Please give an example. You mentioned the protests around pensions in Taiwan. How does this new model, this new way of doing things, help somebody who is an elderly person, not living in Taipei, who doesn’t feel very well represented by their local legislator already? How will this impact their live
It is always easier to start with something at city level. We can talk about something like national land-use planning, which mandates that each county or city has a civil participation mechanism to determine how to allocate land. This includes zoning, renovation, large-scale construction like the third extension of Taoyuan airport runway and very large-scale buildings like the Taipei Dome, and it includes the preservation of culture and road planning. It all relates to how we want to make use of the environment that we share.
When we say the environment, it is not one thing. It is the human habitat – the city we live in, the architecture. And it is also all living beings – the animals, the plants, the eco-system inside the city. This architecture, it also changes the flow of traffic, the communication.
Having a “smart city” is fundamentally changing the “interface” of how city inhabitants interact with the services provided inside the city. All these environmental things are difficult to convey in text. You can read hundreds of pages about each aspect. In fact, people do that with environmental impact assessments, city traffic assessments. For large-scale construction people usually use BIM (building information modeling) systems to integrate all those information sources, so that a professional architect and their team can organize the different flows of information and try different ideas of how best to build an airport, a road, a dome.
The problem is that the BIM system is designed for professionals as the primary user. If you are a journalist, it may be difficult to read this raw data and make sense of it. Then another professional, armed with her own BIM system, may say, “This construction sucks, because it will damage this land for years to come, and it must be done in a different way.” Then the civil society or private sector people may rely on that person and say, “We want a different vision.” But people who rely on this second person, they do not actually know the full details of the new model. Maybe they trust that person more. But whether one model is better, very few people really know.
With VR, the elderly people you mentioned can use their smartphones and add an NT$300 (US$10) Google Cardboard viewer. Wearing it for just one minute, they can see, at a glance, an overview of what “Plan A” and “Plan B” would look like in their neighborhood; how it affects the sunlight, the traffic patterns, and when they go out the door, how the city would feel. People will be more informed of their different futures. If they are interested in getting more information, perhaps about how the street cat they are feeding each day will be impacted by construction, then they can request this information. With the translational mechanism in place, we are able to simulate how the stray cats will fare. Cats are stakeholders too. The biological eco-system is a stakeholder; it just does not have voting power.
The technology shows possible futures that include “silent” stakeholders. This is something I am very passionate about; it is what I call “assistive technology.” It is lifting people who are excluded – and by “people” I also mean things like rivers – in a way that other people, who are stakeholders and the general populace can have a dialogue on.