Becoming more entrepreneurial in their government approaches is a concept aimed at supporting today’s cities in dealing with complex challenges. However, to date, knowledge about how cities can apply such approaches still remains a puzzle. This article presents the case study of the Neubad Lucerne initiative in order to contribute to the generation of a comprehensive picture and of instructive knowledge for city municipalities on their way toward an entrepreneurial city. It asks particularly how city governments and municipalities can stimulate grassroots initiatives toward an entrepreneurial city in a play way instead of a managerial way. The focus is therefore on playful rather than managerial city government processes that stimulate the emergence and activities of grassroots initiatives, the role and organizing mechanisms of networks that develop, and the role of temporary spaces in enabling activity and the construction of social identity.
Voice assistants (VAs), typically promoted as omniscient conversational butlers, still remain below users' expectations. Interaction designers seem to struggle bringing in user perspectives necessary to develop more meaningful VA applications beyond simple use cases such as playing music. One of the reasons might be the immateriality of cloud-based VA technology making it difcult to comprehend such complex and ever-evolving systems. In this paper, we investigate provotyping as a design tool for 'materialising the immaterial'. In our case study, teams of multidisciplinary experts devised twelve provotypes to explore intangible VA technology. We present and discuss three generalisations in respect to the role of provotypes for the exploration of VAs. Our fndings show provotypes can serve as the necessary props by which we can bring in missing perspectives around this technology and generate material which enables designers to speculate, debate, and sketch out ideas for meaningful futures of VA applications.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing; • Interaction design; • Interaction design process and methods; • User centered design;
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