The parameters of the Public Transport system are:
These could be categorised under either: time comfort, convenience, and status. There were the major issues that people mentioned in relation to public transport.
There are many different issues that can be discussed in relation to public transport. In my analysis I decided to keep to realistic prospects. I could have started suggesting redesigning train carriages to have more space, introduce entertainment facilities like TV, music or computers installed in the back of the sits. However, I realised that the government?s main issue is to make people use public transport more, reduce traffic on roads, which affect the environment, increase pollution etc. The improvements, like TV or computers will increase the price of tickets and people will not be able to afford a bus or train ticket at the airfare price. The services I will suggest will try to keep within realistic boundaries.
Current campaigns and actions taken by the government are not very effective. That is because their decisions are based on theoretical ideas. And are not supported by direct experiences of it. How many politicians, who argue the public transport case actually catch a bus or a train to work? I believe that we have to lead by example. So, if we start acting on these changes first, this example is going to become more effective mean to convince people to change, rather than developing more theoretical models of how people use public transport and what they need. We need to demonstrate it by our own example and people will follow.
It was difficult not to follow the temptation of designing something new and I had to regularly pull myself back to the brief. It is easier to start from scratch. But it would be working in a system of designing a product to satisfy a need, and I realise that we want to achieve the dematerialisation of products or turn products into services. Therefore new train carriages are the wrong way to go. We already have an existing public transport system with buses and trains and operational infrastructure. My role is to take this system and try to adapt, adjust and redesign some elements to new needs. This way we don?t add more objects to the system, we work in the existing system but adjusting it to fit new developed needs of the society, changing the society at the same time.
System A -> System B
The fact that I am aware of the process that I just described shows that this design is a self-aware procedure, because it was initiated by a self-conscious discipline and required close observation of each step.
Another thing that needs to be mentioned here is that I am not only a designer, but also a frequent user of the public transport. I am part of the system that I am trying to change and will have to adjust to consequences of my own ideas. I understand that I?ll have to use the new system and adjust to and change with it.
One thing first, is that no one works in isolation. Design is a collaborative process. In discussions between myself, Master students, and other people collected a list of things that we all thought could improve public transport system. My work is influenced by other people?s suggestions and I was aware of their inputs and considered different points of view. Some suggestions were surprising for me, because it made me reflect and realise my own prejudices and limitations of what I considered to be relevant and significant to the project and what I probably did not want to see. For example, smoking issue was pointed out to me later in the process and made me realise that I structured my ideas around those people who don?t smoke and did not consider things related to smoking. It made me accept this suggestion and readjust my analysis to include it in. Here I described the process where we identified the misfits. We have more direct, immediate and describable experiences of things that are wrong, or don?t work. We identified a wide range of misfits and my job here will be to adjust elements that don?t work and achieve the fitness.
Next step was to sort the list that I gathered and analyse it. Categorising these ideas into groups helped me to see a bigger picture where everything fitted in, draw connections and link areas that could be logically related and by improving one, others could be influenced indirectly and adjusted automatically as a consequence of the major change. It also involved a process of elimination. I was aware from the readings that we had to do this semester that there is a distinction between a creative approach and a scientific approach to design. I prefer to have my options open and work by looking at the whole, concentrating on the solution and introducing new elements when they are needed, which sometimes are not very obvious from the beginning. (Here I probably described my espoused theory, the ideal that I would like to work by.) In reality, I realised that it is going to be easier for me to work by elimination here, and apply scientific method, which I used by categorising pieces of information into logical groups and narrow down the field of definition for the problem.
The 4 main areas that I identified at the end of the elimination process, that I believe could be manipulated in realistic perspectives are:
The reflex action here was to look at these already narrowed down categories and develop 4 different ways to improve these misfits separately. In the process I realised that some steps, causes for certain misfits were the same and therefore the solutions that I developed were extremely similar if not the same. This stroke as being very confusing and forced me to review and reframe the problem once again. I realised that even the final 4 components are interlinked and need an overall single approach. I could identify the links between them and created another system of relationships, that I am going to present below:
We eliminated the obstacles and found the logical solution. In other words, this way we would achieve the best fit, with components that we identifies closed the gaps in the system.