Hasta La Ideas

Opinion: in his latest column, Dan Hill examines what services like the Uber taxi app mean for cities and asks whether the designers of public services can learn something from them.

Uber Über Alles. In my previous column, I suggested that the big deal about self-driving cars was not that they could drive themselves but that they could be shared rather than owned. With that in mind, I’ve been following the apparently unstoppable rise of Uber, though this time with some concern.

With the Uber app, you choose a vehicle to match your need on-demand (SUV, Prius, limo — sadly no ute as yet) and then it finds a nearby driver of said vehicle for you. Payment is cashless and fares are calculated in advance. Maps, apps, credit cards and phones-as-sensors make everything smooth as silk. Thus, it is likely to tear apart the traditional taxi business.

This form of “radical disruption” is now hardly radical at all, but rather obvious. Simply apply the affordances and dynamics of twenty-first century networked business to an existing service. Applying Uber to the taxi business is just the same as applying Amazon to retail, Square to cash, Spotify to music, Taskrabbit to labour, and Foursquare to that most meaningful of all human pursuits, informing your friends that you are in a bar.

We’ve figured it all out. We know how to make signups, APIs, buttons, lists and responsive layouts. We know how to embed a video, a map, a typeface — it’s all done. We know the business models are free, premium and freemium. The name should be one word, short and easy to type (if it could possibly be less that one word, it would be).

Most importantly, the service should be inconceivable without The Network. It is thus globalised, localised and “user-centred” to the extent that, in the now infamous words of one of Twitter’s founders, it suggests that the internet is simply “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.”

That solipsistic view of the world is baked into the dynamics of software like Uber. When you try to sign up as an Uber driver — I clicked through, just to see — the last stage involves ticking a box labelled “By signing up, I agree to the Privacy Policy and understand that Uber is a request tool, not a transportation carrier.”

With that one small tick-in-a-box, Uber is deploying what writer Douglas Adams called a Somebody Else’s Problem field over the entire regulatory “dark matter” of the taxi business. This means their service glides as smoothly as a Prius with the engine turned off over all that bureaucracy concerning safety, hygiene, insurance and so on. The drivers and their organisations have to deal with that lot, but not Uber. Yet Uber is where the value suddenly lies.

The primary example of such unchecked network logics is of course Amazon, and you only have to read Carole Cadwalladr’s recent Guardian article to infer the outcomes of Amazon becoming, as Brad Stone’s bestseller critique has it, “The Everything Store”. It’s a clear formula: deliver an attractive globalised service while sidestepping as much local regulation and tax as possible.

If, as entrepreneur Marc Andreessen has said, such “software is eating the world”, then apps like Uber are just the hors d’oeuvres. The next course contains the more interesting questions: what happens when we apply those affordances and dynamics to the core services of everyday life that are not just serving desires — as Spotify, Vine or Amazon do — but needs, like mobility, health, waste, energy, food, water and education?

Necessarily predicated on rampant growth models, Uber itself is bound to move beyond the high end of the private-hire business into mobility and logistics in general: the Everything Moving Store.

The Uber website is currently more Mr Porter than the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, an embarrassingly aspirational montage of white people in black cars. The styling oozes try-hard tastefulness, leaving a bad taste. It suggests a target market that might just about stretch to the outer orbits of The One Percent. But where next?

Well, Uber plans to add 200,000 vehicles to its fleet in the next two years and move beyond the 60 cities in which it already runs — that is not boutique levels of ambition. CEO and founder Travis Kalanick says “We need to stamp out an urban logistics fabric in every city in the world, then it’s figuring out other things we can do with that fabric.”

There’s the rub. So this, as with Amazon (and Starbucks, J Crew and the rest) is another cultural blitzkrieg, obliterating difference and leaving high-quality homogeneity in its wake. With clothes and coffee it’s a shame, but not that big a deal. However, when it ploughs into a core urban service like mobility I have, well, a few issues.

Although taxis are a form of privatised transport, they remain part of the city’s civic infrastructure, part of their character. As architect and teacher Robin Boyd wrote, “taxi-men teach the visitor a lot about their towns, intentionally and unintentionally.” Boyd was able to to demarcate Sydney culture from Adelaide culture based on whether the cabbie opens the door for you. I recall scribbling a drawing of a Stephen Holl building I wanted to visit in Beijing, as my only way of communicating my desired destination to the taxi driver. Uber makes transactions easier, but what we gain from a seamless UI, and the convenience of the global currency of apps, we lose from the possibility of understanding a place through a slightly bumpier “seamful” experience.

The broader issue is replacement of public services with private services. Kalanick describes Uber as “the cross between lifestyle and logistics” which, to be fair, is not exactly a “cross” many would have spotted. So Uber is now selling movement; or as they put it, “evolving the way the world moves. By seamlessly connecting riders to drivers through our apps, we make cities more accessible…”

This is an egregious untruth. Uber is currently a premium car service, which is as far from accessible as one could imagine. It actually falls to the municipality to build a service that is genuinely accessible, that services “citizens” rather than “customers”. Delivering mobility across a city includes the dispersed areas of low or unpredictable demand, the off-peak as well as the predictable peak, with cost of the former offset by the latter. Uber, however, is beginning to nibble away at both ends, yet without the idea of true accessibility in mind.

Who’s to say that similarly shiny networked services won’t also begin to offer privatised coordination of your waste collection, energy and water provision and so on, to match the trends towards private education, private healthcare and private mail delivery to gated communities? Note also Barclays pulling its sponsorship of London’s bike-sharing scheme. Given that the Greater London Authority can hardly let the service lie fallow until market conditions become attractive for a sponsor again, it is left to them to pick up the tab.

Tony Judt’s book Ill Fares The Land is just about the most powerful retort to the ideologies that underpin this demise of public service. Coincidentally, mid-diatribe, Judt alights upon the aesthetic of London’s taxis:

“Visual representations of collective identity used to matter a lot. Think of the black London taxi, its distinctive monotone emerging by consensus between the wars and serving thereafter to distinguish not only the taxis themselves but something about the austere unity of the city they served. Buses and trains followed suit, their uniformity of colour and design emphasising the role they played as common transporters of a single people.”

Uber.com’s equally monochrome visual representation describes exclusive if guileless aspiration rather than common people. That’s Uber’s brand, and fair enough. Emerging amidst another age of austerity for most, though, the counterpoint with Judt’s admittedly nostalgic recall is a little hard to take. But more broadly, as the likes of Uber become more successful, are we inadvertently accelerating the process that has undermined the very ideas of public and civic?

This might seem a little hyperbolic, in a “first they came for the taxis, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a taxi driver” kind of way. I don’t mean it like that. I am a technologist as well as a designer and urbanist, and see immense potential in software to improve the urban condition.

But cities are not merely “giant machines for giving people what they want” any more than the internet is. They are more than that. They speak of a higher form of human organisation, of different people living together for mutual benefit rather than simply “individual utility maximisation”. That is something worth fighting for.

It may mean that public enterprise has to adopt the popular dynamics, patterns and systems of our age, yet bent into shape for public good. This seems possible, as the GOV.UK project from the UK’s Government Digital Service illustrates. Perhaps by marrying such supremely good interactive work with the ethos and long-term viability of the public sector, services like Uber will be left to play happily in the aspirant niches while high-quality networked public services will be available for all. It is just as viable for public transport systems to apply network logic as it is for Uber to do so, if not easier, as the public sector gets to shape the policy and regulatory environments, as well as the delivery.

Indeed if they don’t, we sleepwalk into an urban future with parts of the city run on privatised globalised apps, parts run by cobbled-together hyperlocal community groups and huge gaping holes in-between, punctuating what remains of a faded and patchy shared public sensibility.

So the design question posed by Uber is: can public enterprises adopt the popular dynamics of private enterprises without also absorbing their underlying ideologies?

Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. He is an adjunct professor in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at University of Technology, Sydney, and his blog City of Sound covers the intersection between cities, design, culture and technology.

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Opinion: in his first Opinion column for Dezeen, Dan Hill reflects on the recent sale of Finland’s two most iconic design brands – Artek and Nokia – and suggests what the country’s design industry should do next.

“John le Carré said the only way to write about a place was after visiting it for a day, or after a long life once you’d moved there… Time between those two lengths didn’t lend more certainty, just detail,” wrote Rosecrans Baldwin in Paris I Love You But You’re Getting Me Down.

On that basis, I am not well placed to write about Finnish design culture. Having lived in Helsinki for two years recently, I can only really guess at the deeper resonance of Vitra buying legendary Finnish furniture brand Artek, following hot on the heels of Microsoft buying legendary Finnish cellphone brand Nokia. But guess I will.

Within a single week, not long after football’s transfer deadline day, Nokia’s “devices and services” division, which contributed hugely to Finland’s economic and cultural growth over the last two decades, moved to Microsoft for a Gareth Bale-esque $7.71 billion. This deal was swiftly followed by Artek, formerly owned by the Swedish investment company Proventus, joining furniture’s Champions League, via Vitra.

Although this small country of five million people has also produced Iitala, Marimekko, Kone, Fiskars and others, these two firms bookend a first era of Finnish design, with Artek founded by the Aaltos and co. in 1935 and Nokia’s dominance of the global mobile phone sector six decades later. Where do these “exits” leave Finnish design?

Under Marko Ahtisaari, a coherent and bold design culture had recently emerged at Nokia, with their Lumia phones drawing on a distinctly European heritage to produce an object, at least, that moved beyond Apple and Samsung. However, the wider culture around Nokia over the last decade had already – and fatally – betrayed a lack of understanding of the value of design. The software suffered badly and although intriguing handsets occasionally emerged, one felt that design was generally no more than an indulged child amidst what was really a masterful engineering and logistics machine, wrapped in the PowerPoint Palace’s bureaucratic managerialism.

Once Apple, and then Google, had deployed a richer, strategic approach to design in order to seamlessly orchestrate people, apps, media, devices and the interfaces between them, Nokia had no answer. Neither did Microsoft, for that matter. Hence these massive brands were left looking like the two kids picked last in the school playground, staring awkwardly at their boots, red-faced and uncomfortable in last year’s kit. With no other option than each other, Microsoft bought Nokia’s design function – minus Ahtisaari, who is moving on – simply to stay in the game.

Meanwhile, Artek had been looking forward, with Ville Kokkonen’s seasonal affective disorder-defying lamps building on imaginative research. As with Nokia and Ahtisaari, Artek benefits from thoughtful designer leadership in Kokkonen; both draw from wide-ranging perspectives well outside of traditional design practice. Yet Artek’s essential problem is that the entire furniture business is struggling for cultural relevance. Furniture is important for putting things on, yet unlike in the mid-twentieth century, it says less and less about our age. We know that, as architecture theorist Kazys Varnelis puts it, “technology is our modernity” now; inner space, not interiors.

So the questions posed by these acquisitions are more fundamental than those of the balance sheet, where both moves make sense commercially. The question is cultural: Artek was born with an avant-garde mission, whilst Nokia was the first to capitalise upon the most influential cultural object of the last three decades. So this week of deals actually poses the question: what does Finnish product design do now?

There are two obvious trajectories to ascribe, twin arcs towards a twenty-first century industrial design.

The first is in a new form of interactive object, as active partners of people, socially and culturally, via Internet of Things technologies, absorbing the essence of Varnelis’s “new modernity”. Here objects can be augmented with emotional expressiveness and responsiveness, with variable character and identity, via interactions across diverse social relations and contexts. In other words, what’s Finnish for Little Printer or Fuelband? Nest or Glass? Or better, whatever’s next?

Might this be a big ask for a culture whose national stereotype is the taciturn man likely to embark on a devastatingly lengthy Finnish silence at any moment? Like all stereotypes, this is both true and not true, and fortunately there are enough (North) polar opposites to refute it. Yet their late urbanisation means Finns rarely possesses a naturally social culture. It is a culture rooted in the tangible, the material, the output of designer Tapio Wirkkala‘s and Kaj Franck‘s peerless craft. After all, Nokia lost it when Apple veered towards people over things.

The Finnish language is at its most beautiful in the ancient series of soft, weathered words denoting the physical reality of landscapes and bodies; “chipped sounds, words eaten away by ice and silence”, as novelist Diego Marani has it. Yet there is effectively no word for “please”.

But despite this granite-hard pragmatism, there is evidence elsewhere of a supreme facility with the social (and no, Rovio, makers of Angry Birds, I’m not looking at you.)

There is the gloriously levelling ritual of cheek-to-cheek encounters in the sauna, a unique social space recently revived by NOW in Helsinki. Equally, the päiväkoti day-care system for pre-school children is one of the finest learning environments you can imagine, setting up the nation’s world-class results. It is human-centred, with an emphasis on both material and environmental exploration – most time is spent outdoors – as well as carefully tended social, cultural and emotional growth.

Then we must note the Nordic region’s unlikely but deserved emergence as a culinary leader, well-represented in Helsinki. This provides more evidence, with its emphasis on the nuanced, often intangible differentiators of quality, service, provenance, ritual and theatre.

Could Finnish design culture augment its innate facility with the inert via this empathetic understanding of people, ritual and service?

If that is a move outwards from the object, there is another trajectory in the opposite direction, towards a different kind of performative fabric, via architecture at the atomic scale.

The 50,000 Nokia employees not bought by Microsoft – still under the Nokia brand, focused on networks, mapping and advanced technologies – recently received a €1 billion EU grant for research into graphene, the “indistinguishable-from-magic” one-atom-thick material that is the thinnest and lightest yet produced, 300 times stronger than steel, transparent, bendable and highly conductive.

Similarly, Finland has Aalto University’s world-renowned Nanotalo lab, with its focus on biomimetic nanocomposites, particularly derived from Finnish timber. Artek’s Kokkonen is a regular visitor. Yet its facility is separated from the design faculties, lost in the university’s misguided attempt at an urban plan without the urban. Connect the power of this research to Finland’s design culture and its potential becomes tangible, just as with 1930s modernism that fused science and engineering with design in order to produce Artek.

Finland could take its design culture forward once again, now all that is solid – stone, fabric, ceramic, glass – has melted into an air of vertically-integrated software, services and media. Perhaps the next evolution is in digital/physical hybrid objects possessing familiar and treasured materials woven with two-dimensional nanocomposites, and allied with responsiveness, awareness, and character by virtue of having the internet embedded within. Finland might be perfectly placed to pick up that gauntlet. But will they?

Despite a culture borne of survival, Finland has an incredibly high standard of living. You might occasionally need to summon a bit of “sisu” on a pitch black, minus 20 degrees January morning, but it’s nothing a Woolrich parka can’t fix. In deep summer or deep winter Helsinki – don’t ask about November – it is difficult to imagine anywhere better.

Yet in places, that success bred complacency, and by “places” I mean the pre-iPhone era Nokia and some of its other heritage brands. These last weeks suggest that Finnish design can no longer afford to be complacent. Nokia single-handedly contributed a third of Finland’s entire corporate research and development as recently as last year; that is unlikely to happen again. Similarly, Artek has to try hard to prevent the sheer weight of its gilded past from holding it back. People might say, “those E60 stools won’t sell themselves!” Actually, they probably will. What they sell next is the question.

So building on and respecting these rich legacies is important, but moving on is more important. Again, Finland has every chance to do so.

Soon the Finns will witness “ruska” spread across the nation, from Aalto’s moonbase-style buildings in Rovaniemi near the Arctic Circle, down to the rapidly greying Baltic off the capital. Ruska occurs when birch, larch and rowan trees explode into russet tones of richly saturated purples, reds, yellows and oranges, before shivering off their leaves for winter. It’s an extraordinary vivid and life-affirming cycle.

Finnish design needs a similarly florid and dramatic replenishment. While the trajectories sketched above are mere suggestions, the recent seismic activity at its two most iconic brands, Artek and Nokia – one a tremor, the other a quake – provides the perfect opportunity for re-imagining Finnish design in the twenty-first century.

Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. He is an adjunct professor in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at University of Technology, Sydney, and his blog City of Sound covers the intersection between cities, design, culture and technology.

The post “Finnish design can no longer
afford to be complacent” appeared first on Dezeen.