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Highlights • Openly exposing collected data to participants in CS systems has multiple benefits. • Participation in mobile open data CS systems is strongly driven by altruistic motives. • Financial or personal ethical rewards are not strong drivers of participation. • Altruistic participation safeguards contributed data quality even with anonymity. • Engagement can be boosted by contributing meta-data (reviews) and contextual reminders. Abstract The paper presents experiences from the rapid introduction and deployment of a data crowdsourcing and data sharing system, motivated by an urgent civic need arising due to the appearance of jellyfish in the swimming coastal areas of western Greece during the summer season. The system was tailored for mobile use and although the pressing need for its deployment negated the time for thorough design, a rich set of lessons and findings emerge from its public use by 13,340 users, over a period of 2 months, reporting over 1,800 times on the condition of 189 local beaches, of which 157 were added to the system by the users themselves. This work touches on issues of usability, motivation, data reliability and public utility of mobile participatory systems and demonstrates that effective outcomes for public bodies may rise when systems are designed for the immediate benefit of citizens, by openly exposing the collected data. Most importantly, participation in mobile crowdsourced systems where the data is openly shared between participants is found to be strongly driven by altruistic motives and not by financial or ethical awards. Additionally, the altruistic motives behind participation overcome the added difficulty of participating from a purely mobile use context, and safeguard the quality of the contributed data, reducing the need for complex quality monitoring and safeguarding mechanisms. Finally, the paper identifies barriers and opportunities for the opportunistic participation in mobile crowdsourcing systems during leisure time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents research into new ways in which organisations can gather field-based consumer insight particularly in public spaces. In an increasingly complex and fast moving business world, there is a need for quicker and more efficient consumer experience research that also provides a wider focus on the situation under investigation as required when studying urban spaces. The paper presents a method called DiCER for using large groups of non-specialists (i.e non-ethnographers) to make fieldwork observations working in a transdisciplinary setting with ethnographers and designers. In this method, groups of people are given a small amount of training and provided with support materials that allow them to make and report observations. The method provides a way of harnessing the potential of an organisation׳s staff for a shared goal of generating useful fieldwork material. The method was first tried out in two studies that investigated how collaborative activity could be facilitated in large public spaces. This helped identify issues related to the design of support materials whilst conducting fieldwork and explored ways of analysing and presenting the results of such activity. A follow-up study observed the activity of conversations between strangers waiting in a railway station concourse. The aim of this was to test both the method on a more focused problem and prototype tools to support recording observations in such a context. The outcomes were prototypes and interventions demonstrating potential techniques for gathering fieldwork material. A final study explored the potential of using a group of non-specialist employees distributed across an organisation to fulfil parts of a fieldwork project. This guided the development of training sessions for people with little prior knowledge of doing fieldwork. The main output was design recommendations for further applications of the method in a similar context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper can be framed within the growing interest in the public dimension of technology design: it proposes a framework for the public design of urban technologies by elaborating on the concepts of digital commons, matters of concerns and engagement. The framework is discussed through the case study of a mobility application developed within a wider project of digital commons design. We contrast a Smart City approach and a urban computing one, and we argue that the latter is more fruitful in the long run, since it entails elements for the establishment of forms of recursive engagement of users, who co-produce digital commons together with technology designers as a response to their matters of concern. Applying our framework to the design of urban technologies, we conclude that design should support collaborative practices starting from the articulation of matters of concern to designing in a participatory way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While urban computing has often been envisaged as bridging place, technology and people, there is a gap between the micro-level of urban computing which focuses on the solitary user with technological solutions and the macro-level which proposes grand visions of making better cities for the public. The gap is one of scale of audience as well as scale of normative ambition. To bridge this gap the paper proposes a transdisciplinary approach that brings together actor–network theory with critical and participatory design to create prototypes that engage people and build publics. The theoretical discussion examines a way of thinking about size as performative and shiftable through practical design methods. The micro/macro prototyping approach is demonstrated via an empirical case study of a series of provocative prototypes which attempt to build a material public around the issue of community noise at Heathrow airport. The paper suggests that this approach allows issues to be followed and engaged with, and their dynamics re-designed across different scales. This proposes a new role and scope for the researcher/designer as proactively engaging in normative shaping and supporting of real world settings which bridge place, technology and people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With today׳s ubiquitous computing technologies, our daily activities are continuously traced by smartphones in our pockets and more of our everyday things are now connected to the Internet. This phenomena is changing the way we live, work, and interact. This creates, not only technological opportunities for smarter cities, but also interactional opportunities for the citizens. However, designing, developing, and deploying urban computing projects in the wild, outside the controlled research environment, is challenging, due to the complexity of the urban context as well as the people who live in it. What are the ways to trigger and increase the public towards active participation or technological uptake in urban computing? How to design and structure participation for urban computing research and technologies in the wild for it to lead to mass participation with its citizens? These are the questions that are investigated in this paper. We present a survey on existing approaches in engaging participations and devising interactions with a range of existing urban computing technologies: smartphones, public displays, cyber physical systems (including those with embedded systems, sensors, and actuators), and Internet of Things. Based on the reviews, we propose a taxonomy for categorising and characterising urban computing technologies and approaches with regards to the level of participation they stimulate, the participation scale they support, the manipulation and effects mode they enable, and the interaction mode and scale they enable. Finally, strategies for structuring and engendering participations and interactions based on our own experience from deploying small to large scale urban computing projects in the wild are presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]