Since the smart city vision increasingly shapes our urban life globally, it becomes ever more urgent to integrate participatory futuring in ongoing smart city-related technology development. This study aimed to find starting points for such integration by unraveling the ‘guiding visions’ of corporate technological innovators in the smart mobility and transport sector around Amsterdam. We conducted and analyzed interviews with innovators from 12 smart city start-ups and scale-ups based on three elements of guiding visions: (1) the desired future city, (2) the purposes of technologies they expect to fulfill, and (3) how technologies are thought to relate to their wider societal context. The interviewed innovators appeared to envision a clean, frictionless future city, whereby smart city technologies fulfilled four purposes: catalyzing efficiency, nudging citizens, customizing user experiences, and connecting places and people. Innovators’ ambitions for societal participation were modest and mainly aimed at end-users to optimize design features. Overall, the innovators’ guiding visions highlight the need for participatory futuring approaches that appeal to innovators’ motivation to make a social contribution, but also help them to widen and deepen their understanding of the public values that citizens perceive to be at stake in the smart city.@en

The ‘smart city’ vision is popular, but it lacks citizen perspectives. The aim of this study was to gain insight into whether and how art-based citizen engagement can create more room for citizen perspectives in smart cities by developing and testing an art-based citizen engagement project in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. To that end, a combination of interactive theatre, interaction design and social research methods was used to bring together diverse publics and innovation professionals for joint exploration of increased dataveillance in cities. The events were studied through observations, and through interviews with participants and organisers. Data analysis was guided by the outcomes, processes and challenges of the responsible innovation dimensions: inclusion, reflexivity, anticipation and responsiveness (Stilgoe et al., 2013). The most important achievements of art-based citizen engagement were: engaging people who would not have engaged with the topic otherwise, encouraging participants to question common phrases and assumptions, exploring future social implications of technologies, and staging meaningful interactions between citizens and professionals. The most significant challenge was to involve citizens in a way that could influence innovation trajectories.@en

Art is increasingly used to engage publics on emerging and controversial technologies, but we still know little about what works in art-based engagement and why. To investigate what art can do for public engagement, we systematically reviewed academic work published from 2000 to 2018 about the effect of art on organized public engagement. We used the dimensions of Responsible Research and Innovation as an analytical framework to identify what outcomes are achieved and what processes contribute to those outcomes. The 30 included studies showed that art mainly supported engagement by (1) reaching wider audiences, (2) fueling individual reflection, and (3) making visible how technologies come into being and interact with the world. With due consideration of the risks of instrumentalization, future research should empirically and reflexively investigate the outcomes and methodologies of art-based engagement, especially concerning collective reflection and change.@en