In search of a theme: infrastructure and logistics

I have spent a great deal of the last two days thinking about the interface between public and private good, social and individual benefits and pain points and how one can hone in on a theme which relates to the issues we have been talking about over the last few weeks. I have been reading articles and listening to podcasts and looking for inspiration anywhere I could find it. I have tried to avoid thinking of solutions but designed the framework within which we can collectively create potential solutions in terms of pain points and opportunities, personas and use cases.

In the end I have two favourite use cases. One relates to the interface between age and loneliness with e-commerce. The environment I imagine, which is common all over London and other cities in the UK, is the block of former council flats which now contains a combination of former council tenants, many of whom are ageing and young professionals. I know that this is a solution but it is only intended to provide thoughts. How about if the immobile volunteered (and were vetted) to become recipients for e-commerce deliveries. That way they would be visited/checked up on by the delivery person and the parcel recipient, and they could ask the recipient to bring a newspaper or a box of eggs when they came to pick up their parcel. Connections could be made and communities strengthened.

The other use case is the problem of enforcing the delivery zones in busy streets or the interface between local government urban rules and commerce to enable commerce and allow free flow of traffic and pedestrians. How would it be if loading bays had sensors and delivery vehicles licenses to use particular bays which came with a chip that could be picked up by the sensor which would also recognise when a vehicle was parked that did not have the required chip. Enforcement officers would then receive a message if there was a vehicle parked there that did not match. Hopefully this would prove a deterrent. It could also be linked to time of day.