Designing for citizen-centric smart cities: supporting people's needs of a community garden

Abstract

There are a variety of smart city agendas but in recent times a citizen-centric focus has emerged. Citizen-centricity requires a different focus in terms of purpose and outcomes such as providing benefits that cross the digital divide and supporting people's general wellbeing and happiness. It is submitted that the design of the technology that enables smartness and citizen-centricity is another consideration to achieving these aims. Through a process to design technology for a community garden with the express aims of meeting the needs of people, three design implications for design have been identified: supporting a conceptual understanding of that technology and its place in a large system; supporting people's ability to perceive technology and its functionality; and, the technology must be designed to support people's experience of the space in which it is located. To some extent these implications contradict existing design intentions for technology of this nature, such as invisibility.