Smart engagement for smart cities: Design patterns for digitally augmented, situated community engagement

Public digital technologies are increasingly pervading cities around the world, creating a new phenomenon of “urban spamming,” which exposes urban dwellers to vast amounts of commercial advertising and other forms of digital content. Over the years a large body of work has focused on how these technologies can be harnessed to engage urban dwellers in local issues and to give them a platform to share their opinions. Despite this, situated digital technologies created for community engagement with “best intentions in mind” are not always relevant to the context of where they are located. These technologies are often unable to adapt to the variable conditions of the space and changing needs of urban dwellers within them. This issue of relevance is amplified due to the increasing hyperconnectedness of modern society, where information has become readily available through personal smart devices. While there is much understanding of how situated digital technologies can be designed so that they are relevant to the context of place and space, there is currently no up-to-date set of principles that define how they should be designed to be relevant to individual urban dwellers within their respective communities. To address this gap, we propose a smart engagement approach to investigate the factors that make situated digital technologies relevant to individual urban dwellers. From a discussion of previous work and reflection of our own studies, we then present six design patterns within the context of making situated digital technologies relevant.