Engaging citizens with smart city through dialogues evoked by playful and speculative experience design
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Abstract
With the development of technology, in a city context , the topic of smart city has become more and more popular. Smart city can bring positive changes to citizens' lives but might also cause risk and conflicts. However, in most cases, the development of smart city is a top-down process that rarely involves citizens' opinions. Building upon the above background, this project aims at designing a playful experience to engage citizens in smart-city-related topics. In the research through design phase of this project, through conducting the generative session with citizens in Amsterdam, the project aim concretized into the design goal: To trigger citizens' awareness on the possible pros and cons of using the technology of data collection and analysis as a manner to make a city better, and further formulate their stands through more in-depth discussions on smart city topics that are more relevant to their daily lives in a playful way. In the ideation and prototyping phase of this project, two rounds of prototype test were conducted with Amsterdam citizens, and the insights generated contributed to the iteration of the design. The final concept: Future News Stand is a co-creatable opinion sensitizer which aims at engaging citizens in the discussions of the possible future scenarios in a city in a playful and speculative way. The design of Future News Stand consists of two parts. (1) Future News Co-creation Toolkit is a set of paper tools with instructions that help to imagine and generate future scenarios on a particular topic in a brainstorming session setup. (2) Future News Stand is a portable installation for evoking discussions about a particular future scenario with citizens on the streets. The combination of these two parts of design enables the co-creatable quality and the adaptability of Future News Stand. That is, the content on the Future News Stand can be easily changeable, and co-creatable depends on the (stakeholder's) purpose of usage. In this project, the future transport in Amsterdam was chosen to be the main topic for discussions. The final test with seven citizens in Amsterdam showed the promising abilities of the design to trigger citizens' interests in the future transport in Amsterdam and evoke discussions on it. Equally important, the experience was perceived as playful and enjoyable by the participants. Besides, the Future news co-creation toolkit is invited and has a high possibility to become part of "co-creation navigator" - Waag's online co-creation tool collection.