Highlights & main takeaways from ThingsCon Salon – Don Quichot in the Smart City
News & Updates
On 5 September, ThingsCon teamed up again with the Human Values for Smarter Cities project to organize a Salon linked to the research project. This time, we were guests at Marineterrein in Amsterdam. We focused this meetup (and workshop) on participatory design for machine learning.
Don Quichot in the Smart City?
In this ThingsCon Salon, we explored the changing roles of designers in contemporary developments involving human values and smart city technologies. As Kristina Höök and Jonas Löwgren suggest, when faced with a complex sociotechnical fabric that includes AI, designers should consider their work as “interventions into ongoing transformations over which they have limited control” (Höök & Löwgren, 2021). What implications do this statement and our experiences in state-of-the-art participatory design projects have for our work?
Kars Alfrink (Tu Delft) led a workshop in which we designed contestability loops for the scan bike use case in Amsterdam. Two presentations helped us to reflect on the results of the workshop. Evelien Zengerink (City of Amsterdam) presented how the scan bike was codesigned with a citizen panel and Geke van Dijk (STBY) showed how machine learning can support people with low digital skills for using government websites.
The highlights of this session can be found in these notes below: