With bicycle parking facilities in the Netherlands expanding to hold thousands of bikes, rapid entrance and exit are crucial to avoid congestion and mishaps. To achieve this, Dutch Rail began a project to create a new type of entrance gate without doors. Within fractions of seconds, the gate’s sensors would identify bicycles and cyclists, enabling most to continue without stopping or with only a minimal pause for interaction with the gate.
The new gates would have to draw the attention of thousands of users at the right moments in the right way, be understood at a glance, and highly intuitive to use both for newcomers and regular commuters. In a word, if successful, they would be barely noticed at all.
Systems in systems
As a design problem, this can be seen as the task of creating one system (the gate) which must function within another, larger one (the public space). The former is complicated, but once created, stable and predictable. The latter, the life of public spaces within which the gates must function, is complex: open, dynamic and networked, impossible to ever wholly describe or predict. It consists of physical features that enable or constrain movement, planned and unplanned events, changing traffic patterns and information systems. Most importantly, it contains people with all their abilities and limitations, straining to process the myriad things consuming their attention at any given moment.
Most importantly, it contains people with all their abilities and limitations
STBY supported the designers in the client team with a combination of public life study and user experience research that provided answers to the team’s most critical questions. What do cyclists notice first and understand? Insights about this helped decide the right physical form for the gates, causing approaching users to unconsciously adjust their pace and path in advance and speeding up the flow. How does the presence or absence of other people impact behaviour? Would people intuitively start, stop, and maintain the right personal distance when hundreds were going through the gates in a hurry? Insights about this helped set response time limits. If the gate were to respond a fraction of a second too fast or slow, it could sabotage interaction with users.
Where sources did not provide answers, we set up experiments with prototypes and did observational studies. These ranged from entire simulated environments with models of terminals through which real cyclists moved, to simple tallying of the number, type, and path of cyclists at existing facilities.
Evolving technology to fit public life
We presented our results to the entire client team, including engineers, communication specialists, city functionaries, and visual and industrial designers, among many others. This helped create a shared understanding of the real-life situation in which the gates would be used, and helped each discipline understand its impact on others. We devoted special effort to documenting research in a way that was equally accessible to all involved.
The project is an interesting next step in the ongoing evolution of cycling culture and infrastructure in the Netherlands. The decade-spanning process in which random chance and social upheaval played as large a role as design and policy, has produced a unique body of knowledge and approach to innovation. The creation of the new gates and parking facilities is one of the latest episodes in this continuing story, and we found it very rewarding to play a role in this. As pioneer Margaret Hamilton, creator of the software for the Apollo moon mission expressed it: “Part is software, part is peopleware, part is hardware.” To be continued.
