IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 63

Utilizing the water for activities, biodiversity, need
for a meeting space, easier bike commuting, power
to the pedestrians, tech as information channels,
and to curate social activities were some ideas that
emerged from this session. The fifth and final session
in December concluded the LL by evaluating the
process and discussing possible ways forward.
Throughout these sessions, four themes emerged:
traffic, activities, connection with nature, and democratic
and inclusive space. Alongside the themes,
some interesting questions were raised: What will
the next generation of elderly want? What do young
adults want? How to make Kungsgatan more flexible
and attractive for the elderly? At the end of this
process, the students visualized the most important
spots (the bridge and the square), proposing a series
of visions inspired by the ideas and themes emerging
during the LL sessions. The vision on the theme " connecting
with nature, " for example, highlights biodiversity
by providing space for urban gardening and
relaxation in the park next to the stream. Moreover,
it proposes the use of water to provide educational
activities for children and the use of light at night to
make the Kungsgatan area a safe and pleasant space
to spend time (Figure 2).
The LL ended with a feedback panel in January
2021 where the students together with the LL members
presented the process and the outcomes to the
research project team and a group of citizens. Four
employees from the municipality were invited: a general
and strategic traffic planner, a planning architect,
a city developer, and a city architect. Overall,
the LL process, as a first step, helped the citizens, students,
and researchers to explore desirable futures
for Kungsgatan and identify shared values to create
more sensible, inclusive, and sustainable smart city
technologies. The research project continues with
a backcasting process [13] where we connect the
future visions driven by citizens, and the underlying
values, to current smart city technologies to take
steps toward realizing those visions for a more inclusive
and sustainable Kungsgatan.
Discussion
Research in SuMIn is well under way and we
have, so far, described our first steps into the project.
In what follows, we present some key observations
our team has made together with the reflections we
had on them.
September 2021
Figure 2. One of the vision images made by the
students, taken from the joint course deliverable
they prepared.
63
The ultimate aim of our work is to contribute to
a public interest perspective on smart city technology,
and the way we have chosen to do that is to
try and orchestrate an inclusive design and development
process. The use of an LL approach to engage
citizens from various backgrounds in cocreation of
desirable urban futures, combined with backcasting
connecting the LL outcomes with the current state
of smart city technology in the Kungsgatan testbed,
was intended to provide directions for truly PIT
development.
However, one conspicuous observation is that
the LL participant roster was not nearly as diverse as
we had intended. The participants attending the LL
sessions, including the kickoff workshop, comprised
mostly young university students-among which
there was a senior adult-and a few workers as well
as project affiliates. The group included both men
and women, mostly of Swedish origin and physically
able-bodied.
To try to understand the limited diversity and numbers
in the LL, we drew on the only data available:
our personal experience of contact with citizens. We
tried to remember small details about people's hesitations
and motivations around taking part. We also
drew on the reflections of those students who ran the
LL. We share here some of these reflections, which
offer clues as to barriers to entry for the LL process.
In meeting those who owned and worked in shops
and cafes located along Kungsgatan, we were met
with a wide variety of responses to our invitation to
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021

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