Students’ innovation for age-ready smart cities

Abstract

The development of smart cities has seen a shift in governance systems where citizens have gone from mere recipients of services to co-creators. As smart cities rely heavily on Information and Communication Technologies to achieve their goals, it is a challenge to engage older populations in digital participatory processes. A project-based learning course was developed at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology to challenge master students across all study programs to come up with ideas for tackling this issue. This paper presents the results of their multidisciplinary collaboration applied to real cases in municipalities in Norway. We find that a transgenerational approach is essential in the design and development phase of participatory methods to ensure better implementation and uptake of technologies.