Smart City Interface Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Smart City Interface - Case Study Example A real-time city model can enable feedback loops from people themselves, also enable an interface onto the city, forming a kind of interface for the organization, thus personalized streams of city data are rendered into actionable information making our cities more legible, efficient and livable. City governments, technology companies, and design firms working together to construct these highly-networked future cities have come up with various prototypes of interfaces through which citizens can engage with the smart city. But these prototypes embody only institutional values not always aligned with the values of citizens living in the city. Judging from the promotional materials released by Cisco, Siemens, IBM, Microsoft and other corporate smart-city makers, one would think that the chief preoccupation of the smart city was on reflecting its own data consumption and hyper-efficient activity back to itself. At its heart is a control center filled with screens serving in part to visualize, and celebrate the city’s supposedly hyper-rational operation.IBM designed Rio’s Ops Center that integrated data from 30 city agencies; layered screens featuring transit video feeds, weather information and maps of crime statistics and power failures and others. The city is thus partitioned into atomized projects, services and flows, each competing for technician’s attention. The design of Swansea urban interfaces allows citizens to engage with the operating systems as more than mere reporters.  In addition, considerations of how these interfaces structure their inputs and outputs, how they illuminate and obfuscate various dimensions of the city, how they frame interactions, what are the reflections of these interactions in terms of informing the relationship between citizens and cities, and in what manner these interfaces transforms or shapes people’s identities as urban subjects.