Designing for neighbourhoods and citizen engagement the case of myneighbourhood

Abstract

Citizen engagement, human infrastructure and engaging citizens to facilitate bottom up social innovation through technology is an important part of Human Smart Cities, which was the main focus of the EU MyNeighbourhood project. The main research question addressed in this paper is how to design social software to support neighbourhoods and encourage the social cohesiveness through social-spatial spaces in the real and virtual world where neighbours could come together and act towards improving the neighbourhood. The paper describes the co-design process in the project to design services and a technological platform for citizen engagement. The co-design process provided a rich set of requirements for a diversity of users. The challenges in designing the technology and the user engagement activities that were experienced and addressed during the project are discussed.