A report of “Lose your way: Towards a Citizen-driven city” workshop

Design & the City 2016 was a conference organized by Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences from the 19th to the 22nd of April. The summit explored citizen-centered design approaches for smart cities.

Design & the City 2016 was a conference organized by Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences from the 19th to the 22nd of April. The summit explored citizen-centered design approaches for smart cities. Its central theme was the role of design(ers) to create opportunities and practices for citizens, (social) entrepreneurs and policy makers towards more livable, sustainable and sociable urban futures.

On the 22^nd of April ENoLL and Tampere UAS co-organized the workshop “Lose your way: Towards a Citizen-driven city”, a full-day session exploring the concept of Smart Cities through a lens that promotes citizens as the driving force of urban innovation and urban planning. Around 25 people attended the workshop. 

Participants had the opportunity to share their best practices and discover the citizen-driven ones pre-selected by the organizers, like “Lose your Way” a pilot projects developed by Tampere University in the context of MEDAIA-project that implements mobile technology in urban planning, Design for Europe, a EU initiative supporting design and innovation in Europe, and ECIM, a project aiming to create smarter mobility services across Europe.

During the workshop the Living Lab practitioner Casper Westerveld shared a brand-new framework, the Living Lab roadmap: this allows figuring out if Living Lab methods can be used to reply to the research/innovation question we have by following a set of simple steps (read more here). 

Participants had the possibility to actively contribute in different ways: during the pitching session some of them presented on stand, others shared their comments and questions using dedicated workshop cards developed by organizers. Also, attendees participated in the “Lose your way” walk and discovered an experimental way to interact with urban spaces. Finally, they contributed to the ECIM Playground session, contributing to a brainstorming session to enrich the existing content of the platform with new creative app ideas.