Research Question

First we shape the city than the city shape us. Winston Churchill

R.Q: How can we create, by designing the streetscape, a safer, more pleasant environment for people rather than for cars?

“The quality of a city has to do with the quality of the public space” said once the urban designer Jan Gehl. But in the course of time, traffic has obtained a predominant influence on the use of public space that such space is only meaningful in its traffic-related functions.
Man, as a user of public space, has been reduced to a small part of the system.By intervening in the domain of infrastructures, the “hardware” and people's behaviours, the “soft” aspects of the city (Sikiaridi/Vogelaar,2006), my thesis addresses the integration of traffic with other forms of human activity. Design can shift back the lay-out of the urban roads to a more predominant public use by starting a process of shifting the language of standardized street elements into tailored public furniture and micro architectures.

Design can bring new approaches on the use of the public space and open new paths of urban design. A gradual transformation of the spaces trough design interventions can invite people to reappropriate the public space by making it convenient, safer, attractive, and sociable.

Work in Progress

Inspirations

Midterms Submission (updated)

“The observation that the risk of an individual pedestrian or bicyclist being hit by a motor vehicle decreases as the number of pedestrians or bicyclists increases, respectively runs counter to what one might expect .”

Safety in Numbers by Brad Aaron

Thesis Title:

SOFT ROAD DESIGN

R.Q:

How design can help to humanize urban roads from mainly traffic to a more predominant public(people) use?

Abstract:

Feeling safe when we and our children make use of the road is a basic need.

But often this need of security induces attitudes of closure that effectively reduces the quality of urban life. Alternative strategies seek out security in a more open and participatory enjoyment of urban activities.

A number of studies paradoxically affirms that when pedestrians make more use of the road, decrease the possibility of accidents between people and vehicles.

But in the course of time, traffic has obtained a predominant influence on the use of public space that such space is only meaningful in its traffic-related functions.

Man, as a user of public space, has been reduced to a small part of the system.

With design we can shift back the lay-out of the urban roads by marking a more predominant public use.

By intervening in the domain of infrastructures, the “hardware” and people's behaviours, the “soft” aspects of the city (Sikiaridi/Vogelaar,2006), my thesis addresses the integration of traffic with other forms of human activity.

Design thinking as a creative process can bring new approaches on the use of the public space and open new paths of urban design.

INSPIRATIONS: Click Me

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Click Me

EARLY.DESIGNS: Click Me

People research plan:

The Urban Design Research:

My research started by photographing interactions of people and elements that are part of the road network:

I'm planning to involve different groups of people of different ages and different nationalities. To be able to achieve successful feedbacks and results I will tryout several times the same method:

A first version of my "urban probe pack" is going to be tested on friends and students of the DAE. The number of people depends from their availability and will be defined better after a first tryout.A second version will be tested in the city of Venice and Torino during my Italian trip on the first week of November 2008.
The probe pack consist in a series of sticky cards especially conceived to let the participant be able to speculate and rediscover the urban space. The participants will comment on aspects of social life and co-relate them to the urban space by sticking the cards on the spots they want and then record it on a picture.
The results of the series of "urban probe packs" will bring a everyday-life into the design process as a source for ispirations.
The second fase consist in designing the research inspired concepts and in a more evaluative way , test them by creating prototypes and/or models.

R.Q: How can we increase pedestrian's road use and shift the identity of the road from motorist-centered to human-centered?

Experts in my subject:

City Counsellors:

Comune di Torino Settore Arredo Urbano for financial and more practical questions about urban designs and city planning.

Ilda Curti Città di Torino Assessore alle Politiche per l’integrazione

Urban designers: Walter Cavallaro, street furniture director Comune di Torino, Esterni.org - Design Pubblico

Xavier Lust designer, Belgium, Jp Decaux

Street Artists: Anish kapoor, Roadsworth Toronto, The London Police Amsterdam,

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Click Me



EARLY.DESIGNS: Click Me

photo credits: roadsworth montreal

Bibliografia

Books:

Anderson, Stanford. On Streets. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978.

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein.A pattern language : Oxford Univ. Pr., 1978.

Establishment, Building. Designing for Pedestrians.
IHS BRE, 2006.

Gaventa, Sarah. New Public Spaces. London: Mitchell Beazley, 2006.

Gehl, Jan. Public Spaces Public Life. Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 1996.

Gehl, Jan. Life between Buildings. Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2008.

Geoffrey Alan Jellicoe. Motopia: A Study in the Evolution of Urban Landscape: Praeger, 1961.

Liane Lefaivre, Döll. Ground-up city, play as a design tool: Rotterdam : 010 Publishers, 2007

Naegele, Isabel and Ruedi Baur. Scents of the City.
Lars Muller Publishers, 2004.

Novak, Anja et.al. Aldo Van Eyck. City: NAi Publishers/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2002.

Sucher, David. City Comforts. Seattle: City Comforts, 2003.

Zardini, Mirko and Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Sense of the City. Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2005.


Internet:

Design pubblico
http://www.designpubblico.it/english/cose/

Mindmaps

Early Concepts

Night Cane - D.A. Artuffo 2008

Vulnerable Signs - D.A. Artuffo 2008

P.zza Carignano.Turin.Pedestrian area

What attracts people most it would appear, is other people
Willam H. Whyte

Safety in Numbers, The theory

Overview

Safety in Numbers is the observation that the risk of an individual pedestrian or bicyclist being hit by a motor vehicle decreases as the number of pedestrians or bicyclists increases, respectively. This idea runs counter to what one might expect -- that the more pedestrians and bicyclists there are, the more collisions with motor vehicles will occur. Data show there is not a proportional relationship between these two variables. In fact, the safety in numbers relationship has been observed across a wide range of geographic study areas, from individual intersections to continents, in the U.S., Europe, and Australia.

The Data

A widely cited 2003 paper by public health consultant Peter Jacobsen examined injury rates, pedestrian and/or bicycle volume, and population over time in several different settings, with the following results:

• The likelihood of injury to a pedestrian or bicyclist in 68 California cities decreased as the percent of commuters walking or bicycling increased.
• A study of walking, bicycling, and moped use in 47 Danish towns found that walking was safer where there were more walkers and bicycling/moped use was safer where these modes were higher.
• The number of bicyclist fatalities per distance bicycled in 14 European countries decreased as the distance of bicycling per capita increased.
• In 8 European countries where data were available, the number of bicycling and pedestrian fatalities each decreased as per capita biking and walking trips increased, respectively.
• In Britain, bicycling varied up and down with different factors, such as the Arab Oil Embargo and new traffic speed laws, from 1950 to 1999. Whenever bicycling increased, per capita bicycling fatalities decreased, and the inverse was also true.
• In the Netherlands, where bicycling facilities and traffic law changes from 1980 to 1998 have greatly increased the amount of bicyclists and bicycle mileage, per capita bicycle fatalities have fallen equally dramatically.

Similar to these results, a 2006 study of 247 Oakland, California, intersections found that pedestrian collisions decreased with increasing pedestrian flows, and increased with increasing traffic volume.



Jacobsen, P. 2003. Safety in numbers: more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking and bicycling. Injury Prevention, 9:205-209.

Gaffney, D. September 3, 2008. A virtuous cycle: safety in numbers for riders says research. Science Daily (University of New South Wales).

The human costs of insecurity on the roads

Each year in the 15 European Union countries, 50,000 people die in traffic accidents, 150,000 are handicapped and one million six hundred thousand are injured.

In proclaiming the promotion of road safety for the period 1997-2001, the European Commission estimates that, if the current situation will not change, one European in 80 will die in a car accident and his life will be reduced an average of 40 years, one in three Europeans in the course of his life will end in hospital because of a traffic accident.

The European Transport Safety Council, in 1995, had assessed the amount of the economic cost of road accidents in 162 billion ECU sum that corresponds to double the funds available annually in the EU for all its task.

San Cristoforo, Protector of Car Drivers

DESIGN AND ROAD

In Italy there are average 614 car accidents, 15 deaths and 867 blessed on the road per day.

R.Q: How design can improve the safety of vulnerable road users?


Design can be used to solve practical problems, to create awareness in order to give positive examples around the use of the road.
Design can trigger imagination to think about a better road, to be proposed to individuals, politicians, city planners and road engineers.

We let down our children and our
communities when we ceded control of the
streets to the car.
City planning as if people mattered
Philip Parker 22/06/2008

Old people, Children, pets and birds are the the creatures more at risk.

The general increase of traffic hazards and have prompted parents to reduce the freedom of movement of their children, with important consequences for their health and this figure has changed life in our cities.

Design as: safety objects, awareness campaigns, critical objects, communication signs and road enginering .

THE PERCEPTION OF SAFETY

R.Q: How can design make people feeling more safe?

Perceived safety refers to the level of comfort of users. For example, traffic signals are perceived as safe, yet under some circumstances, they can increase traffic crashes at an intersection. Traffic roundabouts have a generally favorable safety record, yet often make drivers nervous.

Are design for safety making us feeling safe or they are having the opposite effect?
What are communicating? Is it possible to design safety?

Symbiotic Design

"The term symbiosis (from the Greek: σύν syn "with"; and βίωσις biosis "living") commonly describes close and often long-term interactions between different biological species"


R.Q: How can anonymus existing objects renovate their image and values?

Symbiotic design is a new category of designs that will interact with the existing substrate of object that surround us.

Far away from any marketing research and outside any commercial category this new objects will rely and support the already existing macro structure of objects of the "contemporary living".

The Symbiosis consist in supporting the already existing objects, anonymus and sometimes obsolete, and giving them a new life, new values.

A new life in terms of energy consumption, in improved functions, cooperativism with other existing objects in the environment.

New aesthetic created as a methafore of a prosthetic support or even shaped in a form of parasitivsm.

5.5 Designers, Paris


D.A. Artuffo - Damper, radiator humidifier