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Minding the gaps on The Better Way
A Quiet Car and an Improve Your English car in subway trains. A lapel button to indicate you're feeling gregarious. When 100 TTC lovers assembled recently for Transit Camp, they had visions aplenty for the system
February 11, 2007
Leslie Scrivener
Say it's been a frantic day at work – phone calls, interruptions, intrusions. The day ends and you long for silence, but a subway ride lies ahead. What to do? Why, at the station make your way directly to the Quiet Car, the one without conversation, where cellphones and announcements are silenced.
The Quiet Car may not suit everyone. But, if you're feeling friendly, put on a lapel button that says "OK," a signal that you're open to conversation.
Want to improve your English? Head for the Improve Your English Car, where volunteers will help you practise for the duration of your ride.
These ideas emerged during last Sunday's Transit Camp, a day of out-of-the-tunnel thinking on how to improve the Toronto Transit Commission, specifically, its clunky website, its shelters, its subway cars and the way it communicates with its riders.
The 100 or so campers were young, in their 20s and early 30s, mostly people who work in the communications and tech industries and university students, all madly in love with transit. The TTC is symbolic of their relationship with the city – but more about that later.
They wore toques and scarves, and some stayed in their parkas because the ballroom at the Gladstone Hotel on Queen St. W. was frigid. Peering over their shoulders, watching as the younger people moved images around on their white Mac laptops, were the 50-somethings, the people who run the TTC, listening and learning. And politicians were hovering, too. Adam Giambrone, the TTC Chair, spent the day there. Vice-chair Joe Mihevc was also present.
Gary Webster, 55, interim general manager of the TTC, took notes. "Several years ago this is not a group I would likely spend time with on a Sunday," said Webster. "But if we don't show up we send them a message we don't care ... we have to think of it more from their point of view than we usually do."
Many saw this as an important turning point, if not a history-making event: here were the TTC brass and politicians listening to their riders, the people who use the beleaguered system, and young people at that.
Webster, with an engineer's more linear way of thinking, said it took him a while to figure out what was going on among the clusters of creative people. But once he understood the process – open, non-hierarchical – he listened carefully. A hand-written notice taped on the wall captured the vote-with-your-feet spirit of the camp: "If you are not learning or contributing, go somewhere else."
Webster came away with at least one idea he'll consider: maps for each streetcar line showing where it intersects with other routes, so passengers on the Dundas car, for example, know where they can get onto the Yonge subway.
"The TTC is, for once, turning to its users," said Bob Brent, former chief marketing officer for the system. Traditionally when the TTC consults, it calls the meeting, usually to tell riders about a route change. "It's an organization that has tended to be xenophobic and claustrophobic."
Brent, 56, started the TTC's first website in 1997. "And it hasn't changed in 10 years."
While most of the energy at the transit camp went to reorganizing and simplifying the TTC home page – it was variously described as too cluttered, too corporate or designed by Soviet commissars – one group addressed transit shelters and how to include directions and ways of finding information.
One popular idea dubbed "Where's My Bus" featured a numeric countdown screen at each shelter – like the new pedestrian signals – that tells you how many minutes until the next bus will arrive. "This is a design slam," says 29-year-old Kristan Uccello, a bearded, toque-wearing software engineer. "So let's go crazy with it." He and a team of campers were working on an idea for a "user interface," a screen in transit shelters to display a route map that would tell you where you are and where the bus is.
The transit camp's redesign of the site downplayed corporate policy documents and highlighted trip planning. As in, "I'm here, how do I get there and what time is the next bus?" – information you could get online before leaving work or by text message on a cellphone while you're standing at the bus stop. And Michael Glenn, 31, a co-founder of the Web design firm RadiantCore and a daily TTC user, suggested making it available in multiple languages.
Kal Bedder, who runs the TTC website, watched the group's brainstorming with interest. The transit system's site gets 11.8 million visits a year: how do you best cope with a huge range of individual rider queries? But he liked what he saw and heard. "This is the new town hall," he says. It's a "playground for ideas." Not to mention the source of a lot of free advice.
Back at the redesign of the subway car, sociology PhD student Sam Ladner, 36, and political science/philosophy undergraduate Rochelle Latinsky, 21, tossed all their ideas into a cardboard model that was furnished with colourful Playmobil figures. They were thinking of a cluster of seats in the middle of the car, so there's more room for standing during rush hour. Of poles that short people could reach. Storage for backpacks. Outlets to plug in a computer.
Ladner talked about how design shapes experience and how difficulties are created when design is poor. Take the backpack, for example. "People walk around and the packs smack you on the head," she said. "The little incivilities add up and the backpack is a symbol of that. You take the backpack off and recognize the communal space."
Connecting the community around a subway station to the station itself was a theme among artists at the camp. Illustrators Julia Breckenreid and Sandra Dionisi wanted to see subway art – think of all the empty wall space – displayed the way advertising is. Better still, use art made by creators who live near the station. "Have art in the subway cars and streetcars," says Dionisi, "so riders are looking at art, not at their feet or avoiding looking at other people." Other ideas: project images on the walls of subway tunnels, or hold a design competition for Metro passes.
Eli Singer, a 29-year old who works for Cundari SFP, a company that specializes in branding, sees the transit camp as part of a wider social movement, a shift toward a more collaborative and democratic way of introducing change in society. It's fuelled by Toronto's blogging community, said to be one of the most active in the world, and by first-rate, urban-centred blogs such as Spacing Wire, the leader in the discourse, as well as Torontoist, blogTO and Reading Toronto.
"This generation hitting their late 20s and early 30s wants to be part of redefining the city's identity, " says the lightly bearded Singer, who was wearing a cowboy shirt. "In the video-game generation and blogging world, the new method of communication is working together, and dialogue – it turns the hierarchy upside down or at least on its side."
As traditional organizations start to pay attention to the blogging community in order to reach the always-coveted youth market, somehow it's an easier link when the organization in question is the TTC. There's a romantic connection between a certain type of young person and the red streetcars that are a symbol of the city.
"What is our shared experience?" asks Singer. "It's the TTC. Streetcars are like moving architecture and part of the landscape.
"You have your memories from childhood. It's a way to meet people and at the same time it blends into the background; it's in the city's subconscious."
Mark Kuznicki, 36, one of the organizers of the camp – which was free and open to the first 100 who signed up on line – sees the campers as a community of urbanists, passionate about their city. "It is a very deep feeling, especially with those who are young and worldly.
"There's a ... loyalty, that this is who we are – the people, not the power structure, not government or corporations; it's not somebody else's job to create the city."
The Transit Camp was born out of frustration as well as idealism. Robert Ouellette, editor of the Reading Toronto website, wanted to go to a New Year's Eve party near Woodbine Ave. and found the TTC site couldn't help him get there.
It's an embarrassment, he wrote in an online challenge to TTC chair Giambrone in which he offered the services of Toronto bloggers to make the TTC site a better one.
The camp's organizers quickly found 10 sponsors to donate $300 each toward the camp, which took place in a month.
The event was based on the California-born "BarCamp" format, which has thrived in Toronto since it arrived here in 2005. BarCamps are open-ended gatherings on specific themes in which leadership emerges from the group, all participants are equal, and all sessions are meant to be complaint-free crucibles of ideas that belong to the collective, not individuals. Think how much creativity emerges from coffee-time conversations during traditional conferences.
During the camp, Giambrone said the TTC issued a request for proposals to redesign the Web page, with a deadline at the end of last December. But the commission found that the resulting pitches weren't "expansive enough," so it's reissuing the call sometime in the next six weeks.
Which makes room for the ideas from the Transit Camp.
"We want to make sure that (a successful proposal) includes input from groups like this," says TTC chief Webster. "People who talk about the TTC in their spare time, these people really care."
Minding the gaps on The Better Way
A Quiet Car and an Improve Your English car in subway trains. A lapel button to indicate you're feeling gregarious. When 100 TTC lovers assembled recently for Transit Camp, they had visions aplenty for the system
February 11, 2007
Leslie Scrivener
Say it's been a frantic day at work – phone calls, interruptions, intrusions. The day ends and you long for silence, but a subway ride lies ahead. What to do? Why, at the station make your way directly to the Quiet Car, the one without conversation, where cellphones and announcements are silenced.
The Quiet Car may not suit everyone. But, if you're feeling friendly, put on a lapel button that says "OK," a signal that you're open to conversation.
Want to improve your English? Head for the Improve Your English Car, where volunteers will help you practise for the duration of your ride.
These ideas emerged during last Sunday's Transit Camp, a day of out-of-the-tunnel thinking on how to improve the Toronto Transit Commission, specifically, its clunky website, its shelters, its subway cars and the way it communicates with its riders.
The 100 or so campers were young, in their 20s and early 30s, mostly people who work in the communications and tech industries and university students, all madly in love with transit. The TTC is symbolic of their relationship with the city – but more about that later.
They wore toques and scarves, and some stayed in their parkas because the ballroom at the Gladstone Hotel on Queen St. W. was frigid. Peering over their shoulders, watching as the younger people moved images around on their white Mac laptops, were the 50-somethings, the people who run the TTC, listening and learning. And politicians were hovering, too. Adam Giambrone, the TTC Chair, spent the day there. Vice-chair Joe Mihevc was also present.
Gary Webster, 55, interim general manager of the TTC, took notes. "Several years ago this is not a group I would likely spend time with on a Sunday," said Webster. "But if we don't show up we send them a message we don't care ... we have to think of it more from their point of view than we usually do."
Many saw this as an important turning point, if not a history-making event: here were the TTC brass and politicians listening to their riders, the people who use the beleaguered system, and young people at that.
Webster, with an engineer's more linear way of thinking, said it took him a while to figure out what was going on among the clusters of creative people. But once he understood the process – open, non-hierarchical – he listened carefully. A hand-written notice taped on the wall captured the vote-with-your-feet spirit of the camp: "If you are not learning or contributing, go somewhere else."
Webster came away with at least one idea he'll consider: maps for each streetcar line showing where it intersects with other routes, so passengers on the Dundas car, for example, know where they can get onto the Yonge subway.
"The TTC is, for once, turning to its users," said Bob Brent, former chief marketing officer for the system. Traditionally when the TTC consults, it calls the meeting, usually to tell riders about a route change. "It's an organization that has tended to be xenophobic and claustrophobic."
Brent, 56, started the TTC's first website in 1997. "And it hasn't changed in 10 years."
While most of the energy at the transit camp went to reorganizing and simplifying the TTC home page – it was variously described as too cluttered, too corporate or designed by Soviet commissars – one group addressed transit shelters and how to include directions and ways of finding information.
One popular idea dubbed "Where's My Bus" featured a numeric countdown screen at each shelter – like the new pedestrian signals – that tells you how many minutes until the next bus will arrive. "This is a design slam," says 29-year-old Kristan Uccello, a bearded, toque-wearing software engineer. "So let's go crazy with it." He and a team of campers were working on an idea for a "user interface," a screen in transit shelters to display a route map that would tell you where you are and where the bus is.
The transit camp's redesign of the site downplayed corporate policy documents and highlighted trip planning. As in, "I'm here, how do I get there and what time is the next bus?" – information you could get online before leaving work or by text message on a cellphone while you're standing at the bus stop. And Michael Glenn, 31, a co-founder of the Web design firm RadiantCore and a daily TTC user, suggested making it available in multiple languages.
Kal Bedder, who runs the TTC website, watched the group's brainstorming with interest. The transit system's site gets 11.8 million visits a year: how do you best cope with a huge range of individual rider queries? But he liked what he saw and heard. "This is the new town hall," he says. It's a "playground for ideas." Not to mention the source of a lot of free advice.
Back at the redesign of the subway car, sociology PhD student Sam Ladner, 36, and political science/philosophy undergraduate Rochelle Latinsky, 21, tossed all their ideas into a cardboard model that was furnished with colourful Playmobil figures. They were thinking of a cluster of seats in the middle of the car, so there's more room for standing during rush hour. Of poles that short people could reach. Storage for backpacks. Outlets to plug in a computer.
Ladner talked about how design shapes experience and how difficulties are created when design is poor. Take the backpack, for example. "People walk around and the packs smack you on the head," she said. "The little incivilities add up and the backpack is a symbol of that. You take the backpack off and recognize the communal space."
Connecting the community around a subway station to the station itself was a theme among artists at the camp. Illustrators Julia Breckenreid and Sandra Dionisi wanted to see subway art – think of all the empty wall space – displayed the way advertising is. Better still, use art made by creators who live near the station. "Have art in the subway cars and streetcars," says Dionisi, "so riders are looking at art, not at their feet or avoiding looking at other people." Other ideas: project images on the walls of subway tunnels, or hold a design competition for Metro passes.
Eli Singer, a 29-year old who works for Cundari SFP, a company that specializes in branding, sees the transit camp as part of a wider social movement, a shift toward a more collaborative and democratic way of introducing change in society. It's fuelled by Toronto's blogging community, said to be one of the most active in the world, and by first-rate, urban-centred blogs such as Spacing Wire, the leader in the discourse, as well as Torontoist, blogTO and Reading Toronto.
"This generation hitting their late 20s and early 30s wants to be part of redefining the city's identity, " says the lightly bearded Singer, who was wearing a cowboy shirt. "In the video-game generation and blogging world, the new method of communication is working together, and dialogue – it turns the hierarchy upside down or at least on its side."
As traditional organizations start to pay attention to the blogging community in order to reach the always-coveted youth market, somehow it's an easier link when the organization in question is the TTC. There's a romantic connection between a certain type of young person and the red streetcars that are a symbol of the city.
"What is our shared experience?" asks Singer. "It's the TTC. Streetcars are like moving architecture and part of the landscape.
"You have your memories from childhood. It's a way to meet people and at the same time it blends into the background; it's in the city's subconscious."
Mark Kuznicki, 36, one of the organizers of the camp – which was free and open to the first 100 who signed up on line – sees the campers as a community of urbanists, passionate about their city. "It is a very deep feeling, especially with those who are young and worldly.
"There's a ... loyalty, that this is who we are – the people, not the power structure, not government or corporations; it's not somebody else's job to create the city."
The Transit Camp was born out of frustration as well as idealism. Robert Ouellette, editor of the Reading Toronto website, wanted to go to a New Year's Eve party near Woodbine Ave. and found the TTC site couldn't help him get there.
It's an embarrassment, he wrote in an online challenge to TTC chair Giambrone in which he offered the services of Toronto bloggers to make the TTC site a better one.
The camp's organizers quickly found 10 sponsors to donate $300 each toward the camp, which took place in a month.
The event was based on the California-born "BarCamp" format, which has thrived in Toronto since it arrived here in 2005. BarCamps are open-ended gatherings on specific themes in which leadership emerges from the group, all participants are equal, and all sessions are meant to be complaint-free crucibles of ideas that belong to the collective, not individuals. Think how much creativity emerges from coffee-time conversations during traditional conferences.
During the camp, Giambrone said the TTC issued a request for proposals to redesign the Web page, with a deadline at the end of last December. But the commission found that the resulting pitches weren't "expansive enough," so it's reissuing the call sometime in the next six weeks.
Which makes room for the ideas from the Transit Camp.
"We want to make sure that (a successful proposal) includes input from groups like this," says TTC chief Webster. "People who talk about the TTC in their spare time, these people really care."