Production – Amsterdam Hackable Metropolis

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!

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.

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 April 15th, 2014

Cycling Cities!

Last week we met Gerrit Faber, a policy officer from the Fietsersbond. He provided us with some interesting insights.

Contemporary architects design beautiful buildings, but they forget to take the bicycle into account. Steven Fleming also formulated an opinion about this current development. Architects who design Vinex districts nearby large cities often design a car-friendly area. Density and heterogeneity are two key concepts when thinking about a bikeable city, which are mostly not contemplated when a new city is designed.

We should take the bicycle into our homes according to Fleming. What if stores would be more (cargo)bike friendly? Lets stop treating bicycles as if they are horses, leaving them hooked onto a pole outside the supermarket. It would be more convenient to take the bicycle inside and to load the groceries into the bicycle as you are shopping. Mothers (and fathers, of course) can leave their kid in the bicycle seat, so that they don’t have to carry them all the time.

Fleming also proposed a bicycle path where cyclists can field protection from rain and sun. He likes to play with hilly paths; slowing cyclists down by making the path going uphill, encouraging cyclists to go faster when the path is going downhill. Pedestrians would walk up, while cyclists have their own bicycle path under the pedestrian lane. Gerrit actually did not agree with this view. In Amsterdam Zuid-Oost, this has already been tried; separating the fast traffic from slower traffic. It resulted in unsafe situations, not necessarily on the level of road safety, but more on a social level.

His view on the bicycle as the ultimate design which can be brought inside stores and houses may seem a bit utopian, and certainly not within reach for a crammed city like Amsterdam. Most parents are not going to carry their cargobike three stories up on small, high stairs. But for cities that are newly build, like Vinex districts in the Netherlands, this would be an option!

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.

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_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.

By amberebrahim February 12th, 2014

User Scene

User Scenario – Amsterdam Hackable Metropolis

http://vimeo.com/87093503

At the kick-off day we got a glimpse of our the project we would be working on. As a quick first exploration we were assigned to create a user scene. This video is meant to illustrate one of the potential user scenarios. But in order to do so, we needed to get a clearer view on who our user might be and the conflicts they’re running into. After some pretty heavy brainstorm sessions we finally agreed on a topic: black spots.

After writing our storyboard we went to the Rijksmuseum, where we wanted to start shooting scenes.

One very shiny morning and two very rainy afternoons later we had all our material on tape. Back to the editing table. The user scene assignment turned out to be very useful. It was fun way to learn about each others skills and to start thinking about the context of our topic and users.

So here we proudly present the result of our early mornings in the rain!

By amberebrahim February 10th, 2014

Tinkering & messing around

Loes and Tamara facilitated the workshop. The objective of the workshop was to have a lot of fun. We were introduced to MakeyMakey (check out some video’s here). We were thrilled by the possibilities of hacking any object and turn it into a controller, even bananas! Combined with a program like Scratch an interactive installation can be built at any moment. Because the Olympics started last weekend (and Holland was in a medal frenzy), Loes and Tamara assigned us to make an Olympic related game.

During the openings ceremony, one of the Olympic rings did not open. So we were inspired to create the Olympic Ring Game.

We turned a simple ball game into an Olympics themed game, with a physical interface to match the theme. With scratch, we made a program that assigned the player to throw the ball to a specific color. If the player hits the right color, the player is being awarded with 10 points. The computer randomly assigns the player to hit another ring (or the same, as happened during the demo). After 5 rounds, the game is over and the players wins!

The game was very simple yet satisfying. It was easy to extend the game in a variety of ways, but we didn’t have enough time. It was nice to get introduced to physical computing and maybe we can use some of these tools (or a similar system) in our project. We definitely had a lot of fun during the workshop, so well done Tamara & Loes!

CREATING TOMORROW

Amsterdam Hackable Metropolis

engage and empower a public around the issue of cycling

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