Academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly, but the fragmentation in approaches makes for a confusing debate. This article brings some structure to the debate by analyzing a corpus of 51 publications and mapping their variation. The analysis shows that publications differ in their emphasis on (1) smart technology, smart people or smart collaboration as the defining features of smart cities, (2) a transformative or incremental perspective on changes in urban governance, (3) better outcomes or a more open process as the legitimacy claim for smart city governance. We argue for a comprehensive perspective: smart city governance is about crafting new forms of human collaboration through the use of ICTs to obtain better outcomes and more open governance processes. Research into smart city governance could benefit from previous studies into success and failure factors for e-government and build upon sophisticated theories of socio-technical change. This article highlights that sma...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0020852314564308

Governing the smart city: a review of the literature on smart urban governance:

Smart city policies: A spatial approach

Teaching has often been thought of as a creative performance. Although comparisons with performance were originally intended to emphasize teacher creativity, they have become associated instead with contemporary reform efforts toward scripted instruction that deny the creativity of teachers. Scripted instruction is opposed to constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom collaboration. To provide insight into these methods, the “teaching as performance” metaphor must be modified: Teaching is improvisational performance. Conceiving of teaching as improvisation highlights the collaborative and emergent nature of effective classroom practice, helps us to understand how curriculum materials relate to classroom practice, and shows why teaching is a creative art.

Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation

How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology:

https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa48144/Download/0048144-12012019122659.pdf

Smart cities: Advances in research—An information systems perspective

Living Labs aim to engage in user-centered design practices where users are included in their daily life environment as innovative agents. However, empirical insights in end user engagement in Living Lab practices are currently lacking. This article focuses on opening up this black box of user engagement by analyzing the involvement of a group of entrepreneurs in a Living Lab smart city pilot in Amsterdam, the Climate street. The goal of the article is to analyze how and to what extent the Climate street enabled the involved entrepreneurs to engage in bottom up innovation. Theoretically, the article explores this pilot from a Science and Technology Studies perspective, specifically its notion of the socio-technical network. The article concludes that user innovativeness was limited by the pre-configuration of the entrepreneur as lay tester rather than as an active user-innovator. Furthermore, it is suggested that the inherent tension in Living Lab practices between configuring users and actual user practices hampers user innovativeness in general. Granting users more agency and opening up Living Lab practices to daily life dynamics stimulates the transition from tester to innovator in a daily life setting and subsequently makes entrepreneurs more readily smart.

/pdf/do-smart-cities-produce-smart-entrepreneurs-1ixkwz30g9.pdf

Do smart cities produce smart entrepreneurs

What role can the ideas and practices of ordinary people play during the design and development of new ICTs? This PhD thesis aims to answer this question by investigating user innovativeness in Living Laboratory practices. The guiding principle of Living Laboratories is that user-centered design situated in a daily life context instigates unexpected new ideas and uses of technologies, culminating in the development of more successful ICTs. Furthermore, end users of technologies are positioned as partners in public-private-civic partnerships that Living Labs aim to facilitate. Working from a Science and Technology Studies-perspective, this thesis focuses on the dynamic relationship between user, context and technology to articulate how “user innovativeness” takes shape and is translated into new ICTs in Living Laboratories. The concepts of improvisation and situated expertise are used to guide the analysis of user innovativeness in three cases studies. These case studies focus on the role of users in development practices of (1) pollution measuring smart sensor prototypes in a public park in Amsterdam, (2) a sustainable shopping street in Amsterdam and (3) a smart community game in two neighbourhoods in Ghent. Based on the analyses, the following conclusions are drawn; (1) innovation practices in Living Laboratories focus on realizing both social and technological innovations; (2) users are often enrolled in user-centered methodologies in Living Lab-projects as users, not as partners. Users are recognized as experts of the daily life setting, but their insights are configured in such a way, that unforeseen ideas and practices are not always acknowledged. (3) By attempting to steer and govern “bottom-up” innovation from a “top down” perspective, unforeseen, improvised and perhaps innovative insights are not granted agency in these practices. The situated expertise of users is recognized, but is not always realized in new ICTs. In the final chapter, 6 suggestions for Living Lab-practitioners are presented.

/pdf/user-innovativeness-in-living-laboratories-everyday-user-1t32o2e1jr.pdf

User innovativeness in living laboratories: everyday user improvisations with ICTs as a source of innovation

This article focuses on how collective improvisation, as a play with situational affordances and constraints, can facilitate or elicit luck in social innovation processes. We propose the improvisation perspective to offer a means to move from ungovernable to governable serendipity in innovation. Furthermore, the article presents Trasformatorio, an innovation methodology based on the living lab approach, that takes innovation-through-improvisation as its premise. Following an analysis of Trasformatorio’s social innovation efforts, we conclude that while governing serendipity may be a challenge, improvisation provides an opportunity to innovate responsibly. Improvisation refocuses ideas about unexpectedness and anchors the unforeseen to a process approach. This, in turn, leads to insights about how responsible social innovation can be governed by means of (1) situation awareness; (2) collective brokering; and (3) explicit reflection about how product and process, here conceptualised as part of a Design Space and Narrative Space respectively, interrelate.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23299460.2020.1816025

Collective improvisation as a means to responsibly govern serendipity in social innovation processes

This paper presents a method to map user needs and integrate serendipitous search behaviors in search algorithm development: the living lab approach. This user-centered design approach involves technology users during technology development to catch unexpected insights and successfully innovate. This paper focuses on the preliminary findings of a living lab case study to answer the question how this methodology reveals fine-grained information about users' serendipitous search behaviors. The case study involves a specific user group, media professionals who work in broadcast television and use audiovisual archives to create audiovisual content, during the development of new search algorithms for a large audiovisual archive. Research insights are based on data gathered during one co-design workshop, and ten in-depth semi-structured interviews with media professionals. Findings stipulate that these users balance socio-technical constraints and affordances during creative retrieval to (1) find exactly what is sought; and (2) increase the possibility of serendipitous, unforeseen search results. We conclude that modeling these search processes in terms of improvising with constraints and affordances enables an effective articulation and channeling of user-technology interaction insights into new technology development. The paper suggests next steps in the living lab approach to further understand serendipitous search and creative retrieval processes.

/pdf/seeking-serendipity-a-living-lab-approach-to-understanding-h5mmfvet1u.pdf

Seeking Serendipity: A Living Lab Approach to Understanding Creative Retrieval in Broadcast Media Production

Media professionals – such as news editors, image researchers, and documentary filmmakers - increasingly rely on online access to digital content within audiovisual archives to create narratives. Retrieving audiovisual sources therefore requires an in-depth knowledge of how to find sources digitally. These storytelling practices intertwine search technologies with the user’s ideas and production cultures. This paper presents qualitative research insights into how media professionals search in digital archives to create (trans)medial narratives, and uses the notion of creative retrieval to unravel the dynamics of audiovisual narrative production. Creative retrieval combines ideas about the effects of media convergence on media content, theories about serendipitous information retrieval, and studies of creativity to argue that retrieval practices of media professionals who create audiovisual narratives are governed by organizational, technological and content affordances and constraints. The paper furthermore exemplifies the first stage of an ongoing research project in which a user-centered design approach guides open source self-learning search algorithm development to support creative retrieval.

/pdf/audiovisual-narrative-creation-and-creative-retrieval-how-2i7nf0leyn.pdf

Sabrina Sauer

Papers

Do smart cities produce smart entrepreneurs

User innovativeness in living laboratories: everyday user improvisations with ICTs as a source of innovation

Collective improvisation as a means to responsibly govern serendipity in social innovation processes

Seeking Serendipity: A Living Lab Approach to Understanding Creative Retrieval in Broadcast Media Production

Audiovisual Narrative Creation and Creative Retrieval: How Searching for a Story Shapes the Story