Taking a People-First Approach to Building Cities
Here at Stae, we talk to cities everyday. In a recent conversation with an infrastructure manager of a small U.S. city, he asked me: “What exactly makes a city smart?”
And it’s a good question.
His team was in the midst of reviewing proposals for a connected streetlight system, and he wondered if buying these lights would make his city “smarter.” In other words, he was seeking a higher-level understanding of how residents would be impacted rather than a product review. And we agree that this is the best way to approach building cities; not from a product-centric perspective, but from a people-centric perspective.
Beyond the list of tech specs… would the system help him and his team provide better services to the city? How would it actually help the people living there?
We believe in taking a nimble prototyping approach to building out city tech. Consistently testing ideas out with real people in real city scenarios before implementing new technology or drafting legislation is extremely important. Here at Stae, we’re in the field bi-weekly trying new features before they get built by designers and engineers.
Sometimes tests can be as lightweight as hand drawings on index cards that illustrate a new workflow, or as complex as a hardware rig that collects a new type of real-time data. The results can be humbling! While our prototype vehicle tracker performed perfectly along emergency vehicle routes, our paper prototype of a chatbot to assist city response workers totally bombed. Our team assumed that having more information at the frontlines would enhance the resolution of landlord-tenant relations, when in reality it added more noise than value.
To circle back to the city manager’s question earlier: There’s no set criteria for what makes a city smart. The effort to leverage connected technology and real-time data to make better decisions is in its early days. A majority of the “smart city” space is currently occupied with selling a connected device — whether it be a traffic counter, street camera, or parking sensor. The main problem is that each one often comes with its own software to wrangle and silo incoming data. So by default, the data from those devices lives on a discrete dashboard and often can’t be viewed alongside other city data or by more than one person. How can cities know if solutions are effectively reducing cost and frustration if they’re not able to correlate the data with other metrics and insights?
Without the ability to have many city stakeholders conduct cross-disciplinary query, cities risk being in a position where data determines, rather than informs, decisions.
What we do know is that the answer to the question goes beyond any single product or suite of products. It will involve putting people first and consistently iterating and innovating to have a meaningful impact on their lives. This is why we are not only building a central communications platform between city data and residents, but we are also prototyping and co-designing with cities — enabling them to test out new technologies before making a decision about buying them and getting locked into a single solution or contract.
The hope is that our work will empower cities to make better decisions about which investments will have the most meaningful impact on residents.
Does your city or county need help managing and gaining insight into their civic data? Get in touch to learn how we can help.
