Close to 100 Montrealers sacrificed a rare sunny Saturday in the city to collectively imagine concrete ways to make snow removal operations smarter. Entrepreneurs, designers, coders, city employees and ordinary citizens elaborated together a dozen projects that would address the needs of the various « vicitims » of the snow storms that regularly hit the city.
In a co-creation process inspired by the methods of design thinking facilitated by f. & co on an invitation by the City of Montreal, participants first had to use LEGO bricks to re-create a winter storm scenario and study the situations experienced by a series of characters. It’s the needs of a few of those personas that they subsequently had to take into account with innovative solutions.
The goal was not to come up with a solution that would be ready to implement by the city, but rather to let the main preoccupations emerge and provide approaches and potential solutions to remediate. The results of this co-creation day will help inform the city’s decision-making process.
During a fast-paced two-minute pitch session, elected officials formed a « Dragons’ Den » of sorts to evaluate citizens’ proposals. Anie Samson, borough mayor of Villeray—Saint-Michel—Parc-Extension, Harout Chitilian, vice-president of the Executive Council in charge of the smart city, as well as Jocelyne Bourget, director of the Information Technology Department, took stock of the wide variety of options that they can choose from in their quest to better involve citizens in the development of an actually « smart » city.
Mr. Chitilian best summarized the intention of the citizens who had gathered for the event: to maximize the use the public domain to « digitize daily life, » much beyond the single problem of snow removal. If we are to believe him, this is not the last time that we will see citizens’ collective intelligence put to good use in order to feed the city’s reflection on ways to reinvent itself and its services.
f. & co promises to help.
Follow the conversation on Twitter at #innmtl.
The event garnered generous media attention: CBC, CTV, Global, Le Journal de Montréal, Montreal Gazette, Métro, La Presse, ICI Radio-Canada, TVA.