The city and the City: a long view on experience and interaction design in smart urban environments

A session at RE:DESIGN/UX Design

In many ways, the “smart” city is already here: public wifi, location-based services and embedded digital display systems embodying a few of the most present, if not visible, harbingers. And there are deeper evolutions afoot: energy and data infrastructures are becoming more complex and at the same time more seamlessly integrated into the material and structural disposition of the world about. What is the essential character of these systems as they grow into the future?

One of my favorite philosopher-scientists, Paul Dourish, once said that “increasingly, the very world itself has become an interface to computation… and yet, that interface is nowhere near as conversational as it might be”. While we may instrument the built world with the technologies of interaction, the really powerful design narrative here is around *lived* human experience.

If ‘cities’ are already a somewhat alienating proposition, what does their hyper-saturation with IT augur for the future generations inhabiting them? If architecture and structural engineering would take the evolution of materiality and space in hand, then it seems that interaction designers and their cohorts must take the long view on human-computer interactions with regard to the “humane” lived experience in those new environments.

About the speaker

This person is speaking at this event.

Scott Nazarian

Creative Director, frog

Scott’s current design practice resides within the community at frog where he is a creative director in their Seattle studio. He joined this community in 2007 in frog’s San Francisco studio as a self-described “HCI generalist”. Prior, he had been a principal investigator with the Sun Labs in Menlo Park. Scott holds patents in the areas of visual media search methods as well as graphical user interface approaches for 10′ interaction.

A graduate of the Art Center College of Design, Scott holds an MFA in Media Design. Fortified with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, in the last twenty four years he has been a journeyman along the path of visual communications and production throughout film, photography, editorial graphic design and interaction design for both screen and built environments. He has instructed at all levels of the design curriculum, most recently as an adjunct professor at California College of Arts.

Scott has an abiding interest in speculative fiction and its influence over popular expectations around human-computer interaction. Equally fascinated by historical determinism, he is also a student of the cultural perceptions and behaviors that ground new product experience.