The technologies of information and communication in all the instances of our daily life modifies the way we live and think. Urban computing, ubiquitous, locative, multimídia and interconnected, generates a large amount of data, resulting in an abundance of information on almost everything in our world. Cities permeated by personal, vehicular and environmental sensors acquire sentient characteristics. A citizen-sensitive city can work with individualized day-to-day strategies. The thesis discusses the role of cities and the complexity of our lives, the interrelationship of hardware, symbolic models and patterns of use (applications), and the design challenges to this global hybrid information ecosystem. It presents netnographic research, through case studies, urban explorations and interviews, where one can observe our presente contemporary condition.
