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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
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.
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 robotsintended to enhance community life by performingdaily tasks and fostering social relationships amongresidents. Imagine robots operating from aneighbourhood hub, undertaking various responsibilities, from grocery shopping to assisting the elderly, thereby becoming integral participants in neighbourhoodevents 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.
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.
At the beginning of 2022, we officially kicked off the project Cities of Things LAB010, shaped together with Creating010 of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and with main partners Afrikaander Wijkcooperatie and Studio voor de Stad (represented by Zeewaardig). To close the two-year project, we will be part of the 10-year celebration of Afrikaander Wijkcooperatie on 10 January at Gemaal op Zuid in Rotterdam. Read more here.
The project’s goal was to create a toolkit for co-designing the future presence of city things in neighbourhoods so that this is driven by the local communities and not by the so-called big tech companies. We have a page dedicated to the fieldlab, find more on the start backgrounds of the project.
This project strives for positive and productive ways of living and working together with citizens with ‘city things’, by designing them together with them, developing competences to organize their lives with ‘smart things’ and thus involving citizens in the design of their own neighborhood in the context of the developing ‘smart city’.
Descriptions Cities of Things LAB010
Early in the project, we developed a basic robot prototype platform based on the combination of a Hoverboard connected to a remote control that powered a platform that makes it possible to experiment with different functions and let you play out interactions of the urban robot with other things and especially people. In a hackathon in April 2022, we tested the platform as a basis for new ideas and civic prototyping, which turned out to work very well. Since then, the kit has been functioning as a platform for both technical explorations (adding sensors and autonomous behaviour) and design exercises for different functions.
The main track was the co-design with a group of local residents of Afrikaanderwijk, coordinated via Afrikaander Wijkcooperatie. In total, 10 so-called thinktank sessions were organised, and the group developed the concept of the Inzamelbot based on the platform. The Inzamelbot is connected to the Grondstoffenstation (Resources Station), which deals with the recycling of resources in the local market. It will play a role in collecting valuable resources from the market.
A second function the Thinktank foresee is collecting and spreading neighbourhood stories. As a conversation starter, a carrier of these stories or other forms. This is something that needs to be detailed.
In total, more than 20 instalments of city things have been made in different projects, both by students in workshops and the think tank. An overview can be found on the dedicated website Wijkbot.nl. The platform is the perfect mix of a defined artefact and an open platform. There is still more to explore in developing the software, and we will fine-tune the workshop. New plans for educational programs are in the making.
At the “Miniconferentie” during the celebrations from 14:00-16:00, we will share our results, and a small exposition will tell more about the project.
On 5 October, we will be at the conference and festival in Hamburg CityClimate meets CreativeCoding to host a workshop with the Wijkbot.
“Autonomous urban robots are starting to appear in European cities, with delivery-, scanning-, cleaning-, advertising-, security-, or waiter- robots being just some examples. The current development of most such robots is driven by commercial interests, with limited consideration for their impact on cities, communities, and ecosystems. In the Cities of Things Lab 010 (https://citiesofthings.nl), we take a different approach by treating urban robots as future co-citizens and advocating for their integration into democratic society and local civic communities.
We’ve created a low-cost kit (www.hoodbot.net) for co-prototyping neighbourhood robots with input from citizens. The resulting prototypes show how robots can become part of and contribute to local communities. We will prototype climate-focused neighbourhood bots for Hamburg’s streets in the workshop. We will explore the opportunities and risks posed by robotics developments in our cities, communities and ecosystems and investigate how such robots can become enablers of bottom-up systemic change.”
As part of the sneak preview of the Grondstoffenstation Afrikaanderwijk we will show two versions of Wijkbot, and specifically the iteration developed in the Cities of Things LAB010 project with the residents of the Afrikaanderwijk. That iteration is named Inzamelbot, as it is part of recirculating resources towards the Grondstoffenstation. Next to materials like paper, plastic, food leftovers, wood, and cans, we also invite residents and other visitors to leave their ideas for Wijkbot.
New AI-endeavours build communities of self-improving multilateral augmented intelligence, as flocks of multi-core AIs improve themselves in continuous self-reflection.
Having AI as co-performers with humans has been the topic more than once, referring to the concept defined back in 2018. In the latest developments of the AI uprise, we see the power of conversational AI in chatGPT and all the followers. It is often perceived as the interface with the AI, the new way of addressing the powers in combination with the magic of tokenised predictive language created through the large language models (LLMs). On top of that, starting from this new implementation of conversations with the machine intelligence, the start of real interactions with the AI emerges and with that, a potential learning loop between the human and the AI.
This post is written in Dutch. Below is an English translation added.
Afgelopen Koningsdag hebben we een nieuw experiment gedaan met de Wijkbot, de prototype-kit van een stadsrobot waarmee we in de Afrikaanderwijk aan de slag zijn. Na afloop van het bezoek van de koning organiseerde de wijk een festival in het park. Met de wijkbot was een zogenaamde Verzamelbot gemaakt die hielp het festivalterrein schoon te houden. Het ontwerp en maken van deze Verzamelbot was gedaan door de bewoners van de denktank Cities of Things Lab 010.
