Updates - Page 4 of 5 - Cities of Things

Signing LoI field lab MUC-AMS 11 Oct

Post author By iskander
Post date October 8, 2021

This press release is sent out by Creative Holland, October 8.

Successful collaboration between Munich and Amsterdam enters next phase with Cities of Things field lab

On 11 October 2011, at the EXPO REAL event in Munich, City of Amsterdam alderperson Victor Everhardt and Clemens Baumgärtner, Head of the Department of Labour and Economic Development of the City of Munich, will sign a Letter of Intent regarding the continued partnership between the two cities on innovation and the creative industry. This signals the joint launch of the ‘Cities of Things’ field lab: a program to identify and test new solutions for urban issues.

This joint field lab follows from the Creative Embassy MUC-AMS initiative, in which Dutch and German creative companies cooperate to develop solutions for the challenges facing society. With these programs, Creative Holland (an initiative of the Dutch ‘top sector’ program supporting the creative industry) aims to stimulate international business development. The goal is to give Dutch creative SMEs a kick-start on the other side of the border.

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Building a collaborative relationship with a travel buddy for multimodal journey planning

Post author By iskander
Post date September 27, 2021

Yeonju Jeon finished her graduation 31st of August 2021. I invited to describe her findings.

Life is a series of choices from a small decision such as choosing what to have for dinner to a major decision that will change the course of life ahead. And we are handing over many simple and repetitive decisions to computers. We used to depict a dystopian future where the world is taken over by machines and robots. To this day, where we get recommended with new content by the algorithm and automatically filtering out spam by machine learning, we are still concerned about the negative impact that technology will bring in our lives. If we can’t stop machines from mimicking what we do, then wouldn’t it be our job to give it the right intention that will benefit us?

reflections

blog – co-performance of human and nonhuman

Post author By iskander
Post date September 13, 2021

Due to my holidays, I write this post a bit later than usual. Welcome to the new subscribers! Every month I take one article in the domain of Cities of Things that trigger thinking about one aspect that is part of the Cities of Things elements of living together with intelligent things in cities that shape our city life so to say. That can be a new insight or a connection to one of the core aspects. This month I like to dive into one of the latter categories. One of the concepts I ran into while doing research at Delft University of Technology is the co-performance as described by Kuijer and Giaccardi in 2018. It reflects on a notion that we grow into a form of collaboration with technology that is based on shared goals, on a certain leveled interest almost. At least that is what I especially take out of it.

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Research – predictive behaviors of vacuum robots

Post author By iskander
Post date August 15, 2021

Last 2nd of August Peicheng Guo graduated with his master research project “Towards an active predictive relation by reconceptualizing a vacuum robot”.

Peicheng not only used the proposed method for designing things that predict, but he also added a couple of valuable models both on the level of relations with domestic products as with autonomous objects in general. Via a Research through Design approach, he developed new insights and brings the knowledge on predictive relations a step further. To illustrate possible future collaborations with objects we use he redesigned the user manual in a guidebook for learning to understand each other’s (human owner and object) intentions.

reflections

Blog – cities of DAO things

Post author By iskander
Post date August 4, 2021

Thanks for subscribing. In this monthly newsletter I dive deeper in one of the articles that relate to Cities of Things that I collected in my weekly updates of last month. This month I explore the relations of DAOs and Cities of things.
Check also the website Cities of Things to be update on latest research and other activities. Like the master graduation thesis from Peicheng Guo on predictive behaviours of vacuum robots.

A lot is discussed about DAOs, the decentralized autonomous organization, and last months a couple of interesting articles passed by. In A Prehistory of DAOs Kei Kreutler is looking into what to learn from different earlier types of organizations: “DAO comes from imagining how features of decentralized technology, such as global digital assets, censorship resistance, and automated actions, will change how organizations operate.” It is mainly an organizational form for shaping organizations and processes to deal with decision-making. A basic element of the DAO is the governance mechanism and operating principles. In further exploration, interesting connections are made with gaming environments and a form of guilds. All focused though on the organization of humans in organizations.

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Rewatch MAB20 symposium

Post author By iskander
Post date July 15, 2021

At the Media Architecture Biennale, this year Cities of Things was invited to organize an embedded symposium. We introduced Cities of Things and the field lab Amsterdam-Munich that we are setting up in collaboration with Creative Holland (internationalization program for the creative industries).

Part of the symposium was a panel with guests: Euiyoung Kim, assistant professor at the Delft University of Technology, Marcel Schreuder, founder of Springtime, and Marthijn Pool, founder of Space&Matter. Julia Christiansen program manager digital transformation of the City of Munich introduced the Munich Urban Colab, also partner in the field lab initiative.

In the panel we discussed the relation of Mobility & Society and the role intelligent citythings might play. You can rewatch the symposium via the website of MAB20, scroll in the program to the 2 July.

reflections

Blog – a metaverse of citythings

Post author By iskander
Post date July 12, 2021

Looking back into the future; the last year I had to think more than once on a project we did back in 2013 on the future of e-commerce; Shopping 2020. It would be nice to have a look into the trends we projected back then to see what became true or not, not to prove ourselves right, but more to learn from the thinking patterns. Thinking about this and exploring the articles of June that might be the base for this month’s look-back update, I could not deny the rise in attention for the metaverse for some time now. A new promise for future forecasters from consultancies especially those with a technology focus. As often, without planning to do, links between the stories pop up… First, let’s go back to the shopping future.

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Podcast iBestuur

Post author By iskander
Post date July 8, 2021

A couple of months ago Iskander was invited to participate in a podcast of iBestuur (part of Automatiseringsgids) discussing Mobility in Digital Future. We discussed the future of mobile technologies and the societal consequences. The podcast is in Dutch and can be listened to here: https://ibestuur.nl/video/podcastserie-digitalisering-op-drift-deel-1-mobiliteit

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Exploring urban farming futures

Post author By Eva van der Born
Post date June 23, 2021

Introduction

There is no place left on earth that has remained untouched by humans. We are living in the Anthropocene; an unofficial geologic epoch, yet commonly used term to describe the time wherein the impact of humankind on the planet is substantial. We have become the single, most dominant species on the planet, causing global environmental and ecological changes. One of these changes (though not the only one) is global warming. Ecological theorist Timothy Morton deems global warming to be what he calls a hyperobject: an object that exists on too large of a scale for human perception. As a result, we can only observe the effects of the problems such as extreme weather, melting glaciers, a reduction in crop yield, etc. but never grasp and “prove” the object as such [1].

reflections

Blog – communities of collaborative AI

Post author By iskander
Post date June 7, 2021

This post is a monthly update that I have sent to all subscribers of the Cities of Things newsletter.

Looking back at last month there were two interesting articles that deserve a closer look in relation to the Cities of Things. It connects to some of the basic concepts, and triggers deeper exploring that I probably do later.

One of the core concepts that inspire Cities of Things is the relationships we as humans have with the technology that gets more agency, will make their own decisions, will have more responsibility in taking decisions. The things that are becoming citizens. Things are still representing systems of designed agency, often by organizations. They might however become more learning creatures on their own. We strive for a harmonious society living together with these things, where we can perform in co-performance with the things reaching a shared goal, using each-others best characteristics.