Audience Consideration

One city in Brazil show leadership in urban planning by considering the needs of its inhabitants. It seams obvious sometimes that we must consider the needs of the user for which we are creating. Teachers must consider their students in their teaching form. A writer must consider the workings of the audience's mind. Considering our audience is crucial to our success, yet it often goes unnoticed.

Curitiba has proven very successful in the planning of its city specifically for its inhabitants. The city planners of Curitiba created space in the beginning for low income housing, public schools, public transportation routes, and protected open space. They then recruited non-polluting industry. This provided inhabitants with lower traveling costs and allowed them to have a higher income. The non-polluting industries, the reduced travel, and the protected open space created a high quality of life in that area.

Everything is recycled in Curitiba. A quarry was converted into a famous amphitheater. A garbage dump was converted into an 11-acre Botanical Garden, home to over 200,000 species. An old glue plant became a Creativity Center where children make crafts to sell in tourist shops. Old buses (with a life-span of only 3.5 years) become job-training centers, where courses are less than a dollar and tough by rotating teachers offering their knowledge on over forty trades and disciplines. Other buses become clinics, classrooms, baby-sitting centers, food markets, and soup kitchens.

This innovations are said to be owed to the city's municipal departments. These departments are said to be composed of "professional problem-solvers -- rather than by the more traditional sorts of bureaucrats skilled at explaining why problems can't be solved." These people take risks, expecting that mistakes will happen. When they believe in a program, but don't have all of the funding, they go ahead with it anyway working to gain the resources along the way. They constantly seek to improve the system.

Mindset Shift
Why is it that the municipal departments of Curitiba are such good problem solvers? Why are they so willing to take risks while ours are clearly not? Does the unwillingness to change or try stem from fear? Pride? Is there a mindset shift that needs to happen here? How do we bring that about?

What can I do? - Personal Challenge:
Take conscious steps to increase the efficiency of YOUR system. If you've never waited tables, I strongly suggest that you do at some point in your life. Everything about that job is efficiency - how many orders can I take, which glasses and dishes can I grab on my way to the kitchen to turn in this ticket?

Identify one system in your daily life that is inefficient. (dishes, mail sorting, anything) and find a way to make it work better. Document time and cost before and after. Note the changes. What were your reasons for doing it inefficiently before?

Please write your results as a comment to this post.