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Are you interested in the connection between interaction design and the city? Our summary today works with the book chapter titled The city as an urban interaction design platform from 2014 by Martin Brynskov, and the book’s title is Urban Interaction Design: Towards City Making. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how interaction design can be part of cities because we will talk about it in detail with the next interviewee, Professor Jeni Paay, in episode 093. This chapter introduces the connection, issues and concerns about urban interaction design.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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It is no longer meaningful to have a complete separation between the idea of an urban plan, a building or product, a service, technology or interface, or see these in isolation only. What it is we are developing constantly changes depending on use and context. What is understood and used as a product for one group can be a service for another. In its simplest functional form, Google maps is both a map providing services, an application program interface, and a tool for mapping out urban issues or connections, for example. One person’s product can become a platform or a tool for others.

A city can be understood as a very complex system with many actors and their interactions. In complex spatial planning, more actors are getting involved to the discourses about urban plans. Urban planning is evolving towards connecting the different fields and establishing interaction between them as a basic principle. Urban planning is no longer a land of urban planners, because city design more and more respects perspectives, approaches and uses integrated with more advanced tools. Urban design also requires interactions between traditional and newly established actors and different fields and disciplines. The traditional role of the urban designer, so far being the alpha and omega in city shaping processes, has also shifted. Thus, the role of urban interaction design is starting to facilitate interactions and communication among these complex layers and actors.

The city is a platform for life between the buildings and even between the systems, and the urban designer seeks to help and shape such lives. The urban planner creates the physical environment in which a rich and diverse community can grow and where everyday urban experience can unfold. The architect makes the concrete framing of the life between buildings. The service and interaction designer seeks to support and provide meaningful services and applications that enhance, support and explore the everyday life. So urban interaction design aims for thriving urban social life, the community of strangers. The technologies, services, and tools are seen as the means to that end – a rich and diverse urban experience in a community of strangers.

In its broadest form, community is the central core concern of urban interaction design. Do we see communities as a subject, something we develop for, or mutual partners that we co-design with? Whatever the case, citizens are beginning to take more control over the design of their cities and at least express their opinions thanks to networked technologies, digital media. This is a large part of what urban interaction design aims to facilitate.

With the definition of interaction from a human-centred interaction perspective, the future of the networked city is not straightforward. Within the complex interaction layers and levels, the user is continuously changing, they are diverse, multiple, within many groups. They might be more active in one aspect than in another and have different and conflicting interests. As their collaborations become increasingly networked, it involves more and more services and tools, with various aims and outcomes. Therefore, the development of such services goes hand-in-hand with the diversity and number of urban actors. The interplay between people and these networked tools, abilities, concerns, practices of people and the properties and behaviours of such products become increasingly complex. Each item is part of the urban ecology, since the city is a series of platforms for urban interactions.

Our current society sees the increasing and continuous spread and flow of ideas and information. We, as citizens and communities, are better-informed or at least have the access to more diverse source of information with which to build our opinions and express our needs. This, however, doesn’t necessarily turn into more power or agency. The agency depends upon many factors, like accessibility, the ability to work with such tools, the level of democracy, governance, etc. The role of citizens in public life is expanding and people are demanding more involvement in public issues.

Interactive technologies are also transforming our aspirations and the possibilities of citizen participation. Urban interaction design seems to be a new framework that can help with people’s demand to be involved in meaningful ways. Urban interaction design stands in as an appropriate place to enrich the traditional tools, practices and mechanisms that have been designed in the last decades to deal with such concerns. This includes institutional participation, like community meetings, referendums, and such, and the direct actions, like demonstrations, occupy movements and labour movements. Getting more information from the world has indeed changed the effectiveness of these traditional forms of building voice.

Emerging technologies give us new tools through which to mobilise, disrupt power agendas, share public opinions, access public information, and so on. They also created completely new forms of participation and also involvement in a wider range of aspects, like designing infrastructures, services. These all benefited from co-creation and co-production. Urban interaction design thrives to put users in the centre of this design process. Whether thinking of citizen or user participation, designers try to rebalance the decision-making process so the protagonist can better inform the process and gain empowerment. In this way, the less powerful elements can take part in top-down decision-making.

Beside the technological opportunities, the mindsets behind such tools also shifted. This is where ideas such as openness, adaptation and personalisation, real-time response, transparency and DIY are flourishing. Urban interaction design can also be relevant in this aspect: it can highlight underlying societal change driven by a changing technology landscape and how public participation can be enhanced. Today and in the coming future, urban interaction design has the opportunity to impact the aspirations of civic engagement and make more profound, direct, effective and diverse experience of engaging in public issues.

However, designing for participation is not easy and it can be quite complex and ambiguous. Participation is not an exact science and designing participatory processes in any field is always strategized on a case-by-case basis, relevant and relative to particular context, goals and practicalities. In this sense, the process of change we are witnessing adds more opportunities to design successful participatory strategies in many fields. Urban interaction design can bring much to the table, enhancing and providing tools for a diverse range of actors to join in civic engagement. So, what we originally called participation is broadening with a new generation of available approaches, a more creative use of civic engagement strategies, more powerful tools for better-informed involvement and action-oriented representativeness.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Cities are complex systems with interconnected layers and actors interacting with each other.
2. Urban interaction design can improve those interactions and citizen engagement with tools, services and products, but these should always remain the means to achieving better participation, and be accessible and usable for the people.
3. Today and in the coming future, urban interaction design has the opportunity to impact the aspirations of civic engagement and make it a more profound, direct, effective and diverse experience of engaging in public issues.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What is the biggest obstacle in using urban interaction design? If it were easy, we would have lovely services and products, but I think we can all agree that some of urban services could be much better.
2. Do you regard yourself as an urban actor?
3. How involved you are in your city’s life? Do you know about such tools that help you be involved? What do you think about those tools and services?

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