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Welcome to the UrbanIxD Summer School
Michael Smyth
Centre for Interaction Design
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
@michael_smyth
Sunday, 25 August 13

The UrbanIxD project concerns the Research
of, and Design for, the point of contact
between people and urban technologies.
We are building a network of researchers
working on urban technologies from the
human perspective.
We have partners in UK, Italy, Denmark,
Croatia

The UrbanIxD project is working towards
the production of a research manifesto
of future research directions.

One of the stages in this process is why we are
all here in Split, at the UrbanIxD Summer School,
#urbanixdsummerschool.

Seams and Boundaries in the Hybrid City
The Hybrid City is an environment that
comprises both the tangible and the virtual.
It is a place where data resides at the
boundaries of the physical and the digital.

What are the products and services that
citizens of the near future will use to create
and consume data in the Hybrid City?

The goal of the Summer School is the
production of fictional concepts that
explore the active role of citizens as
designers, users and inhabitants in the
emerging Hybrid City of the near-future.
The outputs from the Summer School will
feed into a series of exhibitions and
events planned for 2014.

We live in a world where everything seems
possible and as a consequence have lost
the sense of wonder.
Branko Lukic, NonObject, MIT Press (2011)

Where do these moments of
design inspiration come from?

Critical Design acts as a catalyst or provocation
for thought (Anthony Dunne, 1999).

Critical Design centres on the design of tangible
future scenarios that humanise the future and
reveal needs, values and priorities.

UN Habitat report on populations moving to cities - just
over 50% of the world's population now live in cities.

In Europe the figure is over 70%
Europe is a dense continent and the major lived
experience of people is an urban one.

Europe is the region with the highest
Internet penetration rate in the world 75%,
followed by the Americas 61%.
In 2011, more than 70% of European households
had access to the Internet at home.

But this is an average - The regional differences in
Internet access within the EU were large, from
26% of some areas of Bulgaria, to 95% or
more in areas of the Netherlands.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly
distributed.
William Gibson, The Economist, 2003

The city is a mesh of heterogenous networks. Not just
official governmental, institutional and commercial
levels but also as a mesh of hybrid human networks.

In 2011 there were 741 million mobile phone
subscriptions in Europe. That's 1.2 SIM cards per person.
The average age of first phone ownership is 7 years old.

More than 70% of homeless people in London
own a mobile phone (Kwon & van Boeijen, 2012).

The vision of Ubicomp is one of seamless interfaces,
connecting into invisible, distributed, pervasive and
ubiquitous computing

Interactions create data, often personal data
relating to individuals, and if our interactions are
"seamless" this raises serious questions around the
visibility of what happens to that data.

Smart Cities projects tend to take a Big Picture
view of systems, considering technology from an
infrastructural perspective - the bird's eye view
of the city. But this is not how we naturally
experience it.

Urban Interaction Design addresses the
intersection of people with the data rich city

The Summer School has a focus on learning
through doing.
You will learn about Urban Interaction Design
through the work that you do as part of the
multidisciplinary Atelier Groups that are at the
core of the event.

But most of all you will learn from your fellow
participants as they will posses ideas and skills
that, we hope, will cause you to reflect on how
and why, you do what you do.

There will be presentations from
practitioners and researchers.

In the Summer School Reader we have included 2
‘working documents’ from the UrbanIxD project. The
first addresses the emerging trends in urban interaction
design, while the second reflects on the importance of
interaction design for smart urban living.

Each piece hints at directions and themes that
you might like to consider, they reflect our thinking
in this nascent field.

The Summer School is a chance to go
beyond the limits of design definitions, to re-
think what design is today and to explore
the role it plays in society through critical
design practice.

For 9 days in Split, you have the opportunity to
regain your sense of wonder. It is a chance to seek
out those indicators and signs that just might
provide insight into our shared urban futures.

A possible place to begin is at the marginal
zones of the city, the space between and
beyond buildings where data ebbs and
flows with time and place.
This is a place where citizens seek to
understand the urban environment through
situated interaction.

The Summer School is just the beginning of our journey.

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