How to Design a Participation Companion: A Conversational Interface to Foster Motivation and Support Participation

Smart cities are no longer based only on technologies because it is their citizens who significantly influence the development. Lack of motivation plays a major role in the area of bottom-up participation. The digital transformation is creating new opportunities to support people in their participation process and increase motivation. Through the use of artificial intelligence, systems such as virtual companions can be improved further to create a valuable relationship between the human and the machine by incorporating interpersonal elements. A virtual companion that supports people in their participation process could be a solution to motivate people to participate. To provide a basis for deriving design knowledge for a Participation Companion this research starts by identifying the stakeholders’ needs and problems based on literature reviews and interviews. It then follows an iterative, user centered prototype development and evaluation.