Article: Towards a Narrative-Aware Design Framework for Smart Urban Environments

This article presents a novel approach to the design of smart city systems that takes into account not only technical installations in a future Internet of Things environment, but also the power of human storytelling in an always-on networked world.

Authors: Lara Srivastava and Athena Vakali, Department of Media Communications, Webster University, Geneva, Switzerland and Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Published in The Future Internet - Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Open access full-text is available here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/013265227140q447/fulltext.pdf

ABSTRACT - Innovation in smart city systems is based on the principle that devices, places and everyday things can each be enabled to serve people in a real-time and responsive manner. This chapter presents a novel approach to the design of smart city systems that takes into account not only technical installations in a future Internet of Things environment, but also the power of human storytelling in an always-on networked world. It is only when environments are both sensor-driven and socially-aware that a more holistic, and therefore more useful, urban narrative can emerge in the future Internet context. The present chapter proposes a new narrative-aware design framework and applies it to a hypothetical city scenario in order to highlight its main components and the benefits it may offer to a future Internet city’s actors.

Keywords: Smart cities, sensor data analysis, social data mining, smart urban services, Internet of things, narrative, storytelling, navigation, mobility, sensors, web 2.0.