Tutorial: Towards Human-Centered Smart City Solutions

Abstract

There are many perspectives and conceptions about “Smart Cities”. One thing they have in common is the enrichment of city functions through the use of information technologies. However, often smart solutions are developed following a “top-down” approach [7] and besides, it seems that prioritizing efficiency and sustainability are not often the best way to address the needs of the citizens [11]. Thus, human-centered methods are necessary towards developing solutions that truly answer to the needs of the people. The scope of this tutorial is that of introducing smart cities (e.g., [1], [3], [4], [8], [10]) and ways of making them smarter - especially from the perspective of citizens - with a human-centered [9] approach. Methods for collecting people's opinions and data regarding the city ecosystem, as well as guidelines on how to use this information to go from raw data to useful, concrete and human-centered solutions, are fundamental for improving the livability of a city. In this tutorial, some of these methods will be presented, enriched by various practical examples and some basic information about smart cities. The participants of the tutorial will be able to test some of the proposed methods in interactive and hands-on sessions.