Probing Permanent, Temporary, and Situational Exclusion in Public Transportation with a Generative Design Toolkit

Public transportation systems play a pivotal role in ensuring equitable access to urban resources. However, marginalized demographics frequently encounter complex forms of exclusion while using various modes of public transportation. This is often a result of inadequate citizen participation and flawed quantitative requirement capture methods that neglect to include the voices of marginalized users. This paper presents a participatory research study aimed at co-producing knowledge pertaining to Permanent, Temporary, and Situational Exclusion. Our study deployed scaled-down mannequins in a generative toolkit in participatory design workshops with female bus users in a Tier II city of India. The participatory making sessions catalyzed the articulation of distinctive viewpoints on exclusion by participants. Consequently, daily negotiations, latent requirements, and design deficiencies in existing infrastructure, often concealed from conventional research methods, were revealed when participants were involved in designing safe buses for their own use. We found that the making session encouraged the workshop participants to discuss exclusions in a humane manner, bringing up their past experience of dealing with these situations and suggesting empathetic design solutions.