Designing Mobile and IoT Solutions for Sustainable Smart Cities

Personas, the Pandemic, and Inclusive, Synthetic, Smart City Planning

“…The data-driven smart city is both situated in, and contributes to the social, political and cultural context of urban life. In this context, application of personas can be part of large-scale online analytics data, inclusive of artificial intelligence analytics (Salminen, et al, 2018;Salminen, et al, 2020) consonant with the use of smart city analytics in the era of COVID-19, which include important considerations of making smart cities safer, more resilient to change, more sustainable, and in alignment with the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 11 (Allam & Jones, 2020;Visvizi & del Hoyo, 2021;Wanderley, & Bonacin, 2019). Anticipating the future impact of personas on the social sustainability of smart cities, that is social inclusion and equity (Rebernik, et al, 2020), personas can tap into, and help synthesize, the tacit stakeholder knowledge, employing social media, user review and peer checks with empirical/numerical data in a complementary fashion (Mahamuni, et al, 2018;Salminen, et al, 2020).…”

“…It has also become clear that crucial stakeholder involvement in coping with these changes involves more diverse communities (Brouselle, et al, 2019;Shin, et al, 2021). Smart cities, undergirded by information and communication technologies ICT) and other ambient technologies such as mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential to yield sustained benefits to the aspirations, service and resource needs of all citizens, provided that they are able to participate in the policy design process (Ju, et al, 2018;Wanderley & Bonacin, 2019). If anything, COVID-19 has underscored the importance of smart cities as a response to many of the challenges brought by the pandemic (Jaiswal, et al, 2020;Webb & Toh, 2020).…”

“…Smart cities are characterized by an integrated system, a distributed network undergirded by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and a broad array of technologies including: sensor based data, artificial intelligence, data analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and augmented reality, while drawing upon human and social capital (Sanchez-Corucera, et al, 2019;Wanderley & Bonacin, 2019). In the inclusive smart city, citizens are not simply passive recipients of technologymediated resources and services, but rather engaged contributors in a reciprocal exchange (De Olivera-Netto, et al, 2016;Shin, et al, 2021).…”

“…In this paper an inclusive policy design approach is applied to a smart planning process (Gandy, Baker, Zeagler, 2017), that employs the use of 'personas,' a tool consisting of imagined (constructed) "characters" that reflect a composite of shared individual traits (Fuglerud, et al, 2020;Thayer, 2014). Personas have been created using participatory design methods in the specific context of electronic waste disposal planning for a smart city (Wanderley & Bonacin, 2019). This contextspecific problem-solving task was aimed at creating a better product, a recycling bin prototype to address the challenge of electronic waste disposal for sustainable smart cities.…”