The UrbanIxD Online Conversation

The UrbanIxD

Online Conversation June 2014 With Tobias Revell, Manu Fernรกndez and Han Pham Hosted by Martin Brynskov

This document is a record of the online conversation that can be viewed on the UrbanIxD project website: www.urbanixd.eu/conversation

Welcome to this online conversation about urban interaction design And thank you to our distinguished guests, Tobias, Manu and Han! (more about them below) Over the next ten days or so we will be discussing the character and relevance of the emerging field of urban interaction design (or “urban ixd�).

I would like to ask you: How do you see urban interaction design as a field, and how do you yourself relate to it, if at all? Is it a necessary field?

The background is the increasing number of ways in which cities are being shaped by digital technologies, media and materials. You have been joining this conversation as part of the UrbanIxD project, and the specific occasion now is the book Urban Interaction Design: Towards City Making which was published (free online) last week.

In this book, the eight co-authors, who come from many different backgrounds, establish what they propose as the FOUNDATIONS of urban ixd, and then they point to five TRENDS which they see as central to the field. The five trends are: Amateur Professionals Reshaping Cities, Rethinking City-Making Institutions, Urban Product and Platform Reciprocity, Sharing Tools for Sharing, Designing for Digital Ownership in Cities.

The core tenet is that a confluence of fields is happening out of necessity, and that the trends manifest themselves through activities and people working together. The book uses a wide variety of cases from cities and organizations around the world to draw up a picture of urban ixd.

The outcome traces an overall outline of emerging city making practices which in some ways are challenging established urban planning.

For further information, see these three diagrams from the book which illustrate (1) the overall confluence of approaches with a traditional departure in Technology, Society and Arts, (2) specific disciplines involved, and (3) methods relating to the field of urban ixd.

Martin Brynskov UrbanIxD project partner, Aarhus University June 17th 2014

Specific disciplines involved in Urban Interaction Design

The overall confluence of approaches with a traditional departure in Technology, Society and Arts

Methods relating to the field of urban ixd

Our contributors:

Manu Fernandez is an

urban strategist, founder of Human Scale City urban agency and author of Ciudades a Escala Humana blog. As a researcher and urban policy consultant for the last twelve years, he has always been involved in projects relating to local sustainability. He is currently focused on three areas: adaptive urbanism strategies to actívate vacant sites, the intersection of digital and social perspectives of bottom-up smart cities and, the link of social creativity and local economic development.

Manu holds a master´s degree in sustainability management and is a graduate in Laws and Economics and is currently working on his PhD on the narrative of smart cities and its impact on public policies.

Tobias Revell was born in a

Hampshire town built around a system of roundabouts in late 1986. His first memory involves filling the doors of a Porsche with sand. He holds a BA Hons in Design for Interaction and Moving Image from the London College of Communication and an MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art from which he graduated in July 2012.

As well as being an internationally exhibiting artist, he's an associate designer at Superflux, tutor in Design for Interaction and Moving Image at LCC, visiting tutor with MA Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art and a researcher for ARUP's Foresight and Innovation in London.

Han Pham is a Future Cities

Anthropologist/Experience Strategist at The Intel Collaborative Research Institute (ICRI Cities). Her focus is the social science layer of designing engaging and sustainable experiences for future cities.

She explores “grounded” futures by using anthropology, psychology, and behavioral science to anticipate, facilitate, and strategise toward future contexts of urban interaction design, particularly trust-seeking, sense-making, and placemaking in cities. She uses a participatory-led approach to explore socio-technical sustainability, emerging cultural techni-quette, and cultural sensing/prototyping.

1: How do you see urban interaction design as a field, and how do you yourself relate to it, if at all? Is it a necessary field?

I guess this field, urban interaction design, is a merge of practices that is happening right now.

In fact, lots of people are doing it without even noticing or even calling it UrbanIxD.

Manu Fernandez: I must start with my own personal experience involved in the UrbanIxD project activities, as it has been one of the first times I work on a direct link with interaction design as a field. Coming from a background on urban policies, sustainability and civic engagement projects, I found myself in a challenging position, as if I was entering an uncharted territory to me. What can I bring to the table? What is this field all about?

I guess this field, urban interaction design, is a merge of practices that is happening right now. In fact, lots of people are doing it without even noticing or even calling it UrbanIxD. As such, it is not constituting anything, but adding glue to approaches and traditions that used to work in silos and in the last few years are discovering each other´s methods and tools to create projects, devices and processes aiming at fostering public life in cities.

This is at least the way I try to find my personal contribution and the way urban studies and urban practitioners (generally speaking, everyone active in understanding the way urban life occurs and the way public policies influence our lives or promoting local projects).

Urban Interaction Design: Towards City Making as a reference text, but also the collaborative process through which it was developed, comprises a well-rounded proposition on how to grasp the coming together process of approaches that find in UrbanIxD their common ground. In this manner, those involved in making the city turn out to be more than the usual suspects, at least in the narrow vision urban planning has tended to understand the question of how to create more human cities.

The experience of living in the city requires a trans-disciplinary outlook to design spaces, buildings, interfaces, services, platforms and any sort of enabling mechanism if we want to succeed in encouraging ownership, appropriation, awareness and engagement in public life in cities Urban life is, in fact, a continuous flow of interactions or, at least, this should be the main focus of urban projects whatever the field or the level of implementation. If cities can be described as life between buildings, the dynamics of social relations are the core interest of urban interaction design projects. These projects can be designed as a particular mix of the three main

components (urban-interaction-design), but always considering the implications of the networked society. This implies that the generalization of technology, the renaissance of public space, the claims for more democracy or the new forms or social activism must be present in any project expecting to be meaningful.

This is, very briefly (and I need to refer to Urban Interaction Design: Towards City Making for further reasoning), how I would need to explore the significance of UrbanIxD. As mentioned before, this confluence is already happening, or at least can be traced through projects, practitioners and organizations getting their hands dirty designing new kinds of urban actions and interventions. In this sense, the question is not whether this field is necessary or not, but how to use it as a compass that guides the city making process in the coming years for citizens to be part of it.

the question is not whether this field is necessary or not, but how to use it as a compass that guides the city making process in the coming years for citizens to be part of it.

2: How do you see urban interaction design as a field, and how do you yourself relate to it, if at all? Is it a necessary field?

Tobias Revell: Like Manu, I have to start with UrbanIxD. This was, for me, the first confluence of those words, particularly the curious ‘x.’ I’ve taught and studied interaction design but to me it has always been a broad and playful field, not the concerned and critical operation of UrbanIxD: A set of tools rather than an ideology or political construct that when not cynically deployed as marketing fodder most often occurs as gimmicky side shows gripping the shirt-tails of 90’s media art. As a friend once remarked - ‘now you can put an Arduino in a box that does a thing and convince people on Kickstarter to fork out for it.’

Of course it encompasses more than that and projects range from arduino-in-a-box stuff to massive city-wide infrastructural interventions.

The ‘urban’ is even more ambiguous. To suggest that a situation in which apparently half the world’s population live is singularly ‘urban’ is fallacy. This word encapsulates the desperately poor to the overwhelmingly privileged. The embedded and defined to the outliers and extremities. It is dormant property investments next to the homeless, austerity cuts next to record profits, road deaths next to new motorways, toxic assets, pollutants and

As a friend once remarked - ‘now you can put an Arduino in a box that does a thing and convince people on Kickstarter to fork out for it.’

Given this, urban interaction design for me is a massive set of tools applied to the largest part of the world.

politics as well as the darling of urbanism - ‘public space.’ I don’t have to point out that no two cities are alike, one would find very little in common between say, Copenhagen and Yamoussoukro save to say they are both ‘urban.’ However, again, UrbanIxD is entirely aware of this fallacy, embracing these failings to ask what else might be done, or more importantly, learnt. I taught the summer school in Split, Croatia last year and found a worldly and critical environment, conscious of not falling into solutionism or hero-speak and viewing the word ‘urban’ in the broadest possible context.

Given this, urban interaction design for me is a massive set of tools applied to the largest part of the world.

Glad that’s clear.

What became interesting to me with UrbanIxD was the ‘critical’ element.

And perhaps this is where it starts to stand out as a nascent field.

What became interesting to me with UrbanIxD was the ‘critical’ element. And perhaps this is where it starts to stand out as a nascent field. It does not seek to impose interventions on unwary populations like some maniacal shadow-thing of network-colonialism: Does not stroll into unguarded neighbourhoods and insist that it Knows What’s Best For You. It is more interested in listening, learning and speculating. Cajoling, goading, occasionally provoking a response that initiates a chain of reasoning in it’s audience (whoever that may be - another matter.)

Then how do I relate my own practice to this? Martin Brynskov showed an interesting diagram at the UrbanIxD summer school, in which the field I most closely associate with - critical design - hugged a far corner of the map of design fields. This seemed to imply some arrogant and jealous guarding of a niche and if there’s one thing I fear and loathe more than any other academic tendency - it’s siloing. For me the potential to open up some of the tools of critical design to wider practices, to allow for some healthy cross-contamination and inter-breeding of tools and ideas holds great opportunity. If nothing else, an opportunity to test these tools on non-gallery application and to see how they fare in the real world.

3: Everybody wants to be a pirate Han Pham: Pirates in My Hood. In my East London neighborhood, home to the wild and hip, the diverse cacophony of the Ridley Road market where butcher stalls jostle with colorful bolts of Nigerian fabric, a ship has moored – a pirate ship.

Unabashedly, right there on the high street – close enough to an organic grocery and within winking distance of a Mexican cantina. The Ship has a single goal: to ransack young minds of cobwebs and fill them with stories of lands unseen. According to the Hackney Pirates (http://www.hackneypirates.org/), “The Young Pirates come to our Ship of Adventures after school – it is a weird and wonderful out-of-school learning environment complete with secret passageways, an underwater cave and a ship’s cat.”

Context is important – the street is an increasingly expensive one; the mom-and-pop shops that give the neighborhood its character are moving out amidst the rising rents reflective of the general surge in London population. Several stores over the past two months have shuttered, despite the increasing bustle of the streets.

Yet, in some way, a charitable venture aimed at increasingly literacy and filled with those unnecessarily scorned dusty relics of a bygone era – Books – has snuck in under the guise of piracy to reclaim a bit of the high street for children, not as future consumers, but of hope.. and well, bookworms. And, in doing so, they also reimagined the city as not a grid of streets or a network of wifi connectivity, but of secret passageways to explore – not just physically, but in those hidden recesses of the imagination harder to reach. Is the future library or media a pirate ship? If so, where will it take us? And why does everyone want to be a pirate? (I do.)

Design for Bursting Cities The current global population of 7.2 billion is projected to increase by almost one billion people within the next twelve years, according to official United Nations population estimates (medium variant, 2012 Revision); and by the middle of the 21st century, the urban population will almost double. This forthcoming, complex challenge of rapid population growth will compound, constrain, and stretch us in ways we cannot even imagine.

I can relate to a few things about urban design from a people-centered perspective: I’ve worked on urban disaster management, hidden health care systems, the future of

And, in doing so, they also reimagined the city as not a grid of streets or a network of wifi connectivity, but of secret passageways to explore – not just physically, but in those hidden recesses of the imagination harder to reach. Is the future library or media a pirate ship?

Urban Interaction design – is it hype, is it a philosophy, or is a way of coming to real terms with designing with and for a living city in flux from people to its cultures and technologies?

education, the changing face of mobility, sustainable cities, and here I am thinking about pirate ships and how they relate to urban interaction design.

Urban Interaction design – is it hype, is it a philosophy, or is a way of coming to real terms with designing with and for a living city in flux from people to its cultures and technologies? My hope is that the ubiquitous, emerging, and (I hope) surprising nature of urban interaction design can rise above the fray of a single design language or singular solution to the urban challenges we will meet in more creative, playful and thoughtful ways. Yes, even disaster management can be playful.

The Uncharted Nature of Change A part of what I think about in my daily work thinking about future cities is not just innovation, but its shadows. In championing new technologies, as an anthropologist, I think deeply about what else we might champion in terms of what we want to sustain and nurture (this is a great New York Times article on the power behind the increasingly threatened art of handwriting http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/ whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html ) and I also think about why people challenge the “solutions” designers may bring into the world.

Urban Interaction Design isn’t a seamless experience – perhaps part of emergent nature of this field will be to reveal the seams, not its seamlessness – to call attention through digital technologies the unique possibilities humans bring: Vulnerability.

Uniqueness Security, being seen. Transparency; rebounding.

Urban Interaction Design isn’t a seamless experience – perhaps part of emergent nature of this field will be to reveal the seams, not its seamlessness – to call attention through digital technologies the unique possibilities humans bring: Vulnerability.

Uniqueness. Security, being seen. Transparency; rebounding.

My focus is often on the changing role and avatar of trust in our hybrid society: the future is not a done deal. We are not impervious or all powerful, despite the promise of ubiquitous computing and analytics. There is a sense of both empowerment and vulberability arising in this brave new world. Beyond the politics of online security, safety is an emotional quantity; a social beast. We need to feel safe, but also be seen – an interesting project from Xuedi Chen & Pedro G. C. Oliveira (https://www.behance.net/gallery/17256769/xpose ) explore how interaction design will weave itself into the things we wear, not just through laws or end user license agreements.

Designing for the Displaced It’s harrowing, the role of being a trust broker, and the innate knowledge that I will always enter as an outsider learning the ropes again, and again – and knowing that the understanding will never be complete; the world is always in flux, mine, theirs.

It occurs to me, wryly, that innovation isn’t a pure thing; it does not just leap free from our minds. It may connect or push forward, but it also displaces. The same happens for cities. As cities grow, they displace.

Urban Interaction Design, if it were to be embodied, is not a perfect-skinned being – it’s scarred and knowing, used to hustling and improvising, mediating between digital and analog, hi-fi and lo-fi, making and making do to create something unexpected (for example, taking over a major cultural institution via data http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/16/hackthe-space-tate-modern ). In a world where certain resources are constrained, sometimes your resources are the inverse of what you might expect: Displacement, Defiance, a breaking down, and a refashioning.

Within the field of Urban Interaction Design, we have to ask, and provoke, what is necessary in the city.

FilmAid International, in its decades-long work in refugee camps across the world, rejected the notion that all refugees needed to survive was the “basic necessities” of food, water, medicine, shelter; through their pop up movie screenings they are redefining necessity – “FilmAid gives people food for the mind.”– Oketayot Hope Sandra, refugee from Uganda Their intro film, with the strapline Projecting Hope (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=fM1HzLVH7R8), pushes this notion of “the city” from constructed ones with health and safety checks to the increasing cities of the displaced, the mobile cities, the invisible cities between borders. What would interaction design be for these cities?

I believe we are both at the beginning and at a crossroads. We are all pirates. Welcome to the conversation of what Urban Interaction Design could be.

Comment: Lara Salinas Hi Han & all (as this is an open reflexion and I would like to invite everyone not just Han to the debate!)

I absolutely agree with your assertion “context is important”, the character of urban spaces is important, and as it has been already discussed it leads us to a people-centred approach to platemaking.

However, a couple of days ago I attended to Cybersalon Manchester, where among other great interventions around the motto “The Future is What It Used To Be”, we end up discussing how “the future” as it has been imagined is the outcome of historical struggles (quite brief summary of the discussion led by Barbook’s Imaginary Futures, in which that context is a historical-political context). We run out of time and closed the discussion with a call to imagine new futures. I was invaded by the pessimistic aftertaste of being, no matter what, trapped in a future that has already being carefully design.

Urban Interaction Design, if it were to be embodied, is not a perfect-skinned being – it’s scarred and knowing, used to hustling and improvising, mediating between digital and analog, hi-fi and lo-fi, making and making do to create something unexpected.

So, as Tobias was asking, (and because I do my best as an urban pirate) I would love to hear more about “imagination”, and what is the role of digital technology (beyond “innovation”).

Many thanks!

4: Urban Interaction Design - the flipside Martin Brynskov: Thank you, Manu, Tobias and Han, for giving us your initial shot (across the bow?) at what Urban Interaction design is and can be as a field, and how you personally and professionally feel related to it.

Hearing these quite positive characterizations, indicating both the need for urban ixd and contours of thoughtful mobilization, I would like to ask of you where you see the flipside of this trajectory. What is missing?

Manu focuses on the confluence of fields, letting new agents into the processes of making cities, essentially saying that we’re all city makers. Tobias, in a similar vein, characterizes the ways of urban ixd’ers as “cajoling, goading, occasionally provoking responses” towards a “healthy cross-contamination and inter-breeding of tools and ideas”. And Han trumpets the pirates’ fanfare and hopes that urban ixd “can rise above the fray of a single design language or singular solution to the urban challenges.”

In short, and unreasonably condensed.

Hearing these quite positive characterizations, indicating both the need for urban ixd and contours of thoughtful mobilization, I would like to ask of you where you see the flipside of this trajectory. What is missing? Certainly the rhetoric may rub against some established professions and, rightfully, earned positions within the processes of urban planning and architizing.

Where are the urban planners? The artists? We the people, the policy makers? Are we all here?

How would you, reflecting on the responses in this conversation, point to challenges within the field of urban interaction design moving ahead?

Comment: Lara Salinas First I would like to thanks Martin, Manu, Tobias, Han and all the team behind UrbanIxD for making this possible.

The conversation so far is quite interesting. It is quite exiting to see the collective and trans-disciplinary effort towards city making (of which I consider myself part).

When I try to explain what I am doing I always get a “mmm… could you put me an specific example?” as an answer. I cannot blame them. I struggle to define my own practice. Although I am not 100% convinced by UIxD (yet), it is a great start. Next time I’ll answer: “I am an Urban Interaction Designer”. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. :) So far UIxD remains nicely vague in some aspects. UIxD seems miles far away from the mainstream smart cities discourse (technology driven), but still, Smart City has been mentioned. Is it inevitable? Has it just be used -as I do quite often- because is a well known concept that helps to create a shared starting point for debate (even if we are not talking about smart cities)?

So far UIxD remains nicely vague in some aspects. UIxD seems miles far away from the mainstream smart cities discourse (technology driven), but still, Smart City has been mentioned.

Is it inevitable?

Manu has emphasised on how UIxD may be about “encouraging ownership, appropriation, awareness and engagement in public life in cities”. Han advocates for designing for otherness, for liminal spaces. I feel absolutely inspired! But then, my first question is: how would be UIxD related to the Smart City (if at all)? shall we forget about the smart city for a moment and maybe say that UIxD is an approach to design for digitally enhanced urban environments, from a people-centered perspective?

Many thanks, Lara.

Comment: manufernandez > Lara Salinas Lara, I join your last sentence, a very precise summary of what it took us five days to work out in the booksprint :-) Of course, there are lots of nuances and elaborations to be discussed but, to me, that´s all about in a few words.

Regarding the “smart cities” thing, I am afraid mentioning it is inevitable. It´s a common place and referring to it is a way to start talking about other options to design the networked city.

But we can get rid of it (the smart city term) soon and extend the framework far beyond it. In fact, in my opinion, there is no smart city vs. urban interaction design confrontation. They are so different in tools, goals, preoccupations, conceptual background,....that thinking UIxD as an alternative to SC may make it dependent (as opposition) instead of an autonomous -but not lonesome- field of practices.

In fact, in my opinion, there is no smart city vs. urban interaction design confrontation. They are so different in tools, goals, preoccupations, conceptual background...

Projects, interventions, installations... may have a well-established rhetoric, but only scratch the surface of what is at stake in urban fields.

5: The litany of an urbanizing world: Manu’s questions for Tobias and Han Manu Fernandez: 1. Tobias’s contribution points out, among other things, a crucial issue on urban challenges related to equality. The litany of an urbanizing world has been spectacularized and designing project in the urban context may be fooled into a critical approaches that do not consider conflicts and clashes. We can even consciously include these concerns when designing new projects in the urban realm, but fail to make it a transformative goal of them. Projects, interventions, installations... may have a well-established rhetoric, but only scratch the surface of what is at stake in urban fields.

Can you think of projects or initiatives that hit the nail on the head on this? Can you think of some sort of criteria to discern the spectacular and the transformative?

It is also a warning not to understand urban interaction design as a coherent, comprehensive, neat and totalizing construct, but as a standpoint to intervene in the messiness of cities.

2. Han’s post can be read as an invitation for urban interaction designers to get their hands dirty. It is also a warning not to understand urban interaction design as a coherent, comprehensive, neat and totalizing construct, but as a standpoint to intervene in the messiness of cities.

Can you give us some examples of everyday life situations in which urban interaction design can be more meaningful for all those pirates?

Comments: Han Pham Hi Manu: You invited me to give some examples of everyday life situations in which urban interaction design can be more meaningful for all those pirates – those who get their hands dirty with doing, not talking, to intervene in the messiness (and interesting realities) of cities.

Clearly, the place is to start with everyday people who do it already in their communities. You said something in your post about how you relate to the field that was very telling: “…lots of people are doing it without even noticing or even calling it UrbanIxD. [T]he last few years are discovering each other´s methods and tools to create projects, devices and processes aiming at fostering public life in cities.”

In London and many other cities, there is a rich and growing trend in government to use more adhoc and transparent ways of codesigning sustainable urban experiences with, or by, citizens – they don’t usually call it urban interaction design; instead they’re simply open challenges to imagine practical (and meaningful) solutions to social problems.

Project Kneehigh (http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/projects/ knee-high-design-challenge) was a recent design challenge led by the Design Council, Guy’s & St Thomas’ Charity, and the London Boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth. Design Challenges are open innovation competitions, in this case for “people across the UK to come up with new ideas for radically improving the health and wellbeing of children under five in Southwark, Lambeth, and eventually beyond,” which will begin to be developed into new services, products, environments (or anything else) that really make a difference.

One of the projects that stood out for me was Crafty Explorers (see their intro video http://vimeo.com/81029490) run by the award-winning geography collective Mission Explore.

Speak about breaking out of silos.

They wove together insights about the lack of affordable early child services in communities and the changing nature of the high street to re-imagine a new social enterprise that could transform shopfronts into community-led and sustained centres that provides families with missions that turn the outdoors into a world of discovery for parents and children.

When you walked into the pilot pop-up shop, you entered a world specifically geared for children’s imaginations, but not meant to strip their parents of their pocketbooks. The children learned about the environment and design by creating their own creatures, given three missions to go on – and zip, out the door they ran, pulling along their parents, to local parks: to observe, to reflect, to listen, to climb, and more. When they came back, they would give an oral “mission report” before triumphantly marking a gigantic, hand-drawn map of the neighborhood with their adventures.

One of the founders told me proudly that a hallmark of the shop is that the children are in and out in less than 10 minutes – so that the kids could get hands on, and get dirty with exploring, noting, sharing knowledge the outside world.

It sounds like a small thing, but it’s not.

Youth health and well-being isn’t only about the children; it’s about reaching the parents and enabling them. The choice to position this as a shop on the high street is strategic: children who are in parks are in parks – the founders wanted to reach those children who aren’t. Couching active, creative play in

In London and many other cities, there is a rich and growing trend in government to use more adhoc and transparent ways of codesigning sustainable urban experiences with, or by, citizens – they don’t usually call it urban interaction design; instead they’re simply open challenges to imagine practical (and meaningful) solutions to social problems.

But most transformative outcomes may show up in the process that occurs in communities after the catalyzing project. What happens next and who is going to operate seem to be main concerns in designing what interaction designs are for.

the physical world creates a set of rich, embodied, shareable knowledge (and curiosity) about their communities that can create stronger connectedness within both the family and the wider community – all for children up to age five. Sustainable enterprise, environmental education, health and wellness – this project speaks to some of the tenets of urban interaction design without even calling it that.

There are a few elements here in bringing urban interaction design more meaningfully to the public: 1. Use everyday words. Words can either invite you in or shut you out. Part of the challenge for urban interaction design, as a field, is to demystify it into everyday language and to make room for people to be a part of designing their own urban experiences.

2. Remember urban interaction design is not just digital – it can be lo-fi or no-fi. Urban interaction design can leap the digital divide, or at least not widen it, by re-envisioning its tools and skillsets.

3. Think bigger by thinking smaller and more specific – don’t be afraid to ask for help from people half your size or even double your brain. :) 4. Connect the dots, even if they’re outside your traditional boundaries 5. Think creatively about business – How can the design sustain itself?

(Manu, this ties in well with your comment to Tobias: “But most transformative outcomes may show up in the process that occurs in communities after the catalyzing project. What happens next and who is going to operate seem to be main concerns in designing what interaction designs are for.”)

Thanks, Manu, for the question. -- Han

I think theories that begin to deliver an understanding of how and why the city works in a certain way have more to offer than interventionist master plans or protracted and distracted projects.

Comment: Tobias Revell I think theories that begin to deliver an understanding of how and why the city works in a certain way have more to offer than interventionist master plans or protracted and distracted projects. The work of Jane Jacobs for instance as well as my recent love-affair with James C. Scott’s work on the project of legibility (I might talk about this in my next post.) Do more for ‘the city’ in terms of actually allowing people to really understand and appreciate the form of it than clever digital gimmicks.

Additionally, a lot of this discussion centres on the fact that we are perceiving something fundamentally wrong with the city that may not actually exist, in case of course it’s a disagreement with the urban context in which case I would get all giddy about

photovoltaics and distributed network technology. No two cities are alike and they have vastly different ‘problems’ if they’re that.

I think the problem of the systematic exploitation of human lives, which is at some root, the cause of most unhappiness in the urban environment, whether by business, data minting or criminal activity, is only ‘solvable’ through large-scale legal and infrastructural interventions over long periods. Again, I can lace caveats all the way through this.

As far as discernment goes, it’s about having a good bullshit sensor. There are loads of examples of interaction design projects created as spectacle and paid for with ad revenue.

These do nothing to help anyone and are perhaps in the long and short, more damaging than had they not existed. I have hundreds of specific examples here.

And then how can you even measure the transformative? Like, what is that measure? Property prices? Jobs? Welfare claims?

Life expectancy?

6: The Systematic Exploitation of Human Lives: Tobias asks the questions Tobias Revell: My turn again. Like Martin, I’m worried about what we’re missing here. We’ve all given a very upbeat and hopeful overview of Urban Interaction Design from our positions of privilege without addressing many of the problems. There are problems of barriers to access and levies. Regardless of the ‘good will’, criticality or consideration of a project, we have to be extremely wary of the fact that urban legal and infrastructural conditions marginalise and even punish large parts of a society.

Efforts to ‘improve’ that part of the urban fabric - in whatever way - will, on the whole, force these levies higher by increasing property prices, demanding more security, instituting new legal frameworks.

What I mean is that, for example, dumping a load of lcd screens in a city as an intervention to help people connect and communicate comes with a load of security, legal, energy and access issues that are often hidden behind the rosy glow of said intervention.

Manu, for you I ask the question you asked me back with some additions. You’ve probably got a better idea of projects or initiatives that are effective than I do; I’d be particularly

I think the problem of the systematic exploitation of human lives, which is at some root, the cause of most unhappiness in the urban environment, whether by business, data minting or criminal activity, is only ‘solvable’ through large-scale legal and infrastructural interventions over long periods. Again, I can lace caveats all the way through this.

I’m worried about what we’re missing here.

We’ve all given a very upbeat and hopeful overview of Urban Interaction Design from our positions of privilege without addressing many of the problems.

There are problems of barriers to access and levies.

Additionally, I think it’s easy to spot and filter out the spectacular, but how do we measure the success or transformative power of a project?

interested to hear any that begin to deal with the systematic failings of the city or the state to provide happiness. Additionally, I think it’s easy to spot and filter out the spectacular, but how do we measure the success or transformative power of a project?

Han, I’m glad you mentioned seams. This is something that the pedlars of ‘big data’ (see also big tobacco, big ag, big pharma, big arms) are beginning to realise is inherent in their business model. Language here becomes particularly important in parallel, (see also the cloud > the [company name] cloud > your cloud > my cloud e.g. the massive, highly-securitised network of fibre optic cables and server centres that works bypass legal and tax regulation). You also begin to talk provocatively about mobile and ‘invisible cities between borders.’ I was wondering if you could expand on a definition for these and how you think they might have a timely relationship with this new and nascent field. comments: Han Pham You invited me to expand on a definition for “mobile and ‘invisible cities between borders” and how you think they might have a timely relationship to the new and nascent field of UIxD.

Urban interaction design is a place to think about reinventing the roles we play in the places we come to, invent, rediscover, and change in a city. I grew up as a child of refugees who remade themselves out of necessity. When one city fell, they found a path in that rupture to another, and were changed by it and changed it.

Like Manu, I also find “myself in a challenging position, as if I was entering an uncharted territory to me. What can I bring to the table? What is this field all about?”

For me, it’ can be a place where outsider meets insider.

Urban interaction design is a place to think about reinventing the roles we play in the places we come to, invent, rediscover, and change in a city. I grew up as a child of refugees who remade themselves out of necessity. When one city fell, they found a path in that rupture to another, and were changed by it and changed it.

With this background, I think often about the power of displacement. In asking about mobile cities and invisible cities between borders, I raise the question of what and who is being displaced, why, and what role do we have in the transition?

Displacement is difficult to perceive until we begin to look for it. Then we see this process, inevitably, and we can raise a lens to the “invisible” (or willfully ignored), and in design for how we relate to it—or interact with it. Cities collide people, contexts.

Perhaps we have a chance to make that collision less painful.

For those who work in imagining future cities, it is simultaneously a building and an undoing. To fashion one’s vision, there is sometimes a dismantling of another vision – or it can raise a question whether a vision should exist in the absence of one.

In this article, Here’s How Vancouver Responded to London’s “Anti-Homeless Spikes, we see a debate unfolding about the

nature of urban infrastructure (or street furniture) as commons, both simultaneously public (“A Bench”) and private (“A bedroom”) (http://mic.com/articles/92463/here-s-how-vancouver-responded-to-london-s-anti-homeless-spikes).

It was a transatlantic response to what occurred in London: “metal spikes were placed outside of a luxury apartment building to curb homeless people from sleeping in the areas at night.”

In Vancouver, public benches were designed to “convert into usable shelters where the backboard lifts up to provide shelter, reading “Find shelter here.” As the authors of the article propose, “RainCity’s benches show that a rampant urban problem can be solved in a civil way.”

At the same time, it is an interesting example of how urban interaction design creates a dialogue not only within the inhabitants of a co-located space, but can challenge across spaces and cities.

The promise of urban interaction design is to perhaps in the word “interaction” to encourage more directly a dialogue at the juncture of this change, both in the incremental and the seismic.

We may attempt to stabilize the connective tissue of cities in the work of urban interaction design, but cities change. Its people change. Cities move, as peoples’ move, and the locus of attention can change, shift, from the present, or, toward the future, which isn’t necessarily always comfortable.

In the news, we understand that there are unprecedented numbers of displaced people, a majority of them children, moving across borders. How do we use urban interaction design to cater to the vulnerable, and the unexpected?

At the same time, we face a time of disruptive financial instability. We cannot consider the public commons as a stalwart resources that will remain without a fight, without a re-envisioning of our relationship to it – and it to us and our lives, not only in the present, but able to survive into the future.

Last year’s urban IxD project CUBA forced us to confront the question of how we finance the public space in times of budget cuts – and that simply passively expecting, or demanding, that services continue without all of us actively engaged in finding a way to sustain what we use wasn’t an answer was a dystopic, but strangely familiar, computerized fiction: (http://vimeo. com/74186790).

This is clearly not the vision we want. But it also suggests that part of creating the future is sustaining it with new models of habitation, interaction, policy, entrepreneurship that revisits old resources and imagines new ones in a way we – literally – can live with.

We may attempt to stabilize the connective tissue of cities in the work of urban interaction design, but cities change. Its people change. Cities move, as peoples’ move, and the locus of attention can change, shift, from the present, or, toward the future, which isn’t necessarily always comfortable.

We cannot simply turn people away at our borders. Urban interaction design is not a binary solution. It asks, how can we understand the reverberating effects of how we interact with the now (the people, the culture, the things, the space) in a way that there can be a future that does not propose spikes, but invites?

We cannot simply turn people away at our borders. Urban interaction design is not a binary solution. It asks, how can we understand the reverberating effects of how we interact with the now (the people, the culture, the things, the space) in a way that there can be a future that does not propose spikes, but invites?

Comment: manufernandez I will start with the latter. Measuring community transformation can be quite tricky and hard to turn into indicators. But I can think of some traces certain project can leave when they operate within inequality contexts.

Learning (whatever we call the process of gaining awareness and capacity to act on) can be a suitable measure. What are the people involved/influenced by the project learning?

Particularly beyond their own expectations and interests. Is the project promoting a broader sense of other people´s positions, interests, and situations?

Sediment can also be a clue. Is the project something that happens and disappears afterwards? You always design with a final time, a final result, a final outcome. But most transformative outcomes may show up in the process that occurs in communities after the catalyzing project. What happens next and who is going to operate seem to be main concerns in designing what interaction designs are for.

Is the project something that happens and disappears afterwards?

You always design with a final time, a final result, a final outcome. But most transformative outcomes may show up in the process that occurs in communities after the catalyzing project. What happens next and who is going to operate seem to be main concerns in designing what interaction designs are for.

A more specific one: replicability. This time, to avoid the risk of designing outsider projects (hit and run?): you appear and you leave, with promoters (leader/initial/initializers not worrying how communities can take ownership of what tries to be an excuse for those transformative impacts. How are projects documented and shared? What strategies to design the projects *really* in a collaborative way with the communities and individuals the projects wants to be relevant?

Regarding your first question about some illustrative projects, I can only think of what I am more familiar with, which tends to be about space appropriation projects. To me, this kind of projects has a lot to do with urban interaction design, though probably they may seem not so tech-intense. I am thinking of Campo de Cebada (http://www.publicspace.org/en/works/g362-el-campode-cebada) and many others (unfair to mention just one, but this is probably the closest one to me of those more acknowledged).

It is an inspiring process on how to work on the crossroads of the conflicts you mention on regulations, institutions/citizens, urban infrastructure as commons, etc. I would also mention mapping projects, again, with lots of examples worthwile mentioning (from Map Kibera http://mapkibera.org/ to 596 Acres http://596acres.org/en/), where the process of mapping through representation in networked maps is an excuse for broader

projects that relate to social awareness, subjective appropriation of places, mobilization for action, etc.

Not sure if these ideas make sense as a concrete answer :-) Comment: Tobias Revell > manufernandez “Sediment can also be a clue.”

This is really interesting as I think it ties in to wider thoughts about technological progress, that in Nick Foster’s words (paraphrased) ‘the future builds up favela-like.’ The deceptive presentation of the Smart City or of corporate-led futures, where the future happens at the same time in one distinct geographical zone is at odds with how this really works, and works successfully - the gradual creeping of piecemeal improvements into daily life at different scales across vast distances.

7: Is Urban IxD the (Wo)Man in The Mirror? Response from Han Han Pham: Michael Jackson is on the radio. The strains of “Man in the Mirror” kickstart my response to Martin’s question about the flipside of Urban IxD: “What is missing? Or, rather, who is missing? Are we all here?” “.. There Are Some With No Home, Not A Nickel To Loan Could It Be Really Me, Pretending That They’re Not Alone? … They Follow The Pattern Of The Wind, Ya’ See Cause They Got No Place To Be…” In reflecting on the three posts I’ve shared in this discussion on Urban IxD, I realise there is a theme linking them: that urban interaction design is not just digital – it can be lo-fi or no-fi.

Urban interaction design can leap the digital divide, or at least not widen it, by re-envisioning its tools and skillsets.

In “Everybody wants to be a pirate” I raise the spectre of urban high streets, small businesses pushed out by high rents and one organisation’s stake in the modern-day black market of

‘the future builds up favela-like.’ The deceptive presentation of the Smart City or of corporate-led futures, where the future happens at the same time in one distinct geographical zone is at odds with how this really works, and works successfully - the gradual creeping of piecemeal improvements into daily life at different scales across vast distances.

… literacy – in order to propose that we consider what is being displaced in our cities, and how do we (re)place them?

In the response to Tobias’ invitation to continue exploring “invisible cities between borders”, I shared the story of Vancouver’s response to London’s “Homeless spikes” in which we see the debate about the fraught and fragile nature of the urban commons sparring across borders, designed into what public benches symbolise. In that article I ask, how do we use urban interaction design to cater to the vulnerable, and the unexpected?

What I found was a courage, at least in rhetoric, of the power in reimagining relationships in the new urban city. What particularly intrigued me were those projects that refused to be swayed by the hegemony of a new paradigm but stayed, swaying yet resolute, in the center of instability – investigating the strange siren call of the illicit.

In the third collaboration with Manu on bringing urban interaction design more meaningfully to the public, we glimpsed the story of an innovative project fostering a more active public life for families in cities – a part of a growing trend in government to use more adhoc and transparent ways of codesigning sustainable urban experiences with, or by, citizens.

However, they don’t usually call it urban interaction design. That project brought together sustainable enterprise, environmental education, health and wellness – speaking to some of the tenets of urban interaction design without naming it so. Looking beyond the project, as Manu suggested, “some of the most transformative outcomes may show up in after the catalyzing project: What happens next and who is going to operate seem to be main concerns in designing what interaction designs are for.”

That post posed the challenge to think creatively about business – How can urban interaction design sustain itself?

While, as Manu suggested, Urban interaction design itself is not necessarily new but a reimagined opportunity to acquaint ourselves with our shared and disparate skillsets, what I observed at the Urban IxD summer school last year in Split, Croatia, among the gathering of 40-odd nascent voices in the field, from urban planners to economists, designers to scientists, was a desire to call into question what future we are making.

What I found was a courage, at least in rhetoric, of the power in reimagining relationships in the new urban city. What particularly intrigued me were those projects that refused to be swayed by the hegemony of a new paradigm but stayed, swaying yet resolute, in the center of instability – investigating the strange siren call of the illicit.

In one of the projects, The Future Cloud is Buried, the team suggested that the collective public of one city decides to recapture the intangibilty of virtualised information by burying “all its local, most valuable data in an off-grid cloud just outside the city.”

The twist, however, was that in “providing [a] meaningful physical interface for future Splitonians, the buried cloud also gives birth to a new pirate-tourism industry as well as a new

drug scene.” Borders, especially those at the sociotechnical edge, bleed. The attempt to keep people out whether in policy, practice, or technological change, propels new strategies of inclusion.

In the posts above, we see urban interaction design not only as a tool for entertainment or media, but projects re-envisioning impacts on the health, the environment, education, crime, ethics, policy of our cities.

I like to focus on analog examples because too often we forget that the bleeding edge of social innovation doesn’t always need to start digitally, although digital means can accelerate those endeavours.

I am inspired by a recent example showcased in the article, “Untouchable to indispensable: the Dalit women revolutionising waste in India” in which the author describes how the city of Pune, India has given an “army of mostly Dalit (‘untouchable’) women the sole rights to collect and recycle the city’s mountains of trash.” In doing so, the hidden infrastructure and industry of a city is coupled with social transformation. “The wider focus has achieved an unthinkable triumph: women from the lowest caste – those who are barred from drinking from the same water tap as others – now interact with the households they service and, for now, have beaten out powerful competitors for the right to collect the city’s refuse.”

“I began to think maybe the law could catch up with changes in society.

That was an empowering For Manu and Tobias both, I would like to ask you to focus on the idea.” Perhaps before the role of women in urban interaction design (current, potential), law, we can imagine how as designers and designed for – and ask you to call attention to some of the specific gendered challenges and opportunities the way we relate to the of our growing cities, from the safety of our streets to the way city, and to each other, urban interaction design might have an impact on the business can reveal, and perhaps of work. In addition to sharing your ideas, I’d also invite you to alter, some of its broken share your questions. seams.

As US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said, “I In the Urban IxD twitter conversation as well as our online conversation, we touched upon the question of how a city sustains itself; asked – what, exactly, is the business of urban interaction design?

began to think maybe the law could catch up with changes in society. That was an empowering idea.” Perhaps before the law, we can imagine how the way we relate to the city, and to each other, can reveal, and perhaps alter, some of its broken seams.

Thank you, Martin, Manu and Tobias, for this chance to think and reflect with you. See you all in Venice.

The Conversation on Twitter This live public Tweet chat took place on the 27th June 2014, and followed on from the online onversation with Tobias Revell, Manu Fernรกndez and Han Pham, moderated by Martin Brynskov.

It is available on Storify: http://tinyurl.com/q9rvzyq

UrbanIxD: Designing Human Interactions in the Networked City A Coordination Action project funded by the European Commission under FP7 Future and Emerging Technologies (FET Open). 2013 – 2014 Project Number: 323687