Author: iskander

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research update

The Agentic Turn

Designing things in times of immersive AI

A write-up of my talk at the Design Thinkers Academy, 28 May 2026

I was invited to speak at the Design Thinkers Academy about where Cities of Things sits today, and I used the occasion to do something I’d been circling for a while: take the temperature of the whole project. What does it mean now that generative AI is everywhere — and what happens when that intelligence stops living on our screens and moves into the things and spaces around us? That shift is what I’ve come to call the agentic turn, and it’s the thread running through everything below.

Where this comes from

Cities of Things began in 2017–2018 as a research initiative and design lab at TU Delft, set up by Professor Elisa Giaccardi and myself as visiting professor. We weren’t interested in the smart city as a story about data collection, sensors, and dashboards. We were interested in a different question: what does it mean to live together with intelligent things, objects, and systems? In 2021 the work became an independent foundation — the Cities of Things expertise center for physical and embodied AI — which is now my main focus.

The premise has stayed remarkably stable. We treat things as a kind of citizen. Not just as devices that sense and collect data in real time, but as data-enabled artefacts that can act proactively and, crucially, begin to behave socially. As designers we found that an irresistible question: if a thing starts to behave like a social entity, how do we relate to it?

Five dilemmas

Before any of the prototyping, we mapped the tensions that this raises. Five dilemmas have guided us ever since, each a spectrum rather than a yes/no:

  • Responsibility — private versus public
  • Priority — does the human or the system come first?
  • Relationship — is the thing a tool or a social partner?
  • Adaptation — does the thing adapt to the human, or sometimes the other way around?
  • Delegation — do we hand over a single task, or everything?

You can see these dilemmas play out in the wild already. We don’t really have delivery bots on Dutch streets yet — only a few experiments — but in the US and China they’re common, and the TikTok and Reels footage of them is telling. People form an emotional connection, or they get angry, or — most interesting to me — they help. When one of these things gets stuck on the pavement and a passer-by frees it, and the thing responds well to that help, there’s a small moment of joy there. That tells you something about the relationship we’re building.

Civic prototyping: the Wijkbot

The way we study this is not by sketching it out but by building it. Credit here goes to Tomasz Jaśkiewicz, lector of civic prototyping at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, who came up with a beautifully simple hack: a hoverboard platform you can stand on, turn into a remote-controlled base, and quickly build a robot on top of. That became the Wijkbot (Hoodbot).

We took it everywhere — hackathons, half-day workshops, and out onto the street, including the big market in the Afrikaanderwijk, where we ran a project for a year and a half. The method is wonderfully direct: you stand at a distance, you mimic the robot’s behaviour, and you watch how people relate to it in real time. We did this with students, with professionals, in Rotterdam and as far as Hamburg, often together with the systemic co-design network, and we developed it into a workshop format that digs into the deeper layers of people’s motivations.

The driver underneath all of it: not technology built for us by big tech, but technology we can build ourselves, as citizens.

From things to systems

In the last couple of years the questions have grown outward — from the single thing to the system. If a community builds a commons-based, bottom-up form of governance around both human and non-human actors, what economic models start to appear, and how do we design for them? This is the strand that increasingly defines the work.

The ChatGPT moment

When we started, we understood machine learning and could reason about these things, but the technology wasn’t there yet. The transformer arrived around 2018, but it became legible to everyone only with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. After that, everyone understood what generative AI could mean — for conversation, text, images, search.

If you sketch the arc, you move from textual and conversational, through images, search and reasoning, into multimodal combinations — and then into the two stages that interest me most: agentic AI, and physical AI.

Agentic is the threshold. An agent is something you delegate a task to. Something becomes agentic when it starts to act proactively — taking actions you didn’t explicitly ask for, because its rules and knowledge lead it to. That’s the moment we start building genuinely new relationships with things, especially once those things are embodied in our environment.

Co-performance, and the sweet spot

I keep coming back to the concept of co-performance, introduced by Kuijer and Giaccardi in 2018. When we live alongside AI on these surfaces, we have a choice of strategies: delegate everything; treat the AI as a tool that must follow us; let it take over the human role; and so on. None of the extremes is interesting. The interesting work is finding the sweet spot in between — what does AI do best, what do humans do best, and how do we choreograph a co-performance that may itself shift over time?

Immersive AI — and its shadow

That’s the optimistic reading. There’s a shadow too. I describe the emerging condition as immersive AI: intelligence that is everywhere and connected to the things in our environment. But we already live in a state of mind addicted to small chunks of media, needing a continuous drip of the new. So I sketched a small model — partly prompted by a group of Unilever marketers asking about exactly this.

Put three forces together — immediacy culture, agentic AI, and the physical environment — and they form a super-stimulus effect: a flywheel of dopamine dependency and environmental triggers, personalised, which is a potentially dangerous mix. We should be aware that we risk building a world where we live inside immediacy and AI black boxes, using intelligence built into everything without understanding how it came about.

The way I frame the whole landscape: physical AI is the fixed environment turning computational — a lamp post, a bin, anything with an algorithm in it becomes part of a “mirror world” of opportunities. Embodied AI is the moving things, the city bots, now carrying that same generative capability. Where they meet — when we interact with embodied things inside a physical-AI context — that’s immersive AI. New affordances, new services, and new consequences to think through.

Four conditions of interplay

How we experience this depends on the kind of interaction we have. There are four conditions, along two axes — one-time versus ongoing, and a single thing versus a system of things:

A brief brush with one object is an encounter; a brush with a coordinated system is a passage. An ongoing bond with one thing is companionship; living inside the system is inhabitation.

The manifesto: a seven-year reflection

Around last November, seven years in, I decided to reflect on Cities of Things itself — what is its state in 2026? So I interviewed around thirty people: academics, designers, practitioners, former students, anyone with an opinion and a role. The conclusions are gathered in a new manifesto, and a few threads from those conversations shaped the thinking that follows.

One interviewee talked about emerging milieus of intelligence — systems built from the bottom up — and argued that design should stop focusing only on the object and attend to the supporting environment. Don’t start by designing a nice thing and its insides; start with what it touches and what surrounds it.

This sent me back to my own unfinished 2018 research on predictive relations. Our interplay with a thing is shaped by the mental model we hold of it — we expect a certain response. That response is shaped by the thing’s intelligence, and by our own history and profile, which we can understand. But there’s an extra layer: it’s also shaped by every interaction every other person has had with that thing, anywhere in the world, at any time, because these systems are continuously connected. What does that do to the relationship? That’s the open question I’d parked, and immersive AI reopens it.

And it deepens further with agency. Is an object a single agent? Or, as Simone Rebaudengo put it in our conversation, is an object an assembly of different agents working at different tasks?

A story from the (near) future: The Grid

To make this tangible, I told a speculative story set in 2033.

Two pressures shape its world. An energy crisis has made us far more deliberate about how we use and organise energy. And a loss of trust in the centralised internet has pushed people toward bottom-up mesh networks, node to node. Imagine a phone company — say, Fairphone — that doesn’t just make a phone but a module you can drop into anything to spin up a mesh easily. Call it Fairmesh, a service.

Meet Lena. She enters the building where she lives and immediately feels its state — the building gives her feedback through the device she wears. Inside, all the things are connected in a mesh; and the buildings themselves mesh together across the city, a hypermesh layered on top.

What I find compelling here is the counter-movement to centralised intelligence. Alongside the big models — the OpenAIs and Geminis — there’s a push toward small, dedicated language models. The heat pump has its own tiny LLM, tuned only for its task; so does the solar panel. They’re conversational and intelligent within their narrow remit, and through the mesh they begin to talk to each other, generating new knowledge and behaviour in the space between them.

The residents organise too. In the story they’re a cooperative — De Warren — that holds a quarterly assembly to decide their shared goals: use less energy this quarter, or give away the surplus they’ve saved; who governs whom; what the rules are. And into that assembly the things contribute as well, each offering its own overview of what it has done.

None of this is wholly invented. In Amsterdam, the Schoonschip project — a community of floating houses connected to the grid through a single plug — already runs its own internal energy economy: batteries, solar panels, residents buying and selling surplus among themselves and with the outside. The Grid simply asks what happens when those balancing systems stop being merely algorithmic and start becoming intelligent. (I even fed the scenario text into NotebookLM and got back a two-minute film — and it captured nicely how, in this world, the things become genuine players in the equation. Who rules whom?)

Ten design considerations — the Manifesto 2026

This brings me to the heart of it: ten design considerations for working in immersive AI. I prefer “considerations” to “commandments.” They fall into four rough groups.

Understand and be honest — the first five.

  • Design for Legibility of Agency (LA) — make the intelligence readable.
  • Provide Predictive Symmetry (PS) — arrange a relationship between human and thing that is genuinely trustworthy.
  • Emerge Relational Integrity (RI) — let the relationship hold together honestly.
  • Keep Peripheral Presence (PP) — use the intelligence only when it’s actually needed.
  • Reveil Assemblage Transparency (AT) — when multiple agents or stakeholders coordinate around a person, that coordination should be perceptible and its boundaries knowable. Be honest about it to the one human in the loop.

Friction leads to more engagement — the next two.

  • Appreciate Friction in Interactions (FI) — build friction in, deliberately. Don’t make things so smooth that people stop thinking.
  • Incorporate Temporal Honesty (TH) — a thing with vast knowledge can leap to conclusions you don’t follow and didn’t want. Respect the difference between a new encounter and an established relation; don’t simulate relational depth that hasn’t been earned; let people walk the path of a decision themselves.

Embed in new forms of governance — the commons layer.

  • Leverage Democratic Precedence (DP) — communities should define the kind of environment they want before agentic systems arrive. Governance infrastructure must precede technological infrastructure.
  • Ensure Distributed Sovereignty (DS) — keep control distributed rather than concentrated.

Be an open platform — the last one, which arches over the rest.

  • Open up to Build Back (BB) — people must be able to introduce their own agentic things, modify existing assemblages, and keep the possibility space open against closure. Don’t hand people a finished system to use; give them things they can build and rebuild. “Vibe coding” is a hot term, but the underlying principle — we can make this ourselves, fairly easily — is a powerful one.

These are still in development; there’s a card set to think with, and an open discussion about whether to fold in the resource and societal impact of these systems too. The current set is mostly about how we design once we’re in this situation — how to make things that are genuine, good and honest.

What remains human

My personal conviction is that a real shift is underway in how AI is embedded in the things we use. Since ChatGPT we’ve treated it as a tool we reach for. But what happens when AI is embedded in everything, always there, and able to become agentic — to initiate interactions with us? That always-on intelligence is a new form of relationship with our environment, and it isn’t only technical or functional. It’s social. It’s about what just happened, socially, between us and the thing.

We have always designed for humans — to serve us, to be usable. The extra quest now is to design not only what works best for us, but what keeps us human — what prevents us from becoming less so. With all the convenience these systems offer, if we’re not aware of how much of the human part of ourselves we’re delegating away, we lose some humanity in the bargain.

I’ll close where one interviewee pointed me, to Donna Haraway. I’m critical precisely because I’m optimistic. I can only be optimistic about the usefulness of all this if I’m also willing to be critical and look hard at where the dangers are.

Cties of Things is an independent expertise center for physical and embodied AI. More on the manifesto and the research behind this talk at citiesofthings.nl. — Iskander Smit, iskander@citiesofthings.nl

This write-up is written by Claude Opus 4.8, based on the transcription of me presenting the deck, combined with the PDF of the slidedeck. Let me know if you like the whole story 🙂

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The 2026 Manifesto

The new design possibilities of immersive AI are real, but so are the risks. Intelligence that enters the room can enrich experience or silently erode agency. It can strengthen communities or fragment them. The difference is in the design.

The 2026 Manifesto for Immersive AI provides ten considerations for designing responsibly and effectively in this space, developed through conversations with more than 30 leading experts across design research, urban policy, robotics, architecture, and technology strategy, combined with seven years of applied research.

  1. Design Legibility of Agency — When a thing acts, people should be able to understand that it acted, why, and on whose behalf.
  2. Provide Predictive Symmetry — When a system predicts a person, that person should have meaningful access to the nature and basis of the prediction.
  3. Emerge Relational Integrity — The quality of a human-thing relationship should emerge from interaction itself, not be predetermined by external optimization.
  4. Keep Peripheral Presence — Agentic intelligence should operate at the edge of attention, not the center.
  5. Reveil Assemblage Transparency — When things coordinate around a person, the fact and scope of that coordination should be perceptible.
  6. Appreciate Friction in Interactions — People must retain access to resistance, surprise, and unoptimized experience.
  7. Incorporate Temporal Honesty — Systems should not simulate relational depth they have not earned.
  8. Leverage Democratic Precedence — Communities define the environment they want before agentic systems are introduced.
  9. Ensure Distributed Sovereignty — Data, models, and infrastructure should be subject to collective governance.
  10. Open up Build Back — People must be able to introduce their own things, modify assemblages, and keep technological possibility open.

These considerations are not constraints on innovation. They are what makes the difference between products people tolerate and products people trust.

Find more description about the ten considerations here.

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reflections research

Cities of Things affordances

In the process of creating a new Cities of Things manifesto for 2026 and beyond, as a reflection of the state of Cities of Things, an explorative research project was started. Through interviewing 30 experts the first outlines of thinking about the shift from a cities of things with agency, towards living in a reality of immersive AI, where given more depth.

The State of Cities of Things

Living with things, part of the city fabric, as residents, as citizens. It was what we envisioned back in 2017, resulting in a set of dilemmas that still hold true in current relations with AI. But what has changed in that almost decade? Machine learning and AI became generative AI. And we evolve in a society where we increasingly partner with other intelligences. Both ‘in your face’ while using the gen AI tools for creating and even communicating as a coach or a shrink. Trust in the systems changed. Critique is also serious. Big tech has shifted attention to generative AI, and new big tech players have taken a defining role. OpenAI, Anthropic, and next to the existing ones like Google and Meta. And even if seemingly lagging behind like Apple, it is the core of the attention. 

This all focuses on the backend, the infrastructure, and the screenbased interactions – with extension to other forms of communicating with images and sound. The physical angle is still early in development. Physical AI start to be a thing in 2026 for sure, and robotics is accelerating with humanoids and doganoids. It is still fresh and experimental. 

You could say that these forms of physical AI are the fully embodied ones. Another form are the autonomous vehicles that get more and more agency to make decisions by themselves, operate with less instructions. The latest version of FSD (Full Self-Driving) is illustrative. Comparing videos over the years give you trust that the current version is capable to deal with all regular situations, and only has flaws in edge cases. You might even say that it still has human characteristics; it sometimes misses a sign or is confused. The forgiveness of humans is however quite different. 

From the beginning of the Cities of Things research we think that things are not the same as objects. We like to see things more as assembles of meaning and behavior. With that, it can also be a static thing or system as a whole. In the thirty interviews that serve as the point of departure for reflecting on the state of Cities of Things, this notion is common. And it goes behind that, looking at the other intelligences and more-than-human actors and systems. New -or changing- forms of community and governance are a topic. And new types of infrastructure. One thing that we foresaw but was still very conceptual is the fact that these things that form the city are an assembly of layers of states, in the sense: the physical layer, the regulatory layer, the digital layer, the data layer, the object layer, the citizen layer, the relational layer. And within these layers, iterations happen, evolutions take place. The layers are responding to each other in different ways. Are entangled better said. How these entanglements are shaped differs and changes over time. A thing is, in that sense, a moment in time, entangling different aspects from the layers in a performative expression that is taking space in its environment. An abstract description, but in other words, the essence is that things are not static, given. 

A story from a possible future

Before diving deeper, I like to sketch a possible future of the state of Cities of Things that encapsules some concepts that are discussed and we find important to unpack later, using the expert opinions.

1st act, the context

Everything that can be a computer will become a computer. Chips are flocking the things we use. In our house, in our cars, the phones were the first ones maybe, and are an enabling platform for those things that are still lagging behind. Things become sensors of their environment. Not for direct services, but at least for informing maintenance. The iPhone was introduced in 2017 as a marriage of a communicator, a music player, and an internet device. The word “communicator” is another word for “phone”; using it makes the narrative correct (a phone that is a phone sounds less interesting). The aspect that this device became a communicator and connector of all other aspects of our life, of our physical and digital realities, literally, might not have been foreseen back then. 

It is a known change in society, in human interactions and daily life. We are disconnected from our direct reality and live more prominently in our own chosen digital reality. We all carry our personal bubbles and live inside these. It is seen as a problem for our social intelligence, for our healthy human-to-human connections. These can be separated, though; the phone’s enabling capability for creating new infrastructure and new types of embedded intelligence in a network. That is a capability in its own right. The other capability is serving as the hub in our social fabric. Social on all levels of friendship: from deep commitment to loosely one-time contact while doing a transaction, or even just an interaction. 

The big shift that is happening now in the second half of the 20s is the extension of this enabling layer with AI and, more importantly, agentic capabilities. That is not a new function or system added, but an evolution of existing intelligent systems. Or better, of all existing nodes in systems, aka things. What might happen next is that these agentic capabilities will also get more agency. Not forced by the producers or providers, but grow from the opportunities on a functional level. We will have different conversations with the things we use, the services we experience. Services that can be more autonomous. 

The next possible step is the forming of new networks, new communities, and new societies. Among the things, but especially among gatherings of things and humans. And other non-human lifeforms. 

The weak signals are the digital systems and especially the agent-based assistants that have their after-work gathering. It is a meme, but one that might make sense.

Next to the autonomous things, the level of agency is increasing. Who is taking the agency? Are we delegating more and more out of convenience and losing agency without being fully aware?

Next step after agency per things, is a type of organizing layer formed by the things, the communication between things, creating their own governance structures, with or without humans in the loop. 

The term humans in the loop is already an indication how this can evolve. A human in the lead or in the loop? Democratizing things? How far?

Some aspects that are interesting: What is driving this, and what are scenarios for this evolution? Who is the owner, and ownership Related to public spaces, governance, democracies? New infrastructures? Organizing scales (family, building, neighborhood, etc)?

2nd act, a story from the near future

In 2033, Apple is still organizing its yearly WWDC. And for the 2033 edition, people are already getting excited with the first announcements in April. There is expected to be a major update to the immersive device after it launched last year. It seems they have found their mojo again after years of downfall and doubts about their relevance in the current state of digital life.

The rise of a small player, such as Fairphone, in the late 20s was not to be expected. The pivot towards a community device, rather than a communication device, was so new that it shook the whole industry. The uptake from the mesh-based communication ate in the business of all players, and although Apple was not that affected in the first years, it started to compete with the 2029 introduced connector-hub-puck, as people started to combine this with all kinds of services in a new open platform that emerged from the mesh networks. 

It was not a surprise that Fairmesh was acquired by a big player, but Apple is usually not in the business of acquiring complete service brands. With the rapid growth of Fairmesh, it almost felt like a reverse takeover, and, officially, it is a collaboration, not a takeover, with Apple adding the Fairmesh protocol and chip to their AirTag devices.

More about Fairmesh

In 2029 the small mobile phone company Fairphone introduced a new device that was aimed at local communities. Already in 2025, the first local initiatives to build mesh networks for communicating text-based messages began experimenting. On the one hand, it focused on disaster-based communication needs, a hot topic as the several wars were increasingly developing into a worldwide conflict. A pivotal moment was when mesh networks began connecting to edge devices, such as phones, enabling simple messages to be integrated into richer content through smart use of AI. With the latest open source models with a smaller footprint, it became common to download AI models to personal devices and build a local personal assistant. 

The device that Fairphone introduced used a low-end computing architecture, and the core was the chip for the mesh-networking aimed at peer-to-peer. As they had integrated this chip also in the existing phones, they kickstarted a local-based network. And they offered a device for local communities, a kind of router/antenne that makes it possible for all kind of communities to create local networks with messaging services. 

The device gained traction as the liminal state of the world, moving from crisis to crisis, made people receptive to a new robust network that was not run by big tech. In just one year, millions of devices were distributed, and, more importantly, it has been possible since 2030 to connect from the Nordkapp to Tarifa and from rural Ireland to the Donbas, even reaching into Asia. And it is the first network to show similar uptake in the global south.

Apple 

With all the economic crises that followed in 2026, the US-Iran conflict, the already-started trend toward a declining market for premium phones, Apple had some rough years. They had been planning for a new type of device in the early 2020s that moved away from the phone as a form factor; the first signal was the iPhone Air, which proved that the core technical ingredients fit a small footprint, the camera bump. After the bust of the Apple Vision devices, the company can capitalize on its new success, and with the new AirTag, it launched a personal device that fully leverages the cloud services infrastructure. A special T1 chip was launched to create a platform for physical AI, a form that emerged in the late 20s as a new form of AI. With the Tag, services can be connected to every device you like. One thing that is not possible yet is to connect to the internet without a phone nearby. 

In 2032, Apple decided to start a collaboration with Fairmesh, not by fully acquiring but by opening their AirTag with a mesh chip and an AirTag Plus with voice-based communication devices. The Fairmesh is also expected to be added to a new version of the Apple Watch.

About

These are rough thoughts about the state of cities of things, as part of making sense of the current state, and part of the process of formulating a new manifesto and design principles for Cities of Things that aimed to be completed in May 2026. Written between 10-17 April, and used as resource for the first version is discussed at the event on 24 April.

More to follow!

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Join us: State of Cities of Things event 24 April

State of Cities of Things: design for the interplay of humans, urban robotics, and physical AI

Last November, it was 7 years after the launching paper was presented at NordiCHI, “Near future cities of things: addressing dilemmas through design fiction“. It made me think it would be nice to reflect on the last seven years, especially on the state of Cities of Things, with the people who were important during those years. So I started planning interviews. In the coming month, this will come together in a publication, and I would like to invite you to join us for a network event where we present the results and reflect on them with some special guests. Powered by CLICKNL.

SAVE THE DATE:
Friday, 24 April 2026, in the afternoon.
Location in Amsterdam.
With: Iskander Smit, Maria Luce Lupetti, Sen Lin, Tomasz Jaskiewicz, and Vera van der Burg. Moderated by Monique van Dusseldorp.

Program

The program for the event:

15:00h__Doors open
__Wijkbot/Hoodbots will be present to explore!
16:00h__Welcome and introduction
__Presenting the research results by Iskander Smit
16:30h__Panel introductions
__Maria Luce Lupetti, Sen Lin, Tomasz Jaskiewicz, Vera van der Burg
17:00h__Interactive reflections
__Panel and participants moderated by Monique van Dusseldorp
18:00h__Drinks and bites
20:00h__End

About the panel

Maria Luce Lupetti is an Assistant Professor in Design at the Department of Architecture and Design at Politecnico di Torino. Her research is concerned with all matters of human entanglement with the artificial world, especially concerning complex technologies such as AI and robotics. She is co-director of POEL – Possible Entanglements Lab, a research group dedicated to investigating how people and technologies co-shape one another, and how design can help envision desirable configurations.

She is the PI of ‘Participatory Design Justice for Ethical AI Transitions’, a three-year project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research, under the FIS2 program. She is also Partner Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quality Work in the Digital Age, and serves as Exhibit X section editor for ACM Interactions Mag.

Maria Luce Lupetti was a postdoc researcher at the start of the Cities of Things research program at Delft University of Technology, and author of the first paper on the topic.

Sen Lin was among the first master graduate students at Delft Design Lab Cities of Things, with his research “Hinting Civic Futures, A call for cityness in the future smart age“. In 2024, Sen developed with Iskander the speculative workshop for Generative Things, as part of the ThingsCon team.

Sen is a product designer and researcher keen on design reflection and value intervention. Possessing a diverse background in strategic design, design speculation, and innovation consulting, he is passionate about creating socio-technical apparatuses following his importance felt. Sen used to lead trend-driven innovation and design foresight at Thoughtworks China, uncovering strategic pivots to future-proof businesses.

After working in China for 5 years, he returned to the Netherlands in 2023. He has been visiting China for a couple of months beginning 2026 and Sen will share his impressions from urban robotics in the China of today.

Tomasz Jaskiewicz is a professor in Civic Prototyping at the Creating010 knowledge centre at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Within his research group, he investigates new applications, methodologies, tools and processes to engage city dwellers in digital innovation within their social and physical living environments.

Tomasz has been active within the Creating010 Research Centre since 1 March 2021. Tomasz Jaskiewicz has a background in architecture and urban planning and has practical work experience developing experimental architecture projects, interactive installations, and digital design tools. Since 2014, he has worked as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft, where he has focused his research on Explorative Prototyping as a strategy for dealing with the complexity inherent in designing interactive environments. In parallel, he has also conducted substantive research into social practices within flexible office ecosystems and ‘smart’ urban contexts.

Tomasz was an initiating partner in the Cities of Things LAB010 living lab, and developed the first Wijkbot concept for civic prototyping citybots. He will share, among others, the backgrounds of Wijkbot/Hoodbot and the learnings ‘Between Experiments’ (ref).

Vera van der Burg is a designer, researcher, and Ph.D. candidate at TU Delft’s Designing Intelligence Lab, where she develops Reflective AI: a design practice that treats artificial intelligence as material for creative reflection rather than a tool for automation.

Her research investigates how training AI models can become a reflective practice, how subjective datasets reveal our own perspectives back to us, and how we might use AI to examine ourselves rather than extract from others. Vera strives to develop slower, smaller, and more intimate approaches to working with AI in creative practices, and I combine working with AI tools with an active making practice.

With her project Text-to-Clay, she showed at the last Dutch Design Week a different relationship with AI for design. She was awarded Emerging Talent at the Dutch Design Awards and FD Talent 50, and was featured in Dezeen.

Location

The event will take place in Commandantszaal at Marineterrein, Amsterdam

Registration

Please let us know if you plan to join! Also, if you only join us part of the time.

Register here

About the research

The current list of (planned) interviews for the research:
Kars Alfrink, Viktor Bedö, Vera van der Burg, Nazli Cila, Alain Dujardin, Paul Geurts, Elisa Giaccardi, Daniel Goddemeyer, Matt Gorbet, Louise Hugen, Tomasz Jaskiewicz, Jelmer Koedood, Rob van Kranenburg, Sen Lin, Maria Luce Lupetti, Iohanna Nicenboim, Gerard Nijboer, Simone Rebaudengo, Emiel Rijshouwer, Jip Schelling, Rob Schmidt, Marcel Schreuder, Paul Skinner, Kristel Thieme, Thijs Turèl, Jann de Waal, Martijn de Waal, Peter van Waart, Ren Yee, Cristina Zaga

Below is a PDF I made as an introduction for the interviewees.

2-pager Cities of Things 7 years later_Download

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Meet the Wijkbot!

Welcome! Whether you’ve encountered the Wijkbot in person or heard about it, read on for an introduction to how the Wijkbot came about and its journey so far.

On this website you’ll find many examples of neighborhood robots built in workshops, in the Cities of Things LAB010 living lab, in student projects, and at festivals. Contact Iskander if you’d like to know more or would like us to organise a workshop.

The Wijkbot began as an accessible way for anyone to quickly prototype city robots. In the Cities of Things LAB010 project (2022–2024), we collaborated with the Afrikaander Cooperative and spent a year working with a residents’ think tank to explore what city robots could mean for the Afrikaanderwijk. The result was the Inzamelbot — a collection robot.

The Inzamelbot’s appearance was inspired by the newly opened Grondstoffenstation of the Cooperative. The Wijkbot platform today combines a second-hand hoverboard as a base with a standard open-source controller, and a body built from leftover packaging materials from the nearby market.

We’ve discovered that the Wijkbot platform is an excellent way to start conversations, generate knowledge, and make tangible what would otherwise remain abstract. We’ve experienced this in workshops at PublicSpaces (Amsterdam), the Society 5.0 Festival, Smart & Social Fest (Rotterdam), Climate Meets Creative Coding (Hamburg), Dutch Design Week, and many others.

Over the past years, many student projects have been carried out using the Wijkbot platform as a foundation or tool — conceptually, design-focused, and technically.

The Wijkbot is an initiative of Cities of Things and Creating010. Cities of Things is a knowledge platform and research programme that originated at TU Delft, focused on the design of intelligent things and their role in cities and society.

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update

Wijkbots in the wild at two events

This week, Wijkbot is present in different forms at two events, one in Amsterdam and one in Delft.

ESConference, Amsterdam, 11-13 February 2026

The Wijkbot Kit 2.0 is part of the ESC conference exhibition, the annual conference of the Expertisenetwork Systemic Co-Design*, held 11-13 February at Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam. Wijkbot has received funding from the ESCall program to refine its existing knowledge product, the Wijkbot Kit. In that project, we expanded the workshop to place greater emphasis on the contextual aspects and second-order effects of introducing wijkbots in existing neighborhoods or communities. We’ve written about this project previously.

Highlight Festival, Delft, 11-14 February 2026

The Highlight Festival** in Delft (11-14 February) is themed “Robo-futures” this year—a fitting context for the Labkar, a mobile robot derived from the Wijkbot concept and developed as part of the Sociaal AI Lab in Rotterdam by Creating010 (Hogeschool Rotterdam). It will be around in Delft at Leeuwenhoek park and —in case of bad weather— in The Social Hub, both next to NS Station Delft.

We invite visitors to consider what roles a neighborhood robot might play on the streets of Delft.

Hoodbots (Wijkbots) are experimental urban robots developed within the Civic Prototyping research group at the Research Centre Creating010 (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences). These AI-speaking vehicles roam public space to spark unexpected encounters and ask big questions: Who owns robots in our streets? Who takes care of them? And how do we want to live alongside them?

*The Expertisenetwork Systemic Co-design (ESC) connects four metropolitan universities of applied sciences, six design research groups, and 38 societal and design partners. As a leader in systemic and design-oriented work, ESC has a direct and indirect impact at the intersection of practice-oriented design research, design professionalization, societal transitions, and education.

**Now in its ninth year, Highlight Festival transforms Delft into a playground for art and technology. Each edition brings together artists, designers, engineers, and researchers to create site-specific installations across the city. From light and sound to robotics and data, and research and fine art, the festival invites visitors to explore innovation and creativity in unexpected ways, not just as spectators, but as active participants in shaping the future.

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update

Wijkbot at Makerfaire Eindhoven

At MakerDays 2025, the MakerFaire in Eindhoven, the Future Parade is a fixed part of the programme on 27 & 28 September 2025. The Wijkbot was part of the parade with a special version of the Gemaal op Zuid Rotterdam project, where children build their own robots from leftover market materials.

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reflections research

How AI Reflects on the Hoodbot, Civic Prototyping and Fifth Order Design

As a little experiment and a way to reflect on a part of the research from the last 7 years of Cities of Things, I used the (in)famous Notebook LM tool to create a podcast discussing research sources. The result was rather pleasing, in the sense that based on four sources it gave a rather accurate description of the backgrounds of the Hoodbot research and the link with concepts we are exploring with Fifth Order Design.

The research sources were:

Lupetti, M. L., Smit, I., & Cila, N. (2018, September). Near future cities of things: addressing dilemmas through design fiction. In Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 787-800).

Lupetti, M. L., & Cila, N. (2019, October). Envisioning and questioning near future urban robotics. In Design and Semantics of Form and Movement. Conference: Desform.

Jaśkiewicz, T., & Smit, I. (2024). Between experiments leveraging prototypes to trigger, articulate, and share informal knowledge: Case of the cities of things living lab. In Applied Design Research in Living Labs and Other Experimental Learning and Innovation Environments (pp. 210-233). CRC Press.

Stompff, G., Jaskiewicz, T., Nachtigall, T., & Smit, I. (2025). Design in the Real World: Facilitating Collective Learning through Design. In Applied Design Research (pp. 290-308). CRC Press.

Notebook can also create infographics now, but this is not that good. The visual references would not pass my creative direction 🙂

In the latest NADR publication, we wrote about the potential role of AI-image generation in Civic Prototyping:

Scaffolds of Imagination: Partnering with AI-image generation in Civic Prototyping (Tomasz Jaśkiewicz, Iskander Smit, Peter van Waart, Manon Mostert van der Sar, Evin Wijninga)

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reflections

2026: The year social intelligence surfaces

In my piece for RIOT 2025 (June 2025), I argued that generative and agentic AI push us into something qualitatively different: intelligence no longer as an app, but as an atmosphere—infused into objects, services, and environments until the fabric of everyday life becomes conversational. The shift is not only from responsive tools to initiating systems, but from discrete interactions to a ubiquitous field of relations.

2025 was the pivoting year for agentic AI. Everyone declared it the year of agents—though the examples were interesting rather than transformative. Physical AI grabbed headlines at CES: humanoids and helper robots demonstrating cleaning tasks and household routines. Straightforward. Even dull. But this is the opening act.

The real shift happens when AI becomes embedded in everything we use. Every device with computing power, every service with a potential connection to an intelligence layer running beneath the surface. Call it the Upside Down, if you like—a realm that’s always there, occasionally bleeding through.

Three ways the atmosphere manifests

How does this intelligence layer relate to our lived world? I see three models emerging:

The Cloud. Everything intelligent draws from shared data and knowledge; intelligence operates at the system level. Individual actions connect to an ecosystem that almost lives on its own. Activities in the real world and in the cloud proceed as parallel processes—related but distinct.

The Digital Twin. A representation of reality built for understanding. Intelligence is made available to the actor’s individual profile in the real world. More sophisticated versions enable simulations and predictions based on aggregated profiles. The focus remains individual: what can this model tell me about my situation?

The Mirror World. Combining these two into something new. Not only does the individual actor apply profile information and predictive knowledge, but the social fabric of the lifeworld itself is mirrored. Relations, communities, collective patterns—all represented and capable of influencing action in return.

We’re early. It’s hard to predict how the mirror world will impact the lifeworld. But 2026 will give us the first real indications.

The individual trap

Notice that current AI development remains stuck in individual framing. Chatbots became primary access points for questions in 2025—Google pushing Gemini, OpenAI as poster child, Claude rising as the choice for users wanting something more personally attuned. Research shows people increasingly use these bots for personal questions, emotional feedback, and companionship.

But it’s always one person, one tool. Even in social contexts, the relationship is fundamentally individual.

The companion device market tried to extend this: Rabbit, Humane. Both failed—costs too high, friction too great. But intelligence is moving to the edge. Apple’s next-generation AirPods will matter here. Translation already works. Visual intelligence currently requires activation—take a picture, wait. That friction will disappear. The always-present companion is coming.

Still individual. Still personal optimization.

A collective turn

Here’s what shifts in 2026: we begin asking questions about collectivity, governance, and who sets the goals of the ecosystem.

In times of austerity—less money, fewer institutional supports—people turn to each other. Communities gain importance: local, ad hoc, interest-based, place-based. This isn’t speculation; it’s already happening.

Now add intelligent things to these communities. The sensors. The solar panels in your energy collective. The batteries. The shared vehicles. What happens when these become fellow community members?

Will we govern them collectively? Can we? How? What are the new forms of autonomy for actors?

In 2025, the introduction of agents or agentic operating services became foundational to the possibilities of collective working. This is extending to physical space. The interactions between the individual operating agents will be the defining factor for our day-to-day lives. New negotiating agents will become the crucial nodes.

This is where social intelligence enters. Not intelligence based on individual knowledge—that’s the IQ model we’ve been building. Social intelligence is the EQ of the ecosystem: intelligence that emerges from and operates on social relations. The mirror world doesn’t just reflect individuals; it reflects how we’re connected. And if we can see those connections, we can begin to govern them.

Respecting externalities

A community optimizing for itself creates externalities—impacts outside its boundaries, costs borne by others. When your energy collective’s AI negotiates with the grid, whose interests does it serve? When shared vehicles optimize routes for members, what happens to non-members, to public space, to the commons? Social intelligence without social accountability is just collective selfishness with better tooling.

This is the tension that 2026 will surface but not resolve. We’ll see the first cases of communities incorporating intelligent things as participants. We’ll see experiments in collective governance of AI systems. And we’ll see the early conflicts over who’s inside, who’s outside, and who bears the costs.

Agentic social intelligence

We will start living alongside intelligent things as part of our social fabric, not as tools but as participants in collectives of humans and things. The atmosphere is forming. The mirror world is taking shape.

2026 is the year social intelligence surfaces, and new relations with our new fellow agentic actors will start to take shape. It will be a year of learning about new social structures and building understanding on growing into a new living world.

I am looking forward to research through (speculative) design with Cities of Things and partners!

Let me know if you’d like to dive deeper, with an inspiring presentation with more extended examples and projections, or a speculative design workshop with your team or students.

Categories
reflections update

Systemic co-design with agentic engineers

Weekly reflection on human-AI-things collaborations

The shift isn’t from human coders to AI agents. It’s from coding to engineering.

Every, the company behind Lex (which I’m using right now), released four predictions for 2026. The one that stuck with me: the rise of the “agentic engineer.” A couple of months ago, I wrote about an Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, who described this exact reality—directing a team of AI agents rather than writing code himself.

But calling this “directing agents” undersells what’s happening. The agentic engineer doesn’t just orchestrate; they design the environment in which agents can work at their best capacity. They build their own tools, shape workflows, and define constraints. The craft moves upstream: from writing the code to engineering the context.

This connects to another of Every’s predictions: designers building their own tools. That was what triggered me in the Austrian developer’s account was how much of his work involved creating bespoke tooling for his own process. This is what happens when the friction between idea and prototype disappears—designers no longer depend on a coder to test their thinking. They build, they learn, they iterate. Two principles at work: Understanding by doing, and Eating your own dogfood.

And here’s where it gets interesting: if professionals are building their own tools, will end users follow? Is every product becoming less an interface to data and more a platform for making bespoke tools? Does a new layer emerge where users shape their own outcomes?

I think this points toward co-design—but a richer version than we usually mean. Not just designer and user collaborating, but multiple layers of expertise are woven into the design process. The economist who maps value flows in a community. The ethicist who flags downstream effects. Stakeholders who traditionally appear only in the research phase are becoming part of the building itself.

In this framing, agents don’t just execute—they can represent these roles, simulate options, play out consequences before anything hits the real world. Agents as citizens. Not tools we use, but participants in how we design.

Within Cities of Things we have been looking into human-AI teams for a masterclass on designing these new teams, where this engineering was a key element. Building successful human-AI teams should focus on the relationships among the different human and non-human team members, not on task performance.

This triggered thought is part of my weekly newsletter:

Weeknotes 371 – The real shift is not from human coders to AI agents—it’s from coding to engineering the environment where agents are co-designers. And other news on AI companion devices and robots at CES.

https://www.iskandr.nl/systemic-co-design-with-agentic-engineers

Image: Interpretation by Midjourney