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Hi all! Thanks for opening and reading this newsletter. First apologies for the late sending; proposal deadlines on Monday do not happen that often…

That is also the short summary of last week as I was quite busy shaping a project for a proposal, which is very nice but always more work than planned. I hope we will do the project as it is a perfect fit for the goal of Cities of Things. Which is now officially a foundation by the way. I have been shifting my activities towards this topic for the last few years and with the setting up of the field lab and now shaping this project in Rotterdam, it is not only research in the context of TU Delft.

So maybe nice to give an impression of what it entails by the activities of last week:

• I have still 5 graduation students working on related projects, some more on the topic than others (a special topic within the Cities of Things research is on the predictive relations, which can also be less related to the city as the graduation project of Peicheng for instance, who is redesigning a robot vacuum into a predictive companion).
• Research linked is the workshop we are organizing with a diverse group of academics for MAB20 on Subversive Citizenship.
• For the field lab Amsterdam-Munich we are planning a workshop on 8 July (find more information at Creative Holland website) and we have a symposium at the MAB20 conference on 2 July.
• The proposal we submitted together with Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences for CityLab010. There is a short description on the website.
• I was invited to share opinions for two Dutch publications; Tweewieler (video) and iBestuur/Automatiseringsgids(podcast).
• For a special series of New European Bauhaus I shared on Cities of Things, and I joined a panel of Sensemakers AMS. It was interesting how citizenship and activism were connected as a means for improvement. What would that result into if we have the lens of things as citizens; what will things activism look like?

Luckily not every week is like this… :-)

This week (the rest of it), will be also dedicated to preparations for the sessions and workshop of the next two weeks. Furthermore, Jip will have his graduation ceremony this Friday, looking forward. And Peicheng his greenlight on Thursday. We also started serious planning for this year’s ThingsCon (a bit later than usual, you can guess why), and we think we are up to an interesting hybrid format for this year, but we keep you posted as soon as we have shaped it further.

If you have time left to visit events online, I might have some interesting ones: NEXT Conference is having a session with Amy Webb the well-known Future Forecaster that I always visit at SXSW. On Friday afternoon you can choose between Dutch Digital Day (just like NEXT curated by Monique) or keynotes from the Low Carbon Design Institute.

Let me keep it to this for now. Diving into the news funny enough there is a theme for this week: authentic artificial life in robots and other newly added objects.

Find the links for this week in the newsletter.

Hi all. This week I will do a short(er) update and collection of news as I have been busy with some proposal writing on top of the normal activities.

Last week I missed out on a lot but I did attend two sessions of the Low Carbon Design Institute (LoCDI), one with Rachel Jones of D-Ford, the innovation department of Ford who is doing research into urban mobility, and one with Ugo Vallauri of The Restart Project. To keep it short, one of the main take-aways for both their talks is that the impact of producing products on CO2 and the environment is much higher than the use on a general note. So enduring the lifetime of products is a good strategy for fighting climate change. I think it is interesting to think about the role of shifting functionality from the physical capabilities to the software embedded in hybrid product-service systems; in cars, the over the air updates are becoming more and more common, and you see for instance that services as Peerby stimulate the design of more durable (and with that more sharable) products. It is on the other hand counterproductive to block the possibility for repairing the devices we use most and are having huge impacts like our phones. I hope Apple will make this a priority next to cleaner production and the intentions of being good with privacy ruling. You can sign a petition on the right to repair in UK and Europe via The Repair Project.

Speaking on Apple. For those who missed the WWDC keynote, it was a bit as expected and predicted last week. No fireworks but a solid path to a focus on spatial technology both in concrete products as on the connection of the real world to the Apple ecosystem. The hottest demo was the of course the universal access that stresses the Apple ecosystem strategy.

For this week I might have a look at CogX as I got a free pass some time ago (judging all the promotion I think there might be more). On this Wednesday I am invited to reflect in a panel on the talk of Jessica Groopman at Sensemakers AMS, check out more information on the Meetup page.

Ok, let’s check for some of the news. First a personal share: I was interviewed for Tweewieler some time ago to reflect on the future of cargo bikes in 2050. The video series is now online, I am part of the last one, but the others are also interesting to watch if you are interested in mobility in the city.

Check the articles in the newsletter on Revue.

Hello all! Welcome to new subscribers. Let’s dive into a quick recap of last week and a look forward to this week, before checking out the most interesting news-bites.

Within the Delft Design Lab Cities of Things Jim graduated on his project everydAI (An AI assistant supporting balance between work and personal activities to increase wellbeing in the home office), very relevant in these times. Check out this short movie to see what he has built.

We also continued working on the field lab activities Amsterdam-Munich. We are planning a workshop for partners, and also organize a short symposium at MAB20 on 2 July. We also closed the submissions for the workshop we organize at the same conference on subversive city manual. We have cool submissions and already looking forward.

On a personal note; I got my Covid vaccination! With the Janssen version so only one injection is needed. Good to see that the speed of vaccinating here in the Netherlands is catching up. I hope we will reach a level that there is no need for individual passports with all its consequences, that we as a society as a whole are protected. We’ll see.

We are still in the mode of an online life, especially with events. This week is kind of crazy as it seems that ‘everyone’ is organising their events in this week. Just like last week, I probably will miss a lot. I plan to check out the online expo of STRP festival at least, hopefully also some of the special evenings. Dutch Technology Week is a new thing that I discovered last year when we were planning a ThingsCon event that did not happen. I need to check the program still. The Global Foresight Summit themed ‘Beyond Uncertainty’ is also happening. This session on Moral Machines organized by Iohanna and Filippo is very nice; I don’t know if there is still capacity. For Dutch speaking and media interested, there is a NPO Innovatie Festival on Thursday too (probably scratching the surface). If you are more into movies, check out the summer edition of IFFR, here in Rotterdam.

So no need to be bored :) I hope you still have some time left for reading. Here are some finds from last week. Let me also mention that I will publish this week a more reflective post on the Cities of Things newsletter. Feel invited to subscribe if you haven’t yet.

News from Google I/O, a Ford electric truck that is not positioned as a phone on wheels, but as a battery on wheels, and some interesting long-reads. Find the links in the newsletter.

Dear subscriber, As expected this email lands a bit later in your mailbox due to the public holiday yesterday. For the first time here? You might consider subscribing and receive this email around 18:00 CET on Mondays.

First a look back at last week as always. In general terms, especially living in Rotterdam, I did follow the excitement of Eurovision. I am not a fanatic follower but keep track of it, and this year the connection was much more. Even in the situation that the city was not a big party place due to covid of course. Apart from the music, more interesting is to see what is used of the current state of technology in an event with almost no budget limits and a lot of prestige. The stage design was impressive although not so much on the stage itself, even less than other years. It was mainly about huge screens with props, and the difference between being in the room and watching on TV was more than ever a big difference. Most striking there are the additional AR layers. We are getting used to AR-lenses of course in our favorite social apps, it was nice to see how it mixed with normal screens. 

In one song they used a more well-known technology: the green screen, which was used all the way (Greece). Nice was how the movies from people in the room became part of the experience, with green dancers and props moving around. So AR versus Chromakey-Chic I would almost say. It resembles the difference in apps like Snap and TikTok where chromakey is used as a kind of amateur technology for DIY in visual effects, while with AR it is part of the newest technology as with the lenses of Snap. They just announced more attention event to build on this technology and applications with the introduction of a developer-Spectacles (Snapchat AR glasses). In an interview in the podcast Sway CEO Evan Spiegel projects that mundane AR is a decade away. We will see how quickly Apple is ramping up here.

Furthermore, last week the usual mix of working with the master graduation students, both existing as possible new projects. We did a workshop with the first group of participating companies in the Cities of Things field lab. And we had the third session in Trust in IoT in the meetup with Eindhoven Internet of Things. And lots of other things.The rest of this week is pact with the usual mix of activities. Looking forward to Jim graduating (if all goes according to plan) on Thursday. I might check the inaugural lecture of Reint-Jan Renes this afternoon, and I probably will miss most of Dutch Innovations Days organized in Enschede and online. Wednesday evening the new One Seconds Institute is organizing a meetup with Space10 as a speaker which should be interesting. Also, a bit conflicting in my calendar but still aiming to check it, on designing cities for all.

Ok, so far, let’s jump to the news of the week. Find the links here.

Hi all, good to see you here (again) at this weeknotes newsletter, my week in review: what got my attention in human-machine tech, cities, design, IoT, and other interests. Let me mention that I also write a monthly newsletter specifically linked to Cities of Things, covering one broader reflection per month. And if you can’t get enough, with the ThingsCon newsletter we keep you up to date with the activities we organize throughout the year, with a focus on the December event, but also Salons like the one this Thursday, and we are working on another idea, hope to share soon. 

Next to the weekly news capture (below), let’s start with a short review of the week. Outside and inside. As mentioned last week Jip has had his green light for his project and this means after Jim a second project is ending soon. Meike and Peicheng have passed the midterm, Yeonju will mark that moment this week. Together with AMS Institute a new project is commissioned and advertised and it is great to see multiple applications now. I am also speaking to three other (new) partners for projects so it will remain busy in the Delft Design Lab.

Last week I was also invited to two different settings to reflect on the future of cities and mobility, one for a podcast focused on IT organization and one video interview for professionals in bike retail. I will share the links as soon as they are up.

So what else happened last week?

Bitcoins and Elon Musk. Lots of rumors again. For a good reason, as many predict he almost looks like sorting for his own Tesla-coin. In a world of mesh-networks that generate the new platforms for (business) value Tesla is of course another party to be able to leverage on ubiquitous physical connected objects (see also my Cities of Things monthly newsletter on the Apple take here). Elon became rich with a payment system for digital services before of course, next to his kind of megalomania character, we can expect everything. Not sure if it will be a coin or more of a currency based on the blockchain principles powered by renewable energy from the Tesla grid. We will see.

In the meantime, I am building a backlog for watching online conference content these weeks. I might need a vacation to catch up. Or skip all Netflix and alike of course… Maybe you have the time for:

• Uroboros 2021; a lot of intriguing sessions, like this one on cities as spacships, however, I’m not sure if I can keep up the attention with 1,5-hour panels
• CHI academic conference; keynote by Ruha Benjamin was tipped this morning by TU Delft colleague
• OZY fest; total different – I might try to listen to Gladwell, that is a long time ago, and Cuban
• Do I want to build my own Arduino-based object recognition system? Let’s check this tutorial of Jan Jongboom

Or go to one of these events this week, and I might see you there (if I make it):

• [TUE 20:00 CET] Londen IoT
• [WED 16:00 CET] Future Talk #1 Activism
• [WED 20:00 CET] Sensemakers meetup
• [THU 15:00 CET] Rotterdam citizen science inspiratielezing
• [THU 18:30 CET] Eindhoven IoT + ThingsCon

Ok, let’s check on other news captured. Learning by digital hypermapping the now and the past to understand the future.

Find the articles in the newsletter. I hope I did not add too much to read again. Luckily we will have a long weekend again (at least here in the Netherlands) with Whit Monday next week. I might publish this newsletter a bit later. Enjoy the week!

Welcome to this week’s update! With notes about the last week and looking forward to interesting things happening this coming week. In case you happen to have landed here from a link or search, consider subscribing and receive this as an email weekly…

Last week I tried to attend as much as possible of the Obfuscation workshop. Which has only partly succeeded, meaning I did attend even less than planned. Still an interesting event, and in case I can find the time, I can have a look at the several presentations online. It is worth checking out the website as it is a nice way of storytelling by experiencing, with a flavor -as mentioned last week- of the oldskool digital art institute website (a category on its own), and only doable on a desktop. I do not have an extensive report ready but some quick quotes from presentations, which are hard to comprehend without context, but give you a cue to decide if you want to dive in further :-)

• Obfuscation is not just human behavior, it can also be an agent behavior in an artificial society. We can create artificial societies in the form of simulations to study obfuscation behavior (Amineh Ghorbani)
• Conservative people are more in favor of fewer regulations, and obfuscation (Ulf Liebe)
• The current focus is on communities vs networks, as the network promises did not deliver. Facebook vs Facebook groups. Responsibilities for filtering are shifted from algorithms to humans; can Lead though to burned-out moderators… (Lior Zalmanson)
• Another Facebook as an example: the amount of information collected is creating possibilities to learn more of people than the original goals for collecting, by making combinations (Patrick Skeba); see image
• You can not isolate the data linked to one person and protect it, we need models that tackle all connections that are made in our databases (from discussion in session Public Interest Technologies for the ML Age)
• We need slow tech in the smart city movement (Ellen Goodman)

And of course, much more was discussed. It dealt a lot with social media, something that has less my interest in the context of this newsletter and Cities of Things, however, it is of course kind of an engine nowadays for our digital life.

Next to that, the week was filled with the usual mix of meetings with students, working on the fieldlab Cities of Things and beyond, and Digital Twin strategies for INFO.We had another nice intimate workshop with Eindhoven IOT & ThingsCon on Trust in Design last Thursday. Check out the last one in this series on 20 May.

This week started well with the greenlight for Jip this morning (congrats!); it is still hard work for completing the last bits and pieces (he might read this ;). It is a strange week here with another scattered national holiday on Thursday.If you read this on time, check out the session of Anab Jain at (re)programming tonight at 19CEST.

Ok, let’s check what I saved this week of the news… Find the links in the newsletter.

Welcome to another weekly update. If you happen to have landed here from a link or search, consider subscribing and receive this as an email weekly…

Last week’s work consists of the usual mix of work on the Delft Design Lab Cities of Things with supervising the five graduation students. Jim has had his greenlight on Thursday, so he has now entered his last phase in designing “an AI assistant supporting balance between work and personal activities to increase wellbeing in the home office”. Peicheng had a successful midterm meeting (“Towards an active predictive relation by hacking study of vacuum robot”).

Not much time to attend events last week. Primavera De Filippi did an interesting talk on “Self-sovereign identity in a globalized world.” The aspect of having credential-based identity systems as a driver for economic inclusion was nicely illustrated with Kiva. A great case of how different asset and money systems are combined.

And she explained the UBI tokens benefits (see Proofofhumanity.id);

I have no conclusions here; if you find this interesting be sure to follow the NGI Forward salons dealing on SSI.

Speaking on trust, we (as in ThingsCon) will have our second online workshop with Eindhoven Internet of Things this Thursday, diving into trust by design exploring some cases. We had some interesting conversations last time on Codes of Trust. It is totally fine to join btw if you missed that one.

Another event I might join this week is the postponed Obfuscation Workshop, which was planned last year before. I am not sure what to expect, the website brings back memories from Mediamatic conceptual website from other times… Don’t forget to check out the workshop for MAB20 on Subversive citizen manual, entries to participate until 14 May. I might also have a look myself at Primer21 cfp.

The coming week Uroboros is starting; I mentioned that one last week, I still need to check what that is about tbh. If you like to plan ahead, these potentially interesting events are happening in June: STRP and CogX. Totally different from each other, which I like.Ok, enough on the event planning. What did the news bring us last week? Discontinued robot-dogs, robot-gizmos and robots making sense. And more.

Check the articles of last week via the Revue update.

That was it for this week. Enjoy the week!

PS: I will publish the new monthly update reflection on the cities of things newsletter soon, you can still subscribe to not miss that one!

Landing here for the first time? Find the earlier editions here. This is a weekly newsletter with my personal reflections in the context of the research and design I do. IoT, AI, robotics, and the impact of technology on society mainly. 

One day to go to another Covid-Kingsday here in the Netherlands. And another day for the first phase of some lockdown releases. If the latest numbers of infections and hospitalizations are not interfering after all…

Last week I did some work on planning the future of Cities of Things activities and work on the field lab that will organize a session in Amsterdam with consortium partners end of May and in Munich hopefully end of June to officially kick-off. Also happy to be part of MAB20 conference with a panel/mini-symposium. More to follow soon on that.

Let me remind you also of the academic workshop on the subversive citizen manual for the more-than-human city we are organizing at the conference. Call for participation is open until 14 May, check the website for more information.

We had another interesting session with ThingsCon on Code of Trust, organized by Eindhoven Internet of Things and it was nice to have a different group of people and context to discuss this (even as it is online, the communities can still differ). We keep you posted. We (Lorna and I) are thinking by the way that it would great idea to have a student involved in diving into the toolkit for trust in design for IoT that could be built upon the first insights of all these sessions. If you are interested or like to advertise it with the students, let me know! And we will have a second session on Trust by Design zooming in on use cases on 6 May, more information here.

Last week I followed a bit of the conference on the New European Bauhaus. Lots of policymakers and related speakers setting the stage for this new European program. Definitely interesting framing and the invitation to share projects before summer is something to consider. There is a lot to say about a new kind of built environment that is adapting to the intelligent systems, as we are researching with Cities of Things.

Speaking of Cities of Things: the end of the month is near so I will post a reflective post on one of the bigger stories of last month via this newsletter. You can subscribe in case you like to receive it in the mailbox directly.

And there was the Apple event of course. I promised to reflect on that last week. Indeed the Airtags were finally announced. The importance of this is of course not the tags but the system it is embedded in which makes the finding really possible. I have been pitching these concepts years ago for finding specific products (think 2 wheels), and so have a lot of others; the power is in the huge base of devices that can pick up signals. I like some of the analyses made (see below) that this is the starting of a real merge of digital and physical experiences as the physical world can get even more digital nodes now. But let’s first test the Airtags, I ordered a couple so I can replace my old Tile that ran out of juice a year ago or so.

I am not buying any desktops, but the iPad Pro has one feature that might consider; the center vision for video calls. I will wait though for hearing out some test results. I do have my own follow-me-camera (Obsbot Tiny), but the killer feature would be to have eye centering for the iPad to start using that device more…

Ok, enough gadget talk and FWP… Let me give a shout-out to The Low Carbon Design Institute virtual residency that Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino initiated. You can still apply this week for participating in the super interesting program. Or follow separate sessions later in June of course.

And on to the captured news of this week, with new robots but also some interesting reflections on changing systems…: check the newsletter on Revue.

To close; if you are in the Netherlands, I hope you can find the party feeling tomorrow with an orange lockdown-safe Kingsday party. For the rest, you might have a look at the Playful Urban Futuring session this Wednesday evening. Dive into responsibility gaps, or into blockchain ecologies. Have a great week!

Thanks for subscribing (or in case you ended up via the tweet, feel free to subscribe for a weekly newsletter in your mailbox; check earlier editions here)!

I was interviewed this morning from Japan, for the Privacy Talk YouTube channel. I will share the interview here as soon as it is online. Thanks, Kohei Kurihara for inviting me. It was also nice to revisit the article of 2017 I wrote at the beginning of the research program Cities of Things. It still describes nicely the motivations of the research activities!

As promised I published a post on the results of the Designing Connected Experiences minor of bachelor students Industrial Design, including reflections.I attend the NGI Forward session with Alicia Asin, CEO of IoT platform Libelium. An interesting takeaway was the clear opinion of the role of 5G for IoT; there is a big impediment for that now, as the energy consumption would make it impossible for simple products. There is however also a promise in the increasing combination of IoT and AI that might be used for more efficient use of energy. She sees finally a change towards more mature applications of IoT, going beyond the proof of concept stage. Something that I recognize from the practice at INFO.

On Wednesday I joined the AIxDesign meetup. I missed earlier editions which is too bad. An interesting series of meetups I think. This edition dealt with architecture. Of buildings, not of software. The speaker was Klara Vatn, Head of Design in the Oslo-based startup Spacemaker. A design-supporting tool for architects. Both in ideating new urban layouts as a helpful partner in detailing certain aspects like sunlight calculations. She used the metaphor of an AI on your shoulder not to take over but to help with advice and coaching. Also interesting how she was explaining how the black box of AI was fragmented and divided among different elements of the design process. Remaining a black box but with more connection as it is more specific.

Before diving into captured news of last week, let me invite you again the workshop this Thursday on Code of Trust for IoT. Join us for a session on Code of Trust for connected objects, organized by Eindhoven Internet of Things meetup in partnership with ThingsCon.

Continue reading via the newsletter at Revue. With amongst others: People may trust computers more than humans, Amsterdam’s ethical sensing plan is a model for smart cities, AI ethicist Kate Darling: ‘Robots can be our partners’, and the weekly round-up of new helpful robots.

A short week last week. With a lot of things on the agenda. For a couple of years, I do a kick-off presentation for the students at AVANS CMD as part of the kick-off of a minor on Integrated Smart Systems. It is a mix of introduction to connected objects and the internet of things, and some peek into the future of more intelligent things. In collaboration with the new coordinator we discussed diving a bit more into the difference between collector- and actor-products as introduced in the model of Nazli Cila back in 2017 (see this paper). It was nice to dive a bit more into that framework again, still relevant, and the third level; the creator, has links with the Things that Predict, which is my personal research focus still.

Speaking of that, on Friday eight teams of bachelor students of Industrial Design in Delft presented the results of their minor Designing Connected Experiences, with the focus on the city context. All projects had interesting angles, all different, but some could also very well be connected. I will make a post with all the projects on the Delft Design Lab Cities of Things as soon as all videos are ready for public sharing. The projects became more interesting if more than one type of object was connected and when the objects also take initiative in the interaction. And adding a goal for the impact made the projects even more relevant!

The week was also dedicated to IoT Rotterdam. The whole week sessions and workshops could be followed. I participated in two workshops organized by Creating010 on Value of the Smart City and on Digital City and Digital Citizenship. On Friday Pieter and I gave a masterclass on Responsible design for networked objects. We shaped a new masterclass that focused on diving deep into the redesign of an existing smart object, to go beyond the first level issues and solutions. We were very happy with the format and the discussions we had. We think that the masterclass will work even better in 3 hours with more time for the designing part. We are happy to do the masterclass more often so let us know! :-)

If you are interested in Trust and IoT, we do another round of workshops on 22 April, 96 May, and 20 May organized by IoT Eindhoven. Check the meetup-page for info and RSVP.

We also sent out a newsletter for ThingsCon, with the introduction of our new year theme: EVERY____. Want to know more, check the newsletter here.

The rest of the week was filled with meetings with graduate students and field lab development. And what happened furthermore in the world; let’s check the news bits…

Find the collected news-items in the newsletter.

See you next week…

I don’t have any public sessions on the calendar. I might check out the NGI Forward session with the Libellium CEO, one of the bigger IoT platforms. I cannot make it to this week’s What’s Next but if you are into Generational Intelligence, check it out!

As it is less packed with sessions, I might have finally time to update the websites of Delft Design Lab and Cities of Things…

Have a great week!