Exploring Citizens’ Perceptions of Urban Well-Being Through a Card-Based Game

Paper Title

Exploring Citizens’ Perceptions of Urban Well-Being Through a Card-Based Game

Publication Info

• Topic area: Participatory methods for assessing urban well-being across diverse contexts.
• Keywords: Urban well-being, participatory design, card-based toolkits, cross-city comparison, gamified methods, subjective well-being, data-driven solutions, cultural context, urban planning, human-computer interaction.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing urban well-being (UWB) indices often rely on standardized indicators, which fail to capture context-specific priorities and local perceptions.
• Significance: Understanding UWB is crucial for urban planning and policy, as it impacts quality of life and community cohesion. Current methods lack sensitivity to cultural and geographic differences.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has developed composite indices like the OECD Better Life Index, but these often overlook relational and community-level aspects. Participatory methods have shown promise in capturing intangible dimensions of well-being but have not been applied systematically to UWB. Card-based toolkits in HCI have been used for ideation and engagement but not for UWB studies.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Urban Well-Being Deck (UWBdeck), a participatory card-based method that uses gamified mechanics to explore citizens’ perceptions of UWB across diverse cities.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduction of UWBdeck as a participatory tool for eliciting context-sensitive definitions of UWB.
  2. Empirical evidence of cross-cultural variation in UWB perceptions, highlighting underrepresented dimensions in existing indices.
  3. Adaptation of the Data Slots card game to focus on UWB outcomes, including new data cards relevant to urban contexts.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Participants play a structured card game involving data selection, ideation, assessment, and investment phases.
  • Workshops conducted in eight cities with 140 participants, using scenario cards, data cards, investment chips, and game sheets to scaffold ideation and capture responses.
  • Data analyzed through thematic coding and quantitative summaries, enabling cross-city comparisons.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • 256 participant-generated proposals categorized into 22 distinct UWB themes, with greenery and biodiversity (n=28), safety and security (n=26), and social events and community (n=25) as the most prominent.
  • Locked and discarded card patterns revealed local preferences for data types, e.g., health data in Tokyo, personality data in Berlin, and local news/events data in Numazu.
• Advantage over baselines: UWBdeck surfaced nuanced, context-specific priorities that standardized indices like the OECD Better Life Index would obscure. Themes such as nutrition and data access emerged as significant yet underrepresented in current frameworks.
• Experiments / evaluation: Workshops conducted in Tokyo, Numazu, Amsterdam, Boston, Abu Dhabi, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and Madeira. Participants included citizens, academics, and city officials. Data analyzed using thematic coding and Z-score standardization for cross-city comparisons.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Uneven participant demographics and overrepresentation of academics may limit generalizability.
  • Predefined data cards constrained thematic diversity; future iterations could allow participant-suggested cards.
  • Planned expansions include broader city coverage, targeted recruitment, and investigation of urban scale effects on UWB perceptions.

Summary

The study introduces UWBdeck, a participatory card-based method for exploring urban well-being perceptions across diverse cities. Workshops with 140 participants yielded 256 proposals categorized into 22 themes, revealing both shared priorities and local variations. Themes like nutrition and data access emerged as significant yet underrepresented in existing frameworks, demonstrating the method’s ability to capture nuanced, context-sensitive insights. UWBdeck complements traditional indices by engaging citizens in co-creating definitions and solutions, offering a replicable format for cross-cultural research. Future work will expand the dataset, refine recruitment strategies, and investigate the influence of urban scale on UWB perceptions.