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What are the goals of good Service Design? February 24, 2009

Posted by sl1814 in : 4_ServiceDesign, Presentations , trackback

A proposal of 13 tactics from Iain Bordin.

For our presentation in Service Design for Public Space, Jeeyhun and I sought to first define what we meen by “service” and then to explore how a service designer might seek to improve the quality of life in a city.  In the slideshow below are quotes from Iain Bordin’s proposal of 13 tactics that lead to a good life in the urban environment.  For the presentation we sought to open up his writing with specific examples from the city around us that illustrate his taxonomy in context.

1) Temporalities (i.e. The city that never sleeps.)

” . . . capitalism and the modern city have increasingly marshaled us into various forms of schedule, appointemnts, meeting slots, diaries, calendar dates, and windows of opportunity . . .yet other times are also possible – times of the body and nature, times of moments, circularity, indeterminate length and movement.”

One need only to look at the MTA subway schedule to understand how New York can manage to never sleep – the cadence sustained by 24 hour transportation  lends itself to the perpetually awake, always in motion pace of life we all manage to love and disdain.  A walk across the Brooklyn Bridge provides a completely antithetical temporality – both slower yet more leisurely and outside daily rhythms that demand a more frantic passage between the boroughs.

Perhaps leveraging such temporalities could ground the frantic distractions that keep this city in perpetual motion, or perhaps they could integrate a more leisurely pace into a more temporally diverse space.

2) Performance

“The good life of the city should incorporate all manner of spaces where people can gyrate, glide, and rotate, mime, perform, and declaim, climb, descend, and traverse, and act out opinions”

We see countless examples of street performers, musicians and dancers throughout the city, yet seen within a wider field of self expression, it is the fashion and care with which we present ourselves to the city that reveals the sheer scope of performativity in New York.

Perhaps avenues for self expression might take a cue from less visual contexts, enabling aural and physical performances less easily spotted on our streets.

3) Media

” . . . potential meeting places, where glances, touches, smiles, words, gossip, observations and opinions all have the possibility of being transferred”

Anyone who lives in a brownstone will see in the stoop a potential meeting place that mediates between the public sidewalk and the private residence.  These bridges-of-sorts recognize an alternate function for the built environment expemplifed in Bordin’s quote, namely the encounters that can occur in intermediate spaces.  In contrast, one might see in the financial district what Jane Jacobs called the “dead stuffed city,” a place resigned to so specific a form of meeting and exchange of information that it seems devoid of life and the potential to amplify any other activities.

4) Remembering

” . . . a testa-ment to the struggles, remarkable spirit, and lasting achievements of everyday urban citizens.”

There are quite obvious ways in which we remember our collective heritage within a city, and gravestones and memorials are among them.  Yet what is less explicit are those memories inscribed into our daily lexicon.  Whereas “Wall Street” might initially appear to be the name of a street that denotes our financial capital, what is less commonly understood is that Wall Street is the former site of the original city wall that was demolished in its first major expansion.  The implicit remembrance afforded by such nomenclature goes beyond merely naming a place and reveals how the conventional naming system of streets in accordance with their location with respect to a mapped grid can deprive a space of implicit access to its heritage.  In contrast to memories that are neither contested nor controversial, it is in those spaces where history and rememberance remains a topic of debate that the politics of remembering in a city becomes clear – one need only to consider the dogged attempts at designing a World Trade Center Memorial to see why.

5)  Quietude

“[Quiet aspects of the city] that do not seek to proclaim their presences with an immediate and unavoidable declamation.  Compared to the architecture of shouting, these other, more retiring designs are like asides, off-stage whispers . . .”

The quiet and meditative spaces afforded by libraries and museums are among many that contribute to a sense of comfort and stillness in the midst of urban hustle.  Yet how that quiet extends itself to the needs of an entire population can be a far more political issue than it initially seems.  Mike Davis has written extensively about the unspoken exclusions-by-design that accompany such seemingly innocent interventions like homeless-proof benches.  If quietude is understood as a necessary feature of good life in a city, offering a seat to those in need of temporary respite while excluding other potential uses (ie a place to nap) might be understood as a violation of an implicit right to the city.

6)  Uncertainty and Risk

“We need a city which we do not know, which we not understand, which we have not yet encountered, which is simultaneously strange, familiar, and unknown to us.”

Although pre-Guiliani New York certainly exhibited a far greater sense of uncertainty and risk (for better or worse), anyone who rides the subway system remains braced for the unknown (albeit a relatively safer iteration) on each ride.  In sharp contrast to Boston’s T, Chicago’s El-trains or the DC Metro, there is far less certainty as to what one will encounter, whether it be a performer, an evangelist, a breakdown resulting in an hour’s delay, or something or someone far more disturbing.  And yet rather than seeking to eradicate this, following Bordin’s suggestion, we might see in such unpredictability an aspect of urban life that is vital and necessary.

Although city guides and rating services such as YELP have come to assist so many of us in navigating less traversed areas of the city, we must also recognize in the possibility of knowing what one will find in advance an impulse that seeks to eliminate this aspect of risk.  Where in the short term it might be beneficial to navigate a new neighborhood in search of a venue or restaurant without getting lot, perhaps in the long term services that amplify the word-of-mouth to unprecedented levels will be seen as hostile to this aspect of urban life, and services that locate a balance will appear.

7) Provisional Identities

“  . . . people are constantly being reconstructed and reimagined in cities today, and this is the way that cities must then be design – not for predictable, monolithic sectors of the population  . . . but for various different and competing tastes, opinions, and outlooks.”

A space that allocates for provisional identities might best be understood as one that recognizes all aspects of one’s life – and yet this is what makes it so difficult to visualize since it requires that we recognize conspicuous absences.  One photograph might illustrate the identities catered to in a given frame, yet it cannot show us what is absent from a space’s surroundings.  In this sense we might locate in neighborhoods that lack grocery stores, public transportation, or daycare, a failure to provision for given aspects of professional and domestic life.  A subway map that distorts an entire area of a city that is underserved might serve as an instructive example: in eliminating those spaces where subways do not go we implicitly eliminate certain identities struggling to be served.

8)  Fluidity

“Although undoubtedly necessary to demarcate our private homes and places of work . . . boundaries do not always have to be frontal and brutal in their expression, not always challenging and confrontational to those who negotiate them.”

Fluid movement in a single direction does not necessarily eliminate boundaries – one need only examine heavily trafficked streets which lack sidewalks or bike lanes to see how one dominant range of motion can exclude others.  Truly porous boundaries might be found in an area where different ranges of motion and modes of transportation are equally served – where pedestrians and automobiles have a proportional ability to move through the city.  In the ongoing efforts to physically seperate the bike lane on ninth avenue we might recognize a project that is reclaiming pedestrian space in the city.

9) Interventions

” . . . we need the security of hospitals, homes, and schools, offices, factories, and airports.  And at other times we need different kinds of architecture, those which appropriate rather than dominate, and those which intervene and attach rather than impose and replace.”

In our most relegated spaces, such as the aformentioned airports and schools, the built environment enacts a sort of formal legislation that relegates what activites can occur – yet following Bordin’s example, the intervention that serves a given need or impulse need not be a permanent structure overwriting all activity that used to occur within a space.  One example which received near-universal acclaim was Christ and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 “The Gates” in Central Park.  The 7,503 vinyl gates of saffron-colored nylon transformed the park for two weeks, yet did so in collaboration with what activities already exist in the park.

10)  Play

“[Play] tells us that aggression in cities is latent and not always detrimental, that being ridiculous is okay, that all of us are in some way children at heart . . .”

There is no shortage of festivity and play in New York, from parades to outdoor events throughout the summer.  And yet some might argue that our city relegates too much of this activity to bars and spaces where spending money is mandatory.  Of course  no local culture is without its imperfections, yet perhaps a bar-centric notion of play might be leveraged to serve others in the city.

11)  Active Health

” . . . too often healthy activity is solely confined to the self-conscious gym or regimented sports field.  Active health means being energetic in all parts of our lives . . .”

12)  Active Thinking

” . . . a place where we are asked about politics, ethics, and morality, about the environment, nature, and climate, about friend, families and desires . . .”

In protests, pamphlet distribution, public radio and ongoing debates throughout the city we find activities that promote active thinking.  While hardly a cause for celebration, the city-wide disapproval of the Sean Bell shooting this past year exemplified a willingness to confront and consider issues of discrimination and police brutality, as well as the limit to which dialogue incites wide-spread action in responsive citizens.

13)  Emotions

“Without a full range of emotions-that is, without a full range of the meanings and possibilities of how it feels to be human we are as yet unfulfilled, and the good life is yet to be achieved.”

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