As a researcher the opportunity to work on truly innovative projects is too good to pass up. And from my first few weeks with the DG Cities family (that’s exactly what the wonderful team is like) I’ve already been immersed in some exciting, challenging and potentially transformational projects. Projects which will not only help to bring the newest technology into the hands of citizens, but will also work to make the cities in which they live cleaner, greener, and more liveable for generations to come.

At DG Cities the focus of our work is to always ensure that urban innovation is first and foremost human-centred, and designed with users and other stakeholders at every stage. As the organisation’s newest recruit my focus will be on ensuring we incorporate research and service design principles, methods and concepts into our work with stakeholders – from community networks and local government, through to technology providers, and leading academic thinkers. We will continue to incorporate the voices of citizens and those using services, making use of robust research techniques to ensure we are inclusive and transparent in how we represent the diversity of citizens in the cities we work in.

As a qualitative and quantitative researcher, I’ve worked for over 10 years on multi-disciplinary projects. I’m an environmental engineer by education, and a social scientist through a career of working with sociologists, economists and occupational psychologists in roles in local government, the civil service, academia and the private sector. DG Cities is similarly multi-disciplinary – our clear strength being the ability to connect different expertise together to solve city-level problems.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be working with the team at DG Cities on various projects in which we hope to incorporate the voice and perspective of citizens and users, from the problem-mapping, ideation and design phase right through to data analysis, evaluation and impact assessment.

On Project Endeavour, a partnership between DG Cities, Oxbotica, the autonomous vehicle (AV) specialists, and Immense Simulations, the mobility system simulation experts, we will be exploring user knowledge and perceptions of AVs as well as their experience when interacting with these new technologies. During the on-road testing phase, we will be engaging with users from across the community to guarantee inclusive engagement, and we will explore how new technologies such as AV can be made more user-friendly for all road users.

I will also be developing, for project dRisk, a programme of user research and user engagement. DG Cities is leading on the engagement of citizens to explore a different but hugely important element of AV development: how AVs respond when extraordinary events happen on the road. These events are often called “edge cases”, and they represent unique and highly unlikely but very high-risk events which AVs need to be trained to deal with. Over the coming months DG Cities will be working with citizens to explore different types of edge cases, and helping the consortium of partners to incorporate these scenarios into development of this new technology.

It promises to be an exciting time for research into the world of Smart Cities and service design, and with urban communities globally still reacting and learning from the coronavirus pandemic, the need for city level decision makers to engage with citizens will only increase. Be sure to keep an eye on our blogs to hear more about how these projects develop.