The world of New York taxis finally explained
It’s hard to think of the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission as a champion for design thinking. But I bumped into my old friend Rachel Abrams the other day, and she was brandishing a copy of Taxi 07 – Roads Forward, a policy document she helped produce for the TLC (ha!). Taxi 07 is an object lesson in using design thinking and great storytelling to change public policy.
We’ve been using storyboards, cartoons, diagrams and collage for many years to explain to clients what we’ve learned about their businesses, to analyse the complex interdependencies between services and products, processes, brand, customers and marketplace and to show what future alternatives might look like. Rachel and her co-editors, working for the Design Trust for Public Space and the TLC, have now applied this kind of system view and powerful visual explanations to changing a vital part of the New York transport system.
