Information technology is supposed to benefit people. Not all people, necessarily. But some people, some of the time. Very frequently engineers are looking to solve a problem, but there are few or no end users involved in the design of solutions. There are many explanations, including lack of knowledge of the options, political agendas and financial considerations, for end users to be rare or absent during the design of systems.
Lack of flesh and blood end users is not always an impediment to progress or impact. In the first meeting of the ITU Machine-2-Machine Focus Group (notice that there are no humans in the chain) I attended earlier this week, the end users' needs are considered as part of Use Case descriptions and the final user is represented by actors in these use cases. This approach works well for many situations. But not for all.
Usman Haque's guest post on Wired's new (since mid-January 2012) Ideas Bank blog, makes the case that citizen participation is not optional when technologies work on intelligent city information architecture. In fact, Usman argues that citizens, not corporate giants like IBM, Cisco or General Electric should drive and be at the "center" of the activity.
He writes, "We, citizens, create and recreate our cities with every step we take, every conversation we have, every nod to a neighbour, every space we inhabit, every structure we erect, every transaction we make. A smart city should help us increase these serendipitous connections. It should actively and consciously enable us to contribute to data-making (rather than being mere consumers of it), and encourage us to make far better use of data that's already around us.
"The "smartness" of smart cities will not be driven by orders coming from the unseen central government computers of science fiction, dictating the population's actions from afar. Rather, smart cities will be smart because their citizens have found new ways to craft, interlink and make sense of their own data."
As I mentioned above, there are frequently excellent reasons for users or citizens to be represented by their proxies. In fact, isn't that what a representational democracy does? It elects people to represent citizens in decision making processes, just like actors in use cases represent the end users of technology systems.
That said, I agree with Usman that, first, it's not easy to bring about a major transformation from brick-and-mortar cities to smart cities, and that people have to drive or at least participate in the innovation or else the outcomes could be rejected by those they are intended to serve. And, furthermore, I agree that the infrastructure for smart cities may serve citizens but it requires investments at such enormous scales that only cities (or national governments in some cases) can fund the infrastructure, and only very large companies, like Cisco and IBM, can realistically be expected to build them.
Perhaps the absence of users in the case of city development, or at least in the planning of city change, is an issue that could be addressed by increasing the use of AR-assisted information delivery and retrieval programs.
Here's the scenario: Joe Citizen is sent a device with instructions (a tutorial) and asked to use it to review a proposed project and give his feedback. He takes the device out into the neighborhood, turns around, explores a proposed project from different angles and answers questions on the screen. He goes to the nearest city office and turns in the system complete with his ideas and feedback. If he doesn't return the system or perform the task on time, an invoice is sent for payment (similar to a fine if a citizen doesn't show up for jury duty).
For very modest investments, the citizens of a city could take an incremental step towards a smart city just by "seeing" the information that their city already has and can make available using Open Data systems. I haven't forgotten my plan to repeat the Barcelona City Walkshop this year.