Towards a Narrative-Aware Design Framework for Smart Urban Environments

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.