| Time | 11:00 – 12:40 |
| Location | ❺ Beijing room (AMS level 3) |
| Capacity | 30 |
Networked safety and enforcement cameras increasingly shape urban life, yet their presence and function often remain opaque.
This workshop explores how citizens can turn the tools of surveillance back onto the systems that watch them: Redirecting object recognition to identify street camera’s for civic scrutiny.
Building on several camera spotting tours supported with various versions of a “mobile transparency app”, we introduce a new prototype that uses object recognition to detect street cameras and log them through a civic annotation workflow.
Participants begin with a brief introduction into the origins of this initiative, a playing field of transparency and participation, and earlier versions of our camera-spotting tours. We then head outside in pairs to test the new prototype: one person identifies cameras using the detection app, while the other captures location and context. This hands-on exercise offers a direct experience of sousveillance in practice.
Back inside, we shift from observation to imagination. In small groups, we discuss what a civic register of surveillance cameras could mean for citizens, municipalities, and researchers. What forms of awareness, accountability, or contestation become possible when transparency is collectively produced? And what can this mean for the camera’s themselves? How can we make their role in the public domain more acceptable, useful, democratic and contestable?
The workshop is for anyone interested in civic tech, democratic oversight, and human-scale alternatives to opaque “smart city” systems. Together, we explore how civic sousveillance might evolve into a deeper practice of scrutinizing—and reshaping—the technologies embedded in our streets.
The workshop is led by urban innovators and design researchers connected to the Human Values for Smarter Cities project, and was initiated by concerned citizens who want to shed light on the invisible architecture of the smart city.
Hosts
Tom van Arman is the founder and director of Tapp – Smart City Architecture. He works regularly with citizens and policy makers to develop ethical urban tech utilizing open data, A.I., and interactive visualization to create more livable and inclusive cities.
Tessa Steenkamp is a design researcher at the lectorate ‘Civic Interaction Design’ at UAUS. For the project Human Values for Smarter Cities, which runs from 2022 to 2026, her research is formed through designing and organizing participatory experiments in public space. The project addresses the use of image recognition in public space. How could these algorithms be designed and communicated, in such a way that a wider public is aware of, and engaged in, their deployments? Tessa will explore these questions through designing digital and spatial experiments, applied to real-life use cases. With her design studio Bits of Space, Tessa gives shape to the interactions and relations between people, place and technology. The studio crosses traditional, professional boundaries, and instead takes human interactions and public values as starting points.
Mike de Kreek has a background in participatory action research and arts-based research in contexts of collaborative learning, co-creation and collaborative governance. He gets enthusiastic when academic processes are collaborative in themselves, nurturing improvements of work or empowerment of people. He is part of the Human Values for Smart Cities project, which runs from 2022 to 2026 and is led by the Civic Interaction Design Research Group at the AUAS. The focus lays on civic participation and engagement in articulating, making and evaluating of smart city technologies in urban spaces.