Shanghai Metro System Improvement
Understanding and Modifying a Complex System
- Problem -
How might we ease the commute peak in shanghai metro?
- Project Intro -
Project Brief
To identify a pain point and develop a solution that could aid in solving a problem within several different complex system, including food, insurance, transportation, etc.
About
Shanghai is a large city with a population of 26 million. Every morning around 8 o’clock to 9 o’clock, which is usually called “the morning peak”, Shanghai metro transports nearly 1 million people.
Our goal was to understand the transportation system and ease the morning peak.
Project Info
Project Type
Group
Group Members
Yi Xie
Wangyu Fang
Time Length
3 Weeks
Tools
Omnigraffle
Google Form
Keynote
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Skills
User Testing
System Thinking
Data Visualization
Prototyping
Course
System (Spring, 2019)
Instructor
Erin Malone
1
System Research
10,000,000
Amount of people in the metro system every morning peak
1. The Morning Peak
Shanghai is a big city and there are 26 million people in Shanghai. Every morning around 8 o’clock to 9 o’clock, which is usually called “the morning peak”, Shanghai metro needs to carry nearly 10 million people. Twice every day, there are two giant peaks that create huge pressure on the metro system.
2. Problem & Characteristic
The peak created quite a lot of problems for the government. Metro is considered as a government infrastructure in Shanghai, so the government has the responsibility for all accidents that happened in the station more or less, and needs to pay for them.
And another thing that should be noticed, Shanghai metro is heavily funded by the government so the operation of the whole system is not sensitive to the income from selling tickets.
3. Idea of the System
Now we have known what the problem was and its consequences, the next step for us would be finding the cut-in points in the system, finding what caused the problem. So we mapped out the Shanghai Metro system in a concept map.
As we looked at the whole map, we found people was the key to solve the crowdedness. We planned to design a way to guide the passenger flow.
We did consider other parts:
Train schedule - the schedule was as full as possible during the peak time.
Metro line arrangement - Already build, unrealistic to change.
Passengers’ work time - Would be effective to ease the peak, but unrealistic to ask companies to change just for the traffic.
4. Locate the problem
Using the connection circle and then the feedback loop, I was able to address that there was a reinforcing loop in the system that passenger number was involved, which was unhealthy to the system.
I also realized that instead of like other transportation companies thinking of how might they attract more passengers, what the Shanghai Metro system needed was how to have fewer passengers during peak time and they don’t really care that much about how the tick sale.
2
User Research
Who?
If we wanted to know how to reduce the number of passengers, we needed to know more about them. We decided to learn more about the passengers by having a survey. We were in San Francisco at the time but we managed to find a group of bank workers that were happy to help us and take that online survey.
We found
Metro can be substituted with private vehicles and buses.
People choose to take the metro because of its efficiency and punctuality.
Metro passengers have to endure the crowdedness.
Metro passengers are likely to use phones to spend time.
And obviously, passengers are also not having a good time.
3
Solution
2. Environment
Ecosystem map to map out the environment the passengers were living in.
1. Mobile App
It provides you a metro map, a normal map, and a transfer planning service. Just like a Google map, but smarter. It will tell you complex plans, for example, like take the metro for 2 stations and take a taxi to station 5 and get back to the metro for the most comfortable trip.
It will encourage the passengers to leave the metro system before the incoming crowdedness if the destination station is crowded to take a taxi or take other traffic. It will provide a coupon for the other traffic. It would be easy to manipulate for the government, and also just a much less expenditure or trouble in comparison to an accident in the station due to the crowdedness.
2. Advanced Signage & Instruction
For other people who don’t use smartphones at all, an advanced signage and instruction system for them based on the existing signage design.
4
Reflection
Redundant?
It perhaps sounds redundant, since - of course, it was the people who caused the crowdedness, then why had we done so much work to find out a fact that is so obvious?
I believe it is because we were designing for a system, so it would be different from what we used to do - we needed to consider “people” as a part of the system that we were making changes to, instead of a target that we were making changes for. And since “people” was just a part of a whole system, it was necessary to go over the entire system.
Also, during this project, I realized that solving problem on a system level not only needs me to solve the problem itself but also the reason that caused this problem and the consequences it will cause.
Future Improvements
I am not very satisfied with the solution we came up with in the end. Throughout the project we considered, analyzed problems on the system level, but when it came to designing the actual solution, I think my mind just fall back to the mindset that I was used to - the way we design products for users.
The two parts of our solution have some function to change the system though, they should still be considered as products for users. As I am revisiting all the material now, I think I should come up with something that can change on a system level, like a twist of the rule of the system.