Untapped Potential of Participatory Design: Citizen Centered Social Data Utilization for Smart Cities

Our society has shifted to digital society, where generates tremendous amount of city activity data or Social Data. This potentially rich city re-source has attracted attentions of diverse city players, and often described as “the new oil”. Accumulated social data could potentially open to create better society, generate competitive industries, and improve citizen’s well-being. However, majority of societies do not know how to utilize them for future cities, yet. Challenges to social data utilization are profound. Not only technical and political challenges are there also privacy and ethical challenges. Considering these social challenges, we explored potentials of social data utilization through a series of participatory design workshops. In the workshops, participants collected their own social data and used them for collective concerns. Through the case, we found an interesting potential solution of social data utilization for designing future city, by combining concepts of data donation and citizen as co-designer. Because the combination of data donation and citizens as co-designers could provide one of the optimal solutions for utilizing social data the most without violating the data ownership. By participating in the design process, the data owner can reuse their own donated data for their own purposes, holding a right to control and interpret in the design process. This article, by introducing a smart city workshop case, proposes and discuss a potential of data donation and participatory design, which could be one way to promote social data utilization for the greater good.