Downtown Iowa City uses artificial intelligence to engage visitors, residents

IOWA CITY — If you see someone talking to a lamp post or mural in downtown Iowa City, don’t think anything of it — it’s by design.

Thanks to Hello Lamp Post, a new artificial intelligence technology, anyone can ask questions or have friendly conversations with inanimate objects around downtown.

By texting HELLO DOWNTOWN to (319) 346-3443 or scanning QR codes on strategically placed signs, visitors and residents can ask about various topics. With time, the program will expand its conversational skills.

During its pilot over the holidays, visitors could ask where to find Santa or where to buy a good gift for dad, for example. Next year, they’ll be able to text questions about murals and public art, or ask how long street construction will last.

“The goal in bringing Hello Lamp Post technology to downtown Iowa City is to open up additional ways for anyone visiting the area to interact with the district in a unique way,” said Betsy Potter, director of creative services for the Iowa City Downtown District. “It’s a fun way to interact with public spaces that you can’t traditionally do. This is a more fun way to interact with things because it’s a text message, which is supposed to be more accessible and easy to use.”

Launched in December, the holiday season was the perfect time to introduce the new tool as a concierge service for those looking for holiday activities and shopping ideas. The downtown district plans many more rollouts over the next year to engage visitors in real time with featured public art, upcoming streetscape projects and event information.

The company that created the technology — headquartered in the United Kingdom — has been rolling out the technology across Europe for the last decade. There, it’s used in cultural tours, for public comment on construction and crime reporting. Hello Lamp Post’s debut in Iowa City is one of the first rollouts to happen in the United States.

“We’re tapped into what other communities are doing around the world,” Potter said. “The Dubuque Street construction was supposed to happen this spring, so that was the original intent of the program — (for the public) to ask questions about what was happening.”

With the delay of that construction, the district found other uses for it in the mean time.

A key component of the technology — giving a persona to each unique object the program is assigned to — allows artificial intelligence to gather community feedback in a more natural way. When it was used in London, for example, two cranes working on a bridge formed a fictional romantic relationship that piqued public interest.

“When it comes to the approach with murals, we’re hoping to give them identities based on what the artists are giving us,” Potter said. “It’s a way to give personality to inanimate objects.”

In Iowa City, public art creators could help craft the personas used with AI to shape conversations with humans. With a little fun through accessible text messages, the downtown district hopes to both increase the level of engagement and give a new way to engage that evolves past static forms of communications like phone or email and social media platforms like Facebook.

“Using the infrastructure that already exists in cities and towns to make them more interactive, we can bring more voices to the table,” said Tiernan Mines, chief executive officer of Hello Lamp Post. “It’s a great way to increase diversity by opening up conversations with the local community.”

And though employees are not providing the responses to each individual question, they can see every question and comment to incorporate into future work and more traditional communications plans, addressing concerns they otherwise might not think about.

“It’s about how we get more authentic responses, and that’s really, really hard,” Potter said. “When it comes to projects, especially infrastructure projects, we don’t get to hear a lot of direct feedback or get direct responses outside of more traditional surveys.”

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