Daniel Gooch

Reimagining the role of citizens in smart city projects

The technological focus of many Smart City projects relies on top-down innovations, ignoring the role that citizens can play in improving their local communities. In this paper we outline our approach to supporting citizens in playing an active role in urban innovation, from the crowdsourcing of initial ideas through to facilitating citizen involvement in the realization of community projects. This extends previous work in the field by exploring how to go beyond identifying issues and ideas to securing a commitment from citizens to assisting a project intended to address an identified issue.

DevOps for the Urban IoT

Choosing the right technologies to build an urban-scale IoT system can be challenging. There is often a focus on low-level architectural details such as the scalability of message handling. In our experience building an IoT information system requires a high-level holistic approach that mixes traditional data collection from vendor-specific cloud backends, together with data collected directly from embedded hardware and mobile devices. Supporting this heterogeneous environment can prove challenging and lead to complex systems that are difficult to develop and deploy in a timely fashion. In this paper we describe how we address these challenges by proposing a three-tiered DevOps model which we used to build an information system that is capable of providing real-time analytics of Electric Vehicle (EV) mobility usage and management within a smart city project.

Amplifying Quiet Voices: Challenges and Opportunities for Participatory Design at an Urban Scale

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design (PD) activities are somewhat limited. In this article, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a Smart City project. Through analysing the nature of citizens’ concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising PD at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city.

Digital games-based learning for children with dyslexia: A social constructivist perspective on engagement and learning during group game-play

Taking a process-orientated, social constructivist lens, we examine the case of a digital game called Words Matter. The game was designed for children with dyslexia and was informed by principles from casual games and evidence-based practice from special education. Focusing on the game play of two groups of children, we employ a systematic thematic analytic approach on videos of childrens verbal and non-verbal interaction triangulated with their game logs, concentrating on the nature of student-student as well as student-tutor social interactions. Our findings show that children spontaneously engage in game talk regarding game performance, content, actions and experiences. While this game talk facilitates a strong sense of social engagement and playfulness, it also caters to a variety of new opportunities for learning by sparking tutor and student-initiated interventions. Alongside its social theoretical lens on digital games-based learning, the paper analyses game-based social interactions in tandem with game design decisions enabling additional implications to be drawn for pedagogical practice and game design. Group game play of drill and practice games is driven by social engagement.Social engagement is expressed through game talk.Game talk can strengthen the self-esteem of children with dyslexia.Game talk can reveal learning processes offering intervention opportunities.A sense of ownership of personalised games can inhibit collaboration.

Demanding by Design: Supporting Effortful Communication Practices in Close Personal Relationships

The investment of effort into personal communication can be highly meaningful to people, and has particular significance for the mediation of close relationships. This paper presents qualities of effort investment that are seen to be valuable. Furthermore, we consider how these qualities might sensitise designers of communication technologies to the meaningfulness of effort. We report a qualitative study focusing on individual descriptions of meaningful effort invested into everyday correspondence. We encapsulate our findings in the form of five qualities that characterise valued effort: discretionary investment, personal craft, focused time, responsiveness to the recipient, and challenge to a senders capacities. Drawing on ideas generated in brainstorming sessions, we present two illustrative concepts for new communication technologies, highlighting how our findings can guide the creation of designed artefacts.

Engaging with the Smart City Through Urban Data Games

This chapter will explore how gamification can be used to motivate citizens to engage with data about their city. Through two case studies, we aim to show how prompting hands-on experiences with urban data can improve data literacy and ultimately increase citizen participation in urban innovation and the co-creation of smart city apps. The first case study presents a game called ‘Turing’s Treasure’ designed to elicit design features and data from the players for MotionMap, an interactive map that improves the planning of travel through different modes of transport around Milton Keynes, UK. The second case study describes the outcome of several creative and competitive app design sessions that have been conducted with school children in London and Milton Keynes. We conclude by discussing where we think this field is heading in the future and what additional benefits this will bring.

Season's Greetings: An Analysis of Christmas Card Use

Christmas is the time of year when people reaffirm social connections through the medium of Christmas cards. Although much communication in the modern age is conducted via electronic means, many people continue to send and receive paper-based cards during the festive season. With a view to understanding practices surrounding the use of digital and paper-based media, this paper explores the use of paper-based and electronic Christmas cards among a sample of university students. We describe students practices regarding Christmas cards, examining motivations of use and perceptions of value associated with paper and electronic cards. Our analysis leads to a number of potential opportunities for enhancing the perception of electronic alternatives to paper-based cards.

Supporting urban change: Using a MOOC to facilitate attitudinal learning and participation in smart cities

Smart cities try to use technology and data to improve the efficiency of city services, to address societal challenges and to improve collaboration between citizens and government. Driving such social change requires a deep socio-ecological transition with both organisations and individuals lifestyles needing to change. This has led to an increasing recognition of the need for education to empower people to play a more active role within smart city initiatives. This paper examines our use of a MOOC as a tool to facilitate attitudinal learning around the topic of smart cities and to explore whether the learners engage in local smart city activities. A mixed methods research design was employed, collecting data via an online survey that was completed by 202 learners and through in-depth interviews with 8 of those learners. The results show that learners’ perceived high levels of attitudinal learning on the topic of smart cities across four categories of learning outcomes (general, cognitive, affective and behavioural). Our findings also contribute to an understanding of the types of post-course activities learners participate in and their experiences of trying to apply what they learnt if they participated in local smart city activities. We conclude by providing new insights into how to design for learning to support social change in the context of a MOOC.

Designing with Data: A Designerly Approach to Data and Data Analytics

Theme, Goals, background and motivation This workshop focuses on Data as Design Material for connected products and services. It brings together HCI researchers, ethnographers, industrial designers, data scientists, tool developers and others interested in Designing with Data.