SUCIB

The question

Governments and organisations want to involve citizens in what happens in their city, and much of that effort has moved to online platforms. In theory this makes participation more accessible. In practice those channels miss precisely the people least at ease with them, and stay invisible to anyone not actively looking. So they end up being used mostly by those already engaged or higher educated.

SUCIB, Smart Urban Community Interaction Blocks, started from the question of how to support citizen participation in public space in a hybrid way: using the strengths of the work already happening in the street, but backed by physical, electronic, interactive installations.

What we made

A DIY electronic toolkit that lets citizens and local organisations devise and build their own actions in the street. The toolkit consists of interaction blocks mounted on a modular tubular system. Installations assembled co-creatively become temporary, mobile interventions: displaying information, holding conversation and debate, voting, showing local environmental data, running workshops and exhibitions, and games and placemaking. One application is the mobile voting unit used by RenovaS in Schaarbeek, within the Pogge neighbourhood contract. The toolkit was also deployed within p-lab, in the Brussels pedestrian area.

The research builds on shifts within human-computer interaction: a questioning of the conventional smart city, a search for interfaces beyond the touchscreen, a move from persuasive to ludic technologies, from scientific to more artful approaches, and the rise of DIY toolkits and maker culture. We worked with participatory design, co-creation and participant observation.

The defining qualities of the toolkit are reusability, modularity and versatility, and above all appropriability: organisations and residents have to be able to adapt and reuse it themselves, without us there.

What came of it

Alongside the toolkit itself, SUCIB produced policy recommendations for the Brussels-Capital Region. In short: do not keep digital participation online but take it out into the street, invest in citizens’ own capacity and lower the barriers to bottom-up initiative, make environmental data visible in the place where it is collected, and support local actors with experiential tools through an expertise centre offering training, exchange and technical help.

A second research strand looked beyond the human. Through speculative fabulation, stories you make and handle together rather than write down, we explored how to involve residents in urban questions where non-human inhabitants have a stake too.

• Policy recommendations · How can we strengthen the Civic Smart City in Brussels? (PDF, 11 pp.)
• Paper · Nijs, Laki, Houlstan, Slizewicz and Laureyssens, Fostering More-than-Human Imaginaries: Introducing DIY Speculative Fabulation in Civic HCI, NordiCHI 2020. Free to read, and cited over forty times since.