Hasta La Ideas

Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing and current head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia, has a new manifesto on his blog called “Towards urban systems design,” based on a talk he’ll be delivering in November at the Pompidou. The abstract reads as follows:

The networked objects which are increasingly populating our lives and our cities already generate torrential, unceasing volumes of data about our whereabouts, activities, and even our intentions. How can we ensure that this data is used for the equal benefit of all? What provisions regarding such objects should citizens demand of their municipal governments? How might the juridical order respond most productively to the presence of these new urban actors?

“This is not a talk intended, primarily, for technologists,” Greenfield explains, “but for people who understand themselves to be citizens, constituents and co-creators of an urban polity. And it’s an attempt to use the appearance of networked informatics in our cities to argue a much larger point: that our times and circumstances call for a conscious art and craft of urban systems design.”

Read the entire piece here.

(more…)