Cityware – Urban Design and Pervasive Systems

The goal of Cityware is to develop theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape. It focuses on 2 major questions around space, infrastructure and its relationships with behaviors:

1. how do we design the space created by fusing electronically created interaction space with architecturally created physical space?
2. how do we provide interaction and interoperability that scales up to city-scale pervasive systems, while ensuring that they function appropriately and merge aesthetically with urban spaces, materials, forms and uses?

Three projects are currently defined

Radio City: the human behaviours associated with the presence of those radio signals.
Making space: explore the relationship between the spaces created by urban architecture and the interaction spaces created by artefacts such as digital devices
Where am I? What’s that? I’ll remember this: exploring opportunities that pervasive technologies offer to provide novel and effective support for way-finding, interpretation and recollection.

Relation to my thesis: I am involved in “ambient intelligence in the city” kind of project called ICING. In Cityware, I would be interested to know more about how pervasive systems scale up to city-scale while delivering appropirate experience to the users.