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17-25 October 2026

The Camera Car Fair / The Fair Camera Car

A car with cameras on its roof: what does it see?

Hosted by Bits of Space

This project is now archived and was part of DDW23

This project is part of
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Most Dutch cities have a camera car (or: ‘scan car’) driving around. This is a car with box full of cameras on its roof. Through image recognition algorithms, it reads licence plates and hands out parking fines. During an experiment set up in a fun-fair-setting, we show what else the car can do.

The Camera Car Fair / The Fair Camera Car

The camera car can do much more than just parking control. It can identify stolen cars or even track how far your car has travelled. The cameras can count cyclists, identify litter on the street or recognise sought-after criminals - all much more efficiently than a human being could do. To add these new functions to the camera car, only a software update is required. The camera car itself will look the same as before. What does the camera car in your city see, that you can’t see? Come explore the journey its data travel, and how they are used. Which functions do you think are a good idea – and where do you think is the limit?

Research project: Human Values for Smarter Cities

The experiment is part of a research project at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The project is called Human Values for Smarter Cities and runs from 2022 to 2026. Smart city technologies, including artificial intelligence and computer vision, promise to bring a higher quality of life and more efficient urban management to our cities. However, developers, designers, and professionals working in urban management have started to realize that implementing these technologies poses numerous ethical challenges. Policy papers from city governments and institutions now call for human and public values in tech development. But what are ‘human values’? Who defines them, and how do they translate into design features? We explore these questions through designing digital and spatial experiments, applied to real-life use cases. Partners of the project include Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, TU Delft, AMS Institute, ARVOO, Tapp, the City of Amsterdam, the City of The Hague and the City of Rotterdam. The experiment was produced in collaboration with The Incredible Machine.

By

Bits of Space

Hosted by

The Social Design Lobby
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Colofon

Design Researcher Tessa Steenkamp
Tech Lead Harm van Beek

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Sponsored by The Camera Car Fair / The Fair Camera Car
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Sponsored by The Camera Car Fair / The Fair Camera Car