2026-07-12 · 10 min read · Raw Drafts / Cities / Public Systems
The City Is an Interface
How streets, public services, data, culture, and infrastructure turn urban planning into an everyday experience.
Urban planning is often represented through maps, zoning diagrams, transport models, and long-term development plans. Interaction design is usually represented through screens, flows, buttons, and user journeys.
They appear to operate at different scales. One works with streets and neighbourhoods. The other works with products and services.
In practice, they meet constantly.
A pedestrian crossing is an interface. So is a bus stop, a public toilet, a park entrance, a permit application, a waterfront warning sign, a shared Wi-Fi network, or a digital map showing where construction has closed a street.
These systems tell people what is possible, where they are allowed to go, what they need to know, and how much effort participation will require.
The city is full of interfaces.
Planning becomes real through experience
Most people do not encounter urban planning as a policy document. They experience it through daily friction.
They experience it when a pavement disappears halfway down a street. When a bus arrival display is inaccurate. When a shaded arcade is blocked by parked scooters. When a river is clean enough to look inviting but no one knows whether swimming is safe. When a cultural building appears public from the outside but feels difficult to enter.
Planning decisions become tangible through movement, waiting, confusion, comfort, risk, and access.
This is where interaction design offers a useful perspective. It asks what a system communicates through use.
Can people understand what is happening? Can they complete a task without specialist knowledge? What happens when the system fails? Who is excluded by the default path? How does the experience change across languages, abilities, devices, neighbourhoods, and income levels?
Urban planning asks many of the same questions, although the consequences unfold across larger territories and longer periods.
A city is a service environment with millions of simultaneous users. It is also a political environment where those users have unequal power to shape the service.
Every interface has a site
Digital design often speaks as though products exist everywhere in the same way. A button is a button. A map is a map. A sign-up flow is a sign-up flow.
Cities make this assumption impossible.
Every urban system has a site. It has a climate, a history, a language, a maintenance culture, a legal framework, a set of institutions, and a pattern of everyday behaviour.
In Tainan, a street cannot be understood only through its official carriageway and pavement widths. Its actual interface includes temple activity, food stalls, parked scooters, arcades, drainage channels, shopfronts, informal seating, deliveries, heat, rain, and the shifting boundary between public and private space.
The street works through overlapping agreements. Some are written into law. Others are negotiated every day.
A digital service placed into this environment also becomes part of that negotiation. A parking app, tourist map, public Wi-Fi portal, or mobility platform does not sit above the city. It enters a specific system of habits and power.
Site analysis therefore matters in interaction design for the same reason it matters in architecture and planning. Context changes the meaning of every intervention.
Infrastructure has a user experience
Infrastructure is often discussed through capacity, efficiency, coverage, and cost. These measures are important, but they do not fully explain how infrastructure enters public life.
A technically functional system may still be illegible, intimidating, or inaccessible.
Public Wi-Fi provides a simple example. Coverage maps and router counts can show where a network exists, but the public experience depends on other questions.
Can someone identify the correct network? Is the login process understandable? Does the captive portal work on an older phone? Is the location accessible after business hours? Is there a clear way to report that the connection is broken? Who is responsible for updating the information?
WiFi.ee began as a database of public wireless access points, but the deeper design problem concerns trust and maintenance. A network is useful only when people can find it, understand it, and believe the information around it.
The same principle applies to transport, energy, waste collection, healthcare, water systems, and climate infrastructure.
Infrastructure communicates through interfaces. Sometimes the interface is a screen. Sometimes it is a sign, a timetable, a gate, a painted line, a sound, or the absence of information.
Bad infrastructure design makes public systems feel arbitrary. Good infrastructure design makes collective systems easier to understand and use.
Public space is an interaction system
Parks, plazas, libraries, museums, and waterfronts are often described as physical places. Their public character also depends on rules, signals, thresholds, and forms of participation.
A park may be free to enter while still excluding people through location, surveillance, programming, social codes, or a lack of accessible facilities.
A museum may present itself as a civic institution while its ticketing, wayfinding, opening hours, or architecture quietly communicate who belongs.
An event in Yoyogi Park can create a temporary public interface through shared ground, informal participation, open movement, and low barriers to entry. Its accessibility is produced through many small decisions: where activities are placed, whether people can join without prior knowledge, whether observation is acceptable, and how rules are communicated.
Public space works through these invitations and constraints.
This is close to interaction design, but the urban scale adds conflict. Different groups may need the same space for incompatible purposes. Maintenance budgets may be limited. Informal uses may clash with official plans. A successful space must support negotiation rather than a single optimized journey.
The goal is not frictionless urban life. Some forms of friction reveal competing needs that deserve political attention.
The challenge is to make those conflicts visible and navigable.
Culture shapes how the city works
Culture is often added to planning as a layer of identity, heritage, or place branding. In everyday urban life, culture operates more deeply.
It shapes how space is used, how time is organized, who takes responsibility, what is preserved, and what kinds of change feel legitimate.
In Tainan, temples are religious sites, neighbourhood anchors, event infrastructure, soundscapes, traffic generators, social networks, and repositories of local memory. Their role cannot be reduced to visual heritage.
Former industrial buildings, Japanese-era structures, traditional markets, food streets, and waterfronts also carry multiple functions. They help residents interpret the city and locate themselves within its history.
Adaptive reuse succeeds when old structures gain present-day relationships. Preservation without use can turn the city into a display. Development without memory can erase the systems that made a place socially meaningful.
Cultural planning therefore has an interface problem. Institutions and planners must decide how history will be encountered, who can contribute to its interpretation, and whether cultural space supports everyday life or mainly serves visitors and investment narratives.
Culture is active urban infrastructure. It influences behaviour, belonging, and the capacity of communities to organize.
Data needs a public interface
Cities generate enormous amounts of information. Transport agencies publish schedules. Environmental sensors measure air and water. Governments release budgets, permits, traffic counts, and planning applications.
The existence of data does not automatically create public knowledge.
A spreadsheet of water-quality readings may satisfy a transparency requirement while remaining useless to someone deciding whether to swim. A planning portal may technically allow participation while requiring specialist vocabulary and hours of effort. A map may show construction projects without explaining how they will affect a particular neighbourhood.
Open data becomes civic infrastructure when it helps people answer practical questions.
Is this route safe? When will the service arrive? Why is this park being redesigned? Who approved this development? How can residents correct missing information? What evidence is being used to justify a decision?
This requires design work: translation, hierarchy, context, provenance, accessibility, and feedback mechanisms.
It also requires governance. Public interfaces need owners, update processes, correction channels, and long-term maintenance. A beautifully designed platform that stops receiving updates becomes another abandoned piece of infrastructure.
Urban informatics should therefore be judged by its usefulness in public life, not only by the volume of data published.
From users to residents
Interaction design often uses the word “user” because it focuses attention on the person interacting with a system.
In urban planning, that category quickly becomes insufficient.
A resident is affected by systems they may never actively use. A street redesign changes noise, access, property values, deliveries, heat exposure, and social life. A tourism platform changes neighbourhood demand even for people who never open the app. A new transport line reshapes development across areas far beyond its stations.
People are also more than users because they hold rights, responsibilities, knowledge, and political claims.
They can contest a system. They can organize around it. They can maintain it informally, misuse it creatively, or refuse its intended logic.
This changes the design relationship.
A commercial product can often choose its target audience. Public systems have obligations to people who are difficult to serve, expensive to accommodate, or absent from conventional research.
Urban planning requires participation, representation, and accountability. Interaction design can contribute methods for observation, prototyping, testing, and communication, but those methods cannot replace political decision-making.
The designer’s role is to make consequences clearer, widen participation, and expose hidden assumptions.
Time is part of the interface
Digital products are often designed around immediate actions. Cities operate through decades.
A tree planted today may provide meaningful shade years later. A transport corridor can shape development for generations. A temporary event may create relationships that influence how a district evolves. A neglected drainage system can remain invisible until extreme weather exposes its condition.
Urban interfaces therefore include time.
They communicate whether a system is cared for, whether an institution can be trusted, and whether public promises will survive beyond a launch.
Maintenance is one of the strongest links between interaction design and planning.
A system is never finished when it opens. Conditions change. Information becomes outdated. Materials deteriorate. Behaviour adapts. New groups arrive. Political priorities shift.
Designing for maintenance means deciding who notices problems, who has authority to respond, how feedback travels, and what resources are available for repair.
A city that launches new projects without maintaining existing systems creates an interface of abandonment.
Planning as experience architecture
The connection between interaction design and urban planning is larger than the use of digital tools in cities.
Both fields organize relationships between people, systems, environments, and institutions.
They decide what becomes visible, what remains hidden, which paths feel natural, where effort is required, and whose needs become defaults.
At their best, both disciplines create conditions for people to act with greater understanding and agency.
This does not mean treating the city like an app. Cities are more contested, layered, and alive than products. They contain histories that cannot be redesigned away and communities that do not share a single objective.
The useful connection lies elsewhere.
Interaction design can help planning become more legible, responsive, and accessible. Urban planning can help interaction design become more conscious of place, power, infrastructure, maintenance, and long-term consequences.
Together, they suggest a broader practice of experience architecture.
This practice moves between scales. It can examine a button, a bus stop, a street, a public institution, or a regional network. It asks how individual encounters connect to the larger systems producing them.
Raw Drafts has been circling this territory through public Wi-Fi, open data, waterfront access, museums, cultural infrastructure, public events, housing, mobility, and city ecosystems.
These subjects belong together because they all ask the same underlying question:
How does a system become part of public life?
The answer is found through policy and infrastructure, but also through signs, thresholds, stories, habits, permissions, and everyday encounters.
The city is planned through documents.
It is understood through interfaces.
AI authorship note
This essay began with Kris Haamer's question about whether Raw Drafts already contained material connected to city and urban planning. AI supported synthesis, drafting, editing, and implementation. Kris is responsible for the editorial direction, the framing of the city as an interface, and the decision to publish it.