The City Is My Homescreen

This talk will address how to take the city as inspiration for contemporary interaction design and for the architecture of tomorrow's hybrid digital-physical services, spaces and communities. Using numerous project examples, the talk will illustrate how using the city itself as an interface for new forms of infrastructure and services --- via a diverse range of affordances, intelligences, and surfaces --- might create and reinforce both social fabric and wellbeing, rather than diminish it. As opposed to the generally individuating nature of today's interfaces, I will draw inspiration from contemporary architecture, distributed integrated systems, and decentralised machine learning, to describe a richer potential understanding of interactions, spaces and architecture in the city. Ultimately, the key questions underpinning tomorrow's urban interactions --- such as application, ownership, and identity --- will be linked to the potential of augmented modes of legible urban interactions, enabling the co-design of a new kind of city, creating new forms of public value for a broader range of citizens.