Smart City Citizens' Service Provision using Participatory Design and Participatory Sensing: Lessons for Developing Cities

Involving citizens in public affairs through participatory design and participatory sensing is a new emerging theme in the Western World contributing to realization of successful e-government applications. Such participatory design and participatory sensing (PD/PS) through Internet of Things (IoT) devices uses data, information and information sharing which are key aspects of development in globalized economies. Adopting a mankind nervous system IoTs architectural design from human computer interaction design principles, PD/PS offers a promise for a fair balance between functional and non-functional IoT requirements which have been revealed to be orthogonal yet necessary. The methodology of this paper leverages literature search, policy analysis and aligns to empirical participatory design results from the previous PhD study in order to inform Smart City initiatives in a developing country context case study. Based on findings, this paper proposes a smart city digital model premised on participatory design for public safety requirements gathering to advance a participatory design-sensing (PD/PS) architecture IoTs for Kampala Smart City. This paper contributes to the benefit for realization of a smart city strategy that is part of the commitments for e-government benefits attainment for citizens. It can be used as a framework for operationalization of e-government for citizen applications in both urban and marginalized contexts with diffusion of smart mobile phones and similar affordable sensing devices. From a human computer interaction approach, further research aims to align the proposed architecture within the cloud-computing framework.