Smart cities for citizens

Challenge(s):

To involve in the project of Smart City to ALL the citizens, including children and older persons.  For  children, the initial challenge is how to explain what is a Smart City, to have an understanding, and to be  happy with the project.

For a city, it would be important that families can see that the family obtain benefits with a project of  "Smart City", and this is why children have a role seeing why this is positive and funny for them.

In the case of the older population, they would need to identify clear benefits for them, for example by  supporting their health, by having better conditions in the city or transports.

Selection:

In these two cases, both for children and older persons, it is not easy to explain questions related to  technology, as is the case for services provided by a Smart City.

And this is why “Visualization” can be very useful, and if we are considering a “comic”, then we are also  using “Storytelling”.

So, my selection will be a combination of both.

Application:

Visualization when talking of a city is very useful as many different services can be optimized, and both  children and older persons would understand better if they see an image.

In a comic like the one I used, there is also a Character introducing the subjects and telling a story.

In this way, you can be ensuring that the “audience” is correctly understanding, as in the picture of  buses to go to the school, where the presenter character can explain that good traffic coordination  would allow getting on time to school in the case of children.

For the case of older persons is the same if they have to go to a hospital or to visit their sons.  Storytelling allows visually concatenating a sequence of benefits, simulating an experience like a day in a  City.

Insights & Approach

The result confirmed our thoughts about how a comic can be convenient for these types of users,   mainly for children.

The approach was completed or complemented with a robot that could answer questions from them.

In the case of older persons, it is also more interesting for them to have such a format. A picture is  clearer than a long description.

And, the approach more effective is when the story of the comic is a practical situation, for example,  related to health, to transport improvements. And additionally, may be interesting to use new  technology as intelligent devices (Smartwatch) to control a correct heart performance avoiding going to  the hospital.

