Creating sustainability through Smart City Projects

Smart Cities are a key mechanism for facilitating sustainability – be that in the use of resources (e.g. energy, water), the running of city infrastructure (e.g. transport) or in terms of social policy (e.g. politics). Using our experience of a Smart City project, MK:Smart, we describe what role citizen-led innovation could have in promoting long-term sustainable change. Beyond this we detail some of the barriers to success we have identified in the hope that design patterns might help us address these challenges

Sensing and visualizing spatial relations of mobile devices

Location information can be used to enhance interaction with mobile devices. While many location systems require instrumentation of the environment, we present a system that allows devices to measure their spatial relations in a true peer-to-peer fashion. The system is based on custom sensor hardware implemented as USB dongle, and computes spatial relations in real-time. In extension of this system we propose a set of spatialized widgets for incorporation of spatial relations in the user interface. The use of these widgets is illustrated in a number of applications, showing how spatial relations can be employed to support and streamline interaction with mobile devices

A Tale of Evaluation and Reporting in UK Smart Cities

Global trends towards urbanisation are associated with wide-ranging challenges and opportunities for cities. Smart technologies create new opportunities for a range of smart city development and regeneration programmes designed to address the environmental, economic and social challenges concentrated in cities. Whilst smart city programmes have received much publicity, there has been much less discussion about evaluation of smart city programmes and the measurement of their outcomes for cities. Existing evaluation approaches have been criticised as non-standard and inadequate, focusing more on implementation processes and investment metrics than on the impacts of smart city programmes on strategic city outcomes and progress. To examine this, the SmartDframe project conducted research on city approaches to the evaluation of smart city projects and programmes, and reporting of impacts on city outcomes. This included the ‘smarter’ UK cities of Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough. City reports and interviews with representative local government authorities informed the case study analysis. The report provides a series of smart city case studies that exemplify contemporary city practices, offering a timely, insightful contribution to city discourse about best practice approaches to evaluation and reporting of complex smart city projects and programmes

Communication on Smart City Evaluation and Reporting In UK cities: Pilots, Demos and Experiments Case

Global trends towards urbanisation are associated with wide-ranging challenges and opportunities for cities. Smart technologies create new opportunities for a range of smart city development and regeneration programmes designed to address the environmental, economic and social challenges concentrated in cities. Whilst smart city programmes have received much publicity, there has been much less discussion about the evaluation and measurement of smart city programme outcomes. Existing evaluation approaches have been criticised as non-standard and inadequate, focusing more on implementation processes and investment metrics than on city outcomes and the impacts of smart city programmes. Addressing this, the SmartDframe project aimed to examine city approaches to the evaluation of smart city projects and programmes and reporting of their impacts on city outcomes. A number of ‘smarter’ UK cities were invited to participate, with agreement by city authorities from Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough to be interviewed about their smart city work. The findings provide a series of smart city case studies that exemplify contemporary city practices, offering a timely, insightful contribution to city discourse about existing and best practice approaches to evaluation and reporting of complex smart city projects and programmes

Urban Data in the primary classroom: bringing data literacy to the UK curriculum

As data becomes established as part of everyday life, the ability for the average citizen to have some level of data literacy is increasingly important. This paper describes an approach to teaching data skills in schools using real life, complex, urban data sets collected as part of a smart city project. The approach is founded on the premise that young learners have the ability to work with complex data sets if they are supported in the right way and if the tasks are grounded in a real life context. Narrative principles are used to frame the task, to assist interpretation and tell stories from data and to structure queries of datasets. An inquiry-based methodology organises the activities. This paper describes the initial trial in a UK primary school in which twelve students aged 9-10 years learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, by interpreting existing visualisations of smart meter data and data obtained from aerial survey. Additional trials are scheduled with older learners which will evaluate learners on more challenging data handling tasks. The trials are informing the development of the Urban Data School, a web-based platform designed to support teaching data skills in schools in order to improve data literacy among school leavers

Smart objects as building blocks for the internet of things

The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as nearfield communications, real-time localization, and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment. Such objects are building blocks for the Internet of Things and enable novel computing applications. As a step toward design and architectural principles for smart objects, the authors introduce a hierarchy of architectures with increasing levels of real-world awareness and interactivity. In particular, they describe activity-, policy-, and process-aware smart objects and demonstrate how the respective architectural abstractions support increasingly complex application

Participatory Data Analysis: A New Method for Investigating Human Energy Practices

This paper presents a novel data-driven method to investigate the interdependence between technology design and human energy practices. The method – called Participatory Data – makes use of fine-grained energy data collected via smart meters and smart plugs, and behaviour visualisation during home visits to spark self-reflection among householders

Creating an Understanding of Data Literacy for a Data-driven Society

Society has become increasingly reliant on data, making it necessary to ensure that all citizens are equipped with the skills needed to be data literate. We argue that the foundations for a data literate society begin by acquiring key data literacy competences in school. However, as yet there is no clear definition of what these should be. This paper explores the different perspectives currently offered on both data and statistical literacy and then critically examines to what extent these address the data literacy needs of citizens in today’s society. We survey existing approaches to teaching data literacy in schools, to identify how data literacy is interpreted in practice. Based on these analyses, we propose a definition of data literacy that is focused on employing an inquiry-based approach to using data to understand real world phenomena. The contribution of this paper is the creation of a common foundation for teaching and learning data literacy skills