You get the answers you deserve — Cities need to engage people as users and citizens

Engaging people as users or citizens creates different results. Cities need to be strategic in the roles they give to citizens in engagement.

Our questions define the answers we get.

Last week I was invited to do a workshop on participation and engagement with an enthusiastic team of people from Helsinki Regional Transport Authority HSL. In my introduction I talked about the reasons why engagement should not be narrowed down to asking people what they want.

I strongly believe people are social animals with the capacity to take others into consideration. The word capacity is intentional here. It does not happen by itself. We as designers, service providers and civil servants play a huge role in how we trigger people.

A couple of decades in volunteering, NGOs and local government have taught me that “what do you want” is one of the most common yet least productive and most divisive questions you can ask in civic engagement. Why?

“What do you want” emphasizes the voice of those with strong self-esteem and abilities to produce solutions. It´s a bit like placing a blank sheet of paper in front of people and asking them to draw something.

The well-meaning solution-oriented engagement builds up an expectation that if you experience difficulties, you also need to be able to fix them. But if you feel that your voice matters, you will believe in your ideas more. If you are in a good place in your life, you feel more confident in expressing your views. But if you have been discriminated all through you life, if people have not kept their promises to you, if your life is a mess, you more often than not just wish that someone would stop and listen — would show empathy and willing to understand. If you are in a tough situation, your ideas might also come out in an angry, emotional or even aggressive tone. But if you are in a good place, you can remain calm — and the recipients are more keen on listening to you.

Helsinki has a city bike system with one of the highest usage in the world. The places for the stops were crowd sourced from residents and it is further developed annually based on usage and feedback. The bike provider was chosen through a public tender where results from user testing was used a one of the selection criteria. (Image: City of Helsinki)

We also need to look at engagement from a sustainability point of view. A focus on wants does not trigger people to think about the needs of others or the limits of growth. If we all try to get exactly what we want (and perhaps a bit for a rainy day), we ran out of land, money and resources. If we engage people without laying out the limitations created by money, legislation or the planet, we are bound to have a double disappointment: we as city officials are disappointed with the unrealistic ideas and residents will be disappointed with the way the city used their ideas.

This “what do you want” approach leads to what British economist William Forster Lloyd coined as tragedy of the commons, a development where the final result does not promote good results for all and actually ends up depleting or spoiling the shared resource.

To take a simple example, in the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, a rumor started spreading that stores are running out of toilet paper. When people started hoarding toilet paper , stores actually did ran out of toilet paper.

Tutoring on digital skills in libraries is done both by librarians and volunteer organizations.

We need intentional role-setting

In the discussion following my talk to the transport planners, one of the participants, an industrial designer, asked what is the theory base behind this boom around participation. His question made me stop for a moment. He nudged me into thinking more about the diversity of engagement needs.

When it comes to public services, cities have both users and citizens. We need to be clearer in whether we are engaging people as users of services or as residents in a democratically run system. Some situations do call for understanding people´s wishes, behavior and wants, some call for a more societal and more deliberative approach.

Shared features for engaging residents or users

• Understanding people´s needs and behavior: in government, we are pretty efficient in solving things — even if we are solving the wrong things. Solutions for issues are not always where the problems arise. We need to more intentionally enter the state of not-knowing and learn to understand people´s lives.
• Checking that you understood people correctly: we easily interpret things through our own experience. That´s why we need to stop and actually repeat back to people what we have heard. Every single time I have done this, people have wanted to correct my comprehension and I have learned more.
• Conscious efforts to reach underrepresented groups: open access is not enough. Where and how we engage people defines who feels welcome. We are responsible for making sure that we understand the needs of the quiet, the weak and the suffering.
• Asking for help: governments can not do it alone. We should be better in highlighting challenges and providing information on them to people — and then asking residents, corporations and NGOs to help. When we show vulnerability, others are more willing to help.
• Doing things in a transparent manner: our default should be that our data and our process are open and predictable.
• Sharing information in an understandable and clear manner: we have a lot of information and we easily forget that others do not have that knowledge. They also have knowledge we don´t have. Investing in opening data and research findings actually builds up people´s capacities for empathy.
• Tackling unconscious bias: other people are not like us. Biases are stereotypes of other people which exist outside our own awareness yet influence our decision-making. We need more training on understanding — actually how we are human and how to tackle biases.

Below is a rough draft of the differences between engaging residents and engaging users.

Helsinki´s award-winning central library Oodi is one of Finland´s largest citizen engagement project lasting over ten years. Residents have been engaged in all stages from dreams that created the brief for the architecture competition to the public art in the main staircase.

Option 1. Focus on citizens

When: When you decide on the allocation of public resources between areas, groups or individuals
Examples: Tariffs, Urban Planning, Investment Planning
Inspiration from research: Political Science, Sociology, Moral Philosophy, Economics
Possible tools: Data visualization, Town halls, Etnography
Success factors: Fair and predictable process, Deliberation
Pitfalls: Lack of transparency, NIMBY movements
Some questions to use:
- Tell me about your day.
- What is going on?
- Show me how you do this.
- What would be the right thing to do here?

Culture Kids is a comprehensive arts education program where all children born in Helsinki are invited to build a life-long relationship with professional arts institutions. The children and their parents are invited to two events each year in the same institution until they start school. The programme builds on a model created by Helsinki Philharmonic.

Option 2. Focus on users

When: When you want to focus on efficient and smooth service delivery
Examples: Websites, Customer Service Centers, Mobile Apps
Inspiration from research: Design, Industrial engineering
Possible tools: User testing, Prototyping, Customer journey
Success factors: Understanding people´s behavior
Pitfalls: Unconscious bias towards your own behavior, Relying on surveys
Some questions to use:
- Show me how you do this
- What do you want?

OmaStadi is Helsinki´s participatory budgeting program. During the first round 2018–19, residents voted on the use of 4,4 million euros. One of the winning projects is this football field in the neighborhood of Arabia.