PhD update – January 2019

Thought I’d post a quick update on my PhD. Since my previous post almost five months have passed. I’ve been developing my plan further, for which you’ll find an updated description below. I’ve also put together my very first conference paper, co-authored with my supervisor Gerd Kortuem. It’s a case study of the MX3D smart bridge for Designing Interactive Systems 2019. We’ll see if it gets accepted. But in any case, writing something has been hugely educational. And once I finally figured out what the hell I was doing, it was sort of fun as well. Still kind of a trip to be paid to do this kind of work. Looking ahead, I am setting goals for this year and the nearer term as well. It’s all very rough still but it will likely involve research through design as a method and maybe object oriented ontology as a theory. All of which will serve to operationalise and evaluate the usefulness of the “contestability” concept in the context of smart city infrastructure. To be continued—and I welcome all your thoughts!


Designing Smart City Infrastructure for Contestability

The use of information technology in cities increasingly subjects citizens to automated data collection, algorithmic decision making and remote control of physical space. Citizens tend to find these systems and their outcomes hard to understand and predict [1]. Moreover, the opacity of smart urban systems precludes full citizenship and obstructs people’s ‘right to the city’ [2].

A commonly proposed solution is to improve citizens understanding of systems by making them more open and transparent [3]. For example, GDPR prescribes people’s right to explanation of automated decisions they have been subjected to. For another example, the city of Amsterdam offers a publicly accessible register of urban sensors, and is committed to opening up all the data they collect.

However, it is not clear that openness and transparency in and of itself will yield the desired improvements in understanding and governing of smart city infrastructures [4]. We would like to suggest that for a system to perceived as accountable, people must be able to contest its workings—from the data it collects, to the decisions it makes, all the way through to how those decisions are acted on in the world.

The leading research question for this PhD therefore is how to design smart city infrastructure—urban systems augmented with internet-connected sensing, processing and actuating capabilities—for contestability [5]: the extent to which a system supports the ability of those subjected to it to oppose its workings as wrong or mistaken.

References

  1. Burrell, Jenna. “How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms.” Big Data & Society 3.1 (2016): 2053951715622512.
  2. Kitchin, Rob, Paolo Cardullo, and Cesare Di Feliciantonio. “Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City.” (2018).
  3. Abdul, Ashraf, et al. “Trends and trajectories for explainable, accountable and intelligible systems: An hci research agenda.” Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2018.
  4. Ananny, Mike, and Kate Crawford. “Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability.” New Media & Society 20.3 (2018): 973-989.
  5. Hirsch, Tad, et al. “Designing contestability: Interaction design, machine learning, and mental health.” Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. ACM, 2017.

Waiting for the smart city

Nowadays when we talk about the smart city we don’t necessarily talk about smartness or cities.

I feel like when the term is used it often obscures more than it reveals.

Here a few reasons why.

To begin with, the term suggests something that is yet to arrive. Some kind of tech-enabled utopia. But actually, current day cities are already smart to a greater or lesser degree depending on where and how you look.

This is important because too often we postpone action as we wait for the smart city to arrive. We don’t have to wait. We can act to improve things right now.

Furthermore, ‘smart city’ suggests something monolithic that can be designed as a whole. But a smart city, like any city, is a huge mess of interconnected things. It resists topdown design.

History is littered with failed attempts at authoritarian high-modernist city design. Just stop it.

Smartness should not be an end but a means.

I read ‘smart’ as a shorthand for ‘technologically augmented’. A smart city is a city eaten by software. All cities are being eaten (or have been eaten) by software to a greater or lesser extent. Uber and Airbnb are obvious examples. Smaller more subtle ones abound.

The question is, smart to what end? Efficiency? Legibility? Controllability? Anti-fragility? Playability? Liveability? Sustainability? The answer depends on your outlook.

These are ways in which the smart city label obscures. It obscures agency. It obscures networks. It obscures intent.

I’m not saying don’t ever use it. But in many cases you can get by without it. You can talk about specific parts that make up the whole of a city, specific technologies and specific aims.


Postscript 1

We can do the same exercise with the ‘city’ part of the meme.

The same process that is making cities smart (software eating the world) is also making everything else smart. Smart towns. Smart countrysides. The ends are different. The networks are different. The processes play out in different ways.

It’s okay to think about cities but don’t think they have a monopoly on ‘disruption’.

Postscript 2

Some of this inspired by clever things I heard Sebastian Quack say at Playful Design for Smart Cities and Usman Haque at ThingsCon Amsterdam.

Playful Design for Smart Cities

Earlier this week I escaped the miserable weather and food of the Netherlands to spend a couple of days in Barcelona, where I attended the ‘Playful Design for Smart Cities’ workshop at RMIT Europe.

I helped Jussi Holopainen run a workshop in which participants from industry, government and academia together defined projects aimed at further exploring this idea of playful design within the context of smart cities, without falling into the trap of solutionism.

Before the workshop I presented a summary of my chapter in The Gameful World, along with some of my current thinking on it. There were also great talks by Judith Ackermann, Florian ‘Floyd’ Müller, and Gilly Karjevsky and Sebastian Quack.

Below are the slides for my talk and links to all the articles, books and examples I explicitly and implicitly referenced throughout.