Empowering Citizen-Environment Interaction vs. Importunate Computer-Dominated Interaction: Let’s Reset the Priorities!

This paper starts out by extending the scope of traditional human-computer interaction research towards human-environment interaction and in the context of smart cities to citizen-environment interaction. This is complemented by a critical evaluation of technology-driven approaches in the development and deployment of smart environments, especially for smart cities. It argues to reset the priorities by putting humans and citizens first and computer technologies with non-transparent AI-based mechanisms second in contrast to current developments resulting in increased automation in all kinds of applications. The evaluation of this ‘smart-everything paradigm’ implies to reflect and to redefine the basic assumptions. Based on the concept of ‘human-technology symbiosis’, the paper discusses several design trade-offs as, e.g., ‘human control and empowerment vs. automated and autonomous systems’ and ‘usable privacy vs. importunate smartness’. The resulting proposal for urban environments is to move beyond ‘smart-only’ cities and to establish the goal of humane, sociable, and cooperative hybrid cities, reconciling people and technology by providing a balance between human control and automation as well as privacy and smartness. This can be achieved by viewing the city and its citizens as mutual cooperation partners, where a city is ‘smart’ in the sense of being ‘self-aware’ and ‘cooperative’ towards its citizens by supporting them in their activities. The goal is to enable citizens to exploit their individual, creative, social, and economic potential and to live a self-determined life, thus meeting some of the challenges of the urban age by enabling people to experience and enjoy a satisfying life and work.