The PPS Dispatch_004

Resisting the efficiency cult: physical affordances and creative placemaking support trust-based relationships

Every day, we come across stories of people and places that inspire us. The PPS Dispatch is our way to capture, share, and amplify some of the incredible things happening within different communities. These signals resonate with us and inform our work, which is focused on moving towards more resilient systems, communities, places, and services.

This week, we are changing up the structure, because it felt forced to organize things into 4 neat buckets. Instead, I will be taking more of a narrative-driven approach, kind of like a mash-up of a couple through-provoking pieces and some reflections on relationships, and placemaking. As always, this is a continuous work in progress, so hit that reply button and let me know what you think.

In Relationships aren’t very efficient, but efficiency isn’t always effective, Paul Taylor hit on some challenges I’ve seen when working within systems or organizations aiming to maximize efficiency above all else. He argues that “we have set up processes designed for the canning of baked beans rather than helping improve lives.”

We need a new vocabulary and new process that restores humanity to the system. One that centres on people, communities, relationships, and dreams. One that focuses on strengths and possibilities, not labels and limitations.

I have seen this over and over in the worlds of service and system design: our attempts to make the messiness of humans and relationships fit neatly into our service models and systems, rather than the other way around.

Frederick Winslow Taylor would have loved today’s world of process, customer segmentation and journey mapping. Such methodologies can approach humans lives as something that can be managed just like a car production line, or a canning factory producing baked beans. (…) Human lives don’t work like that – as Bryony says: “People’s lives don’t go in straight lines and relationships are messy and, people don’t fit into boxes, but the world has evolved in this way that we want people to fit into boxes. We want to put a label on somebody so we know which box they fit into, which pathway they need to follow, which service they’ll fit into”.

But I think this is also true for many efforts around improving our physical places, urbanism and placemaking. From responding to RFPs with strict guidelines, to rigid measurements and metrics and even working through complex bureaucracies - the attempts to streamline human existence into stripped-down versions for the sake of efficiency is evident everywhere.

And on the flip side, I think many of us feel the pain of this world focused on efficiency over effectiveness in our every-day interactions and experiences. Whether its trying to reach a human about a challenge with a product or service and being bounced from an app to an AI chatbot to an automated customer support call in what feels like an endless cycle of doom. And for any of us working within any service role, the way our performance is measured, the way we are incentivized, and what we prioritize, all connect to this cult of efficiency.

I think everyone gets more and more frustrated by that bureaucracy and that lack of humanity. And then everything breaks down, trust breaks down, then everything just takes longer as well.

I really appreciate the connection to the breakdown of trust linked to this - and not in a one-and-done kind of way, but more in a death by a thousand cuts kind of way…he goes on to say:

Because instead of us having really good relationships, human relationships with each other, we just have endless tick boxes and referral forms, and work in little silos and move people around the system.

The other post that stood out was Good conversations have lots of doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni. He talks about affordances within conversations (and relationships), which connects to Taylor’s point about the breakdown of trust and the cost to our relationships with each other. It makes me wonder how we might create doorknobs for trust-building? Not just in conversations (although that is obviously an important part of it), but how do we create affordances within our places, communities and services that support trust-building?

When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating.“

What are physical affordances we can create within our environments that enable humans to come together and offer conversational affordances to one another? We need public spaces, benches, and places for gathering in order to have people able to linger, connect, and have conversations that include things like “digressions, confessions and bold claims.“

I see more and more how tactical urbanism and creative placemaking through interventions, iteration and experimentation are ways to counteract the efficiency-obsession and move things forward at the speed of trust.

Affordances is a familiar concept, but understanding the importance of intentions/needs connected to them is a helpful lens for this line of inquiry. An overview on Wikipedia describes it this way:

The key to understanding affordance is that it is relational and characterizes the suitability of the environment to the observer, and so, depends on their current intentions and their capabilities. For instance, a set of steps which rises 1 metre (3 ft) high does not afford climbing to the crawling infant, yet might provide rest to a tired adult or the opportunity to move to another floor for an adult who wished to reach an alternative destination. This notion of intention/needs is critical to an understanding of affordance, as it explains how the same aspect of the environment can provide different affordances to different people, and even to the same individual at another point in time.

Adam says, in good conversations,

What matters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances.

Similarly, in our physical environments, we can offer affordances that serve the needs or intentions for many. And to understand the needs and intentions of those around us, we need plain old human relationships - trusted relationships - not checkboxes and neat processes. So when affordances are offered, trusted relationships help us to accept them. And hopefully act on them.

As Gibson puts it, “Needs control the perception of affordances (selective attention) and also initiate acts.”

I would argue then that affordances are an efficient and effective way to create environments that serve people‘s needs, in all their beautiful messiness and complexity.

Thanks for coming along!
Lena with Process/Practice Studio