Value Sensitive Design of Smart Cities Maaike Harbers Delft University of Technology Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences The Netherlands M.Harbers@tudelft.nl Peter van Waart Creating010 Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences Delft University of Technology The Netherlands peter.van.waart@hr.nl Eva Visser Creating010 Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences The Netherlands eva.visser@hr.nl ABSTRACT This paper explores the opportunities of using Value Sensitive Design for creating smart cities. Smart cities are larger in scale than the technologies to which Value Sensitive Design has been applied so far. The large size of the endeavor introduces new challenges for Values Sensitive Design. This paper discusses the following five challenges: complexity and emergent phenomena, collaboration between multiple parties, involvement of citizens, diversity of values, and the role of the designer. For each challenge, directions for solutions are suggested. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.1 [Public Policy Issues] General Terms Design. Keywords Smart city, Internet of Things, Value Sensitive Design, participatory design, human values. 1. INTRODUCTION In recent years, more and more cities have adopted the aim to become a smart city [Bowerman et al., 2000]. Smart cities can be defined as “well-defined geographical areas, in which high technologies such as ICT, logistic, energy production, and so on, cooperate to create benefits for citizens in terms of well-being, inclusion and participation, environmental quality, intelligent development; governed by a well-defined pool of subjects, able to state the rules and policy for the city government and development” [Dameri, 2013]. This leads, for instance, to a more efficient organization of transport, more effective distribution of water, or higher-quality health care. Smart cities often contain an Internet of Things, a network in which intelligent systems, devices and services are connected to each other [Atzori et al., 2010]. This paper explores the opportunities of using Value Sensitive Design to contribute to the human dimension of smart city design. Value Sensitive Design is a design approach that systematically accounts for human values in the design of technology [Friedman et al., 2013]. The motivation for explicitly addressing values is that values of designers affect the technology they design, and technology, in turn, affects the values of its direct and indirect stakeholders, either by hindering or supporting them. For a technology to be successfully adopted, it is important that it is in line with its stakeholder’s values. Value Sensitive Design thus seems to be a valuable approach for the design of smart cities. There is related work in which Value Sensitive Design has been applied to UrbanSim [Borning et al., 2005], a large-scale simulation system that models the development of urban areas [Waddell, 2002]. This project concerns urban development and attention is paid to creating a simulation that is responsive to the values held by different stakeholders. However, the project’s primary concern is the design of simulation software, whereas this paper is about the design of smart cities. Value Sensitive Design has been developed within the field of Human Computer Interaction, and most projects in which it has been used concern a single technology for a relatively specific target group, e.g. blind and deaf-blind public transit riders [Azenkot et al., 2011] or teens and their parents [Czeskis et al., 2010]. Smart cities, in contrast, involve a network of technologies and stakeholders, with many interactions and independencies between them. The interconnected systems in a smart city each have their own stakeholder group, of which some may expand to all of the city’s inhabitants. In short, smart cities are much larger in scale than the technologies to which Value Sensitive Design has been applied so far. The large scale of smart city design introduces new challenges for Values Sensitive Design. This paper discusses five of these challenges and points towards directions for possible solutions. 2. CHALLENGES We discuss the following five challenges of applying the Value Sensitive Design approach to design smart cities: complexity and emergent phenomena, collaboration between multiple parties, involvement of citizens, diversity of values, and the role of the designer. 2.1 Complexity and emergent phenomena Smart cities are much larger in scale than stand-alone applications or devices. This not only means that the design of a smart city amounts more work than the design of a single technology, it also changes the nature of the work. The network of connected intelligent, adaptive, and self-learning devices and services in a smart city can be considered as a complex system [Holland, 2006]. This implies that due to the interactions of the individual parts new phenomena emerge, which may hinder human values. For example, if self-driving cars all follow the same alternative route in case of a traffic jam, new traffic jams quickly emerge, thus hindering well-being. To avoid such undesired effects, the interaction between different parts of the system needs to be coordinated, for instance, by designing communication protocols, standards, rules and policies. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Conference’10, Month 1–2, 2010, City, State, Country. Copyright 2010 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010 …$15.00.