The ubiquitous and pervasive deployment of smart technology in urban environments has serious implications for privacy and security issues. The trend towards more comprehensive application contexts requires a corresponding shift from a mostly individual person-based, user-centred design approach to a multiple people and multiple devices-based, citizen-centred design approach for smart environments we are confronted with in the urban age. This is followed by the progression from smart rooms to smart or cooperative buildings and their extension to smart urban environments as, e.g., smart cities and airports. It includes also a shift in terms of scale and context, ranging from individual devices for personal activities to multiple devices used in group activities and social interactions. This has serious implications for the research area currently called ‘human-computer-interaction’.
Instead of dealing with individual, personal desk-top computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc., experiences and interactions of humans with ‘computers’ will increasingly take place in the context of interacting with ‘smart artefacts’ integrated into the environment constituting ‘smart ecosystems’.
It should convince and incite all stakeholders “to move beyond ‘smart-only’ cities” and transform them into Humane, Sociable and Cooperative Hybrid Cities. The combination of redefining the ‘smart-everything’ paradigm in terms of empowering people, employing privacy by design and enforcing an overall citizen-centered design approach is guided by the goal of reconciling people and technology, creating and maintaining a balance of decision-making and control entities. To remedy the situation, a ‘privacy by design’, respectively ‘privacy by default’ approach is proposed. People do not have the choice to decide and make the trade-off decision between smartness and privacy themselves but are confronted with serious privacy infringements. People are not asked anymore beforehand for their permission to collect and process their personal data. There are two trade-offs to be considered: (a) between human control and automation, and (b) between privacy and smartness.
To illustrate the situation, the paper addresses several general problem sets concerning artificial intelligence and algorithmic automation as well as privacy issues. The paper argues that a citizen-centered design approach for future cities is needed for going beyond technology-driven ubiquitous instrumentations and installations of cities. While the approach has general applicability, the examples are mainly taken from the domain of employing information technology in current and future urban environments, where one can observe an increasing hype indicated by the label ‘smart cities’. One could also say this is a proposal in the spirit of humanized computing. The critical reflection implies to ‘redefine’ the ‘smart-everything’ paradigm. The approach is characterized by design goals like “keeping the human in the loop and in control” and the proposal that “smart spaces make people smarter”. This paper presents different manifestations and problems of the ‘smart-everything’ paradigm, provides a critical reflection of its implications and proposes a human-centered design approach resulting in the provision of ‘people-oriented, empowering smartness’.