Workshop on the City of the Future

Last week, I participated to a workshop on The City of the Future organized by Nicolas Nova (EPFL) and William Cockayne (Stanford). More than brainstorming about, it was the opportunity to learn about critical foresight methodology and techniques. Both Mauro and Nicolas wrote a very complete report on the petal graph, the S-curve, cartesian diagram and the diachronic table.

Relation to my thesis: ubicomp is also about projecting how sensor, wireless and distributed technologies will be used and integrated in the future. In foresight much can be learned by looking at the past and comparing it with the present. Now that we have the first glimpse of real-world ubicomp environments (as mentioned by Adam Greefield, Bell and Dourish) we can reflect on Mark Weiser’s visions of calm computing and the dissapearing computer. Based on how we got here, we can start building alternative agendas such as the new approaches suggested by Yvonne Rodgers. During the workshop we watched Walt Disney’s visions for the city of EPCOT in the 60s to reflect on our own visions of the future of the city (e.g. where was Walt wrong or correct and what path lead to his visions).