Activating Data through Eco-Didactic Design in the Public Realm: Enabling Sustainable Development in Cities

Abstract

This paper explores how design in the public realm can integrate city data to help disseminate the information embedded within it and provide urban opportunities for knowledge exchange. The hypothesis is that such art and design practices in public spaces, as places of knowledge exchange, may enable more sustainable communities and cities through the visualization of data. To achieve this, we developed a methodology to compare various design approaches for integrating three main elements in public-space design projects: city data, specific issues of sustainability, and varying methods for activating the data. To test this methodology, we applied it to a pedogeological project where students were required to render city data visible. We analyze the proposals presented by the young designers to understand their approaches to design, data, and education. We study how they “educate” and “dialogue” with the community about sustainable issues. Specifically, the research attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How can we use data in the design of public spaces as a means for sustainability knowledge exchange in the city? (2) How can community-based design contribute to innovative data collection and dissemination for advancing sustainability in the city? (3) What are the overlaps between the projects’ intended impacts and the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Our findings suggest that there is a need for such creative practices, as they make information available to the community, using unconventional methods. Furthermore, more research is needed to better understand the short- and long-term outcomes of these works in the public realm.

1. Introduction

Sustainability is often perceived within the context of crisis management, under the umbrella of urgent challenges. However, this “crisis” mode may also inhibit collective thought and social change since it can remain broad in scope and focused on the present. In turn, it can immobilize the general community and leave these programs in the purview of the “experts”, as investigated by Collins and Evans [1], and elaborated upon in the context of sustainability by the authors [2]. No matter how green our urban infrastructure is, one of the most difficult challenges in greening a city is to activate the collective intelligence [3] of unsustainable human and organizational practices and the social structures needed to make these shifts possible. We observe that effective action is slow to materialize, as collective knowledge and behavior change are part of a larger dynamic that requires understanding to reach a deep political and societal mindset.

If we consider collective civic intelligence, we cannot ignore the urban public realm as a key space for knowledge exchange. We also see that public spaces are increasingly being used to exchange knowledge with the community [4,5,6]. At the same time, data are central in the discourse of sustainability; data are often perceived as a need for monitoring, a guide for action, and a means for evaluation [7]. However, how can design in the public realm activate data to spark collective civic intelligence and even action?

This paper explores how design in the public realm can integrate urban data to help exchange knowledge and enable a more sustainable community. Our hypothesis rests on the notion that sustainability in the city can be enabled through the visualization of data in public spaces, as these are essentially places of knowledge exchange. To achieve this, we develop a comparative methodology to understand the various design approaches to integrate data, design, and sustainability in public-space projects.

We used the work completed in a classroom setting by a group of students of sustainable design to test the methodology and draw some insights into the approaches that emerged. The objective of this pedagogical project was for the students to explore how they can activate data through design, which can also “educate” the community about sustainable issues. This pedagogical approach for teaching sustainable design was intended to produce a variety of ideas for the public realm that would activate open data collected by the city that most often remain hidden and not accessible to most people. These open data represent a series of issues for the city, and this design exercise aims to render visible the invisibility of the significance of these data. The pedagogical project focused on all these issues and therefore was considered as the best case to test our hypothesis.

Thus, our research aims to investigate how collecting and disseminating data in the public realm through design can address the different domains of sustainability (namely, the social, economic, environmental, and cultural) while also raising awareness or soliciting action. We extend our analysis to understand how the different projects relate to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Specifically, the research attempts to answer the following questions:

• How can we use data in the design of public spaces as a means for sustainability knowledge exchange in the city?
• How can community-based design contribute to innovative data collection and dissemination for advancing sustainability in the city?
• What are the overlaps between the projects’ intended impacts and the 17 SDGs?

To answer these questions, we start by presenting the main literature concerning the role of design in enabling sustainability and extract the tensions that define the design process—in terms of data, design outcome and objective, mode of delivery, and sustainable development impact. We then present the resulting methodology that we propose for studying and comparing the urban public-space projects. In the third part, we present the specific case study used to test the methodology. Before concluding our study, we reflect on (1) how the method enables us to develop our understanding of sustainable design in the public realm, (2) any gaps in the analysis, and (3) if there is a common thread in the design approaches of these projects. While previous publications have studied each of these elements independently, no previous research has attempted to explore their synergistic outcome within a design-based research approach, deciphering the tensions that guide projects’ design process or their overlaps with the SDGs.

2. Sustainability, the Community, and the Design of Public Spaces

2.1. Design in the Public Realm as a Means for Communicating and Enabling Sustainability

In the 1960s, green design represented a major shift for designers, embedded in the aspiration of eco-awareness, driven by a radical approach that questioned the emerging conspicuous consumption phenomena and the poor state of the urban condition [8,9,10,11]. During this time, some architects and designers even lived in their structures to express their connection with nature [7]. The didactic efforts of the 1960s seem to be founded on a vastly different set of motivations from those of modern green design [12,13]. Today, green design seems to be aiming for the recognizability of eco-features [14], as a means to engage with the community and to demonstrate eco-responsibility.

The ability to communicate eco-responsibility is seen as a growing phenomenon [15,16]. A rise in the occurrence of discernible eco-features in the design of the city—its buildings and public spaces—has occurred in the past few decades, which may contribute to this [6,17,18,19,20,21,22]. In this emerging phenomenon, projects are not only designed to be eco-efficient, but they are also designed to appear eco-efficient [23].

The phenomenon of embedding messages in art and design practices is not new. Indeed, art and design in the public realm can convey messages to the general population, rather than just the patrons of art institutions, such as a museum. These practices may also have the capacity to contribute to emergent critical discourses [24]. Increasingly, public art and design have sought to espouse messages of environmental degradation [18]. The basic premise of this type of public art and design, which aims to synthesize concerns of sustainability, is to enable collective awareness [22]. As early as 1995, Suzanne Lacy described this new genre of public art as work that can contribute to the common good when inserted in the public sphere [5], to a point of becoming a political act [4]. It has also been suggested that open creative practices on a macro level can spur societal innovation [25].

In a recent publication, Cucuzzella et al. refer to this phenomenon as an eco-didactic approach [26]. These authors have defined the eco-didactic approach as “a new mode of seeking public enlightenment through the arts, [which] ties the creative and design fields to a form of instrumentality” [26]. We propose that eco-didacticism in the public realm can be characterized by spaces that are designed to deliver an eco-message through expressive, informative, and educative means.

One characteristic of eco-didacticism is the desire to inform viewers of a project’s green qualities by encouraging them to think about its physical and connotative features. Cucuzzella et al. [26] refer to this as a cognitive experience. This implies that some of the eco-features must be made visibly obvious to visitors in order to deliver clear and uncontestable information through formal qualities. This requires a communication approach for disseminating the desired message based on collective consensus. It is possible to identify characteristics that are not only eco-features attesting to resource performance but also explicitly seeking to exhibit these features to visitors.

In the next few paragraphs, we provide a brief introduction to the three main areas that are key in the process of designing installations in the public realm, which incorporate data for communicating issues of sustainability with the community. These are data collected by the city, the broad imperatives of sustainability for the smart city, and the UN SDGs as a potential metric.

2.2. Data in the City

Today, data are increasingly perceived as an object of design—where the objective is to find innovative approaches to either communicate existing city data or collect new forms of data. Data in the built environment have been used for a variety of means. For example, they have been used as a feedback mechanism for responsive environments to better manage urban operations and resources [27]. Furthermore, the collection, sharing, analysis, and availability of data have been recognized as a critical means for tracking and, in turn, achieving sustainable development goals [28]. This practice highlights that data, while being a managerial necessity, allow for novel connections with citizens [29]. As such, we increasingly see data being used to exchange knowledge with the community, either through phone applications or through digital or interactive devices placed throughout the city.

However, data can only be operationalized when coupled with effective information and communication technology (ICT). The application of new technologies combined with ICT has been viewed as a cornerstone for smart development [30], for improving monitoring and for building knowledge [31], and for democratizing growth, ensuring equal access, and encouraging participatory action [32,33]. Communicating data to urban citizens and users of interior or public spaces has been shown as an effective way to inform actions and, in many cases, even change behaviors. This can be applied to energy actions, for example [34,35,36].

2.3. Sustainability and the Smart City

Antoine Picon has recognized that a smart city contains digital tools that allow the optimization of its functioning and sustainability goals [3]. Picon states that the smart city is inspired by a deliberately technocratic emphasis, with its programmed monitoring and effective management. This author claims that these tools can also address the quality of life of inhabitants, as well as the types of relationships they maintain with one another. Thus, a connected and collaborative city may initially seem opposed to the smart city, but the two are mutually complementary. This is because the smart city sets out to reinvent collaborative citizen experiences spontaneously—where collective experiences can help envision and embody positive futures [3]. These experiences would be nourished by, and ultimately contribute to, both the human and hard sciences. Bisello et al. [37] propose that smart and intelligent cities are encapsulated by the sustainable city vision—where the social, economic, environmental, and cultural dimensions are in balance.

Rethinking the urban design project that aims to further the sustainable goals of a city, in a previous publication, we [38] define a “blended project” as a theoretical framework that addresses sustainability and smart cities’ concerns at once through cultural developments (Figure 1). In this research, we propose that blended projects can accomplish a multitude of outcomes: (1) They are well integrated within their context; (2) they can effectively manage natural and energy resources; (3) they can improve the quality of life; (4) they can encourage local culture production; and (5), most importantly, they are activated and programmed. These types of projects are also appropriate to their users and environmentally sound. Thus, blended infrastructure projects are means for a sustainable vision that can also generate a unified brand (i.e., the city as destination) and present a sense of place that is unique, tangible, and relevant [39]. Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between smart-city and cultural development strategies through the lens of sustainability, in which their sum is the potential for blended projects.

This current research considers public blended urban design projects as potential enablers for environmental, social, cultural, and economic sustainability. This can be achieved through “the intrinsic links between cultural diversity and biodiversity, through its influence on consumption patterns, and through its contribution to sustainable environmental management practices as a result of local and traditional knowledge” [40]. It is important to note that the intersecting boundaries of Figure 1 are figurative in their definition, considering the complex reality of urban projects described by Dovey and Ristic [41]. Even projects that adopt a predominantly smart-city approach will inevitably include some cultural development aspects. Although these complex and intertwined relations cannot be ignored or reduced to single labels, they are approached and categorized in this paper based on the designers’ implicit intentions.

2.4. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The UN’s 2030 Agenda, approved in late 2015, marked an important shift in the global sustainable development effort [42,43]. Structured around 17 transformative goals, the SDGs and their list of clear targets are expansive and comprehensive (Jayasooria, 2016). Unlike previous sustainable development agendas, the SDGs are accompanied by a global call to action, offering a stable definition for sustainable development that designers can seek in their work—essential for infrastructure, design, and construction [44,45,46,47,48].

Today, the SDGs are becoming an essential tool for guiding public and private sustainability efforts. This is also the case in space design and architecture, as seen by the SDG architecture guides published recently [49]. Within the scope of this research, both “data” and “cities” are considered cornerstones for achieving the agenda’s targets. The role of ICTs’ for enabling development has made it the focus of several SDGs targets [50]. In their review of ICT’s role in the 2030 Agenda, Tjoa and Tjoa [51] propose that, while expanded technological infrastructure and usage might result in environmental drawbacks, ICTs enable unprecedented development capacities. This includes information access, supply chain management and integration, crowdsourcing of data (regarding health, well-being, and finance), and predicting and controlling disasters (such as in pandemic, as seen in Grantz et al. [52]. Recent research, such as that of Kostoska and Kocarev [53], highlights ways that ICTs can better align with the agenda goals by adopting holistic approaches integrating knowledge from the governance, sustainability, and data sciences.

Researchers have also explored the roles of cities and urban environments in achieving the SDGs. We already found that more than 40% of the agenda’s targets are dependent on construction and real estate activities (understood as designing, building, maintaining buildings, and infrastructure), and that those activities can directly affect sustainable development goals [54]. Researchers have also found that the SDGs and their indicators can provide a more balanced and integrated approach for applying urban sustainability principles and monitoring progress towards sustainable development [55,56]. However, their local application (i.e., in an individual project or a specific urban context) has proved to be challenging due to their generic characteristics, global focus, and the many topics they cover [57]. Consequently, developing methodologies and frameworks for integrating the SDGs in the design and analysis processes of projects is key for meaningful integration. This was attempted in available publications such as [58,59,60,61].

Against this backdrop, designers have a crucial role in exploring and materializing the links between their work and the 2030 Agenda. The authors have previously [58] suggested that this process has to happen in the early design stages—to ensure that the SDGs are embedded in the designers’ and their project’s intentions [62,63]. In this research, understanding the overlaps between the intents of city-focused design projects and SDGs can reveal the potential contributions of city elements to global sustainable efforts.

3. The Tensions Defining Urban Project Design

Given the above three areas of research, which, when considered together, may contribute to more sustainable cities, we describe in the next subsections the series of tensions to consider when designing for sustainability, particularly when aiming to communicate a message to the general public, using data. The first series of tensions is represented by the imperatives of the four pillars of sustainability. Design projects often focus on one of these domains, while aiming to address the others without compromise. This is a difficult balance. We have also organized the four categories of tensions, defining the project design process as (1) the direction of the data exchange, (2) the design impetus (or motivation for its existence), (3) the mode of delivery of the message it seeks to convey, and (4) the sustainable development impact (SD Impact).

Table 1. Summary of the tensions defining using data in design sustainability in the public realm.

Categories	Tension		Reference
SUSTAINABILITY DOMAIN OF CONCERN	Tension between the social, economic, cultural, and environmental domains of sustainability.	Environmental	[64,65,66]
		Social	[68,69]
		Economic	[68,70]
		Cultural	[26,70,71,113]
DATA	Tension between collecting data from the community and disseminating data through design to the community.		[27,28,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,50,51,72,76,77]
DESIGN	Tension between designing an entirely new artifact and designing only an add-on.		[78]
	Tension between product- and system-based design.		[41,81,83,84,85,86,87,88,114]
MODE OF DELIVERY OF MESSAGE	Tension between a physical or virtual type of solution.		[90]
	Tension between activating widely accepted knowledge and encouraging provocative debate.		[92,93,94,95]
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IMPACT	Tension between raising awareness and soliciting action.		[4,103]
	Tension between community and individual-focused design.		[110,111,112]
	Tension between project benefits to people (and their socioeconomic system) and benefits to the planet (general ecological benefits—flora and fauna, and non-human benefits).		[96,97,98,99]

, at the end of this section, presents a summary of these tensions with their associated references.

3.1. Defining the Four Domains of Sustainability for Design Projects in the City

3.1.1. Environmental

We refer to the environmental project as one that addresses ecological issues or one that increases public or individual awareness of ecological sustainability on a city scale. These projects aim to reduce environmental impacts by reducing resource consumption or toxic emissions in the environment [64]. The design approaches adopted are often based on solving problems and limit their scope to areas of known environmental risk [65]. Although some projects seek solutions at the building, neighborhood, or even city scales, the impacts emanating from these built projects affect the whole ecosystem. Indeed, UNESCO has placed environmental sustainability at the core of its work and actions [66]. Its four main goals are as follows: establishing a certified Environmental Management System, reducing carbon emissions, eliminating single-use plastics, protecting biodiversity, and promoting urban agriculture. Such design projects aim to improve ecosystems.

3.1.2. Social

Barron and Gauntlett [67] describe social sustainability as a system or structure that actively supports future generations’ capacity to create healthy and livable communities. Socially sustainable communities are equitable, diverse, connected, and democratic. They provide a good quality of life. Besides this, other elements can include the following: the generally acknowledged values of discipline, honesty, and laws; and the unity of the community, comity, compassion, forbearance, fellowship, fraternity, diversity, humility, sodality, tolerance, patience, love, institutions and pluralism, etc. [68]. According to Polese and Stren [69], policies necessary for social sustainability require a more equitable fiscal situation, the integration of all communities within the city into a cohesive whole, and the provision of equitable mobility systems for access to public services and workplaces, all within the framework of an open and democratic local governing structure. A design project can be considered within the social domain when it aims to strengthen regional and vernacular connections and support communities to achieve an equitable and dynamic society.

3.1.3. Economic

Theories in economic sustainability focus on the efficient usage and fair distribution of goods [68]. Thus, economic sustainability can be understood as a group of practices that will support economic growth without hindering a specific community’s environmental, social, or cultural capacity. One possible approach here is to strengthen or even enable entrepreneurial opportunities, directly affecting economic growth [70]. Another example can include offering individuals price incentives for local products or services. These types of services may also have beneficial rebound effects. In this particular example, this service can also raise awareness about resource consumption and help prevent damage to the national economy. A design project can be considered within the economic sustainability domain when it aims to strengthen individuals’ or communities’ economic aspects.

3.1.4. Cultural

Grodach and Loukaitou-Sideris [70] define sustainable cultural projects as those that seek to create a positive city image, improve the quality of life, focus on community development, and encourage the local production of culture through arts and education. However, the cultural pillar of sustainability can be broad. The UNESCO “Global Report on Culture for Sustainable Cities, Culture: Urban Future” highlights the following:

“Culture and development have long had a reciprocal and interdependent relationship, although this has only gained momentum at the international level over the past 30 years. The evolution of holistic approaches is intrinsically linked with global debates, in particular those around the concept of sustainability”

[71] (p. 18).

Furthermore, urban design projects in the city can specifically aim to sensitize the community about aspects of sustainability issues. This phenomenon is increasing, as we see more art and design projects that aim to place eco-messages directly in the public realm [26]. Thus, a project can be thought to address the cultural pillar when it aims to increase awareness about cultural issues in society.

3.2. Data Exchange Direction

Collection vs. Dissemination

Within “big-data” exchange processes, there is always a tension between the collection and the dissemination of information [72]. In sustainability science and citizen data, this tension is usually named the data pull and push process [73]. In many cases, the collection and dissemination have to happen in parallel or with a balance, where the applications usually involve “stakeholders needing to have access to real-time generated data sets and analytics from populations as large as a metropolitan community and be able to respond to as well as disseminate information to these populations” [74]. What is essential is that the collection (pull) or dissemination (push) of data might depend extensively on the context and development-problem area of focus [75,76,77]. In the context of design for enabling sustainability in the city, it is important to analyze the application or design’s primary function—oscillating between the collection or dissemination of data and information.

3.3. Design Impetus

3.3.1. New Artefact vs. Product Augmentation

The definition of a new product or artifact can be considered a hierarchical combination of elementary subsystems where each of these subsystems is dedicated to consumers’ satisfaction and expectation [78]. As Lancaster [79] first suggested, a product may be conceptualized as a basket of attributes (physical and symbolic) that seek to satisfy consumers’ needs. Innovation may classify the idea as “new” and a radical shift from its precedents if any. There are two main criteria for innovation: the degree of novelty and the novelty’s nature [78]. According to these authors, a product can be thought of as a composition of technical subsystems and linking mechanisms. Linking mechanisms refer to how the new subsystems can be integrated within the new product: Is the linkage completely different from the previous version? Based on this, it is possible to distinguish between modular innovations and architectural innovations. A modular innovation changes the subsystems without changing how they are linked. An architectural innovation imposes a change in the links that unite the subsystems. As such, we can think of design as proposing entirely new artifacts or presenting improvements, or augmentations, for existing products.

3.3.2. Product vs. System

In this tension, we considered whether the project proposed was the design of an artifact (a technical problem) or if the design considered the system within which it existed and sought to address this larger complexity of its environment (a combined technical, social and cultural problematic) [80]. The main difference between a product and system approach is that the system-focused design pays attention to the relationships that the new artifact has with the other elements in its context and how these other interconnected elements are influenced by this new design [81,82,83]. If a product is focused on questions of affordances [84], efficiency [85], or even aesthetics [41], then the product is embedding itself within a system. In this case, it is addressing these qualities while aiming to understand the dynamics of the new artifact within the larger context in which it lives [86,87,88]. Therefore, a “system focus” would entail a comprehension and articulation of the dynamics, influences, or impacts of the new artifact with its environment. Whereas a “product focus” does not consider its wider influences or impacts, and remains purely technical.

3.4. Mode of Message Delivery

3.4.1. Physical vs. Virtual Approach

Increasingly, societies and humans interact within the digital world [89]. A connected society enables greater socialization while remaining contactless, living in the virtual [3]. A virtual mode of message delivery would entail an artifact that lives in the digital world, enabling a message to be delivered through the means of the connected city [29]. On the other hand, a physical artifact in this research project is defined as one that is materially embedded in the public realm [22], where the general public can experience it through their physical senses. An example of a physical artwork in the public realm is Ice-Watch, an artwork exhibited at COP21 in Paris, a 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change. This famous public space artwork was created by artists Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing. It was an intervention in the very physical city, as spectators often are photographed touching the melting blocks of ice standing idly in the public realm. However, thousands of people were affected by this piece without ever visiting the actual site in Paris, and the other cities in which the artwork was exhibited. They discovered the artifact through its accompanying website, as well as through the media that poured out after each installation. So, even if Ice-Watch was a very physical installation, its virtual presence and associated press helped it touch communities worldwide [90]. This public-space installation is therefore adopting both a physical and virtual approach.

3.4.2. Consensus vs. Dissensus

Communicating eco-messages can happen in a multitude of ways. If we consider Habermas’s theory of communicative action, we see that the most substantial arguments encapsulate elements of objectivity, subjectivity, and normativity [91,92]. Specifically, the communication approach of the intended message of an eco-didactic work can span from one that is universally accepted (using the conceptual model of consensus) to one more subtle, or even subversive (using the conceptual model of dissensus) [93,94]. When communicative actions are conveyed, not through words, but physical or virtual artifacts, then the three dimensions of the communicative action must be considered a little differently. For example, the readability of the message and who is “allowed” to read it produces an additional political dimension for the work [95].

An example that would illustrate the difference between consensus and dissensus as a method for the mode of message delivery is the work by Wolf Vostell. His work, which depicts a car made out of concrete placed in the public realm, critiques the ubiquitous use of the automobile. This is an example of how public art can deliver a message that is already well understood in the community (consensus), yet also provides a visceral experience.

3.5. Sustainable Development Impact

3.5.1. People vs. Planet

The development of products inevitably places the burden of environmental degradation on individuals rather than corporations. Humans feel the brunt of the responsibility for the planet’s degradation, yet corporations are the main culprit [96]. Taylor and Watts state that “20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era” [96] (p. 1). Given that the increasing impacts of human activity on the environment on all scales have outpaced the systems and processes of the natural environment, humans are equally increasingly striving to find innovative ways to address this imbalance [97]. As innovations in new materials, new technologies, and omnipresent data are increasingly seen as the foundation of the city’s future, there arises an associated distancing from the primary causes of our planetary condition [98]. Discourses about environmental crises and damages continue daily, and with this, a sense of despair and powerlessness emerges, a sensation that Glenn A. Albrecht describes as a form of eco-anxiety, Solastalgia [99]. Are the social and organizational problems that humans face not better dealt with from a systemic lens? Can efficiencies at the product level help societies in the quest for a more sustainable planet? This tension considers where the primary benefits of the message being delivered are most focused: the planet or the people.

3.5.2. Raising Awareness vs. Soliciting Action

The public realm is the space of collective experiences [100]. Increasingly, art and design in the public realm have taken on the goal to enlighten the public about environmental catastrophes [18]. Even if these works aim for social transformation, however, this may require deep shifts in societal structures [101]. Some of these works facilitate emotional experiences [18], while others aim to visualize scientific data and even enable action, through principles of knowledge exchange for environmental issues [102].

Consider Ice-Watch again: The melting blocks of ice are quite clear in their eco-message, and the work’s aim to raise awareness is quite evident. The installation is created through science since each of the 12 chunks of ice is equivalent to the global amount of melting ice per second in Greenland. It is difficult to understand how to change the situation of melting glaciers, as the artwork offers no suggestions for how, at the individual level, one can begin to take action. There is no direct solicitation of action, and, given that the problem of melting glaciers requires a systemic understanding of greenhouse gas emissions from a development perspective, viewers are left powerless. Even if the eco-message is extremely clear, the action to be taken to improve the situation is not [4,103].

3.5.3. Community vs. Individual

Artworks in the public realm can be aimed at the community or the individual. In some cases, the works may enable dialogues directly in the public realm [104,105]. In these types of works, both communities and individuals, are intended as the audience, which may result in both conceptual or physical processes of interaction [106,107].

The goal in all these types of works in the public realm is to exchange knowledge or disseminate messages [108,109]. Returning once more to Ice-Watch, the work intends to touch an entire community. It sparks an emotional connection between the public (a community of viewers) and the topic of melting glaciers. It may not enable individuals into action, but it makes communities acutely aware of the damages to our environment [110,111,112]. An example of a work that activates the individual directly is the Washed Ashore eco-art installation by artist, Angela Pozzi. In this work, there is a call for citizens to help collect waste that has washed ashore. This debris, mostly plastic waste, is used by Ms. Pozzi to create the series of artworks exhibited along the shore. Her work enlightens the community at large, but it also focuses on the individual by mobilizing them to take action. This highlights the tension between community or individual-focused design.

4. Methodology

4.1. Approaching City Projects and the Analysis Method

To study how city projects navigate the tension between sustainability, data, design, and eco-messages requires a type of expertise that is rooted in the specific design problems. As proposed by Collins and Evans [1], this would be considered internal expertise. Thus, the researchers analyzing these tensions would also need to understand the outcomes of the design process and designers’ intents. The experts who can analyze these projects should have a contributory ability to the topic—e.g., they should be designers focused on studying and creating similar urban projects. As such, the analysis becomes in itself a type of reflection-in-action, as proposed by Schön [115]. This approach is in line with the practices of architectural judgment, such as those used in competitions and design critiques [116,117].

Pedagogical design projects present a fertile space for such analysis to be conducted. Education design projects offer the possibility to formulate briefs and requirements in a way to guide students to explore the tensions presented earlier. Thus, and unlike real-life projects or built case studies, the pedagogical projects’ outcomes would all respond to the same requirement and would not be limited by real-life constraints (such as economic or bureaucratic). Additionally, the diversity in student backgrounds and interests would generate a rich variety of projects and ideas to be explored. Moreover, course instructors are fit to provide a polymorphic reflection on design outcomes based on the dialectic instruction and assessment of design-focused projects.

We adopted an expert elicitation process, to involve the teaching team as internal experts who are directly engaged in developing the design projects. Some critiques of this method have been voiced by scholars in public policy development [118,119]. However, this methodology has gained much ground in studying sustainability and sustainable development issues in the last few years. Recently, it has been used to understand and evaluate the SDGs and their links to various sector-driven activities [44,120,121].

4.2. Selected Case Study: Contributing to Sustainability through the Smart City

The case study we selected comprised ten projects, an outcome of a design exercise organized for a first-year public-space sustainable design studio, titled “Contributing to sustainability through the smart city”. This exercise was designed to encapsulate the principles embedded within the theory of eco-didacticism in the public realm. Furthermore, the main objective of this exercise was the democratization of the open data collected and available by the city—data which most often remain hidden from the majority of the urban population. These first-year students were required to imagine how these data can be used in the design of an urban installation, while making the invisibility of the data visible to the public.

In this exercise, the term “smart community” was defined as civil society’s contribution to the city’s intelligence. This embraces the broader definition of smart cities as suggested by Picon [3]. Students were required to explore how open data can be used in urban design projects such that they can contribute to heightening awareness about sustainability in the community. The design questions that framed the projects were as follows:

• How can we include civic engagement in the way smart and sustainable communities are developed?
• What data are needed to enable this civic engagement?
• If the data do not exist, how would you ensure that information is appropriately and continuously collected?

While the City of Montreal made some data publicly available and accessible to the students, these data were not activated in design by the city. In other words, the data were invisible to the community, even if the datasets were housed on the open data portal in the form of datasets. Some of the datasets were mapped (i.e., using graphical methods to represent specific datasets) on the city’s website; however, the city wanted to explore how these data could be utilized more creatively to inform citizens and solicit positive behavior from communities. Some of the design proposals by the city representatives included the following:

• Large-scale public data mapping and visualization;
• Processing and using public data in artifacts that communicate concrete and easy-to-read messages;
• Promoting and valuing contributions from citizens in creating data and information about the city;
• Considering how data are governed when added by citizens to the city’s open data portal;
• Helping to recognize the truthfulness and authenticity of a citizen’s contribution to data creation;
• Harnessing the potential of digital technology to promote civic engagement and improve democratic practices (e.g., Civic Tech group).

Students could choose from three alternatives regarding how they would incorporate data into their design project:

• Using existing and already collected data from the city: Students were expected to imagine how these data could be designed into the public realm to help communities better understand their relevance and help them become more aware of sustainability issues. Here, the students focused on disseminating these data through their designs and on “teaching” communities about some sustainability issue, using either dynamic or static interactive methods.
• Exploring how new data can be collected: The students were expected to find ways to gather new datasets not currently available in the city database. In other words, they designed a mechanism to obtain new data on a regular and sustainable basis.
• Combining both mentioned strategies: The students were expected to utilize existing data while complementing them with new data or simultaneously collecting and disseminating the data through their design. Thus, their task was to find how the city could collect new data in engaging ways while also seeking new mechanisms and platforms to communicate that same data.

Table 2. A summary of the design outcomes, including projects’ title, submitted panel, overarching objective, and message of each of the student team projects.

Project Title and Students’ Name	Illustration	Problematic	Overarching Objective	What is the Message or Imperative?
The Power in the Reversibility of Light Pollution By: Molly Taylor, Kelly Patilla		Light pollution data.	Introducing a new way of collecting light pollution data.	Taking part in a short activity that will teach people how to measure the brightness of the current sky, which further raises their awareness of the city’s light pollution.
AQI Accessible By: Bianca Macleod, John Sales		Air quality information.	Monitoring and displaying air quality.	Not only educating the public but also providing them a role in gathering data.
Trouble With Takeout By: Jazmin Harrington, Dylan Razzell		Growing incidence of single-use plastics and Styrofoam containers.	Developing an app.	Informing consumers on which restaurants and cafés near them have environmentally friendly packaging.
Car Commute Awareness By: Kevin Mains, Florence Simard		An increasing number of cars on roads.	Making an installation.	Billboards and lights receive and announce data such as the number of vehicles passing the bridge. The project attempts to decrease air toxicities and traffic.
Under Artificial Skies By: Astou Touré, Lucia Giron		Light pollution and energy waste in Montreal.	Making an installation.	Quantifying the amount of energy wasted overnight due to light pollution to raise awareness.
The Smart Bus Stop Don’t wait, learn instead! By: Manuel Souris, Claire Duby Riou, Max Thomas		Amount of carbon emissions from individual cars.	Making an installation.	Making people aware of their daily carbon emissions from taking the car and how they can escape such emissions by taking the bus
Our Unsustainable Coffee Habits By: Laura Porto, Marco Nguyen-Cote		Waste generated by the consumption of single-use coffee cups.	Making an installation.	Raising awareness among the residents of Montreal regarding the issue of the waste generated by the consumption of single-use coffee cups.
Late again? By: Rees Tucker, Eric Riordon		Efficiency in public transportation.	Developing an app.	Increasing efficiency of public transportation in Montreal.
Illuminated Neighborhood By: Anastasia Statsenko, Patrizio McLelland		Energy consumption.	Making installations.	Constructing educational data visualization that urges residents to track their home energy use and to develop more sustainable habits.
Rootrade By: Lily Cowper, Oldri Kecaj		Scarcity of Montreal-north grocery stores low-incomes among residents.	Developing an app.	Acting as a grocery store map and cost-comparison app and allowing busy residents to purchase nutrient-rich vegetables from growers at greenhouses nearby.

presents the ten projects that were used in this study. We have included in this table the title, the submitted poster, and some other details that would enable a comprehensive understanding of each project submitted. In the following section, we describe the analysis process and outcome.

4.3. Analysis Framework

We designed the analysis framework around questions that address the categories presented in Table 1: (1) How does the project relate to the topics of the SDGs? (2) What is the project’s sustainability area of concern(s)? (3) How does the project situate within the eight tensions identified—across the data-exchange direction, the design impetus, the mode of message delivery, and the SD impact?

The details of the sub-questions for each of these categories are presented in Appendix A. The overview of the analysis framework is presented in Figure 2.

4.4. Analysis Process

To analyze the design outcomes of the young creators, a committee of five experts–including the authors–composed the expert elicitation team. This expert group was composed of the studio instructor, the reviewers, and teaching and research assistants involved in the first-year design studio. The analysis aimed to discuss, judge and critique the projects through the submitted design panels and project descriptions and to arrive at an answer to the questions highlighted in Appendix A. Figure 3 presents the overall process of the structured expert elicitation process.

As part of their project proposals, the students were asked to select the set of SDGs that they understood could capture their project’s objectives. Their choices were based on the course content related to the SDGs (which included a presentation, group discussion, and class activity). Thus, in this research, the students completed the first step in the framework proposed in Figure 2. Following this primary student input, the expert panel completed the remaining analysis, using the structured expert elicitation method proposed in Hemming et al. [119]. The results reported are considered a manifestation of the reviewer’s consensus regarding each of the projects, with their justifications presented in the comments. Overall, the 5 experts arrived at a consensus and justified the 120 analysis points. The outcome of this analysis is presented in Appendix B.

5. Results

5.1. Overview of Results

In terms of the SDGs, the students mostly selected SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities) as their key area of focus—with all 10 projects linked to it. This was followed by SDG 4 (education), with nine projects. This choice was justified by the will of the students to raise awareness and educate city dwellers about sustainability, ecological, or climate-change-related issues. This is not surprising, since the students were asked to develop a design that would be installed in the public realm and that would allow knowledge exchange or dissemination, using the city’s open data or new data collected. Finally, SDG 12 (sustainable consumption and production) also received significant focus, with six projects.

Other SDGs were selected based on the thematic focus of each project, such as food (SDG2), well-being (SDG3), energy (SDG7), infrastructure (SDG9), climate change (SDG 13), biodiversity (SDG 15), and partnership (SDG 17). No projects selected SDG 1 (poverty), SDG 5 (gender equality), SDG 6 (water), SDG 8 (economic growth), SDG 10 (equality), SDG 14 (marine ecosystems), or SDG 16 (peace and strong institutions). While some gaps might be justified by the context of Montreal (such as SDG 6 and 14), other SDGs that were ignored might point to gaps in data’s guiding design towards primarily infrastructural and resource-focused sustainability challenges (based on the SDG categories proposed by Lucas et al. [122] and Waage et al. [123]). These findings are shown in Figure 4.

The analysis outcomes showed that most of the students’ designs targeted environmental and social sustainability issues, while cultural and economic dimensions were the two least addressed, respectively. Furthermore, the projects all pursued multiple goals, revealing that sustainability work cannot be limited to one specific domain.

Although the focus of most projects was to make environmental improvements, many incorporated different types of interactive processes such that they could perhaps enable changes in cultural or social norms. On the other hand, some projects primarily focused on the cultural or social dimensions, which may have ecological consequences. Figure 5 presents the results of the analysis of the distribution of the four sustainability pillars (environmental, economic, social, and cultural) for each of the design projects (top), as well as the distribution for the combined (of all projects submitted). The units on the top graph of Figure 5 indicate zero bars (not addressed), one bar (minimally addressed), and two bars (highly addressed).

The analysis results for the eight different tensions (within the five categories delineated above) are presented in Figure 6; starting with the tension around data-exchange direction, we see that projects mostly aimed to collect a few pieces of information, while their main intentions were to disseminate the data collected by the city to society. In the design category, the dominant approach in the projects leaned towards designing new artifacts, which may suggest that designing an object from scratch is an easier task than augmenting an available product, which entails analyzing existing flaws and proposing a more suitable alternative.

Looking at the mode of message delivery, there was a higher focus on physical approaches for designs compared to virtual solutions. Although some considered making virtual platforms and networks, the illustrated effects were focused mainly on the changes they could bring about to the physical world. For this reason, most projects are placed in the physical realm. The projects also addressed widely recognized challenges instead of controversial issues that have potential disagreements behind them. This was clear from the selection of the SDGs by the students—mostly avoidant of contested topics such as poverty, gender issues, racial tensions, socioeconomic inequalities, or political challenges.

In the sustainable development impact category, the results reveal that most projects tried to raise awareness about sustainability issues rather than solicit positive actions, with a slight bias toward targeting the community rather than the individual, and an overwhelming focus on addressing human-related challenges rather than planetary issues. It was clear that most students struggled in activating data for soliciting actions. This is a very challenging design approach. We also note that students were unable to conceptually scale the potential for individual actions, resorting to addressing the community as a whole.

Although the designs highlighted the current major sustainability issues and raised awareness around them, they did not demand explicit and immediate actions to solve these problems. The outcomes show that long-term and planet-related goals have received less attention from students (Figure 6).

5.2. Intersecting the Findings and Discussion of Outcomes

Looking at the assessed parameters and co-occurrences (a Spearman’s Correlation was run for all analysis data to determine trends, and we extracted significant correlations starting at 0.05 significance), we see that students generally paired production, distribution, and delivery of goods and services SDGs with natural environmentally focused goals. This further highlights the intent of the projects to improve and provide new products and services in a manner that is more environmentally conscious. We observe that most of the environmentally focused projects are mainly aimed at raising awareness (rather than soliciting action). However, projects that focused on the economic, cultural, or social dimensions presented a broader mix between awareness and action. It is not surprising that the environmental pillar and the mode of consensus for conveying the eco-message were the most heavily adopted strategies across the design projects. These are the low-hanging fruit for design projects that aim to raise awareness.

We also see that projects that aimed at disseminating data depended more on dissensus as a method and tended to have more physical solutions to their design. This might be due to the lack of need for attracting users (through consensus) to collect new data and the fact that the projects aimed to use the public realm (rather than digital devices) to express and illustrate their data. It is far more difficult to propose a design project that adopts a mode of communication-based on dissensus to disseminate a message. This requires a profound understanding of the social issues embedded within the community by the designer in order to address these diverging points of view.

It is clear from the results that most projects that used the physical solutions were less concerned with soliciting actions and more dedicated to raising awareness. On the other hand, virtual solutions were concerned with changing behaviors and attempting to address systemic issues. In most cases where the students sought to collect new data, these data were used to address a social habit that was deemed unsustainable: encouraging turning off office lights after work hours, for example, or finding ways to improve the experience of public transport. These types of unsustainable habits resonated with the young students. However, their proposals remained at the product level and rarely attempted to consider broader systemic viewpoints to capture a deeper level of influence.

These findings suggest the strength and weaknesses of each approach. Physical solutions, in the form of installations and additions to the public realm, emerged in the design process as more suitable for data dissemination and raising awareness about issues around which competing views and values might exist. On the other hand, virtual solutions, in the form of phone apps, were more suitable for data collection and more convenient for soliciting actions guided by a vision for systemic change.

6. Discussion and Conclusions

This study focused on the topic of activating data in the public realm for enlightening communities or individuals on issues regarding sustainability. This design practice has been evolving for about two decades, following the realization that corporations are not moving fast enough in their aims to address such issues. Innovative design approaches for reaching the community through small interventions in the city show promise. They offer inventive interactions in the city and facilitate knowledge exchange in unconventional ways. When our 10 project ideas were presented at the final class exhibition, there was much excitement among city representatives. The city’s interest in these types of public-space designs indicates, to some degree, that there is a need to suggest varying ways to connect citizens and communities to the difficult topics of unsustainability. Further exploration of how design practices in the public realm can reach the community, while starting deep dialogues on the diverse topics, comprises a promising future research focus.

However, as crucial as these practices may appear for furthering the targets of sustainability in the city, much research is still needed to better understand the shifts that they engender for individuals, for the community, and corporations as the real culprits of the current environmental predicament. Therefore, another necessary research axis in this field is the study of individual, community, and associated corporate reception of such public-space installations in the short-, medium-, and long-term. This would enable a better understanding of whether changes are taking place, for which stakeholders, and for how long. Such a study would also help improve the public-space installations since it would provide a clearer perspective of the types of installations that are most effective at generating such change.