Rethinking public spaces

Human-centered design is a flexible approach to problem solving that can be applied to many fields. It was an especially good fit for the people who had gathered for the Gehl Institute Public x Design conference. These architects, city planners, and community organizers who gathered during Detroit Month of Design, already knew that the success of any public space intervention depends on understanding the values and motivations of the people who will use the space.

In a two-hour presentation to this group, we focused on Learning from People – techniques for gaining deep empathy for the people they are designing for. Using a combination of lecture and hands-on exercises, and drawing from a human-centered design perspective, we taught participants the value of these approaches and how to implement them. Participants learned why and how to conduct an empathy interview and observational empathy, explored the benefit of talking to extreme users and of going deep rather than wide (5 great stories can sometimes give you more information than 1000 surveys). We dove into how noticing people’s hacks for using a space can help focus in on individuals’ unmet needs, and participants learned ways of unpacking the information gained through these techniques in a way that not only is thorough and rigorous, but also unlocks their creative talents. Participants left with a new tool-kit of techniques to apply to their specific design problems and projects.