"Smart cities" is a buzzword of modern planning, but one of the most effective ways to improve city-life is by encouraging people to play games on the street, an academic says.
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Technology that makes our cities smarter should predominantly be encouraging citizens to be more playful on the street and making cities liveable, rather than just "more efficient", University of Sydney chairman of Design Lab Martin Tomitsch said at the Festival of Urbanism on Thursday evening.
He slammed the concept of "selling smart city solutions in a box", noting scholars have been criticising top-down approaches to solving problems that put the government in the driver's seat rather than the citizens using the technology.
The best way to approach the big issues of modern urbanism was introducing playfulness into the cityscape with games or "City Apps" - in other words, giving city residents more carrot, less stick, would be a better approach, he said.
He pointed to an example of one solution to the common problem of jaywalking at traffic lights in Germany - caused by long waits at crossings.
The new use of technology was called StreetPong and instead of additional warning signs or threat of a penalty, it instead looked to a "positive experience" whereby pedestrians could play a game on a touch screen display while waiting.
They could even play against the person on the other side of the street also waiting to cross.
He contrasted this with the "countdown" lights seen around Sydney, which had a counter-effect on pedestrians.
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Instead of reducing jaywalking, he said it encouraged people to rush across to see if they could make it in the last few moments of the countdown.
Another solution using games to solve everyday city-life problems was the TetraBin - a solution to littering - which turned throwing trash away into a "playful experience" with an interactive game of Tetris. This was rolled out during Vivid 2014 and was developed by students of one of Dr Tomtisch's classes.
"Both started from a problem and used design, and design thinking, in order to come up with a solution," he said.
Now the word defining the new wave of smart cities technology is ''gamification'' - long touted as the solution for a range of modern life concerns - from transport and traffic to finance and health.
Another way to use technology that already exists in a more user-friendly manner would be with useful displays that give average people "super powers", he said.
This included real-time apps to know whether a bus was on its way - giving people the ability to "see around the corner". And clever use of camera and screen technologies, such as Samsung making a truck seem see-through to help driver visibility.
Light displays could be useful not just for "pretty images" - such as at Vivid - but in providing information on a daily basis, he said. For instance, projections showing whether there are queues or busy traffic.
He also encouraged designers to consider how these products worked when the technology failed, noting a success of escalators being that when they broke, they were still able to be used as static staircases.
