Episode 8 of the Citizen Centric podcast is now out! Workplace is still on the agenda as the latest workplace trends can really help us to understand more about user experience in a city.

Elisa Rönkä from Siemens is a perfect person to talk to about this subject. She specializes in end user apps, IoT and emerging technology but she isn’t a fan of technology for technology’s sake. Her role is to look past that shiny new piece of technology and ask “but what does this do for me as a user, employee or citizen?”

We talk about:

- why the era of accepting friction in our daily life is over

- how Elisa’s varied work history makes her the perfect person to question the experience delivered by new technology

- why the best innovation occurs when people collaborate voluntarily and why that doesn’t normally happen in meeting rooms

- why workplaces are a good place to study when aiming to understand user experience as employers are trying to keep up with apps like uber or justeat

- why technology needs to delight us and not just function

More about Siemens https://new.siemens.com/global/en/products/buildings/markets/smart-office.html

We continue our examination of the future of work and WeWork are a wonderful company to study. They have revolutionised the way people and companies work and they have a valuation of 47 billion dollars even though they are still only 9 years old. From the outside its hard to know if they are a company that offers flexible space for rent, that offers agile services, a technology company or is it all of the above? I speak to Henrik Botten Tauboll, who is the Director of Real Estate for WeWork Nordics, Baltics and Netherlands.

We talk about

- the latest definition of Proptech

- WeWork’s plans for the Nordics

- How they put humans at the centre of their designs

- Why they design narrow corridors in their buildings

- How they use data to bridge the gap in understanding the difference between what spaces people say they want and what spaces they really use

- How they have different approaches for different cultures based on the data they have collected

- How they provide variety, choice and freedom while keeping costs down

- How if you create a great workplace then people want to stay there after work

- Why they are focused only on the centre of cities and not on the suburbs

- How they add pop up services to their buildings

Link to the WeWork Global Impact Report https://www.wework.com/newsroom/posts/2019-global-impact-report

The way we work is undergoing major change and Kati Barklund is an excellent person to help us understand the future of work - or workplace strategy as she refers to it. Over the course of her career she has spent time working in all of the relevant areas. She has specialized in the physical during her time working in service and operations development at Coor, she specialized in the digital during her time working in Microsoft and now she works on Workplace Leadership and Culture at Tenant and Partner.

It was when she was managing innovation projects that she discovered that Physical workplace, Digital workplace and the Psycho-social workplace (Leadership & Culture) are all intertwined and that all of them need to be considered if we are to create great workplace experiences.

In our conversation we talk about:

- Why it shouldn’t be called the future of work as all of the components are already here

- How recent changes have resulted in a demand for more meaningful work

- Why the workplace is mainly about engagement and empowerment

- How the expectations are different for the range of generations in the workplace

- How workplace can be a strategic tool

- Why, despite all the technology that exists, we still need to meet face to face

More about Tenant and Partner here https://www.tenantandpartner.com/en/

Mobility as a service (MaaS) is slowly changing from an abstract idea to a reality in a few cities around the world and Sampo Hietanen has been described as the person that has turned the original high-level concept into a real service. He is the CEO of Maas Global and their service is called Whim. Whim is the first all-inclusive MaaS solution commercially available on the market and it gives its users all city transport services in one step, letting them journey where and when they want with public transport, taxis, bikes, cars, and other options, all under a single subscription.

The Smart Docklands district in Dublin produces 9% of Irelands GDP and is home to the European headquarters of companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Hubspot. The district contains 44,000 employees and 26,000 residents and there are plans to invest €3 billion there in the next 7 years.

I speak to Michael Guerin who is the project manager of this world class test bed and we chat about:

- How the presence of some many technology companies has resulted in tech hubs by companies who aren’t necessarily thought of as technology companies such as Accenture and Deloitte.

- How the Smart Docklands has embraced the citizen centric approach of Smart City 3.0

- Their method of citizen engagement which included stakeholders from the city, property owners, tourism and residents

- How Dublin’s continued growth and current housing crisis could create opportunities relating to efficient living concepts

- The drivers behind Dublin’s focus on cycling and their cycling data trial that helps cyclists, city planning department and the local employers

Frans-Anton Vermast is the international smart city ambassador for Amsterdam Smart City. His speciality is related to bottom up approaches to urban development which he describes as involving citizen engagement and a user centric approach to problem solving.

In my chat with Frans-Anton we discuss

- The need for a non-discriminatory approach to city solutions

- How we need to re-establish trust with citizens to encourage them to share their data with their local government

- Amsterdam’s approach to space sharing of government buildings

- Why some residents of Amsterdam still have a car even though they only use it one day a week

- Why governments need to set the conditions on how citizen data is used and whether they should police the private sector or not

You can read more about Frans-Anton here https://amsterdamsmartcity.com/users/fransantonvermast

He can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/faco69

Amsterdam Smart City would also like to promote their international smart city community via www.amsterdam.com and also their Smart City Festival https://wemakethe.city/en/

Tom Huston is the Head of Development for United Smart Cities. United Smart Cities, based in Vienna, is the official Smart City program of the United Nations.

I’m extremely grateful to have him on an early episode as it allows me to explore city level sustainability which is one of the core topics for this podcast.

Tom is an expert at understanding and communicating the opportunities that exist in the overlap between smart city and sustainability and ….. we discuss how cities are planning to be more sustainable and what role citizen centric solutions play in that journey.

In a very general way sustainability can be split into the system providers and the users of the system. We sometimes call this the supply side and the demand side. From a city perspective the supply side could be energy utility companies or public transport providers and from a corporate perspective the supply side could be the manufacturers of a product or the providers of a service.

In smart city discussions the users or citizens are often split into two categories which are the political actors and the consumers of services. The political actors are the citizens that engage with the city government by attending town hall meetings, completing surveys, signing petitions etc. The consumers are the people that use the local services such as the buses, parks, libraries etc.

From time to time I try to nudge Tom away from talking about the system dynamics and more towards the citizen who is a consumer of services ……. but from his point of view the main tasks and opportunities are on the system side. He quite rightly says at one point that there is no point in moving people towards electric cars if the electricity grid is dirty.

Our chat gives me a chance to evaluate how mainstream the viewpoint of this podcast is and how ready cities are to wield the power of user centric urban services in order to make their cities more sustainable.

If we want to people to walk more, to eat less meat or to use shared products instead of buying everything that we need in our daily lives ….. then do we do this by preaching about health or through the guilt trip of climate awareness or ……… can we achieve the same thing by making peoples live easier and saving them time – that’s what we want to explore.

In this first episode we explain the focus of the podcast. Our core message is: "if we solve the citizen’s problems first and if we do this with intuitive and easy to use tools then all of the data to make city more efficient and sustainable will be available by default".

Another way to phrase this is: how can concepts such as sharing, the platform economy, smart city, the future of work, circular economy and a greater focus on health and wellbeing combine to improve the quality of life in our cities?

The bulk of this episode is a section of Ken Dooley's interview with Aarni Heiskanen from a recent episode of the AEC podcast where he discusses his aim over the coming episodes.