As the Smart City concept evolves, it necessarily incorporates more sustainability and inclusiveness features. In this context, the mobility of people is still one of the major challenges for cities. Among the most vulnerable group of citizens are the elderly, as they demand special requirements in the design of smart mobility. At the same time, smart cities’ technologies could be used to maintain their quality of life. From an architectural and sociological point of view, smart cities change the meaning and the use of public spaces, from physical meeting places to relational public spaces, in which humans use interposed technological means and information flows. This leads to the concept of Interconnected Public Spaces: a mixture of physical and virtual environments, generating interconnections at a planetary scale, that can be used to attract elderly people for collectively sharing experiences outdoor in public spaces (parks, squares or bus stops, in any city on our planet), increasing their physical form and stimulating them mentally, socially and emotionally. This paper describes the development of an inclusive smart bus stop prototype and the use of its ICT infrastructure to build Interconnected Public Spaces.

Smart furniture (smart cities) can provide publicity, mobility services and local government communication, among many other services; however, its use for improving the quality of life of the elderly (extended IP-spaces concept) can be further researched. This paper describes the first step in a collaborative design of a smart city platform based on this concept. This design requires a layered design, as it includes architectonic, artistic, technological and social aspects. Participatory design (PD) and participatory action research (PAR) methodologies were selected to include the elderly in the design to ensure the acceptance and usability of the system. During this specific design process, three groups of elderly people from three geographic points of Spain were recruited. PD was applied to capture the users’ preferences and general specifications regarding the architectonic aspect of the project, while PAR was used to capture these groups’ quality-of-life needs, determine the initial acceptance of the project and define the initial activities to be realized for mitigating the detected needs. The application of these qualitative methodologies should produce a user-centric, valuable but local (specific) design. As more groups and towns will be involved, the new local designs will build a bigger set of validated solutions that potentially could be customized and reused for other contexts.