On exploring a pervasive infrastructure to foster citizens participation and sustainable development

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study where we engaged citizens in a user-driven innovation process to design smart services, exploiting data collected by a low-cost pervasive sensing infrastructure, called Beanstalk. Such as infrastructure has been developed with the final goal to deliver data back to local communities which are empowered to act and leverage the collected hyperlocal information. In doing that, we organized different user-driven innovation sessions aimed to capture communities’ ideas and desires, with the intent to develop human centred and transparent intelligent urban environments. The preliminary results show the interest of citizens in being informed about the phenomena revealed by the gathered data and in acting toward a sustainable development, through the creation of smart services.