UrbanIxd interesting links

“Urban Innovation” are two words I hear in tandem a lot these days, along with “civic hackathon” and “crowdsourced urbanism.” Contrary to what you might think, these buzzwords have not been coined by urbanists attempting to appear more innovative. They’ve been coined by tech innovators attempting to be more urbanist.

Interaction14 will explore the wide diversity of interaction design practices and seek inspiration from related disciplines. Four days of workshops, presentations and social events. Join us and let Amsterdam inspire you.

Flossie 2013 is a two-day event for women who use or are otherwise interested in any aspect of open technology, open knowledge, digital arts, and social innovation. Flossie 2013 will be in London from 8-9 November

This is the personal blog of Dan Hill. The views expressed here tend to gravitate towards recurring themes of cities, architecture, design, media and culture—often colliding in the same post

In the second part of The Networked Society City Index films, Patrik Regårdh looks at how cities are improving literacy, education, healthcare and sustainability using user case examples from Singapore, Sao Paulo, Paris and more.

See the gallery here

In the future, cities will be judged by their generativity.  Over seventy percent of the world’s population, and almost all of the globe’s skilled talent, will live in cities by the year 2050.

When I was a kid, there was no image more closely associated with surveillance than the CCTV camera. Big Brother is watching, we were warned. The government is keeping tabs on you with video cameras on every street corner. Soon they may even install cameras in your home, they insisted. Honestly, that may have been preferable to what we ended up getting.

The Small Society Lab is a pop-up public centre for research and action in progressing the development and understanding of the small city of the future. Focusing on exploring the intersection between art, community and technology, it supports and develops a range of projects, interventions and events that help define the values, actions and solutions that will support a sustainable future for the post-industrial urban environment.

Great free resource by Bryan Boyer and Dan Hill: This book is a primer for people working on problems at the intersection of crowdfunding/sourcing, social media, urban planning and decision-making. So in other words, it’s about contemporary cities and how we might create new platforms to enable more effective debate about the future of our shared spaces.

MESH Cities' mission is to help distribute the methods and technologies that will shape the design of tomorrow's responsive, sustainable cities. Please join us in that goal. MESH is an acronym that stands for: M=Mobile E=Efficient S=Subtle H=Heuristics

The directional street sign consists of 3 separate arms pointing in different directions, each containing a LED display that shows specific text or graphics about a nearby destination. Depending on the actual location of the content it displays, each arm is able to rotate endlessly around 360 degrees. The content varies depending on what passers-by select via a list of buttons, ranging from public transport arrival times nearby to the content and actual location of Twitter messages. Read more at Co.CREATE

Ireland's capital has become IBM's smarter city testbed. Research is being conducted in Ireland on how problems like congestion can be tackled through joining up existing databases. This is part of IBM's larger Smarter Planet programme, which explores broader environmental concerns. The work involves applying analytics to huge amounts of data to solve pressing problems.

The meta-city is visualised in this video.

Watch Dogs is similar to Grand Theft Auto in that both host open urban environments that players navigate while completing plot-driven missions or simply exploring at their leisure. However, that’s where the similarity ends. Watch Dog’s protagonist, Aiden Pearce, can hack into Chicago’s fictional Central Operating System, a supercomputer that controls urban infrastructure and serves as a hub for every smart device in the city. A web of wireless connections are traced through the air to guide the player’s actions, possibly with deadly effect. 

This forward-thinking report is illustrated with a series of artist’s impressions, to demonstrate how the futuristic components – such as photovoltaic surfaces and algae producing bio-fuel pods – can theoretically enable buildings to produce food, energy and resources. Download the report