For our latest piece, we’re looking at the way we communicate aspects of our work – specifically, the images we use to illustrate the smart city and the applications of IoT tech. Communications Lead, Sarah Simpkin, proposes we move away from waves of light and flying numbers and focus instead on showing the tangible difference an innovation could make to a place, and to the lives of people that live and work there.

What comes to mind when you think of a smart city. A web of blue and white orbs against an evening sky? Maybe some icons floating above the rooftops, or a wave of binary superimposed on a cityscape? A turquoise infographic or two? Search ‘smart city’ and you can see just how uniform this visual shorthand has become.

Motion blurs and flying numbers over the city are supposed to signify an efficient flow of systems, data, energy and information. According to colour theorists, blue is the colour of trust and clarity, as opposed to red, used in a similar context to signify risk or data security. The web or net symbol is a very literal way of making visible the idea of connectivity, of linking nodes. But technology has moved on from the telephone line – it isn’t so linear. In a way, these images are drawing on analogue concepts to try and visualise today’s dispersed, wireless networks. They pretend to map sensors and data points of various city systems, but are mostly sci-fi really.

Early ideas of the smart city didn’t draw on the same visual references. In 2008, IBM launched their Smarter Planet vision, which proposed exploiting the interconnectivity of power grids, food, water, traffic and healthcare systems, enabled by “sophisticated analytics and algorithms that could make sense of it all.” The concept was by Ogilvy & Mather and IBM, and the visual language was developed by San Francisco agency, Office. There were no webs of light, but instead, colourful motifs that illustrated the project’s objectives. As Office wrote in their case study, it was “a graphic language that could illustrate these complicated solutions in a way that was visually arresting and distinctive, yet simple and approachable enough to be easily understood around the world.”

Somehow, from the singular idea that connected technologies could improve urban life, tech firms ended up with a much more nebulous way of expressing this connectivity. You could argue that the resulting imagery has distanced useful technological advances from their purpose, and from the people that could stand to benefit. And just as these illuminated webs are a bit of a turn-off, so are many visualisations of future transport - I’m thinking of the ones that show beatific couples spirited around in shuttles between futuristic towers in a perpetual golden hour. There is a lie in their two-dimensional promise of the future, because it doesn’t see the city as a holistic, complicated whole. A world with self-driving services may not be so far away, but they won’t necessarily be the defining element of our streets. Some of us will probably still ride old bikes, there will be people walking, wheeling, signposts, deliveries, litter, trees – all the chaotic, unplanned details that give a city life.

What do the components of a smart city really look like?

For a while now, I’ve been asking the DG Cities team to send me site photographs of any new installations – “no image too boring” – and they have delivered. IoT, ultrafast connectivity, damp monitors: none of these announce themselves with a beam of light, the reality is much more prosaic. In fact, much of the action is buried underground or in a cupboard. A camera on a lamppost, a small white box on the side of a brick wall, easily mistaken for a meter cabinet. But what that box represents is the ability to easily switch broadband supplier – the contents of that box help council tenants get a better deal. And that camera, connected to a monitoring app that alerts the maintenance team to issues, makes life harder for fly-tippers, gathers evidence more efficiently and helps to improve the neighbourhood.

There’s perhaps a reason why mobile masts and boxes aren’t overtly shown – in my view, much could be done to improve their urban presence. But picturing technology as an ominous urban forcefield can’t do much for public engagement either, particularly when it comes to connecting with those sceptical of big data, 5G and most recently, the idea of the 15-minute city. What’s more, the sophisticated new AI imaging tools we have at our disposal may just generate more of the same. As these models learn from existing visual references, we could find ourselves bathed in binary, in an echo chamber of ever more clichéd imagery.

But it’s easy to grumble. What should we be trying to show instead? I think we should be focusing on the outcome, on what we anticipate a new service or solution could deliver. Not to oversell it, but to illustrate what it’s supposed to do. If we’re looking at the potential impacts of some of our IoT, electrification or connectivity projects, for example, the picture is very different.

It might just look like a child doing their homework, or streaming a game. It could mean interviewing for a job without the screen freezing awkwardly. It might be the quiet rounds of an electric bin lorry, a safe journey home from a night out in a shared mobility service, or a new way to gather a community’s views on local issues. Or it could be a lifeline – a health alarm, a home free of mould and damp, an accessible link to vital services. Technology touches so many aspects of life, from the mundane to the extraordinary, and it is these human interactions that DG Cities is most interested in.

So, when we’re choosing an image for our own communications, we’re going to try not to default to the industry standard. No more retro futuristic webs of light, because for DG Cities, the future of the smart city is about people – and understanding what technology can do to make their lives better. Even if that really looks like a box in a cupboard.