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Smart Cities have been around as a concept for quite some time. However, most examples of Smart Cities (SCs) originate from megacities (MCs), despite the fact that most people live in Small and Medium-sized Cities (SMCs). This paper addresses the contextual setting for smart cities from the perspective of such small and medium-sized cities. It starts with an overview of the current trends in the research and development of SCs, highlighting the current bias and the challenges it brings. We follow with a few concrete examples of projects which introduced some form of “smartness” in the small and medium cities context, explaining what influence said context had and what specific effects did it lead to. Building on those experiences, we summarise the current understanding of Smart Cities, with a focus on its multi-faceted (e.g., smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living) nature; we describe mainstream publications and highlight the bias towards large and very large cities (sometimes even subconscious); give examples of (often implicit) assumptions deriving from this bias; finally, we define the need of contextualising SCs also for small and medium-sized cities. The aim of this paper is to establish and strengthen the discourse on the need for SMCs perspective in Smart Cities literature. We hope to provide an initial formulation of the problem, mainly focusing on the unique needs and the specific requirements. We expect that the three example cases describing the effects of applying new solutions and studying SC on small and medium-sized cities, together with the lessons learnt from these experiences, will encourage more research to consider SMCs perspective. To this end, the current paper aims to justify the need for this under-studied perspective, as well as to propose interesting challenges faced by SMCs that can serve as initial directions of such research.

In this chapter, we present an experimental design anthropology that involves practical engagements with possible futures. We demonstrate this through the example of our interdisciplinary collaborative research into Wizard of Oz (WOz) simulation testing in the automotive industry, undertaken with designers, test leaders, and participants in Sweden. This experiment, in which participants are invited to drive a simulated autonomous driving car, therefore simulates a technological possibility that emerges as an experiential reality during the test. Thus, enabling our ethnographies of impossible experiences made possible through simulation. By productively contesting conventional anthropological temporalities and ethnographic modes, the test reveals new layers of the complexity of how (im)possible worlds might be constituted as interventional and experiential layers of design anthropological practice.

This chapter explains how designing for future intelligent mobility systems is advanced by a human-centered approach, based in design anthropology. It provides an accessible introduction the theory and methodology of this approach, the production of ethnographic insights, and their translation into design probes for use workshops tailored to enable stakeholders to actively co-design future mobility and autonomous vehicle services and outlines the potentials and challenges of engaging diverse stakeholders—from industry and policy to the people who will use future technologies and services—in the development of future mobility.

Automated vehicles (AVs) have the potential to cause profound shifts across a wide range of areas of human life, including economic structures, land use, lifestyles and personal well-being. Most current social science on AVs is\ud narrowly framed. Research on public attitudes has focused on whether people are likely to accept and use AVs. We\ud contend that failing to anticipate a wider range of profound social implications may have serious negative\ud consequences, and that social scientists from a range of disciplinary perspectives can provide invaluable insights.\ud Our conclusions are the product of a workshop in London held in 2018 to discuss the place of social science research\ud in relation to the development of AVs. This paper summarises a core selection of our concerns, interests, theoretical\ud and substantive points of reference and aspirations for a constructive role in this field of research and development.

As technology has become more advanced, self-tracking devices and data have become normal elements of everyday life. Imagining Personal Data examines the implications of the rise of body monitoring and digital self-tracking for how we inhabit, experience and imagine our everyday worlds. Through a focus on how it feels to live in environments where data is emergent, present, and characterised by a sense of uncertainty, the authors argue for a new approach to understanding the implications of self-tracking, and questions what this means for the status of big data. With contributions ranging across the social sciences, the book brings together the concerns of scholars working in design, social sciences, philosophy, and human-computer interaction. It problematizes the body and senses in relation to data and tracking devices, and presents an accessible analytical account of the sensory and affective experiences of self-tracking.

HCI research on mobility and transport has been dominated by a focus on the automobile. Yet urgent environmental concerns, along with new transport technologies, have created an opportunity for new ways of thinking about how we get from A to B. App-based services, innovations in electric motors, along with changing urban transport patterns, are transforming public transit. Technology is creating new collective transit services, as well as new ways for individuals to move, such as through rental, free-floating e-scooters, so called 'micro-mobility'. This workshop seeks to discuss and establish HCI perspectives on these new mobilities - engaging with and even inventing new modes of transport, fostering collaboration between scholars with varied topical interests around mobility. We seek to bring together a group of industry and academic collaborators, bringing new competences to HCI around the exciting opportunities of redesigning our contemporary mobilities.

In this article we outline and demonstrate a design anthropological approach to investigating automated mobile futures as a processual opening up of possibilities, rather than as a process of techn...

A growing body of Human-Computer-Interaction research and the automotive industry has identified that understanding user needs and creating positive user experience (UX) is crucial in order to successfully introduce Autonomous Driving (AD) vehicles to the market. AD research is commonly undertaken to provide user insights by studying the individual-technology experiences in lab settings or by forecasting attitudes and acceptability through large surveys. However, these approaches base their knowledge on people's past or present expectations and limited real life experiences of AD. To better understand upcoming individual user needs and to enable new innovations beyond acceptability forecasts and UX lab tests, we need to identify new concepts through alternative methodologies that can generate user foresights based on users’ evolving anticipations of AD in their everyday lives. We propose an ethnographic approach with iterative speculative scenarios, which we demonstrate through a study undertaken with participants from five families who were introduced to evolving levels of AD, in real-life situations. To demonstrate the methodology, we draw on empirical findings which reveal anticipatory experiences, which we abstract through the concepts of confidence, hope and being-in-the-moment. We show how these concepts structured our user foresights, and outline the implications of engaging them in innovation processes.

The environments in which ethnography is currently being played out are in many ways shifting as part of a world where academic research is increasingly implicated in applied and public scholarship ...

New technological possibilities associated with autonomous driving (AD) cars are generating new questions and imaginaries about automated futures. In this article we advance a theoretical-methodological approach towards researching this context based in design anthropological theory and sensory ethnographic practice. In doing so we explain and discuss the findings of an in-car video ethnography study designed to investigate the usually unspoken and not necessarily visible elements of car-based mobility. Such an approach is needed, we argue, both in order to inform a research agenda that is capable of addressing the emergence of automated vehicles specifically, as well as in preparation for understanding the implications of automation more generally as human mobility is increasingly entangled with automated technologies and the future imaginaries associated with them.

In this article we take the novel step of bringing together recent scholarship about mobile media and communications with new ethnographic research and scholarship about mobile self-tracking. The c...