Cities of things

Date & Time

Friday, July 2 | 11:30-13:00 CEST, 05:30-07:00 EDT, 19:30-21:00 AEST
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Description

How will our city life change when we share public space with autonomous intelligent things? What will be the impact for designers of the city and the intelligent things, how will it impact policymakers? In this symposium we dive into these and other questions, organised by Cities of Things field lab AMS-MUC initiative.

In 2017 the research program Cities of Things was established at Faculty of Industrial Design of Delft University of Technology. The notion that with the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) combined with IoT (internet of things), the concept of what is a “thing” shifts from passive artifact to active partner. Capable to perform tasks and make judgments, things increasingly “work with us” to produce positive change in everyday life. In the lab we use the theory of ‘Things As Citizens’ and the notion of shaping the future of our cities with intelligent things.

In 2018 we established a Delft Design Lab Cities of Things. A dozen of master graduation research projects have been completed since then, as well as a postdoc research (Lupetti, Smit, Cila, 2018) and a workshop format has been developed and published (Lupetti, Cila, 2019). In 2020 we decided to set up a fieldlab in collaboration with creative industry partners in the framework of an existing collaboration of the cities of Amsterdam and Munich (Creative Embassy AMS-MUC) . In the summer of 2021 this fieldlab will officially kick-off with a first consortium of creative agencies from both Amsterdam and Munich.

The activities will not be limited to these cities, with the Cities of Things Knowledge Hub we intend to connect research activities with communities of practice. We like to use this symposium at MAB20 to connect with interested partners. In the symposium, we will share the starting points of the research and the research themes, and we invite some of the consortium partners to share their plans for field lab projects. In the last part, we like to actively engage with the MAB20 participants to make new connections.