Mayor's Office of the City of Bloomington.
I worked on the transparency initiative with the goal of creating a transparent government ecosystem for the residents of the City of Bloomington.
I proposed a solution of an extension of the B-Clear Data portal into Community Kiosks strategically placed around the city.
The City of Bloomington started a granted application to attain funding to implement community kiosks.
During this year long process, I utilized my design process as shown here. Because of the length of the project, I attempted to utilize Agile methodologies to break up the work in more manageable chunks.
While the community kiosks were not taken all the way to launch, my research and recommendations have been presented to the City of Bloomington and a grant application has been submitted to pursue kiosks at this time.
During the first half of the this process, I maintained a blog for milestones that go more into depth on specific points of the process. You can find that here.
During my research, I utilized 6 different methods to better understand the problem space of transparency in government. You can see below the procedures and insights for each of these methods.
The secondary research consisted of listening to and reading different podcasts, videos sources, and articles which discuss transparency in different contexts. These contexts included workspaces, government, history, and relationships to name a few.
My literature review looked at different papers that looked at the relationship between government transparency, government communication, and community trust and confidence with the government.
The survey consisted of 39 questions that included short answer, multiple choice, and select all that apply questions.
It was distributing utilizing official government communication channels such as Backdoor, official social media pages, and email lists. In total, the survey had 54 participants.
The survey data was analyzed utilizing affinity diagramming.
The survey constructions was done jointly with my colleagues Shikhar Mangla, Tingting Hu, and Payoshni Kulkarni.
For my exemplar study, I collected 3 different exemplars to look at how different levels of government are working towards transparency. My exemplars included 2 city websites and 1 state department website. All exemplars collected were from the same state as the City of Bloomington.
I constructed a journey map of the experience that a government employee might have while trying to post the data collected to the B-Clear data portal the City of Bloomington currently has.
This was primarily constructed on assumptions to better understand the workload implications of any designed soution.
I interviewed the Deputy Mayor of Bloomington and the Innovation Director of Bloomington about their current practices, desires, and definitions of transparency.
These interviews were conducted along with my colleagues Shikhar Mangla, Tingting Hu, and Payoshni Kulkarni.
From my research I found the following takeaways which helped direct the prototyping process:
Based off of my research I came up with three design principles that I believed should utilized during the design process.
To accompany my design principles I also came up with two goals I wanted to address with my design.
After analyzing the information presented to me during my research, I was passionate about the idea of a community kiosk as the solution. At first, I felt that this idea was unlikely to be taken and applied by the City of Bloomington. I decided to pursue it despite this because I wanted to deliver to the City of Bloomington something that I believed attainable if they were willing to invest in it.
To start my prototyping, I started sketching out ideas.
At first, I started with the "obvious" design around a kiosk (bottom right) in order to get it out my system so that I could push for more innovative ideas.
I then moved on to other ideas such as integrating the kiosks into the the public transit system and art instillation type kiosks.
Throughout the prototyping process I would frequently return to sketching as a means of understanding the important functions of the design.
I further explored the different forms for the community kiosks by modeling them in Blender.
While modeling, I tested out variations on the forms that I was considering. I also sought feedback for each of my forms from my colleagues and other individuals who are residents of the City of Bloomington.
Through this process, I decided to include two different forms the Bus Stop Kiosk and the Park Kiosk in order to reach a wider audience. This decision was brought about through the following major insights.
Taking the insights from the previous round of prototyping, I moved forward by taking density maps from the City of Bloomington's existing data portal to analyze possible locations that would help reach the most people.
I started by looking at different density maps prepared by Bloomington Transit as part of their 2019 route optimization report available here. I pulled the population density map, the employment density map, and the zero-vehicle household density map.
Locations for the bus stop kiosk were selected by looking at bus stops that fell within or near red areas of the combined overlay map. These areas indicate a higher population of individuals that would be inclined to utilized the transit system and where they would be located at either end of their bus route. The following bus stops were selected:
Locations for the park kiosks were selected by considering the impact of each park via social justice and through population density. Two of the five parks selected were picked as a means of bringing the unhouse population back into the governmental process and to demonstrate a desire to be transparent about policies concerning the unhoused population. This was done in response to specific feedback given in the survey. The remaining three locations were picked based on population density and usage. The following parks were selected:
The installation of community kiosks as a means for residents to access B-Clear Data Portal helps make public data more discoverable and accessible.
The pilot locations were selected in order to be inclusive by reaching a wider range of the resident population of Bloomington. A few locations were specifically selected to welcome the unhoused population into the governmental process.
The two different styles of kiosk were designed to encourage interaction by telegraphing their purpose but also making them feel approachable. Both styles feature rounded corners to prevent injury of children and residents.
The user interface is designed to help users not only discover data and information, but also related events going on in the community.
I've increased inclusiveness by placing a "suggested events" panel that will suggest local events based on the information you are looking at. This invites residents to attend committee meetings and festivals that they may be interest in.
To make information that is popular discoverable, the 3 topics tabs on the right of the interface are generated based on data and information that is most popularly looked for at that specific kiosk location.
In contrast, to make the information presented approachable the first 2 tabs on the left are static and are based on the type of kiosk and the location of that kiosk.
The bus stop kiosks default to a view of the Bloomington Transit Doublemaps with the bus routes that apply to that bus stop already viewable. This feature helps the approachability of the kiosks by presenting information people are already looking for.
For park kiosks, the primary landing page is the "neighborhood news & data". This is to increase the discoverability of new and important information that is relevant to residents in the area of the kiosk.
Another unique feature of the park kiosk's is the time stamp at the bottom of the neighborhood news and data page. This time stamp has the current time and the the time for sunset because most parks close at sunset. This is to extend the accessibility of immediately useful information available at the kiosk.
In addition to the design a brochure and PSA video were created to mock up introducing the community kiosks to the public. Both introduce the kiosks and their function. The brochure, which is meant to educate on the types of information a resident can access, has information about where to find the kiosks and what the different topic icons represent. The PSA video is a more casual introduction which educates the public on how to use the kiosks and what the purpose of them is.
I found this project to be both professionally and personally fulfilling. I got a chance to exercise all the skills that I have built up over the course of the Indiana University Human Computer Interaction design program while also being able to work with and contribute to the local government of the City of Bloomington, my home for the last several years.
I found the process of this project to be enlightening. While I attempted to implement a process that resembled agile, I am not completely sure I succeeded in using this model due to my own inexperience with it. In contrast, working with the City of Bloomington was illuminating in concerns to working with a client. I regret that the initiative that we were working on with the City of Bloomington was more exploratory because I would have like the experience of working with a budget.
I think what I learned from the experience of this process was the ability to self direct towards a deadline. It was also excellent practice in deciding which steps are needed to progress the project further. For a couple of the research methods, the experience of working through the government approval structure was also good in terms of better understanding how to allot enough time for navigating those approval processes.