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:
- February: A Saturday Morning in Meadowlink Commons
- March: The Bench That Knew Too Much
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)
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.
