Engaging and Informing Citizens with Household Indicators

Abstract

Urban simulation systems can be a powerful tool for helping to understand the complex, long-term consequences of urban planning decisions. Simulation results are summarized and reported using indicators: aggregate measures such as population density or total minutes of vehicle delay. To citizens without expertise in urban planning, such indicators may be abstract and unfamiliar; they are difficult to compare to experiences of the city today. Household Indicators address this gap by presenting a personalized, household-level view on simulation results through a web-based interface. This paper discusses the design of a Household Indicators tool, employing the Value Sensitive Design theory and methodology.

Twenty years of value sensitive design: a review of methodological practices in VSD projects

“…encryption for security). In doing so, they relied mostly on the background knowledge of their authors, but in some cases additionally considered input from stakeholders, such as customer product reviews (Bleumers et al 2015), rankings (Boyd et al 2016) or semi-structured interviews (Davis 2008). The other six projects utilized stakeholder collaboration, envisioning, brainstorming or the value dams and flows method as a way to derive necessary technical requirements (Miller et al 2007).…”

Prescriptive Analytics Using Synthetic Information

“…In a world that is becoming increasingly urban and networked, it is essential to develop the analytics tools that will help us manage the immense amounts of data being generated, and will help us to use these data to improve human lives and the human condition (Nathan, Friedman, & Hendry, 2009). It is important to enable and ensure the participation of the population who will be affected by policy, in the policymaking process (Davis, 2008). This is an important direction of research for synthetic information methods, and for prescriptive analytics in general.…”

Design methods for ethical persuasive computing

“…VSD emphasizes values of moral import-values such as fairness, autonomy, privacy, and human welfareand thus speaks to ethical concerns in technology design. Over the past fifteen years, researchers have applied VSD to such diverse values and technologies as informed consent in delivering web browser cookies [28,16], democracy and fairness in an urban simulation system [8,15], and reputation and trust in a corporate knowledge-sharing system [26].…”