response assignment
For this response assignment, first complete the two assigned readings/podcast for this week: (1) a short excerpt from Sara Ahmed’s book, What’s the Use?; and (3) an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible that tells the often-overlooked story of a social movement that brought about a dramatic change in urban design for mobility.
Podcast website: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/
In this week’s assignment you will consider an aspect of urban development related to mobility (movement through space) and discuss how it affects different people in different ways. In other words, your task will be to consider how a technology or process related to urban mobility might be used in multiple ways by different people depending on their unique circumstances or capacities.
Notice, in the podcast episode, how the movement for disability rights was also a movement for mobility rights, and how the achievements of these activists to make campuses and cities more accessible for disabled people also made them more accessible for everyone else. From an urban design and planning perspective, this is important; changes to the urban landscape can affect different people in a variety of different ways depending on their individual capacities, but the effects of those changes can go beyond what designers originally predict. Your task in this assignment will be to try to think about (alternative) use in this expanded way.
Your response assignment must follow these steps:
- First, choose a technology, process, or design aspect related to urban mobility that you will examine. This could be a transportation infrastructure, a physical instance of urban design or planning related to mobility (an example here would be a curb cut, though please do not choose this specific example), or some other process by which people move throughout the city in their everyday lives. Feel free to be creative here.
- Explain what you consider to be the intended, or typical, function of the example you chose. In other words, what would most people consider to be the usual way that people use or interact with mobility-related technology or process?
- Explain who you think is the intended, or typical, user of this technology or process. (Recall how Sara Ahmed (on page 19) noted that “intended functionality can be a reference not only to what something is for but who it is for”.)
- Think about some possible uses and users of this technology or process that are not typical- in other words, uses or users that are not the original focus of the technology or process’ design. Give an example of both a use and user of your example that you would suggest are unexpected or unintended from an original design standpoint. In other words, show how your example is affecting people and their mobility in an unexpected or unplanned way. Again, feel free to think outside the box here.
- Lastly, discuss why it is important for urban designers to think about alternative uses and users in the context of urban mobility. In your answer, include at least one specific reference to both the Ahmed reading.
