The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Yannick Fernholz, whose focus is on smart cities. Urban environments are being rapidly digitalised, and this also results in massive data collection; such smart cities promise increased efficiency, quality of life, security, and sustainability, but also result in a techno-deterministic top-down governance of citizens and the exclusion of non-digital populations rather than true engagement. What is missing is ethically grounded technology design.
What human values should be translated into the design principles for smart city technologies, then? What do the different stakeholder groups think, and how do their values conflict with each other? This project utilises a value-sensitive design framework to address these questions, foregrounding moral and ethical concerns while engaging in conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations.
This draws on expert interviews with entrepreneurs, activists, bricoleurs, brokers, and assemblers across public, private, academic, and civic sectors. Interviews explore human values and conflicts between them; they examine understandings and experiences of smart cities, crisis communication scenarios, ethical values and design priorities, stakeholder inclusion approaches, stakeholder value tensions, and reflections and outlooks.
Early insights point to value trade-offs between inclusion and speed; data access and privacy; value focus and pragmatism; responsibility and role ambiguity; and automation and comprehension.
