Transform
Transform is an abstract user experience designed to solve the problem of transportation within the city of Denver, Colorado. The main issues we tackled are inequality in public transportation, inner-city traffic, and long-distance commuting. We focused our investigations on autonomous vehicles and how they could be used to remedy these imbalances.
Final Video
The Problem
It is important to understand the racial inequality intrinsic in nearly every American public transportation system. Given my positioning as an affluent white man, these details are easy to overlook since most of these systems are built to spirit people like me from places that people like me live to places that people like me want to visit, but the difficult fact is that these systems aren’t made to be really good for anyone else. To quote from the Kinder/Rice article “Racism has shaped public transit, and it’s riddled with inequities” - “From funding, planning and infrastructure, to design and policing, many transit agencies essentially have built two systems with different standards for “choice” and “dependent” riders (that is to say white and Black).”
Transit agencies reflect the world they were created in, and for those constructed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, they were shaped by the re-segregationist backlash to the civil rights movement.
In many cases Highways were bulldozed through Black neighborhoods to provide easy access to city centers for white people living in the suburbs. This resulted in massive disruption to innercity communities and the phenomenon known as “white flight”
The paradigm has now flipped in many cities- such as denver, where the central city areas are pricing out minorities, who are forced to move to affordable housing developments constructed on the outskirts
The Solution
The first two on the left are variations of a route that someone traveling within the city boundaries would have. Most of the trouble with this route is that either the traveler has to wait for 2 separate busses (and take the train) or they have to walk to a distant bus stop.
The last route is one that someone traveling from the outskirts of Denver into the city center would face. This route is painful because it takes very long, this trip could be completed in half the time in a car, but then the driver will experience daily traffic and will have to find parking, which eats up more of their precious time, costs money, and stresses them out.
This here is Jefferson Tucker, a 45-year-old businessman working in the financial district in downtown Denver.
Jefferson currently drives to work as it’s the fastest route, but the traffic, pollution, and parking make him want to switch to public transportation. However, taking public transportation adds an additional 30 minutes to his morning commute, nearly doubling it.
By using our service, he can still have a quick morning commute while taking public transit and thus mitigate the frustration of traffic and anxiety of downtown parking.
This here is Michelle Washington, she’s a 32 year old engineer who works in Commerce city (popular destination).
She typically walks the distance to the bus stop because it saves her time but causes her to arrive to work tired and sweaty. So this makes her the perfect candidate.
These autonomous electric vehicles have the flexibility to serve multiple uses; here are some possibilities
In our research, we came across a company that specializes in a similar field. This company is called VIA. They provide flexible transportation solutions to cities. The example we have here is a system in orange county CA that was created specifically to connect riders with the public transportation system.
Panasonic has created a smart city in Denver, this smart city features autonomous busses, solar panels on every house, free city-wide wifi and solar street lights.
My teammate is Cole Maison-Pierre. This project was completed in my junior year fall semester user experience course taught by Soojung Ham. Thank you for viewing!
A full transcript of the final presentation is available to view here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hCQeA_tBJ7qMUnwwECZGYRktYI1XbVEavUifHypcDFg/edit?usp=sharing
Additionally, the presentation’s appendix is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFppASyYqMp8AjifeyiRA-L-vSGx1fBs2neDw8hqwPs/edit?usp=sharing
Process
Here’s a screenshot of the final Miro board my teammate and I created.
Process 2
Interview with Michael Leccese.
Suggested further readings: A People’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence by Mimi Onuoha and Mother Cyborg