Collection of Emerging Infrastructures

How might we combine available resources to create a greater impact?

Based on the patterns that we identified among the recent interventions, we curated a collection of emerging infrastructures from mobility, food, healthcare, leisure & entertainment, and retail industries. These archetypes of infrastructures demonstrate a tactical use of new and existing infrastructures that are able to translate public health policies and guidelines into practical and accessible offerings that give shape to healthier and safer interactions.

Each archetype is supported by a public health rationale that explains the scientific foundations of this infrastructural intervention.

Mobility Industry

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions of people to stay in their homes and deeply disrupted the mobility industry. As countries re-open and loosen their measures, enabling safe and accessible transportation for all depended on cooperation of private and public organizations to iterate on mobility infrastructures. The following examples from the domains of airlines and public transport illustrate how organizations combine resources to enable safer interactions through the public transport services.

MASK SURVEILLANCE
Within the mobility sector, specifically, public transportation and ridesharing services, ensuring the safety of passengers and service providers highly depends on compliance with personal protective equipment (PPE) requirements. Through new service touch-points, PPE is communicated, distributed, monitored, and enforced for riders.

MOBILITY CORRIDORS
As the social distancing measures limited the mobility of residents in public spaces, municipalities around the world started to close streets to vehicle traffic to create more space for pedestrians and enable alternative ways to commute.

CROWD MANAGEMENT
Ensuring physical distancing in airports is a major component of minimizing the risk of viral transmission among passengers and airport staff. In order to overcome this challenge airports deploy integrated crowd management solutions that consist of a combination of measures such as communication and facilitation of physical distancing, as well as AI-enabled monitoring and enforcement of measures.

Food Industry

Among the other aspects of daily life, food purchase habits have been changing as a result of the pandemic. With people working from home, and unable to socialize at catering venues, all stakeholders in the food production and distribution network have been adapting their operations and offerings to address the changing needs and financially sustain themselves.

FROM FARM TO TABLE
With restaurants shutting down during the pandemic, most farmers lost their largest revenue source. Demand from restaurants by people who now need to cook at home. Farmers have on-boarded new strategies such as building hyper-local businesses and online presence, switching to faster-growing crops, and cutting the middlemen from their sales operations.

FOOD DISTRIBUTION
With the social distancing measures in place, restaurants had to change the way they serve their customers. Faced with constraints on indoor dining, restaurants expanded food delivery offerings, started to sell groceries at their venue and offer meal kits as a means of sustaining their business. In response to the changes, retail stores have also expanded their offerings to sell pre-packaged restaurant food.

THIRD SPACE
In addition to the limited capacity of on-site dinning, getting customers to confidently eat restaurant food remains one of industry’s biggest obstacles. Catering industry is inventing creative ways to enforce social distancing and make their dining spaces seem more lively to attract customers.

VIRTUAL CARE
In order to minimize the risk of infectious transmission, patients utilize video conferencing to connect with health service providers. Medical professionals utilize electronic medical records for data exchange and there is a growing need for building protocols to improve interoperability of healthcare services.

SPECULATIVE VACCINE ADMINISTRATION
In order to achieve herd immunity, at least 70 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated. This speculative vaccine administration infrastructure highlights multiple components of private and public infrastructures that can be used to communicate public messages for vaccination and accessibly administer vaccines.

ACTIVE SURGE-PREPAREDNESS
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the rigid healthcare infrastructure in many aspects, including the availability of hospital beds, stock of personal protective equipment, and hospitals’ capacity to prevent infectious transmission during a massive surge in patient numbers. Healthcare providers are employing different measures to prevent future disruptions in hospitals’ capacity to provide life-saving services.

Leisure & Entertainment Industry

Accommodation businesses have been heavily impacted by the loss of customers over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to build the trust of users to travel and ensure their safety, industry players have been implementing a series of new services that combine the competencies of their entrepreneurial ecosystem and re-purpose technology to enable new interactions.

ACCOMMODATION + CATERING
During the pandemic, most hotels have been unable to continue their indoor food services due to safety concerns. As a result, hotels and other hospitality providers are partnering with local food service providers to experiment with new food service models to cater to the needs of their users.

SPACE CATERING
Hotels are re-purposing their spaces to cater the needs of remote workers who struggle to find a place to have focused work without getting exposed to health risks. Some hotels are partnering with co-working space to take advantage of their expertise in re- purposing vacant hotel spaces to work without exposure to health risks.

DIGITAL TOOLS
In order to ensure the safety of their users, hotels have been incorporating digital solutions into multiple touch points within their space with the aim of minimizing surface contact and interaction with staff.

CONTACTLESS MEDICAL DELIVERY
The public health imperatives of stay-at-home orders and quarantine imposed major constraints on the services of pharmaceutical suppliers and retailers. In order to deliver necessary medical supplies to quarantined or hard-to-reach areas, pharmaceutical suppliers have been partnering with tech-powered logistics providers. These partnerships allow organizations to deliver medical supplies to the people in need by minimizing the risk of infection of employees and users.

TOUCHLESS RETAIL SPACES
Retailers have been adapting their touchpoints with users in order to minimize the risk of viral transmission between customers and employees. Some retailers have been deploying self-service and cashless pop-up stores in hospitals and quarantine areas in order to supply food and essential groceries to frontline workers. In urban areas, many retailers have been converting their stores into delivery hubs in order to provide same-day-delivery and curbside pickup options to residents.

PRE-PURCHASE EXPERIENCE
Stay-at-home orders accelerated the digitalization of services in the retail industry and increased the adoption of existing technologies for e-commerce customer experience. Retailers sorted different solutions to mimic the in-store pre-purchase experience to build the trust of customers to shop online.

Cross Industries

CONTACT TRACING
Countries that deployed contact tracing systems to slow down the spread of virus share the same rationale yet have various ways of translating it into concrete solutions depending on multiple contextual factors including governance and culture. The system of contact tracing requires the support of law and policy, collaboration between different entities, infrastructures that can exchange data, and the availability of personal devices for location-based data collection.

MOVING FORWARD
What if we could center design practices around public health?

Implications for Design
& Public Health

The disruption brought about by the pandemic has radically changed the ways humans interact with each other and their environments. In the midst of this transition, businesses have sought to translate public health policies into practical, accessible solutions to reshape everyday life, which call for an integration of design and public health practices. Without this essential combination, organizations cannot expect to improve their capacity to translate scientifically grounded policies into systems of offerings that will address public health imperatives.

Addressing the Needs
of Populations

In order to control the spread of the novel coronavirus, public health guidelines and policies have imposed major constraints on the ways individuals interact with each other and their surroundings. Faced with the urgent imperatives of protecting lives and restoring the economy, businesses had to prioritize the common good over the expectations of their individual users. This recognition of mutual accountability—employers, employees, and customers engaging together in constraining the pandemic—is replacing the one-way relationship between service providers and their users. When the well-being of society depends on mutual accountability across daily interactions, businesses need to expand their definition of the user to accommodate the needs of entire populations.

New Options for
Choice Architectures

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the risk and cost of previously unnoticed microbial transmission that occurs throughout our daily interactions. Having to adapt their service offerings to minimize the risk of microbial transmission, businesses have faced a dilemma between ensuring compliance with public health imperatives and satisfying the needs and expectations of their users. Overcoming this apparent quandary depends on the capacity of businesses to present their users with alternative choices for accessing their services while actually motivating new behavior, rather than merely policing and enforcing public health measures. To present practical and inclusive choices for their users, businesses need to consider the pillars of science and social justice at the level of infrastructure.

Value-Based
& Purposeful

Upon facing major public health challenges that they were not equipped to tackle, organizations have started to recognize public health as an integral part of their resilience. Many of them are developing internal capacity, bringing public health expertise to the core of their operations7. While such expansion results from the economic devastation caused by this pandemic, the field of public health is broader and more consequential than the current set of imperatives. As businesses start to incorporate public health expertise into their structures, multiple dimensions of the field will become visible. Organizations that are able to adopt a holistic understanding of public health—and demonstrate that insight within and across their purpose, operations, and offerings - will certainly have a greater understanding of the various disruptions we are yet to face.