Smart Transactions in Public Spaces (STiPS)

Dynamic public spaces such as parks and festivals offer a series of challenges for Internet of Things (IoT). Consisting of complex social, technical and economic networks, value transactions come in many different forms. From tourists seeking information about the heritage of a site, to families purchasing food from pop-up retailers, and a myriad of vendors requiring secure connections to support payments, logistics and communications, the contemporary public space is a complex environment in which contemporary digital economies give way to physical cash and basic telecommunications.

The Smart Contracting in Public Spaces project is located within the Ambient Environments Constellation, and sets out to better understand the value constellations that occur between the stakeholders who inhabit and move through public urban environments. Working with the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Open Experience (OX) team who deliver innovation and design thinking to banking products and services, and the RBS Innovation Engineering team who develop advanced technical platforms to support services, the research team will develop user-centred solutions to support secure, easy to use prototypes for value transactions public spaces.

We will use design methods to explore user adoption and accessibility of various forms of contract, informed by research in a range of technologies including centralised and distributed services. Throughout, we will work with the participants recruited from the public who regularly use parks and events such as festival, to design and prototype platforms of exchange that emerge from participatory workshops. By working closely with these groups, we examine whether distributed ledger technologies are relevant platforms to offer trust and security between complex networks of consumers and vendors, and anticipate the implication of the EU Payment Services Directive 2. The research will provide new insights for policy makers that complement the UK Treasury’s preliminary consultation on Digital Currencies.

Target Outcomes:

• User centred prototypes that offer secure models for value transactions between a wide variety of stakeholders and IoT devices in public spaces.
• Ethnographic study of social, cultural and economic value transactions in public spaces
• Mapping of value constellations within public spaces
• Technical platforms to support secure value transactions in dynamic economic environments
• Development of user centred design solutions that are accessible and easy to use
• User centred, iterative testing in public spaces