PARSE
Design games and scenarios to imagine smart cities, differently.
Too often, the stories we tell about smart cities aren’t told from residents’ perspectives: those who live, work, and play in these neighborhoods. Instead, we only hear stories told from the perspectives of industry or government.
PARSE stands for Participatory Approaches to Researching Sensing Environments and was a multi-year project to collaboratively explore the issues and possibilities of distributed sensing in Atlanta. Our goal was to elicit and share stories about what a “Smart Atlanta” might be from residents’ perspectives. Through community-based co-design workshops, we engaged multiple neighborhoods across Atlanta. From these workshops, we developed a set of scenarios describing smart city services from residents’ perspectives. The purpose of these scenarios was not to set agendas for development or specify products and services, but rather to share desires and concerns about smart city technologies grounded in the actual experiences of citizens of Atlanta.
2016-2018
Concept and Research: Cookie Nguyen and Carl DiSalvo
Design Lead: Cookie Nguyen
Related Publications:
DiSalvo. Carl. 2022. Design as Democratic Inquiry. MIT Press.
Related Media:
Smart Cities Classroom Toolkit, developed from the PARSE project for use in classrooms. Sponsored by the Serve-Learn Sustain Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology.