Reimagining BART for Older Adults
by Anna Bloom, Public Health & Uday Suresh, Bioengineering, both rising seniors and Fung Fellows at UC Berkeley
Briefly imagine that you are in front of the Downtown Berkeley BART Station, ready to adventure into San Francisco, but are faced with the daunting task of making your way down through the two lower platforms onto the train car. This task is tough enough for most students using BART for the first time as freshmen, but imagine this task as an older adult — which often provides another level of complexity and consideration. Just making it underground can be frustrating as the escalator can be tricky and crowded to board, with only one elevator being an alternative option. Once below the surface, a new challenge arises when encountering a multi-step ticketing machine with a distance-based fee system. Finally, if you can make it to the platform on time, boarding the correct train safely and quickly can be especially confusing with current limited signage and potential mobility challenges.
These obstacles are not insurmountable, however, as proven by the Fung Fellowship’s cohort of 45 UC Berkeley undergraduate students tasked to imagine this exact scenario and prototype possible solutions as part of a two-day make-a-thon, FungMakes. These two days were dedicated to using low-fidelity prototyping in small groups to quickly and economically advance innovations within the broad public health topic of isolation. The Fung Fellows enthusiastically took on this challenge, as a part of their new experiential and collaborative undergraduate program that addresses real-world public health challenges. Working with community and industry partners, the Fellows practice human-centered design methods to develop digital technology innovations.
Since BART opened in 1972, the downtown Berkeley BART station has not received a formal upgrade[1]. Therefore, the teams of Fellows had their work cut out for them when innovating creative solutions to ease the journeys of the 14,000 people who use the downtown Berkeley station each day. The timing of this challenge coincides with two current efforts, one by BART to modernize the downtown Berkeley BART station and the other by the city of Berkeley, currently renovating the street level entrance to the station[2].
To kick off the weekend, the Fellows participated in one of five prototyping workshops with experts in each medium.
- Sketching: Emily Yao, Co-founder of Planet Murple
- Body Storming: Catherine Newman, Product Design and Development Consultant
- Foam Core: Vivek Rao, Doctoral student in mechanical engineering
- Craft Materials: Jessica Granderson, Research Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
- LEGOS: Whitney Hischier, Partner at Red Team Thinking
In each workshop, teams were tasked with the same challenge of building a prototype to make the Downtown Berkeley BART station ‘older-adult friendly’.
In the spirit of co-design, the Fellowship often turns the responsibility for shaping the curriculum onto the participating students, allowing us — third-year undergraduates Anna Bloom and Uday Suresh — to partially take the reins of the event’s content and design. We helped to provide a contextual link between the featured prototyping techniques, the spirit of the fellowship program, and our cohort’s communal desire to apply design thinking to improve public health.
Our primary activity centered around the challenges that older adults might face when making their way through the Downtown Berkeley BART Station, focusing on aspects such as the ticketing process, boarding the train itself, ease of overall system use, design of the BART train cars, and much more. Over the course of a full and exciting afternoon of prototyping, the teams proposed a wide variety of novel solutions. The LEGO teams, for example, created colorful and vivid depictions of the platforms made into wheelchair-friendly configurations. The craft materials group developed a simplified electronic ticketing system that was more considerate to the customer — relying on a visually appealing and easy to understand user interface, including a built-in distance calculator and color coded icon-based touch-screen.
The experience of prototyping, however, would not be complete without sharing the innovations that we had produced with each other — which took place during a lightning round session where each group explained their ideation process as they created their first prototype for this challenge. Through this process, we were all able to understand each group’s prototyping process and the steps in their methodology. This provided fundamental insights about prototyping overall, as well as the value of quick iterations and feedback for improving older adult accessibility in the BART system.
To find out more about the Fung Fellowship and other design challenges we are tackling, check out our website http://funginstitute.berkeley.edu/ff/
[1] Raguso, E. Downtown Berkeley BART plaza slated for major overhaul. Berkeleyside, Nov. 2013.
