Urban Informatics

Collaboration at the nexus of policy, technology and design, people and data

Kristene Unsworth, Andrea Forte, Richardson Dilworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138299801
• eBook ISBN: 9781317312604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Information shapes urban spaces in ways that most people rarely stop to consider. From data-driven planning to grassroots activism to influencing the routes we walk, bike, and drive, new information technologies are helping city dwellers to leverage information in new ways. These technologies shape the uses and character of urban spaces. Information technologies and tools such as social media and GIS tracking applications are being used by individuals as they go about their daily lives, not as alternatives to social interaction, but as opportunities to participate in the shared experience of urban life.

This edited volume focuses on the creative application and management of information technologies in urban environments, with an emphasis on the intersection between citizen participation in creating city environments and the policy-making that supports it. The chapters address critical issues including the digital divide, transportation planning, use of public spaces, community building, and local events. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology.

From Design Fiction to Design Friction: Speculative and Participatory Design of Values-Embedded Urban Technology

Laura Forlano and Anijo Mathew

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the results of the Designing Policy project, which engages current debates about urban technology through the creation of a visual toolkit and a series of workshops. The workshops were held in Chicago, New York, and Boston during 2012–2013 with funding from the Urban Communication Foundation. The purpose of the project was three-fold: (1) to open up the “black box” of urban technology in order to reveal the politics embedded in city infrastructures; (2) to move beyond discussions of urban problems and solutions, and towards a more conceptual future-oriented space; and (3) to explore the use of design methods such as visual prototypes and participatory design. This article introduces the concept of design friction as a way of understanding the ways in which conflicts, tensions and disagreements can move complex socio-technical discussions forward where they can be worked out through material engagement in hands-on prototyping.

Introduction

In recent years, cities around the world have embraced the Smart City agenda, one that technology companies such as Cisco and IBM promise will result in greater productivity, efficiency, innovation, and security for citizens. Through the widespread deployment of information technology—cameras in adaptive traffic signals, networked parking meters with dynamic pricing, and sensors embedded in garbage cans—cities are redesigning their infrastructures and, at the same time, making critical decisions about the kinds of citizens that can participate in urban life. For the majority of citizens, technology remains as a “black box” with little attention to the implicit social, cultural, political, and economic implications of any given technology decision on the experience of living, working and, more generally, belonging in cities. In tandem with these top-down efforts to roll-out urban technologies, cities have become hosts to a variety of more bottom-up civic hackathons and participatory workshops that aim to find technological solutions to urban problems. There have been a number of significant critiques of the Smart City agenda, which aim to open up alternative lines of inquiry about the opportunities and risks of urban technologies (Greenfield, 2013; Townsend, 2013).

This paper discusses the results of the Designing Policy project, which engages current debates about Smart Cities through the creation of a visual toolkit and the design of series of workshops. The primary motivation for the project was to open up the “black box” of urban technology in order to reveal the politics, ethics, and values that are embedded in city infrastructures. For example, the use of parking meters with dynamic pricing may unfairly penalize a particular group of citizens with the common necessity of finding parking in a particular neighborhood at a particular time of day by requiring that they pay a higher price. This is merely an example of the implications of relying on algorithmic forms of management and control over city resources such as parking. Without a careful examination of (and public deliberation around) the opportunities, risks, and unintended consequences present within urban technological systems, policymakers may inadvertently be designing cities that benefit a very small minority of citizens while ignoring the majority. The introduction of a wider set of values—beyond productivity, efficiency, innovation, and security—that might more accurately represent the everyday lives of citizens has the potential to inform current discussions around Smart Cities as well as the decisions that policymakers ultimately will make about the adoption, deployment, and use of (or rejection of) urban technologies in their cities.

A secondary motivation for this project was to move beyond discussions of urban problems and solutions, and towards a more generative future-oriented space of speculation informed by the everyday lives of citizens including their neighborhoods, memories, and desires. Decisions about urban problems are often framed in rational, quantitative, and analytical terms of government bureaucracies with their valorization of speed (How quickly can I get from point A to point B?), capital (How much can the city gain in revenue from tourism?), and quantity (How many people are in Times Square at any given moment?). However, civic life is much more than that—it is a tearful 2 am heartbreak on the corner of 7^th Street and Avenue A; it is scrounging for quarters in between the cushions of your couch to make rent; and it is listening to wonderful (and, sometimes, horrible) musicians in the subway tunnels. What discussions of Smart Cities fail to account for is a holistic understanding of a full diversity of citizens that places value on their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. This speculative, future-oriented component removes the urgency of designing cities for today’s problems with the notion of alternative possible futures based on more social, psychological, and emotional aspects that tend to be missing from discussions of urban technology.

A third motivation for the project was to explore the use of design methods such as visual prototypes, participatory design, and speculative design in order to extend and translate social science research beyond the academy. The use of visual prototypes is important as an alternative format for expressing complex socio-technical theories to a broader audience. For the most part, the work of social scientists is still measured by academic publications, which have a limited ability to circulate due to journal pricing, library access, and academic language barriers (across disciplines as well as between experts and practitioners). The use of participatory design introduces a different, more horizontal relationship between researchers and their field sites. As such, the researcher is no longer the expert who is studying the participants but rather the facilitator of (and also a participant in) a process. Both of these applications of design methods require a rethinking of traditional academic norms around research and publishing.

Value-Sensitive Design and Urban Technology

The role of socio-political values as embedded in urban technology (such as interfaces, street furniture, networked communication infrastructures, and personal technologies) has been an important site for research in media and communications, science and technology studies, urban planning, computer science, and human-computer interaction in the past ten years in tandem with the introduction of mobile phones, tablets, and laptops as well as the related software, systems, and networks. Scholars at the nexus of these fields have studied surveillance and security, privacy, intellectual property and open-source software, the digital divide and access to information, emergent forms of organizing (Humphreys, 2008), identity and sociality (Ito et al., 2005), as well as digital government and citizenship (Foth, 2008; Foth et al., 2011). For example, research on community wireless networks illustrated the ways in which bottom-up infrastructures introduced alternative possibilities for urban technology such as reduced cost, more widespread availability, and local ownership and control (Bar and Galperin, 2004, 2006; Sandvig, 2004, 2006; Sandvig et al., 2004; Meinrath, 2005; Bar and Park, 2006; Powell and Shade, 2006; Forlano, 2006, 2008; Forlano and Dailey, 2008; Powell, 2009; Forlano and Powell, 2011; Jungnickel, 2013). This project continues the focus on values in the still emergent, interdisciplinary field of urban informatics (Foth, 2008; Foth et al., 2011; Foth et al., 2011), which occupies space between some of the more traditional disciplines. One of the contributions of these studies has been to introduce new terminology that is useful in order to describe urban technology as well as emergent relationships between cities and socio-technical systems such as net locality (Gordon and Silva, 2011), code/space (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011), situated technologies (Shepard, 2011), and codescapes (Forlano, 2009).

This project draws on science and technology studies in order to emphasize the importance of understanding the ways in which socio-technical artifacts and infrastructures (Star, 1999) are imbued with socio-political values (Winner, 1986; Bijker et al., 1987; Nissenbaum, 2001) and invisible actors (Latour, 2005). In particular, the project uses a value sensitive design approach, which “accounts for human values, such as privacy, fairness, and democracy, throughout the design process” (Davis et al., 2006: 67). This approach considers the relationships between people and technologies as socio-technical systems in keeping with theories around the social construction of technology (Pinch and Bijker, 1984). Value-sensitive design emphasized the participation of direct and indirect stakeholders as well as multiple, iterative investigations to probe different aspects of a project. Value-sensitive design has been applied in a range of academic communities including human-computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, and information science (Friedman, 1996; Friedman and Nissenbaum, 1996; Nissenbaum, 2001; Le Dantec et al., 2009; Friedman et al., 2013).

In most cases, the design of digital technologies for cities does not consider the needs, goals, and values of citizens (Dourish and Bell, 2011). UrbanSim (Davis et al., 2006), Betaville (Skelton, 2013), and Hub2 (Gordon and Koo, 2008) are three examples of online platforms that allow participants to simulate and design their own cities and spaces with attention to their individual needs, values, desires, and goals. For example, Betaville is “a massively participatory online environment for distributed 3D design and development of proposals for changes to the built environment” that advocates for a “new form of open public design” (Skelton, 2013: online). Another interesting example is the Grow A Game project, which uses a value-sensitive design approach to redesign a traditional board game (Flanagan et al., 2005; Flanagan and Nissenbaum, 2007, 2014; Flanagan et al., 2007; Flanagan and Nissenbaum, 2008; Flanagan et al., 2008; Belman et al., 2011).

Many of these examples involve solution-oriented online platforms on which alternative urban spaces and cities can be designed around the values and needs of citizens. Our project differs from these in that it uses face-to-face participatory design workshops for the speculative and conceptual design of the technologies that mediate contemporary urban life such as urban screens, big data, the “Internet of things,” and the quantified self.

Participatory Design Meets Speculative Design

In recent years, social scientists have become interested in working in modes that go beyond written text in academic journals. These include inventive methods (Lury and Wakeford, 2012) and public ethnography (Gans, 2010), as well as the creation of artifacts (Belman et al., 2011; Jungnickel, 2014), performances (Orr, 2006; Watts, 2012), exhibits (Latour and Weibel, 2005; Townsend et al., 2011), and constituencies through workshops and events (Loukissas et al., 2013; Greenspan et al., 2014). This project diverges from traditional social science methods and human-centered design methods in that it used a participatory design approach to structure a series of workshops. Between November 2012 and May 2013, three workshops were held, one each in Chicago, New York, and Boston. Each workshop was five hours in length and had approximately 30 participants, or five to six people per working group. Participants included a wide range of professions including designers, scholars, technologists, activists, policymakers, government leaders, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs. Rather than treating participants as research subjects, we understood them to be partners in a research process in line with recent thinking about moving beyond “designing for” and towards “designing with” (Schuler and Namioka, 1993; Winner, 1986; Sanders and Stappers, 2008).

We selected a codesign or participatory design (Kuhn and Winograd, 1996; Kensing and Blomberg, 1998; Sanders, 2002; Slocum, 2003; Muller, 2003; Spinuzzi, 2005; Sanders and Jan, 2008; Sanders and Westerlund, 2011) approach due to its history in the design of technology systems for workers in Scandinavia in the 1970s as well as its application in the field of Human-Computer Interaction more recently. In particular, participatory design is a useful approach for creating a format through which diverse stakeholders can share their ideas, become exposed to the ideas of others and generate new ideas. As a methodology, codesign is more active and hands-on than other methodologies that are common in public policy, such as town hall meetings and public hearings. Recent design scholarship explores the link between design—whether through objects, exhibits, or workshops—and the construction of publics and the building of political constituencies and publics around important policy issues (DiSalvo, 2009). In this project, we engaged a wide range of stakeholders in collaborative hands-on activities that have the potential to redefine meaningful citizen engagement. For example, citizens can be involved in placemaking, “citizen science,” storytelling, or game play around important public policy issues. However, as many scholars have noted, participatory design should not be understood as a smooth or easy process for collaboration. In fact, the tensions and frictions that are likely to occur when diverse groups are convened may be one of the most valuable learnings from this methodology (Mouffe, 2003; Tsing, 2005; Hillgren et al., 2011). We can think of this as a kind of adversarial design (DiSalvo, 2012a), which is based on the theory of agonism in which there are potential benefits to political conflict. Finally, concepts such as things and infrastructuring (Björgvinsson et al., 201...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Urban Informatics: The Role of Citizen Participation in Policy Making
• 1. From Design Fiction to Design Friction: Speculative and Participatory
• 2. Technology-Enabled Participatory Platforms for Civic Engagement: The Case of U.S. Cities
• 3. Potential and Challenges for Social media in the Neighbourhood Context
• 4. The Digital Divide in Citizen-Initiated Government Contacts: A GIS Approach
• 5. Does Anything Ever Happen Around Here? Assessing the Online Information Landscape for Local Events
• 6. Goals, Challenges, and Capacity of Regional Data Portals in the United States: An Updated Understanding of Long-Standing Discussions
• Index