and motivation Cities around the world are facing tremendous challenges. For example, emerging cities in Asia and Africa often have to deal with unexpected side effects from mass transport, inadequate urban infrastructure, or other environmental side effects due to fast growth of urban areas and demand flexible and adaptive strategies for urban planning. The approach from the last decades was to harness innovative technologies and acquire knowledge through data mining strategies. This movement to optimise the city is known as the smart city concept. There are several definitions of a smart city circulating in research. Our work invokes the standard that is based on the evaluation of several definitions by the International Telecommunication Union. They declare a smart city an “innovative city that uses information and communication technologies (ICT) and other means to improve quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services, and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social and environmental aspects” (Kondepudi, 2014, p. 13). The concept of smart cities characterises the city for aspects of efficiency and effectiveness and areas of concerns like energy consumption, administration and traffic. The problem of this consideration is that the human aspects like the perception of space are not regarded. Smart city technologies are not a panacea for cities as pointed out by Battarra, Gargiulo, Pappalardo, Boiano, and Oliva (2016). Present strategies are therefore focusing on human-centred technologies and try to engage citizens in the planning process. This transformation is sometimes labelled as Smart City 2.0 strategies (Pomeroy, 2017). We will use the formulation of the Responsive City in this paper, as it is proposed by Goldsmith and Crawford (2014). This term reflects the changeover from top-down governed cities towards citizen-centred and citizen-inclusive governance in the best way. The main reason for having the vision of a responsive city for future cities is that mere smart technologies fail to integrate evolving self-organizing entities by dealing with mainly post-occupied spaces and it cannot improve aspects of cities that go beyond easily quantifiable criteria. Such aspects are for instance the quality of life, also designated as liveability, or the citizens’ identification with a place. There are many solutions to make this vision practical. We concentrate in this paper on participatory design approaches in urban planning and from here develop a new strategy which combines active co-designing with crowdsourcing methods. The difficulty is that cocreation of design is typically based on a continuous communication between the designer and the co-creators (e.g. the user of the product). By including a large amount of people in a co-design process, it is not only an issue of how the design ideas of the co-creators can be collected but also how the information can be transformed to useful input for the designer. The presented method is more complex than a simple add-on of the existing co-creation. We therefore give the new strategy its own name and designate it as Citizen Design Science. This paper begins with a short review of the history for participatory planning and some current approaches how ICT can improve urban design and planning processes. Another focus is on community workshops which enable active designing with residents. We present the idea of Citizen Design Science while also taking the presented challenges as basis. After the discussion of the theoretical framework, we bring it in context of existing and upcoming usercentred and participatory design. At the end, we introduce the Quick Urban Analysis Kit (qua-kit) as a design tool that enables non-experts to do simple design tasks. Due to the simple handling for the user, we see it as an appropriate, powerful enabler for Citizen Design Science.