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update

Updates Q1 Cities of Things

Let me share some updates from the last quarter at Cities of Things.

Newsletters

We started a fresh format for the Monthly newsletter, applying speculative design techniques to build a story on the near future living with agentic things in the city. The recipe is:

  • The weekly reflections of my personal weeknotes newsletter Target is New are sources of inspiration on the news of human-AI co-performances.
  • To frame the agentic thing, I use the card deck made by Near Future Laboratory (Design Fiction Work Kit, I use the physical set, there is also an online version). Four types of cards (Object, Archetype, Attribute, Action)
  • I speculate myself an object situated in the city that touches the four cards (loosely) and the themes from the Month.
  • I feed this all to Claude via the writing tool Lex and ask to build a story from the situated object, and summarize the links with reflections.
  • With Midjourney I create an illustrative image.
  • I do a final edit before publishing it via the Substack.

So you can read to stories:

Wijkbot / Hoodbot

Via the website of Wijkbot, we keep you updated on realized projects and collaborations.

  • A team of students completed their ideation app for workshops with the Wijkbot
  • Another team of students from The Hague University of Applied Sciences master Next Level Engineering completed their project.
  • We finished the updated version of the Wijkbot Kit, as this was supported by the ESCall funding. It is a combination of a more step-by-step approach to dive deeper into the dilemmas, including the needed artifacts (more details follow soon).
  • We wrote a proposal for an installation using Wijkbot as learning experience, applying a combination of civic prototyping and thing-centered design: “Wijkbot Commons, Cohabiting with Autonomous Objects” (let me know if you like to know more)

Publications/media

  • We are part of Publiekwijs Handboek, aimed at journalists who want to get in touch with people.
  • Wijkbot is also part of the Kennisportfolio Rijksoverheid as a fieldlab (Cities of Things LAB010 project).
  • Wijkbot was part of this publication: A living lab learning framework rooted in learning theories (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2025.107894)
  • A new book chapter was written by Guido Stompff, Tomasz Jaskiewicz, and myself, for the NADR publication, with Wijkbot as the inspiring case for design in the real world (keep you posted)
Handboek Publiekwijs

Knowledge partnering

  • We are knowledge partner for the ThingsCon project Exhibition “Generative Things” that premiered at TH/NGS 2024 back in December and has two more events in April (14-15) and June (14) in collaboration with Master Digital Design of Amsterdam UAS and Waag Futurelab.
  • Iskander is working as a researcher in residency exploring Civic Protocol Economies at the Civic Interaction Design research group of Martijn de Waal.
  • We are partner in Digitaal Sociaal Innovatielab of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
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update

2025: Cities of Agentic Things

In this first post of 2025, I want to set out a theme for the year; “Cities of Things, Cities of Agents; living with agentic things as fellow citizens.”
This theme is a natural evolution from our focus on Things as Citizens, and it intertwines deeply with our ongoing exploration of Cities of Things.

What exactly do we mean by “agentic things”? These are AI-powered objects and systems that possess a degree of autonomy and decision-making capability. They’re not just tools but active participants in our urban environments. It is related to and brings into practice the current discourse on agentic AI and agents that dominate the 2025 predictions for generative AI.

“Things as citizens” has been the guiding concept within Cities of Things from the start. Things with Agency was introduced in the first years of the start of the research program in 2018. These things take a leading role in making decisions, although in collaboration with humans. In line with co-performance principles (Kuijer & Giaccardi, 2018), humans set goals and define the best way to divide the work between humans and AI. After two years of building up relations with generative AI, we can imagine that the AI might even get a role in discussing the goals, as the AI will have more and more initiative from gathered knowledge around the world.

Human-AI partnerships are changing

This is a double-edged sword; we get used to using AI tools as co-workers, as smart interns who can check the first thoughts, but also the entry into a world of knowledge that we never can compile as individuals. At the same time we -luckily- more and more start to value the quality of the output. In the Netherlands, “polarization” was the so-called Word of the Year, but we might easily have “hallucination” as a competitor. We are still finding ways to deal with the new relationships we are building with our AI buddies; can we trust them really? It is the standard routine in starting to use every new tool: defining the trust in output.

The output might still be challenged, the outcome of the collaborations is clearly changing our way of working and thinking. In the spectrum from tool to co-pilot to co-performance we are changing especially the creation of new ideas, of creative writing, and way-finding in the deep forest of information. We are still calibrating these relationships, as a new form is entering with great speed and impact: agentic AI. Are we ready to delegate our tasks to the new agents? Do we have enough agency as humans to steer on the desired outcomes? And overall, will we have enough time to get used to and master this new agentic world?

The impact will be even more substantial when we see the agentic AI become part of the things we use, and when it becomes more of a team of AIs, we need to coordinate and inspire with the right goals. We can expect this to happen on different levels or scales, starting with the tools we use for personal work like writing or searching, to the control of our more and more intelligent home environment, to neighborhood and city level. And our social context will evolve on similar but different levels: from families and team-setting, to our social communities are part of, to politics and geo-politics.

2025 is the year for Cities of Agentic Things

So, in this line of developments, the attention to the role of AI as agents, agentic AI, in the coming years, we would like to express this focus in the theme for 2025: Cities of Things, Cities of Agents; living with agentic things as fellow citizens.

In our core belief, we see the intelligent city as both an opportunity and a challenge in creating just and liveable cities. Next to building knowledge through design fiction and experimental projects, we built a toolkit for expressing the feelings and goals of citizens with the Hoodbot (Wijkbot). Both lines will be infused even more with agentic intelligence.

This is reflected in our activities for 2025. Taking the Wijkbot to a tool for expressing goals with agentic things in your neighborhood, building new knowledge in collaboration with our research and educational partners, and contributing to the exhibition Generative Things to engage with the development of a vision for the future of agentic things in our cities.

Provotyping Generative Things

In 2024, Generative Things were introduced as part of the theme for ThingsCon. As soon as I made my first slide deck on the topic for a presentation at CleverFranke, I noticed how entangled the theme was with Cities of Things. Generative Things will still be an inspiration in 2025, and Cities of Things will remain a contributor to the next steps of the exhibition with “provotypes” of Generative Things by ThingsCon that are planned for the first half of 2025 in collaboration with Master Digital Design of Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Waag, and part of the Amsterdam 750 Future City program.

The driving questions in that program are very much in line with these of Cities of Things: What hidden systems are beyond AI, and how will they drive/influence generative things? What if AI becomes Sneaky AI as part of the things we use? How will we understand the intentions of these new co-performing generative things? How to design for transparency, understandability, scrutiny, and contestability with things? How much of new things do we accept? How to deal with “e-waste”, what are the new supply chains? Can we create regenerative things?

Wijkbots for agentic things

In collaboration with Creating010 and the research on Civic Prototyping by professor Tomasz Jaskiewicz, we have been creating the WijkbotKit as civic prototyping tool, a way to work with citizens to understand the impact of intelligent things in their own (neighbor)hood. The agentic character of these robotic things was always the driving belief, and we took this inspiration both on concrete and more philosophical level in the explorative projects. From Neighborhood Navigators to Rotter-bots, to the social impact in the Afrikaanderwijk.

Building upon the knowledge from the first years of experiments, captured in the article “Between experiments; Leveraging Prototypes to Trigger, Articulate, and Share Informal Knowledge”, we have developed an iteration of the Wijkbot workshop format toolkit that brings extra focus on the ecosystemic embedding and inviting participants to formulate their hopes and fears with that lens. The agentic part of these new robotic things as partners will be an integrated part of the WijkbotKit 2.0.

In half of February, we have planned the first workshop with the new kit. We will also explore possible extensions in the kit to experience the agentic character of the things, both in methodology and in tooling.

Bringing it in Practice; towards new design methodologies

With all our collaborations with universities Cities of Things has been a continuous provider of inspirational assignments. This can contribute to the building of new knowledge to dive deeper into a specific element and introduce the role of robotic things to a new generation of designers and makers. We will continue doing so.

We see a role for Cities of Things to explore the emerged practice of designing for cities of agentic things in new design methodologies and programs and combining the methodology developed for the workshops and research through speculative design and civic prototyping.

Invitation to join our journey

We are looking back at a year with serious steps in the development in knowledge and relevance for Cities of Things. Thanks to all the partners, the students who worked on projects, and the workshop participants. We are looking forward to continuing these collaborations. We invite you to join our journey to express hopes and fears for the cities of agentic things in 2025!

We will keep you posted on the activities: the workshop in February, the activities of the exhibition Generative Things, and more to follow!

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update

2024 wrapped up

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.

One of the Wijkbots makes an appearance at the conference wrap-up.

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”

Sen Lin introducing workshop activity at Salon Dutch Design Week

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!

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update

Exhibition Generative Things at ThingsCon

As part of the special edition of TH/NGS 2024 – Generative Things, an exhibition and design contest was commissioned to invite the design of “provotypes” of future generative things. The exhibition kicked off at the conference in Volkshotel Amsterdam on 13 December, and has an online version too: https://thingscon.notion.site/exhibition-generative-things

Cities of Things contributed in developing the theme.

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field lab Cities of Things Lab010 research

Chapter “Between Experiments” in NADR book

The learnings of developing and applying the WijkbotKit in the last years is captured in a chapter in the book of the Network of Applied Design Research that was published at Dutch Design Week 2024: Applied Design Research in Living Labs and Other Experimental Learning and Innovation Environments. The article is result of the fruitful partnership with Creating010 and especially the research on Civic Prototyping by professor Tomasz Jaskiewicz.

Find the article here: Between Experiments; Leveraging Prototypes to Trigger, Articulate, and Share Informal Knowledge

The digital version of the book can be downloaded via the NADR website.

Abstract

Living Labs are ‘open innovation ecosystems’ (ENoLL, 2024), offering unique opportunities for conducting scientific experiments ‘in the wild’ (Romero Herrera, 2017; Ballon & Schuurman, 2015). Yet, Living Labs also support the generation of other, informal, types of knowledge: often tacit and difficult to capture and share, acquired outside of rigorous academic research frames (Schuurman & Tiinurist, 2017), and comprising insights, ideas and know-how gained through experience, serendipity, and sometimes ad-hoc and playful explorations aaskiewicz, 2021). This chapter focuses on the significant, yet often overlooked, role that prototypes play in triggering, articulating and sharing such informal knowledge. Grounded in the discourse on the role of prototypes in Research through Design (RtD), the chapter brings forth that prototypes are not just valuable as artefacts to be studied through formalised research but are also crucial in supporting the generation of rich, contextual insights, ideas and know-how, sharing them across experiments, disciplines and stakeholders, while often facing the challenge of legitimisation and generalisation of such knowledge.

Jaśkiewicz, T., & Smit, I. 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.

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reflections

New relations in generative things

On 4 June 2024, I gave a talk at an evening on “Designing Intelligent Cultures with Data and AI”, organized by design agency CLEVER°FRANKE from Utrecht (check also their recap). I decided to share my developing thoughts on the emergence of Generative Things, a new breed of things that we foresee happening in a certain form in the research of Cities of Things for some years, but with the rise of the new generative AI could become even more relevant to explore. Especially for designers. My goal for the talk was to give a kind of direction of thinking that -in my humble opinion- is needed to design these new things, or better said, the new relations with these generative things.

As background for a transcript of the talk, I recorded a test run that I did as practice (and timing), and I feed this together with the slide deck to ChatGPT. I then asked to rewrite the first rough breakdown of slides and transcript into a blog post. It did a good job making a summary, and I did the final edit afterward. Below is the result. Let’s start by sharing the slides. If you like to know more, get in contact.

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update

Wijkbot workshop at PublicSpaces conference

On 6 June Cities of Things will be hosting a Wijkbot workshop at the PublicSpaces conference.

On 6 and 7 June, PublicSpaces and Waag Futurelab will organise the fourth edition of the PublicSpaces conference with the theme ‘Taking Back the Internet’. The two-day programme will take place at Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam. Through panels, keynotes, roundtable sessions, lectures, art and culture, we will work our way towards an internet where we set the rules collectively. 

https://conference.publicspaces.net/en

On Thursday afternoon, we will build three Wijkbots with the latest WijkbotKit, inviting the participants to express the role of Wijkbots in our city. Find more information on the workshop here. We will update the results via the Wijkbot website.

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reflections update

April reflections and update

Following the method of last Month, I again asked the AI-intern (ChatGPT-4) to reflect on the different weekly thoughts at Target is New, through the lense of the Cities of Things Manifesto. I continued the conversation a bit with my own feelings about last Month, as an important moment with two long-expected AI-enhanced devices finding their way to customers and reviewers. Humane and Rabbit make different choices in the way they interact with the environment and with the user. The technology and execution are both rather flaky and more of an alpha version, but it gives some views into a future for wearable technology as an extension of our current phone practice.

Here is the conversation, I end with some ‘human’ reflections 🙂

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update

Neighbourhood Navigators and future citizenship

Today -19 April 2024- four teams of students from the master program Industrial Design Engineering faculty of Delft University of Technology will present their first ideas and explorations of the relation of so-called neighborhood navigators for future citizenship as part of the Smart and Social Fest in Rotterdam.

The teams are part of the course Interactive Technology Design and chose Future Citizenship as the overarching theme for this year.

Interactive Technology Design is a project-based course within the Master (MSc) Design for Interaction programme at the Delft University of Technology. At the end of the course students deliver “experiential prototypes” in a public exhibition. The prototypes communicate students’ designs, and enable exhibition visitors to immersively experience the designed products and services.

https://www.tudelft.nl/io/samenwerken/studentenprojecten/interactive-technology-design

The four teams will present their first prototypes halfway through the program during Smart & Social Fest in VONK, the innovation center of the City of Rotterdam.

The Smart & Social Fest features Exploring Future Citizenship, an exhibition showcasing the ongoing creative endeavors of over 100 Industrial Design Engineering students from the TU Delft. This work-in-progress exhibition offers a glimpse into the creative explorations of students that merge AI technology with innovative ideas aiming to redefine urban citizenship.

The exhibition stands as a testament to the creative process — raw, unfiltered, and in flux. It invites scrutiny and critical dialogue, encourages poking and prodding at the boundaries between the digital and the physical. Each prototype and idea is an interrogation of what it means to belong to a city that is rapidly recalibrating to the rhythm of algorithms and data streams.

From the expo description.

We would like to explore whether the Wijkbot can be a proxy citizen in a neighbourhood, and if so, what that means for neighbourhood life. Will a community of civic robots interact on ‘another level’ representing human neighbourhood fabric? Those are some of the questions we had about commissioning the assignment.

In this assignment, the students are challenged to design “Neighbourhood Navigators”, autonomous robots intended to enhance community life by performing daily tasks and fostering social relationships among residents. Imagine robots operating from a neighbourhood hub, undertaking various responsibilities, from grocery shopping to assisting the elderly, thereby becoming integral participants in neighbourhood events and connectors within the community.

The assignment encourages you to think beyond conventional technology design, prompting you to envision a future where technology enhances neighbourhood citizenship, fosters community engagement, and promotes a sustainable and resilient urban environment. Through this project, you will contribute to reimagining how technology can be harnessed to create more inclusive, interconnected, and harmonious urban communities in the near future. In your design explorations you can make use of the “hoodbot” prototyping kit.

Taken from the assignment

We keep you updated on the results!

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reflections update

March reflections and updates

Every week, I post a newsletter via Target_is_New signaling notions from the news and elaborate on one topic triggered by a news item or event I visited. As my frame of view is the City of Things beliefs, it makes a lot of sense to create a monthly post here looking back and combining these thoughts. And it would be nice if I could use the generative tooling.