Briefing: Design Thinking for public space decision taking: Citizen/user designer's approach to problem solving

Transcription

1 Briefing: Design Thinking for public space decision taking: Citizen/user designer's approach to problem solving Project Goal: Project aims at developing and testing of a mobile collaborative platform that will allow users to easily design an urban space (square, kid s area, etc.) through visual participation and interaction. Local authorities will open public calls to citizen to design a given urban space. User will take a picture and use the app to insert objects and modify objects from the picture to design a new urban space. Local authorities will collect data from all participants and design an urban space based on the average of all designs. We want to go from: To this: Background: Citizen Participation for decision taking 1

2 Public citizen participation is articulated in several ways (elections, referendum, lobbying, Agenda 21, etc.) but we focus on community based formal participation and deliberation. In the last 10 years there has been a very interesting evolution of community based participation that has allowed to enrich decision making and reach larger social consensus. Local authorities have engaged citizens to take part in decision taking for everyday issues such as: urban planning, use of public buildings, design of urban spaces, participatory budgeting, etc. Participation and deliberation methodologies have been improving during this period. Simultaneously, and with the popularization of ICT (devices and networks), Internet solutions were developed to support and enhance participation processes. There are many Web based solutions for that purpose: Openideo Etc Some insights from Internet citizen participation experiences: Metholodology is based on a standard workflow: background information (usually in text form), questionnaires to answer by the user, possibility to propose some items, vote ideas and projects, comment them and look up final decision. Internet based participation projects fail to attract, engage and retain users. Main reasons are: Too much content, usually text and language level that makes it unfriendly. Bad user experience. It usually takes user computer skills for granted. Users are obliged to actively access the website (under user/password) and spend time to see new content. Being away from the website for some time may result in losing the pace and quitting. From the process leader point of view, when there is a large participation, it derives in a large amount of content to treat. They also feel like there is much more happening outside of the participation formal environment than on it. People start blogs, forums, wikis where real participation eventually happens! 2

3 Although, there are some benefits in the projects we aim to retain and enhance: Social implication: public participation processes are appreciated as a way to involve citizen in democracy among election dates. Democracy training: people learn about public affairs, how they work and the difficulty in managing public affairs Accountability: it is an effective way to deliver public accounts transparency and data openness. Savings: in the short term, there might be savings in experts tems ; in the long term, since projects come from consensus, they have higher rates of acceptance and tend to last longer and overcome political flows. Larger consensus: it is proven that that projects with public participation are largely much accepted since they incorporate citizen voice. Decision taking: it helps public authorities to reach agreement in delicate community issues. Project: Project will focus on finding a common solution (platform, software, methodology) for citizen participation through interactive mobile design thinking of urban spaces. Vision for the project: A local authority wishes to set up a public deliberation process to renew a public square. They would use this platform to allow citizens to design the square. The back-end would be used by the public organization to define the universe of elements to put into the square. Every element (a swinger, a slide, a bench, a tree, etc.) would be linked to characteristics (cost, regulations (two trees cannot be closer than X meters), incompatibilities between elements, etc.). In the front-end would be presented a realistic scenario (a 3D reconstruction) upon which they would create their scenario by picking the universe of elements. [think of age of empire game or even Farmville ] 3

4 They would even add new elements from pictures they took from street furniture, though they could not be considered by the algorithm. The following image mock-up show the app from the user interaction: The user takes a picture of the original area. 4

5 the picture. User can access a gallery of elements to place in Gallery of branches. The user choose the one he/she likes the most. 5

6 The user can place it in the area. evaluation. Once it is designed, he/she can submit it for its At the end of the process, the user would have created a scenario which could be shared. It could also be considered to build scenarios in community. Once the due date for the process is reached, the project organizer could automatically exploit the data and information. The organizer could ask the software: of those viable scenarios, which of them agree on a, for instance, 60% in terms of elements? At the end of the day this would be, in one hand, a way to simplify decision-taking, and in the another, ensure the most common elements of the scenario. Talking software, we must take into account graph databases models and computation power in order to allow real-time calculations while the users interact with the interface and for the data exploitation. Other related concepts: Role game Serious game 6

7 Usability and Human Centered Interface Open innovation Co-creation This proposed app is based on the knowledge acquired by Eral Grup in the development and implementation of participation and deliberation process carried out with the Participa web platform. Eral Grup has developed a participation suite called Participa ( for the Vegga Foundation. This platform has been used in hundreds of participation projects by local authorities. Participa platform is an online solution that enables the participation process in all stages allowing users to give feedback and vote. Our insights from Participa tool are: Users do not feel comfortable with such a user interface It does not enable mobility and real time participation It does not engage users (web platform is a technology barrier and it requires lot of time investment to follow the process) It does not consider data exploitation by promoters (local authorities in this case) The actual proposed app focus on solving those issues. About Eral Grup: Incorporated in 2002, ERAL GRUP develops services and technologies to provide a knowledge management tools and contents and help organizations to communicate and collaborate in a multi-layer and open world. ERAL GRUP develops and builds online tools to understand and provide value from social networks content, as well as, provide means to disseminate and collaborate. Over the past 10 years ERAL GRUP has set its focus from collaborative and participation/deliberative tools, in which field it has a consolidated reputation. ERAL GRUP innovation roadmap focuses on developing intelligent knowledge management solutions capable of extracting and making sense out of huge data feeds through data mining, semantic algorithms, etc. Through the R+D+i department ERAL GRUP is developing different types of technologies and support for social, deliberative and collaborative platforms: 7

8 Real-time collaboration exchange platforms Insights from data mining, crossing attribution models for decision making Automatic content curation based on non contextual concepts Connecting the Internet of Things to the social networks Eral Grup clients are regional and local public institutions and private firms mainly from tourism, insurance and health sectors. ERAL GRUP offers a large range of services in order to develop and implement the most suitable technology for knowledge management: Conceptualization: ERAL GRUP analyzes customers business needs and design and communication strategy and campaign. Graphic Design: Creativity and the service of multimedia communications objectives. Attractive design applications aligned with our customers corporate image. Development: We build or adapt the technology and software that best adapts to the users and the chosen strategy. Implementation: ERAL GRUP is aware of the importance of delivering a solid service and an outstanding user experience, which pushes to build robust and resilience technology infrastructures. Support and training: to train future users to adapt to the new software, and by tracking to support the new model. Eral Grup team consists of 13 professionals in order to provide an interdisciplinary teamoriented knowledge during the different phases of a knowledge management project. All professionals are specialists, with more than 10 years of experience. CEO Francesc Camps Mathematician (UAB 1998). He combined his technical background with studies in pedagogy and applied didactics. Master in e-learning and e-business (ICTnet 2001). Extensive experience as director of training in various training schools (MEGSJC, Molins Spanish Center), professionally specialized 8

9 in the field of knowledge management. He held various consultants and management positions (ThinkTwo, factory for Employment and Applied Innovation and development, Inéditos viables). Afterwards he founded and now manages the business group Eral Grup. He combines his professional career to research in social innovation. Since 1999, he founded and chairs the foundation for strategic innovation VEGGA, an organization dedicated to the study and promotion of citizen participation and collaborative methodologies of social learning through information technology and communication. CTO Bernat Quingles Bachelor in Engineering (UAB 2001). 7 years of experience in management and development of knowledge management projects, both in terms of technical aspects (materials, structural design, programming of dynamic interactions, monitoring implementation of interfaces based on standards such as ADLSCORM, etc. ) and in human resource management and project management (definition of project phases, stages scheduling, management and coordination of the different profiles involved, etc). Experience in development of various online applications for different purposes and on various platforms and languages (such as Java, JSP, Tomcat, PHP, ASP, etc.). As well as development planning and coordination of the different profiles involved in the project. Experience in Web development applications with support for Databases (Oracle, Mysql, etc.) secure environments, and high degree of interactivity and multimedia immersion. 9