Interaction Design · Research
A collaborative workshop that helps city teams agree on what a street is for, before anyone draws it.
Brief
THE BRIEF
Dublin City Council's BETA Projects gave us this brief as part of a project at NCAD. Many departments shape a street, each with different concerns, and the council's priorities get lost in the noise.
Research
RESEARCH
Complexity wasn't just the topic,
It was the first problem.
We mapped what made street planning so hard, who would use a tool for it, and what already existed. Four pain points kept showing up:
01
Complexity
Multiple departments, each with different concerns and priorities.
02
Dependency
Every decision has implications, constraints and trade-offs for the next.
03
Alignment
Decisions get made in silos, without awareness of other concerns or the bigger context.
04
Transparency
Decisions are poorly documented, with no rationale, so they can look arbitrary.
Three user groups, two moments of use
Primary: designers, architects and engineers inside the council, for whom this is daily work Secondary: councillors and high-level managers, who sign off on design briefs Tertiary: members of the public taking part in consultations
Pain Points
• Emotional confusion: After the breakup, Axel feels uncertain…
Scenario
Axel is a musician who, three months after his breakup…
Ideal Experience
The tool would be used early, to break silos while a street is still at the planning stage so effort goes to the right place. But it couldn't be a one-off: it also had to stay in use as a single source of truth for what was decided, and why, throughout implementation and public consultation.
That gave us three "How might we" questions:
How might we agree on a design brief before setting out to draw or implement street design?
How might we coordinate design priorities and carry them across roles, functions and levels of planning?
How might we capture design decisions and their rationale, and convey them across functions?
What was already out there
Sensemaking
SENSEMAKING
Time to turn all that into a journey.
We traced the steps of a tool in use, from the moment someone needs it to what happens after.
Trigger
• Project initiation.
• Need to put together a clear design brief.
Discover
• Understand
hight-level priorities.
• Capture street information.
Use
• Map out street plan/guidelines.
• Get reminders when going against priorities.
After Use
• Export report (design brief).
• Save to account.
• Compare with others (see overall trends).
Developing
DEVELOPING
An idea came fast. Too fast.
Our first solution was "Fit this street" an interactive digital tool where anyone, from anywhere, could enter information, set priorities, plan out a street and generate a design brief from their input. We started dreaming of a public engagement tool where street decisions could be democratised and outsourced.
To test the flow, we ran a first workshop using LEGO and lollipop sticks as building blocks for street components: lanes, trees, benches, bus stops, parking. Everything seemed promising.
Then we stopped and stepped back.
Little did we know we were jumping too fast into solutions and losing sight of what mattered most. We had been sucked into the vortex of complexity, plagued by the same problem we had set out to solve.
We only saw it while building a comparison matrix, measuring nine ideas against criteria for the design: timeline, cost, scalability, effort to coordinate, space for discussion, documentation, and whether it forces reflection.
The exercise showed a digital workspace would be the most viable solution. But more importantly, it took us back to the one thing that mattered most in the brief: collaboration.
As the goal is to break across silos, it should be done collaboratively, not individually. A magical tool for individuals won't solve a problem made of multiple perspectives that need to be considered together to reach alignment.
Testing & Iteration
TESTING & ITERATION
So we went back to the people
who live this problem.
We revisited what we had learned in a co-design workshop with our DCC contact and participants from across the council: City Architects, Road Design, City Development and Active Travel.
Five things came out of it, each one in the participants' own words:
Knowledge
Decisions depend on knowledge that lives in people's heads. We need a way to externalise it. "I don't know the street well enough to know..." "I know that down the street there is a pub and some cafes."
Perspectives
Each party brings a different and equally valid view of the big picture. "From your side it's greening, from my side it's footpath."
Ideal Experience
Numbers
Numbers trigger technical mindsets and bog people down in details. "Minimum is 1.4, and then we would need the footfall to determine how much more space is needed."
Constraints
A constant struggle between ideals and limits, sometimes self-censoring ideas before they're considered. "Ideally it would be to pedestrianise it all but then you also need delivery vehicles and access to car park."
The workshop gave us the facts and also the shape of the process: what steps it takes, which questions to ask, and which information was missing. So we started prototyping a very rough version of a digital collaborative workspace, with the facilitator's questions and the participants' answers on the same page.
