Doing ethics in Smart City Tech

On 6 September ThingsCon will team up with the Human Values for Smarter Cities project to organise a Salon on Doing Ethics organised at VONK Rotterdam, the innovation centre of the municipality of Rotterdam.

Doing ethics in Smart City Tech/ The good, the bad and the acceptable

Ethics in smart city technology is not something you assess at one specific point in time in a tech's lifecycle and then can forget about it. In the project Human Values for Smarter Cities, researchers, designers, civil servants (The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam), and citizens look for ways ethical principles can be interwoven in the articulation, making, deployment and adjustment of smart city technology.

Ethics for smart technology is also not a set of fixed values. We try to see ethics “as a process, as a verb, as doing ethics. Ideally, we organize collaborative and iterative processes that make room for ethical reflection, inquiry, and deliberation and that involve thinking, feeling, and action: your head, your heart, and your hands.” (Steen, 2023, p. 8).

In the project, the central focus lies on what we can do to do ethics, to facilitate this process, and when to do this in the life cycle of a specific technology, preferably with various stakeholders. In this ThingsCon Salon we zoom in on methods that facilitate participants to uncover, discuss and weigh negative and positive aspects of smart city technology. We explore how these methods work, but also what participants learn in these processes. We share findings and learnings from the research project and invite practitioners with experience applying ethics in their design practice. In a panel, we discuss with all speakers and participants ‘doing ethics’ in the way presented and how they relate to ethical values.

Join us for an inspiring and interactive workshop and evening lectures.

The workshop will be limited to 20 people. Please RSVP via the separate event here on Meetup.

The preliminary program for the Salon:

Workshop - Agonistic Machine Vision Development (16:00-18:00)
A Tangible Approach to Involving Citizens in the Development Phase of Machine Vision Systems for Scan Cars by Laura de Groot.
More information here.

18:00 - drinks and bites

Meetup Doing ethics in Smart City Tech/ The good, the bad and the acceptable (19:00-21:30)

- Opening by VONK, our location host
- Pitches Human Values for Smarter Cities project - Mike de Kreek and Tessa Steenkamp
- Lessons learned from the afternoon workshop
- Speakers: Anna Noyons, founder and creative director of social design agency (ink)., on Social Design in Practice, and Douwe Schmidt, project manager public tech at Municipality of Amsterdam, initiator of Tada, on ‘the ethical leaflet’ in Amsterdam
- Panel Discussion with Anna Noyons, Douwe Schmidt, Tessa Steenkamp en Mike de Kreek
- Wrap up & drinks

Please find more information on the speakers on our website.