Experience Smart Cities: Students design the cities of tomorrow

Students enrolled in the part-time master's program in Energy & Sustainability Management addressed specific challenges in urban areas in the Smart Cities & Municipalities workshop with the aim of improving quality of life and developing sustainable solutions through concrete projects. Asc. Prof. (FH) Dipl.-Ing. Christian Huber, program director, accompanied the students through the workshop in November 2025, providing practical guidance and supporting them in implementing their ideas.

Smart City is not understood as purely an IT issue, but rather as project-related development of cities and municipalities. The focus is on many different, often locally based projects: sustainable mobility, energy and resource efficiency, citizen participation, urban gardening, temporary use or new forms of communal use. Digital tools can support such projects, but they are not automatically the starting point. The key is to solve specific local problems and tangibly improve quality of life and sustainability.

WARM-UP AND CREATIVE KICK-OFF

The workshop began with a relaxed warm-up: small, playful tasks helped the students to quickly adopt an open mindset and embrace unfamiliar perspectives. The aim was to let ideas grow first. They then built cities out of wooden blocks in small groups. This revealed paths, squares, uses, and conflicts - almost like a condensed reflection of real everyday city life.

This combination of discussion and creative modeling gave rise to the framework conditions for the smart city components: Which needs are most important? Where are the key problems? Which resources and limitations shape the context? The playful approach thus transformed into a shared space for thinking, in which urban challenges became tangible and laid the foundation for further ideas.

PERSONAS AS A STARTING POINT: MAKING NEEDS TANGIBLE

In the next step, the students worked with personas - fictional but realistic user profiles. These profiles illustrate typical life situations, goals, needs, and challenges of specific groups. Personas help to leave one's own perspective behind and consistently think from the perspective of the people for whom the solution will later be effective. This change of perspective is particularly crucial in smart city projects: only those who understand real needs can develop solutions that work in everyday life and are supported by citizens.

BUILDING MODELS, DEVELOPING SOLUTIONS

Based on the personas, the students modeled real-life situations and thought through problems. They used small model figures that allowed for quick and flexible visualizations. This resulted in small scenarios in which obstacles and conflicts became immediately apparent. The teams then developed smart city components designed to address precisely these pain points. Whether the solutions were implemented digitally or analogously played a secondary role - the decisive factor was the concrete benefit for everyday life in cities and communities. Christian Huber summarized the core of the unit: “With personas and simple models, we quickly reach the point where it becomes clear for whom we are actually designing. That’s exactly where smart cities begin: with real needs and tangible problems, not with technologies.”

COMBINING CREATIVITY AND THEORY: SUPPORTING IDEAS WITH RESEARCH

After the creative development phase, the students further refined their designs. They linked their ideas to research findings and practical examples from smart city projects in order to test and deepen the components and classify them within existing approaches. In this way, the initial concepts were transformed into well-founded ideas that are both creatively developed and technically sound.

Links:

• Energy & Sustainability Management | pt