Smart cities will be the standard of urban living, according to the United Nations… but are your needs, as a citizen, being considered?
In this talk, we will reflect, together, on: Why do smart cities need to become people centered? What is really being transformed in the city? How can people become the center of this transformation?
Imagine yourself, living in a city, in 20 years from now…
– Where more than half of the world’s population shifted from rural to urban areas…
…and you will live among them.
– Where hundreds of trillions of dollars/euros have been spent on revolutionary initiatives to change infrastructure, digital technology and interconnected intelligent networks…
…and your data will be its fuel.
– Where smart cities are the standard of urban living…
…and your needs were not considered?
These first part of the statements are not product of your imagination, they are the top three projections from the United Nations for urban living by 2050, so it is important to think about them (or start taking some action).
25. can we design citizen-driven
smart cities?
how
define
Analyze the problem(s) and set a clear
scope to all stakeholders (citizen,
government, services, tech companies,
academics, researchers, etc.)
28. can we design citizen-driven
smart cities?
how
develop
Involve the citizens to dig in the previously
identified problems. Co-design possible
solution.
31. can we design citizen-driven
smart cities?
how
deliver
Present your findings. Learn through feedback
and iterate again.
32. because it leads to living better lives
in harmony with the city.
why should smart cities be
people centered?
33. are you willing to step up and change
from a tech-driven paradigm to a
people-centered one?
what about you?
34. as citizens,
to build the future we want,
we need to have the guts to
step up and
start co-designing it.
(thank you very much!)
Editor's Notes
Hello, I’m Marilia
From the past 10 years I’ve been working in the fields of Usability, User Experience and Customer Experience mostly for telecommunications and recently I focused my carreer on Service Design and I’m working for a non-profit organization that works for public services in Porto, Portugal.
Also, as I am a very passionate advocate for data driven decision, I’ve reclently co-founded the communitu of Design Research Portugal, to share the benefits of research into design and development.
But, no more about me, lets talk about cities!
First, let’s start from the beginning, what is a city: Accorind to Wikipedia, a city is a large human settlement.
This means that a city is a place where there are a lot of humans. And lots of humans means lots movements, lots of communication, lots of interactions, lots of transactions,
and, of course, a lot of data.
First, let’s start from the beginning, what is a city: Accorind to Wikipedia, a city is a large human settlement.
This means that a city is a place where there are a lot of humans. And lots of humans means lots movements, lots of communication, lots of interactions, lots of transactions,
and, of course, a lot of data.
and, of course, a lot of data.
It is the ability to measure, analyse and monitor live data that enalbles the city to become smarter.
All this data gathering, analysis and processing regarding our day-to-day lifes
is it the fuel of smart cities
So, there’s a lot of talk about what a “smart city” is
but most common definitions of smart city are focused on technologies applied to infrastructures, that can form connected networks/systems which communicate with each other
Ok Marília, this sounds great, so why should smart cities be people oriented?
As humans, we love (and desperately need) predictability!
We know if we leave the house before 06:23 in the morning, we can go by car and take a specific route because the streets will be empty and we will get at the office quickly, but if we leave after 07:41, we will need to take the X bus, because we know, by experience, that the Y bus will be crowded at that time, and after that, we will have a connection with the Z train at 08:04 that we couldn’t miss or else our day will be absolutely ruined.
This sounds familiar, right? This is just one example of mobility, but there are other examples, in other areas of our lives in the city.
We need predictability, because..
If we think of our day to day life, we will agree that what we value the most in our daily routine is time:
Sometimes we even think we can manage time! But truth is, we only manage our decisions. We manage what we are going to do in a specific timeframe, because, in fact, we are not really able to manage time itself.
Friendly reminder about this: we should really be deciding every aspect of our lives in order to make the best of the time we have, shouldn’t we?
In addition, there is another major variable, called space (which is forever related to time, of course):
Again, thinking of our day-to-day commuting periods, we also know the routes, paths, roads, vehicle options (or lack of vehicle options), etc, of our daily lives
We navigate space mainly based on time consumption, but, of course, also related with other things, like safety, security, infrastructure or even health-related.
But, as we can acknowledge, there are lots of variables that we consider every day, at different moments (that, sometimes, are mind consuming) and we may not realize it, but we master every little detail of our interactions with the city services.
We do this with the idea that we are managing what we do in specific timeframes and we absolutely hate it when our interactions with the city consume more of our precious time than we expected to.
From a people perspective, all this variables have huge impact in our lives. So, c so we should be considering them when we design a smart city. the understanding of people about smart cities was a lot different than the definition I stated in the beginning.
There was a study made in 2016 about citizen perspectives on the smart city which mentions that:
People assumed that a smart city is “a city that can react day-to-day to its population”. React to the population! This means react to people’s needs, their problems, their struggles, their lives, not to some isolated specific technology events that were monitored at specific times and triggered some specific interactions in specific contexts.
We live in the city, so… the city should help us spare time! Or at least prevent us from spending unnecessary time on our daily activities.
(Thomas, V.; Wang, D.; Mullagh, L.; Dunn, N., 2016),
In that research, people stated that they wanted to know what would be happening, where it would be happening, when it would be happening, and what that would mean for them
— because, as I said:
— people need to have more time for what matters: family, friends, carreer, happiness, love. (adicionar separado)
But now I want to focus on another variable
I want you to think about technology. Think of the most futuristic smart city and picture and imagine in your head.
Most of you thougt of this. In the eighties and nineties, … Then, the paradigm changed, we have been facing a massive need to re-build that software (or design a new one from scratch) with user-centered approaches because that is the way that will make users perform their tasks in a more effective, efficient and happier way. And companies are saving money on the operation and also on training.
It is good to have technology-driven innovation, we’ve seen, for example, from the Ancient Rome that urbanism was designed to fulfil specific military purposes and it out well for the population because they were safe in the city, but, I guess…
…when we are talking about building cities that use our data: shouldn’t we be thinking about people centered city design?
What happens if we repeat this tech-driven approach and spend tons of money – and time - in applying superpowers to the city, without involving the citizens?
(colocar bolds)
Let’s analyze this technology driven cities:
We all know AR, VR, IoT, AI, Smart Sensoring, etc., are the today’s technological tools for enabling city’s smartness.
So let’s see what is really being changed in a tech-driven smart city:
Air pollution control, renewable energy, and waste management. Intelligent, adaptive fast lanes and slow lanes for new ecological vehicles. Fiber optic data networks, intelligent buildings that optimize heating, energy usage, lighting, and ventilation, etc.
A lot of areas are being transformed. And
We all understand that all this technological transformations have real impact on citizens lives, SO, instead of answer technical requirements , every new feature should be answering a citizen problem and the citizen should be part of the solutions.
How can we do that? How can we design people driven smart-cities?
I’m sorry to tell you.. But there is no recipe, I would be lying if I gave you some rules to follow but, in my opinion, we can start by applying some techniques that aim to engage the citizens in being part of the proper definition of the problem(s) and also being part of the solution(s).
From my experience, working for the city of Porto, I can tell you some tips we applied in our projects of designing city services, that really made a difference in our context.
Lets take a look:
In the phase of discovery we Identify the problem, opportunity or needs to be addressed through design.
We made some little changes to the methods we used.
Imagine that we needed to re-design an urban park in the city. We started by gathering some data. In that park there were only 2 chess tables available and data showed us, that people spent a lot of time in the chess tables. So, it was logical that in the re-design of the park, we would, for example, double the number of chess tables.
But data only tells us, what is happening, it does not tells us what is happening. So we went to the field.
We started observing. And we did see a lot of elderly sitted by the chess tables. But they were not playing chess at all!
The reason they spent most of their time there was because those were the only benches that had back support!
So this is part of identifing the problem. Really go after the whys. Instead of doubling the chess tables, we changed the park benches at that was the solution to the real problem.
After discovering, we should start analyzing the outputs of the discovery phase and set a clear brief for sign off by all stakeholders (citizens, tech companies, governments, academics, researchers, etc);
In other project, of a re-design of a city service, that we knew that employees were a very stressed about, we really took some time into interviewing all the managers, all the employees and assess a lot about their pain point, what they valued the most and what were their expectations.
Then we were able to cluster a lot of their pespectives on the issues but it was not enough. We could not make a match between their pain points and the actions they were making.
We decided to do a complete journey mapping and focused on theire real activities.
And oh boy…. There was a huge gap between what peolple said they did and what they really did. And this was very helpful clarify a lot their pain points and also for them to aknoledge were their pain points come from.
And for us to have a clear picture about what was happening, and what could we do to improve it.
The next phase is to develop a solution to the problem by
Envolving the citizens to dig in the previously identified problems, opportunities or needs and design service components in detail and as part of a holistic experience while iteratively test concepts with end users;
When we started designing the experience we decided to do focous groups as a way to iterate the developments.
This went wrong in so many ways that I am not even going to waist time explaining… we only get opinions, we could not see real impacts f the solution to every stakeholder… so instead of this we decided to do…
Service blueprint, co-design the solution with every stakeholder, so that they could design the service of the holistic experience and at the same time iteratively test concepts
Then, when we lanched the service we knew that it would have acceptance and stakeholder new that we should continue to learn through feedback and iterate again.
What we learned?
People being part of the solution leads to engagement with the city and in ultimate analysis, to living better lives in harmony with the city.
That’s great Marilia, but I don’t work for the city, nor for government, neither for public services.. so I can’t really do much.
Well, now that we understand how technology can enable us to be smart citizens and we know that we humans achieve our best results when collaborating I question:
Are we willing to step up and change from tech-driven paradigm to People-centered one?