Skip to content

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 Signal and/or sign up for our newsletter, where we share thoughts, interesting readings, conferences, or other media that relate to smart city technologies.

Check out our past Newsletters

Newsletter #1 – APR 2023
Newsletter #2 – JUL 2023
Newsletter #3 – OCT 2023
Newsletter #4 – APR 2024
Newsletter #5 – NOV 2024

Research Team

Mike de Kreek
AUAS – Civic Interaction Design Research Group
m.de.kreek[at]hva.nl

Tessa Steenkamp
AUAS – Civic Interaction Design Research Group
a.t.steenkamp[at]hva.nl

Martijn de Waal
AUAS – Civic Interaction Design Research Group
b.g.m.de.waal[at]hva.nl

Kars Alfrink
TU Delft

Gerd Kortuem
TU Delft

Thijs Turel
AMS Institute