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Arup’s Drivers of Change initiative is an on-going research programme exploring those issues most likely to have a major impact upon society, on Arup’s business and on that of their clients.
Following the success of drivers of change 2006 publication, Arup Foresight recently published an update. This new set of 175 cards investigates leading drivers in greater depth that have particular relevance to the work of Arup. They include energy, waste, climate change, water, demographics, urbanisation and poverty. The cards can be used for developing business strategy, brainstorming, education and to help the reader to gain greater knowledge of the issues which are driving global change. The publication also encourages us to think holistically and creatively. Also check out the various Arup Foresight blogs: |
| Posts in category 'Urban development' |
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26 June 2009
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23 June 2009
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The first LIFT France conference took place last way in Marseilles. Being in Seoul, South Korea, myself, I missed it entirely, but luckily the videos are now becoming available.
Welcome to Lift! Initial and necessary challenge: “Technology & Society: Know your History!” Changing Things (1) – The Internet of Things is not what you think it is!
Changing Things (2) – Fab Labs, towards decentralized design and production of material products Changing Innovation (1)- The end of IT Changing Innovation (2) – Innovating with the non-innovators Takeaways: Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet’s thoughts from Lift
Changing the Planet (1)- Sustainable development, the Way of Desire
Changing the Planet (2) – Co-producing and sharing environmental consciousness
Conditional Future More videos are being posted to LIFT’s Vimeo, DailyMotion, Blip, Metacafe, Revver and Viddler accounts, so you can choose the platform you like. |
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19 June 2009
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British Council press release:
Breakthrough cities is a groundbreaking report on how cities can mobilise creativity and knowledge to tackle compelling social challenges. The report was commissioned by the British Council from the Young Foundation. Geoff Mulgan and Charles Leadbeater, established international experts in social innovation and creativity, are major contributors. The Breakthrough cities report is a unique resource for anyone working in the field of city policy – policy makers, consultants, public employees, workers in the arts or education sectors, NGOs, or simply private individuals committed to improving city lives. It provides inspiring ideas, understanding and guidance that can help make cities better places to live in. - Download report (1.4 mb) |
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11 June 2009
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Fabio Sergio, a design and user experience strategist, creative director at frog design, and former associate professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, was one of the speakers at the Frontiers of Interaction conference that took place on Tuesday in Rome, Italy.
- View presentation notes and slides (alternate link) You can also watch other Frontiers of Interaction resentations in English (skip the Italian introduction):
See also my earlier post on Matt Jones’ talk at the same conference. |
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25 May 2009
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Design Innovation Scotland has published a white paper by John Thackara, entitled Clean Growth: From Mindless Development to Design Mindfulness.
It’s the first in a series whose aim is “to stimulate thought and debate about…radical solutions to real-world challenges”. The intended readers are regional economic development professionals and policy makers. |
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20 May 2009
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Experientia is proud to announce the official launch of Humin, a programme developed for Flemish SMEs and start‐ups that creates competitive advantage through people-centred innovation.
In May-June last year Experientia (in collaboration with Richard Eisermann of Prospect and Tjeu Arits of Arits Consulting) worked intensively with the City of Genk, Belgium, to set out the project vision and prepare all the application documents in order to gain Flemish Government/ERDF funding. Meanwhile, the project was evaluated positively and yesterday it was officially launched. From the launch press release:
The project manager is Dany Snokx, who worked for 11 years at Philips Design in Eindhoven, and for past four years was engaged as creative director for Philips Lighting. The bilingual (Dutch/English) humin.be website provides plenty of background information. |
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12 May 2009
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The built environment is now the largest negative factor in the stability of ecosystems and the climate. As populations become increasingly urbanized, the evolution of cities will largely shape the outcome of our long dependence on natural resources.
Recognising the need and opportunity to improve sustainable building practices, the City of Helsinki and Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund are organising a sustainable design competition (rather than just an architecture competition) for a major urban development project. Called Low2No (implying “low to no carbon emissions”), the competition’s goal is to attract and identify the best teams to design a large mixed-use building complex on a reclaimed harbour at the western edge of Helsinki’s central business district, that would through its exemplary nature set out a sustainable development framework applicable to other contexts. Despite the short application time frame, a total of 73 applications were submitted. Last week, five teams were selected from a very competitive pool of proposals to proceed to the design phase of the competition. One of the shortlisted teams is led by the global design and engineering firm Arup, in partnership with the international architecture and urban planning agency Sauerbruch Hutton, and Experientia, the experience design company that this blog is part of. Arup is highly regarded for its many top-level projects, but also for its philosophy and culture of engineering – and in our field for the many important contributions by Dan Hill at conferences and on his famous cityofsound blog, whereas Sauerbruch Hutton is well-known for the design of the German Federal Environment Agency. Needless to say that we are very proud to be in such excellent company, and to be the only experience design consultancy in the shortlist. The five teams are now working on the development of “a design strategy and approach suitable to the challenge, a framework for developing an indicator of sustainability suitable to the challenge, and a vision for the project that will inspire stakeholders to overcome the challenges of systemic change”. The jury “will be instructed to evaluate the proposals based on evidence of systemic thinking. More than a design, we are look- Experientia will be taking a human-centred angle in its partnership with Arup and Sauerbruch Hutton, emphasising the fundamental impact that people’s behaviours can have on sustainability. Although we cannot disclose too much (the competition is still going on), we will surely be exploring a full plethora of research and design approaches, from ethnographic research to interaction design, and from service design to strategic communications. It will definitely be a great challenge for us to test and prove the fundamental role of a human-centred perspective in this pivotal project. |
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31 March 2009
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Ben Fullerton has an article out in the March/April issue of Interactions magazine on Co-creation in Service Design. It focuses on the “Make It Work” project for the Sunderland City Council and live|work’s efforts to collaborate on the design of a program for the long-term unemployed.
Formerly a designer at live|work, Ben has been active in evangelizing service design in the United States, speaking at the Berkeley iSchool and Adaptive Path, facilitating workshops and recording a podcast with Jennifer Bove. (via Design for Service) |
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1 March 2009
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One of the best sessions of the entire LIFT conference took place on Thursday afternoon.
As half of the world is now living in cities, it’s undeniable that the recombination of our physical environment through technological advancements will lead to unexpected changes, problems but also new opportunities. Carlo Ratti, Dan Hill and Anne Galloway discussed how our relationship to space will change through various new technologies and examine the main challenges of this field. Note: this post contains embedded video which might now not show up in your rss feed. Carlo Ratti An architect, engineer and agit-prop, Carlo Ratti (wikipedia) practices in Torino, Italy, and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, where he directs the SENSEable City Laboratory. The digital layer didn’t really kill the physical layer. They combined. Bits and data are coming together to provide new types of experiences in urban space. The challenge is to provide new ways of sense making by getting rid of all the information we don’t need. To illustrate the point of information visualisation, Carlo showed a lot of work that has taken place at the SENSEable City Lab. Dan Hill (Note that the above video is actually in English, and not in French). Dan Hill (blog) has been working at the forefront of innovative information and communication technologies (ICT) since the early ‘90s. He was one of the key architects of a BBC redesigned for the on-demand media age, launched Monocle magazine, organised the architecture and urbanism conference, Postopolis, in New York, and runs City of Sound, generally acclaimed as one of the leading architecture and urbanism websites. For Arup, Dan is helping clients explore the possibilities of ICT from a creative, design-led perspective, re-thinking how information changes streets and cities, neighbourhoods and organisations, mobility and work, play and public space. Dan started off his talk “soft infrastructure” with a particularly vivid example of soft infrastructure attacking, i.e. not behaving as it should be, as he spent four days getting from Australia to Zurich. It may not matter how good the hard infrastructure is, it is the soft infrastructure that affects how you feel, what the experience is like. At ARUP, a hardcore engineering firm, Dan deals with interaction design, software design, IA, service design, looking at the wider context of the organisation, systems and people, urban design, urban informatics. But not only. Soft infrastructure is also about business models, the legal and political context, the belief systems and the social and cultural fabric. Dan then takes a step back and showed the movie “The City”, the Regional Planning Association of America’s plea for community chaotic cities and urban sprawl (watch it here: part 1 and part 2). Another example of that mindset is the book New Movement in Cities (1966, featuring several pre-Archigram diagrams from Warren Chalk, Ron Herron and Dennis Crompton) that shows a city of arteries and tubes, and a clip from the magisterial 1963 film Hands Over the City, directed by Francesco Rosi. What happened? People happened, not technology. Soft infrastructure gives us a few possibilities though, and one of them is the possibility to bend the physical city, e.g. through informational approaches to transit (examples are MIT’s City Car project and the Volkswagen 2028 project). Both these projects are based on freedom and availability, but not on ownership. The city of the future is the walking city, the biking city – with human-scaled, walkable urbanism, augmented with informatics. These interventions – e.g. bikesharing – change how the city feels without changing the physical infrastructure. Other ways of doing this is by providing people with real-time information about their city. This makes you feel as if you are in control of the transit network and not the other way around, and pulls the transit network back down to the level of people. Another change that informatics is bringing about is that work is becoming invisible. You don’t know anymore what knowledge workers are working on. So how can we make this invisible work visible again? The latent promise of informatics is that things can indeed change in response to information, and we need to use user-centred design techniques in this context. Read also this excellent post-talk reflection by Dan, which contains several of the videos he presented. Anne Galloway There is no video of the talk (yet) by Anne Galloway, which is too bad, because she is quite an engaging speaker and my notes are not too great. Anne Galloway (site | blog) who teaches design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, recently completed a PhD in sociology and anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, which involved an ethnographic study of the design of mobile and pervasive technologies for urban environments. Interested in connections between technological, spatial and cultural practices, Anne’s current research explores how actor-network theory and critiques of everyday life can help people understand and shape emergent technologies. When envisioning the future city, we also have to address people’s expectations, promises and hopes. These however are not qualities we have, but actions we do. We expect. We promise. We hope. They make some futures and not others. What if we imagine the future city as a gift we want to give people? Gifts are powerful, but gifting is tricky business. The gift Gifting Now let’s think again about gifted cities. Cities that provide us with ‘interesting information’ and feedback loops, for free, for us to use. But what am I going to do with that? Citizens, the argument goes, can use these data to take political action, to better map the environment around them. But this requires first of all that we want to be data collectors and that we have the ability to make sense of the data we collect. The new urban citizen in other words creates “gifted risks” So in conclusion, when you are building the new city, |
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13 February 2009
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Kazys Varnelis [CV | blog], the author of Networked Publics and the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, is writing a new book and posting drafts online.
(via Bruce Sterling) |
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25 January 2009
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Fabien Girardin, whose work I start to know (and appreciate) more and more, just uploaded the presentation of his research work in the domain of people-centric sensing, presented last week at Yahoo! Research lab in Barcelona.
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9 December 2008
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A year ago I wrote about Adam Greenfield’s pamphlet Urban computing and its discontents.
Adam’s pamphlet was the firsts in a nine-part series that aims to explore the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the ways we conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing, and what do technologists need to know about cities? How are these issues themselves situated within larger social, cultural, environmental, and political concerns? Two other pamphlets have been published meanwhile:
They are part of Situated Technologies, a project by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, is a co-production of the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), and the Architectural League of New York. The project also organised a symposium and is planning a major exhibition in September 2009. Architecture and Situated Technologies was a 3-day symposium in October 2006 that brought together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of “situated” technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. Participants at the symposium featured Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Richard Coyne, Michael Fox, Karmen Franinovic, Anne Galloway, Charlie Gere, Usman Haque, Peter Hasdell, Natalie Jeremijenko, Sheila Kennedy, Eric Paulos, and Kazys Varnelis. Videos are available online. Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City is a major exhibition, curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York, that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. It will examine the broader social, cultural, environmental and political issues within which the development of urban ubiquitous/pervasive computing is itself situated. The exhibition will combine a survey of recent work that explores a wide range of context-aware, location-based and otherwise “situated” technologies with a series of commissioned projects by multi-disciplinary teams of architects and artists, including:
(via Fabien Girardin) |
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7 December 2008
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Over the last week, I have been helping out Marcia Caines with editing her thoughtful review of the Saint-Etienne design biennial (She helped me out before on editing my piece on the Turin design policy conference).
Take a look, it is a very insightful write-up with some provoking questions at the end. |
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20 November 2008
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28 October 2008
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Kazys Varnelis, director of Columbia University’s Network Architecture Lab, has written a very nice essay for Vodafone’s receiver magazine that explores how mediated communication has changed our notion of place, created non-places and now has us darting between simultaneous environments.
In his essay, Varnelis highlights some dangers though: the fact that we have collectively given up our right to privacy, the splintering of the web in micro publications and micro publics, the tendency to associate ourselves with increasingly homogeneous communities (pictured: The Big Sort: why the clustering of America is tearing us apart, by journalist Bill Bishop). Within this experimental department of the university’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Varnelis investigates the impact of computation and communications on architecture and urbanism. Together with Robert Sumrell, he runs the non-profit architectural collective AUDC; their first book, “Blue Monday“, was published in 2007. In 2005/06 Varnelis was a visiting scholar with the “Networked Publics” program at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication. This fall, MIT Press will publish the results of this program as “Networked Publics“, edited by Varnelis. |
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16 October 2008
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The September edition of the American architecture magazine ArchiTech contains a special section on experience design.
The section, which sees experience design as “a new way of thinking, designing, engaging that uses media and architecture to produce immersive spaces”, is I think quite problematic. Experience design is all about entertainment and communications. Nothing really about addressing people’s needs or providing relevant contextual solutions. Nor does the section contain much about interaction design, or about the relation between people’s use of technology (e.g. through mobile devices) and the architectural environments that surround them. More innovative, experimental projects that are redefining architecture through their reinterpretation of the relation between people and the built environment are not even mentioned. Although it’s a take on experience design which I don’t endorse or care much about, it is one which is quite prevalent, and therefore worth mentioning. The section contains three articles: Building fiction: the architecture of experience design Experience as material: transforming architecture into communications media Convergence: blending the digital and physical (via Stephen Rustow at SRA Consultancy) |
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1 October 2008
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The first LIFT Asia 08 are online. My favourites:
Mobiles and the urban poor – Bruce Sterling
The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tales of the networked city – Adam Greenfield
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7 September 2008
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The Adaptive City is the title of an excellent essay by Dan Hill on recent ideas around urban informatics and urban information design, the impact of real-time data and collaborative planning on urban form, and most of all the changing role and new empowerment of people living in these cities. In Hill’s words: cities as an user interface for governance, in which [citizens] play an intrinsic role.
Dan Hill is a senior consultant at the renowned and highly innovative engineering firm Arup. Prior to that, he was the director of web and broadcast at Monocle and the head of interactive technology and design at the BBC. The essay will be published in the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project Scott Burnham conceived and then developed with Droog Design. |
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5 September 2008
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Nicolas Nova and Bruno Giussani have been blogging two of the LIFT Asia conference sessions that took place in Seoul today.
Session: Networked city Session: Techno-nomadic life |
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24 August 2008
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Russell Davies is concerned that “we’ll end up blundering into cities plastered with the equivalent of flash banners and microsites.”
(via AHOi) |
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