Municipalities’ growing interest in Smart Cities drives technological interventions that enhance logistical, energy, and spatial processes while impacting social and cultural structures. Creating moral smart cities requires according to Wernaart the active involvement of concerned parties at the design table. Or as DiSalvo noted, “Designing becomes a way to care, together, for our collective futures.”

The Moral Smart City project seeks to develop a strategy for fostering continuous citizen engagement in decision-making regarding emerging technologies within the city, utilising the Moral Data City Hunt (MDCH) method. This method, developed by the Moral Design Strategy research group at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, combines empirical ethics, linguistic analysis, and comparative social science. A key component is design fiction, which is applied in a "mobile moral lab" to highlight future technology applications and the associated moral dilemmas. Residents interact with this lab, influencing the moral settings. These interactions help map the ethical preferences of different resident groups,
contributing to a dynamic, techno-moral urban compass.

This article aims to provide the rationale for addressing ‘value friction’ in moral
technological dilemmas for local governments within a pluralistic democratic rule of law, and describes the methodological design choices involved. By mapping friction, the MDCH gathers insights into pluralistic values in society, and the feedback loop helps facilitate the urban transition from citizens' often limited understandings and abstract perceptions of emerging technologies to a collaborative process of co-design and inclusive discussions.
The pilot study of this Moral Data City Hunt method was launched in several Dutch municipalities as of May 2025.