When researchers and civil society imagine the future of our cities

In 2023, FARI – AI for the Common Good Institute, in collaboration with Paradigm, launched a grant to its partner laboratories to stimulate citizen involvement in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data and Robotics research projects. Seven projects were supported.

Michel Joop van der Schoor, post-doctoral fellow in robotics at Brubotics (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and FARI, embraced the challenge by proposing a series of three workshops in October 2024 for public administrations held at FARI, alongside one open consultation with citizens during Innoviris’s “I Love Science festival” at Tour & Taxis. Both initiatives explored the potential of service robots for the Brussels-Capital Region.

In this article, Léa Rogliano, lead of FARI’s Citizen Engagement Hub (CEH), asks Michel about his experience and feedback. What are we looking for when we open up our research to third parties? What can we expect from such collaborations? What are the best methods for achieving a satisfactory result? The CEH’s mission is to stimulate exchanges between researchers and civil society, so as to build a concerted innovation for the common good. Interviews on the other projects awarded the grant will be published soon. Stay tuned!

 

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Léa Rogliano: What does ‘AI for the Common Good’ mean to you?

Michel Joop van der Schoor: For me I would say this is a promise to make AI accessible to all and hold developers accountable by taking them from their ivory towers and open up a multilateral debate on how to proceed, constantly evaluating current status, impacts and goals as this technology has such a potential to be disruptive (or already is).

L.R.: Can you summarize the purpose of the four events you organized for this FARI citizen science project?

M.J.v.d.S.: In the first workshop, we explored Design Thinking and the domains of Brussels as a smart city, using the participants’ personal experiences to map out current needs. During the I Love Science Festival, visitors voted on those needs formulated as problem statements and contributed ideas for robot use cases. The second workshop focused on the ideation of concepts for service robots addressing high-rated problem statements. In the third workshop, we used rapid prototyping to further develop service robot concepts based on identified needs.

L.R.: What have you gained from working with citizens and civil servants?

M.J.v.d.S.: The first thing I wanted was to approach other points of view, hearing from people with other professions, mentalities, ages, and genders, on robotics and its possible applications in the city. It was also about getting their on-the-ground knowledge – I mean the knowledge that people have because they do the work they do in a specific context. All this information is invaluable when designing a robot, helping to consider everything that’s needed regarding requirements, functions, and the small details that matter when accommodating different types of stakeholders who will interact with the robot.

The last workshop, which focused on making a prototype, was particularly interesting for me. It gave me ideas for certain robots from a technical point of view. But above all, I learned a lot by observing how the participants thought about their robots. Watching the groups approach the task differently than I would have made me realize how valuable it was to understand how people in an administration would imagine and build their robot. After all, my goal is to design a robot for them, not for myself. I noticed, for instance, that one group found it very important for their robot to have a smiling face, while another prioritized adaptability in height. As a designer, I often focus on certain features that seem crucial at the outset, striving to perfect them. However, these might be aspects that users don’t even notice. Observing users’ needs in action helps ensure I don’t waste time on features that won’t necessarily meet users’ needs and desires.

“Technical devices sometimes seem so complex and overloaded with functions that it actually causes more effort to use them instead of making things easier and efficient. We need simple solutions solving an issue and not making three new ones.”  – Participant of the Co-Creation Workshop #2 “How do you like your robot?”

I also think the workshops were beneficial for the participants themselves. They gain valuable insights into the entire process, from identifying a problem and coming up with a concept and solutions to building prototypes and trying to test them or get feedback. Going through this process was, I believe, an important learning experience for them too.

L.R.: What were the difficulties during the process?

M.J.v.d.S.:  The first workshop produced good problem statements. It brought together a wide range of ideas and identified what participants saw as the city’s main problems. However, the second workshop was a little more difficult. I had hoped, perhaps naively, that something new, or out of the ordinary, might come out of it, but this was not the case. To achieve this objective, I should have formulated it more clearly during the workshop design phase.

Also, during the last workshop, I realized how difficult it is to get people to understand unfamiliar methods, such as robot prototyping. Some groups came for feedback, and when they presented their prototypes to me, I could see that they had not quite understood what we expected of them. After some clarification, they came up with some solid use cases. Participants from the general public need precise, specific guidance. To make the tasks clearer and more accessible, it would have been useful to have a skilled facilitator per group to guide them through the prototyping of their robot.

L.R.: What are the limits of the exercise of working with citizens for you?

M.J.v.d.S.: For me, the first limitation was representativeness. As it was impossible to organize a series of workshops for hundreds of people, we worked with a small group of civil servants who were not representative of all the administrations. Nor was our consultation at the I Love Science festival representative of the whole city. With this caveat in mind, I kept wondering whether the ideas generated really corresponded to what the majority of people would consider good problems to solve.

Looking back, I think we might have been more productive if we had conducted our research with a group of 15 people from a single organization on a single topic. It is maybe because at the very beginning, I was imagining the project more like a citizens’ jury before it evolved to much applied workshops. Maybe I wanted to do too many things at the same time?

Another limitation is the difficulty of going beyond ideation. It is difficult to go beyond proposing ideas or concepts and work on the detailed design of the idea. A non-expert audience will find it hard to get into the technical aspects, to know how to build a robot, how to develop it, how to think about the hardware, the sensors needed… I think it is quite possible to understand how a robot should work and what functions it could perform, but not so easy to work out how to make it. I would say it is more a question of knowing what to do than how to do it.

L.R.: What advice would you give to researchers who want to involve citizens in their research?

M.J.v.d.S.: My advice would be to seek professional help. This was not the first time I would involved citizens in my research. I had already done this exercise in workshops with workers from an organization, with the aim of imagining robots for their field. Even with this experience, it was crucial to work with a professional facilitator specialized in service design and design thinking, Diana Schneider, for this series of workshops. Designing workshops like this is a skill in its own right. You need someone like her who knows how to do it and has done it many times before. As a researcher, when you work with a professional mediator, you are only responsible for the content and formulation of the objectives to be achieved at the end of the workshop. When it comes to creating the workshop itself, teamwork is invaluable. I think the key as a researcher is to invest time in defining the objectives, what you really want from your work with citizens or public administrations or your specific target audience and getting help to achieve them.

L.R.: Did you stick to your first goals?

M.J.v.d.S.: Good question. I think I did. When I met Diana Schneider in September, we thought about how to organize the workshop and what we wanted to get out of it. We also thought we would need to leave some time between workshops to make adaptations. In the end, we did not have to, thanks to Diana’s hard work and preparation.

L.R.: How long was your work process?

M.J.v.d.S.: I started thinking, planning, and contacting FARI staff in July. My first meeting with Diana was in September. It took two months of preparation. But I admit, we did not have to go looking for participants. We already had an audience at the I Love Science Festival. For the workshops with public administrations, we only had to come up with a good motivational text for the invitation, FARI took care of sending them to its address book. Some companies take care of the recruitment, but it has an added cost. However, depending on the profile of the participants sought in the research, it is mandatory.