A Media Architecture Approach for Designing the Next Generation of Urban Interfaces

Abstract

The augmentation of the built and urban environment with digital media has evolved and matured over recent years. Cities are seeing a rapid rise of various technologies; a trend also accelerated by global crises. Consequently, new urban interfaces are emerging that integrate next-generation technologies, such as sustainable interface materials and urban robotic systems. However, their development is primarily driven by technological concerns, leaving behind social, aesthetic, and spatial considerations. By analyzing our own media architecture research projects and real-world applications from the past two decades, we offer a structural approach for developing these new urban interfaces. The individual cases provide early insights and challenges related to prototyping and augmenting contexts with novel input and output modalities. These results in common, preliminary observed patterns in the process of integrating next-generation technologies into urban environments and surroundings, in response to continuously evolving social needs.