Smart Cities: Real Time Reaction App

I think we need to realise that Smart Cities need to play a passive role in the background, its there, it helps us, but most people don’t need to know why or how.

That said, for those of us who are interested, lets not dwell on the muggles and lets get making some magic.

This was said by some genius in the comments section in a Smart Cities course I’m taking. And this is like, preach. This is what I need to keep in mind when another person to whom I’ll be excitedly telling about all these cool smart urban things we can do would look entirely confused.

This is pretty obvious. That’s what is the actual point of all really cutting edge technology — not be cumbersome and demand attention — but just let you do your thing without you even noticing. It’s like Google’s thing where they don’t want you to spend time on their website, they just want you to go on and find that thing you’re looking for. I haven’t thought about this before though, and especially in terms of smart cities. We’ve been told all the course that we need input from citizens, we need to collaborate with them and work with them — but at the same time it’s true that most of the people living in smart or would-be smart cities have no time for this kind of active engagement that we imagine. It’s gotta be something unobtrusive, not time-consuming, simple as just clicking one button or just pressing a dislike button.

This does actually seem like a great idea — an app that connects your location and your reaction to different things. So imagine you’re at the crossroads, waiting for the light to change. And you see an over-filled rubbish bin. You open your app (or just tell it to open, or send a neural signal, whatever) and there are options — you can rate the time it takes for the light to switch, traffic, cleanliness or rubbish bins or, really, anything else. And you choose the bin one and just click on a ‘dislike’ or ‘like’ or ‘wow terrible’ or something and if you wish you can add a comment. At the same time there’s a person (or a program — that would be awesome!) that sees all the dislikes in real time and gets the camera or a drone shot of this crossroads and sees the bin and immediately allocates resources needed to get rid of the problem. Ta-da!

I don’t know, really, but this doesn’t sounds easy. And maybe a few steps could be done away with. But it’s a start. And I just love reading the comments :)