Things As Citizens in the future Cities of Things
By Iskander Smit
The ThingsCon report The State of Responsible IoT is an annual collection of essays by experts from the ThingsCon community. With the Riot Report 2018 we want to investigate the current state of responsible IoT. In this report we explore observations, questions, concerns and hopes from practitioners and researchers alike. The authors share the challenges and opportunities they perceive right now for the development of an IoT that serves us all, based on their experiences in the field. The report presents a variety of differing opinions and experiences across the technological, regional, social, philosophical domains the IoT touches upon. You can read all essays as a Medium publication and learn more at thingscon.com.
Arizona law gives delivery robots same rights as pedestrians — but they must abide by same rules; we read on the website of Fox News end of May. It triggers my attention as it seems to be an example of the new relation we will have with things in our city. Things that are more intelligent, have agency, things that live on the streets of our cities as a new kind of creatures, even like citizens.
There is a lot to say on these new relations with things. With non-human artifacts, or should we say post-human as more and more often is mentioned. This is the subject of new research program we started in 2017 at Delft University of Technology, called PACT: Partnerships in Cities of Things. The research program combines different topics, like the development of Things that will become intelligent and can interact with each other based on algorithms. An example is to illustrate is this movie Affective Things based on the research of Iohanna Nicenboim and Elisa Giaccardi.
The delivery bots that are mentioned in the example of Arizona are rather serious. There are several companies developing variants, the one of Starship Technologies seems the most market-ready. Started in 2014 by the Skype co-founders they just received a serious 25 million investment round.
The third wave of the smart city; Cities of Things
The evolution of the smart city has more layers. For the kick-off of PACT Elisa Giaccardi distinguished three waves of the smart city.
The first wave — that is still ongoing — is the city as a dashboard. Sensors are added to the city to capture data of the all kinds and that data is served back to the user of the city. First to the makers of applications, the governments and if we are lucky also to the citizens. This is what the current debate is all about mainly. It is what Martijn de Waal divides into three types of Smart Cities; The Control Room with a focus on economic values, The Creative City as a innovation lens, and the The Smart Citizen where the city becomes a political and civic community (De Waal, 2017). In this wave we improve the city on the angle of the citizen mainly.
The second wave focuses on the smart city as an intelligent infrastructure. Starting as a sensing city that is used to nudge citizens in a certain behaviour. Next is the infrastructure that will become more and more adaptive to the collective and individual behaviour. Examples are lighting systems that adapts. But also a public transport systems based on autonomous moving vehicles that personalise the routes based on the travellers. MIT is doing interesting research here in the Senseable City Lab. The angle is the city as infrastructure. In projects like Minimum Fleet where they look how the number of taxies can be reduced in Manhattan by adding autonomous vehicles, and with the Roboat project in Amsterdam, where the boats can form pop-up bridges if needed, autonomous vehicles become part of the intelligent city. The work of Saskia Sassen on the intelligent city is also inspiring. The city as an autonomous entity, not so much reacting on citizens, but also acting and interacting. The network of actors, both human and non-human getting meaning while acting together, as in best tradition of Latour.
The third wave has still to start. What if the Things in the city we live with become more than Things, and will take a role as citizens. What a city is will not only be defined by the citizens or the representing governments, humans and non-humans will live in concert and shape the city together. That is what we call the City of Things. Autonomous moving objects, things as social entities in the city. Things that cannot be controlled, but like humans, Things can be governed. Humans and non-humans have pact/social contracts to live together in these cities. We focus in the PACT research on this last phase. We look at Things as social entities, data-enabled artifacts with performing capabilities. These Things connect to existing networks for the necessary data, and combine that with the real-time data it senses. More than now, these things act proactively and behave socially. The PACT research is linked to the research work on co-performance of things and humans, and during the last period we looked especially to the role of Things As Citizens in different (on-going) research.
Co-performance for more-than-human partnerships
As Kuijer and Giaccardi show in their paper is co-performance (Kuijer, 2018) between human and non-human actors crucial. Artifacts have artificial body/minds capable of performing social practices next to people. In the research co-performance important aspect is the ‘appropriateness’ of human and artificial performances under situated circumstances. People and things have different capabilities. People are better in judging, machines are better in optimizing and generalizing. Humans are better in improvising. That is why appropriateness is so key in the distributions of tasks. The way to treat the appropriateness of the interaction between human and artificial things is looking to changing divisions of roles and responsibilities between human and artificial things. Design plays a key role here to delegate task and judgements. Where the appropriateness is defined in the the margins designers leave to the interplay of humans and things in the everyday performance.
Design qualities for Things as Citizens
In her master research on Things As Citizens Louise Hugen found that a model for democratic citizenship could function well to indicate the different aspects divided in obligations and rights, that are important in the relations of citizens in cities (Butts, 1988). She found in her research the values authority, truth, participation, equality and privacy as most significant.
These values are transformed in design qualities for the Things as Citizens. Hugen created a model where thing capabilities and citizen requirements meet. The design qualities can be used in the creation of the new city things. In her study she focused on one demonstrator, more explorations are needed to test the design qualities. It seems that these six are the most in the core: Based on the value of Truth — a thing is able to promote its sensitivities and is able to show the lack of ethical sensitivities — a citizen is able to understand decisions made by Things — a thing and a citizen can bridge differences in perceptions and intentions. Based on the value of Authority — a thing is able to react in different ways to be partially directable in its actions — a citizen has provisioned space for negotiability — a thing can enter a continuous agreement
Hugen used the design qualities in her project to design a autonomous delivery pod combined with air purification service, and designed specific thing-thing and thing-human interactions to stimulate communication between things and citizens. How city things behave is a key element in having humans and non-humans living together in the cities of things.
Using ideation to learn on Things as Citizens
To research how people think on the new relations with things as citizens Maria Luce Lupetti, postdoc researcher in PACT, created TaCIT; the Things as Citizens Ideation Toolkit. The aim, as Lupetti formulates it: identifying, collaboratively, a set of topics representing the main opportunities and challenges related to the design and development of autonomous things for the city.
We tested the toolkit in sessions at TU Delft, and at public conferences like Border Sessions and The Next Web. One of the key elements in the toolkit is to look at five dilemmas; — Responsibility; private to public, who is responsible for the behaviour of the autonomous thing — Priority; who rules? The human or the system, or the thing? — Relationship; is the aim to behave social or antisocial — Adaptation; aspects of adapting behaviour, presence, from the standpoint of the human or the thing. — Delegation; are tasks partially or totally delegated to the system? In the workshop different briefs are made for delivery pods and last mile vehicles that vary in the usage scenario and regulation scenario. This triggers ideation. Reflections are than done from different roles: government, industry and citizen. What does that make a difference. Via a debate and cluster session the challenges and opportunities are filtered.
The workshops taught the participants to take different perspectives, especially the thing-perspective and their role in the city. We will continue the PACT research as there are still open questions to address. How much do we prone to accept and adapt to things that behave out of our control? And how can we design the appropriate interplays between human and things. What are the morphologies, the non-verbal behaviour, the interaction schemas for the Things of Citizens?
Looking back at the case of the delivery bots in Arizona. Not long after the news on the rights it turned out that people start kicking the delivery pods. It is a form of antipathy Starship Technology (the manufacturer) thinks. It is also a process however to learn to live the new citizens in the city. New rituals will grow on us. And on the Things, in the form of the design rules.
Illustrative is the way people like to game self-driving cars by jumping in front of them. Humble as the cars are they will stop for humans. But too humble might lead to a standstill of society: We need new manners that respect humans and things in the future living together in the Cities of Things.
In the design we need a certain character, but also a language to communicate intentions. And you can imagine that the interactions are not always the same. In the design of self-driving cars like Daimler is research conducted to try to recognise the intentions of pedestrians in the visual recognition system. Is the intention to pass the street or just walking to the side of the pavement. If these conclusions are combined with a learning systems the car might start to recognise types of behaviour.
Which triggers the question what that might deliver. Are all cars rating the pedestrians based on predictive models, categorising future behaviour? Will the car combine older data with newer data to make better judgements? Is this a bias we like to tolerate?
PACT is still in progress and we will continue the research. The dilemmas sketched in the TaCIT workshop are helping us to discuss how much we accept and adept to things that behave out of our control. We hope to develop insights to design for appropriate interplays between human and things.
Iskander Smit is educated as Industrial Design Engineer and worked as creative and strategist in digital services since 1994. He has a longtime track record for designing and thinking on the internet of things. Since 2009 Iskander is member of Council Internet of Things and in 2013 co-founder of the Behavior Design AMS meetup and co-organising Tech Solidarity NL. In 2014 he initiated and co-organised the Amsterdam edition of Berlin conference ThingsCon, a leading conference on the design of the internet of things, that will be organised for the fifth time in 2018. Iskander Smit is now innovation director at agency Info.nl in Amsterdam, that crafts connected digital products and services. Iskander is responsible for R&D and leading labs.info.nl. Since 2017 he is appointed as visiting professor at Connected Everyday Lab at Delft University of Technology, where he coordinates the research program PACT (Partnerships in Cities of Things) and the City of Things Delft Design Lab.
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