Co-design of use patterns to rethink offline activities through civic technologies

In this paper, we describe one of the methodologies used to co-design a civic platform oriented to support local project and activities carried out by different stakeholders operating in the city. Combining storytelling, gaming and sketching, we defined with them a set of use patterns to integrate social network technologies in offline activities, highlighting the strong connection between analogical and digital tools

City Data Plan: the conceptualisation of a policy instrument for data governance in smart cities

This paper presents the conceptualisation of the City Data Plan, a data governance policy instrument intended to connect the production and use of urban data in a comprehensive and evolutive long-term strategy aligned with city development goals. The concept of the City Data Plan had been elaborated by taking into account current issues related to privacy and manipulation of data in smart city. The methodological approach adopted to define the nature of a City Data Plan is grounded on the conceptual and empirical parallelism with corporate data governance plans and general urban plans, respectively aimed to regulate decision-making powers and actions on data in enterprise contexts, and the interests of local stakeholders in the access and use of urban resources. The result of this analytic process is the formulation of the outline of a City Data Plan as a data governance policy instrument to support the iterative negotiation between the instances of data producers and data users for instantiating shared smart city visions. The conceptualisation of the City Data Plan includes a description of the multi-stakeholder organisational structures for the city data governance, cooperation protocols and decision areas, responsibilities assignments, components of the plan and its implementation mechanisms

Building City Mirrors: structuring design-driven explorations of future web-based technologies for local development

This paper presents the design-driven approach applied to investigate how web-based technologies can support local development actions in urban contexts. The key elements of this approach are a design proposal, a conceptual framework working as knowledge infrastructure for the design and research explorations, and a research strategy for systematically investigating the variations of the design proposals and the different aspects of the conceptual framework. The design proposal of the City Mirrors envisions a multi-actor, multi-purpose, and multi-scale digital environment reflecting the key aspects of city development processes. The conceptual framework associated with the proposal is based on the three axes of Users’ representation, City Ecosystem and forms of technological support. The research strategy is developed across multiple case studies to analyse the practical implications of proposing alternatives to current technologies in various settings and intervening in the city context through different types of web-based technologies. Relying on these three components, the presented approach addresses the design problem of web-based technologies supporting competing goals and a wide range of applicative scenarios in its explanatory and prescriptive aspects

Readapting Propp’s character archetypes to explore the relational dimension of city data: a design-oriented approach

This paper presents the approach and tools created to critically investigate the roles and relationships among city stakeholders regarding data-related processes, in order to inform future design solutions for open data portals. The approach to explore the relational dimension of data in local activities is based on mapping the operational roles of the organizations involved in the city data ecosystem throughout a set of archetypes readapted from the characters found in Propp's theory on the narrative structure. A probes toolkit associated with storytelling techniques helped to test the proposed approach during a workshop organized in the city of Milton Keynes. The authors present their motivations and constraints, as well as the rationale regarding the definition of the approach and the construction of the toolkit as part of a design-oriented strategy of inquiry, and discuss the insights gained in the testing experience

Developing a meta-language in multidisciplinary research projects: the case study of READ-IT

This paper presents the philosophical analysis carried out to analyse the stakeholders’ needs within the READ-IT project to inform the design of an information management system (IMS) for multidisciplinary research on the reading experience in Europe. The presented approach is aimed to build a metalanguage representing the reading under different perspectives for enabling researchers in collaboratively working on data sources tracking the reading phenomenon. The construction of the metalanguage is made through a reasoning-based process of analysis and synthesis of vocabulary, concepts and theories from multiple domains, recomposed in an interactional model of the researchers as intended users of the system, the data sources on reading and the role of technology in between

Readapting Propp's Character Archetypes to Explore the Relational Dimension of City Data: A Design-oriented Approach

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We-planning: participatory process to develop a digital platform for a collaborative governance of city services

Public administration, civil society organizations and private sector are strictly interconnected in re-thinking the management of city services and urban transformations toward new form of integration between top-down programmes and bottom up initiatives. The current web applications are not meant to coordinate heterogeneous stakeholders, their agendas and plans impacting over the public sphere, because usually address one specific task related to the management of the city such as issues reporting, online voting, and community services. Designing a digital platform to support the implicit and explicit continuative collaboration among city players involves the challenge to define a shared framework for all of them, representing the real context of their actions: geolocalised evolving multiple social networks, formal and informal relations protocols, roles and competences, and competing objectives to be mediated. The approach followed to model this kind of framework has been based on a participatory methodology structured in three cycles involving contextual enquiries, processes analysis, co-design activities, software development and testing in operational environments within local projects and initiatives at neighborhoods and urban level. The first cycle led to the outline of the platform intended as contents structure, interfaces, and user basic interactions. In the second cycle, urban dynamics have been defined through use patterns and functionalities in several multi-actors’ collaborative scenarios. The third cycle, currently on-going, is oriented to introduce procedural changes in communication and co-management practices refactoring local processes. Starting from the existing functioning advanced prototype, FirstLife, the future research will continue to build a collaborative planning support system enabling distributed decision making processes, the coordination of independent planning activities regarding physical transformations and social regenerations, and monitoring of the implementation of shared actions

The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast

This working paper explores the consequences for historians' research practice of the twinned transnational and digital turns. The accelerating digitization of historians' sources (scholarly, periodical, and archival) and the radical shift in the granularity of access to information within them has radically changes historians' research practice. Yet this has incited remarkably little reflection regarding the consequences for individual projects or collective knowledge generation. What are the implications for international research in particular? This essay heralds the new kinds of historical knowledge-generation made possible by web access to digitized, text-searchable sources. It also attempts an accounting of all that we formerly, unwittingly, gained from the frictions inherent to international research in an analog world. What are the intellectual and political consequences of that which has been lost