Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities

Abstract

Cities are currently being redesigned with sensors and data at their core. Environmental monitoring, crime tracking and traffic mapping are just a few examples of the socio-technical systems that are remaking cities. These systems are emergent sites of politics, values, and ethics where human and nonhuman actors collaborate, negotiate and debate the futures of their cities. One the one hand, they can be used for prediction, measurement and decision-making, but, on the other hand, they can also be harnessed to imagine alternative possible urban futures. Designers have an important role to play in mediating, making sense of, and intervening in these projects, which are at the intersection of the work of a variety of stakeholders including governments, business and citizens. This article draws on science and technology studies (STS) to think through ways designers can evolve existing human-centered design (HCD) methodologies to contend with socio-technical complexity at a time of great economic and environmental crisis. In particular, this article argues that it is necessary to create and explore methodologies that decenter the human and take the nonhuman seriously in order to meaningfully engage in the design of cities with more responsible, accountable, and ethical ways of engaging with emerging technologies.

Vol. 2 n. 4 | 2017 | FULL ISSUE

“…This article aims to illustrate the need for placemakers and urban interaction designers to be transdisciplinary and agile in order to navigate different levels of granularity. This article seeks to practice granular agile thinking by introducing five possible ways to think about the "urban user" and the implications that follow: the user as city resident; the user as consumer of city services; the user as participant in the city's community consultations; the user as co-creator in a collaborative approach to citymaking, and finally; the user rethought as part of a much larger and more complex ecosystem of more-than-human worlds and of cohabitation -a process that decentres the human in the design of collaborative cities (Forlano, 2016). In the following we will look at each stage one by one, however, we also want to use this journey to practice how to keep the bigger picture in mind.…”

“…Conclusion: Towards Cohabitation The final frontier (at least for this article) is to consider -alas briefly -ways society can engage in a socio-ecological transitioning towards a just and sustainable future (Fry, 2009). The aforementioned elaborations brought to the fore many challenges, two of which highlighted here by way of concluding: First, in the granular lineage of user from resident, consumer, participant to co-creator, there is a further step and an additional hurdle to take, which Forlano (2016) describes as "decentering the human in the design of collaborative cities." Removing humans as the exclusive inhabitants of the epicentre of design attention allows us to consider a more inclusive and encompassing worldview.…”

The next urban paradigm: Cohabitation in the smart city

“…In the paper, "Designing for a Post-Natural World: Nonanthropocentric Design and Smart Cities in the Anthropocene", the proposed pathway may not be what many expect, that is, to decentre the human in the design of smart cities. This move is also increasingly being echoed by other commentators and authors [4,5,13]. If we are to acknowledge the interconnected web of life and the morethan-human ecosystem that sustains us, we need to radically re-think not only our place in this world, but the way we create and impact on urban habitats.…”

“…Climate change already has a huge impact on cities with a notable increase in adverse weather events, and some thought leaders actively seek to reconcile the smart city with the resilient city (e.g., 100resilientcities.org). A pertinent question to ask is whether the people focus is in fact worth rethinking in order to imagine the post-anthropocentric city [4]. With a limited perspective that is only concerned about humans, we risk to forget other living beings, the environment, and the wider ecosystem that keeps us alive.…”

Infrastructuring the Circular Economy

“…This demands that agents embedded in a particular context understand and engage in dynamics beyond the interactions happening on the focal level. New pathways are required to mediate the complementary roles of top-down strategic approaches and bottom-up emergent transformations [38].…”