Amplifying Quiet Voices: Challenges and Opportunities for Participatory Design at an Urban Scale

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design activities are somewhat limited. In this paper, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a smart city project. Through analysing the nature of citizens’ concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising participatory design at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city

GeoCoin:supporting ideation and collaborative design with location-based smart contracts

Design and HCI researchers are increasingly working with complex digital infrastructures, such as cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. These technologies will have a profound impact on digital systems and their audiences. However, given their emergent nature and technical complexity, involving non-specialists in the design of applications that employ these technologies is challenging. In this paper, we discuss these challenges and present GeoCoin, a location-based platform for embodied learning and speculative ideating with smart contracts. In collaborative workshops with GeoCoin, participants engaged with location-based smart contracts, using the platform to explore digital `debit' and `credit' zones in the city. These exercises led to the design of diverse distributed-ledger applications, for time-limited financial unions, participatory budgeting, and humanitarian aid. These results contribute to the HCI community by demonstrating how an experiential prototype can support understanding of the complexities behind new digital infrastructures and facilitate participant engagement in ideation and design processes

Defining and assessing the transformational nature of smart city governance: Insights from four European cases

Smart cities are a new approach to urban development based on the extensive use of information and communication technologies and on the promotion of environmental sustainability, economic development and innovation. The article is aimed at discussing whether the adoption of a smart city approach entails the transformation of existing institutional structures and administrative practices. To this end, four cases of European smart cities are analysed: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Turin and Vienna. The article describes their models of governance, investigates the level of transformation that occurred in their governmental structures, outlines the main drawbacks and identifies possible connections with the emergent paradigm of the New Public Governance

Co-designing smart home technology with people with dementia or Parkinson's disease

Involving users is crucial to designing technology successfully, especially for vulnerable users in health and social care, yet detailed descriptions and critical reflections on the co-design process, techniques and methods are rare. This paper introduces the PERCEPT (PERrsona-CEntred Participatory Technology) approach for the co-design process and we analyse and discuss the lessons learned for each step in this process. We applied PERCEPT in a project to develop a smart home toolset that will allow a person living with early stage dementia or Parkinson's to plan, monitor and self-manage his or her life and well-being more effectively. We present a set of personas which were co-created with people and applied throughout the project in the co-design process. The approach presented in this paper will enable researchers and designers to better engage with target user groups in co-design and point to considerations to be made at each step for vulnerable users

An IoT-based solution for monitoring a fleet of educational buildings focusing on energy efficiency

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage iskey to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examinesways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both theusers (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizenś behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system's high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies andservices in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer newapp-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency ofthebuilding. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisionedhere (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity

Lessons learned in effective community-university-industry collaboration models for smart and connected communities research

In 2017, the Boston University Hariri Institute for Computing and the Initiative on Cities co-hosted two workshops on “Effective Community-University-Industry Collaboration Models for Smart and Connected Communities Research,” with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF). These efforts brought together over one hundred principal investigators and research directors from universities across the country, as well as city officials, community partners, NSF program managers and other federal agency representatives, MetroLab Network representatives and industry experts. The focus was on transdisciplinary “smart city” projects that bring technical fields such as engineering and computer science together with social scientists and community stakeholders to tackle community-sourced problems. Presentations, panel discussions, working sessions and participant white papers surfaced operational models as well as barriers and levers to enabling effective research partnerships. To capture the perspectives and beliefs of all participants, in addition to the presenters, attendees were asked to synthesize lessons on each panel topic. This white paper summarizes the opportunities and recommendations that emerged from these sessions, and provides guidance to communities and researchers interested in engaging in these types of partnerships as well as universities and funders that endeavor to nurture them. It draws on the collective wisdom of the assembled participants and the authors. While many of the examples noted are drawn from medium and large cities, the lessons may still be applicable to communities of various sizes.National Science Foundatio

Mapping Participatory Sensing and Community-led Environmental Monitoring Initiatives: Making Sense H2020 CAPS Project

This report presents a summary of the state of the art in urban participatory sensing and community-led environmental monitoring, the types of engagement approaches typically followed, contextual examples of current developments in this field, and current challenges and opportunities for successful interventions. The goal is to better understand the field and possible options for reflection and action around it, in order to better inform future conceptual and practical developments inside and outside the Making Sense project.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic