Small scale collaborative services: The role of design in the development of the human smart city paradigm

Abstract

Cities are facing disruptive challenges today. All these require smarter solutions and are creating pressure for the public and private sector to deliver innovative services and great expectations are put in the new Smart City paradigm. Most of these solutions keep technologies out of the urban environments, far from being considered components of the urban functioning and, furthermore, even farer from people and their urban spaces. In this framework design is today re-orienting its theories and practices to new kind of design contexts (neighborhoods, streets, squares, cities) where societal challenges are emerging that require different level of changes from everyday life to huge public institutions and complex organizations. This re-orientation is based on a different smart city paradigm that puts people at the center of the cities smartness and recognizes the need for developing micro and contextualized solutions to address larger cities problems in a sociable mode. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.