Designing IoT Applications for Smart Cities: extending the Tiles Ideation Toolkit

Abstract

The internet of things (IoT) is gaining momentum as a technical tool and solution for a diverse range of societal challenges. These challenges include smart cities sustainability issues which are widely recognized by decision makers and societies. Despite this, few works try to tackle these challenges empowering citizens through IoT technologies. In this paper we describe how the Tiles toolkit, a card based idea generation toolkit for IoT, has been extended to support non experts in creating ideas addressing societal challenges that affect modern smart cities. We briefly introduce the Tiles generic toolkit, then we describe in detail the extensions proposed on the cards, cardboard and how the new components are employed in a refined workshop protocol. We report the results obtained during a field study of the extended toolkit, where several groups of students collaborated to generate ideas involving IoT in the smart city. We discuss success and failures, drawing our conclusions after analyzing quantitative and qualitative data collected during the workshop. We conclude the article reporting the lessons learned, critical considerations about our experience evaluating the extended toolkit and reflections on possible improvements for future works.