UX Testing for Public Infrastructure

You make an interesting point, that the lifespan of public infrastructure can often outlive the culture in which it was born. Adaptive reuse is an example of how we can retrofit our current values and understandings into what already exists, but that is a complex subject.

In some way, Architects and Engineers already do and have thought this way for a long time. At least good Architects do and others try. Design Thinking began partly from studying Architecture schools but the understanding was never fed back into them. I studied at three Architecture schools, all distinctly different in their culture and approach (albeit all in the same country) but one principle was the same; an underlying philosophy of empathetic design for (users). Designs that demonstrated understanding and amenity for those who would use them were always preferred over those showing only technical or creative novelty for their own sake.

I can't say that automatically translates into the overall practice of industry, of course there are competing economic and personal demands for our time, however it's the basis in which most were taught. Architects I've spoken to (read anecdotally) about Design Thinking tend to baulk at the idea that their process can be distilled into a rigid framework of processes, methods and tools. In fact that's a common mindset for those in creative work - it's the old human vs. machine thing, reproducibility, death of the artist, reaction from the industrial age still playing out, you see this in generative design for form finding, DALL-E-2 etc.). And unfortunately in most large public infrastructure projects, the Architect is long gone, or on their last few billable hours by the time handover and commissioning come for them to verify. Even then, any changes or rectifications could be a strain on the usually already tight schedule and exhausted budget.

Technical requirements are a core part of Architectural, Civil and Urban design, and use various regimes of testing that match the historic limitations of complexity and human capacity. You test that something can perform under a small set of defined conditions, usually set by regulators as a way of mitigating health and safety risks to the public based on a combination of shared common knowledge and historic lessons learned from disasters. That's the way it's done. Do we go back and continuously test, add new tests to the suite for an already constructed bridge when knowledge changes? no. If you discovered a previously unknown fatal flaw, what is your liability ethically, and how would our economic system impact? It's best not to look if you don't want to find anything that could ruin you.

And, what I've alluded to mostly so far is that what we have is a system that will generally favor creation of economic value over anything else when push comes to shove because that is the core of capitalism. Yes, outcomes are on a spectrum of the original example, to the numerous stupid things we see in our own locales every day. Higher quality (in this case in design) usually means higher cost. Why should we pay to possibly make people happier?

Promote the value of happiness.

I appreciate the piece; the topic is something I wouldn't have considered without reading it.