Climate adapted people shelters: A transdisciplinary reimagining of public infrastructure through open, design-led innovation

Successful adaptation to climate change requires collective action by multiple actors operating at multiple scales. The Climate Adapted People Shelters (CAPS) project addressed the complex challenges of public exposure to urban heat, its impacts on the community, and the need for smarter public transport infrastructure to improve the liveability of cities in a warming world. It found that solutions to this problem require the integration of knowledge that includes, but is not limited to, the disciplines of environmental physics, innovation and design, business management, smart technology design, transport user behaviour and local governance. The project sought to foster innovation in climate adaptation through an open and human-centred design competition involving multiple stakeholders. The process was important because it revealed that community expectations about bus shelter design and performance were multi-faceted, and that the needs of infrastructure users could inform the practices of designing future public infrastructure. We discuss how to achieve more effective and broadly accepted urban design by utilizing open innovation, addressing urban resilience and climate adaptation, and leveraging the opportunities that lie within the use of data analytics and sensor technologies to address, in particular, transport user needs.