Workshop | Proactive civic relationships with urban tech in public spaces

Workshop | Proactive Civic Relationships with Urban Tech in Public Spaces

With Mike de Kreek, Researcher at the AUAS – Civic Interaction Design Research Group

Urban technology that uses AI to keep public spaces clean, safe, and well-maintained is not often 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.