The Elevator Pitch

Design Role
Lead in Data Analysiz and Visualization
Coordinated Facilitation






The Elevator Pitch is a research share-out presentation for the event “Imagining an Accessible NYC” held by Gothamist and WNYC at The Greene Space. Our goal is to provide our research and design approach as social designers on the transit accessibility issue in New York City.

Background

Transit accessibility still remains an issue needed to be tackled in NYC. With the commitment from the MTA to put $5.2 billion towards installing elevators and hired its first accessibility chief, we think it’s the rightful time to listen to the voices from the community.

MTA Stations with Elevators (Data Collected Date: Oct 28th, 2019)

Quantitative Research:
Data Visualization

Python
Tableau
QGIS
Adobe Illustrator

Gothamist started a survey on Nov 20th, 2020 to hear the needs of the NYC transit community and gathered 1936 responses in 2 weeks.Based on that, I made a data visualization according to the comments from each borough. The map tells a simple fact:
Elevators are of the highest demand in all boroughs.

Keywords Map According to the Gothamist Survey Response.

But are these elevators really serving people who need them? We mapped out the communities with the highest density of families with babies, elderly, and people with disabilities.
It seems like the elevators are not built according to any of them’ needs.

New York Accessible Stations and Density of Households wirh Child under 5/ Elderly above 85/ People with Disabilities
（Data Source: 2010 Cencus Data）

So, are their voices really being heard? There are only 21% of the survey responders are people with disabilities. So it's hard to tell.

Qualitative Research:

Design with People with Disabilities

Research Community:
CIDNY has been advocates of the disabled community for over 40 years. They are at the forefront of highlight issues when it comes to disabled folks through various services, advocacy, education, and research.

We designed with communities who have lived experience, CIDNY, to learn and cocreate solutions. To understand their experiences we created journey maps of their commutes. We found that they had a point of anxiety which had two folds :

- Anxious of getting hurt
- Anxious of time

But what would happen if folks with disabilities lead in designing solutions? We had a 5 min brainstorming challenge with them and just in 8 min folks with disabilities had 23 ideas that were ready to go for instance. When analyzing the ideas folks with disabilities had a wide range of ideas that touched uponpolicy, cultural shift, and design.

Insights

“ Tech is not the final answer. ”

Tech is still human-made, and it will fail just like human. Even though tech indeed can elevate the independence of people with disabilities, it doesn’t mean developing a new product is the final answer. We need to think of the context, the maintenance, etc. and never stop caring. The point is never the elevators.

“Design with the community, not for Them. ”

Usually in design, when people consider disability, the goal is to smooth things out or to fix a thing. But for us, it's really about honoring the friction of disability.

“Fall out of love with the experts. ”

If inclusivity is having everyone on the table, diversity is inviting them to the dinner. How to do that? To design with the people with disabilities, it's essential to break the "professionalism", and value their live experience. The solutions are already out there.