This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined by Ren Yee of UN Studio at the Mpact Transit + Community conference in Philadelphia. We chat about the cognitive workload of pedestrians and creating safe opportunities for mind wandering and absorbing information.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire episode.
Jeff Wood: It brings me to something that you mentioned in your session earlier that stuck my head in, the idea of mind wandering and just being able to, like, shut off a little bit, maybe, and go to the place where you’re at. And I feel like the green spaces that you can create, that would work for that, especially from a transportation perspective, that maybe it would allow you to do that kind of mind shut off, mind wandering that you were talking about.
Ren Yee: We’re working with cognitive psychologists telling us that it is so important that we allow people to feel assured and safe, for them to go autopilot when they’re navigating through public transit environment so that they’re able to mind wander safely. And this is something that we thought — that this is a very great opportunity for people, especially people who need to commute every day, like at rush hour, peak-hour in the morning and in the evening, this should be seen as opportunity for them to disconnect, a kind of a mental discharge, kind of recharge, so to speak. And I think that if we’re able to see more of such opportunity for people to not only disconnect from their daily tasks and their navigation task, but allow them to connect with nature and connect with people, this is great. So mind wander, obviously, you can just look out the window and just, you know, think of something and disconnect, but also will be nice when you have opportunity to connect people to other groups of people next to them.
So give this opportunity of mind wander, but also opportunity to connect with nature, connect with people. This should be something that people could access during transit, so to speak.
Jeff Wood: When do you come up with your best ideas?
Ren Yee: In the shower. This is a typical answer for everybody.
Jeff Wood: I thought maybe the unwinding of your trip home and to the office on the bike, maybe you had a couple of like, epiphanies.
Ren Yee: No, it’s funny that you say that. I’ve been talking to ChatGPT on the bike. I don’t know if you do that. Now that they have this function that you can talk to it, my 10, 12 minutes of biking to work and back of work is a moment where I ask questions about subjects that I’m interested in. So I talk to ChatGPT, but also do a little bit of thinking. And I think more and more people are doing this, people are now using this commute time with assistive technology to figure out a new discretionary activity. What can they do and how do they fill up this space? So this is how I fill it up. But I don’t know about other people.
Jeff Wood: That’s interesting. I mean, I used to fill up my time when I was commuting to Oakland from San Francisco with podcasts, right? Listen to a sports podcast or Star Wars podcast or whatever it might be because it it’s nice to have that empty space. You don’t have to worry about the cognitive workload that we’ll talk about in a second, but that, you know, fearing for your life, if you’re on a bike and you have to, you know, [navigate a] stressful street or whatever else, but if you’re sitting on a bus or a train and somebody else is driving, you have this ability to shut off or turn on depending on whether you want to or not.
Ren Yee: Yeah, I think this is something that people do — would like to do — but sometimes they do out of boredom. Boredom is not a bad thing. I think sometimes it’s really nice. We also think that the idea of, while people are mind wandering, we were interested in seeing if the opportunity is something that not only you engage with yourself, but if you can engage with the community.
So one of the interesting things that we have been observing in the work that we do in Austin was how children change the vibe and the connection of the group of people waiting in a transit environment or taking transit. We notice that whenever there’s kids coming in, like, for example, especially toddlers or maybe kids below five and six, where they don’t respect their physical private sphere and they just go over and talk to people. They tend to connect with people and bring in a little bit of sense of community, a sense of safety. So this idea of creating opportunity to connect with people, to allow for people, you can choose if you want to talk to the kids, obviously, some people don’t like kids, but sometimes this is also a nice moment to connect the community together.
