| DIGITAL CITY | article

When we think of the way we interact with a computer in daily life, what first comes to mind is an image of us sitting at home or work on our personal computer or laptop, our minds are immersed into whatever is on screen, maybe we are writing an email for work, playing a video game, or shopping on a website. But increasingly our experience with computers is implicated much more in what is going on in our experience outside in the city. Through the miniaturization of microchips with greater processing ability and memory over time (Moores law), computational power, when combined with wired or wireless communication technology, is being distributed throughout the urban environment so as to digitally augment the different aspects of daily active living in sometimes more and sometimes less tangible ways. Ultimately enabling of life, the digitally enhanced city is being deployed to ease, enrich, empower, inform, aesthetically excite, manage/control, and liberate active urban living and attendant flows of information, environmental energies, and social and economic activity. The following interviews serve to discuss these different ways wired or wireless networked computation is being used in the urban environment that will affect how we live now and in the future.

The first interview takes a wide eyed view of the subject by providing insight that might more acutely define the computationally or digitally enhanced city as what he terms the Sentient City.

Could you briefly explain what the Sentient City is? Within the context of contemporary discourse surrounding the Smart City, the concept of Sentience provides a useful way to foreground much of the technology that is currently being promoted as Smart. As we move beyond the initial practices and promises of the Smart City, we find information processing capacity approaching a higher order of magnitude. Here your transaction history, mobility patterns, and personal profile (i.e. sex, age, zipcode and related demographics) are mined for patterns that match known profiles (of a potential customer, or a possible terrorist) and inferences can be made in terms of what one may buy next, or strike next. These computational systems operate on metadata, having been trained what to look for using machine learning techniques, where performance is measured in terms of the percentage of false-positives (or false-negatives). Within this context, urban systems and infrastructures take on a quality of what might best be described as sentience.

So a sentient city, then, is one that is able to subjectively perceive things happening within it, deliberate on what is perceived, and take action based on these deliberations. In what ways is such influencing lifestyle? By now it is commonplace in major metropolitan centers to find urban life increasingly entangled with a range of mobile and embedded media, communication and information technologies. We coordinate meeting times and places through SMS text messaging on a mobile

phone while on the run. We check-in at our favorite venues using social media apps on our mobile phones, and leave tips for strangers about what to do there. We cluster in cafes and parks where WiFi is free to check email on a laptop. We drive cars with on-board navigation systems that map optimal routes to a destination, updating in real-time to take into account current traffic patterns, construction activity, and special events. We pass through public spaces blanketed by CCTV surveillance cameras monitored by machine vision systems running advanced face detection and object tracking algorithms. Ubiquitous computing evangelists herald an age of urban infrastructure capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities that transpire around it. This near-future city is projected as one that reflexively monitors our behavior within it and becomes an active agent in the organization of our daily lives.

What are urban tools for accessing the Sentient City? In an age of Big Data, we have the opportunity to connect, aggregate, analyze and integrate information about the urban environment from a variety of sources. Were able to better visualize, model and predict urban processes, and anticipate probable outcomes. Currently, we access the Smart City primarily via smart phones. With the advent of Sentient urban systems and infrastructures, it is less a question of how we access them and more of how they access us. For example, embedded sensors monitor, manage and regulate utility services and critical urban infrastructure. And, social media platforms such as Twitter and Foursquare - provide new ways of tracking how we move, who we are with, where we go and what we think of where weve been. Data on trending venues, popular neighborhoods, peak times and common frequencies enable mapping patterns of mobility and activity in a more dynamic and fine-grained manner.

Andrew GrayIntern Architect RoTo Architects,

Los Angeles

| DIGITAL CITY | article

Urban FuturesThe Future City Mediated by Embedded Computation

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Which risks or benefits does the Sentient City bear?The dominant paradigm for the Smart City involves global ICT companies working with real estate developers and government agencies to build cities from scratch outfitted with smart urban infrastructure. This top-down, centralized approach nominally promises to optimize the distribution of services and maximize energy efficiency, and make cities more livable, sustainable and competitive. This approach promotes a technocratic view of the city and urban development, the corporatization of civic governance, and the dependence on proprietary software, systems and services leading to a form of technological lock-in that runs counter to more traditional concessionary procurement models. It also cedes human agency to these systems and their algorithms - often downplaying the roles people play (and the decisions they make) in their development, operation and internal functioning. This is usually cited as a benefit: reducing human limitations, error or prejudice in managing smart urban infrastructures is generally perceived as a positive design goal. Much of the drive toward modern forms of automation is based on this idea, and the technical challenges and social dilemmas are well-known.

Contrasting this paradigm is one that places emphasis on the Smart Citizen rather than smart technologies. Shifting the focus from technology and the city to the role citizens might play in managing the urban environment, this bottom-up, distributed approach aims to directly connect people living in cities with information about their local environment, and solicit their participation in reporting conditions and taking action to effect positive change. The Smart Citizen paradigm promises a more organic, ad-hoc, evolutionary and distributed approach. Its focus on people, not technology, as the primary actors in the system reaffirms notions of participatory governance, where social and cultural factors are emphasized over high-tech solutions with big price tags. Yet problems regarding the need for some form of centralization inevitably arise when one attempts to scale local solutions to larger urban systems, where interoperability between different systems and the development of open standards for sharing data between them become paramount.

The notion of a sentient" city looks beneath and beyond the binary opposition of the Smart City / Smart Citizen debate and affords thinking of urban systems and infrastructures as complex techno-social entanglements of

people and machines, where people remain in the loop, so to speak. In this sense, the city, its systems and infrastructures, cannot be separated from the citizens by which it is constituted and through whose spatial practices it is given form. It also looks beyond the mere functional and mundane aspects of city governance and management, which fail to address some of the deeper social, cultural, cognitive and perceptual conditions of contemporary urban space. While creating more efficient and sustainable urban environments is a worthy and increasingly urgent goal, urban life itself has never been something circumscribed by concerns for optimization and efficiency. Forms of urban life found in cities have always been messier - and more delightful - than that, and we have long known that one of the keys to great cities is their capacity to sustain the diversity and variety of urban life.

Mark Shepard, Artist, Architect & Researcherfaculty member at SUNY, Buffalo

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The following interview contrasts an instrumentalist perspective of the future computational city with one where its technologies might be deployed to produce less tangible effects. The discussion indicates a future city where networked surfaces interacting with the immediate environment produce dynamically changing ambient spatial effects that will captivate urban dwellers.

Can you see other applications of information exchange if interactive interfaces cover large swaths of the urban surface in the future?In addition to environmental management or the production of aesthetic experiences, which have both been well considered in the discourse on interaction design, I think that potential of working with interactive interfaces on an urban scale could be used to create alternative spatial scenarios whereby a gap or occlusion is introduced into the ubiquity of telecommunications. It would be provocative to create areas where the usual protocols of communication are suspended temporarily, much like the idea of the Situationist International to attach light switches to the streetlights in the city, enabling a diverse series of spatial effects to be produced in the urban environment.

What if building surfaces were linked together into larger aggregate urban surfaces of communication, a meta-system, what might the implications for social practices and spatial organizations be? The city becomes available for everything and everyone to participate and informing the shape/form/character of the urban surface from the bottom-up. All of this localized information gets collected and orchestrated into a large scale global feedback performance across the city, communicating the status of the city organism as a whole? Like in Servos Spoorg project localized interactions from individual cells when connected into a larger network quote give rise to global information processing as individual sound behavior patterns fuse with input from neighboring cells yielding an aggregate sound composition of cells interacting in parallel.

In the Spoorg project we looked at how one variable, fluctuating light levels in the environment, could engage a series of different inputs that have an effect on that variable (such as natural light levels on the exterior of the building, artificial light levels on the interior of the building, and bodily movement in

the space of the installation producing interferences with light levels). This created a situation where multiple actions could influence the way in which the installation generated ambient sound patterns. Likewise, the integration of such computation into building surfaces in an urban environment would produce variegated forms of informational output, responding to a vast number of agents. Rather than indexing any legible organizational pattern of the city over time, this would likely produce a kind of parallel city with its own organizational logics.

Will urban surface interfaces able to be read and legibly respond in the future for commercial exchange?In ourW work at servo, our attitude toward responsive technologies has always been to work with ambient effects rather than to produce directly legible effects. This means that the cause and effect cycle is intentionally blurred so there may be moments where the underlying responsive logic reveals itself but these are part of a more extensive set of effects that make the logic more inscrutable in order to engage interaction. I think the idea of building surfaces that are capable of scanning the space adjacent to them certainly has commercial viability. I think it would become interesting if the communication of information about a retail location would be transmitted in a way that introduced error into the system so the legibility of what is being transmitted would decay and reform over time.

Servo says the urban surface will become more bio-technological in the future city. Does this change what information is communicated and inform new values and in turn new forms of urban behavior?The idea of the biotechnological surface could be realized in several ways. One way is for the building surface to include spaces where biotic matter is able to thrive. The surface materiality could also be configured so that over time the material decays or transforms in response to the presence of vegetation for example. This in turn would have an impact on the growth patterns of the biotic matter. The other way that biological assemblages could be configured, would be to input electronic information issued from biological behaviors that occur remotely and enable these to act as agents that affect the building directly.

Marcelyn Gow, principal architect at SERVOfaculty member at SCI-Arc

| DIGITAL CITY | article

Figures1. Visualization of Sensor Data Collected from Copenhagn Bicycle Wheel Project2. Spoorg Interaction Diagram3. UTS tower in Sydney

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The final interview looks at various architecture projects that suggest that increasingly building skins, and by extension urban surfaces, will have an animated, real-time interactive relationship with people and the local environment, and that while this is something new to buildings, it is not new to nature. Environmentally embedded computation is essentially animating the built environment in a way that more closely follows processes that organically happen in nature.

In the UTS Tower project how is the skin an intelligent media surface? We designed the skin to be used for dynamic animation and to communicate information into the public realm effectively integrating principles of architecture, fashion, media and communication design into a new hybrid typology. In essence a media wall highlighting (activities such as) events, news, information, performances, campus events at both campus scale and city scales. Media walls have an increasing role in city skylines. The skin will promote the UTS identity as a public and progressive institution with interactive, energy efficient light systems that keep up with the universitys developments in real time. The form of the UTS tower allows different treatments according to site-specific information, city uses and daily light patterns.

Perhaps your most well-known project to date is the Watercube from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The Olympics is a global stage to showcase new technologies in design, what state-of-the-art technologies were applied?Yes the entire structure of the Watercube was based on an innovative lightweight construction, developed by PTW and CSCEC with ARUP, and derived from the structure of water in the state of aggregation of foam. Behind the totally randomised appearance hides a strict geometry that can be found in natural systems like crystals, cells and molecular structures. By applying this cutting edge material and technology the transparency and apparent randomness is transposed into the inner and outer skins of ETFE cushions.

Do you see a larger trend in cities towards building surfaces or urban surfaces becoming interactive carriers of information? Since Frei Ottos soap bubble experiments for the Munich Olympic Stadium in the 1970s, the use of naturally evolving systems for

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building surfaces has been an important area of design research, and one that has certainly informed our work here at LAVA. Increasingly building envelopes are no longer mere facades. They are both smart and educational. Like a skin of a snake or a spacesuit for a new environment, they address contemporary needs for flexibility, light, air and views. A new skin can react to the environment, to temperature, humidity and air pressure, and can have embedded layers of technology and sustainability, saving water, producing energy and communicating information to occupants inside the building as well as to the outside world.

What is your opinion on numerous urban surfaces linked together, providing information about the city as a whole organism?My answer to that question is manifest in our exhibition installation in the CUSP exhibition, currently on a two-year tour in Australia. The networked city of the future is a connected, interdependent organism where buildings are not singular structural entities (designed, serviced and accessed as isolated units), but part of large networked system. I always say: Think of a coral reef, where thousands of species thrive in coexistence of each other and the elements, air, water and sun. The reef is like the city of the future. I believe that the future is not about what buildings look like, but how they perform, interact and how they connect with each other. Outdated passive building facades of the skyscraper are replaced with high performance smart translucent cocoons that create their own microclimate, generate energy, collect rainwater and improve the distribution of natural daylight. By re-skinning these inefficient buildings the past is transformed into superable buildings.

What are the social impacts of interactive surfaces on citizens now and in the future? Are they tools to teach the public about invisible natural forces in the environment? Yes they are vital tools in the global campaign that architects and urban designers face. We need to showcase that the answers to beauty and efficiency are both found in nature and to make visible the invisible. And we need to build sustainably especially as about 50% of carbon emissions come from buildings.

Chris Bosse, Architectfounding partner of LAVA

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