Smart Cities and Our Responsibilities
The number of population increases rapidly and massive numbers of people migrant from the countryside to cities lead us to ask ourselves how can we monitor, manage, and run massive resources, and make sure all the facilities, services, and data serving to population is equally on the right way.
Smart cities keep people up-to-date with the latest data. For example, support people with the kind of data to avoid casualties caused by natural disasters.
To build smart cities, we need cooperation and support from different players, government, companies, educational institutions, entrepreneurs. The vision and ambition for big players will lead to help build a strong strategy to establish transformation to smart cities, start with elevating the awareness of population about the benefits of smart transformation.
Many cities around the world adopt the smart transformation in many facilities as starting point to create a smart ecosystem. For example, San Francisco, California and Amsterdam, Netherlands. On the other hand, we can find small cities built from scratch based on smart ecosystem, for example, Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates.
Smart Facilities
Smart facilities represent services, products, process, apps — those applied in a cities to support the smart transformation.
As much as the number of smart facilities are active and linked with each other and as much as it helps to establish solid ground to build smart cities to help people use those facilities in such an efficient way.
When people start adoption and support smart facilities, this is the tipping point to build customize service, because we have validated the data to build those facilities based on it. At this point, we can change the habit of people to elevate the society to a next and better level and enhance the lifestyle in many fields.
Examples of smart facilities:
Care and Wellness
Pollution Monitoring
Waste Management
Sensors and Measurement (traffic signs, cross the street, road signs, multilingual, advertising)
Government Services
Energy
Entertainment
Metropolitan Design
Designers Responsibilities
As designers, we have a massive role to think creatively and improve smart facilities or even create a new process to improve the experience for each facility to push our cities and society to future.
Here are a few responsibilities that all designers in different fields should follow to support the transfer to smart cities:
— Conduct workshop, conferences, training, and talk about the benefits of the transaction to smart cities. One of the most important objectives that designer should concentrate on is to make the data open for all.
Open data should follow this rules
Complete, Primary, Timely ASAP, Accessibility, Machine-processable, Nondiscriminatory, Nonproprietary, and License-free
— Think big to create products, services, and process that helps people as much as possible to improve their life by making it accessible and easy.
— Support the new small and medium projects by suggesting to integrate transformation to the smart city.
— Conduct research, apply best practices, and concentrate on how to improve people’s engagement with the smart cities facilities.
