Conversation between Barrett and Greene and Nicklas Berild Lundblad: “…Q. How do you best use technology to facilitate that learning?
NBL: The first question you ask before you use technology is “What is the problem I want to solve?” To some degree, this can be a political exercise with great value. You can ask citizens, “What are the ten most pressing problems in our city that we need to solve.”
Once you know that, look for the data; look for the solutions. Look for the different things you need to learn about your city to solve the problems.
Q. In your experience, do governments know the right questions to ask?
NBL: When I worked at Google, one of the things that we said when we went to a government or to a business was “We have this amazing technology. What can it do to answer your questions?” Nine cases out of ten, people would say “We don’t know what our questions are.”
That’s because modern institutions are not built to generate questions or to encourage curiosity in a way that encourages learning over time.
Q. What are some of the ways in which cities around the world are expanding the kinds of data that will help them learn?
NBL: Sensors provide a whole range of data we never had access to before and they have become measurably cheaper in the last couple of decades and are now biodegradable, so you don’t need to worry about spreading them out. Barcelona and other European cities have been installing sensors but then the question is “What do you want to do with the sensor data?”’ It’s the first question you ask yourself before you use technology. What is the problem you want to solve?
You can have sensors that measure pollution in an area and sensors that measure noise and they are really interesting because they allow you to slowly improve on the general living environment of a city. Sensors that measure movements give us a sense of what the rhythms and flows of the city are.
For technologists, a super interesting question is what kinds of sensors do you give? What kind would you refrain from giving? A camera is a sensor, but you may not want cameras everywhere as that leads you to a discussion about surveillance…(More)”.
