Panasonic CityNOW
A smart city web app for city administrators
Panasonic is a global leader in integrated technology solutions. In 2015, Panasonic began a joint venture with the City of Denver to build out a smart city prototype as part of a broader corporate initiative called CityNOW.
Peña Station is situated on 220 acres just 12 minutes from Denver International Airport, and is a live/work proving ground for a variety of leading-edge technologies including controllable smart lighting, parking systems, environmental sensing, and autonomous vehicles.
The Panasonic team faced an unprecedented challenge — how to integrate multiple technologies from dozens of hardware vendors into a system controlled by a single user interface.
In August 2016, Panasonic hired Ben and his team at Clearform to design a browser-based, tablet-responsive controller for the tech underlying Peña Station NEXT, to be fully operational by April 2017. The challenge went far beyond interface design and development for urban technology integration, and included considerations for how citizen privacy, government policy, and current city processes and personnel would affect and could be positively affected by a truly integrated smart city interface.
So what happened?
Ben and his team traveled to the City of Denver and Peña Station where they led five days of site visits, interviews, and design workshops with the CityNOW team and City of Denver officials. Back at their design office, the Clearform team collaborated to define the project requirements that kicked off a series of design and prototyping sprints. Qualitative usability testing was performed with interactive prototypes built during each sprint. Learnings from each round of testing were incorporated into subsequent designs.
As the design reached maturity, Clearform began developing the first custom application interface for the Peña Station NEXT system. Panasonic and Clearform engineers collaborated on the underlying web application architecture to ensure the interface would integrate with the systems being built by the CityNOW team at Panasonic.
Panasonic received all design documentation along with the interface codebase in December 2016, and began integrating the interface and its functionality with the underlying technology. Clearform continued to offer advisory support to Panasonic through the successful launch of the application in April 2017.
