Pi-Live: The City That Forgot 400,000 People Had Places to Be …
Adem Awol
Category: Urban Mobility / Civic Technology
TL;DR: Pi-Live: Mobility, But Make It Actually Accessible
A fully accessible mobility platform for Addis Ababa's most excluded commuters, designed by someone who had passionately volunteered for the job without prior consent.
Pi-Live is an accessibility-first mobility platform for Addis Ababa’s excluded commuters, especially residents with disabilities who are locked out of reliable transport because apparently “getting somewhere” became a premium feature.
It connects the full loop: rider app, driver app, admin dashboard, dispatch, live tracking, payments, emergency reporting, and multilingual accessible UI.
Figma Link (Proof This Was Not Just a Beautifully Worded Panic Attack)
Lesson: What Pi-Live Taught Me, Besides Involuntary Civic Responsibility
Accessibility is not a feature to add at the end. It is the foundation. Designing for the most constrained user consistently produces the most usable product for everyone.
Client communication is a design problem. If the client cannot explain why a decision was made, the product will drift toward what they imagined rather than what their users need.
Scope without a shared definition of "MVP" becomes a negotiation at every single step. Write it down. Agree on it early. Repeat it often.
A working core loop that generates real data is more valuable than a polished system no one has tested yet. Ship the pilot. Learn from the data.
Some battles will be lost. The logo. The compromises. Let them go. Fight for the decisions that directly affect the user experience and release the rest.
Pi-Live is still in motion. The problem it is solving is real, urgent, and largely invisible to everyone who does not live it daily.
Whether the pilot runs perfectly or needs several hard corrections, this project has already proved one thing: designing for excluded users is not a niche concern or a charity case. It is exactly where design does its most meaningful work.
And sometimes, it takes a cousin forcing you into a project for that to become obvious.
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Posted May 29, 2026
Designed Pi-Live, an accessibility-first mobility platform for Addis Ababa’s excluded commuters, because movement should not be premium DLC.
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