The value of design thinking for smart cities
The value of design thinking for smart cities
- Author(s): F. Qaed 1
- DOI: 10.1049/icp.2021.0934
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- Author(s): F. Qaed 1
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View affiliations
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Affiliations:
1:
College of Engineering, University of Bahrain , Kingdom of Bahrain
Source:
3rd Smart Cities Symposium (SCS 2020),
2021
p.
640 – 645
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Affiliations:
1:
College of Engineering, University of Bahrain , Kingdom of Bahrain
- Conference: 3rd Smart Cities Symposium (SCS 2020)
- DOI: 10.1049/icp.2021.0934
- ISBN: 978-1-83953-522-2
- Location: Online Conference
- Conference date: 21-23 September 2020
- Format: PDF
The concept of the smart city is fundamentally based on the link between (1) human and social resources and (2) technical infrastructure to generate growth and enhance the quality of people’s lives. Although technology-driven implementations of smart cities are important, these fail to involve the most important dimension of cities, which is the human dimension. Human smart cities are the latest generation of smart cities that combine hard technology with soft factors such as social participation, empowerment of citizens, and connectivity between people in physical and virtual environments. In a human smart city, people – rather than technology – are the major players of the urban smartness. However, to fill in the gap of understanding the human dimension in smart cities, it is necessary to find new forms of user participation and understanding. One of the possibilities is through the design-thinking approach, as it offers a variety of tools and methods that helps to create a better understanding of users’ needs and involvement. This paper presents the value of using the design-thinking approach to strengthen the human dimension of smart cities, and to offer a new form of human participation and understanding. Through the review of current literature of smart cities and design thinking, and the analysis of three published case studies, this paper determines four areas where the design-thinking approach can add value to smart city design. These areas are: (1) humanising smart city design, (2) the users’ active engagement and involvement, (3) sustainable city development, and (4) exploration of innovative solutions. Finally, the paper highlights the implementation of these four areas in the five phases of design thinking: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test.
Inspec keywords: sustainable development; innovation management; human factors; town and country planning; public administration; smart cities
Subjects: Public administration; Ergonomic aspects of computing