Urban technology that uses AI to keep public spaces clean, safe, and well-maintained is not always seen as a valuable municipal service by inhabitants of a city. On the contrary, the relationships people have with these technologies can be quite problematic. Frustration, powerlessness, and detachment play a role for a significant number of people.
One of the reasons for this is that technologies are often perceived as being optimized for correcting people after they have done something wrong instead of helping people to do something right. In the ‘Human Values for Smarter Cities’ project, we explore how these relationships can be improved by experimenting with continuous ‘conversation channels’ across these technologies’ conceptualization, design, and deployment.
In this workshop, we would like to experiment with prototyping one of these channels with the participants. This will focus on using our imagination to find ways in which parking exceptions in a fictional street could lead to possible adjustments in the behavior of the well-known parking scan car in the Netherlands.
Hosts:
Tessa Steenkamp
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
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.