Smart cities try to use technology and data to improve the efficiency of city services, to address societal challenges and to improve collaboration between citizens and government. Driving such social change requires a deep socio-ecological transition with both organisations and individual's lifestyles needing to change. This has led to an increasing recognition of the need for education to empower people to play a more active role within smart city initiatives. This paper examines our use of a MOOC as a tool to facilitate attitudinal learning around the topic of smart cities and to explore whether the learners engage in local smart city activities. A mixed methods research design was employed, collecting data via an online survey that was completed by 202 learners and through in-depth interviews with 8 of those learners. The results show that learners’ perceived high levels of attitudinal learning on the topic of smart cities across four categories of learning outcomes (general, cognitive, affective and behavioural). Our findings also contribute to an understanding of the types of post-course activities learners participate in and their experiences of trying to apply what they learnt if they participated in local smart city activities. We conclude by providing new insights into how to design for learning to support social change in the context of a MOOC.

The Internet of Things (IoT), a type of cyber-physical system, has led to a drastic growth in the number of devices and sensors connected to each other and to the digital word. This has further led to an exponential increase in the amount of data being produced and disseminated throughout such systems. This data has the potential to provide valuable insights into user behavior that can inform a design process. It also comprises an important aspect of an IoT product or service that an end user might interact to gain actionable insights. For example, when to use energy in the home, how to avoid polluted or flooded areas, or to visit the shops at quiet times. These same users may also be one source of the data that is analysed to provide this intelligence. However, in many case more intelligence is gained by combining different data sets. This raises questions about how to help both designers and end-users to get the most value from the insights acquired through the combination and analysis of IoT data, whilst being sensitive to issues around privacy and security of data contributed by the public. There is currently no clear framework to support designers in navigating through a design process that uses and combines such complex data. The aim of this one day workshop is to explore how to effectively incorporate data into a design process and how to design for more effective interactions between humans and data within IoT technologies. It will also create a roadmap for development of new methods and tools to support responsible, data-driven, co-design of new IoT interactive products and services.

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design (PD) activities are somewhat limited. In this article, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a Smart City project. Through analysing the nature of citizens' concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising PD at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city.

Whilst the ubicomp community has successfully embraced a number of societal challenges for human benefit, including healthcare and sustainability, the well-being of other animals is hitherto underrepresented. We argue that ubicomp technologies, including sensing and monitoring devices as well as tangible and embodied interfaces, could make a valuable contribution to animal welfare. This paper particularly focuses on dogs in kenneled accommodation, as we investigate the opportunities and challenges for a smart kennel aiming to foster canine welfare. We conducted an indepth ethnographic study of a dog rehoming center over four months; based on our findings, we propose a welfarecentered framework for designing smart environments, integrating monitoring and interaction with information management. We discuss the methodological issues we encountered during the research and propose a smart ethnographic approach for similar projects.

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.