Making Cities Smarter: Designing Interactive Urban Applications

In a world in which already more than half of the population lives in cities and that has seen a digital revolution, new ideas are needed for the rapidly growing field of smart cities from a user-experience perspective. More people than ever before will share the same urban infrastructure in the future, leading to a plethora of challenges. In order to prepare for this, governments around the world are heavily investing in smart city technologies. At the same time thought leaders and scholars argue for a movement towards smart citizens and more participatory approaches to city making. A frequently overlooked aspect within the smart city discourse is the design of the interface between citizens and smart city systems. In Making Cities Smarter, Martin Tomitsch dedicates himself to this issue: he translates principles from user-experience design and their application into the urban environment to tackle challenges that are unique to this environment, such as designing for a wide range of uses and users and integrating physical and digital experiences. This handbook is the first comprehensive publication to unpack the experience design of smart city applications that focus on the citizens as the end users.