Presentation to the Design students at Norwich University of the Arts that explored how interaction with data increasingly mediates peoples relationship with cities.

1. Michael Smyth
Centre for Interaction Design
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
@michael_smyth
Data and the Hybrid City

2. Visible media in the urban landscape

4. How do people interact with technology
in the environment?

5. Invisible media in the urban landscape

6. How do we gather data from the environment?

7. How does the environment gather
information about citizens?

8. The vision of Ubicomp is one of seamless interfaces,
connecting into invisible, distributed, pervasive and
ubiquitous computing.

9. Interactions create data, often personal data
relating to individuals, and if our interactions are
"seamless" this raises serious questions around the
visibility of what happens to that data. Issues of
trust, privacy, ownership and control.

10. Is this the vision of the smart city?

11. It is the individuals who inhabit cities
that make them smart.

12. Individuals as creators and sharers of data

13. collectivism & activism

14. Nokuna - social utopia or creative control centre?
!
It’s 2063 in the Displaced City. Nokuna is a protected
region that operates on a gift economy model. The
universal Bitcoin currency has had its signal blocked and
is useless within Nokuna’s boundaries.
!
!
Andreas Streinzer, Anthropologist
Caitlin Cockerton, Design Researcher
Joatan Preis Dutra, Media Designer
Louise Jensen, Interaction Designer
Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena, atelier leader / Damir Prizmic, atelier coordinator

16. Tidy Street, Brighton (2011)

18. Trash|Track :: MIT Lab (2009)

21. Walking Path to Avoid CCTV in New York (2001)

22. visibility & virtuality

23. Ingress :: Niantic Labs (2012)

24. AR game that encourages players to input
data about physical monuments.

25. Immaterials - The ghost in the field :: Timo Arnall
and Jack Schulze (2009)

27. connectedness & discovery

28. Yellow Arrow Project (2004)

29. a cartography of the intimate & the everyday

30. Dead Drops :: Aram Bartholl (2010)

33. Rider Spoke :: Blast Theory (2009)

35. Aurora, the Aura City
!
Now it is 2113 and this is our second wave of hope.
Wearing our new technologies, we have achieved
ultimate connectivity: we enjoy augmented
experiences as long as we sync our senses with
others in proximity. Sharing visual data requires that
people look in each other's eyes; sharing feelings
can only occur if people actually touch.
!
Mara Balestrini
Sandro Engel
Ena Hadžić
Assunta Matassa
Tobias Revell , atelier leader / Sara Božanić, atelier coordinator

37. The hybrid city is characterised by
increasing layers of data.

39. How will we derive meaning from data and how
will those meanings inform our subsequent
decisions - urban interaction design

40. What are the products and services that
citizens of the near future will use to create
and consume data in the Hybrid City?

41. Further Reading
Talk to Me - Design and the Communication
between People and Objects (2011),
Antonelli & Hunt (eds), MoMa Press.
Non Object (2011) Branco Lukic, MIT Press
Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding
the City (2011) Mikoleit & Purckhauer, MIT
Press

42. www.michael-smyth.co.uk
www.urbanixd.eu
!
@michael_smyth