Abstract

For the past year we were assigned to work with Curiosity Lab. Our task was to find a way to attract potential business partners by either expanding on their existing technology or introducing new technology to the lab. This broad problem gave us the opportunity to go in any direction we wanted, so in order to guide our thinking we developed a How Might We questions: How might we successfully implement smart technology to the city of Peachtree Corners in order to attract potential business partners? Once we had our question we immediately began to research. Our priority was to find what the residents in Peachtree Corners needed. As we looked into other smart cities around the world we found that the majority focused on providing technology that improved the quality of life while enhancing social connectedness among citizens. We conducted interviews with residents in the community to get their thoughts on Curiosity Lab, and it revealed that they knew little to nothing about the lab. They only mentioned the 3-mile autonomous vehicle testing track which most did not find particularly helpful to the community. We decided to change our approach, and came up with a new How Might We question: How might we encourage residents in Peachtree Corners to provide direct feedback in order to improve community engagement while simultaneously developing new ideas for Curiosity Lab? We realized that our main issue was that there was a lack of public engagement. Curiosity Lab has heavily invested themselves in expanding their autonomous vehicle technology and was not communicating with the residents to see what technology could be incorporated to help them. After finishing our research we decided to create an online platform that gives the public the opportunity to engage with Curiosity Lab while simultaneously learning about the technological advancements occurring. We each developed our own prototypes that focused on designing an application with helpful features that the public could use to actively engage with the lab. The idea was that Curiosity Lab could further expand on it in the future if they were to implement it to the lab. Unfortunately, we did not get to test our solution since we would not be able to gather all the resources needed in the limited amount of time we had. Despite that, we were still able to come up with an idea that would provide all residents the opportunity to have a sense of community by creating a platform that will encourage them to engage with Curiosity Lab. While this internship was difficult and we often had to take steps back, it taught us to put ourselves in the shoes of the people that are often affected by the problems and reach out to those people.