the first stages of the project. However, with improved UM prototypes more concrete collaborations with city officials were easier to arrange. The first successful trial done in cooperation with the City of Helsinki Public Works Department asked citizens to report sightings of bunny rabbits in Helsinki, in an effort to research this new urban problem [1]. This experience triggered the interest of the Planning Department who wanted to ask residents of the Malminkartano area in northwest Helsinki to give their opinion on traffic issues in their neighborhood, as a way to inform the upcoming traffic safety-planning project. Together with our ICING partner from the city, the collaboration was defined and started. Contrary to the bunny rabbit case, the Malminkartano project saw a much bigger involvement from the city planners side, both in the setting up the project, collaboratively with the UM design team, as well as in making use and experimenting with the tools provided by UM.
2.2 The requirements for the participatory project The first briefs given by the Planning Department explained in general terms what they initially had in mind: they wanted to ask residents of the neighborhood of Malminkartano in Helsinki their opinion regarding traffic issues in the area, using the Urban Mediator’s map feature to collect information and opinions regarding specific locations in that part of the city. Included in the draft document was a set of questions targeted to the residents: Where should traffic speed be lowered? Where should parking along the street be permitted? Where should street bumps be placed? Where is visibility bad? Where are dangerous spots, related to traffic/movement? Moreover, the planners wanted to ask citizens their opinions regarding the opening up or not of a particular underpass, for general traffic, and were interested in knowing if residents would be pro or con this proposal. Their initial framing of the project was in terms of "polls" and "questionnaires". As location was a key issue in all their questions, it was evident for them that a map interface could provide an easy entry point for residents to locate their concerns and address their questionnaire. Urban Mediator is not however designed per se to simply facilitate the setting up of online questionnaire. It rather offers the possibility to collaboratively gather location information on a map, as related to a particular issue or question. In order to help us better explain the potentials and limitations of UM to the planners, we decided to set up some co-design activities with them. These activities would also help us gain a better understanding of what was at the core of their information needs. Through this strategy, we hoped to collaboratively design proposals, using the UM tools and features we controlled and could adapt or refine. We wanted to make the most out of the existing features and refine them, and only
develop new ones if this could be done efficiently during the timeframe we had, and if the new development efforts would provide generic tools to complement the 'Urban Mediator as toolkit' idea we were aiming at.
2.3 Developing a common language and understanding The ‘working group’ for the setting up the Malminkartano project with Urban Mediator tools consisted of two interaction planners responsible for interaction between the department and citizens, the traffic planner responsible for drafting the plans for the Malminkartano area, the ICING partner from the City of Helsinki, and the UM design team. In the first meeting, we presented Urban Mediator (by then version 1.0) and proposed our own interpretation of their questionnaire, implemented with the existing Urban Mediator features, and the ones we thought we could develop further. First, using the “bunny rabbit case” example, we explained the way UM works and how topics of interest can be set up and used to gather location-based information around these topics. Second, we proposed to create a specific UM topic for the project, and complement this with UM web widgets that could be included in the planning Department’s website. The UM widgets would prompt the user to: 1) Indicate dangerous places, and 2) Propose solutions. These widgets would lead users to the actual UM pages where they could respond to the prompt, by creating a point on the map and then name it, tag it, describe it, and attach a picture if needed. We also proposed that the question regarding the underpass, which was bound to one particular location, would be a ready-made point (created by the planners) in the UM topic. By opening this point, citizens could respond using the commenting feature. During the meeting it appeared that the functions of the widgets remained relatively unclear to the planners. The term ‘web widget’, and even our explanation of this term (“a piece of code that can be included in any webpage and that brings up Urban Mediator functionalities, such as the possibility to add a point on the map”) did not open up the concept to the planners. We decided to address this in a hands-on co-design workshop (March 2008) where the planners and the designers would together design the setting up of Urban Mediator for the project. During the workshop, we used paper prototypes and Post-it notes to mimic the steps needed to set up a particular topic on Urban Mediator and to create the web widgets that would be included in the Planning Department info page, which would prompt the users to give their contributions. This enabled the planners to better understand the potential of using widgets. They decided then on the information that was needed to create the appropriate widgets for the project: 1) the title of the widget and, 2) the written hints and instructions that would guide users in providing the information needed to create a point, such as: examples of point titles and tags related to the widget prompt. We also decided together on what we referred to as the “hidden tags”, which would be used to help the planners categorize the points submitted by the users. The workshop activities helped the planners to better understand the concept and the tools that UM offers for setting up projects (topics, points, widgets, etc). After the workshop, they started to refer to the widgets as either the “buttons” (for the Add a point widgets), or the “windows” (in the case of the other widgets). From our side, we got the information we needed to create the topic and the widgets.
We then sent the web widgets’ code we generated with UM to the Planning Department’s webmaster. She included it in the web page she had prepared on their website for explaining the traffic safety project and how one could take part in it (see Fig 2). It was interesting to see how the webmaster ended up editing some of the widgets’ code herself to best fit the appearance of the planning department’s web pages. This was a good example, even if small, of independent and direct design action from a collaborator outside the design team, and it reinforced our hopes of designing for adaptation.
Figure 2 Screenshot of the Malminkartano traffic safety planning page on the City of Helsinki Planning Department website, as it appeared on 13.05.2008, with the UM widgets embedded in it (on the right hand side).
2.4 Public participation as public trials The scheduling of a public residents evening event in Malminkartano, where the Mayor of Helsinki and various city planners were to present plans related to area and answer residents’ questions, accelerated the process of setting up the project. The interaction planner and the traffic planner decided it would be a good occasion to present the project to the residents, and invite them to participate. This event kick-started publicly the project; flyers explaining how to take part were distributed and an official presentation was made directing the residents to the Planning Department’s web page. On this page, the Urban Mediator widgets asked them to a) mark parking problems, b) mark dangerous places, and c) mark improvement suggestions for the traffic. The project was up for about a month, and it gathered 73 new points (35 dangerous spots, 25 improvement proposals, and 13
indications of parking problems) and 24 responses to the underpass question (as comments to the point). Some of the points created by residents were also commented on by others.
and can be used for various needs, we decided to make it a standard set up feature for topics. It was rewarding to see that the approach of providing a toolkit rather that any fixed solution is bearing results. This first became apparent as we noticed that the web widgets placed on the Planning Department’s website, had been edited and customized by the webmaster. Moreover, after this case was successfully closed, the City of Helsinki Youth Department also decided touse Urban Mediator as a tool to ask young people to propose possible locations for new skateboard parks. We briefly gave their webmaster an overview of how to set an Urban Mediator topic and how to create widgets, and they appropriated the UM tools for that. We believe that this case is a good example of collaboration between the design team, primarily involved in R&D, and planners involved in public participation. We advocate, building on this experience, a role for the designers and (software) developers inside public participation projects, not only as providers of the technology, concerned only with the development of the tools to be used, but as full actors in the collaborative design of public participation project.
4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Figure 3 Urban Mediator user interface. The topic view for the Malminkartano traffic safety project has the map view active, a set of widgets to add new points and a keyword cloud
3. DISCUSSION AND PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS The planners addressed the project at first with a set of concepts they were used to handling in their work practices. This was the case for example with the references to creating a “poll” or “questionnaire”, that would be augmented by a “map software”. The questionnaire is indeed a tool they use and that is part of the toolbox of participative projects. The map aspect of UM brought in the new locative possibilities to the “questionnaire” idea. In our perception, Urban Mediator was neither a questionnaire nor a map software, nor even a combination of both. The idea of the poll and questionnaire led us however to experiment with the possibility of refining some of the UM tools, so that the Urban Mediator topic administrators and widget creators could include a pre-defined set of questions that can be filled in as users contribute with their points. The questions and their answers are attached to the points created using the widget. This feature is now added to the customization possibilities offered for the Add point widget creation, and make it possible to create this type of participatory consultation using UM. During UM development we have been investigating the possible use and forming of folksonomies and tags in such systems geared at citizen-city interaction. Collaboration with the planners also permitted us to further refine functionalities associated with the use of tags. For example, to implement some of the planners’ ideas related to a controlled categorization of the data, we introduced “hidden tags” as a lightweight approach for giving the planners a structured possibility to organize the data collected, according to relevant categories. As this feature is quite flexible
Our thanks to our colleagues at the ARKI research group, most particularly to Roman Suzi lead software developer of UM. Thanks to the planners from the City of Helsinki planning department and to our ICING project partner at the City of Helsinki who has facilitated the collaboration. The authors acknowledge the support for ICING provided by the European Commission through FP6 contract number FP6-IST-2004-4 26665.
5. REFERENCES [1] Botero A; Saad-Sulonen J. Co-designing for new city-citizen interaction possibilities: weaving prototypes and interventions in the design and development of Urban Mediator. In Proceedings of the 10th Participatory Design Conference. University of Indiana Bloomington. USA. (2008) [2] Ficher, G. & Giaccardi, E. Meta-Design: A Framework for the Future of End-User Development. In Lieberman, H., Paterno, F., Wulf, V. (Eds) End User Development – Empowering People to Flexibly Employ Advanced Information and Communication Technology, Kuwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands. (2004) [3] Henderson A. & Kyng M. There is no place like home continuing design in use. In J. Greenbaum & M. Kyng (Eds.). Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey, pp. 219240. (1991). [4] ICING project website. Accessed online on 15.08.2008 at: http://www.fp6-project-icing.eu/ [5] Saad-Sulonen, J., Susi, R. Designing Urban Mediator. In Proceedings of the Cost 298 conference: participation in the broadband society. May 2007, Moscow, Russian Federation. (2007) [6] Urban Mediator information and development website. Accessed online on 15.08.2008 at: http://um.uiah.fi
