DITW 03: Externalities
Image taken on a block I used to live on in Columbus, OH
Design in the World is a series of interesting moments and reflections on how design has an impact on making the world easier or harder to navigate.
Unintended Consequence
Around 2018 or 2019 light electronic vehicles (LEV) were popping up everywhere. They were unregulated, mass manufactured, and dropped off and picked up on practically any street corner with pedestrian traffic. In some contexts they were a pretty convenient and fun way to get around: for a fraction of the price of an Uber or Lyft. You could cart your way across the city to get somewhere faster. Add some booze to the mix, and you had a fun way to get around on a sunny day at around 20mph tops. At night, it was sometimes fun to ride these along different bike trails as a way to get out for a bit. Over time the lack of regulations combined with unintended or unexpected user behavior made these scooters less of a luxury and more of a pain:
In Cleveland, people would take these scooters and throw them into the Cuyahoga river. People would catch them while fishing.
In Nashville, people would drive these to bars and toss them in one heaping piles of scooters without any consequence.
In cities everywhere, people would park these scooters in the middle of sidewalks, obstructing the path. (see above)
Ah, and some people indeed lost their lives while riding these things for one reason or another.
Though these products were an innovation in transportation and digital strategy (all you needed was an app, drivers license, and a credit card to unlock one), they were not designed to protect people, a core responsibility of a designer . Sure, the engineering of it all worked great, but these products were not designed to protect people or their environment. On the contrary, each scooter consumes a share of lithium battery, rubber, fabricated metal, plastic, cables, among other components only to end up in the bottom of a river. A gnarly carbon footprint / unit. Hundreds of thousands of these were produced, only to become obsolete after so many uses. It’s pure waste. Moreover, the context in which this solution was deployed caused it to save one person some time, while causing many other people a lot of grief. For each $3 scooter ride across the city, dozens of other pedestrians were negatively impacted by its presence. Runners would trip over them. Drunk people would plow into other people on them. It makes you wonder, was the liability ever worth it? how could this business ever be sustainable? Today they are more heavily regulated and some cities have straight up banned them, but why did it take so long? This sort of design focuses on improving a micro-system (transactional user/business benefit) while neglecting impacts on the macro-systems and contexts surrounding it. (environmental and societal impacts)
All that being said, these products do have a place in the world. In my opinion, people should own their own LEV and take care of it and responsibility / accountability for it. They are a cost-effective and fuel-efficient means of taking short trips places. You can carry one in the trunk of your car and use it when you need to park far from your destination. But to mass produce these and treat them as a commodity creates a system where they as machines are not just abused / abusive, but dangerous as well. As designers, we have a responsibility to understand the impacts our products have on the world and the people whom use them.