A citizen-centric smart city: design of an urban furniture collection

• Autor(a) principal: Figueiredo, Sara Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/31634
• topic: Smart-cities; Smart furniture; 5G; Human-centric; City services; Urban design

The LuxTurrim5G project, led by Nokia and Spinverse, in Finland, started by designing a Smart Pole whose functionality, besides lighting, was to support an infrastructure to install a new network for sensors, but mostly 5G equipment. The granularity of the pole locations was adequate to guarantee the spacing among 5G cells, thus enabling smooth integration of this technology in the urban fabric. In the second part of this project, a design team from Aalto University was involved in enlarging the technological project’s scope. The first part of the work consisted of analysing the apparent tendency to often catalog a city as a Smart City, which repeatedly occurred from the installation of any technological facility, even if citizens did not perceive its value. From the research conducted, it was verified that it is imperative to take a holistic view of the city and, second, to change the paradigm from technology-centric to citizen-centric to develop a Smart City that promotes quality of life and well-being for its citizens. These findings resulted in the developed work, whereby the initial LuxTurrim5G pole evolved to become an innovative product-service ecosystem in which the products and services were merged to support citizens intrinsically, promote well-being, a better use of resources, and enhance civic participation and social cohesion in the city life. The Smart Pole triggered the conception of a Smart Urban Furniture Collection concept that was designed to offer support for the installation of new technologies as well as space for a robust set of services tailored to citizens and cities. These services range from safety and emergency, city management, transport and mobility, and citizen engagement. These were considered to be the essential set of service parameters in the Smart City context. The Smart Urban Furniture Collection was designed to adapt to the city’s DNA and urban cultural heritage. Four different collections were designed, each with an interpretation of, besides the Smart Pole, a Smart Bus Stop, a Smart Bench, a Smart Trash Can, and a novel element; a Smart Hub, developed to increase social inclusiveness and fruition of public spaces. Besides coordinating the Aalto Design Factory team task force, the author of this dissertation proposed one of the four collections, in particular the Loop Collection. This collection, inspired by minimalism and emotional design, offers a modular approach based on an aesthetic motif, a rounded rectangular shape, leading to a significant number of easily configurable versions of the different urban furniture elements. This paper describes the basic research that led to the above-mentioned concepts and the Loop collection, presenting a thorough description of the ideas supporting the different design decisions or approaches. It also details the different activities in which various stakeholders such as citizens, municipality managers, consortium partners and other representatives were involved prior to the design phase defining the process’ strategy and evaluating the results.