In January 2020, the Penang State Government launched an international design competition centered on reinventing the city of Penang urban development that enables sustainable growth for the city and Malaysia. The Penang South Island competition required the design of a smart city masterplan for three completely new islands on reclaimed land off the south coast of the main Penang Island. When implementing entirely new systems of city management, governance, and citizen engagement, there is a need for advancing residents’ knowledge of those systems. As a strategist, my role was to represent the user perspective and lead the co-creative strategy design process to assure that the urban design provides opportunities for Penang to grow and serve the communities over the next 25 years, when the masterplan will be fully developed.

We used journey maps combined with user prompts as a collaborative research tool. During a co-creative experience mapping workshop we considered the role of the future physical and digital infrastructure in the daily lives of specific groups: the entrepreneurs, elderly, food vendors, fisherman, and micro-business owners. Using firesight, we defined how city services and infrastructure may look like in 20-25 years time. We outlined the multi-touchpoint experiences across the new development to assure that the physical infrastructure creates new business and community building opportunities and is accessible to all. The process led to outlining several future-focused community-centric experience concepts focused on the needs of 3 groups: micro-business owners, the fisherman, and local entrepreneurs.

The masterplan proposes a participatory culture focused on placing people at its centre, enabling tools for collaboration and integrating a bottom-up approach across policy-making, data, infrastructure and architecture. We designed a long-term strategy to transition towards the knowledge economy through participatory culture in line with architectural development over the 25 years period. The scaling strategy proposes that people should not be expected to make a leap themselves, but for the projects and activities to be taken where people live, and to be advocated by community spokespeople with accessible tools. Scaling projects, tools, services and smart infrastructures over time will allow those relationships and networks will become increasingly more complex and span from hyper-local to global. As the solutions scale, the participatory approach along the tools will be built into everyday practises of the community.