On September 10th, a group of about forty-five students, design professionals and bloggers gathered at the School of Visual Arts in NYC for an “Iconathon,” a collaborative design charrette aimed at creating a set of graphic symbols that can be applied across sectors to communicate commonly recognized urban concepts. The event was organized by Code for America [for more about Code for America, revisit our feature about the program. -Ed.] in partnership with The Noun Project, a group dedicated to contributing to and disseminating the world’s collection of visual symbols. Each Iconathon event, held in cities across the country, has its own civic theme. The theme was “311″ in San Francisco, “Food and Nutrition” in Los Angeles, “Democracy” in Chicago, “Neighborhoods” in Seattle and “Education” in Boston. In New York, the event series closed out with a focus on designing icons for “Transportation.”

Taking its name from “hackathons,” collaborative computer programming sessions, the event coincided with a number of technology-based initiatives aimed at improving the way that transit riders access and interpret information. For example, just the previous week New York City’s MTA introduced its touchscreen pilot program called On the Go!, an iPad-like interface that offers applications and real-time news and weather information for subway riders. This came on the heels of Washington DC’s transit map survey, an effort by the Washington Metropolitan Transportation Authority in conjunction with Greater Greater Washington to obtain rider input on how to best convey information on the metro map during its latest redesign. As metropolitan areas and cities seek new ways to adapt to demographic shifts in language and culture, how that information is visually disseminated and the technology that facilitates this with efficiency and ease have become increasingly important.

Icon Presentations | Photo by Flickr user Josh Clark

The event began with an hour-long introduction by four speakers — Jake Barton, Founder and Principal of Local Projects; Adam Greenfield, Managing Director of Urbanscale; Frank Hebbert, Director of Civic Works at OpenPlans; and Edward Boatman, founder of The Noun Project. This was followed by an all-day, facilitated design workshop, where attendees worked in groups to design transportation-related symbols for cities.

Jake Barton discussed the work of his firm, Local Projects, to demonstrate how media can be embedded in physical spaces. He used the official NYC Information Center as an example of how tourists can create custom guides to the city using touchscreen technology and then email, print or access the information on their cell phones to use on the go. Barton showed how technology can both create localized experiences and be a revenue-generating engine for the city. Defining his work as “interaction design,” he explained how Local Projects is translating advocacy into a visual language and focusing on the everyday user experience — that is, “designing for civic action and for the public, not just for public spaces.”

Adam Greenfield also touched upon this issue of localization, but he approached it from the framework of mobility, specifically transmobility, which he defined as “personal mobility in (and for) the networked city.” Citing Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city, he spoke of the role that technology can play in creating equality of movement, where digitized interactive spaces provide people with agency in the public realm. Greenfield was the first speaker to touch upon the fact that not all symbols or civic concepts are universally translatable, but vary across cultures and demographics. He gave the example of the off-bus fare collection system on the BRT in Curitiba, Brazil, implemented to speed up boarding. A similar program is being piloted in New York City on its Select Bus Service. The system used in Brazil could not be copied in its entirety; it had to be tweaked and readapted to the behavior of New York City riders. He also discussed bike sharing, a trendy topic among urban planners in New York and elsewhere, to explain the importance of interactive technology in creating a system of “on demand, intermodal, point-to-point mobility with beautiful seams.” He argued that transitions between modes, such as from bike to rail to bus, can never be completely seamless because there are unavoidable moments of transition. But as designers we should strive for “beautiful seams,” transitions that are fluid and easy to make between modes. He articulated a larger ambition of the day’s session: to create the visual language that will enable people to get to jobs, places of work, and to explore the city.

Frank Hebbert walked us through some of the examples of crowdsourcing technology that OpenPlans has been involved with, such as the OpenTripPlanner used by the NYC Department of City Planning. Using a web platform created by OpenPlans, city residents can suggest bike share stations or determine the location of the B63 bus in Brooklyn through its real-time tracker. A question that emerged out of his examples is whether or not there is a “right” way to communicate information on a map in such a way that it can be easily interpreted by a large cross-section of people.

Icons from The Noun Project

Edward Boatman elaborated on this idea by homing in on how to most effectively communicate civic messages through symbol designs. His interactive presentation, in which he asked the audience to vote on various design options and select the ones that best conveyed a specific idea, was a particularly compelling way to illustrate some of the challenges that designers face. Setting the stage for the interactive group breakout sessions that followed, he explained that there are two ways to convey a message — through an iconic symbol, in which an object is illustrated, or a narrative symbol, in which more visually complex information is presented, such as the idea of time — and provided examples of each type. It was a successful segue into a discussion of the role that culture and demographics play in understanding civic references.

The issues raised during the workshop — the intersection of technology, connectivity, visual language and user experience — are complex and constantly evolving. Thus, understandably, the discussion raised more questions than it answered, but nonetheless provided critical fodder for discussion and debate for the design session that followed. Is there a universal global language of transport? In what ways are these technologies and visual languages scalable? How can we translate this on a broader scale to improve user experience and minimize disjointedness in transitions between systems? The Noun Project plans to release the symbols created through the Iconathons — you can browse through a series of sketches that create a graphic shorthand for everything from bridges to bus stops to bike share stations here — into the public domain later this fall.

Icons in process | Photo by Flickr user Josh Clark

Manasvi Menon lives in New York City and works in transportation. She is on the board of Young Professionals in Transportation-New York, New York chapter.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch are the co-founders of Project: Interaction, a 10-week after school program that teaches high school students to use design to change their communities. As students of the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Dukes and Koch are well versed in the ways design thinking and methods can inspire change and solve problems. Inspired by the achievements of practitioners today, they found themselves imagining the potential impact of starting design education at an earlier age. On September 29, the Project: Interaction team will teach their first class, fifteen 9th and 10th grade students at the Urban Assembly Institute for Math & Science for Young Women in Downtown Brooklyn. Their intention is to encourage skills in and engagement with creative thinking, problem solving, observation of the world around us, and the sketching, building and communication of ideas. Dukes and Koch talked with us about the motivations behind the project, and the importance of education in the still-evolving field of interaction design and how to use the city as a classroom. If you like what they have to say, check out their Kickstarter page, where they are working to raise money for classroom supplies and materials. -V.S.

What is interaction design?
Katie Koch: Interaction design is a holistic process of thinking about an unmet need. The process includes observing and defining a problem, imagining possibilities for how we might fix it, and implementing and testing our ideas in the form of prototyping. The problems we address range from the ways you use your cell phone, to how you get money out of an ATM, to how you order and receive your Netflix DVDs.

Carmen Dukes: It’s important for interaction designers to understand the people who experience the products and services we build. It’s our responsibility to evolve our ideas to accommodate the needs of the people who interact with them.

How did Project: Interaction come to be?
Katie: Carmen and I met in the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). I started my career in graphic design and have been a long-time design evangelist. My practice as a designer helped me have a greater understanding of the world around me and fueled my interest in studying the people and things in my environment. So last year I decided to return to graduate school.

Carmen: My background is in film and television and currently I work in web and mobile production. In my spare time, I’ve spent hours studying game design and how successful games create meaningful experiences. The overlap of these personal passions led me to the field of interaction design.

Katie: During the first week of classes at SVA, we both attended a lecture by accomplished interaction designer Kim Goodwin. She issued a call to action for designers to educate and train people to employ creative thinking to solve day-to-day tough problems. Carmen and I walked away with the same thought: why isn’t anyone teaching these skills to kids?

Why did you decide to work with high school students?
Katie: If you ask any designer where she first learned about design she will likely be able to recall a specific moment that opened her eyes to this world. In high school I was very much into math and science classes and engaged with art in my free time, for fun. I didn’t know about design as a way to use my logical left brain and my creative right brain together to create artifacts and experiences that make people’s lives clearer, easier, and more fulfilling. High school students are often investigating broad sets of interests, figuring out what their personal passions are while beginning to understand and establish their place in the bigger picture beyond school. They are at a crossroads in many ways and I imagine many would be delighted by the discovery of design just as I was.

Carmen: A knowledge of design methods is a transferable skill set. Giving students a toolkit that they can use to explore and solve problems that matter to them will be powerful no matter where their future careers lead them.

Before the semester begins, you are asking the students to complete a survey about their existing knowledge of design. What will you ask them and how do you hope to use their answers?
Katie: We will start by asking the students to draw a picture of their favorite place in New York City. Then, to answer questions about their favorite school subjects, what kinds of activities they like, and why they want to be in the program. We want to find out what knowledge the students already have so we can leverage and build upon their existing interests.

Carmen: This exercise is also a simple way for us to begin to get a sense of our students’ personalities. The more we can get to know our class, the better learning experience we can provide.

Tell us a little about the curriculum and planned program for your first semester of Project: Interaction.
Katie: The first few weeks will be spent covering design basics, talking about what design is, how to observe the people and places around us, and how to develop new ideas. We’ll take a field trip to a working design studio, R/GA, so students can see how designers work together in the context of a business. Then we’ll spend a couple of weeks on more intensive topics like the increased availability of mobile devices as a way to connect to other people and communities. The class will end with a three-week project that the students can share with parents, teachers and their schoolmates.

Carmen: The goal of our curriculum is to expose our students to design in a relatable and tangible way. It is critical that we engage them by using all the senses, so in-class activities and assignments will be hands-on — rapid sketching sessions, prototyping with Legos and letting them act out their ideas.

Katie: Our students might be surprised when they come to our first class. We want to show them that you don’t need a fancy computer to start designing; anyone can start by sketching with only a pencil and paper. We expect that the students will want to start using a computer or other device to help them solve the problems we present to them but we think it’s important to learn first how to approach issues using their brains before relying on a machine to support their thinking.

Your curriculum overview shows that you plan on staying very NYC-specific. Why did you choose such a place-based approach to the subject?
Katie: A lot of the concepts we’re presenting are fairly abstract. We wanted to ground the program in something the students are already familiar with. New York is a city made up of communities, and that’s a theme that the students will already understand.

Carmen: We want the students to rethink parts of New York City they see everyday; for example, offsetting the experience of a crowded subway commute with better bike lanes or creating green spaces for enjoyment, collaboration or recreation.

We received a lot of advice from educators about the importance of making each lesson in our program meaningful for student retention and engagement, so it was critical to us that we create connections between the city and our students. The curriculum we’ve designed will help them explore the city and the final project will give them an opportunity to apply their new-found design skills to a project that impacts their immediate community. We’re excited to be working with folks from Transportation Alternatives for the final project. They will work with the kids to observe and document city life on the street outside their school and envision ways to better utilize the space for the people who use it each day.

Katie: Ultimately, we hope our students will walk away from the class with the understanding that practically everything around them is designed, and that they, too, can participate in shaping their world.

How are you balancing the curriculum to reflect both the more consumer-driven side of design practice and the potential for design to effect social change?
Katie: Because of the way they think, designers are in a unique position to incite changes in the practice of design and in the business of the clients with whom they work. There are plenty of design studios that are focused on sustainable practices or are incorporating design for good into their services. Designers think through problems by reframing how they see them, and they often act as change makers because of their unique perspective. We’d like to reinforce that idea with our students.

Carmen: We will talk about both commercial and social design, depending on the lesson, so that students will have a comprehensive understanding of what role design has in an organization. The similarity between design firms focused on designing products for consumers and those focused on design for social change is their process for defining a problem or unmet need and arriving at the right solution. These are the methods that we are teaching.

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Carmen Dukes is a digital producer at Hit Entertainment where she is responsible for creating games and websites for global kids brands including Barney and Friends and Bob the Builder. Previously, she worked at VH1.com where she developed interactive content in support of VH1’s popular Celebreality shows. Her professional interests include video game mechanics for interaction, sustainable product design, data visualization, and educational technology.

Katie Koch is a web designer from the Midwest, by way of Brooklyn. She has designed and developed interactive projects ranging from corporate and nonprofit websites, online communities, mobile applications, and user interface designs. A typographer at heart, Katie is a details and information enthusiast whose passion for simplicity drives every aspect of her work in design and user experience.

Rachel Abrams is a design strategist. With a background in interaction design and political research, she identifies people-friendly, technology-mediated experiences for commercial spaces and public places. Her interest in New York City’s yellow cabs began in 2005, as a participant in the Design Trust for Public Space’s Designing the Taxi initiative. From there, as one of the Design Trust’s six Taxi07 Fellows, she contributed to its report to the NY Taxi and Limousine Commission, Taxi07: Roads Forward. Following the fellowship, Rachel’s independent research has continued to focus on opportunities for policy and tech-led enterprise to intersect and inform each other, exploring how regulators and design innovators can collaborate to improve everyday experiences of public space.

But what is design strategy anyway? We know what IDEO’s Tim Brown thinks. According to Omni-blogger Alex Kauffmann, Brown’s definition stems from his belief that while traditional analytical thinking “narrows and reduces ideas, design thinking broadens and multiplies them.” Rachel agrees: whether by invention or improvement, design for her is a way of interpreting and intervening in our common experiences of places, objects, each other and ourselves.

Five Steps
So, everyone knows what’s involved in taking a taxi. But sometimes breaking down even the most obvious of processes into their constituent elements can provide insights into how design thinking can reimagine, and improve, everyday experiences. She took us on a cab ride in mid-summer 2009. Through her design thinker’s lens, Rachel’s understanding of the basic elements of daily transactions can offer insight, suggesting the touch-points where technology can usefully, appropriately, seamlessly intervene.

Actors Involved
As we analyze the steps that we take for granted, the network of actors involved, previously unapparent in a system as complex as this, is revealed.

One of the actors most directly involved in and affected by the conditions of the taxi system is, of course, the driver. For this cab ride, we found ourselves in the capable hand of Anzou, an Ivorian man in his late twenties, who drives a Ford Escape hybrid. Like most cabs, it’s on the road pretty much 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Anzou drives an 8-12 hour shift six days a week and shares ownership of his cab with a colleague who drives it six nights a week. But they don’t own the medallion – the value of which Anzou estimates to be near to half a million dollars these days. It belongs to a small-scale license holder who does not drive a cab. The medallion is what signifies this vehicle is a legitimate yellow cab for hire. The associated hack license indicates its driver is licensed to pick up passengers.

The Passenger Information Monitor
The day before this cab ride, Anzou had a good day of fares: he picked up 23 passengers in 12 hours, trips that ranged from three minutes to 45. These trips provide not only opportunities for capturing hard data, but also chances to learn how the taxi experience itself might be transformed, for drivers and riders alike. Take, for example, the passenger information screen or Taxi TV. How might we reimagine what this screen presents? What other services are viable on-screen that would appeal to passengers and drivers? For programming content, that’s where some design thinking comes in handy.

Soft Knowledge
As the City draws inspiration from the Design Trust’s work, and elsewhere, to improve the taxi system’s efficiency, economic value, ease of use and sustainability – to harness the excess capacity both within and among cabs and their users – it could certainly make more of other untapped value in the system, such as what New Yorkers and drivers already know about the city.

The potential of this kind of thinking – capturing simple observations about what’s been previously overlooked, and applying these in both efforts, to keep regulation relevant and to finesse tech-enabled invention – is by no means limited to the taxi cab. Rachel’s current interests go beyond any one New York City government agency or one policy issue. “More broadly,” she says, “bureaucrats face an exciting, if daunting challenge: they serve citizens who, these days, also happen to be tech-savvy consumers with high expectations of commercial services in other everyday life transactions. The bar’s been raised. It’s no longer enough to throw digital capabilities at an institutional mandate to deliver tech-mediated public services. Who’s missing? Designers with empathic skills. Our process for revealing what citizens want and need can help policy makers meet their goals and broker not only what’s technically feasible but also appropriate and desirable.”

Just as we may not usually think of cabs as a central part of the public realm, much less a field of action for designers, many urban systems could benefit enormously from the kind of design thinking that questions the assumptions hiding in plain sight and then finds synergies with social imperatives and policy agendas. Many systems – whether a public good or a private amenity – also require greater efficiency, economic value, ease of use and both financial and environmental sustainability. We’re certainly at a point where public information for and about everything from mass transit to healthcare is opening up and going online. According to Rachel, “as authorities open up access to public data to applications developers and service designers, our transactions as public, participatory actors will be transformed. “At this open moment, a design approach can only enrich the outcomes of this emerging dialogue between government authorities and technology’s innovators. Why? Because although this exchange is already underway, it invites (demands?) public engagement, not least as it promises to shape, among other significant things, the public spaces of the city.”

Photos by Jacki Munro.

In thinking about tourism in New York City, there are maps to pour over, statistics to crunch, buses to take, books to read… How is tourism different today, given the rise of hand-held mobile devices? How do people define tourism in general? Am I (still) a tourist?

I started at what a relatively savvy tourist might consider the beginning: The Times Square Info Center, recently featured in the Architectural League’s New York Designs lecture series:

“What used to be a room filled with brochures, counter agents, and lines, is now a technologically-advanced visitor center that allows you to piece together your own itinerary through the city on one of three interactive map tables, creating custom maps and guidebooks which you can print out, email to yourself, or take with you on your mobile device.”

photo by Ken Taranto

The design of the space is clean and open. This choice encourages visitors to share with one another, as well as with their iPhones. The most local, the most up-to-date information is communicated, after all, by word of mouth. Technology simply records, organizes and delivers it.

“People want information that is not only portable, but also reusable and searchable.” -Claire Weisz Both the space and the user experience of the Info Center are designed to organize information in a new way. There are no lines to wait in, but rather kiosks to gather around. Information – details, addresses, pictures- can be shared in two significant ways. The primary format that the Info Center promotes is mobile. All information gleaned from the various screens can be emailed directly to individual visitors. As you enter, you pick up a “puck” from a table.  This puck, seen below with an ad for Lucy’s Legacy printed on one side (I understand Lucy’s an Ethiopian hominid that we’re all related to), contains a graphic code (like a simple bar code) on the other side.  The kiosks recognize this code and store your individual information, which you can later email yourself or print out and take with you.

This much I knew going in. But the actual experience of visiting led to some surprising insights and (re)discoveries. Check out the video below:

I leave the Info Center feeling like a “new tourist.” I don’t have a static map, I have addresses. I don’t have a list of highlights, I have a list of different kinds of places (a gallery, a restaurant, a cultural point-of-interest), all within walking distance from each other. The brochure model is a-geographic: it doesn’t matter where I am as long as I reach these particular destinations. The new Info Center, however, has chosen to organize those bullet points in proximate geographic sequence, starting with my chosen point of origin. Ultimately, my list leads me to a neighborhood rather than a series of isolated destinations.

And then, the question becomes, once I’m in that neighborhood, will the itinerary burn a hole in my phone, or just get me in the mood to explore? Will I, scavenger-hunt style, feel like I have to hit all the places on my itinerary? Or will the list serve as a casual reminder of where my chosen points of interest are in relation to each other?

“More and more people see urban exploration as an activity to do on a regular basis.” -Claire Weisz The format of the information becomes significant, as well. With the information on my phone, my tourist status is hidden – I don’t have a book or a map to blow my cover. It that way, I feel freer to wander. The technology has enabled a sense of freedom, if not a sense of immediacy. There is no fear that my information is out-of-date (in some ways, this is a false sense of security as, clearly, websites and digital information can fall behind the times). It all feels fluid, not restrictive.

Finally, I realize this information is not limited to tourists in the strictest definition. That is, as much as I use UrbanSpoon or even Everyblock, am I not simply seeking out information about a new place? As Adam Greenfield pointed out in his forum post last week, “nothing in the world is as interesting as information about place when you’re in that place.” The ubiquity of hyperlocal news and information only further supports this idea that we can all be tourists in the places that we live.

Claire Weisz, principal of WXY Studio, which – along with Local Projects – is responsible for the design of the new Times Square Info Center, describes how the way in which the center organizes information can help support this shift:

“Sometimes it seems like tourists are a commodity like sugar, coffee and other things consumable, spurring growth in our local economies. But simply seeing fewer tourists in the regular places doesn’t mean there are fewer around. In some sense, tourism has evolved into an activity everyone does – like getting exercise, fresh air etc. We are all tourists and I would say cultural critics of our own environments. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter as venues for commenting, observation and recording of movement between places have spurred this. Perhaps that is why something like the new NYC Information Center is an enhanced portal and so has turned into both a tourist hub but also an outlet for organizing infinite bits of information. People want information not only to be portable but also to be reusable and searchable while on the move. So, it’s not that the brochure is dead, it’s just that its usefulness seems limiting. Having a tourism moment in daily life is like having a regular day while on vacation in a remote location. Urbanity continues to fascinate, and more and more people see urban exploration as an activity to do on a regular basis.”

Exactly! I walk to Washington Square Park and ask a sample of people how long they think one has to have lived in New York before one can consider herself a local.

The answers from the “actual” tourists were interesting. Most of them were content to walk around, had a good sense of where they were, and were confident about how the city worked. I asked a few of the “locals” about giving directions and found, for the most part, locals underestimate the wayfinding capabilities of these tourists. Here’s some of what they had to say:

The design of the new Info Center enables and encourages the ways, it seems, many tourists like to wander. The design promotes a geographical understanding and engagement with the city. My list, for example, was based around a neighborhood and points all within walking distance. Taking that information with me only furthers encourages walking, which everyone agrees is the best mode of experience.

I never ended up (intentionally) going to the basketball courts, or to the Merchant’s House Museum. I still have them listed on my phone and maybe someday I’ll stop and watch a game. I don’t feel obligated to go because, local or not, New York is home. And maybe that’s what makes tourism so unique here. At the risk of sounding like a real estate commercial: however long you’re here, you’re home. The new innovations in the tourism industry – like providing a personal email of an itinerary based on walking-distance – provide that sense of independence. You can choose a destination, or you can choose to wander. You have the tools and the choice. You can follow a book, a street sign, an iPhone. You can be a local. Or a tourist.


Sara Bremen is a master’s candidate at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) where she studies new media, computer programming, and interactive design.  She lives in the West Village.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.