About
Human Values
for Smarter Cities
Designing ethical smart city-applications: how to move beyond the manifesto?
Smart city technologies, including artificial intelligence and computer vision, promise to bring a higher quality of life and more efficient urban management to our cities. However, developers, designers, and professionals working in urban management have started to realize that implementing these technologies poses numerous ethical challenges. Policy papers from city governments and institutions now call for human and public values in tech development1, ethics guidelines for trustworthy A.I., and cities for digital rights. In a democratic society, these technologies should also be understandable for citizens (transparency) and open to scrutiny and critique (accountability and contestability).
This four-year project aims to help such professionals to develop an integrated, value-based design approach for smart city technologies’ ethical implementation by focusing on the concrete and urgent case of machine-vision in public space. It consists of three aspects. With civil servants at municipalities, we will create a language enabling them to translate public values such as transparency into concrete specifications. With designers, we will develop guidelines and principles to answer these value-based requirements. Finally, we will develop methods to engage civil society in this process with both groups of professionals.
The Human Values for Smarter Cities project will run from 2022-2026 and is financed by RAAK-PRO – Regieorgaan SIA.
Contact
Project Manager
Jorgen Karskens
j.r.karskens[at]hva.nl
Join our community of practice
We would like to invite you to join the Community of Practice group on LinkedIn and Signal, where we share thoughts, interesting readings, conferences, or other media that relate to smart city technologies.
The goal is to form an interdisciplinary learning network: for participants to learn from each other, exchange ideas, and where we will also share and disseminate the project’s findings and results. Feel free to invite other people that are interested in the subject to the LinkedIn and Signal group.