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Eliciting Empathy towards Urban Accessibility Issues
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Urban accessibility assessments are challenging: they involve varied stakeholders across decision-making contexts while serving a diverse population of people with disabilities. To better support urban accessibility assessment using data visualizations, we conducted a three-part interview study with 25 participants across five stakeholder groups using map visualization probes. We present a multi-stakeholder analysis of visualization needs and sensemaking processes to explore how interactive visualizations can support stakeholder decision making. In particular, we elaborate how stakeholders’ varying levels of familiarity with accessibility, geospatial analysis, and specific geographic locations influences their sensemaking needs. We then contribute 10 design considerations for geovisual analytic tools for urban accessibility communication, planning, policymaking, and advocacy.
What is architectural atmosphere? To answer this question, we propose a paradox: a precise definition of the inherently vague and ambiguous concept of atmosphere that satisfies, as so far as possible, scientific criteria and methodology. We suggest that the term atmosphere, understood in an architectural context, defines a state of resonance and identification (sensorimotor, emotive, and cognitive) between an individual and their surrounding built space. Human beings can empathise with inanimate rooms when they interiorly establish an embodied simulation of certain architectural features. Thus, atmospheres might be determined, mapped, and measured through quantitative methods tracing emotional, cognitive, and neurophysiological responses of individuals to spatial conditions.The exploratory study illustrated attempts to test this hypothesis, by undertaking an experiment informed by phenomenological and embodied cognition theories. We analysed the spatial unit of the corridor, altered in twenty-one variations. We modified one potentially atmospheric parameter at a time, and collected emotional responses of participants. Subjects interacted with immersive virtual-reality settings. Our findings demonstrate that an experimental approach is applicable to evaluating atmospheric perception and suggest which architectural features seem to interplay with the empathic sensibility of the perceiver (i.e. colours and material patterns) and which ones do not (i.e. lighting qualities).
We introduce Project Sidewalk, a new web-based tool that enables online crowdworkers to remotely label pedestrianrelated accessibility problems by virtually walking through city streets in Google Street View. To train, engage, and sustain users, we apply basic game design principles such as interactive onboarding, mission-based tasks, and progress dashboards. In an 18-month deployment study, 797 online users contributed 205,385 labels and audited 2,941 miles of Washington DC streets. We compare behavioral and labeling quality differences between paid crowdworkers and volunteers, investigate the effects of label type, label severity, and majority vote on accuracy, and analyze common labeling errors. To complement these findings, we report on an interview study with three key stakeholder groups (N= 14) soliciting reactions to our tool and methods. Our findings demonstrate the potential of virtually auditing urban accessibility and highlight tradeoffs between scalability and quality compared to traditional approaches
The aim of this paper is to move established positions in architectural design by discussing a more refined user perspective. The motivation is threefold. Firstly, fields like environmental psychology and cognitive science for architecture have in recent years brought novel insights on the embodied nature of human spatial experience, and the extensive effects of the built environment on people’s psychosomatic health and behaviour that are not well-captured by existing building standardization systems. Secondly, while the fast growing trends of user-centred and research-based design in architecture have showed that users’ experience is a valuable source of design knowledge, the methods for incorporating this wealth of new insights in the architectural design process are still underdeveloped. Finally, the example of the newly built psychiatric department in Aabenraa, Denmark, whose interior, despite an international architectural award in 2016, had to be re-designed one year after construction due to poor understanding of the users, indicates existing discrepancies in the current approaches to translating research information in user-centred design.
To address these issues, we discuss the experiences from a new masters’ course in ‘Architecture, Health, and Well-being’ and propose that user-centred methods like ‘personas’ and ‘scenarios’ used in IT, marketing, and product development also have a potential to develop more in-depth research-informed user perspectives. As well as, to help students envision and strengthen the architectural quality of the programming and building design throughout the architectural design process, by supporting a ‘design empathic’ understanding and immersion in user perspectives.
Crowdsourcing (geo-) information and participatory GIS are among the current hot topics in research and industry. Various projects are implementing participatory sensing concepts within their workflow in order to benefit from the power of volunteers, and improve their product quality and efficiency. Wheelmap is a crowdsourcing platform where volunteers contribute information about wheelchair-accessible places. This article presents information about the technical framework of Wheelmap, and information on how it could be used in projects dealing with accessibility and/or multimodal transportation.
Mobility in urban environments is an undisputed key factor that can affect citizens’ well-being and quality of life. This is particularly relevant for those people with disabilities or with reduced mobility who have to face the presence of barriers in urban areas. In this scenario, the availability of information about such architectural elements (together with facilities) can greatly support citizens’ mobility by enhancing their independence and their abilities in conducting daily outdoor activities. With this in mind, we have designed and developed mobile Pervasive Accessibility Social Sensing (mPASS), a system that provides users with personalized paths, computed on the basis of their own preferences and needs, with a customizable and accessible interface. The system collects data from crowdsourcing and crowdsensing to map urban and architectural accessibility by providing reliable information coming from different data sources with different levels of trustworthiness. In this context, reliability can be ensured by properly managing crowdsourced and crowdsensed data, combined when possible with authoritative datasets, provided by disability rights organizations and local authorities. To demonstrate this claim, in this article we present our trustworthiness model and discuss results we have obtained by simulations.
Much of the academic and commercial work which seeks to innovate around technology has been dismissed as "solutionist" because it solves problems that don't exist or ignores the complexity of personal, political and environmental issues. This paper traces the "solutionism" critique to its origins in city planning and highlights the original concern with imaging and representation in the design process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to create compelling and seductive images of concept designs, which sell solutions and presume problems. We consider a range of strategies, which explicitly reject the search for "solutions". These include design fiction and critical design but also less well-known techniques, which aim for unuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present two examples of "magic machine" workshops where participants are encouraged to reject realistic premises for possible technological interventions and create absurd propositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that such practices may help researchers resist the impulse towards solutionism and suggest that attention to representation during the ideation process is a key strategy for this.
In this paper we present the design and implementation of two different game applications, designed and developed in order to extend and motivate the community of mPASS, an urban accessibility mapping system. On the one hand, mPASS relays to collect a sufficiently dense, detailed and trustworthy amount of data. On the other hand, its niche goal somehow limits its natural audience, which is not enough to reach the critical mass of information needed by the system in order to provide effective accessibility maps for its users. To overcome this problem, we resorted to the use of a gamification strategy to develop both a traditional prizing add-on and a novel mobile game targeting young and adults players, aiming to include them into the data contributors community. Design process and development description of both games are presented, highlighting the design iterations of the concepts, motivated by contribution gathered from feedback sessions, focus group and experience prototyping.
The civic potential of pervasive computing technologies has been increasingly explored within academic and urban planning communities. One vision is of communities and cities enriched with pervasive computing, where citizens can leverage the new technology and interfaces for their own purposes, and at the same time be empowered to be heard through the use of such technology. This article reports lessons learned from a project that created public human interfaces for interacting with city officials in Oulu, Finland. We focus on civic engagement and reflect on a deployment of public interactive crowdsourcing technologies that are openly available to everyone, right in the heart of the city. The series of field trials reported here involve public displays, mobile phones, and Internet technologies. We find differences in the performance of different kinds of input mechanisms, and present lessons learned from cooperating with officials in a joint civic engagement effort.
The principal purpose of this research was to gather evidence regarding the validity of scores on a multidimensional measure of empathy, the Interpersonal and Social Empathy Index (ISEI). A secondary purpose was to estimate the correlations between factors underlying scores on a measure of interpersonal empathy and scores on a measure of social empathy. An exploratory factor analysis was performed on half of the sample (n = 214) to establish the underlying factor structure. The 32-item measure yielded a 4-factor, 15-item solution. The other half of the sample (n = 236) underwent a confirmatory factor analysis to examine the subsample’s psychometric properties by comparing 3 hypothesized measurement models, and correlations between factors. A correlated 4-factor model demonstrated the best fit of all models, χ2 (84, N = 236) = 162.59, p
Awareness campaigns aiming to highlight the accessibility challenges affecting people with disabilities face an important challenge. They often describe the environmental features that pose accessibility barriers out of context, and as a result public cannot relate to the problems at hand. In this paper we demonstrate that contextual cues can enhance people’s perception and understanding of accessibility. We describe a two-week study where our participants submitted reports of inaccessible spots all over the city through a web application. Using a 2x2 factorial design we contrast the impact of two types of contextual cues, visual cues (i.e., displaying a picture of the inaccessible spot) and location cues (i.e., ability to zoom-in the exact location). We measure participants’ perceptions of accessibility and how they are challenged to consider their own limitations and barriers that may also affect themselves in certain circumstances. Our results suggest that visual cues led to a bigger sense of urgency while also improving participants’ attitude towards disability.
Empathy has been inconsistently defined and inadequately measured. This research aimed to produce a new and rigorously developed questionnaire. Exploratory (n₁ = 640) and confirmatory (n₂ = 318) factor analyses were employed to develop the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE). Principal components analysis revealed 5 factors (31 items). Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed this structure in an independent sample. The hypothesized 2-factor structure (cognitive and affective empathy) was tested and provided the best and most parsimonious fit to the data. Gender differences, convergent validity, and construct validity were examined. The QCAE is a valid tool for assessing cognitive and affective empathy.
G*Power is a free power analysis program for a variety of statistical tests. We present extensions and improvements of the version introduced by Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, and Buchner (2007) in the domain of correlation and regression analyses. In the new version, we have added procedures to analyze the power of tests based on (1) single-sample tetrachoric correlations, (2) comparisons of dependent correlations, (3) bivariate linear regression, (4) multiple linear regression based on the random predictor model, (5) logistic regression, and (6) Poisson regression. We describe these new features and provide a brief introduction to their scope and handling.
Mobility is the key for people with disabilities to have full participation in life. To support their mobility, previous work primarily focused on accessibility as an attribute of the external environment to be evaluated, labeled, visualized, and improved. Relatively less work has looked at how people with disabilities go out and move around in practice and work to achieve mobility. This paper presents a qualitative study of 14 wheelchair users' travel practices in everyday life in China, highlighting urban accessibility as alignment work -- the use of an awareness of the conditions along the journey to continuously align and re-align various resources to ensure accessibility and mobility across contexts and moments. By highlighting alignment work, we present another side of the story of urban accessibility, and broaden design considerations to support mobility for wheelchair users.
Civic problems are often too complex to solve through traditional top-down strategies. Various governments and civic initiatives have explored more community-driven strategies where citizens get involved with defining problems and innovating solutions. While certain people may feel more empowered, the public at large often does not have accessible, flexible, and meaningful ways to engage. Prior theoretical frameworks for public participation typically offer a one-size-fits-all model based on face-to-face engagement and fail to recognize the barriers faced by even the most engaged citizens. In this article, we explore a vision for open civic design where we integrate theoretical frameworks from public engagement, crowdsourcing, and design thinking to consider the role technology can play in lowering barriers to large-scale participation, scaffolding problem-solving activities, and providing flexible options that cater to individuals’ skills, availability, and interests. We describe our novel theoretical framework and analyze the key goals associated with this vision: (1) to promote inclusive and sustained participation in civics; (2) to facilitate effective management of large-scale participation; and (3) to provide a structured process for achieving effective solutions. We present case studies of existing civic design initiatives and discuss challenges, limitations, and future work related to operationalizing, implementing, and testing this framework.
Spatial experience, or how humans experience a given space, has been a pivotal topic especially in urban-scale environments. On the human scale, HCI researchers have mostly investigated personal meanings or aesthetic and embodied experiences. In this paper, we investigate the human scale as an ensemble of individual spatial features. Through large-scale online questionnaires we first collected a rich set of spatial features that people generally use to characterize their surroundings. Second, we conducted a set of field interviews to develop a more nuanced understanding of the feature identified as most important: perceived safety. Our combined quantitative and qualitative analysis contributes to spatial understanding as a form of context information and presents a timely investigation into the perceived safety of human scale spaces. By connecting our results to the broader scientific literature, we contribute to the field of HCI spatial understanding.
Traditionally, urban accessibility is defined as the ease of reaching destinations. Studies on urban accessibility for pedestrians with mobility disabilities (e.g., wheelchair users) have primarily focused on understanding the challenges that the built environment imposes and how they overcome them. In this paper, we move beyond physical barriers and focus on socio-political challenges in the civic ecosystem that impedes accessible infrastructure development. Using a multi-stakeholder approach, we interviewed five primary stakeholder groups (N=25): (1) people with mobility disabilities, (2) caregivers, (3) accessibility advocates, (4) department officials, and (5) policymakers. We discussed their current accessibility assessment and decision-making practices. We identified the key needs and desires of each group, how they differed, and how they interacted with each other in the civic ecosystem to bring about change. We found that people, politics, and money were intrinsically tied to underfunded accessibility improvement projects "without continued support from the public and the political leadership, existing funding may also disappear. Using the insights from these interviews, we explore how may technology enhance our stakeholders" decision-making processes and facilitate accessible infrastructure development.
Immersive storytelling is widely considered to have a great potential to foster empathy toward suffering people, as well as to provide enjoyable experiences able to attract wider audiences. This article examines how the immersive presentation of 360-video nonfiction contents impacts both empathy toward the characters and enjoyment of the experience and the interplay between these two psychological outcomes. Participants watched a series of 360-video stories presented either on a virtual reality headset or a screen, and measures of spatial presence, empathy (in terms of perspective taking and empathic concern), and enjoyment were collected. Mediation analyses and structural equation models showed a direct positive effect of spatial presence on perspective taking and empathic concern, and an indirect negative effect of immersive presentation on empathic concern through enjoyment. These findings indicate that enjoyment of pleasurable aspects of the experience may hinder the affective dimension of empathy toward the characters, and point out to the need to carefully consider the targeted reactions from the audience, since different intended psychological outcomes may not be fully compatible.
Digital civics research seeks to understand how technology can create new forms of relationships and services between public officials and citizens in governance. To accomplish this, design in digital civics emphasizes the importance of relationships based on dialogue, empowerment, and participation; all of which are contingent upon the existence of trust. Currently, however, these relationships are most often characterized by entrenched distrust which problematizes opportunities for dialogue and participation. In this paper, we explore how design might support trust in the relational aims of digital civics. To do so, we led 13 public officials in a large US city through a design-based inquiry centered around the role of trust in their various efforts to engage communities. In our findings, we discuss four strategies for supporting trust in digital civics.
This paper explores a neglected mode of mobility through an ethnographic study of pram strollers in Copenhagen. I illustrate the analytic advantages of mobilities design thinking to explore how pram strolling is shaped by material designs and experienced through affective atmospheres, embodied practices and social encounters. In so doing, the pram is seen as a significant, yet largely overlooked, designed artifact that affords urban mobility. In the creative vein of mobilities design, the paper experiments with a new style of visual ethnography, surface ethnography, to help unravel the affordances of surfaces. In this process, I relate pram strolling to questions of urban accessibility issues, and more generally, reflect on the future applications and potentials of mobilities design thinking.
Poorly maintained sidewalks, missing curb ramps, and other obstacles pose considerable accessibility challenges; however, there are currently few, if any, mechanisms to determine accessible areas of a city a priori. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using untrained crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk (turkers) to find, label, and assess sidewalk accessibility problems in Google Street View imagery. We report on two studies: Study 1 examines the feasibility of this labeling task with six dedicated labelers including three wheelchair users; Study 2 investigates the comparative performance of turkers. In all, we collected 13,379 labels and 19,189 verification labels from a total of 402 turkers. We show that turkers are capable of determining the presence of an accessibility problem with 81% accuracy. With simple quality control methods, this number increases to 93%. Our work demonstrates a promising new, highly scalable method for acquiring knowledge about sidewalk accessibility.
The emergence of ubiquitous computing as a new design paradigm poses significant challenges for HCI and interaction design. Traditionally, human-computer interaction has taken place within a constrained and well-understood domain of experience single users sitting at desks and interacting with conventionally-designed computers employing screens, keyboards and mice for interaction. New opportunities have engendered considerable interest in context-aware computing computational systems that can sense and respond to aspects of the settings in which they are used. However, considerable confusion surrounds the notion of context what it means, what it includes, and what role it plays in interactive systems. This paper suggests that the representational stance implied by conventional interpretations of context misinterprets the role of context in everyday human activity, and proposes an alternative model that suggests different directions for design.
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