Could technologies be designed to afford a more proactive role for citizens in making and/or supporting the decisions that prevent pollution in cities?
400 words contributing to Prix BLOXHUB Interactive Symposium 2019, Copenhagen
Urban liveability for me is about fairness and equal opportunities measured by the wellbeing of those who are the most vulnerable. Current technological narratives often support and reproduce current ways of living and thinking. While Ramia Mazé talks about the role of design specifically in“(re)producing social norms, practices and structures” [1], I believe technologies could be designed to help provide alternative discourses and practices, and also to question what is currently offered to us in technological visions of the future.
Fran Tonkiss (2015) describes this conundrum:
“Strategies for more environmentally sustainable cities must go beyond issues of design and technology to address toxic environmental inequalities. More sustainable urban futures that don’t simply depend on finding better technical solutions, but on a more serious commitment to environmental equity in cities and elsewhere.”
In my PhD and personal design practice, I work with air pollution and climate change. I use pollution as a ‘trojan horse’ to observe and better understand different barriers to individual and systems change. Improving air quality, for example, will require an understanding of how air pollution is currently produced and how it’s made ‘invisible’ or more salient through current political, economic and technological narratives and opposing interests.
Smart city players often talk about the empowerment of people and communities through digital technology. However, for decision-makers and those in power, it is difficult to find a balance of how to manage that new sense of empowerment without giving people so much power that they would overrule their own authority. As a means of empowerment through digital participation, public and private sector actors often end up developing digital applications and citizen engagement platforms that pay lip service to citizen participation, asking people whether e.g. the road should be green or blue, instead of asking them whether a road should be built in the first place. These token gestures easily mislead people and give them a false sense of empowerment and the belief that they have a say in complex environmental and political matters.
In the case of air pollution for example, currently, citizens are presented with a narrow set of narratives that gives them little agency to tackle air pollution. All too often these interventions simply monitor, visualise and confirm the fact that the air is polluted — while people become increasingly disillusioned by the fact that their air remained just as polluted as ever. In order to step beyond this kind of passive data spectatorship aspect of measuring and visualising data and also moving beyond technological solutions, the aim could be to better understand the necessary structural, institutional and infrastructural changes that have to be put in place first, so that people could change their current energy behaviours in cities.
While ignoring the already well-established evidence of how to actually improve air quality, a frequent argument in smart cities is that we still need more evidence and even more granular data to be able to manage pollution. A frequent saying in a smart city is that ‘we can’t manage what we don’t measure’. It seems as if though after we measured it, we keep forgetting to manage pollution through stringent environmental regulation.
Looking at numerous global examples, air pollution is often so high that it exceeds what current sensing technologies can even measure, yet decision-makers have taken little action to improve the situation. Many local and national governments often put energy and investment only into mitigative interventions (e.g. domes with air-filtration systems, anti-pollution bus stops and large-scale air purifiers), which are politically popular but have only marginal impacts on the sources and prevention of pollution.
While agreeing with Fran Tonkiss’ thoughts, I believe there is still an exciting opportunity for designers to rethink the ways in which urban technologies are designed and how those could increase the degree of participation and engender a more proactive role for citizens in making their cities more liveable and healthy.
Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro [3] note in a conversation with Ranulph Glanville that second-order cybernetics, for example, conceives design as “conversation for learning together, as a way to create possibilities for others to have conversations, to learn, and to act”. Technologies could be designed and used as prompts or triggers to provide opportunities for people to discuss how things could be otherwise and enable collective action. I am really looking forward to sharing some of these ideas and findings at the symposium…
(As usual, I appreciate/welcome any comments and ideas. Please send your thoughts to gyorgyigalik.medium@gmail.com)
References:
See original blog post: https://prix.bloxhub.org/blog/400-words-on-prix-bloxhub-interactive-gyorgyi-galik
[1] Mazé, R. (2019). Politics of designing visions of the future. Journal of Futures Studies. 23. 23–38. 10.6531/JFS.201903_23(3).0003. (In this blog, you can find the reference on p.24)
[2] Tonkiss, F. (2015) Divided Cities: Urban inequalities in the 21st century. Published: 18 May 2015. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4iXe5l4whY>
[3] Dubberly, H. and Pangaro, P. (2015). Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action. Cybernetics and Human Knowing — Vol. 22 (2015) — nos. 2–3. pp. 73–82. Available at: http://www.dubberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/cybernetics_and_design.pdf (In this blog, you can find the reference on p.1)
Gyorgyi Galik is a London-based innovation designer, design strategist, and environmental advocate. She is a Lead Advisor and Programme Manager at Design Council’s Cities Programme. She is also at the finish of her Ph.D. studies in Innovation Design Engineering, School of Design at the Royal College of Art. With a background in social design, behavioural science, and environmental health, she has more than a decade of experience delivering experimental research, design and technology projects in the corporate, governmental and non-governmental sectors.
