Milton Keynes is a new town and of course the home of The Open University.
It’s also a place where the future is being trialled and created in real time, right before our very eyes.
It’s a smart city that soon may be home to driverless cars
and a place where citizens are being empowered
to use data to transform their lives and their communities.
Enrico Motta is a project director of MK smart,
so I asked him what he thinks our future cities will look like.
That’s, I’ve always been very, very interested, the intersection of technology in people,
so pretty much all my career, even when I was doing my PhD for suppose interested in
understanding how you could build computers that were able to solve problem like people
do, as opposed, is just having Algo, it’s that a machine like but I know you were like
so this intersection between people and technologies really what drives my research and of course
in the modern world, where technology is now much more ubiquitous than it was when I started
in my career. I will say working in the intersection of technology and cities as communities is
a natural step for my research and that’s what I really like doing.
So how did this become the MK: Smart project, and how did this form and what were some of
the driving ideas behind it?
-Well we were very lucky as The Open University to be actually physically based in Milton
Keynes, and I think we are very lucky, we have a very progressive council that looks
at these objectives of being at the forefront of technology to improve quality of life in
the city is one of the key priorities.
As a technologist, I know, putting together a kind of team to help do this from a technology
side might be relatively straightforward but what kind of other types of skills that you
need in people, did you need, and how did you kind of come up with creating a team that
wasn’t just about technologist but also had people from the public and kind of the
ability to have a more inclusive team that dealt with people side as well as the technology side.
- Yes, absolutely, the history of not just my city but the technology is full of failures
due to the fact that you only had technologists in the picture and you didn’t have other
profiles including crucial in the costumer’s Smart Cities, you need to have citizens. So
I think this is really one of the big strengths of MK smart, the fact that is not always just
the technology led project but also is a project where the requirements come from the council
and there is a strong input from a variety of stakeholders, industry council, academia
but also the community, but also in addition to that you know, we didn’t just do see
the engagement, we didn’t just, you know, run a road-show and told people what we were
doing, we say ‘hey come and contribute, come and work with us, and you know, if you
have really good ideas let us know and we might actually help you with realising any’.
I was very happy that we helped the number of ideas to implementation.
That sounds very inspiring and optimistic, but I would also be interested in some of
the challenges. I know for instance when people think of smart technology, they sometimes
think of the really exciting possibilities of it, but when the nitty-gritty comes about
it, for instance around data sharing, it becomes a little bit more complicated. So I’d be
interested in some of the concrete challenges you faced, and you know, moving forward this
kind of smart empowering agenda and also some of ways in which we think there has to be
some shifting of how people think or some mist that might emerge that really have hindered
the ability to kind of, put this forward in the most empowering way possible.
- A key challenge is really to do with the data availability and the nature of data,
when you talk about smart solutions in cities, a lot of times is basically about generating
and making available data that can improve decision making, but then of course when you
look at the practice, all this data that you are talking about typically belong to many
different organisations. Very often you have ideas where you know, if we can get all this
data for example about energy use, then we can do these clever things that then means
everybody wins, you know, we can optimise use of energy, okay but the data about energy
use belong to individual customers, there is a privacy element there and again these
tension has not been solved optimally at the moment, of course you don't necessarily want,
I certainly don't want all my energy data to be released public so that anybody can
use them and know that those are my energy data because their private data in second
you can infer a lot about my lifestyle and the lifestyle of my family simply from looking
at the energy data even, you know when we are at home or we are not at home.
What role do you see in projects like MK Smart and for technologists to do a similar process
with data empowerment and allowing people to understand the possibilities of data?
There is a big challenge for us in being able to develop for example, data portals, city
data portals, which are really accessible which make information interesting enough
and easy to discover enough that people might say ‘actually
I would like to know what the council is doing in my neighbourhood’ for example with roads,
buildings or energy or whatever and other initiatives. Beyond that, I think the key
approach is really then to come up with dedicated solutions for specific things, so for example,
like our MK portal is a very successful portal because it doesn't try to do everything, it
doesn't try to be a portal where you go and find anything that is up in the council. It’s
simply a portal to encourage crowdsourcing ideas, debating about Smart Cities and allow
people to propose ideas, vote on other people ideas and eventually to have a debate and
to come to some agreement about priorities. So essentially, there is these also kind of
high road, the low road is to have many more portals like our MK which just do one thing,
but it does it really nicely and they engage the community. The high road is also to find
better interfaces and better mechanisms to allow people to make sense of data and that’s
of course, really important, not just for Milton Keynes but for a healthy democracy.
In today’s world as you know, in the past few years there’s been a little bit of a
shift toward irrationality and subtle, and essentially diminish the value of evidence,
and I think it’s really important actually to try and address that by having better solutions
to allow people to really see the data about an issue and then make up their mind, that’s
not an easy challenge.