Heart of Tallinn
A study of infostructure at Tallinn’s busiest crossroads
Heart of Tallinn is a project about urban places – or rather, non-places. In this project, we used systems thinking and service design to overhaul Hobujaama Square, and find some personality and friendliness in one of Tallinn’s busiest traffic crossings.
TIMELINE
Spring 2020
5 months
TYPE OF WORK
Design Research
System Design
Urban Design
Hobujaama Square
Hobujaama Square is a popular crossing, right next to the historic Old Town of Tallinn. It’s surrounded by shopping centers, hotels, and the popular Rotermann neighborhood. Hobujaama also functions as a major bus hub and crossing point for all trams, and is at walking distance from Tallinn’s harbor. While this sounds great, it’s also an unpleasant and cold place, with little comfort or personality.
This situation had been going on for years. Hobujaama Square did not fall into the scope of any of the developmental projects in the area in the past years, and had already turned into an embarrassing eyesore. In collaboration with the Tallinn Strategy Center, we were tasked with developing a new vision of what the Hobujaama square and crossing could become.
Analysis
Our research started with multiple visits to Hobujaama. We scribbled observations on the types of people we saw, mapped out traffic flows, and took loads of pictures. We then took our findings back to the studio, and studied the surrounding areas and the relationship between the square and the city. We gathered all the information we found in a gigamap, which became the base of our research conclusions.
Personas
From there, we categorized the people we saw at Hobujaama. We distinguished four groups, based on their purpose and the amount of time they spent at the square. This helped us to define the roles Hobujaama had to take, and what it was offering now.
Missing the Mark
"It's not trying to be pleasant, it's just a transit place—and it's failing at that, too."We quickly concluded that Hobujaama was missing the mark in a lot of ways.
The square is surrounded by popular places that draw lots of visitors, and many people cross the square on their daily commutes. It’s also on-route for many tourists. But while Hobujaama is surrounded by shops, attractions and services, the square itself doesn’t have anything to offer to the people that visit it.
Instead, Hobujaama felt more like a transit place: a connection point between destinations. The many bus- and tramlines and heavy pedestrian traffic supported this idea. But at the same time, the traffic situation at Hobujaama was clearly unsafe and inefficient. Pedestrians, bikes and e-scooters were mixed together, to everyone’s annoyance, while nobody felt safe from the cars buzzing through the streets.
Meta Research: What Makes a Good Public Space?
Besides analyzing Hobujaama, we also started researching the characteristics of good public spaces. This not only helped us understand how to create them, it showed us why they are vital in the first place. A diverse landscape of high quality public spaces is absolutely vital to the living quality of a city. Public spaces provide us with services, experiences, social interactions, culture, and make us feel like we belong.
Based on our research we found four core values of good public spaces: ownership, a welcoming feeling, a generation of interest, and built-in opportunities for social interaction. This might sounds like a tall order, and sometimes public spaces turn into highly orchestrated ecosystems, trying to get everything just right. But if you look closely, you’ll see that a simple market square ticks all of these boxes.
Creating a Vision: The Heart of Tallinn
Based on our research, and through many iterations, we developed a vision of what Hobujaama Square could be. We decided to embrace its current nature as a transit place, and build a solid public space with a distinct personality from there.
We envisioned Hobujaama as a heart in a triple metaphor: a central place in the city, a place that people flow through, and a place that “beats” with life. The seeds of those components were already in place, but they needed a guiding vision and a strong plan to be brought to existence.
We summarized our core needs for Hobujaama as passing through efficiently, pleasantly, and meaningfully, and arranged them as a hierarchy of needs.
Bringing the Heart to Life
To realize our vision of Hobujaama as an efficient, pleasant and meaningful transit place, we defined two domains that needed our attention. We needed to overhaul Hobujaama’s infrastructure, and add a new layer of infostructure on top.
Step 1: Infrastructure
For a major transit area, Hobujaama was horribly inefficient. At the main crossing, cars, trams and busses compete for space, while pedestrians converge on small islands in the middle of traffic, waiting for their turn to move. On the northern side of the crossing, two large pedestrian spaces are split by an underutilized road, resulting in a disconnected urban space.
In our proposal, we removed the islands in the crossing, so pedestrians can wait without being surrounded by cars. We then proposed to close the northern road for cars, and redirect the traffic around the area. This creates one large plaza where pedestrians can freely move, while leaving room for public transport.
To separate bikes and scooters from pedestrians, we placed a mobility lane in the middle of the plaza. These mobility lanes are slowly being developed in Tallinn, and Hobujaama can be connected to the existing network.
Step 2: Infostructure
Many places lead to other places, but with Hobujaama we decided to take it one step further: the core function of the square is to guide you to your next destination. To do that, Hobujaama needed a solid wayfinding system, that’s useful to everyone in the area.
We wanted to use the wayfinding system to create a unique personality for Hobujaama. Through many iterations, we came to a line-based navigation system, embedded into the surface of the plaza and sidewalks.
The lines create a playful network of linked elements on the square. The combination of the lines with words and icons give direction and information at the same time, leading to local shops and services, cultural references, or away from the neighborhood, to the next destination.
While we liked the lines in the ground, we wanted to push them a bit further. In our design, the lines leap from the ground to form benches, screens, mild barriers, and other elements that give personality to the square.
Lessons Learned
Communication is Key
This project started right before covid-19 drove us out of our studio. We were suddenly struggling to make things work over video calls, something completely foreign to us. We also quickly learned the nuance of communication can easily be lost in a voice call, especially when tensions run high. But in the end we made it work, and we felt extra proud because of it!
Less is More
We spent the majority of our project trying to do EVERYTHING, from cultural references to fountains to ferry times and shopping tips. We drowned ourselves in possibilities, until we realized we were never going to find a coherent concept underneath. In the final phase we cut down to 20% of our ideas, and built the Heart of Tallinn from there.