Designing the future cities: trends and issues from the interaction design perspective

Abstract

Background: The design of future cities is a challenging endeavour, to which interaction design can contribute by applying its well-established principles and methods. Interaction design methods aim at optimising interactions between humans, tools and environments, considering material tools, immaterial aspects like the interaction modalities, contextual aspects. Methods: This contribution is structured like a literature review, discussing the applicability of design methods into urban settings. The first part reviews the key features and scope of three different design methods (nudges, persuasive technologies, and design thinking) and proposes a categorisation of city layers to identify possible intervention focuses. Results: The following of this contribution discusses one major issue that an interaction design approach may encounter while intervening in a city, i.e. how to structure a user-centred process when users are in the order of a multitude, hence hard to be segmented. Conclusions: In the last section, the concept of breakdown, derived from the human-computer interaction literature, is proposed as a way to partially overcome this issue.