Keywords

1 Introduction to Urban Interaction Design

Cities are increasingly characterized by urban environments permeated with data and augmented by technology. In fact ICT can be considered as a new layer of complexity to the city, where everything is digitally interconnected and interdependent. Interactions between city users and these environments are the central question in this context.

What is needed from the user point of view, which technologies can be used, how to “humanize” their impact, and finally how to design an answer to a need, are all questions at the core of Urban Interaction Design.

Urban Interaction Design can be seen as being grounded in the traditions of the Society, Technology and Arts [1], as depicted in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Urban interaction design approach

Full size image

The ‘Urban’ in urban interaction design signifies the emphasis on spatial aspects that affect human relationships, drawing on approaches from the social sciences.

‘Interaction’ refers to technology, particularly communication and networked technologies that convert the raw material of data into meaning that informs our decisions, at scales that range from citywide solutions to grassroots hacking and tinkering.

‘Design’, the last part of the trilogy, draws on an interdisciplinary arts tradition, bringing critique and creativity into the mix, with an emphasis on both theory and practice [2].

2 Market Analysis

Urban Interaction Design innovates the way we can build Smart Cities, strongly adding the point of view of those for which the Cities are created, the Citizens. In the present study we analyze, by involving a panel of experts via an online survey, what are perceived to be the main challenges to innovate a Smart City, where the opportunities are foreseen, and what cases are already drawing upon this field.

2.1 Online Survey

An online survey which explores the perceived impact of Urban Interaction Design was deployed in two phases and run in 1H2014, reaching 122 experts worldwide. Most respondents are based in Europe (70 %) and almost evenly split between Industry (57 %) and University/Research (43 %) affiliations.

The first phase aimed at assessing the general opinions via 9 open-questions in the subjects of interest, such as the emerging issues in the Smart Cities and future opportunities and best practices for Urban Interaction Design.

The second phase was aimed at extending the sample size and converging the main categories of responses identified before. The survey was simplified to 5 multiple-choice questions and 2 open-questions.

2.2 Opportunities and Best Cases

Our preliminary analysis [3] shows that opportunities to introduce more solutions for the Smart Citizens lay particularly in areas such as smart governance, smart environment and smart living. This result is shown in the percentage mapping of the survey output (Fig. 2), where the percentage gap in total declared issues for the Smart Cities (dark grey in the figure) versus total suggested solutions (light grey) is 12 %, 6 % and 4 % respectively for the said areas. The assumption made here is that those areas where few solutions were suggested require more attention and effort in terms of future developments.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Urban interaction design survey results

Full size image

The respondents provided 104 examples of Smart City products or services that in their opinion were related to Urban Interaction Design. Among these we identified a 30 % as best cases according to the characteristics described in Sect. 1 of this paper, which are listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Urban interaction design best cases in the smart city context
Full size table

The most representative of these is the Smart Citizens project [3], a platform to generate participatory processes of people in the cities. The objective of the platform is to serve as a node for building productive and open indicators by connecting data, people and knowledge. The idea is leveraging on several elements: involvement of the citizens in both the development and product deployment, integration of the solution in the smart city tissue, use of the most innovative open hardware and open software approaches.

3 Conclusions

In this work we presented Urban Interaction Design as a new field with a user-centric approach based on the creative contamination of the Art, Society and Technology domains. We believe it can powerfully innovate the way we develop services in a networked urban environment, offering an effective tool to understand and tackle all challenges holistically.

In order to better understand this field and assess its potential and maturity level we conducted an online survey that prompted smart governance, smart environment and smart living as areas yet under-addressed in terms of available solutions at least with reference to the described approach.