On the road to a sustainable future
“Sustainable cities and commute” is one of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) from the U.N. To promote more sustainable transportation and reduce the impact of carbon emissions on the environment, governments and industries are committed to improving people’s existing commuting methods. The most well-known policy is the car-free areas and the almost national level cycling movement in the Netherlands, which provides a role model for other European countries that are suffering from sustainable policies.
At the same time, during the pandemic, people found that replacing the existing modes of movement with cycling and walking is not only beneficial to body health but also reducing air pollution. London has not fallen behind in transportation development, she has the most notable extensive underground network and the ubiquitous sharing cycles.
In Southwark’s Borough Plan 2020–22, it is emphasized that more underground lines will be opened and the accessibility to cycling will be increased. To encourage the people to adopt more environmental-friendly mobility, the city councils have increased parking fees for private cars. However, there are hidden worries that cannot be ignored under this beautiful blueprint, including public transportation that loses income due to the COVID will increase the fee in the following years. This change will become a heavy burden on the people. The unplanned cycling route has caused multiple traffic accidents. Lack of electric vehicle charging stations reduces people’s willingness to switch from gasoline vehicles to electric ones.
In the service design project, Design Future, students from the LCC MA service design course have the chance to collaborate with Southwark Council, discussing how the borough will achieve a sustainable transportation network in 2030. As a problem solver in the past, analyzing the existing situation and proposing solutions, we brought a happy ending to our customers. In this case, our team will not only explore people’s motivations for commuting but also acting as annoying villains, questioning whether existing problems are problems, and how situations been ignored. This process would be unpleasant, even be tingling, but in the end, it will leave an impression.
Where are we now
By reviewing the policy white paper, we understand several keywords, such as carbon neutrality, reducing unnecessary journey, and increasing the proportion of cyclists. The more information I read, the more questions I have in my mind.
Who decides the necessity of the journey? Would it be residents, commuters, tourists or the council? How do they define the necessity of their commuting? Will the purpose of movement deemed necessary or unnecessary in 2020 remain the same ten years later?
The solutions proposed by the government at this stage have strengthened the importance of non-self-driving vehicles to the community. Many existing services and business models have emerged accordingly, including various sharing vehicles, such as e-scooters and bikes. Renting services not only aim to improve people’s accessibility to mobile tools but even links sightseeing and leisure intentions. These sceneries of easy movement and strolling in the city is vague with a leisure bourgeois-style. Behind these elegant scenes, the real working class and disadvantaged ethnic groups are invisible.
There are still many unanswered questions behind this plan, such as:
Who can afford the purchase and use of electric vehicles? Will the increase in parking fees also increase the burden on the groups that must use cars? What about the accessibility of cycling to vulnerable groups and disable people?
I didn’t think about these issues before and once I realized it; I couldn’t ignore them.
As designers, we all try to create a better world, but who is leading this future? At first glance, the government and industry are still leading the way, and we, as consumers, are still in a restricted role. However, unlike scientists and policymakers who try to get things done step-by-step, what attracts designers more is about the possibility of the future. The ideas that could define the present, prompting people to discuss situations that they want or even don’t want. (Dunne, A. & Raby, F., 2013.) Only when we start a conversation, we finally realize the fear and desire for the future that hiding in our subconsciousness.
Imagination, speculation and practice
“ Future” is a magic word. When we talk about transportation and travel in the future, the self-driving car network that floats in people’s minds under the vision of an extreme smart city, or even more, use technology to popularize personal flying cars. Why are people always keen to talk about flying cars rather than improving existing vehicles or transportation roads? Because facing the immediate problems is boring, involving policies, inter-departmental personnel and paperwork. As global transport leader Isabel Dedring (2021) said, when the constraints of the problem are too real, it also offsets people’s motivation to look forward to changing. What’s more, the future gives an excuse to postpone change.
However, designers have different responsibilities than engineers and policy planners. Through identifying patterns of action, the designer could guide users forward naturally without a need to stop and think. (Koskinen, I., 2012.)
When designers talk about the future, we are not trying to construct a utopia of technological automation or a totalitarian dystopia but to find a balance in this spectrum, empowering the citizens to arouse awareness of the subject and carry out actions. Reflect, and then start a discussion about the possible future.
Speculative Design
Before getting into speculative design, my awareness of design has been limited to traditional industrial product thinking. Having clear design goals, testing and improve products pragmatically with users. When I changed the role from a product designer to a service designer, the focus of the design process was no longer the product, but the person surrounded by the system. Furthermore, when talking about the concept of speculative design, it is not only the design of interaction between people and products, but also the expression of people’s thinking, political positions, and even the traces of communication that are part of the design.
From this A/B list, it is clear that the transformation of design, changing from” For how the world is” into” For how the world could be.”
Subconsciously, this reminds me of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist paintings. Through the flow and splashing of paint, the action is the art itself, and the line will be determined by the painter’s body participation and materials, creating an infinite variety of possibilities.
More extreme engagement forms are displayed in art. For example, John Cage’s 4’33 is to incorporate the listener’s reaction and emotion as part of the performance. Coincidentally, communication with others is seen as a display through artistic activities and design craftsmanship. (Frayling, C., 1993.)
Art is expected to be shocking and extreme. Design needs to be closer to the everyday life, that’s where its power to disturb comes from. (Koskinen, I., 2012., p.215.)
The design disciplines have long been considered pragmatic, focusing on problem-solving. For now, we have enough technologies and tools to change the world, but they have not been able to properly allocate resources. Traditional designers, unlike artists who dig deep into their inner emotions and project them back on society, but integrating existing collective consciousness and cognition in the design solution. As service designers, we recognize that we are part of the system, observe how the environment affects individuals and verify from the individual how they display their cultural context. Now is the time to make this recognition available to the public.
Before entering the public view, the design laboratory is a safe place to reduce the interference elements in the causal system. The aim of experimental research is to focus on the key relationships. (Koskinen, I., 2012.) After our team constructed a future world from a large range of second-hand research, we used rapid prototypes to screen the factors that affect people’s transportation choices and found that the invisible carbon footprint plays a pivotal role in the system.
Show instead of talk
To experiment that tangible carbon footprint will guide people to change their commuting behaviour, we plan to use the prototype to trigger a dialogue between residents and policymakers, to construct a potential vision of a sustainable future in the communication process.
The goals
1.Make intangible environmental impacts that can be calculated or presented in a tangible way.
2.Citizens are aware of the connection between their transportation habits and their carbon footprint.
3.Participate in daily carbon reduction actions through personal transportation choice.
Experiment scenarios
・What if carbon footprints were as valuable as currency?
・What if people have to prove their necessity of travel?
Testing process
Prototype 1: Carbon footprint as personal mobile currency
The aim of the first testing is to make users aware of their carbon footprint. We simulate people’s behaviour and touchpoints in the current travel process and start from the stage of ticket purchase. The scenario we designed is that people do not directly measure the cost of a journey through time and distance, but use the carbon emissions generated by the means of transportation as the basis for payment. Therefore, in future transportation tickets, there will be currency units and calculation methods for carbon footprints.
In order to enable people to better understand the situation, we not only used paper models to simulate tickets but also changed the existing London Underground broadcasts and slogans. Through the prototype, the team incorporated the design concept into the living objects to make the scene more specific.
In this testing, the residents were greatly shocked. We starting the conversation about the impact of public transportation on their lives. For this hypothesis, the residents said that if they need to pay for their carbon footprint, they will rather choose to walk or cycling instead of taking public transportation.
We discussed whether the current increase in public transport costs in London will reduce people’s willingness to take the tube. Even if people choose bikes as a mobile tool, the regular departure of the underground itself still maintains a fixed carbon emission. Is it still not conducive to environmental sustainability? In addition, when certain areas can only be accessed through public transportation due to insufficient infrastructure, whether charging based on carbon emissions will increase public dissatisfaction with the government. Meanwhile, some testers expressed their willingness to wait for the average carbon emission of a specific route to decrease the fee, in order to receive a discount on the carbon footprint charging system.
Prototype 2: Necessity travel proof
In the second prototype testing, our focus shifted from public transportation to private piloting and aircraft voyages. The question we want to discuss is whether the carbon footprint can be one of the decisive factors when people have self-consciousness to decide the journey. By providing highly transparent carbon emission measurement tools, people need to register their travel reason before the journey and pay for the carbon footprint due to different categories. Through this design, we expect users to rethink the meaning and value of the journey to themselves.
The majority of responses is that people feel their freedom of movement is restricted. In addition, people also have questions about the system:
How can the system be considered fair if the payment standard for different reasons is constant? Who has the power to control it? When the system involves quantifying people’s freedom, should the system be designed by the government, the company, or the residents themselves?
These discussions prompted us to examine system planning in today’s society, and it is not surprising to discover that in fact, many monitoring behaviours are already latent in our daily lives. These data generated by monitoring people themselves are then ubiquitous as business-oriented services. Without a doubt, the government also collects them for various social security reasons.
The world we live in
We do not live in the world of 1984, but we are not far away from it. Kevin Kelly mentioned in his book, The Inevitable, that people’s data will become another kind of quantified selves in the era of highly developed information. By tracking themselves and others, they can reach a consensus on the value of life.
We have already lived in such time, as small as the pervasive tracking of commercial advertisements on social platforms, the positioning of bank accounts for payment locations, and even travel certificates due to the pandemic.
There is a question but no one has the answer: if everyone has to pay attention to and even monitor each other’s carbon footprints for environmental sustainability, and take responsibilities for their actions and choices, would this policy bring a better future for society?
Or it would be another good intention for the road to hell?
Preferable future
It’s time to answer that question: whose preferable future?
Our team kept thinking about this issue. Is this designed for the designer’s wish? Or create a new policy for the council to achieve carbon neutrality more effectively? Or is it to bring better air quality to residents? In the end, we realized that instead of creating a new goal for policymakers and residents, it is better to use this opportunity to allow both sides to realize the contradictions and blind spots in the current state and to find a common vision in the dialogue. The work of design is for humans to experience things that don’t exist yet, and then, figure out what they truly want in society.
The architectural or design project today is no longer an act intended to alter reality, pushing it in the direction of order and logic. Instead the project is an act of invention that creates something to be added on to existing reality, increasing its depth and multiplying the number of choices available. (Branzi, 2006, p.16)
Where we are going
After debating with citizens, we can clearly feel people’s distrust of the carbon footprint payment mechanism, which is equivalent to helping the rich and oppressing the disadvantaged in a disguised form. The fairness that people looking for is not just equality for general, but equity for ethnic groups. In addition, the full ban on pollution vehicle is not practical enough under the current framework. When people face this policy, they will focus on the prohibition of rights rather than the possibility of seeking alternatives.
Therefore, our final design plan attempts to balance the autonomy of residents in travel choices and to take into account the carbon emission responsibilities caused by them.
Final design outcome
Travel Permit
How could the design team to help Southwark reach its goal of becoming Carbon Neutral? In the future, what if Southwark put a permit system in place to restrict heavy carbon-emitting journeys?
In this future, people have the freedom to choose a preferred mode of transport, but they need a valid permit to travel. The permit can be obtained by applying on the official gov site. Moreover, each mode of transport has its respective application system.
The new system we have constructed will bring potential value and negative impacts to Southwark Council and residents.
The feedback
After understanding this unpredictable presentation, the council staffs give us a lot of impressive feedback. Overall, this uncomfortable design reminds them of how state powers influence the standards of data controlling. Meanwhile, it triggers the conversation about how to find a balance between the human emergency needs and the urgency of environmental protection, and even how to prioritize them.
Not only did the audience involuntarily explore the feasibility of this concept through the use of realistic design prototypes, but also made them forget that this framework is based on a speculated future, reflecting and struggling with the existing impact on transportation, even looking for the target to blame.
Before we hit the road
Looking back on my design process, the most regrettable part for me is that the discussion with the testers remained at the level of verbal conversation, and I didn’t have the chance to observe how people react when they contact the physical prototype in person. To restore the real scenario in the remote meeting, our team using images and audio in the design process, but it still far inferior to a demonstration in the actual underground stations and parking spaces. What makes me gratified is that the variable facial expressions and emotional reactions of the interviewees can still be captured through the video talk.
During the pandemic, sometimes I forget how to create an emotional connection with others. This project makes me rethink the role of service designers today. Compared with pragmatic experts or purely creative creators, designers have a greater obligation to find a foothold in between and pay attention to what we will awaken, is it will be progress driven by goodwill or monsters in the abyss? Sometimes, it is a two-sided thing.
When designers create hypotheses that make people immerse themselves in their environment, our norms of universal values and ethics will inevitably be tested. When working on this project, our team’s conception involuntarily tends to a totalitarian dystopian society. Under the consideration of efficiency and system dimensions, I have to remind myself not to fall into the thinking of anthropic mechanism and ignore the free will of the individual. Especially as a service designer, the users should not be just an ethnographic paper doll called persona. The service designer who balances the various stakeholders will reintroduce humanistic care and moral choice into the future system.
Designers do have magic. Magic that encourages people to self-verify the potential future. Fastening our seat belts, today this is a display of speculative design, in the near future, it may become our reality.
We are on the road now.
References
5x15 (2021) Rathbones: The Earth Convention — Sustainable Cities with Chris Boardman [online] video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLrIRA20msU [Accessed 5 May 2021].
Branzi, A., (2006) Weak and diffuse modernity. The World of projects at the beginning of the 21st century. SKIRA, Milan.
Cage, J.(1952) 4'33"[online] video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4 [Accessed 16 May 2021].
Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2013) Speculative everything. [S.l.]: MIT.
Frayling, C.(1993) Research in Art and Design.
Kelly, K. (2016): The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. Viking, New York, New York.
Koskinen, I.(2012) Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
New London Architecture(2016) The Future of London Roads [online] video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XgUTjAFo2A [Accessed 16 May 2021].
Pollock, J. (1952) Blue Poles: Number 11 [online]image available at: https://pollocksthebollocks.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/jackson-pollock-blue-poles-number-11-1952/ [Accessed 16 May 2021].
