Is Wireless Connectivity Driving a Behavioural Evolution in Public Space?

I’ve been a firm believer in the value of studying user behaviour when approaching the design of something new ever since I first encountered the theory of Product Semantics, along with human factors in design, while a student. To me this is applicable equally to the design of products, services, websites, buildings or places. When it comes to great placemaking it can become an invaluable tool for assessing what a community needs/wants from their public spaces going far beyond the use of consultation, surveys and focus groups alone. Dependent on size and location (amongst other factors) the primary uses of a public space can be partially predicted and catered for but the behavioural patterns and types of uses will always remain in evolution. By understanding this and by continuing to study the ways in which people use and want to use particular places the design can enable easy transitions and places can evolve with the changing patterns of their users.

I recently read an intriguing blog article by Anthony Townsend, researcher into the impacts of new technologies on cities and public institutions, on the Urban Omnibus forum entitled The Real Social Life of Wireless Public Spaces, which is in itself a response to a research paper and photo essay on the same subject led by a communications scholar named Keith Hampton. I’m not going to get into a discussion about the overall merits or possible flaws in the research by Hampton and his colleagues because I think the original blog by Townsend covers that very well. But the discussion got me thinking about the way wireless connectivity effects public space uses and their behavioural landscape.

As Susan Piedmont-Palladino puts it in her recent Time Magazine article, “Those trees that shaded city-dwellers out for a stroll decades ago now keep the glare off touch screens.”

And despite the fears that mobile communication technology would drive us all into lives of wireless isolation, the opposite seems to be happening. Bryant Park (in New York City), like myriad parks and plazas in other cities, is returning to a role it filled generations ago: a place to share, read, write, gossip, and debate…in short, communicate.

Certainly I believe great public spaces tend to function as places of communication. It would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that fostering this within public spaces is all about getting people to talk and engage face-to-face in those spaces, but to focus on that alone would be to ignore the myriad ways in which we communicate. One inference of Hampton’s study, as pointed out by Townsend in his rebuttal, is that because park-goers using wireless devices tend to arrive alone and leave alone this promotes social isolationism previously uncommon to such places. But I would question whether there was any hard evidence that the majority of park-users in at least 20 years prior to wireless connectivity were commonly interacting face-to-face, with the obvious exception of children’s play areas where both children and parents can often engage in this way.

Further more, the rise in use of mobile internet devices means that even if you do not provide wireless broadband connectivity in a public space that people will still connect to the internet with their phones, tablets or using a dongle connected to a laptop. Not providing wireless broadband only serves to limit the potential number of place users that might have come to use that facility. But how are mobile devices and wireless connectivity changing the behaviour patterns in public space?

For one thing park users are spreading information about their being there and the experience they have there.

The conversations park users are having are as likely to be with someone on the other end of the country as on the other end of the bench.

Susan Piedmont-Palladino

By logging into online services such a 4square or using twitter to tell people where they are and what they’re doing there, instantly posting photos of their activities, in essence they are promoting that space to the world beyond and potentially encouraging other people (not just friends but anyone who sees that post) to go there too. Events big and small, both organised and impromptu, in a public space are given a running commentary and begin to tell the stories of that place. This is something that those managing public spaces can start to tap into and connect those place users more intimately with the space.

While laptop users sat on benches or in areas of seating and tables may commonly be lone park-users, those accessing the internet wirelessly on smartphones might just as likely be in social groups. It also does not necessarily follow that lone park-users in one hour of the day will remain so. As Townsend points out, much of the communication that goes on wirelessly between park users and those elsewhere will include planning to physically meet up for either work related or social activity. It then should be incumbent on the design of the park (or other public space) to be facilitating both the arrangement of and the taking place of such gatherings. Parks could be furnished with informal “meeting” places. In fact old-fashioned structures such as Bandstands might not be too far from the mark for such activity.

Does this mean that Urban Designers, Landscape Architects, Planners, Designers of outdoor furnishings need to rethink the way parks and public spaces are developed and maintained and what kinds of furnishings go into them? I would say yes, but not radically so. Once again the principles of observation set out by William Holly Whyte and his colleagues in the late 1970′s still hold true when it comes to determining how to create spaces that meet and exceed the needs of park users. But now, as well as being able to record the physical movements and interactions of people in a public space by video, we can gather information about their online movements within that public space. We can answer questions about place user behaviour such as:

• Are they using online services primarily for work or leisure?
• Are they using the space as a solitary visitor (communicating by wireless device) or in a group (sharing online information via smartphone or tablet)?
• Are they blogging, using services such as Twitter, Twitpic or Yfrog to share images?
• If so, can this behaviour be harnessed to promote the place further and more actively engage users with the space?

There is also something for the designers of websites and applications, as well as UX designers (many of the guiding principles behind User-Experience design sharing much in common with the philosophy of William H. Whyte along with the forefathers of User Centered Design and Product Semantics) to consider in their work. Already good designers in this area consider the different types of device their work will be viewed on. But beyond that there is also an opportunity to consider where those sites and applications might be accessed and how that can be exploited to further enhance the experience of the user.

Public spaces and buildings such as parks and libraries were long since the nodes through which the productivity of a city flowed and urban life connected. Wireless connectivity has already markedly changed the way in which those spaces are used. It is now up to us to make the most of those public spaces and the behavioural evolution taking place within them and as such make them the true heart and soul of the city once more.

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