The last blog post is actually about the opening keynote of the World Usability Congress. I was listening a talk by Elizabeth Rosenzweig called “Scaling UX Strategies to Transform Cities: Roadmaps for Ethical, Human-Centered…”. I was surprised that this topic related to my idea for the master’s thesis.
Her argument is that technology including AI can help create cities that work for everyone. More importantly building cities where technology like this is ethically designed and centers around people. One of her main arguments is that technology and AI can help create cities that work for everyone.
Why should anyone be afraid to use technology?
Currently AI is like a blackbox and often users don’t understand how it is working. This is also why AI feels scary, because it isn’t transparent enough for the user to understand. Her answer to the question is that it will be important to create transparent, auditable and human in the loop AI Systems, to make people less afraid.
Smart Cities and SDG 11
She based her talk on the SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities, making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Smart cities today tend to focus on economic development and efficiency rather than circular economy. This highlights once again the capitalistic nature of these projects, since most smart cities developments are driven by economy and profit. This is also where Designers can play an important part. As Matthew Wizinsky concludes in his book Design after Capitalism: Design can not just be used for growth and consumption but it could imagine and build alternatives. This might also apply to smart cities that are focused on circular economy. Arguably Designers can help shift that focus of capitalism to a more sustainable and inclusive way. In conclusion, it can be argued that a circular economy will become necessary, because capitalism relies on continuous growth as if resources were unlimited. Currently the environmental crisis is already showing those limits.
Challenges of Smart Cities
What I found most interesting is that the challenges of smart cities apply to other industries as well. Trust, privacy and transparency matter just as much in e-commerce or social media as they do in smart cities.
- Inclusive and ethical smart cities: Technology has to work for everyone, including older people or people with disabilities.
- Trust between people and smart environments: People would only accept certain technology like sensors and cameras if they trust the city.
- Privacy in disappearing computer environments: Technology becomes invisible and people often don’t know when data is collected about them.
- Explainability and transparency of policies and measurements: People should be able to understand what, why and how something is measured.
- Incentives for engagement and sustainable behaviour: People should be motivated to behave sustainably.
- Measuring success and impact in sustainability projects: Projects about sustainability need clear ways to show if they are actually improving people’s lives.
Connection
This keynote fits well with the talk “The UX Horror Show: Let’s Talk About Dark Patterns.” and also the book “Design after Capitalism”. I believe that each of the authors/speakers show what happens when design serves the people instead of a businesses. One of the clearest links between deceptive patterns and Elizabeth Rosenzweig’s keynote is transparency. Her example focused on AI but the same principle could apply to business practices. Both talks empathised that systems are often designed to create deceptive environments.
Usability for the world.
Related Links
Book: HCAI Design Principles – Ben Schneiderman
Paper: How to Create and Foster Sustainable Smart Cities? – Christine Riedmann-Streitz, Norbert Streitz, et. al.
Paper: Deceptive Patterns under sociotechnical view – Luiz Adolpho Baroni, Roberto Pereira
