UX PROJECT: Best Practices for Community Engagement in Smart Cities

Best Practices for Community Engagement in Smart Cities

Project Overview:

Smart cities are modern innovations intended to improve the quality of life through advanced technologies. However, most of these smart city decisions are made at the top level — often excluding the participatory input of the community. In this project, we wanted to learn how community engagement and inclusiveness are addressed in contemporary smart city initiatives.

Objectives:

1. Gauge insights on how city planners engage the community
2. Understand the level of citizen engagement in different cities.

Research Question:

How are smart city planners facilitating community engagement in various cities in the United States?

Method:

Qualitative Interviews (Remote) — Due to the restricted nature of Covid-19, we conducted a remote interview using Zoom.

Participants:

We conducted qualitative interviews with smart city planners across the U.S. and analyzed the interview data manually to identify themes.

Criteria for selecting participants: Smart City Planners must be pursuing mega smart city projects, and must reside within the US.

Our process:

Observation — — Understanding — — Analysis

Role:

I conducted the literature review of this project. In addition, I helped partially with the interviewing process and analyzing relevant themes from the interview.

Insight:

1. A successful model of smart city community engagement is community-centric and addresses problems.
2. Effective data management policies and incentivized programming for community stakeholders have proven to be the best practices.
3. Without community practices, there is a lack of key smart city initiatives that impact the ability to meet needs of the community.

Outcome:

1. We developed recommendations for smart city planners to help with deploying effective solutions.
2. Our project was published in the IEEE journal — https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9778151