HighWire Centre for Doctorial Training, Lancaster University
HighWire Centre for Doctorial Training, Lancaster University
HighWire Centre for Doctorial Training, Lancaster University
This paper aims to foreground issues for design ethnographers working in urban contexts within the smart-city discourse. It highlights ethnography’s role in a shared urban future by exploring how ethnographers might pave the way for envisioning digital infrastructure at the core of Smart City programs. This paper begins by asking whether urban development practitioners can design for inclusive interaction with Smart Urban Infrastructure. The research suggests how ethnographers can work with ‘cities’ to rapidly develop diagnostic tools and capture insights that inform design processes with both utility and inclusive interaction as their key values. This involves rethinking how we consider places where space and information intersect. This work led to developing rapid means to assay a site and sensitize to contextual issues by tapping into heuristic expertise innate in city dwellers. This means doing ethnography in parallel with publics as opposed to performing ethnography ‘on’ them. Hence we discuss a fresh ethnographic perspective that can be especially useful in this context; shared ethnography.
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MOTIVATIONS & METHODS
Framing the development of Smart Cities in terms of inclusion acts as a potent stimulus to re-think Urban HCI. Through this paper, we identify gaps and harness opportunities to make meaningful interactions and warn against the grave implications of inaction. By beginning to fuse ethnographic practice’s rich history of engagement with cities, with burgeoning developments in smart technological infrastructure, the research aims to provoke and inure the urban development, human computer interaction and ethnographic communities to think carefully about the Smart City, and then look beyond it.
In this paper, we argue that a crucial maneuver is necessary; by adapting heuristic methods developed to evaluate digital environments to diagnose physical sites. This affords thinking of an urban site as a user interface and prepares the ground for the appropriate application of digital infrastructure that can enhance and include, becoming a sustainable part of the urban fabric. The resultant general method can be used as an adaptable system for evaluating a city along with its users, drawing on their innate expertise; lived experience. Rather than attempting to erase the difference between physical and digital user environments, it suggests acknowledging their co-presence and interdependence with respect to enabling the utility of a city for users/inhabitants.
Inspired by Kevin Lynch’s seminal approach to urban studies (1960a) and borrowing from Jacob Neilson’s (1992) heuristic user evaluation for this purpose, the researchers devised ways of rapidly capturing insights about a place by tapping into the perceptual images of users. Lynch privileged the meanings that inhabitants ascribed to their environment and his work attempted to make user perceptions a central stimulus for planning spaces, he aimed to capture perceptual images of a city and identify their common patterns. These two perspectives are a surprising fit and form an incredibly productive way of thinking about information layers of a city, its smartness. Coincidentally, these principles are sympathetic to third paradigm HCI thinking (Harrison, Tatar, and Sengers 2007).
Rather than suggest guidelines, too inflexible for designers and too general for broad application, this paper suggests first shifting our stance on how we regard cities. It finds that such reframing can reveal novel ways of harnessing innate expertise dormant in inhabitants. This strategy is also effective in engaging those that sit outside the present gamut of users. Seemingly, the savvy core that, ironically, are the creative technical class that design systems will find it inherently difficult to design for inclusion, our research suggests alternative strategies. This indicates an issue of epistemic injustice, where either prejudice de-privileges the credibility of a person’s insights or there is a gap in collective interpretive resources that puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences (Fricker 2007). The research findings suggest that; people’s interpretive ability, especially concerning their environment can be very strong. Also, that this gap can be bridged effectively by facilitating capture of situated insights and contends that ethnography should give weight to these collective interpretations, especially when this group is the user.
Design for inclusion is not only responsible, it is a political and in some cases a legal mandate. Inclusion is a fundamental consideration to ensure the resilience and sustainability of Smart City programs, as soon as they are regarded as complex product services systems (PSS). It makes sense to frame the city as a user interface when we recognize it as knot of nested services. Manzini et al discuss the need for a framework to understand the new types of stakeholder relationships and/or partnerships that are producing new convergences of economic interests, and their potential concomitant systemic resource optimization (2003). Designed to understand the situated usability issues of an urban site, to underpin attempts to foster livable and sustainable conditions, as such this study might be regarded as a Design Orienting Scenario (DOS) by Manzini (2007). Space and computation are increasingly interconnected as fungible components of a blended whole. As we face a seismic upheaval in how information and space intersect, considering issues of inclusion is both prescient and pressing.
The Urban Future
Cities are sites of tremendous innovation, living labs for experimentation. The question presents twofold; how can ethnography reshape how we envision future urban interactions and how can ethnography harness innovation capability dormant in urban dwellers or ‘users’ to inform Smart City design?
Cities already generate 80% of global GDP (BIS 2013). Therefore, research and governance need to take a lead in removing barriers to inclusion and facilitating collaborative innovation between multiple diverse actors through civic engagement. Importantly, cities are also attractors for less privileged. Between 2000 to 2010 nearly half the world’s urban population growth can be ascribed to rural to urban migration (Tacoli, McGranahan, and Satterthwaite 2015). Added to this, global populations are ageing, surprisingly in nearly all nations, not just developed ones. The number of older persons (over 60) is projected to double by 2050. After the sea change that came in 2004 when humanity for the first time became predominantly urban, by 2047 the number of older persons will exceed children for the first time (UN 2014).
Internet penetration grew from just over 6 per cent of the world’s population in 2000 to 43 per cent in 2015 (UN 2015). Yet, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) secretary-general Hamadoun Touré has stated that access signifies a ‘tipping’ point for global economic development. Forming a key point in the now expired 2015 UN Millennium development goals; access to information remains a key challenge. Touré frames access to communication as a human right; A right to participate in the knowledge society and the dawning digital economy, not to mention the 650 million people worldwide living with a disability of some kind (WCIT 2012).
Globally, every other person has access to basic Internet. In an older, poorer, differently abled and yet more urbane future the social value of inclusive access to technology is obvious, and so is the market opportunity. Paradoxically, those urban dwellers outside of the present smart city purview are in fact crucibles of process innovation perfectly adapted to the contingent mores of urban life. Finding ways to engage and include these sectors in meaningful interactions is an important strategy to enable social mobility and cohesion.
Ethnographic practice is especially germane to contend with these issues. By retooling industry ethnographers with useful perspective to quickly generate insights about an urban site is an important precursor stage in determining what digital services might bring greatest utility to a particular site. The ultimate aim is to beat the bounds for better urban fabric augmented with computation.
Smart City Critique
A growing critical perception of Smart City visions is that they ‘construct the resident as someone without agency; merely a passive consumer of municipal services – at best, perhaps, a generator of data that can later be aggregated, mined for relevant inference, and acted upon, a brutally reductive conception of civic life’. Greenfield claims that Smart City rhetoric intertwines innovation and efficiency with exploitation and control (Greenfield 2013). This is a reality antithetic to inclusive, livable cities.
A fundamental conceptual problem is the distinction between physical and information spaces. For technologically savvy groups, the utility of smart systems is self evident, for others, this can be a source of anxiety and confusion. For the excluded, ubiquitous information signifies an anxious uncoupling or de-situating of information and space. Traditional sites of access for common services; libraries, banks and post become dislocated from visible, permanent sites and becoming ephemeral, always available but mediated through some kind of interface that may appear counter-intuitive or at worst may remain unavailable entirely.
Situating Urban HCI
Computation is becoming predominantly mobile. In early 2014, mobile device use exceeded static devices for the first time (Gens 2014). The present device-based ecology will steadily be displaced by growth in pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Furthermore, the underlying trope is toward computation that it will also become a less visible, more integrated feature of spaces. This signifies a megatrend that is already underway (Vidyasekar 2013).
Often used interchangeably, for clarity, Ubiquitous computing is best thought of as the underlying frameworks or infrastructures that allow people to interface with information. Pervasive computing represents a vision of the blending of the physical components of our lives with computation, in other words the distributed networks of tools within an environment, through which we access information. Presently, an ecology of devices acts as interface to these systems, however looking forward, systems are likely to be increasingly embedded and shared resources (Kostakos 2005). In other research, we have explored how ethnography can anticipate future developments before they arrive (Lindley, Sharma & Potts 2014).
Mark Weiser envisioned computing as an integral, invisible part of the way people live their lives. As Weiser’s vision portents ‘the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’ (Weiser 1991). Usefully, Weiser gives the example of reading a street sign, we absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading, this phenomena suggests in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and can focus beyond them onto new goals. Weiser envisions computing performing this role, extending reach, silently. In terms of Urban HCI, this means removing barriers to interaction and drawing from these effortless, situated interactions as a stimulus. This capacity can act as bridges across groups who may be unfamiliar with or unable to access present technology.
There is an underpinning ‘machinery of interaction’ that reinforces this apparent deftness in reading the road sign, so, can this deeply innate interaction become a gold standard stimulus for HCI? As Crabtree et al argue, uncovering this is ethnography’s prize. Finding it is what doing ethnography as we know it is all about. Arguing, it isn’t especially difficult to do but it does require that we pay careful attention to that which we would ordinarily let pass us by (Crabtree, Rouncefield, and Tolmie 2012).
Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish famously brought interaction with space and place within the auspices of HCI. Space for them refers to a context’s physical configuration. Place refers to the way we are framed by social conventions and experience. Their view emphasises the ways in which we generate spatial forms and articulate spatial experiences. More importantly, it is vital to see both space and place as critical aspects and products of the circumstances of interaction (Harrison and Dourish 1996). In Harrison and Dourish’s words, ‘Place-making however reflects the conscious arrangement of elements to create a space that accommodates activity, and (here is the hard part) the interplay of reflective design and happenstance to give expression to the values of the occupants and their wider community’. In other words, as we have observed, a space can only be made a place by its occupants. The best that the designers can do is to put the tools into their hands (Dourish 2006). Here ethnographers should take issue with what we actually observe in the street to operationalize this vision.
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