Interaction Type: Sidewalk
Jane Jacobs highlighted the importance of the sidewalk for the life of a city. A sidewalk is a place of gathering, of community. A sidewalk also creates safety by having an ever present “eyes on the street”.
But within entrepreneurship, the sidewalk also does a number of other things.
Enforces the normal
The glimpses caught on the street of the men in the business suits, the women with child carriages, or on the flip side, women in business suits and men pushing carriages, within a five minute walk you can see what kind of society you are immersed in by the minute interactions you encounter between people, what they are wearing, what they are talking about. A lot of people do not directly know a women or minority that has started their own company, and so it becomes a more impossible task to imagine yourself as an entrepreneur. By having stories of successful entrepreneurs around you, at first it is surprising, and opens up the possibility that you could follow this path as well. But over time it becomes normal to see these people in this light.
Lower Barriers through Design
Low barrier to starting, by having makerspaces and incubators obvious from the street. There is the ability to glance in, see how ideas are progressing, to feel like they wouldn’t be intruders for coming in and talking more with the people in the space.
Real-World FTUE
In tech there is the idea of the FTUE, or the First Time User Experience. The goal of the FTUE is to make it as easy as possible to make people invest more in the platform and come back. This idea can be applied city-wide by consciously designing
How to Build Innovative Sidewalks
- Hang stories of successful entrepreneurs from the area, especially if these stories are from minorities and women. As it becomes more normal to see these people with these roles in the urban environment, it becomes less of a shock when these people are seen on the stage or in the boardroom.
- Places for people to brainstorm and for others to “catch” parts of conversations.
- Locate incubators, accelerators, and makerspaces close to the sidewalk with large windows so that people outside of the community know what is happening there, and feel comfortable going in and asking.
- Make “next steps” to get involved easy. On the posters of innovative people, add in next events that people can go to in order to join in. In the makerspaces and incubators, have a big board that says what companies or projects people are working on in the space. Include future events that residents can go to. Everywhere, look for ways to make it easy for people to be more engaged in the space.
