A number of years ago when the University of California was building a new campus in Santa Cruz they delayed putting in the landscaping. They waited until the students had worn down their preferred paths between buildings and then landscaped around them. Contrast this with the normal practice of installing nice square cornered walkways and then coercing the desired behavior with walls, fences, and ‘Do Not Walk on the Grass’ signs.

There are two important issues at work here:

1) We often get overwhelmed with minutiae and forget the ultimate goal. The goal of a university is educating students, not pretty lawns.

2) We can influence people by either prohibiting behavior with fences and laws, or by accommodating natural tendencies with good planning.

As a technology consultant I find that many systems people feel that their job is to keep the users from damaging the system (in fact, users are only tolerated as an excuse to buy more hardware). Consequently, they are forever removing privileges and blocking access. They feel that everything should be handled by the ‘professionals’. They forget that the users came first, and that the technology was only installed to support the users. The systems people should determine what the users expect from the technology and then build the systems around the user’s ‘preferred paths’.

Then we have the spectacle of the music industry taking their customers to court for downloading music. It is not that people were unwilling to pay for their music; it was just that the only legal way required them to buy a whole CD with stuff that they did not want just to get the one song that they did want. When Apple provided an easy to use program for downloading music, people flocked to it, using it to legally download over 250 million songs so far.

Recently New York City redeveloped some overgrown land underneath the Brooklyn Bridge into a neighborhood park. For decades the space had been used by skateboarders, and although it was ugly, they did not have to worry about being arrested or chased away. The city could have done the typical park thing and then put up the ‘No Radios. No Skateboards. No… No…’ signs. Instead they designed the park with the goal of creating a space that both skaters and sitters could enjoy by adapting the park to the users through careful planning, and by involving the users in the planning process from the begining.

On the 4th in White Plains we address the allure and dangers of fireworks not by arresting everyone with a sparkler, but by proving a safe public display that is much better than what you could do privately.

Yet, when our teens find a place to ‘hang out’ the merchants and police encourage them to move on. Why not provide them a safe and attractive place where they are welcomed?

The goal of White Plains should be to serve its citizens, not the developers, chain stores, or transients. There should be programs for all segments of the population based on their input. The city should notice the citizen’s ‘preferred paths’ and accommodate them – an increase in on street parking, for example, should not trigger a ticket blitz but plans to provide alternative parking.

Don Hughes