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Amsterdam Hackable Metropolis

engage and empower a public around the issue of cycling

Team

Donna Schipper donnaschipper@gmail.com
Bernard Wittgen bernardwittgen@hotmail.com
Amber Ebrahim amberebrahim@gmail.com

Commissioner:

Description

By josta May 21st, 2014

Let’s bring the experts in!

Last week we organized an expert meeting to get some new insights and fresh opinions on our prototype. The experts were a diverse group of specialists of various fields. There emerged some nice discussions and we got swept away by all the good advice and ideas. For everyone creating a prototype out there an expert meeting is a great way to look into your creation from different angles and evolve its possibilities!

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Hackability
There emerged a interesting  conversation about the hackability of the city. There was stated that by using the plans of the municipality for designs, the tool would loose the idea of hackable city making. To make it more hackable the citizens should get the possibility to choose their own ‘problem locations’ and come up with new ideas as well. The experts liked this idea of organizing new initiatives by the tool of dissolving problems or initiatives in local neighborhoods. This way it gives the citizens as well an opportunity to come up with new ideas for their neighborhood and gain ground for these ideas in their neighborhood. But thereby re-designing bottlenecks in the city would be a part of the tool as well. With the tool the distance between municipality and citizen will become smaller, and thereby bottom-up city making is encouraged.

Of importance is that the tool can add restrictions upon ideas of the citizens about what is possible and not. This is because when you have to go to the municipality every time for improvements, you slow down the participation of the citizens. The system behind the tool has to you show restrictions on forehand about certain rules around city planning. The tool knows the rules and applies these to the designs of the citizens, a bicycle path cannot be 3 meters wide for instance.

Online/Offline
The experts where also interested in the online and offline possibilities of the tool. Online there can be gained ground to make an issue known to the neighborhood/city where people live in and to reach a big group of people. After time, there can be organized a public consultation meeting where different groups with different interests can co-design on a smart table or tablet. Experts of the field should also be able to participate in the process. In this manner you put the different views problems or ideas on the table. Thereby it’s about managing the expectations of the people using the tool. You have to combine this knowledge. This way the session is about brainstorming ideas and become a ‘social game’ for the neighborhood. A direct promising on an end result is not realistic and will lead to disappointment when designs or ideas are not picked up by the municipality.

The tool as conversation piece
When the tool is made manageable for consultation evenings, the tool can become a way to communicate the different ideas and interests of people and to make compromises and understand each other points. The idea of the smart table came up: to co-create together on a physical location on one design. Citizens and experts can work together in this process. Of course not everybody has the time or wants to go to these consultation evenings. Therefore there is decided to make use of gradations of participation, this can differ between ‘lightweight’ and ‘heavyweight participation’.
We will take all this good advice and ideas into account for our coming version of the prototype and research paper! So special thanks to our experts Reinder Rustema, Bob Kassenaar, Sid van Wijk, Maarten Groen, Wouter Meys, Gerrit Faber and Loes Bogers. For us it was one of the highlights so far!

And for everyone, keep the 25th of June free! Final Presentations!

Ciao!

By amberebrahim May 13th, 2014

Speaking about bottlenecks..

Yesterday, we were invited to participate at the knelpunten bijeenkomst (bottleneck meeting) at the Fietsersbond Amsterdam. The Fietsersbond arranges every other week a bottleneck meeting, where they discuss current issues within the Amsterdam infrastructure. They update each other on their contact with the municipality and the current status of the issue.

Gerrit Faber, who we already met earlier this semester for an expert interview, is one of the policy officers at the Fietsersbond. He gave us a warm welcome, as did the other members. We were able to pitch our prototype to these people of the Fietsersbond, who all have years of experience within the cycling culture of the Netherlands and thus form a core within the Fietsersbond society.

They were all pretty enthusiastic about the prototype, even though the functionality was questioned. Later on in the meeting, it became clear that we were a little vague about the way we see our prototype being used by users and the Fietsersbond.

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We proposed two prototypes earlier this semester, and we decided to work further on the first prototype; Verbeter de Straat. Donna and Bernard have been working hard on the design of this prototype. Our idea is to connect this prototype with Fietsersbond Meldpunt, a issue-reporting service that the Fietsersbond maintains.
Fietsersbond Herontwerpen is the current name of our product.

We will post later this week more information about the prototype.

Stay tuned!

By amberebrahim March 25th, 2014

Meeting the assigner

Last week we updated our assigner Martijn de Waal about our progress and search of the last couple of weeks for the improvement and adjustment of the bikeability of Amsterdam.

Related work
We investigated four different topics within our project which all relate to each other. Bikeability, smart city development, community engagement and hackable objects. We learned during the documentation of the related works more about the definition and discours of the concepts and the projects that relate to bikeability in which these concepts play a huge role.

Paper prototype
During the prototyping workshop with Tamara, we got inspired to make our own paper prototype in relation to the concepts that we came with up during the workshop with Charlie. The paper prototype we came up with is a ‘Rate your Route’ application. Users are able to rate their route on weather circumstances, busyness and safety by pressing a happy face or a sad face. Routes can also be saved and shared with friends that are also using the app.

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Martijn liked the idea of the prototype, but he noticed a few features that we did not include. We won’t work further on this prototype, but it was a fun introduction to (paper) prototyping and thinking about user possibilities.

Field research & personas
The sun was shining, time to go outside! We split up and started interviewing people on the street on their biking experience, biking behavior and biking culture. Their answers were quite surprising. Our focus lied completely on route planning and mapping of experiences, but these first cyclists in Amsterdam that we interviewed are not interested in apps that are related to route planning. We ended up with 17 interviews, which ultimately led to 5 different personas. These personas are all part of the bicycle culture of Amsterdam.

persona_Amsterdam_cyclist persona_elderly persona_foreigner persona_momdadchild persona_student(Click on the image for a larger version)

We wanted to create a visual experience of the personas, so we arranged a map of Amsterdam. We mapped different routes per persona, according to the routes our respondents mapped earlier that week. While discussing the personas, Martijn noticed that we missed three types; the commuter, the immigrant and the long distance cyclist. He thought that these subgroups might be interesting to investigate during our next sprint.

The whole experience brought the project to a new level. Currently we are working on two new prototypes; ideation and issue mapping.