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A Lab of Labs: Methods and Approaches for a Human-Centered Design
In this book, Martijn de Waal and Gabriele Ferri report on the methods and approaches used by five leading living labs that attended the Design & The City event organized last year at the Knowledge Mile Amsterdam. Its key question is how can citizens be included as ‘actors’ when designing smart city technologies and services and what methods could designers use to conceptualize citizens not simply as ‘users’ but as ‘full human beings,’ with their personal histories, desires, emotions, and sometimes conflicting interests and complex needs.
Buildx, a collaborative platform focused on building sustainable homes; Feelif, a multimedia tool that allows visually-impaired people to feel shapes on a touch screen; and SAGA, a peer-to-peer learning platform that gives students the opportunity to learn from industry experts – have been announced as the winners of the 2017 European Social Innovation Competition, ‘Equality Rebooted’, at an awards ceremony in Brussels. Selected from nearly 800 applicants from more than 40 countries, each project will receive a €50,000 prize from the European Commission.
While citizen participation is considered to be a critical factor of open data use in municipalities, little research to date has either rigorously explained the content of such participation or demonstrated its effect on open data use. This paper suggests a conceptualization of citizen participation and develops a research model linking the proposed multidimensional construct of citizen participation with initial use of open data in municipalities.
During the last decade or so, as the notion of the Smart City became more and more popular, there is a transformation in how some cities manifest the concept. Overall, there seem to have been three distinct phases of how cities have embraced technology and development, moving from tech-company driven, to city government driven, to, finally, citizen driven. In this time, some cities moved from one phase to another linearly, while others have been stuck in one throughout their experiments with smart cities.