As part of Alternative Imaginaries for the Smart City‘s expansion to Amsterdam, I was interviewed for the Responsible Sensing Lab‘s website. The lab, a collaboration between the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) and the City of Amsterdam’s Chief Technology Office (CTO), “explores how to integrate social values in the design of sensing systems in public space”.

This is how I described the motivation for the project:

The idea behind the project is that so much smart city technologies are designed and then deployed in a top-down manner. So it’s either industry or governments that have either a particular technical interest or a particular managerial interest; and they develop technology that ends up in the neighbourhoods and affects people’s lives.

We are trying to see if we reverse that order, if we work from the bottom-up, that would result in different types of sensing technologies and different types of metrics (what we decide to measure). So on the one hand our desire with this project is to engage the public in questions around what is measured and how.

The interview also features Bob Pannebakker who did the ethnographic research in the neighbourhood (Waterlandpleinbuurt in North Amsterdam). It can be read here.