Yesterday morning, I went to a “Breakfast Briefing” hosted by Catapult on avoiding inadvertent exclusion in smart cities to ensure that they are accessible.

The talk was brief and high-level, but I took away some important points:

• Build on what’s already there, don’t replace it (This made me think of Citizen Jane)
• Talk to people in the community to figure out what they need
• “A good idea is better than a new idea”

Catapault’s site

Update (16/11):

In class today, we talked about assessing sources of information to determine what motivations they might have and to evaluating if these motivations affect what we can take from the research.  One of the questions posed was “who is using the term ‘smart city'”.

This reminded me of questions asked about the term ‘smart city’ in the Catapult talk. Some guests thought that the term ‘smart city’ was inherently exclusive because it likely appealed most to the young and somewhat wealthy and also drew a bad comparison to other cities because it implies that they are not “smart”.

This helped further clarify the concept in my mind of using a smart approach to designing for a park, but not necessarily creating a “smart” park in the way that I was originally trying.