Designing for Trust
Technology is changing your office, home, neighbourhood and local park. Trust is more important than ever.
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I grew up in a largely pre-tech era, but technology has always been part of my life. My family were early adopters of tech and had a level of dedication to Apple I can’t help but admire. This was the 1990s, remember, before Apple was cool. We had a Mac Plus when everyone else had Commodores, and over the years we somehow collected nearly every model from the 80s through to the new colourful iMacs of the late 90s and to today’s MacBook. Even today, when I rummage through old cupboards at my parents’ house, I’ll find an old Mac hiding behind closet doors, behind childhood games and old artwork.
Technology was always there — but it wasn’t everywhere.
It wasn’t in my pocket, in my glasses, in my ears. It was still something you opted into. These days, that line has blurred.
Professionally, as an urban designer, the most significant shift I’ve seen in public space over the past two decades is the addition of a digital layer. It started with things like CCTV and WiFi towers, but now includes EV charging stations, real-time pedestrian counters, smart bins, and environmental sensors. These change how space is used, who it’s designed for, and even who feels welcome. It affects not just our places but human interactions - more on The Future on Loneliness here.
I had a front-row seat to some of these changes during my work with Sidewalk Labs, Google’s bold (and now defunct) experiment in creating a “smart city” from scratch. It was ambitious, and many ideas were innovative from a technical point of view — but somewhere along the way, it forgot the most important thing: that cities are for people. Not tech stacks. Not efficiency metrics. People.
Cities aren’t systems to optimise. They’re lived experiences. They are messy, human, full of competing needs and contradictions, and that’s why they matter. It also makes trust the most important metric to consider.
Embacing a Toronto winter at one of the research sites for Sidewalk Labs
Merging of worlds
Today, we are still in the early stages of what’s to come. The much-maligned word “phygital” (please, someone come up with a better term) describes this merging of physical and digital worlds - I wrote more about Phygital Spaces here.
But it’s not just about adding tech to place. That’s the easy part. The real shift is in what it means for how we live.
The future of place isn’t just more tech. It’s the convergence of different worlds:
Home is now also work
Work is now also wellness
Streets are now also data collectors
Libraries are now digital hubs and local internet provides
Your phone is also access to your doctor, your gym, your school, and your childcare.
These shifts redefine the meaning of place entirely. And for leaders — city-makers, architects, planners, developers, and policymakers — there are big questions to ask.
One thing that we don’t have the option to do is to do nothing.
Designing for Trust: Three key questions to ask
Before we get too excited about drone taxi’s and robot home deliveries, Here’s 3 that come to mind:
Who benefits?
It’s easy to get caught up in the hype—especially when every platform promises smarter, faster, more efficient solutions. But who is actually benefiting? These are critical questions for leaders to answer. This doesn't mean we shouldn't use technology - if anything AI helps make this more democratic, more transparent and greater access to knowledge.
Practically with more implementation of technology systems, particularly in public spaces, it means asking who owns them, who makes decisions, where does the data go? Whose voice is amplified from this information, who might be excluded?
Always asking: What are we optimising for? Who are we optimising for?
Are we designing for transperancy?
If technology is everywhere in our cities and public spaces - do citizens know? Should we know? One of the projects I advised on at Sidewalk Labs was related to ‘Digital Transparency’ in the public realm. The premise was to create a language of symbols of signs that would help understand if data was being collected and tracked. In the same way that you know what a stop sign or a red light means, do you know if there is CCTV or pedestrian counters? - It was an attempt to make the invisible visible. As far as I know, it didn’t go anywhere. But I think its a project to pick up.
Whether its icons and symbols or education and awareness, designing for trust is a really important part of creating inclusive public space.
How are we measuring value?
Most decisions still rely on outdated measures—efficiency, footfall, revenue, occupancy rates. But in this new landscape, we need new definitions of value: ones that account for connection, wellbeing, and long-term community outcomes.
Its easy to sell a shiny project but how often do we go back and evaluate if it worked? To know if it worked we also need to know what value it was expected to deliver. Did you get to know your colleagues better or just work faster? Arguably both are important.
Final thoughts
The future of place is here, but it’s not an algorithm. It’s hybrid. It’s human. And it requires a new kind of leadership: one that requires a high level of transparency and trust.