Documentation

Project: Smart Citizen
Presenter: Fab Lab Barcelona and Institute of Advanced
Architecture of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain
Interviewees: Guillem Camprodon; Tomas Diez
www.smartcitizen.me
Photos: Smart Citizen Team
The N.I.C.E. Award 2015 is looking for new and stimulating
innovations that are solutions to global problems.
What problem do you address with your project?
Cities are the largest creation of human kind. For many
centuries we have been adding complexity and technology
to the urban centres, creating places with the biggest
problems we can find today in terms of sustainability and
contamination of the planet. Being a huge producer of
problems, cities offer at the same time great opportunities
to address those problems by using available, accessible
and open source technology. We believe that Smart Citizen
can build an ecosystem of participation of citizens in the
production of valuable data and information about our
cities, which can help to better understand, transform and
improve the places where next generations will live. Smart
Citizen is about the appropriation of technology for taking
over the active construction of the city. Our idea started
with sensors and data visualisation, but we aim to grow and
to develop applications and partnerships that will allow us
to construct tools for the political participation of people in
their city and to create a new data economy by implementing
block chain technologies in the future versions of our
platforms.
What reactions have you received yet? Is the world
ready for your solutions?
We crowd-funded the development of the initial phase of
the project twice with the result of close to 1,000 people
who actually supported us with funds. Furthermore, we
have been able to collaborate with large corporations like
Intel and Cisco in special projects and events to develop
Smart Citizen. At the same time, governments of cities like
Amsterdam, Barcelona and Manchester have actively supported
the deployment of Smart Citizen in order to align it
with their Smart City strategies – which is a paradox, since
Smart Citizen initially started as a critic exercise against
the big brother and corporative approach of the Smart City
agenda. We have been collaborating with researchers all
over the world in universities like the University College London,
the Royal College of Art, the MIT, among others, and
in different projects related with them. Finally, we are now
getting EU funding support to develop research around the
technology and its implementation strategies in different
cities in Europe. As the world is going open source, we are
about to record the largest expansion of our project – from
1,200 sensors and 3,200 users – and thus to play our part in
the massive growth of the Internet of Things devices and
open data applications.
The N.I.C.E. Award 2015 focusses on digital innovation
through culture. How do you see the cultural sector
influenced by digitalisation?
In Europe and most of the urbanised areas of the world it
is almost impossible to talk about culture without talking
about the digital revolution that we have been living in during
the last 40 years. From computers to smartphones, our
entire lives have dramatically changed, affecting how we
learn, work, play, create and live. It is extremely important
to create a culture with strong values on humanism through
digital platforms, not only using screens and keyboards to
represent traditional cultures, but by reframing the meaning
of culture in a connected world and society. For us it
is of high importance that these values are constructed
around the open source and accessible knowledge on how
things are made, how they can be shared and how they can
be useful and valuable to others – and not just to create
another start-up to make a little money and then be sold
to a larger corporation. Digital culture should help build a
new economy and a value set that can enhance the role of
people in the production and control of their lives.
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