Scientific Report. 1. Abstract. 2. Purpose of the STSM. COST ACTTION TU 1306 CyberParks

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1 Scientific Report Reference CyberParks ECOST-STSM-TU Name Home institution STSM Topic Fiona McDermott Trinity College Dublin Collaborative design and citizen engagement - methods and practices for the development of ICT and public space projects. Period from 7 April 2016 to 13 April 2016 Host institution Future Cities Catapult, London 1. Abstract The questions of how and to what degree stakeholders, particularly citizen groups and social enterprises are engaged in the design of projects that bring ICT and public space together are critical to the sustainable development of such projects. While there has been much research examining the dynamics of participation in design, and the role that different groups of stakeholders, facilitators and coordinators can play in the design process within the domains of HCI and Participatory Design, there has been little research on these factors in the context of urban design and public space projects. For this reason, the aim of this proposed STSM is to investigate the various guises of stakeholder engagement methodologies and approaches as employed in such projects that bring ICT, urban design and public space together. Using the EU project OrganiCity as a case study, this mission reports on various aspects of the project stakeholder engagement strategy and activities including the initial user research, public engagement activities, communication mechanisms and collaborative design tools. Through a complex programme of online and offline engagements, the OrganiCity project seeks to build a strong foundation for future sustainable cities through co-creation by a wide range of stakeholders. In doing so it has opened up a data platform and a comprehensive suite of technology tools to enable citizens, researchers, businesses and city government to create their own experimental applications and services using smart technology. This research highlights the broad resources and extensive efforts that are required of the facilitating organizations in order to support the different stakeholders across various physical and virtual mode of engagement and at different stages of the project from ideation to design, implementation and evaluation. The outcomes of the STSM are intended to provide the Cyberparks Cost Action with an insight into the current state of affairs of stakeholder engagement within the very specific context of a project that aims to create collaborative city experiments using ICT and urban data tools. 2. Purpose of the STSM The main purpose of this STSM (short--term scientific mission) was to investigate how and to what degree stakeholders, particularly citizen groups and social enterprises are engaged in the design of projects that bring ICT and public space together. An existing body of literature is dedicated to examining user engagement and collaborative design processes, which have been widely adopted within the discipline of HCI for a number of years and applied to a variety of domains (Anthopoulos et al. 2007, Merkel et al. 2004). Existing work has reflected on the 1 / 10

2 nature of participation in design (Hutchinson et al. 2003, Vines et al , examining the participants multiple forms of involvement and the role that a facilitator can take in participatory activities, from coordinating, to observing, to full participation. Other research has explored methods and approaches to collaborative design for successful user involvement and understanding (Bratteteig and Wagner 2012, Kleinsmann et al. 2008]. Many collaborative design projects commence with an open and flexible brief, with the goal of forming relationships and understandings of practices, their context and possible solutions to existing challenges (Bødker and Iversen 2002, Kensing et al. 1998). Researchers in these cases apply various kinds of exploratory techniques as a means to facilitate participation amongst multidisciplinary groups, such as: exploratory design games (Brandt 2006); cultural probes as a means to represent the users environment and context in an open, inspiring way (Gaver et al. 1999); and open-ended, flexible scenarios (Strömberg et al. 2004). Techniques applied at this stage of design are dependent on the level of information that is required. These approaches often lead to convergent design ideas and understandings of users challenges and desires that potential interactive systems can support. As well as cases where the process of collaborative design originates from a brief that is often jointly developed within the group of participants as in the examples above, many researchers have also explored how digital and interactive technologies can be used as prompts, tools, or development environments in the design process. Reasons for using such technologies in collaborative design are varied: they can be based on the day-to-day influence they have on the users (Kleinsmann 2008); their potential for unearthing creative solutions (Mörtberg et al. 2010); and to demonstrate existing prototypes to discuss potentials for redesign [Hutchinson et al. 2003). For example, researchers have explored how technological prototypes can be used as probes, forming rough design concepts for developing tools for urban renewal and placing them in the hands of users, leading to unexpected uses and ideas for novel technology solutions (Mörtberg et al. 2010). In the context of urban design, factors such as the rejection of traditional decision-making processes, the emergence of grassroots initiatives, the changing role of urban design professionals and the rise of citizen engagement platforms in recent years bring new research aspects and critical debate into the dynamics of participation and collaborative design. And while the active engagement and participation of citizens in urban design and public space projects inherently gestures towards a set of practices that are empowering and democratic, its limits and contradictions remain insufficiently explored and analysed (Beebeejaun 2016). The general objective of this STSM was to develop a better understanding of the various guises of stakeholder engagement methodologies and approaches as employed in projects that bring ICT and public space together. From this line of inquiry the following research questions emerged: - What is the process for involving different stakeholders (internal and external) in projects and how is engagement with stakeholders managed and coordinated? - What are the different theoretical and methodological approaches to stakeholder engagement in projects? - How do you develop processes which allow for collective experimentation and collaborative design? - How do you attempt to involve a diversity of stakeholders and engage with non-experts? - What are the key issues and problems concerning stakeholder engagement in such projects? 2 / 10

3 3. Description of the work carried out during the STSM This STSM took place in London, primarily at the office of Future Cities Catapult ( with an additional research visit to visit Professor Yvonne Rogers and colleagues at the Intel Collaborative Research Institute ( at University College London. Located within the Urban Innovation Centre in Clerkenwell, Future Cities Catapult is a centre of urban innovation which brings together city decision makers, businesses and universities from around the world to develop solutions to the future needs of cities. The centre provides facilities and expertise to support the development of new products and services, as well as opportunities to collaborate with others, test ideas and develop business models ( The Intel Collaborative Research institute brings together researchers from University College London, Imperial College London and Intel in order to develop adaptive technologies that can optimize resource efficiency, and enable new services that support and enhance the quality of life of urban inhabitants and city visitors. The approach is interdisciplinary, combining methodologies from computer science, the social sciences, interaction design and architects to improve how cities are managed and maintained in order to ensure and enhance citizen well-being ( The work as undertaken by the author took the form of a series of semi-structured interviews with key design and research staff at both institutions, observation of and participation within meetings, witnessing demonstrations of prototypes and other informal interactions. Because another important element of the STSM was to learn about the work of the institutions, a detailed textual analysis of literature relating to both of the institutions and their associated projects as published and disseminated by the insitiutions and affliated partners, was also undertaken. In order to learn from the experiences of personnel at Future Cities Catapult, the following people were interviewed: - John Lynch, Project Lead, Product & Service Design - Anja Maerz, Insights Expert - Belen Palacios, Designer Researcher - Gemma Ginty, Head of Urban Futures - Gyorgyi Galik, Designer Researcher - Jagjit Bhabra, Economist - Ness Wright / Service Designer and Researcher - Christian Schmeer, Filmmaker Researcher In addition to these interviews, the author participated in and made observations of numerous internal project meetings and presentations at Future Cities Catapult, including planning of stakeholder workshops and internal workshops detailing user research. Typically, projects at Future Cities Catapult involve muliple stakeholders from industry, local government, academia and research. The projects which were observed by the author were those involving members from the Insights & Service Design team and Urban Futures team. While visiting the Intel Collaborative Research Institute (ICRI) at University College London (UCL), the author made semi-structured interviews with Professor Yvonne Rogers, Principal Investigator and director of the Interaction Centre, UCL and Steven Houben, research associate at UCL. While the author observed work on a large number of projects both at Future Cities Catapult and the Intel Collaborative Research institute, many of these projects are still at the early stages of development and / or have privacy issues attached to them. For these reasons, this report will focus on one particular case study project, namely OrganiCity. Through the lens of this case study, the report will concentrate on the following aspects of stakeholder engagement: 3 / 10

4 - Ethnographic studies (initial user research, field studies) - Public engagement (intervention strategies, communication with different groups, programme of - events) - Collaboration design (design tools and techniques) OrganiCity OrganiCity ( is an ongoing ( ) EU funded research and development project that aims to provide citizens of London (UK), Aarhus (DK) and Santander (ES) with an accessible and flexible uniform platform for experimentation with urban data and the internet of things (IoT). The role of Future Cities Catapult is to lead the London component of the project which covers citizen engagement, use case generation and dissemination. A key ambition of OrganiCity is to make the creation and design of technologies and services for cities more inclusive for a wide range of stakeholders including citizens and communities. In doing so, the project aims to tackle the question of how smart cities can be organically grown from citizens and communities instead of being engineered by the visions of large cooperates and city governments alone. A key proponent of the project is the idea of delivering 'Experimentation as a service'. Acknowledging that citizens can identify urban challenges, co-create experiments to tackle these challenges, and advocate positive activism and behaviour change, there is huge potential for cities to offer experimentation as a service to help citizens experiment using urban data and emerging technologies to improve their cities. OrganiCity is testing how to provide enough expertise to citizens to allow this to happen so that such experimentation-as-a-service facilities might become replicable, scalable and sustainable. Another key element of the OrganiCity engagement strategy is that while providing high level principles, phases and potential channels that are common across clusters, it also deliberately allows for gaps to allow the individual cities and groups within them to consider what works best for given contexts. Engagement Strategy As part of the project, one of the first important deliverables was the intial engagement strategy, a strategy which notably is to be redefined and updated throughout the project. This report We are All OrganiCitizens - Engagement Strategy (Initial) provides useful insight into the initial engagement across the three cluster cities as well as an outline for the overall engagement strategy for the project. It provides detailed documentation of the qualitative research as undertaken with existing communities, both within the project consortium partners and with close connection to the consortium members. The first stage of the engagement strategy was a community mapping survey in the form of a questionnaire which was circulated amongst the communities and initiatives which were either already directly connected with the OrganiCity project or existing adjacent to one or more of the consortium partners. Analysis from this survey grouped the communities into categories of shared characteristics, goals and demographics. From this information came an informed approach to the qualitative interview process, specifically ensuring appropriate breadth of the investigation across city stakeholders and community groups. At the next stage, interviews were set up to cover all of the categories (Technology/Data Oriented, Governance, Service Creation/Delivery, SME/Enterprise Oriented and Citizen/Community Groups) at least once in each cluster city. 4 / 10

5 Principles for Engagement Deriving from this qualitative research were the following seven principles to be applied during further engagement: - Empower Adjacent Communities and Champion Advocates - Design for Trust, Especially Around Change - Facilitate Personal/Community Ownership - Debate and Co-Create Across the Comfort Zones - Use Challenge Areas as Catalysts for Innovation - Respect the Value of Venue: Face to Face, Online, Culture & Collaboration - Provide a Clear Journey and Value Visibility Within the principles, there are a number of important points worth highlighting in relation to the project's approach to stakeholder engagement: - The intention is not to try to build a new community from scratch project but instead to empower the already established communities and active individuals in the society to further success, and through the advocacy of these actors, grow and diversify the population of co-creating contributors. In this scenario, the role of so-called 'champion advocates', those who already engage in urban experiments, is crucial as they are seen to be pivotal in initiating activity and attracting others to participant. - An increase in the level of collaborative design may result in a shifting of roles of the different stakeholders, including those of local and city governments. Establishing trust through means of clear communication and credible action in these new roles during the shift is important if stakeholders are to affirm internal and external legitimacy. - There is an acknowledgement that in many efforts to co-create new services or business models between local / city governments and community / grassroots organisations, there is a 'brand gap' that exists. - Language plays an important role in the promotion of the project. For example, terms such as smart city or IoT, may not resonate or be relevant to citizen groups or non-expert stakeholders. - While building awareness through discussion is a key initial step in engagement, encouraging entry and/or deepening of participation in new domain areas requires facilitating applied learning. Knowledge creation (learning about the platform and facility) comes before knowledge co-creation in the journey towards successful experimentation. - The setting up of an environment for hands-on experimentation and basic knowledge exchange is an opportunity to allow diverse stakeholders to become acquainted with one another and to share ideas. - The evaluation stage of the experiment process would benefit from the inclusion of a diverse group of stakeholders as this would contribute unexpected perspectives on the ideas and products generated. - It is also acknowledged that in order for it to bring about innovation, the Organicity project must facilitate cross disciplinary and cross demographic collaboration which means providing the physical and virtual platforms necessary to make this happen as well as recruiting the actors to collaborate. - Despite the fact that the majority of the projects technical tools operate online, comfortable, neutral, physical spaces are equally if not more important. These physical spaces are necessary for making the project activities visible and accessible as well as hosting face-to-face engagement between a diversity of stakeholders. - For many that are not familiar with network infrastructures and the world of IoT, the physical reality of IoT devices and their applications are obscure and not well understood. To counteract 5 / 10

6 this, the physical nature of the technology should be brought to the fore, for the benefit of providing an understanding of what the technology is and means. - Transparency of information and clearly defined stages along the process from ideation to funding are critical. The timescale of participation, the current activity and phase, what is expected of participants and the value returned and impact created are all critical information examples. In terms of prescient approaches, Open IDEO ( was a platform that was identified in successfully combining online and offline facilitation clearly defined stages. The Engagement Journey In addition to the seven principles, the engagement strategy details several iterations of the so-called Journey of Engagement as a framework for participatory relationships between the OrganiCity project and different groups within the city. Also distilled from the qualitative research, these journeys are divided into four specific demographic groups (SME s, citizen or citizen groups, academic organization or students, and city governance stakeholder) and clearly demarcate the different engagement phases. Figure 1. Journey of Engagement for Small/Medium Enterprise (top) and Journey of Engagement for Citizens or Citizen Groups (bottom). Source: We are All OrganiCitizens - Engagement Strategy (Initial) The engagement journey outlines have dual purpose. Firstly for the facilitators of OrganiCity, they represent a clear chronological representation of what is required by way of supporting activities, interaction objectives and focused goals. Secondly, for the wider community, they explain exactly what 6 / 10

7 activity is underway at a given time, how they can learn from progress and, if willing to contribute or participate, the precise categories of community activity that are required by the process. Engagement Channels Reaching a diverse group of people in terms of demographics, languages etc. and handling disparities between different localities represents a real challenge in the public engagement and communication of this geographically distributed project. With the aim of creating a general awareness of the project and communicating with a wide range of people across multiple disciplines and locations, an extensive social media strategy was included as part of the overarching engagement strategy. This included assigning location specific channels to the different target audiences and the use of specific social media platforms to target domain audiences. Alongside the multiple social media channels, the project activities are also communicated to the public via the project website and a dedicated newsletter. In addition, physical public engagement interventions include workshops in locations across Europe, conferences, talks and focus groups. Open Call At the time of the visit, the project had just launched the first of its funded open calls ( for experiment proposals. This allows anyone (citizens, communities, researchers, businesses, governments, etc.) to apply for funding to facilitate the creation of working prototype experiments using real urban data and connected devices. Applications to the call have to meet a number of conditions. Firstly, the experiment must address an issue in one of the three partner cities (Aarhus, London or Santander) and should utilize some of the capabilities of the OrganiCity experimentation platform, tools and urban data streams. Secondly, the idea for the experiment should be innovative in some way. And thirdly, the experiment must be co-created or form some type of collaboration with citizens or communities who will use or be affected by the proposed project. Alongside the suite of experimentation tools and data sources ( the open call also incorporates a helpdesk ticketing system to aid potential applicants. 4. Description of the main results obtained Through a complex programme of online and offline engagements, the project has defined challenges specific to each city and has opened up a data platform and a comprehensive suite of technology tools to enable citizens, researchers, businesses and city government to create their own experimental applications and services using smart technology. The open call offers an impressive array of tools to suit the different skill levels of potential experimenters and a lot of consideration has been given in how to support applicants via multiple modes of communication. Extensive resources and continuous effort are required of the facilitating organizations in order to support the different stakeholders across the different physical and virtual platforms and at different stages of the project from the ideation stages to design, implementation and evaluation. In this facilitation, responsiveness, continuity and consistency of voice are essential if the expectations of the stakeholders are to be met and collaborative design process is to be successful. While the modes of citizen engagement are open and diverse (open calls, public talks and workshops, etc.), the formation of the engagement strategy is based on pre-existent communities, initiatives, groups and individuals who share a common interest in the co-creation of new and innovative solutions to improve their urban environment. The question remains as to how best to reach out to non-experts and to those from a diverse range of backgrounds. Future iterations of the engagement strategy could benefit from expanding their demographic reach, for example, by tapping into existing city relationships with 7 / 10

8 established networks of local community organizations across the different cities. Enabling a hands-on learning environment in order to introduce new technologies and tools and encourage experimentation can enhance trust and adoption of both the tools and relationships across emerging partners as they make, share and learn. Workshops can also provide the opportunity to create tangible connections to complex, interrelated systems. An interesting model for this type of future engagement would be the development of physical prototyping workshops as per the work of the Waag Society in Amsterdam, who take a multidisciplinary approach that involves practical prototyping of digital technologies alongside use of social science research methods and theory ( Another relavent approach to consider would be that as adopted by Ecosistema Urbano in the Dreamhamar project ( This project uses a combination of digital and physical platforms to kick start innovative way of transforming urban spaces by setting up conditions that stimulate public debate and generate new ideas and by connecting local citizens to a network of professionals and academics worldwide. 5. Personal benefit and mutual benefit for the host and home institutions The author is very grateful for the opportunity to learn more about the organizational operations of both Future Cities Catapult and the Intel Collaborative Research Institute as well as acquiring unique insights into the methods of public engagement and stakeholder engagement as applied through projects at both institutions. The STSM was also significant in the formation of new relationships between the author and individual researchers at Future Cities Catapult, whereby future collaborative research projects are being discussed and explored. 6. References Anthopoulos, L. G., Siozos, P. and Tsoukalas, I. A. Applying participatory design and collaboration in digital public services for discovering and re-designing e-government services. Government Information Quarterly 24, 2 (2007), Beebeejaun, Y; (2016) The participatory city (ed). Jovis: Berlin. Brandt, E. Designing exploratory design games: a framework for participation in Participatory Design?. In Proc. PDC 2006 Vol. 1, ACM Press, Bratteteig, T. and Wagner, I. Spaces for participatory creativity. Co-Design (2012) 8(2-3), Bødker, S. and Iversen, O. S. Staging a professional participatory design practice: moving PD beyond the initial fascination of user involvement. In Proc. NordiCHI 2002, ACM Press (2002), Davis, J. Early experiences with participation in persuasive technology design. In Proc. PDC 2012 Vol.1, ACM Press (2012), Gaver, B., Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E. Cultural probes. In Interactions 6, 1 (1999), Hutchinson, H., Mackay, W., Westerlund, B., Bederson, B. B., Druin, A., Plaisant, C., Beaudouin-Lafon, M., 8 / 10

9 Conversy, S., Evans, H., Hansen, H., Roussel, N. and Eiderbäck, B. Technology probes: inspiring design for and with families. In Proc. CHI 2003, ACM Press, Kensing, F., Simonsen, J. and Bødker, K. MUST: A Method for Participatory Design, Human-Computer Interaction 13, 2 (1998), Kleinsmann, M. and Valkenburg, R. Barriers and enablers for creating shared understanding in co-design projects, Design Studies 29, 4 (2008), Merkel, C. B., Xiao, L., Farooq, U., Ganoe, C. H., Lee, R., Carroll, J. M. and Rosson, M. B. Participatory design in community computing contexts: tales from the field. In Proc. PDC 2004 Vol. 1, ACM Press, Mörtberg, C. Bratteteig, T., Wagner, I., Stuedahl, D. and Morrison, A. Methods That Matter in Digital Design Research. Wagner, I., Bratteteig, T. and Stuedahl, D. (eds) Exploring Digital Design. Springer London (2010), Strömberg, H., Pirttilä, V. and Ikonen, V. Interactive scenarios building ubiquitous computing concepts in the spirit of participatory design. Personal Ubiquitous Comput 8, 3-4 (2004), Vines, J., Clarke, R., Wright, P., McCarthy, P. and Olivier, P. Configuring participation: on how we involve people in design. In Proc. CHI 2013, ACM Press (2013), / 10

10 Confirmation of the host of the successful execution of the STSM We confirm that Fiona McDermott from Trinity College Dublin worked in our organization/institution/laboratories at Future Cities Catapult from 7 April 2016 to 13 April 2016 The visit has been successful and the results are described in this report, which I confirm. London, 12 May 2016 John Lynch Project Lead, Product & Service Design Future Cities Catapult 10 / 10