Abstract
How much participation is “enough” for artificial intelligence (AI) in public space? We investigate three Amsterdam urban mobility system (UMS) projects —crowd-monitoring cameras, parking-scan vehicles and value-based routing—to examine participatory trajectory with the goal of projecting legitimacy beyond technical execution. To trace who gained voice (and when) across conception, deployment, and operation of the projects, we combined Arnstein’s Ladder and stakeholder mapping as a minimal toolkit. Findings reveal recurrent gaps and challenges in identifying and engaging impacted stakeholders. We sought first-hand, in-depth accounts from project managers of the UMS projects to offer richer context to the decisions made throughout the design journey, highlighting the heavy resource investments of stakeholder participation. We distil our findings into pragmatic guidelines and an open source the toolkit aimed to be a conversational aid to guide project owners and stakeholders to co-determine participatory needs of neglected stakeholders.
Keywords
Participatory-design; Service-design; Transformative-impact; Urban mobility; AI
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1145
Citation
Gu, H., Chandrasegaran, S.,and Kim, E.(2025) Participatory Design Insights from AI Mobility Projects in Amsterdam, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1145
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 10 - Design Practices & Impacts
Participatory Design Insights from AI Mobility Projects in Amsterdam
How much participation is “enough” for artificial intelligence (AI) in public space? We investigate three Amsterdam urban mobility system (UMS) projects —crowd-monitoring cameras, parking-scan vehicles and value-based routing—to examine participatory trajectory with the goal of projecting legitimacy beyond technical execution. To trace who gained voice (and when) across conception, deployment, and operation of the projects, we combined Arnstein’s Ladder and stakeholder mapping as a minimal toolkit. Findings reveal recurrent gaps and challenges in identifying and engaging impacted stakeholders. We sought first-hand, in-depth accounts from project managers of the UMS projects to offer richer context to the decisions made throughout the design journey, highlighting the heavy resource investments of stakeholder participation. We distil our findings into pragmatic guidelines and an open source the toolkit aimed to be a conversational aid to guide project owners and stakeholders to co-determine participatory needs of neglected stakeholders.