Abstract
With the fast development of electronic devices and the internet, Internet of Things devices are becoming more and more popular. For the technical research, our group recognized the limited functions of current LED lamps and therefore designed a multi-purpose lamp that can save energy during the day and serve as night lamp during the night. Assuming that smart devices like the multi-purpose lamp we designed are deployed at a large scale and their usage data is collected in real-time, how should city managers view the data collected? Therefore, the STS research seeks to find how urban dashboards should be designed to best serve their purposes in smart cities.
Modern LED lamps in general are not portable, have limited lighting levels, and just serve as desk lamps. Therefore, we designed a rechargeable multi-purpose lamp from scratch. The lamp can be controlled manually and automatically and has a day mode and a night mode. During the day, users can control it manually or automatically, while in the auto mode, it will auto-adjust its brightness according to ambient light. During the night, it will adjust its brightness to a very low level, and together with its portable body design, it serves as a night lamp.
The lamp consists of three printed circuit boards, a strip LED, and its body. The three boards are the switch board, and the power board, and the light-dependent resistor and LED board that measures the lighting level of ambient light and controls the lighting level of LED. For the body of the lamp, we designed a 3D printable model, but since it is too expensive to print it out, we handcrafted the body in the end. The final lamp can be controlled manually and automatically with the two modes fully developed and is rechargeable with a USB cable. For future design, we plan to minimize the sizes of the printed circuit boards and its lamp body.
The major question is how urban dashboards should be designed in smart cities, and to approach this problem, researching the history of dashboards and the performance of current urban dashboards like the Michigan Data Portal and the Dublin Dashboard was imperative. The research then analyzed this problem with the Actor Network Theory (ANT) and answered the major question from four perspectives.
The STS research concludes that urban dashboards are useful because they provide enough facts about a city, while they are also limited because many intangible aspects of smart cities cannot be summarized by numbers. To ensure the validity of the data provided by urban dashboards, regulations and laws should be put forward. In terms of making the best use of urban dashboards and improving their designs, a hierarchy of urban dashboards should be constructed, and different forms of urban dashboards should be introduced to increase the communication between citizens and city managers. Finally, urban dashboards should include more guidance to ensure easier access by citizens, and their data should be used together with other forms of data to aid city managers in making decisions.
The technical research team designed a multi-purpose lamp and we plan to make it smaller in the future. Then, assuming the vast usage of Internet of Things devices like the lamp in smart cities and considering the tool to analyze the vast amount of real-time data collected from such devices are urban dashboards, the question of how urban dashboards should be designed in smart cities was examined from four perspectives and concluded that they should be used together with other forms of data to best serve their purposes.
