In an era of connected technologies, many cities are turning to technology and smart city solutions to build more liveable environments. What would it take to build cities of the future in which everyone can live and thrive? We can define the ideal smart city as a place that incorporates technology to make city life more accessible and efficient, without feeling like technology is present. The question then is, accessible for who?
This Conversation is part of Remarkable Insights held virtually on 20th January, 2021. There is significant opportunity to leverage technological innovation to drive an inclusive future. But who is left behind as technology transforms the society around us. How might we use Remarkable Insights to create an inclusive now?
Panel
- Adriana Mallozzi, Founder & CEO, Puffin Innovations (Boston, USA)
- Victor Santiago Pineda, President, World Enabled (Berkeley, USA)
- Anna Wright, CEO and Co-Founder, BindiMaps (Sydney, Australia)
Moderator
- Pete Horsley, Founder, Remarkable Technology Accelerator (Sydney, Australia)
The views expressed are solely those of the contributors.
Pete Horsley [00:01:16] Well good afternoon and hello from wherever you’re joining us. My name is Pete Horsley. I’m the Founder of Remarkable and welcome to Remarkable Insights. Welcome to a a new year for many of us. And Remarkable’s mission is to harness tech and innovation for the benefit of people with disability. We’re a division of Cerebral Palsy Alliance and we have the backing of Telstra, icare and Microsoft. It’s really great to have you along with us. Whether this is your first time with us at a Remarkable Insights or whether you’re a seasoned attendee at these events we’re really glad to have you with us. Our our primary mission as I said is to to harness technology and innovation to further inclusion of people with disability and today we’re going to be talking about smart cities and who benefits from that. Our primary, our principal program, our accelerator program has supported 32 startups so far, creating a range of technology from robotics to wearables, sensor technology and platform-based technologies as well. Those startups have served about 45,000 customers with disability and they’ve raised around about 24 million dollars in capital so far, and we’re excited to be able to be part of the ecosystem that helps to create these exciting innovation in technologies.
Pete [01:31:20] Today we want to also begin by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the land, so I’m calling today from Guringai lands on the Northern Beaches and I want to acknowledge our traditional custodians, those Elders past, present and emerging. It’s on their land that we meet and we we pay our respects to their their foresight and their custodianship of our land, to this sacred land. I also want to pay my respects to the the disability advocates on whose shoulders we we stand, they have fought for the rights of people with disability over many years and we we give our acknowledgement to them. Today, it is also International Day of Acceptance. So happy International Day of Acceptance to everyone. As I said today’s conversation is around smart cities and uh and it’s part of Remarkable Insights. Remarkable Insights aims to uncover those insights that can help us create an inclusive now. Rather than us thinking about what can we do kind of in five ten years’ time through many of the the things that are already happening around policy and and innovation. What are the things that we can be doing now, what are those insights that can that can lead to an inclusive now. And we’re glad that you’re joining with us and you are part of this conversation as well. We want to hear your insights as we go on as well. And for anyone who wants to join us, we’re just going to pop up on our on the chat now our social media handles. So please join in the conversation on socials. You can see our handles on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, is at RemarkableTech and if you’re on Instagram it’s Remarkable underscore Tech, and please use the hashtag RemarkableInsights with capitals if you can on both of those words please. The other couple of things I just need to cover off as we begin is this, we do have closed captions available for this and that’s being done by an AI called otter and you can access that down in your toolbar at the bottom, just click the closed caption icon. Today our Auslan interpreter is Tyson Boal. Welcome to Tyson. And also we will be recording this event, so if someone that you know of should have been at this event and hasn’t been able to see it, you can forward the link to them. So make sure you follow us on our YouTube channel as well. We want to begin by knowing, where we did this at our last one, we want to know where people are tuning in from. So if you could jump into the chat right now and please just pop in there what country or where you’re calling from that would be fantastic. We would love to see where you’re all calling in from or dialling from today.
Pete [04:37:23] So New York, welcome, Sydney, Adelaide, Cyprus, Melbourne, New York, Blue Mountains, Bondi, Melbourne. Fantastic. Welcome, welcome. Coogee, locals, that’s good. Lovely to see everyone and thanks for joining us today. Our panel for this Remarkable Insights, are leaders, academics. I think all three of them are lecturers at universities. We’ve got two doctors from amongst us. So I’d like you to join me in welcoming our panelists for today. We have Adriana Mallozzi, Founder and CEO of Puffin Innovations calling from Boston in the USA. Dr Victor Santiago Pineda, President of World Enabled, dialling in from Berkeley in the US and Dr Anna Wright, CEO and Co-founder of BindiMaps calling from Sydney, Australia.
Pete [05:40:11] So in this era of connected technologies many cities are turning to technology and smart city solutions to build more liveable environments, connected traffic lights who use data in real time to adjust the traffic lights to try and reduce congestion on the roads, connected cars that can communicate with parking meters and electric charging stations so that they can direct our drivers to the nearest spot that they can either park or charge. Smart garbage cans that automatically send data to waste management companies and schedule pickups as needed versus having a regular pre-planned schedule. So but what would it take to build cities of the future in which every single person can thrive and live, that’s the question that we’ve got before us today. So, Anna, I might actually start with you. In our catch-up, you mentioned that this webinar was likely to be a love fest of panelists, that we’re all probably going to agree with each other. So I’ll try to be the controversial one to begin with and I might start with you saying “hasn’t technology like Google maps and our smartphones and self-driving cars solved a whole bunch of these issues already…why why um why should we think about accessibility as we think about smart cities?”
Anna Wright [07:07:13] Okay, thanks Pete. Well my my opinion on that but it’s what you said before. Is that we want to build cities and environments that include everybody. So my thoughts on that is that we need to have everybody’s voice at the table. Sure those big players like Google and Apple, they they do do a good job a lot of the time but we also see massive fails, like when we first had automatic water for your hands, that was only for light coloured skin types and a whole lot of people couldn’t use it because whoever was developing it – the product team there didn’t really think through all of the users. So at BindiMaps, we’re always very, very passionate about involving people with lived experience to give us insights on what we’re building and I would just like to see that going out to all of our smart city products and and inventors and everybody out there, is to include a bunch of different voices, as many different voices as possible and that way we will make sure that we do have a truly smart city and smart environments.
Pete [08:23:00] That’s brilliant. And Victor, you did your PhD on disability rights and urban planning. We’re not going to ask you to condense your whole PhD into five sentences or less, but here’s the set up for your question. I once heard of someone in the US who is a part of the team who were coding the smarts that sat behind self-driving cars and the team around her was was even putting things in the code like when you see a pedestrian make sure you don’t hit them, when you see a pram treat it this way. She knew that the code that went in to recognise wheelchairs predicted that a wheelchair would move forward, big wheel at the back or in the middle and it was going to go a certain direction. She had a friend of hers, a good friend of hers, who was actually used to propel themselves in their wheelchair backwards by shuffling their feet. That was the way that they moved around, so she already knew that this algorithm actually had a bias against her good friend and potentially could be quite harmful for them. In in kind of building on Anna’s point there, of we have to have everyone at the table so that we’re we’re hearing diverse voices. I know that you once said that no city leader sets out to build a city full of barriers and to make it frustrating for people. So what are we missing in our in planning for our smart cities?
Victor Santiago Pineda [10:02:16] There we go, can you hear me.
Pete [10:04:02] We can, thanks Victor.
Victor [10:05:17] Fantastic. Thank you so much. But look, I think the the world is increasingly coming to terms with a massive urbanisation trend and and the technology, sort of the digital disruption, is just one of these additional layers that are being brought into somehow solve problems. Just like, just like what stated earlier, we’re not gonna solve these problems if we don’t have three things. Number one, number one, clear awareness of the challenges faced by people with disabilities in the design, in the testing, in the rollout, so really a strong commitment to universal design and the whole development of the uh of the technology. Number two is I think there’s not enough capacity in cities to have city leaders and civil servants and municipal officers, be able to coordinate that work across agencies, so if you’re going to deploy a beacon technology, or you’re going to deploy some kind of kiosks, you know there’s going to have to be a lot of coordination between you know public works, transportation and employment programs, or educational programs, just to be able to understand how the community is able to engage with these new infrastructures and then finally I think, the third, is to understand that there’s always be an opportunity for leadership. Means that if we’re not, if we’re not explicitly designing for inclusion, we’re implicitly designing for exclusion. And I think that’s that’s a that’s a quote that was given by a friend at Microsoft. You know if we’re not consistently looking at these issues to create frictionless barrier-free products, we’re going to end up creating friction and barriers in our products.
So coming together, creating communities of practice, coordinating with other leaders, looking at a win-win-win for people, profit, planet and just access is really how we get to that more inclusive urban future.
Pete [12:50:00] And have you seen examples of that, Victor, in cities where there are the coordination between those those business units within government. Have you seen good examples of that and can you give us just a couple.
Victor [13:05:21] Yeah of course. In Barcelona, there’s an integrated approach to disability strategy, as in Dubai. I helped write the Dubai Disability Strategy where you have a higher council with 18 different agencies all coordinating to their own sort of programmatic and policy initiatives and they get feedback on what they’re doing to each other, so this coordination approach. The City of New York, Commissioner Calise, he’s a good friend of ours and a champ champion of the global Cities For All movement, Cities For All global compact and campaign. So he has to coordinate with 60, 54 city agencies, and so there’s a lot of opportunity for things to fall through the cracks and sometimes you’re kind of always playing catch up, putting out fires somewhere and getting some rewards somewhere else in the city, but really the most important thing is to have strong leadership. You know Commissioner Calise of New York is a person with a disability and has a very senior role under the Mayor and he’s visible in terms of pushing the envelope in the city and really demanding that these agencies coordinate. They don’t all want to coordinate but but he’s pushing that forward.
Pete [14:52:00] That’s brilliant, that’s fantastic. And Adriana you started Puffin Innovations because you’re encountering constant barriers particularly in the built environment but also in other areas. Can you tell us about your experience, perhaps before Puffin and and now now that you’ve created Puffin, and now what that’s like using Puffin.
Adriana Mallozzi [15:13:21] So before Puffin, you know I could only have full access to all of my technologies while I’m in my power chair. Well we don’t live in our wheelchairs and and so that was one of the reasons why I developed Puffin, was so people could still have access to their technology when they’re not in their wheelchair. And so now I have the freedom to still access my mobile devices, be able to control my environment when I’m not in my chair. I can read an eBook if I want to sit on the recliner, or you know be at the beach and be on a beach chair. So that has significantly changed since I developed Puffin. And we’re developing for the future, for these smart cities when they exist, when they come to fruition. We’re prepared for that so our device can interact with smart doors, smart elevators, transportation etc. So we’re really excited for the future and we’re ready for it.
Pete [16:52:21] That’s exciting. And to Victor’s point as well, when you know, when it comes down to leadership and and and you know leaders who who may not have had as much experience of of people with disability or or disability themselves that they forget about that in in in planning, in policy making. What’s been your experience of, of kind of, are there kind of key areas of failure that you’re seeing from that lack of leadership or from that lack of exposure.
Adriana [17:31:21] Yeah um. I mean as Victor said, you know if you’re not designing for an inclusion then you’re definitely designing for exclusion, and and you see it’s you know in various cities across not just across the country but across the world. I love to travel. And even within our own country where we have the ADA, sorry. Where we have the ADA where we have the, where we have ADA. And you know it is our law to have access rights, sidewalks with kerb cuts. We’re still fighting for simple things, just to be able to go down the street and go for a walk on the sidewalk and go grab a coffee or tv or whatever it is and that shows lack of exposure and experience in the leadership of those towns. We’re very fortunate in Boston, that we have a very active disability community, very active advocates in our community and so I’m very fortunate to live in a city where I have a lot of access. It’s not perfect but it’s it’s you know it’s getting there because we have a strong voice in this city and so if we still, you know if we continue to work together and and have people in leadership roles within the city our access will increase exponentially.
Pete [19:35:12] Yeah and I think you’re right. Like I did hear from someone that that here where where we live in in Sydney that there actually is a 30-year implementation plan for full accessibility for our transport system and you think come on like 30 years is is ridiculous.
Pete [19:56:00] Now Victor, COVID’s kind of changed our relationship with cities. I know you were talking about the strength of kind of urbanisation and the strength of cities but we’ve obviously seen people working from home, public transport being under underutilised and some of our urban spaces become quite deserted over the last little while. As the vaccine rolls out across the world, or as multiple vaccines rolled out, roll out across the world, some things will return as usual and some some things may not. There’s a lot of talk about kind of building back better, in fact I think that’s the the the incoming president’s kind of by-line at the moment. Build back better. How do we take this inflection point in history to build back better for the future of smart cities?
Victor [20:48:17] Well I think that’s a good, that’s, I mean Adriana and Anna, and the whole community at Remarkable are doing that and I think the question is how do we leverage and scale each one of the, each one of the companies and your accelerator program is doing that, Microsoft is doing that. Like there are companies that are stepping up to that challenge, there’s leadership you know within the Biden administration, they’re going to be announcing soon several high-ranking presidential appointments that are going to include people with disabilities. There’s going to be a, the most accessible Inauguration in the US tomorrow. So I’m really optimistic that if we just continue to be visible, if if initiatives like these inspire venture, venture capitalists that are investing not because they’re trying to fulfil some corporate social responsibility but you cannot get your product to market in the US or in the European Union or in Australia if you don’t meet digital accessibility standards. So as a venture capitalist you should be looking at accessibility as a requirement for your technology investments. As an entrepreneur you should be doing that in order to show the VCs and your investors that you’re one or two steps ahead of them right, in terms of creating the best product and experience you can. So I’m quite optimistic okay. The work that Anna is doing in scouting at universities and the work Adriana is doing also is reflective of sort of the growing momentum that that we all have.
Pete [23:02:19] So double down is what you’re saying. Double down. Let’s keep going. Let’s encourage each other and I think that you know your your kind of point around really kind of ensuring that leaders like yourself are given that spotlight to be able to to advance these conversations and to accelerate these conversations I think is brilliant.
Pete [23:27:09] Adriana, data is obviously a kind of very integral part of of smart cities and it obviously incorporates data of individual users. If we want an environment that responds to us personally then then there has to be some give and take around around data and privacy. What’s your biggest hope and your biggest fear for how data will be used in the future of smart cities?
Adriana [23:56:06] Yeah, so my biggest hope is that it’ll make it easier for people to be more independent. Right it’ll know that I’m approaching an office building where let’s say I work, it knows what floor I have to go to, I will go in, I will approach the elevator and it knows – hey here’s Adriana, she goes to the fifth floor, so that’s where she’s going to go and I don’t have to do anything and that’s where data is a pro. Also data can help make technology easier to use. We’re using machine learning and AI in our device, so the device can conform to the user whereas in other assistive tech the user always has to conform to the tech and so we want to change that so those are the pros of data. There are certain situations where data could be used in a negative way and an example would be hiring some someone. So HR might be using AI to sort through resumes and applications and they may have something that triggers and says – hey this person has a disability, and so they’ll they’ll see that and say oh we don’t want to deal with that, so we’re going to put this in the no pile, and so that’s a con that many of us are afraid of and it’s not just for people with disabilities right. It’s for anyone in a marginalised community where they are already obviously marginalised and with this AI and data you know there could still there could be even more prejudices against them. So that that’s the con and that’s a fear of many people.
Pete [26:23:21] Yeah I’m probably a little bit like you in this Adriana in that I’m a bit of an all-in kind of person, in terms of I don’t mind that government knows where I am or I don’t mind if a a city or a county knows where I am and what I’m doing. I don’t think I’m doing anything bad so that’s okay. Anna, I just wonder if you’ve got any kind of pushback against that, because obviously your technology is a little bit different in that the user is opting into your system and and utilising beacon technology. Do you have any kind of input on the data piece before we go into that next question.
Anna [27:03:17] Well yeah because we’re actually on the side that we can collect a lot of data and we are asked often that how personalised that data can be. But we’re on the data side we’ve made very strong decisions on data collection and how anonymised that can be. But I would say I’m with you Pete. I’m I’m a very open person when it comes to what I’m doing because again I don’t I’m not doing anything wrong but I will say that that that piece can also come down to context as well. That things can be taken out of context very easily and that that’s where we all have to be a little bit careful around our own data. But yeah being on the data collection side I don’t want to ever be seen as the evil person, that’s that’s watching how long somebody’s spending in in whatever shop in whatever shopping centre with BindiMaps.
Pete [28:09:13] Yeah so your technology BindiMaps uses beacon technology particularly in indoor spaces but sometimes in environments in kind of enclosed environments, what what are the things that you’re excited to see as you deploy this technology across Australia and potentially overseas.
Anna [28:29:21] Oh well I’ve I’d like to think definitely overseas as well Pete. But because so because BindiMaps, we started with helping people who are blind or vision impaired navigate unfamiliar buildings, like hospitals or universities, so things that as it turns out everybody finds hard to navigate. Whether or not you’re visually able or vision impaired. And what I see as a as a great thing is sort of flipping back to something that Adriana talked about, was was independence that everybody wants to be able to go to their doctor’s appointment and not need a stranger to show them where the doctor’s office is. So we started by solving that for people vision impaired and through that process started helping people with other disabilities, such as wheelchair, people that need wheelchair routing and then lastly we solved it for sighted and not the sort of the non-disabled market. But I’m just really excited to see people of all abilities. I said I want everyone to be able to join in these conversations and so a big part of that is to have everyone have access to be in these conversations. I mean through the pandemic we got very used to Zoom, which is fantastic for people with disabilities to join in but I want to see more people at university with disabilities and that’s that’s a hard space to navigate when quite often the disabled routing is through the back corridors of some, speaking of the university that I was an academic at. And for people with vision impairment it’s it’s impossible unless you’ve got somebody who’s sighted with you.
So yeah that’s my big hope for the future, Pete, is that we’ll see more and more people at that table, which will be through education and then jobs and then at those higher level discussions.
Pete [30:28:00] Oh yeah that’s great and and to your point as well, we do want people to participate in in this conversation right now as well. And so if you’ve got a question that you’d like to ask one of the panelists, please jump into the Q&A section. You can see that button in your, in your panel down down below. Click on the Q&A button and type your question in there and if you want to direct it at a particular panelist please do so. We have had a couple of people submit some questions already. Also just a reminder to use our social media handles and they are all in the chat if you want to have a look at those as well. So we had a question that’s actually kind of more about entrepreneurship and so Anna I might direct this one to you. “How do you find the right problem for your startup to solve and what inspires you to consider that the problem that you’ve encountered is the one that you should solve?”
Anna [31:23:24] I don’t know about the right problem to solve but I would say it’s just about talking to people. I had the idea for BindiMaps but as a sighted person I was more looking at braille, going, if you’re blind how do you know that that braille is there in the train station, so it was more of an observation. But I then had to go and talk to a bunch of people who were vision impaired on you know how do they use braille in public places. Like if is this actually a problem. So I’d say it’s it’s by talking to people and again it gets back to that including everyone in the conversation and that’s not to say as an entrepreneur you don’t have a thousand pivots before you end up with the the right product, whatever that is or you just keep growing and and developing your ideas but
I’d say to everybody who’s thinking about solving or wanting to do entrepreneurship, please solve a real problem. We don’t need beer faster when to solve some of the bigger issues in that we’re facing in the world.
Pete [32:34:10] That’s great thanks, and actually we just had a quick one come through as well. “Is BindiMaps accessible or usable by an eye gaze tablet?”
Anna [32:45:11] No, not not that I know off at the moment but I’m happy if that person would like to send me an email. We can discuss that that further so it’s just anna at bindimaps.com
Pete [32:57:23] Perfect, that’s great and thanks Aidan for your question and thanks Chris for the question, Chris from Sydney, who asked that question before. Got another question that’s come through here. This is Yangbo from New York asked, what do you find as the most critical barriers to overcome in order to bring design for universal access into mainstream practice? Victor, would you like to to tackle that one. “What what barriers do we have to overcome to bring design for universal access into mainstream practice?”
Victor [33:29:03] I mean I think the challenge becomes again constantly having a campaign. We’re visible right, we’re not going away, we we’re here, we’re part of humanity and during the modernist era there was so much technology and advancements that ableist beliefs allowed for grotesque things like eugenics, eugenicism and and other technologies like medicine to kind of like try to fix us, because our lives were seen as being less valuable right. So this idea that there’s something wrong with us or that we’re on whole is really an evolution, social evolution towards this new paradigm of the social model of disability or a rights-based model of disability. So I think when you talk about what’s really the the opportunity to to leverage and transform society – just visibility, but also because as said previously in our in our conversations, we you know 60 to 70 percent of people that are employed with disabilities is because they have you know tertiary education. So really understanding that we have to be seen and we have to show the world not only that we have rights but then we also have responsibilities and that means that we have a role to play in terms of building the world that we want to live in and not sitting on the sidelines. Thank you.
Pete [35:27:13] That’s great, really great response. And just a reminder as well that the the three incredible people that we’ve got with us, we really encourage you to follow them on social and we’ve got their social handles there in the chat as well. We’ve got a question from Pete in Sydney, it’s not me, it was another Pete. “We often hear about ‘space’ technology being adopted for other mainstream uses, so things like teflon coatings, what examples are there from smart cities and accessibility inventions?” Does anyone on the panel want to take tackle that one?
Adriana [36:06:10] Um well it’s not really a smart city thing but something from space technology and now it’s been transferred to mattresses as well. If you see The Purple Mattress, you know the honeycomb right, that is space technology and I’ve had that material in my seat cushion for years. So it’s not really smart city related but it is space technology that now is more mainstream. It’s now on a mattress. [Laughter]
Pete [36:49:15] Yeah. And Anna you were going to say something as well.
Anna [37:04:04] Yeah I’ve got I’ve got two. One in each direction. So first one from a tech perspective that’s now become more mainstream is things like Siri.
Pete [37:03:07] Yeah.
Anna [37:04:04] So was initially designed for people that couldn’t interact with their phones manually, so it was a voice activated, so that’s one that’s gone from the sort of the designing for somebody with disability to mainstream. But I’d also like to challenge the other way around. I have a colleague who is completely blind and he works for NASA, identifying new sound, sorry new planets in front of new stars, by listening to sound waves. So I think we also need to think about it the other way around, on what are we missing out on by not employing more people with disability. Again around problem solving and and other things where there are different skills that we can actually harness and to Victor’s point where then everyone can be contributing to our futures.
Pete [38:04:22] Well said Anna. That’s brilliant. Now we’re I’m almost out of time. We might do one more question that we do have, that we had come through. So this one was around the data privacy, “so how do smart cities include data privacy for all?”, that’s from Sonal in Mumbai.
Pete [38:23:11] I know that there’s obviously we kind of tackled a little bit of the data privacy earlier but Victor, do you have any input on the on the data piece or examples that you’ve seen.
Victor [38:37:03] I would encourage, go a good friend of mine, Jutta, an OCAD university professor. She’s been talking about data co-ops, so that groups of individuals could harness and pool their data. The other interesting conversations being developed, if you download the Global State of the Connected World report, addresses some of the IoT challenges around interoperability and data privacy and a great app that we’re supporting called CIVITAS. It has built out a unique blockchain technology to really empower people to own their own data. But what’s unique about it is that it’s a COVID app, that’s also built in from the ground up accessible. And we are excited that one of the modules in that app features our smart city our Cities For All tracking soft system but again we give the rights and the authority full transparency to the user, whether they want to share that data with their city leaders to sort of address challenges or discrimination in their city. There’s a lot of stuff.
Ultimately the more you empower people to make decisions on their data and inform them easily to do that, the better we’ll be.
Pete [40:23:21] Yeah I think that’s brilliant. Really well put. And thanks for the link in the in the chat there. You can have a look at that now. I know that there’s a couple of questions that we didn’t get a chance to get to. Apologies to those. We’ll try and answer and follow those up afterwards. There was a question earlier on asking if the recordings are going to be available after the event, and yes they are. Please look at our YouTube channel in the next couple of days. They’ll be uploaded there. We always end with this question to all of our panelists and it’s asking, what’s what’s one remarkable insight that you either gained from this conversation or one remarkable insight around “Smart Cities: Who Benefits?” that you’d really like to pass on to, to our listeners today. And I don’t mind, Victor, you’re you’re unmuted at the moment, would you like to go first.
Video of the visual scribe of the “Smart Cities; Who Benefits?” session featuring the headshots of the panelists and highlights from the Conversation
Victor [41:15:13] Thanks, I mean I’m really proud to serve on the U.S Federal Access Board which is a federal regulatory agency, as well as serve on the Global Council for IoT and the Global Council on Cities of Tomorrow. I think my reflection is that you know it really starts with a community, if you bring a few people that are like-minded together to start to generate a momentum that’s how things change. If you’re working isolation, you’re working somewhere kind of like alone, you know you need to be able to be part of something and not because as Anna reminded us don’t don’t solve small problems, solve big problems and and look at how not to reinvent the wheel but. I got a call from somebody the other day, wanting to build an inclusive city because he saw my speech but this guy wasn’t quite well informed about the movement so his inclusive city was all based on rehabilitation. Because we’ve already had those rehabilitation focused cities, let’s let’s learn from our own mistakes instead of repeating them. So yeah you have to build community. Number two, you know look at the past and and look towards the future, okay, some of the biggest challenges. Thank you.
Pete [42:55:11] That’s great, thank you Victor. Anna? or Adriana?
Anna [42:59:15] Yeah I’m happy to follow on from Victor. And thank you, I think that the more things like this Pete that Remarkable can put on so we get these communities, what Victor was saying, get people talking, because at the end of the day we don’t know what we don’t know. So the more people we can get into these conversations that have those aha moments and and get educated on on what the future could look like, I think is a really exciting thing.
Pete [43:33:16] Brilliant, and Adriana.
Adriana [43:37:03] I want to touch upon what obviously what Victor and Anna said about getting people together but to Victor’s point about like-minded people. I think, maybe people with similar core values of helping others, but it’s diversity of thought that creates change and innovation and so we don’t want people that are too like-minded otherwise we don’t get diversity and we don’t get innovation and so that I think is really important. To just improve our access and also yeah don’t think small but also don’t think too big either because you can’t, you know change the world overnight and it takes many people and it takes many steps to get there.
So think big but think big in a smaller, you know take small steps to get to that bigger solution.
Pete [44:49:21] Really, really well said. Thank you and to that point as well. We want to hear, so Remarkable wants to hear from diverse founders who are creating new technologies to apply for our upcoming accelerator program – starts in March. It will be predominantly virtual or online so you can access that from anywhere. Applications for that do close on the 28th of January, so please go to Remarkable Tech. I’m sorry remarkable.org.au forward slash accelerator and you can you can apply from there. So yeah it’d be great to see more applications, particularly in this smart city space coming through on that. We want to thank firstly to Tyson for our Auslan interpreter. Thank you for interpreting today, and especially thank you to our panelists. To Anna Wright, Adriana Mallozzi and to Victor Santiago Pineda. So thank you so much for your insights today, thank you for sharing your experience and bringing your networks to this as well. We really do appreciate that and we want to continue this this conversation and this discussion, so please make sure you continue to follow our three incredible panelists on social media and and participate in this conversation. We really want to push forward for an inclusive future. If you know some other people that that missed this panel session today that you would like to forward this on to please think about doing that in the next couple of days. The recording will be on our YouTube channel in a couple of days’ time. We’d also like feedback on our on our webinars. We’re always trying to improve so if you could give some feedback at the end of this webinar that would be fantastic.
Pete [46:47:02] Other than that, enjoy the rest of your rest of your day or evening or morning, wherever you’re calling from. Thank you everyone for joining us on this Remarkable Insights session.
Mentions made:
[01:31:20] International Day of Acceptance
[10:05:17] Microsoft Inclusive Design
[13:05:21] Dubai Disability Strategy 2020
[13:05:21] Cities For All
[17:31:21] Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
[20:48:17] Inauguration Day was more accessible than ever, but there’s still a ways to go
[38:37:03] Inclusive Design Research Centre (Dr. Jutta Treviranus)
[38:37:03] State of the Connected World report
[38:37:03] CIVITAS
