💡What Can a Public Imagination Bring to Light?
Sometimes the answers to our biggest questions come from collective thought.
Welcome to New_Public. This week, we share our latest Signals video featuring Jamin Warren championing imaginative thought towards creating future public spaces. And to expand on imaginative thought, we asked colleagues near and far to tell us about their favorite public innovations. These public innovations range from institutions to civic utilities and the submissions read as deeply personal and give new perspectives on understated innovations. As always, we want to hear from you, so if anything below sparks your interest, leave us a comment, send us an email at hello@newpublic.org or find us on Twitter @WeAreNew_Public.
A History of Public Imagination
To coincide with our Signals research launch, we created a video titled, A History of Public Imagination to ask a greater public: How can we imagine and design a better Internet that will serve society by serving us all, equally? The Internet began as an act of public imagination. Yet today, our current digital platforms serve as private spaces, owned by private companies. For spaces used by the public to function safely and effectively those spaces have to have different goals than private spaces. We believe that successful public spaces cannot be designed by any one individual or discipline — that they require ongoing collaboration not just from designers and technologists but also from social scientists, the communities they serve and the stewards who will care for them.
How can we demand better of the Internet? By looking at past reforms like the development of a five-day work week or the public school system, we ask ourselves, how can we use our public imagination to create new norms?
Public Innovations
At New_ Public, we believe that our best solutions already exist and are hiding in public. We believe that the design of public spaces shapes the kinds of public conversations and communities that a society has. Part of the conversation around developing new public digital spaces is examining the types of public innovations that already work, are already in action, and are of service to a greater public. By lifting out those innovations we believe we can cull lessons of innovation and the type of thinking we reference in the video above. And because we like to have community-minded conversations with peers, we asked our team members and colleagues to contribute their favorite public innovations.
_Douglas Rushkoff
Most recently, I was reminded of the remarkable power of the public museum. We were with my daughter at one of the Smithsonian museums, and she remarked that we hadn’t paid anything to get in. I explained that this was a public institution, like a school or library. But those are things that are supposed to be good for you, she said. A museum was just for pleasure. To look at cool stuff. Experience art. Go inside a rocket ship. Why would the government pay for that?
What struck me about her observation was that it was correct. Most public spaces have some utility value — such as educating kids for the workforce, or providing research materials for local scholars, or social services for the poor. The museum has no excuse other than enrichment. And if the museum is the public sector’s way of showing off, so much the better. It’s simply demonstrating that public innovation can transcend purpose, and reach for the sublime.
_Josh Kramer
The introduction of outdoor lighting, in lamps powered by a succession of tech — whale oil, petroleum, natural gas, electricity — transformed the outdoors completely. Some of Austin’s fifteen story moon towers still stand, relics of the early days of electrified outdoor lights at the turn of the twentieth century. Those carbon arc lights were incredibly bright and loud (think football stadium lights), and illuminated whole neighborhoods. The feeling that a well-lit area is safer is still true today. A century later, we’re still using vacuum-tube, incandescent bulbs in most of American cities, albeit with advances like light sensors.
The innovation continues: City after city is now switching over to LED, an array of bright, efficient lights made possible by semiconductor microchips. LED streetlights use far less electricity and allow for a range of new uses including wifi hotspots and crime surveillance.
Some of the same worries about LEDs now were held about the moon towers long ago: what are the health effects? Are they too bright? It’s a little too early to know, but there may be big, transformative behavioral effects from this new innovation in the years and decades to come. Can busses run late at night? Can restaurants and businesses stay open later? Will sensors in street lights assist in mapping gun violence down to a few feet? Perhaps something like that will be worth the cold, white light.
_Marina Garcia-Vasquez
The public park bench is wondrous in all of its manifestations. Since the 14th century, outdoor public seating in Florence conveyed a sense of civic action and enabled public spaces to turn into theatrical performances and garner tribunal purposes. Yet it wasn’t until the mid-19th century in Paris that park benches were politicized to mark the great era of urbanity. Designed by Gabriel Davioud in the 1850s, public benches were dispersed across the city in newly opened public gardens and boulevards. The street furniture was painted in dark green colors to harmonize with the nature around it. The bench went on to symbolize the civic city, a democratic city that was a free, accessible, and equitable public space designed and considered for its citizens.
The public benches we see today in almost every park in the United States get their form and function from the Parisian bench. The Central Park settee, designed by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, is one of the first designed stationary public benches and is still made with a mix of iron handles with painted green wood slats. The public park bench is ripe with possibility: it warrants solitude and deep reflection, and it pronounces the built nature surrounding it. It is anonymous but also signals a social moment. You are in communion with society just sitting on a park bench. Most notably you can enjoy a city without having to consume, you can be welcomed into a space without having to engage with strangers. Benches were designed and dispersed to signal solitary and social moments. They are profoundly functional and emotional as they can be composed and choreographed to message being in unison with nature and community.
Do you have a favorite public innovation? We want to hear about it!
Quote of the Day
“What artist, so noble, has often been thought, as he, who with far-reaching conception of beauty and designing power, sketches the outline, writes the colors, and directs the shadows of a picture so great that Nature shall be employed upon it for generations, before the work he has arranged for her shall realize his intentions.”
— Frederick Law Olmsted
What’s Clicking
🌐 Online:
Digital day traders used online organizing tools to give Wall Street an unprecedented run for its money. (Twitter by of Scott Nover)
How a team of spies in Mexico got their hands on Russia's space secrets—and tried to change the course of the Cold War. (MIT Technology Review)
Nextdoor is quietly replacing the small-town paper. (Medium)
Want a safer Internet? Listen to Black women. (Undistracted Podcast with Brittany Packnett Cunningham)
🏙 Offline: Design Ideas from Cities
Public lands are one of the United States’s largest experiments in public ownership. (The Drift)
During the pandemic, entrepreneurial chefs have reshaped food culture across the country with homegrown pop-ups that thrive on social media. (New York Times)
Learn how poor internet connection and communications infrastructure prevents rural communities in Peru from thriving. (Identities of the World)
Architectures of protection hastily installed across our built environments aim to keep us safe — pure, secure — through barely visible intrusions. (Places Journal)
Obsessed with growing our collective imagination,
The New_ Public team
Civic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.