Wrapped-up lists populate the email inbox and apps; this is not such a list, but let’s have a look at the 2024 activities of Cities of Things. In the next post we will look forward to 2025 and the theme for the new year.
We worked on the WijkbotKit in several forms, applying it in workshops, student assignments, and Tomasz Jaskiewicz and Iskander Smit published a chapter for the book of the Network of Applied Design Research: Between Experiments; Leveraging Prototypes to Trigger, Articulate, and Share Informal Knowledge, that was officially presented at Dutch Design Week 2024.
The year kick-off with the round-up of the Cities of Things LAB010 project at the 10 year Wijkcooperatie celebrative event. Wijkbot was presented and opened the freshly opened ResourceStation.
Workshop at conference PublicSpaces on 6 June, with an exhibition of the results on 7 June. See post on Wijkbot website.
Workshop at Society 5.0 Festival on 10 October, with a new iteration of the WijkbotKit. See post at Wijkbot-website.
Wijkcooperatie Afrikaanderwijk took the WijkbotKit to organize two workshops, one with kids. and one Woonstad employees. The results from the kids where part of the parade on 16 October at the open day.
We received a funding for extending the Wijkbot toolkit the Ecosystem of Systemic Co-design.
Iskander presented Generative Things at CleverFranke, the theme that was chosen for TH/NGS 2024 and is linked to the Cities of Things theme.
At RoboDam, we pitched the WijkbotKit for robot makers in Rotterdam. And we presented the Wijkbot at EASST-4s conference: “Infrastructuring public engagement with near-future technologies through prototyping kits – the case of a “wijkbot kit”
At Dutch Design Week we organized a Salon, and I did two workshops on Generative Things at The Hague UAS master Next Level Engineering and Avans UAS Health by Design. In the TU Delft minor Interactive Environments Wijkbots were used as part of a “Robot casting performance”
Next to these workshops within student programs we commissioned assignments for Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences IPO and CMD, The Hague UAS master Next Level Engineering. In the TU Delft minor Interactive Technology Design, four teams worked on neighborhood navigators.
Lisa Laverman completed here graduation project at Industrial Design TU Delft, a project that we commissioned together with Springtime. “Bottom-up intelligence: Exploring the role of agents for mobility orchestration in Negen Straatjes, Amsterdam“
Wrapped up
To wrap it in numbers; in 2024 we worked with
🎤 10 public presentations
🪚 8 workshops with about 100 participants
🎓 14 student projects with about 55 students involved
📚 3 new research papers
🤖 about 20 new wijkbots
Happy 2025!