AN INTER NATIONAL EVENT
ABOUT THE IMPACT OF DESIGN
THE DESIGNER IS A GAME CHANGER 2014 — SELECTED WRITINGS
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4 24 E HARD BIT OF H T THE TIMES THEY THE R O F Y IS THAT M ARE A– CHANGIN’ CHANGE O N rs AND SO AREECCO signeWE HAVE TO THINK an de crisis ? DESIGNERS save the DIFFERENTLY Richard van der Laken
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WHAT DESIGN CAN DO!
D E T R O F CRU 3
S E M I T E H ’ T N I THEY NG A H C – A E A ND S R A O AR DESIG E NERS RICHARD EN VAN DER LAK 4
INTRODUCTION
NEW DESIGNER As marketplace mechanisms change in response to pressure exerted by the crisis, the best qualities of designers come to the fore. Government, business and society must embrace those qualities. In 1995 I graduated as a designer from an art academy that focused on a student’s individual expression. What counted was your attitude to society, your relation to content and form, the nature of the commission, and the technique you wanted to apply. That technique was, obviously, offline. There was a computer lying around in some classroom, but almost nobody knew how it worked. As a prospective graphic designer I was forever collecting visual material: books about everything from plants, birds and racehorses to cars, countries and cities, as well as the most obscure magazines. Why? To build up a stockpile of images I could always dip into when commissions rolled in. Those images would guide my work. If I wanted to design a poster depicting a five-legged WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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sheep, I’d comb my archive in search of exactly that image. Naturally enough, I never found that sheep, but I did come across nuclear explosions, Elvis and Nixon, women with moustaches, sleek fighters in shiny Thai boxing shorts and lots more. Those finds fed into my work and allowed for plenty of chance. Now that’s turned a full 180 degrees. Type in ‘sheep with five legs’ and Google instantaneously presents you with pages full of precisely those pictures. DESIGNER AS ENTREPENEUR It’s but a small example of a world that has changed beyond recognition over the past two decades, and nowhere has the change been so extreme as in the graphic industry. Yet no sector has escaped the effects of the digital revolution. And while amazing things have become possible, there have been plenty of victims. Remember that company called Kodak? It used to employ 140,000 people. The crisis that’s been dragging on for six years now often triggers sombre thoughts. Will any of that work ever return? The good news is that the crisis, combined with digital developments, gives 6
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us a perfect reason to explore the potential of the Designer as Entrepreneur. That is somebody who can solve old problems in new ways. Because, more than anybody else, he unites creative thinking with an ability to translate ideas into products. Thinking up a FairPhone that contains no corrupt natural materials is one thing, but designing, producing and marketing it successfully is two, three and four. Bas van Abel’s Dutch company did all four. Creative industries in the Netherlands have always enjoyed the warm embrace of their government and its institutions, but those days are gone as government involvement declines. What’s more, in sectors like graphic design, architecture and product design, the patrons of old have disappeared, some of them for good. NEW OPPORTUNITIES Shaking up the situation so radically like this means that surprising things are sure to happen. The crisis offers designers an opportunity to expand their role. They can take on the task of problem solving and translating, and they can pose new questions, unearth ‘new problems’. Designers always see WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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problems as challenges, moments to burst out of the starting blocks. This demands they enjoy a free role, however, which in times of crisis is of course ‘a dilemma from hell’. Designers, therefore, have to take matters into their own hands. That’s precisely what happened in the hotel business, where nobody had given serious thought to the emergence of a new type of traveller: the ‘mobile citizen’ who’d had enough of waiting for services he’d never asked for in the first place. What this mobile global citizen needs is affordable luxury in inspiring surroundings. So Concrete—a Dutch design office—came up with citizenM, which is now a global brand. In his book The Great Reset (2010) Richard Florida writes about the crisis and its healing effect. That was the case back in 1929 when the Wall Street Crash sparked ‘Fordism’, a way of making expensive products available and affordable for mass production. New patterns of consumption and new concepts of ‘ownership’ are now also set to change the property world, food industry and automobile sector for good. New forms of infrastructure will make people, 8
INTRODUCTION
goods and ideas more mobile and faster. Communication in our network society has made consumers more vocal. If they think something is a good idea, they can assume the role of investor. FairPhone raised more than eight million euros from consumers before a single smartphone had been made, for the simple reason that people believed in the designer’s idea and the idea of social enterprise: ‘a seriously cool smartphone that puts social values first’. “ T he crisis offers designers an opportunity to expand their role. They can take on the task of problem solving and translating, and they can pose new questions, unearth new problems.” GAME CHANGERS Influential factors are the realization that old solutions are no longer adequate, that natural resources are becoming scarce, that consumers place a premium on corporate responsibility and long for transparency, and that the new digital infrastructure opens up new horizons in terms of speed and especially interactivity. And the first to scan those horizons are often newcomers and outsiders: game changers. WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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These game changers are turning things on their heads, most of them from positions as outsiders. Apple took the music and mobile phone worlds by surprise with the iPod and iPhone. For Nokia and Ericsson that came as a bolt out of the blue. They didn’t see it coming. The same applies to the worldwide success of Airbnb, the ‘home sleep’ service that has turned the international hotel and tourism sector upside down. I deliberately cite these examples because, in both cases, creatives and designers played pivotal roles. Apple conquered the world not only with wonderful devices but also with an unbeatably user-friendly and innovative combination of shared devices, software and content — something that Nokia and Ericsson had never even contemplated. Joe Gebbia, founder of Airbnb, is himself a designer, as is evident from everything about Airbnb. It is beautiful, clear, smart, snappy, and everybody understands it. And once again, the Hiltons, Holiday Inns and Marriots of this world didn’t see it coming.
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INTRODUCTION
3D PRINTED HOUSE These are just a couple of examples of global success stories, but small initiatives are equally important. The current economic crisis is also forcing architects to adopt another approach. Amsterdam-based office DUS is searching for new positions and collaborative partners, a way of working and thinking that has already found expression in its design for a 3D-printed canal house. Together with glues and coatings producer Henkel, which is developing an innovative and sustainable 3D-printing material, and construction partner Heijmans, which is exploring construction techniques in the area of 3D printing, DUS built giant 3D printer. And then you have people like Daan Roosegaarde, who is busy punching holes in the smog above Beijing. And me? Each year, together with a group of designers, I organize an annual international conference about the impact of design. It’s a new way of satisfying our hunger for collaborating, editing, interpreting and designing content.
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LINKING IDEAS AND IDEALISM It’s true that designers cannot solve all the world’s problems. But while the old economy was certainly never going to clear away the smog, Daan Roosegaarde is. It’s a typical example of linking ideas and idealism to action. That is the great quality of the Designer as Entrepreneur. And it is precisely this quality of designers that is underestimated. When Bas van Abel came up with his FairPhone, everybody said he must be out of his mind to take on Apple and Samsung. Today he’s already sold 25,000 phones and another 50,000 are on the way. True, Van Abel is not going to solve the problem of corrupt mineral mines in Congo, and he doesn’t claim he will either. But he is turning the telephone—there are now more of them than people on the planet— from an abstract, luxury gadget devised by Californian nerds and screwed together by underpaid Chinese workers, into an object you can relate to. He is restoring the designer-producer-consumer relation we had completely lost touch with, a loss that partly explains the huge waste of natural resources and transport kilometres.
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The beauty of it all is that the FairPhone is no pipedream but a commercial success. It was selling even before it came on the market. Concrete is bringing its citizenM concept to London, New York, Paris and Asia. And it all happens under the adage: ‘If the assignment doesn’t come to us, we’ll just go out and create it ourselves’. The Designer as Entrepreneur is now everywhere, adding a contemporary twist to the power of imagination. To continue Florida’s line of thought, good designers will change our environment, mobility, goods, ideas, industry, jobs and our whole way of living. How right he is. —Richard van der Laken Director, What Design Can Do
Richard van der Laken is director of What Design Can Do, and co-founder of De Designpolitie, a graphic design studio based in Amsterdam
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NEW S N G I S E D ON
BIOLO GY RA D N A ALEXGINSBERG DAISY
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NEW HUMAN Now that we enter an age in which we can design biology, the question arises whether the living machines we create should be considered as either natural or unnatural. ‘Are synthetic organisms any different from the life forms they once were or draw on? If they do diverge, where do we classify them within the tree of life?,’ Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg asks in the book Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature, published earlier this year. Her answer: the tree of life deserves an extra branch, the ‘Synthetic Kingdom’. We may have long designed with biology, but synthetic biology is proposing the design of biology. This may not be just the iteration of nature: the selective breeding of plants or animals or another manufacturing revolution this time powered by biotechnology. It suggests a fundamental change in the things we consume. Biology becomes more than a material ripe for exploitation; it becomes both software and hardware for manufacturing; WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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a toolbox for a new generation of designers mixing and matching components more akin to computer programs and components. The synthetic chemical age and its lurid plastics may have been an interlude as we return to an era of biological materials. How might synthetic biology’s products fit into our classifications of nature and the designed products of culture? In the 1970s, recombinant DNA—the ability to cut and paste genes from far-flung parts of the living kingdoms—sparked a stillcontinuing debate: Is this merely an extension of existing biological design or something new? Now, it is claimed that synthetic biology again offers a novel way to fashion biology more successfully into a tool for mass production, differentiated from the bespoke solutions of genetic engineering. Some academic researchers describe synthetic biology as revolutionary, which may help attract funding, whereas those in industry may prefer to call it an evolution, to keep it within existing regulation. I would argue that it is both. Although the technology builds on earlier ones, synthetic biology and its design of new systems and organisms presents novel dilemmas. New kinds of products, 16
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from rubber-producing microbes to bacterial computers, are prototypes for a different twenty-first century design, breaking our existing relationships with the things we consume. “ A s much as we impose our design on them, living machines, such as fuelproducing bacteria, are more loyal to evolution than human aspirations.� PROGRESS OR EVOLUTION These designs may be unlike any we have previously known. Biology is being remodeled into a design discipline in the name of progress, but progress and evolution follow different rules. Progress in technology is forwardlooking, toward a future state of perfection. It also has a single, fixed-point perspective: that of the human. We even like to imagine ourselves as products of progress. Consider the linear improvement in the (incorrect) classic trope of human evolution, man striding off the page into the future, away from those hairy apes. Evolution, however, responds to context, not intention. Evolution connects all living things; as much as we impose our design on them, living machines, such as fuel-producing bacteria, are more WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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loyal to evolution than human aspirations. Nevertheless, technological progress and evolution can align. Darwin noted that “selection by humans should be understood within the context of natural selection.” Domesticated dogs, bred for diverse human needs are still subject to the rules of natural selection. We humans are similarly co-evolving with our environment and technology and tools, further weakening the notion of the nature/culture divide. We may have got up off all fours and walked, but as long as we exist, we continue to evolve, too. As such, any products of synthetic biology will be intimately bound up in our own nature. Nature is a human construct, and so too is the tree of life, the organizational tool we use to make sense of biology’s diversity. The tree itself is always changing; its taxonomies are regularly reorganized and debated according to prevailing scientific understanding. Shifting from Linnaeus’ two kingdoms in 1735 to Carl Woese and colleagues’ three domains in 1990, some experts even argue that the tree is “dead” and that life in all its varieties is better represented as a fuzzy ball. Certainly, the tree’s simplicity masks nature’s many complexities: agency, life, death, 18
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reproduction, combination, symbiosis, selfassembly, diversity, noise, context, emergent properties, and interaction with other living things. Biology is, ultimately, focused on survival. Such complexities are at odds with engineering ideals of control and simplicity. NATURAL OF UNNATURAL As living things become design objects, we will have to consider the strategies design has developed to build its own successful role in consumerism: like function, form, desire, uniformity, obsolescence, and aesthetics. Questions that design has happily ignored become essential to consider, from life spans to a product’s relationship with nature itself. Synthetic biologists propose technical design features—watermarks for identification, kill switches for self-destruction, or special guards to prevent horizontal gene transfer— to address the marriage of living things with designed products. If these new features are successfully integrated into biology, will it differ from the “natural” biology that already exists? Can we perceive living machines as either natural or unnatural, or do they demand a new category?
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Synthetic biologists take a variety of approaches to make use of biology’s diversity, defining design in different ways as they refactor, mix, digitize, and simplify it. The protocell—a biochemical machine assembled from scratch (the “bottom-up” approach)— is designed, perhaps more clearly than any other synthetic biological organism. But engineered bacteria modified from the “top down” are a more complicated prospect. Designed genetic circuitry is a mix of novel or redesigned DNA originally “copied” and “pasted” from other existing organisms. Once inserted into a naturally occurring biological chassis, the modified bacteria may vary only very slightly in terms of percentage change from wild types, but human design dominates the cell’s function from our perspective. Self-assembling and self-reproducing, its progeny may not be crafted by human hands or human machines. But once the cell performs its designed function, the whole is labeled “designed”; a living machine is made. The redesign of the DNA code itself marks another approach. Jason Chin’s lab at the University of Cambridge is one of several around the world seeking to invent a novel, 20
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parallel biology by developing an alternative code to DNA for biology to “run” on. Proponents of these “orthogonal” systems suggest that they may be easier to subject to human intention and to prevent from interacting undesirably with nature. “Orthogonal” systems may be biological, but they are products of human design. SYNTHETIC KINGDOM Are these types of synthetic organisms any different from the life forms they once were or draw on? If they do diverge, where do we classify them within the tree of life? We may have to insert an extra branch into the tree to categorize them: a Synthetic Kingdom for designed and modified organisms that don’t fit elsewhere. The Synthetic Kingdom is an organizing device that mirrors synthetic biology’s ideology, systematizing a new nature fashioned by engineering logic and its rationalization of the complexity of living systems. When I first designed this extra branch, I saw it conceptually akin to an engineering solution to an engineering problem. It was intended as a tool to spark debate over our understanding of bioengineered organisms. It has proved useful: Scientists often comment WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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to me that it is attached in the wrong place. “It might be better placed coming out of a branch, not at the root,” or, “How about it as a separate tree, or a cloud, or as networks of spaghetti,” they say. Having such discussions about a fiction is illuminating: To me, it illustrates how inviting a suspension of disbelief helps us to imagine a different worldview. That reasoned discussions prompted by a fiction can usefully address an issue is rewarding; the resulting iterations informed by these conversations help to raise new questions. Whether the branch should be smaller, differently placed, or more spaghetti-like, the Synthetic Kingdom itself has been viewed as veering between the critical and the celebratory. Have I have given synthetic biology a kingdom of its own, effectively validating it and enforcing the separation between nature and culture for future products of synthetic biology? I see it differently: The Synthetic Kingdom puts our designs back into the complexity of nature, lessening the distinction between “our things” and “our selves.” Acknowledging this connection between nature and what we design may allow us to design “better.” The modernist designers
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of the twentieth century argued that in terms of beauty, form followed function. For synthetic biology, the matter and meaning of designed things converges. Our greatest challenge may be to acknowledge that the design rules for biology are unlike those for any other material. Human intention may not be enough to overcome evolution. Synthetic biology’s designs on nature require us to adapt our understanding of design, the natural world, and life itself. With the prospect of change comes the opportunity to improve our thinking. This essay is taken from the chapter ‘Design as the Machines Come to Life’ by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg in Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Jane Calvert, Pablo Schyfter, Alistair Elfick and Drew Endy, The MIT Press, London, 2014.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a Londonbased designer, artist and writer and a Design Fellow on Synthethic Aesthetics at Stanford University
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THE HARD T U O B A G N I TH CHANGE G N I V A H IS TO THINK Y L T N E R E F F DI ITH W W E I INTERV RMSTRONG A RACHELAS VAN LIER BY B
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NEW RESEARCHER Imagine a building covered with a biological paint made of protocells that bind CO2 while developing a beautiful limestone coat. It would mean the building would contribute to the solution to climate change at the very place where the problem originates: in the city. Designer, scientist and sustainability innovator Rachel Armstrong investigates such ideas in a new approach to building materials, called ‘living architecture’. On the brink of design, architecture and science, she creates open innovation platforms, exploring building practices that incorporate properties of living systems. What is your message to designers? ‘I think there is a really interesting opportunity in design right now. We live in an age where there is a lot of uncertainty and what design can do is provide an experimental platform from which we can start to map and explore new ideas. A platform where possibilities may be explored without having to fix them in empirical WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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results as would be the case in science. Design is creating a fabric of possibility, because design is evaluated through different systems. And it is also introducing a cultural and creative agenda that hasn’t existed before in terms of new technological development. ‘Symbiotica are an example of this new context. In 2004 artists in Australia presented an installation called ‘Victimless leather’ that exited people about the possibility of working with meat products without animals suffering. Now, they didn’t solve that. What they did was that they created a very engaged provocation. And now, about a decade later, we have actually got the first victimless meat burgers, and Andras Forgacs in Canada is creating leather that is made from tissue culture cells. In some ways design and art have created the conditions for innovation. And I think that that’s the change.’
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So designers don’t even need to understand all the scientific details of emerging technologies? They are free to imagine things. ‘Yes. Obviously design needs to understand what technological landscapes are opening up right now. Particularly in the Nano, Bio, Information and Cognitive or NBIC technologies. Those were earmarked by Roco and Bainbridge, two American researchers who said that if these emerging technologies come together on a platform it will change the way how we work and it will have impact both economically and socially. ‘This idea of NBIC convergence is creating a context in which design is really incredibly relevant. This is where visionary context and also cultural desires can really start to shape the kinds of combinations that are possible. Design engagements can help us to see something that we didn’t see before. They are provoking. Provocation isn’t the same as technological innovation, but it can lead to it. It can make us think differently. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing then becomes a cultural and a social judgement.
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‘Governments are increasingly investing in applied technologies so the opportunities for blue sky research are actually decreasing, which is even more important to keep that space open. Because otherwise things will all get very functional. We keep on making widgets for climate change, without even asking the question: Is fixing climate change a worthwhile thing to do? Can we fix climate change? Should we fix climate change? And is climate change the thing we should be fixating on anyway? But governments don’t really make their mind up about the value of that.’ What would be the alternative? ‘Stand out culturally. Technology provides a fix to things. I’m not sure that climate change is fixable. And even if it was, would we have the budget with which that fix could be distributed fairly and equally to everybody? ‘The alternatives are actually to stop taking away power from people in terms of their cultural and social environments. And re-empower them to adapt, change and respond to events. So for example in Venice the high water has been more frequent over the last half a century and what we see is 28
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beautiful Venetian women in designer clothes putting plastic bags over their legs and walking on these threshold tables. That is fine. Accepting that in the wet months ground floor living spaces are going to be flooded might be cheaper than trying to build great big barriers.’ Still, one of your projects envisions a carbon dioxide absorbing paint for the exterior of buildings, which to me sounds pretty much like a problem fixer. ‘Yes. That came out of an investigation into an emerging technology asking what that technology could potentially do. It helped to get peoples attention. But we actually looked at it in a deeper way when we explored how that system might accrete materials as well as dissolve carbon dioxide to create a broader base for the foundations of Venice, helping to prevent the city from sinking so fast. Our idea with the paint was that it would be an indicator for letting the person in the house know that the paint, by the change of its colour, had caught that carbon dioxide. It was more a form of building citizenship than that it was a strategy for sinking heaps and heaps of greenhouse gas.’
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Are you optimistic about how things evolve and how design and science are coming together? ‘Yes. I’m not saying it is trouble free. But I’m optimistic because I think this is an incredibly exiting time. I think that there are a number of things that are changing the conditions of our existence and our practices. After a generation of digital natives we now experience a world that is complex. We are dealing with systems and flows and relationships that are existing across previous boundaries of disciplines, geographies, cultures or languages. ‘The erosion of these boundaries allows us to have a different kind of thinking, where we start to connect things as opposed to reduce and analyze them into specialist practices. This is encouraging people to think in a different way. ‘Concurrent with that is a growing global awareness of the condition that the earth itself is also changing in terms of the ecological context. These ecological notions are extremely important, because they speak to this different way of thinking. It is creating a platform that I would want to describe as a neo-renaissance, where a cross pollination 30
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between disciplines is possible in an accelerated rate like in the Renaissance, due to 21st century technology. “ We are witnessing a neo-renaissance in which a cross pollination between disciplines is possible in an accelerated rate like in the Renaissance, due to 21st century technology” ‘So I think that there are transformative possibilities but the first thing that we need to do is think differently. And that is the hard bit. Someone like Slavoj Žižek says that it is harder to think about the end of capitalism then about the end of the world. So how do we step outside of these very persuasive ways of thinking. We are thinking of an existing world, while we want to build a new one. And that is why I think why design is so important, because science doesn’t do that easily. The thing that has the power to change things is the cultural aspects.’ Are you working on new projects? ‘I’m applying for a couple of research grants and one that I’m really exiting about WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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is using robotics and plants as a way of speeding up the evolution of plant behaviour. Plants work with a chemical sensor and motor system, so they detect changes slowly. But if we couple that to electronic sensors that look remotely for them, we are going to turn our plants into super cyborgs that potentially can have communications amongst themselves of the kind that they are already having but in a faster way. That could accelerate the evolution of plants in dealing with stressed environments whereby their survival is absolutely necessary for the persistence of our soils or to stop desertification. ‘The idea is to see if we can couple these systems to increase the resilience of certain plant ecologies, particularly through the behaviour of so called mother trees. These are very sophisticated systems that use fungi as well as their root systems to support other trees in the area for reforestation. We are trying to bring some of these ideas together. Again that speaks to the NBIC convergence.’
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Is funding for these kinds of projects difficult? ‘The EU’s Horizon 2020 program has been quite inspiring, particularly for blue sky science. I was very exited when I saw potential in the call. So I do take my hat of to the EU, they are trying to make the process easier. We will see how the application goes. It did give us the space to make this kind of proposal. I entered into fundamental science rather than design, but I think designers have a role to play in these fundamental science calls. And I think that there is a great opportunity to some very interesting things. Again it is about building teams and networks, as Horizon 2020 does ask for interdisciplinary teams. Essentially we build meaningful relationships between disciplines.’
Rachel Armstrong is a 2010 Senior TED Fellow and co-director of the Advanced Virtual And Technological Architecture Research group at the University of Greenwich
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T N E I B AM INTELL– IGENCE S E T A E R C SMART CITIZENS H CARLO RATTI WUIT DEL MATTHEW CLA
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NEW CITIZEN In his role as director at MIT Senseable City Lab, Italian architect Carlo Ratti headed the team that developed the Copenhagen Wheel. The smart wheel captures energy from cycling to give the cyclist a little boost when needed. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time. In this article Carlo Ratti and his co-worker Matthew Claudel describe the changes that occur in cities, old and new, under the influence of ambient intelligence and sensing networks. What was empty space just a few years ago is now becoming New Songdo in Korea, Masdar in the United Arab Emirates, PlanIT in Portugal—new ‘smart cities’, built from scratch, are sprouting across the planet. Traditional actors like governments, urban planners and real estate developers, are, for the first time, working alongside large IT firms—the likes of IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. The resulting cities are based on the idea of becoming ‘living labs’ for WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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new technologies at the urban scale, blurring the boundary between bits and atoms, habitation and telemetry. If 20th century French architect Le Corbusier advanced the concept of the house as a ‘machine for living in’, these cities could be imagined as inhabitable microchips, or ‘computers in open air’. The very idea of a smart city runs parallel to ‘ambient intelligence’—the dissemination of ubiquitous electronic systems in our living environments, allowing them to sense and respond to people. That fluid sensing and actuation is the logical conclusion of the liberation of computing: from mainframe solidity to desktop fixity, from laptop mobility to handheld ubiquity, to a final ephemerality as computing disappears into the environment and into humans themselves with development of wearable computers. It is impossible to forget the striking side-by-side images of the past two Papal Inaugurations: the first, for Benedict XVI in 2005, shows the raised hands of a cheering crowd, while the second, for Francesco I in 2013, a glimmering constellation of smartphone screens held aloft to take pictures. Smart cities are enabled by the atomization 36
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of technology, ushering an age when the physical world is indistinguishable from its digital overlay. SENSING IS THE KEY The key mechanism behind ambient intelligence, then, is ‘sensing’—the ability to measure what happens around us and to respond dynamically. New means of sensing are suffusing every aspect of urban space, revealing its visible and invisible dimensions: we are learning more about our cities so that they can learn about us. As people talk, text, and browse, data collected from telecommunication networks is capturing urban flows in real time and crystallizing them as Google’s traffic congestion maps. Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual’s exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen Wheel developed by new startup Superpedestrian. Even trash could become smarter: the deployment of geolocating tags attached to ordinary garbage could paint a surprising WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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picture of the waste management system, as trash is shipped throughout the country in a maze-like disposal process—as we saw in Seattle with our own Trash Track project. Civic action Today, people themselves (equipped with smartphones, naturally) can be instruments of sensing. Over the past few years, a new universe of urban apps has appeared— allowing people to broadcast their location, information and needs—and facilitating new interactions with the city. Hail a taxi (Uber), book a table for dinner (OpenTable), or have physical encounters based on proximity and profiles (Grindr and Blendr): real-time information is sent out from our pockets, into the city, and right back to our fingertips. In some cases, the very process of sensing becomes a deliberate civic action: citizens themselves are taking an increasingly active role in participatory data sharing. Users of Waze automatically upload detailed road and traffic information so that their community can benefit from it. 311-type apps allow people to report non-emergencies in their immediate neighborhood, from potholes to fallen tree branches, and subsequently organize a fix. Open Street Map does the same, enabling 38
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citizens to collaboratively draw maps of places that have never been systematically charted before—especially in developing countries not yet graced by a visit from Google. BIG DATA These examples show the positive implications of ambient urban intelligence, but the data that emerges from fine-grained sensing is inherently neutral. It is a tool that can be used in many different applications, and to widely varying ends. As artist-turned-XeroxPARC-pioneer Rich Gold once asked in an incisive (and humorous) essay: “How smart does your bed have to be, before you are afraid to go to sleep at night?” What might make our nights sleepless, in this case, is the sheer amount of data being generated by sensing. According to a famous quantification by Google’s Eric Schmidt, every 48 hours we produce as much data as all of humanity until 2003 (an estimation that is already three years old). Who has access to this data? How do we avoid the dystopian ending of Italo Calvino’s 1960s short story ‘The Memory of the World’, where humanity’s act of infinite recording unravels as intrigue, drama, and murder? WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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And finally, does this new pervasive data dimension require an entirely new city? Probably not. Of course, ambient intelligence might have architectural ramifications, like responsive building facades or occupanttargeted climates. But in each of the citysensing examples above, technology does not necessarily call for new urban space—many IT-infused ‘smart city initiatives’ feel less like a necessity and more like a justification of real estate operations on a massive scale, with a net result of bland spatial products. SMART CITIZENS Ambient intelligence can indeed pervade new cities, but perhaps most importantly, it can also animate the rich, chaotic urban spaces d’antan—like a new operating system for existing hardware. This was already noted by Bill Mitchell at the beginning of our digital era: “The gorgeous old city of Venice... can integrate modern telecommunications infrastructure far more gracefully than it could ever have adapted to the demands of the industrial revolution,” (e-topia, 1995). Could ambient intelligence bring new life to the winding streets of Italian hill towns, the sweeping vistas of Santorini, or the empty husks of Detroit? 40
ESSAY
We might need to forget about the flying cars that zip through standard future cities discourse. Urban form has shown an impressive persistence over millennia—most elements of the modern city were already present in Greek and Roman times. Humans have always needed, and will continue to need, the same physical structures for their daily lives: horizontal planes and vertical walls (no offense, Frank O. Gehry). But the very lives that unfold inside those walls is now the subject of one of the most striking transformations in human history. Ambient intelligence and sensing networks will not change the container but the contained: not smart cities but smart citizens.
Italian architect Carlo Ratti is director at SENSEable City Lab, a research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.
WHAT DESIGN CAN DO! 2014
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EDITORS Bas van Lier & Billy Nolan DESIGN De Designpolitie PRINTER Lenoirschuring PAPER Antalis Coloraction No.30 Š 2014 What Design Can Do! Amsterdam. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Warmoesstraat 155 (Unit 3), 1012 JC Amsterdam, The Netherlands, info@whatdesigncando.nl www.whatdesigncando.nl
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‘Economic crisis, combined with digital developments, has opened the way to the Designer as Entrepreneur. That is somebody who can solve old problems in new ways by uniting creative thinking with an ability to translate ides into products.’ R ichard van der Laken
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