Material Meets the City: Exploring Novel and Advanced Materials for the Smart Urban Built Environment

Abstract

The urban realm is currently undergoing a transformation in which cities are being laced with sensors and networks of ever-connected devices. At the same time, more and more novel and advanced materials are finding their way into interaction design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, offering us new interaction possibilities. In this half-day online studio, attendees will have the opportunity to exchange and reflect on urban interaction designs for user engagement based on a set of novel, unconventional, or omnipresent materials in urban environments. We will further collect historical, public, and community locations of different social and societal meaning. Participants will be asked to develop hands-on concepts and use cases for the selected locations through a material-centered approach and think about new levels of user-environment engagement to extend and explore the current design space. The formulated concepts and use cases will be recorded in an online collaboration tool with the prospect to publish them as enhances for the new generation of media architecture.