Home // ACHI 2023, The Sixteenth International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions // View article
Authors:
Joakim Karlsen
Klaudia Carcani
Susanne Koch Stigberg
Keywords: design fiction; smart cities; participatory design
Abstract:
This paper investigates participatory design fictions as a method to involve citizens in the digitalisation of smart city critical infrastructures. By this we contribute to the topic raised by the call for papers to ACHI-COCREATE, to investigate how to make processes of digitalisation accessible to everyone. Based on the observations in one workshop organized for this purpose in a project aiming to install digital water meters in a mid-sized Norwegian city, we find that that participatory design fictions show promise in supporting citizen participation and the discussion of ethical considerations of making cities smarter with the help of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). We find that it is important to prepare design fictions that heed the basics of storytelling as applied in journalism, to make the story both relevant and provoking. Further, we find that if city officials with professional knowledge of the project at hand participates, more rules of engagement and prepping is needed to make sure that they leave enough room for speculation. Even though the citizens participating in the workshop had little knowledge of digital water meters beforehand, the design fictions enabled them to quickly identify ethical concerns with how the data from these could potentially be misused.
Pages: 17 to 23
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2023
Publication date: April 24, 2023
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2308-4138
ISBN: 978-1-68558-078-0
Location: Venice, Italy
Dates: from April 24, 2023 to April 28, 2023