Posts Tagged ‘smart cities’

By Claire Thorne

Wednesday 1 May 2013 #rcaktn

Hosted by Innovation RCA, the Technology Strategy Board’s Knowledge Transfer Networks, and Open City Labs. 

What is citizen-centred design? And what does it mean in the context of future transport? What could, and should, future transport modes, networks and offerings look like? And how do we get ‘there’?

Whatever insights the day’s discussions promised, I turned up to the Dyson building, Battersea, sure of at least one success: The Royal College of Art had managed to bring a hugely diverse group of people [delegate list, pdf ] together under one (very stylised) roof.

The aim of the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) workshop was to scope out one/more potential ‘citizen-centred design for future transport’ multi-institute research programme(s) to take forward.

Here’s my summary of the day’s discussions and key themes:

In a lecture theatre that resembles no other natural sciences, engineering or business school lecture theatre I’ve ever seen* the facilitator (with seemingly endless enthusiasm!) brought together representatives of Open City Labs, local authorities, the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities, the Technology Strategy Board, Transport for London, the Greater London Authority, and organisations like Useful Simple … and of course Digital City Exchange (Imperial College London’s smart cities research programme).

* There are a host of reasons, but for a start, it had windows. And lots of them.

There wasn’t just variety to be found in the participant’s disciplines and sectors; all age groups were represented – refreshing indeed…

[Multi/cross/intra-disciplinary, multi/cross/intra-functional, multi/cross/intra-sectoral, multi/cross/intra-institute, multi/cross/intra-… we hear it everywhere in HEIs (and there’s no denying its value) but it never seems to go far enough. Where’s the equivalent promotion of multi/cross/intra-generational research and academia-industry collaboration?]

Nevertheless, I noted that we seemed a tad short on ‘techies’ (engineers, developers etc) whilst Beatrice Rogers (Creative Industries KTN) was wondering where the policymakers were… Perhaps they were there, or perhaps they got waylaid by other, more outdoors-y activities…

That special combination of a creative space coupled with creative minds led to, well, creative thinking and lively (but friendly) discussions… all manifested through the power of the humble post-it note, taking over every wall.

[By the way, is there an app that can take a photo of multiple post-it notes, and generate a word (or other) document with all the content? (with the text appropriately coloured, and sized proportional to its importance). Anyone? That could be handy/slightly terrifying…]

Duncan Wilson’s  (Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities)  keynote [full slides, via slideshare] highlighted his ‘top 10’ thematic issues/opportunities for citizen-centred design for future transport:

1. Interfaces e.g. wireless electric vehicle charging mechanisms

2. Systems approach

3. Transactions

4. Peer-to-peer

5. Business Models

6. Nudging (i.e. often incentivised, behavioural change) e.g. Chromorama (gamification of London journeys, using Oyster card data)

7. Connected

8. Integrated

9. Feedback

10. Personal space

(and note they’re not sector-specific, and hence pretty much apply to any ‘smart cities’ initiative). Check out the city issue map – presented at the World Economic Forum approximately five years ago. Now in 2013, how has this landscape of issues changed?

During our very first task there was a struggle to get past the wording of the workshop’s title: Should we be talking about Citizen-centred design? People-centred design? User-centred design? Or other?

I wondered what role future transport could play in, not just moving people between sites, from A to B, but in building communities along the way. Jump on a bus in, say, Aberdeen, and if you don’t see someone you know, soon enough you’ll have sparked up conversation with someone you’ve not met before. (Of course this is in stark contrast to London, and undoubtedly some prefer it this way). Could the journey on the city bus become our modern-day ‘village hall’, or ‘community centre’?

Aside from the access to existing data-streams, I think Digital City Exchange would be keen to explore

• the role of big/open data (and particularly real-time predictive modeling)
• incentivising users’ behavioural change

in citizen-centred design of future transport solutions.

A great day, a tonne of data (thanks Rakesh Gaur, Head of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability at TfL!!) and… some transport trivia:

• A London black cab costs £38,000.
• In 1900, 90% of travel was on public transport (e.g. street cars).
• There are 300,000 users of mobility scooters in the UK.
• The majority of transport use in London is for journeys of ~3-5 miles.
• What’s the most common reason why older people don’t use public transport? (it’s not about fare prices, fear of unsociable behaviour, or waiting for connections in the cold weather)… Guaranteed proximity to public toilet facilities!
• The reason why General Motor’s genius (or dubious?) business model was really a success(!)

Thursday 7 February 2013, Queen’s Tower Rooms, Imperial College London

DCE co-host ‘teacamp’ event on Open Data and Smart Cities

On February 7th, Imperial’s Digital City Exchange, the Digital Economy Lab and Sustainable Society Network+ hosted a special, one-off teacamp.

So, what is ‘teacamp‘?

Teacamp is an established series of informal, free, discussion events hosted via the Government Digital Service (GDS, Cabinet Office).

“Teacamps are informal gatherings for digital people who work in and around government and also outside of government. They are usually two hours long including a slot for a speaker and chatting over a cup of tea, hence the name ‘teacamp’…”

What made this teacamp special?

The February teacamp, hosted at Imperial’s South Kensington campus, was planned to coincide with the launch of the Urban Prototyping London 2013 festival, and to focus the discussions on to big and open data.

Speakers

Around seventy people from a range of disciplines and professions came along to interact with the panellists during this one-off event, organised by teacamp founder (Jane O’Loughlin, @teacampLondon) and DCE’s Dr Cathy Mulligan (@API_Economics, DCE Research Fellow) and Claire Thorne (@clairethorne, DCE Programme Coordinator).

(After some last minute tweaks!!) The panel consisted of:

• Richard Foulsham (@DELaboratory) – Programme Coordinator – IOP and Digital, Digital Economy Lab, Imperial College London
• Dr Jenny O’Connor (@Jenny0C) – DCE Research Associate exploring citizen engagement, technology development and adoption, data ownership, and the human aspects of privacy and security in relation to various categories of use.
• Dr Koen van Dam (@Koen_van_dam) -  DCE Research Associate, developing an agent-based model of city systems based on spatial and temporal data from multiple sectors.
• Dr David Boyle – DCE Research Fellow investigating city data-streams and the sensing landscape.
• James Smith (@floppy) – A developer at the UK Open Data Institute and lead organiser for @cleanwebuk

The discussions

For an overview of the discussions, check out Ross Atkin’s comic-style sketch notes (@rossatkin) and @Puffles2010‘s blog post, capturing all the action!

If you’d like more info on upcoming teacamps, keep an eye on the teacamp site/Twitter feed…

Istanbul,13-14 September 2012

By Pantelis Koutroumpis

The first of its kind World Intelligent Cities Summit took place in Istanbul on the 13-14 September. The agenda included prominent figures from the Turkish government and local authorities together with international experts presenting best practices for the development of connected and sustainable cities. While primarily a business and policy summit it was a rather interesting meeting in terms of the common direction towards a more sustainable future where ICT plays a critical role.

Idris Gulluce, Deputy & Chair Committee on Public Works, Reconstruction, Transportation and Tourism of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) talked extensively about the importance of local culture and social understanding for the success of smart policies in cities. He underlined the increasing impact of behavioral sciences in designing, implementing and benchmarking policies and took some distance from ‘all-purpose’ EU guidelines and regulations that often oversee social cohesion and wellbeing in favor of preset targets. Gulluce outlined the list of major transport projects planned or underway in Istanbul like the Marmaray rail tunnel under the Istanbul Strait, the Istanbul Strait Road Channel Crossing, the Gebze-Orhangazi-Izmir Highway and the North Marmara Highway including the third Bosphorous Bridge in the city. In response to the decision to go on with these projects, Gulluce was criticized by the press in the room for a lack of planning and communication in the design and launch phases. From the lively discussions it became evident that Istanbul has changed dramatically during the last fifteen years. As he noted, Hurriyet – a newspaper with national circulation – offered coupons for gas masks back in 1994 to address the problem of air quality in the city. Today the most significant problems come from excessive traffic primarily due to the size of the city (~13m residents) and a historic lack of urban building plans. Besides the economic performance of the area continues to lure more young people to the city from the other regions of the country further affecting the local traffic.

Egemen Bagis, Minister of EU Affairs, went on to explain the increasing impact of cities’ social capital in the development of sustainable-living strategies. Transport, energy, water management, manufacturing and financial services all need to change their practices to address the evolving techno-economic ecosystem. He also highlighted the major improvements in Istanbul describing his experiences when access to drinking water was a major issue for the citizens and ‘hair dressers used soda water to work with’. Moving beyond the darker past he mentioned that people are now already beyond the hostilities of the past and that ‘asking for more tulips’ to decorate green areas is evidence for this improvement. In terms of actions by the government Bagis said that 16m tablets have been distributed to students and identified this policy as a critical broadband demand stimulation measure. The gradual shift from military expenditures towards education is another clear sign of the set of policies that Bagis continues to support.

Pierro Fassino, Mayor of Torino, discussed the transformation of a former industrial city into a modern sustainable landscape. His policies include a successful cycle hire scheme and a plan to reduce carbon emissions by 40% by 2020, in line with the 20-20-20 EU agenda. As explained policy-makers have to find the right mix of tools to ‘marry’ digital applications with social cohesion. Direct communications to the officials through social media or simple apps are a global trend that redefines active participation and democratic representation. His policies include a system of systems approach in managing the city linking all information feeds from energy, water, transport, telecommunications and manufacturing to a central location. Fassino described himself as a proponent of the digitization of public data as the only way to efficiently manage modern metropolises.

Hakki Tok, Chief Information Officer of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, pointed to the progress of the city in the digitization domain and announced that a domain name TSD extension has been granted to Istanbul; from 2013 local servers will have the option to be host under the .ist extension, slightly departing from the country’s .tr TSD. Along with mayors and municipal authorities he showed iPhone and Android apps already in operation that notify the IT centers of local municipalities for urgent or everyday citizens’ needs.

Other presentations included pilots for real life Living labs in cities (Hungary, Switzerland and Turkey), water and wastewater applications as financially viable solutions with significant reuse of resources, smart grid applications and local generation of electricity, applications for buildings and retrofits for households to meet the new model of ‘Plus Homes’ by the Fraunhofer Institute and many more.

In a nutshell, this summit showed that Istanbul is turning into a city-model for Turkey and the world both in terms of its size and the digital applications coupled with policy initiatives already in progress. It is also a great place with nice views to Bosphorous early in the morning and exquisite dietary combinations in Taksim Square a little bit later.

Ovum-DCE Smart Cities Europe 2012

The Lancaster, London 19-20 June 2012

You can find the Chirpstory for the event here.

In many ways the event revealed the broader problems with discussions around smart cities. There is the aspirational vision – cleaner, less-congested, less polluted and more prosperous cities – contrasted with the complex reality of current “smart” ICT projects, often mired in difficulties around business models, administrative jurisdiction, privacy and security issues and any number of other complex multi-stakeholder problems that crop-up when you try and integrate the physical and digital worlds; problems which go far beyond the scope of a simple technological fix.

The day started with an intoduction by Larry Hirst of the Digital City Exchange and Imperial College and Neelie Kroes of the European Commission, and a laying-out-of-issues by David Gann, the principle investigator of the Digital City Exchange.  The vision of the Digital City Exchange is to create the equivalent of a telephone exchange for a city’s data. This platform will then be accessed by citizens, businesses and city administrators to assist decision making, create products and services and inform city management. The key point about this exchange is that it seeks to be an exchange for all types of sectoral data: energy, transport, health, waste, environmental and any other areas you can think of to place a sensor. This goes far beyond the sectoral approach we see in many projects.

The imperative for such projects was underlined by Manel Sanromá, CIO of the City of Barcelona who pointed out that the human race is becoming steadily more urban, a process that has been going on for millennia. A result of this fact is that it is the quality of life that is available in the cities that is going to determine how we live in the future, because although you “can’t guarantee that France, the United Kingdom and the United States will be around in a thousand years, you can be virtually certain that Paris, London and New York will be”.

As such, cities themselves, through offices such mayors and other municipal offices that currently seem to be  undergoing a renaissance, are going to be the source of the impetus for moving to a smarter urban future.

Interesting themes that emerged from subequent sessions included:

The human element: the unpredictability of human nature and the risk of making any broad predictions about how the “human agent” will react when embedded in a smart city. A point raised in both the Transport session by panellists Sue Flack, Anders Roth and Jeremy Green, and by Nilay Shah in his “View from the Top” session as he tried to imagine what a smart city would look like using the tools of process engineering.

What is a smart city?: This is likely to differ from city to city, but what are the essential elements and what is the essential infrastructure needed before you can even think about calling yourself one?

Governance: we may use phrases such as “managing the smart city”, but more often the level of decision making is unclear, a hierarchy and decentralisation are often suggested but we still don’t know who to go to for a particular kind of decision.

Who will pay?: Something of an old warhorse in debates about almost any topic, but one that is particularly uncertain when business models are as contested as they are in the digital environment. A point made strongly by Allan Mayo of the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills who said the assumption that it was all going to be paid for by advertising was naïve.

The smart cities agenda suffers from a certain amount of tension between a bottom-up versus top-down approach. The former is responsive, but limited in scope by barriers between sectors and the latter is slow to develop and ill-defined, but necessary if the full potential of the agenda is to be realised. Hopefully the Digital City Exchange will go some way to filling this lacunae.

Tuesday 22 May 2012, Crayon London

By Koen van Dam

After previously attending the Internet of Things Meetup Meetup #6, it was only a matter of time before DCE would return to another edition of this informal get-together of a community focused on machine to machine communication, open data and trying to change the world. For IoT Meetup #8 the talks had a smart city/smart home/energy focus.

Before the three speakers gave their short presentation sparking off some interesting debates, Owen Davies explained the recent rebranding of Pachube to Cosm. In addition to providing a fresh new design and a name which is easier to pronounce (no more feeling smug hearing other people struggle with this after finally getting it right yourself), the new website wants to offer users more than just a place to store their data to be processed elsewhere. New graphs, maps and data visualisation are part of this. Furthermore, Cosm wants to be a stronger community-based platform, making it easier to see what others are doing and how they use their data and to facilitate discussions.

Claire Rowland, service design manager at AlertMe, a company specialising in home energy and security monitors, gave an inspiring view of how the user experience with smart home devices should look like. She stated that “a home is not a computer”, not the least because homes can be messy and things are not black or white as would be the view of a computer. A clear example of this would be a teenager sulking in the bedroom: present in the house (so don’t set the burglar alarm) but not really actively interacting with the rest of the family at that point either (so don’t go in there and ask if the temperature is right). Furthermore, the house is the last place you want to feel out of control and computers sometimes do make us feel like we’re not fully in charge (especially when they are not working as they are supposed to). As a result, Claire stated that any technology incorporated in the home should feel “homely”. An alarm system using terms like “armed” or “disarmed”, for example, make it sound as if there is a war going on instead of providing you with peace of mind before going to bed. Finally, what other companies building home energy management systems or a burglar alarms do wrong, is that they create devices that require more attention, not less. It will be interesting to see how AlertMe is going to address these challenges, especially when we see a world in which more choices may have to be made by the consumer (e.g. which energy supplier to use, when to run the washing machine so it’s the cheapest, at what time to charge an electric vehicle so the carbon emissions are the lowest, etc). If devices don’t bug us for the ordinary tasks it could make life simpler, but on the other hand we would give up some autonomy as well… and we’d have to trust the algorithms to make the right choices.

Paul Tanner shared his search for a low-power home hub. Such a device would sit in between the sensors and actuators in your home and the (cloud-based) services that can do something useful with the data and allow you to control it. Since a hub would always be turned on, low energy use is a key requirement. Of course the hub needs to spe