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

Using Gamification to Motivate Students with Dyslexia

The concept of gamification is receiving increasing attention, particularly for its potential to motivate students. However, to date the majority of studies in the context of education have predominantly focused on University students. This paper explores how gamification could potentially benefit a specific student population, children with dyslexia who are transitioning from primary to secondary school. Two teachers from specialist dyslexia teaching centres used classDojo, a gamification platform, during their teaching sessions for one term. We detail how the teachers appropriated the platform in different ways and how the students discussed classDojo in terms of motivation. These findings have subsequently informed a set of provisional implications for gamification distilling opportunities for future pedagogical uses, gamification design for special education and methodological approaches to how gamification is studied

Demanding by Design: Supporting Effortful Communication Practices in Close Personal Relationships

The investment of effort into personal communication can be highly meaningful to people, and has particular significance for the mediation of close relationships. This paper presents qualities of effort investment that are seen to be valuable. Furthermore, we consider how these qualities might sensitise designers of communication technologies to the meaningfulness of effort. We report a qualitative study focusing on individual descriptions of meaningful effort invested into everyday correspondence. We encapsulate our findings in the form of five qualities that characterise valued effort: discretionary investment, personal craft, focused time, responsiveness to the recipient, and challenge to a sender’s capacities. Drawing on ideas generated in brainstorming sessions, we present two illustrative concepts for new communication technologies, highlighting how our findings can guide the creation of designed artefacts

Connected seeds and sensors: co-designing internet of things for sustainable smart cities with urban food-growing communities.

We present a case study of a participatory design project in the space of sustainable smart cities and Internet of Things. We describe our design process that led to the development of an interactive seed library that tells the stories of culturally diverse urban food growers, and networked environmental sensors from their gardens, as a way to support more sustainable food practices in the city. This paper contributes to an emerging body of empirical work within participatory design that seeks to involve citizens in the design of smart cities and Internet of Things, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. It also contributes empirical work towards non-utilitarian approaches to sustainable smart cities through a discussion of designing for urban diversity and slowness

Mining a MOOC to examine international views of the “Smart City”

Increasing numbers of cities are focussed on using technology to become “Smart”. Many of these Smart City programmes are starting to go beyond a technological focus to also explore the value of a more inclusive approach that values the input of citizens. However, the insights gained from working with citizens are typically focused around a single town or city. In this paper we explore whether it is possible to understand people’s opinions and views on the Smart City topics of Open Data, privacy and leadership by examining comments left on a Smart City MOOC that has been delivered internationally. In doing so we start to explore whether MOOCs can provide a lens for examining views on different facets of the Smart City agenda from a global audience, albeit limited to the demographic of the typical MOOC user

Season's Greetings: An Analysis of Christmas Card Use

Christmas is the time of year when people reaffirm social connections through the medium of Christmas cards. Although much communication in the modern age is conducted via electronic means, many people continue to send and receive paper-based cards during the festive season. With a view to understanding practices surrounding the use of digital and paper-based media, this paper explores the use of paper-based and electronic Christmas cards among a sample of university students. We describe students’ practices regarding Christmas cards, examining what they do, why they do it, and what they value about both paper and electronic cards. Our analysis leads to a number of design challenges for the development of electronic alternatives to paper-based cards

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

Data Literacy to Support Human-centred Machine Learning

In the past, machine learning applications were mostly developed and deployed in specialist situations where the outputs would be either read by experts, or else interpreted for the public, with the methods hidden from view. In the current data driven society, the general public are increasingly interacting with complex data sets and the outputs of machine learning technologies. Within the domain of the smart city, non-experts are also being brought closer to the design process itself. This paper explores whether improving the overall data literacy of a society can instill within that society a set of core competences that improve the capacity of non-experts in machine learning to engage with machine learning outputs in a more knowledgeable way, or to provide insight and differing perspectives into the design of machine learning applications

“It’s More Like a Letter”: An Exploration of Mediated Conversational Effort in Message Builder

Communication technologies for maintaining close personal relationships are often designed to be lightweight and easy to use. While these properties allow for relationships to be maintained with speed and efficiency, they may come at the expense of more effortful messages that are constructed with thought, time and care. This raises the question of how communication technologies might be designed to provoke moments of effortful maintenance from their users. To explore this question, we designed and implemented Message Builder, a text-based communication system that encourages relational partners to send increasingly long messages. We report findings from a field trial in which 14 dyads used Message Builder for everyday relational maintenance. While some of the effort-provoking features of Message Builder were described as problematic, we found that the system had value in guiding users towards authentic and meaningful effort investments that were valuable within their individual relationships