by Kate O'Neill
When we talk about meaning, we are looking for significance, connectivity. In thinking about what place means, we are looking for clues about what a place conveys into context, what signifiers it brings with it. The important thing about place is that it grounds our physical surroundings, and links us to those around us in that space. For a moment, at least, we share some dimension of cultural identity, and an experience of our sense of surroundings.
The “place” in question could be a store, a hospital, a public park, an airport, a museum, a corporate office, a zoo, or even a city or state or country. Really just about anything. In any case, someone is invested in the development of the idea of that place, whether they think about it that way or not. It is important to cultivate the brand experience of that place, and understand what makes it recognizably different from another space that shares superficial or functional characteristics.
Placemaking and the Idea of Intentional Place
Some places are designed very intentionally—such as a movie set—because the design relates directly to the success of the endeavor. Retail environment design is somewhat like this, where every element is considered as to how it encourages buying behavior, although not merely buying behavior, but merchandised product that is most profitable or somehow most relevant to sell.
Hospitals and healthcare facilities are designed to promote hygiene, sterility, and trust as well as the ideas of hygiene, sterility, and trust.
Other types of places that are often planned, designed, or nurtured very carefully for a particular kind of outcome occur within the fields of architecture, landscape design, interior design, museums, libraries, and more. We could also think about conceptual “spaces” like radio, media, and other esoteric non-space places.
But of course also in digital. In user experience, information architecture, customer experience, brand strategy, and marketing, the context of the digital “surroundings,” in a sense, are critical to understand for influence, behavior strategy, and more
So can we map one to the other? Should we? What do we learn by holding up physical placemaking ideas to digital, and what do we learn by examining the developing disciplines of digital strategy and placemaking for cues about how our built environment should be designed to be more effective, more pleasing, more meaningful.
A model that is valuable to study is placemaking. What is placemaking? It’s an approach to planning that prioritizes the relevance of the space to the community, in a sense.
Placemaking as a term has been around in niche discussions of urban planning for decades, but it seems to be everywhere right now, principally because people across a variety of industries and disciplines have started to recognize the benefits of the intentional design of a place-centric experience. The way placemaking is described and approached seems to vary from source to source, but in general, from its origins with luminaries like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte19 to its current usages, it tends to be about facilitating an integrative, inclusive, meaningful use of a space. The space in question could be as focused as a retail environment display or as broad as an entire city. The various ways people naturally use the space and how the space could be used are both major considerations in design and redesign.
Many of the elements we’ve discussed for Integrative Human Experience Design are also attributes of placemaking: context-specific, visionary, adaptable20, etc.
In some communities, a placemaking approach might surface a need for green space, or a community park. Or a community garden. Placemaking would mean a very intentional effort to create that needed space on the premise that it will benefit the community.
Placemaking isn’t the right model for every integrated experience challenge, but it lends us a great deal of insight about the development of meaningful experiences in place.
If you look at someone like the Danish architect Jan Gehl, whose work is around human life in cities, there are plenty of parallels to digital experience. As Gehl et al. assert in their 2006 book New City Life, contemporary urban planning is totally different from what it was before, say, World War II.
Now—with the proliferation of the private auto, suburban shopping malls, numerous home entertainment offerings, spacious backyards and many other incentives for us to simply stay at home—people venture out in public because they want to rather than because they have to.21
In a similar fashion, we can observe what makes people want to interact in physical space when they don’t have to. What brings someone to a store when they could buy online? What brings someone to a restaurant when they could have food delivered?
What Is Digital Placemaking? (Or Human Experience Design?)
The work of digital experience design, then, is to create a meaningful sense of place that serves people and/or community. It might serve a business purpose, and that’s okay, but it has to have some authentic relevance.
Cities evolve through history and layers of culture, but that doesn’t mean that city planners don’t have a role in proactively developing infrastructure, utilities, and resources to make the quality of life in the city better. You can find a capitalist motive there, too: A well-planned city is not only a better place to live, but also it offers more economic stability and a more assured tax base.
An online space—for example, an e-commerce website—may not seem like a reasonable parallel because it’s a brand-owned space with an explicitly commercial function. But retailers—at least, savvy retailers—pay attention to the implicitly expressed interests of their visitors, those who buy as well as those who don’t, through website analytics.
Designers talk about the analogy of “cowpaths” to explain the idea that cows, or people for that matter, won’t necessarily follow the predicted path if they find that it doesn’t lead to water. They’ll carve out their own, and that trail will be visible to anyone following them. It reveals what they want and how they went about getting it.
Humans aren’t cattle, but we, too, carve out our own paths when what we want isn’t readily presented to us. If you’re in charge of the website where a steady trail of people enters on a particular product page, uses the site search function to try to find another product, and then leaves, you have yourself something to investigate and improve.
Creating a sense of place in a digital experience is about the fundamentals of satisfying visitors’ needs, but it’s also about recognizing and creating a sense of identity that’s shared among the visitors.
Starbucks, “Third Place,” and the Power of Strategic Framing
In the early 1980s, Howard Schultz was visiting Italy and became captivated by the spirit of the Italian coffeehouses. He loved how the Italians seemed to be living balanced lives, and he loved the idea of a “Third Place,” where people could go to create community: a place that was not home and not work.
So Starbucks isn’t about coffee; it’s about “Third Place.” Netflix isn’t about movies; it’s about options for escape. IKEA isn’t about furniture; it’s about self-empowered style. Southwest Airlines isn’t about cheap airfare; it’s about bringing the customer into the decision to embrace operational efficiencies. (Think: peanuts, humor, etc.) Apple isn’t about computers or phones; it’s about design.
It is quite likely that a great deal of the reason Starbucks succeeds is because of this philosophy at the heart of the business strategy. Schultz had not only a product to sell, but also an experience—and a nuanced one at that. Strategy that reaches well beyond planning and examines purpose and metaphor is more likely to be transformative.
Brands need an understanding of what they’re about. Strategic meaning. Strategic purpose.
It’s similar to but not necessarily the “why” Simon Sinek talks about—not always the mission, but more about a crystallizing idea.
Having an understanding of your strategic purpose/strategic meaning allows you to move confidently through decisions, focus on what matters, and develop much more meaningful relationships with your customers. From there, you can develop
more meaningful marketing, more relevant tech trends, and more aligned operations; and all the facets of the business can more readily fall into place around the idea.
Moreover, the chances are better with a strategic metaphor framework that you’ll hit all the resonant notes. You can develop a strategy that helps you succeed while respecting the human beings you’re doing business with. When your purpose relates to how people assign meaning to the places they go, as is the case with Starbucks, it’s even more important to be clear and intentional with that framing.
Stories and Place
I often work at coffee shops. A lot of other people do, too, of course. But since it’s my nature to think about what makes different human experiences meaningful in different ways, I sometimes find myself deconstructing the experience of working in a coffee shop. I’m looking for what we can learn about designing experiences, both online and offline.
The opening question is: “Why?” What is the value of working on my smallish laptop screen on a hard chair at a crowded coffee shop as opposed to sitting at my desk in my apartment, where I have a big display for docking my laptop, access to a huge supply of teas, and slippers to make myself as comfortable as I like? What would make me choose to pay and be inconvenienced for discomfort and fewer amenities?
You could propose “because there are no distractions,” and yes, for some people (including myself), that’s probably a part of it. After all, if you live with cats, you know they can be pretty insistent about getting attention. I can only imagine how insistent kids might be. But then again, you’re adding a whole lot of distractions when you work in a coffee shop, or another “Third Place.” You’re adding a whole lot of people to have to tune out and ignore.
But ignore them you can. In general you’re likely to perceive less of a sense of obligation to acknowledge and respond to the distractions you encounter in a coffee shop than you would, say, at the office, when your colleague shows up at your desk asking for that TPS report. Beyond that, I don’t have to think about the small stack of paperwork on my desk. At the coffee shop, I’ve effectively eliminated it from my context and can concentrate on the work I’ve come to do.
Also, you’re trading familiar distractions for more interesting distractions, and perhaps more stimulating distractions, in a sense. For someone who thrives on creative inspiration, that can make a tremendous difference, whether tackling creative or mundane tasks.
The next question that occurs to me is: “When?” How often is it productive and beneficial to work in a Third Place versus the usual place? What’s the ideal combination of familiar and new to inspire but not distract?
For example, I find that I do really powerful brainstorming and big, think-y, strategic work in airplanes. I always assume there’s a combination of factors in play: turning off internet connectivity, probably first and foremost, but also being in a constrained environment where it is literally a challenge to get up from the seat and do anything other than focus on the space right in front of me. Those factors seem to come together to reward me with some of the clearest thinking work I ever do. But then I wonder: Would I be able to rely on having such breakthrough thinking if I increased my frequency of travel? Maybe it’s the pacing of it that works. I travel far more than the average person, but not as much as many frequent business travelers do, and perhaps the relatively limited availability of the airplane context keeps it fresh. I’m looking to experiment with that a bit over the next year or two.
And in the process of writing this book, I found it helpful sometimes to take my laptop to bookstores with cafés, where I could write surrounded by the context of selling books. I don’t know if it really helped me on a subconscious level to power through and finish, but I always paid attention on my way in and my way out, browsing the new nonfiction table, thinking about what I was working on in that context.
In any case, asking “when” in relation to changing the context of place is important in designing optimally meaningful experiences. At a certain level, it’s the heart of what work-life balance is about.
You’re probably already ahead of me on thinking through the next questions: “where,” “what,” “how,” and “who.”
Well, the “where” question is already all about place, so we’re fundamentally examining it already. But to frame it up in a way we can apply to designing experiences, the place you’re in is a significant part of the context of your interactions. Place creates opportunities for stories and interactions.
In your home, the opportunity for interactions is limited to a small and mostly repeating set. But home is where, in some respects, you probably have the most control over your environment and experiences.
In your office or fixed workplace, the opportunity for interactions is limited to a small and mostly repeating set. Depending on your position, you probably have some degree of control over your environment and experiences.
In a Third Place, though—such as a coffee shop, a bar, an airport, or a park—the opportunities are pretty much unlimited and the opportunity for novelty is much higher. Although you have little control within the place itself, you have in some ways the most important kind of control: You get to choose to be in this place (“where”) for however long (“when”) for whatever purpose (“what and why”) and how much you acknowledge your surroundings (“who”).
It’s not that one is inherently better than the others; sometimes the interactions and novelty introduce too much distraction and annoyance. Today, for example, an uncommonly beautiful woman was seated to my right at the window bench, and for a while (until I put headphones on and drowned it out) I was privy to overhearing her being hit on by strange men. Some were one-and-done approaches; one in particular was a prolonged attempt to wear her down and get her interest. She was unfailingly polite, but I thought (and tweeted) if this is as tedious as it is for me, I can’t imagine how tedious it must be for her.
I digress. But that digression is more or less the point. In a coffee shop or other Third Place, you’re placed in proximity of these kinds of micro-happenings that don’t really add up to much and don’t really change your life; but taken as a whole, they add color and perspective and dimension to our lives. It’s an opportunity for empathy and framing up your perspective alongside countless other people you can observe.
What Else?
On top of that, if you start imagining, as I do, the data being generated all around me by everyone interacting and transacting with digital outlets—like the cash register, their phones, their laptops, their wearable fitness trackers, my tweets about the guys hitting on the woman, and so on—it is a truly fascinating picture of the layers of place.
What does this tell us about designing places? About designing experiences?
As we look at how and where people choose to spend their time online, we can see the influence of place on meaningful experiences: People engage frequently with Facebook partly because it is a place you go to have a Third Place kind of experience. There are distractions, but not too many. The context of Twitter is particularly free of obligations: There is no expectation that anyone can keep up with the volume of content generated there, so you can wade into it like a stream and wade back out without having to acknowledge anyone or anything.
Where things get really interesting is in communities like Meetup.com and Nextdoor.com, where inherently and by design there is an overlap between offline relationships and online interactions. We can ignore etiquette to some extent when we’re dealing with online abstractions we’re not even sure are real people; but when your neighbor is ranting about guns or that new bar down the street, it becomes uncomfortably close and hard to ignore.
How Do Online “Places” and “Spaces” Create Meaning?
A place creates meaning through the associations it has, through the culture it fosters, through the community it creates, through the identity it retains. Culture is defined variously as the arts, knowledge, beliefs, customs, humanities, and other intellectual achievements of a
collective people. In essence, it is about shared ideas. Perhaps the embodiment of shared ideas. Communities themselves sometimes have a culture. The meaning of a place has to do with its identity. Identity is how an individual crystallizes the reactions to the social and cultural environment around them.
Online places and spaces can do this just as offline places can.
If you don’t think so, look at the cultural dynamics of Instagram versus Tumblr, or Twitter versus Facebook. Or Snapchat versus any of them. There are intricacies to the way social norms have evolved in each platform, visual vocabularies that have taken hold in each space. Twitter, for example, has fostered an environment of media junkies, social justice activists, and one-line comedians, in addition to inspirational quotes, selfies, and the rest of the stream. (Well, and a lot of harassment, too. Let’s not forget.) This same mix of dynamics doesn’t exist in the same proportions in any other medium. It’s a culture all its own, a place-specific microculture.
People in Place: Neighborhoods and Community
Many products and services are built around not just one person interacting at a time, but rather several or many people, in groups or en masse, in contact with each other or disjointed from each other’s experiences. There are many variations, from Meetup to Second Life. As soon as you begin to think about the dynamics of planning for more than one person in relation to online spaces, virtual reality experiences, or any kind of group interaction, it starts to bring up questions about community.
Community is a hot topic in online marketing because the term has been adopted to mean the nurturing of a group of users of a product or service. But if you trace the idea of community back to offline, there are wonderful insights to be drawn from how community manifests in physical place. There are related concepts, such as neighborhoods, that may provide meaningful ideas to use in developing the next phase of multiperson interactions.