Facilitating Urban Planning with Human-Centred Digital Design Methodology

Pontus Wärnestål, School of Information Technology, Halmstad University, Sweden

Future Smart Cities and societies can benefit greatly from interdisciplinary Human-Centred Design (HCD). The Participatory Urban Design project has developed and verified a human-centered service design methodology as a new way of working for architects and urban planners. The method is based on the impact mapping and “customer” journey mapping methods. This approach allows the architects in the project to e ectively tie the city’s long-term vision into concrete design solutions for the design and construction of residential areas, and to communicate these values and effects to other stakeholders such as builders and property owners.

It would be reasonable to think that the design and construction of residential areas would be a prime example of Human-Centred Design (HCD). In reality, however, residential areas are only rarely based on a truly HCD process [1]. One reason for this is that the standard methods for engagement and participation in urban planning projects restrict the level of citizen engagement [2]. As HCD is built on a tradition of participation [3] and even civic engagement [4] it is highly interesting to further examine whether the methods can improve citizen engagement and the urban planning design process. HCD methodology is rooted in a digital design context. As digital technology starts to permeate our physical surroundings, there is an opportunity for more cross-disciplinary collaboration between the fields of digital design and architecture. Indeed, recent technological and organisational advances have already intensified the discourse and filled the research agendas on the overlaps between these two disciplines[5]. The overlaps occur partly in terms of the emerging Smart Cities research area, where digital technology and the built environment naturally merge [6]. But on a larger scale, HCD also encompasses strategic service design, which aims to go beyond specific product design and development, and which focuses on organisational change, business modelling, service innovation, sustainability, and long-term end-user experience[7] – which are foundational for the design of residential areas. In the project Participatory Urban Design (PUD), we investigate the effects of introducing such strategic human-centred digital design approaches in the design process of residential areas. We have carried out an Action Design Research[8] project where architects and urban planners from the Architect firm Krook & Tjäder have worked together with service designers from Service Design firm inUse and academic researchers from Halmstad University in an operative design team. Action Design Research is an approach that combines practical problem solving, data collection, evaluation, and theoretical reflection in an iterative fashion [9], and is therefore suitable when working in complex socio-technical systems where artefacts – such as buildings and services that make up a neighbourhood – are structured both before and during contextual use. As a testbed for this approach, the design team is working on creating a new residential area in the outskirts of Laholm, a town in Halland County in southern Sweden.

Harnessing value using strategic HCD

The PUD project has gone through three cycles of action design research.

First Cycle: Learning

In the initial stages of the project, we focused on merging the disciplines of human-centred service design with architecture and urban planning. One Service Designer and one academic researcher re-located to the Krook & Tjäder office to get immersed in their design process, while at the same time running workshops and training sessions on service design methodology. Urban development projects require an orchestrated effort by a wide range of stakeholders, including the city government urban planners and environmental protection inspectors, private contractors and builders, as well as current and future citizens. The process is also subject to several laws and codes, that need to be observed and maintained by a number of different actors and institutions. A residential area represents a longterm endeavour where strategic outcomes need to be considered when it comes to tactical design decisions throughout the project. After the training ramp-up, the project team started working along Krook & Tjäder’s design process and boosted it with specific HCD activities. This included in-depth interviews with relevant stakeholders, facilitating future vision design workshops, and developing end-user interview guides to be used in the upcoming cycles. Based on the analysis of the collected data, the research team concluded that there were three main meta requirements within the framework of the Laholm urban planning project:

1. Basic understanding of the future residents: Residents’ needs do not necessarily correspond to the needs and goals of the builders and the city council respectively. Furthermore, data about future residents is limited to quantitative statistics based on demographics, rather than qualitative insights that explain and predict needs, goals, and requirements from a human-centered value perspective.

2. Lack of connection between long-term goals and short-term solutions: For complex multi-stakeholder projects such as developing a new neighbourhood, the city’s long-term strategic goals and needs must to be considered and clearly connected to more short-term and immediate effects. This requires a holistic strategic design approach that operates on several levels, which is often missing.

3. Lack of clarity: The risk of miscommunication increases as complexity and the number of stakeholders increase. In particular, requirements on values that are hard to directly measure in terms of financial cost – such as emotional value, social value, and meaningfulness – tend to get muddled throughout the process.

According to previous experience of the architects and urban planners in the team, these challenges are practically always present when designing residential areas.

Second Cycle: Design Practice

The first modification of the design process was to introduce qualitative user research before commencing to sketch on solutions. The service designer and researcher carried out a series of in-depth interviews with potential residents. The participants were selected from the predominantly young families from the larger nearby cities such as Gothenburg and Helsingborg, who were interested in re-locating to a smaller, more rural town such as Laholm. The team also carried out interviews with existing Laholm residents in the nearby residential areas. The participants were of all ages, and ranging from both working and retired people, children, to newly arrived immigrants looking for work, and stay-at-home parents. The interviews were complemented with site visits, and the data were analysed in a qualitative fashion. The insights about goals, needs, and behaviours were visualised in an Impact Map (see figure 1), which is a model that connects behavioural archetypes to desired impact and future benefits of the initiative. The model helps decide on scope, values, and priorities on solutions. Our Impact Map details four archetype behaviour patterns found across key demographics of the future residents of the Laholm neighbourhood:

1. The Busy Bee: Caught up in intense work and aspiring to have a high quality leisure time. Often coordinating several family members’ activities and doesn’t have time for micro-managing grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and transportation between work, school, the gym, and home – the Busy Bee requires flexible and customised services for mobility in tight time-frames.

2. The Stroller enjoys the social aspects of living in a vibrant community. This behaviour pattern also describes children who roam the neighbourhood’s playgrounds, and people who desire access to hiking, biking, or running trails in green sceneries. Mobility and access are key drivers of behaviour.

3. The Downshifter: Being able to take it easy and enjoy the moment. Some people need this as a break from hard work, or due to age or disease. Others see it as an end-goal in itself to enjoy a slower and more mindful pace of life. Having meaningful activities of various kinds without having to travel is important.

4. The Green Consciousness. Behaviour that aims “to do the right thing” when it comes to recycling and reducing ecological impact. An infrastructure and service platform that makes it easy to default to environmentally friendly behaviour and boosting a circular economy mindset, such as sharing tools and other resources, is seen as a unique selling point.

Along the lines of design persona theory [10] [11], a particular resident typically exhibits behaviours found in all of these archetypes, depending on what particular situation they are in. By basing design solutions on these behaviour patterns, rather than on stereotypical interpretations of demographics – such as families, elderly, or single adults – we increase the likelihood of arriving at truly human- centred solutions that meet the needs of a large variety of citizens. Based on these four target behaviour patterns, the team started working on concrete design solutions for the residential area. The physical designs took into consideration how digital services for shared mobility solutions would affect the need for parking spaces and driveways for example.

Along with the concrete design work, the Lead Architect performed several presentations to the wider sphere of stakeholders, including Laholm’s municipality officials as well as contractors. Using the Impact Map to communicate long-term strategic goals of the city in relation to the proposed design solutions that connect to the residents’ behavioural patterns was found to be highly useful. In the debriefing interviews within the team, one of the architects stated:

”The Impact Map, with its clear definition of target groups and their needs and behaviours, enabled us to support our proposals for the new residential area. We could with greater clarity than usual show why different solutions are preferable. This way, we were able to more effectively approach other stakeholders in discussions about time, sustainability and costs for the project.”

Third Cycle: Knowledge Dissemination

As the design solutions and plans continued to develop, the third cycle of the project focused on lessons learned and on how the architect firm can transform their practices to incorporate more qualitative human-centred service design in their future projects. As the design of the Laholm residential area continues to take shape, Krook & Tjäder is compiling the results of the research collaboration with Halmstad University in a method book, so that the company can continue to work with qualitative insight-driven user research and Impact Maps in future projects. On the academic side, the knowledge and experiences from the project is currently being disseminated into interdisciplinary research papers that target both the Architecture and the Service Design fields.

From a service design perspective, the project has produced important insights into urban planning and the design of future housing. Digitalisation permeates everything around us, including physical environments. Service designers must therefore learn how to design for physical spaces, such as housing and public areas, that successfully integrate digital solutions. Architects have worked with the physical space for thousands of years and developed a large knowledge base and method bank.

But now, when the digital and physical merge to a greater extent than ever, it is important to let digital service design methods contribute to the design of physical environments. Such interdisciplinary collaboration is the key to future smart cities and societies. This project showed that mutual learning takes place between the fields, and that mixing methods within a common design process is beneficial in multiple ways.

Next Steps

The project is now entering the next phase, which means a greater focus on the intersection between artificial intelligence (AI), health and physical environments. As the design foundation has been laid out in the Impact Map, it is clear that there is ample opportunity to introduce AI-supported digital service platforms that will continue to affect the way physical environments are being built. One example is a logistics service that facilitates the transportation of locally produced foods to the neighbourhood. Such a service would provide premium value to all four behaviour patterns, and is entirely in line with Laholm municipality’s long-term sustainability goals.

About the PUD Project

The research project Participatory Urban Design (PUD) is led by Pontus Wärnestål, Associate Professor in Informatics at Halmstad University in Sweden. It is part of Halmstad University’s research profile towards smart cities and communities. The main purpose is to investigate how methods and tools commonly used in the service design of digital solutions can be used in the design of new physical environments.