Title: Perspectives for Designing Complex Citizens-City Relationships: Participation, Cooperation, Co-Creation and Empowerment
Abstract:
Cities are complex systems with a large number of networked entities, communicating and interacting with each other. The complexity results from the fundamental diversity of the contributing and participating entities: living organisms like humans, animals, and plants; ‘bricks and mortar’ and other artefacts constituting the physical environment like buildings, bridges, streets, rivers, vehicles, etc.; active artefacts with embedded IoT components controlled by software increasingly based on machine learning; virtual counterparts or ‘digital shadows’ of basically all organisms and artefacts (depending on appropriate models) constituting hybrid environments, e.g., digital twin cities; and, last but not least, networks of people with their social relationships in the real world as well as in the virtual world.
People are confronted with new challenges when interacting with technology in smart environments as, e.g., smart artefacts, cooperative buildings and comprehensive urban environments like smart cities and airports. At the same time, it raises fundamental questions about smart services exploiting data, e.g., collected by sensors via an IoT infrastructure. One can observe an increase in importunate automation, lack of transparency and privacy infringements. Humans are increasingly removed from being the ‘operator’ and thus not any more in full control of their environments and decisions.
Our goal is to move beyond ‘smart-only’ cities towards Humane, Sociable, Cooperative, Self-aware Hybrid Cities fostering human-technology symbiosis and urban sustainability guided by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The proposal to meet this goal is to redefine the ‘Smart-Everything’ Paradigm via a citizen-centred and participatory design approach considering relevant design trade-offs enabling human control and empowerment and privacy by design. Keeping Citizens in the Loop by fostering co-provision, co-creation and co-exploitation, using the Open Data Model, is the basis of a Self-Aware City and win-win situations. An important cornerstone of our proposal is to establish a ‘Citizen ↔ Cooperative City Contract (CCCC)’ (e.g., realized as ‘smart contracts’).
Bio:
Dr. Dr. Norbert Streitz (Ph.D. in physics, Ph.D. in cognitive science) is a Senior Scientist and Strategic Advisor with more than 35 years of experience in ICT. He is the Founder and Scientific Director of the Smart Future Initiative launched in 2009. Before, Norbert held different positions as Deputy Director and Division Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute IPSI in Darmstadt, Germany, for more than 20 years and was a Lecturer at the Computer Science Department at the Technical University Darmstadt. This was preceeded by being an Assistant Professor at the Technical University Aachen (RWTH). At different times of his career, he was a post-doc research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, a visiting scholar at Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, and at the Intelligent Systems Lab, MITI, Tsukuba Science City, Japan. Norbert has published/co-edited 36 books/proceedings and authored/ coauthored about 170 peer-reviewed papers. His research covers a wide range of areas: Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Experience Design, Hypertext/Hypermedia, CSCW, Ubiquitous Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Privacy by Design, Industry 4.0, Autonomous Driving, Hybrid Smart Cities, Smart Airports, Smart Islands. Norbert was a Principal Investigator of many projects funded by the European Commission as well as industry. He was and is on Advisory Boards and Evaluation Committees of research institutes and on Editorial Boards of relevant journals. Norbert is an elected member of the CHI Academy, the prestigious ACM SIGCHI award honoring his substantial contributions shaping the field of human-computer interaction. More information at https://www.smart-future.net/norbert-streitz/
Professor DDr. Norbert Streitz will present his talk on May 3, 2023 at 3 PM.
Location: Salon of the CSH
If you would like to attend the talk, please send an email to office@csh.ac.at