Problem
Lansing's city government was looking for a way to amplify the identities of its many unique neighborhoods and citizens in an engaging and cohesive way.
Solution
After intensive research involving Lansing residents, city employees, and members of the council, followed by an involved concept generation process we presented the city with a prototype for an interactive community kiosk, allowing citizens to record and share stories, among many other useful functions.
Impact
The final deliverable to the city was a prototype for kiosks and a plan to implement and sustain them in the city. These kiosks will bolster community and personal identities, build pride in residents' neighborhoods, allow people to learn about the cool things happening in in their city. These kiosks will give the residents agency to tell their own stories and have a more direct path of communication to their city officials.
For a more detailed breakdown of the project, processes, and pictures of the prototypes, see below.
Problem
Lansing is the diverse and growing state capital of Michigan and the city leadership has recently been investing in developing new urban solutions to better serve its residents in areas ranging from tax assessment to pothole reporting. I was part of a team put together to help Lansing improve in a very important area: Neighborhoods.
​
Lansing is home to many interesting, historic, and hopping neighborhoods all with very distinct identities and colorful characters. A problem arises when there is confusion and sometimes conflict between residents about which neighborhood they belong too.
This map of Lansing shows the confused array of neighborhood groups and associations registered with the city.
Visits to the City hall
Over the course of our project we traveled to Lansing as a team several times to speak with different government employees, ranging in responsibility from public services, to mapping, to ward representative to the city council. Our goal during our meetings with the city personnel was to understand as well as possible what they had been hearing from the citizens. We came up with a comprehensive list of open-ended, Socratic questions to ask them to get down to the real pain points of the citizens. While we would have preferred talking directly to citizens who weren't also government employees, scheduling and transportation difficulties prohibited direct engagement with them.
Notes I took during one of our several meetings with city employees at city hall
Concept Generation
We followed the design thinking concept generation frameworks problem space exploration cards and brain writing. We shared a high quanitity of ideas among our team in the form of sketches and short written expressions.
​
Concepts ranged from community centers in each neighborhood at central locations to localize government to water fountains and street crossing lights which update citizens on current events, city projects, and other information. We settled on a concept I came up with that was community kiosks placed in the higher density, more significant neighborhoods which had a host of options for civic engagement with the government, most notably the ability to record, share, and explore citizen stories from around the city.
My original sketch of the community kiosk. A crude communication of examples for information the user could find or share.
Final Prototype presentation and Demo at City Hall
After meeting with the marketing consultants to the City of Lansing along with the deputy mayor, we realized there was a lot of potential from a publicity standpoint. We split the team into two groups to wireframe a couple interactions of the kiosk we envisioned. I wireframed the story telling, and community event functions, shown in the gallery at left.
​
During our expo at the city hall, I spoke briefly in front of the group of city officials, citizens, students, and professors about our kiosks and the potential of story sharing for building unity among Lansing residents, fielding questions from the crowd after. We also had a low fidelity live demo of the story telling function using my computer as a stand in kiosk. Unfortunately, the stories were lost, but pictures of us presenting at our booth and people interacting with the makeshift kiosk can be seen below.
The poster we exhibited at Lansing's city hall, showing a low fidelity mock up of the kiosk and the three main areas of empowerment we aimed to emphasize in our project.
Our booth at city hall, with a city government employee experiencing our story telling demo.
I had the amazing opportunity to represent my team and give the audience a run through of our kiosk interactions seen below and explain our process/intentions with our project.
Below is a low fidelity wireframe made by me to show two of the story interactions that the kiosk would have (these were prototyped later in a more aesthetically pleasing and interactive way). They show both the generative story telling function as well as the explorative function of the kiosks.
The below wireframe illustrates the function of the kiosks to be updated with community events for each neighborhood, spatially located, as well as the capability of the user to reserve a spot if applicable for the event.
