Secret Lives of Data Publics: Mixed Reality Smart City Interfaces

Conventional smart city design processes tend to focus on instrumental planning for city systems or novel services for humans. Interacting with data produced by the new services and restructured systems entailed by these processes is commonly done via interfaces like civic dashboards, leading to a critique that data-driven urbanism is bound by the rules and constraints of dashboard design [1]. Informed citizens are expected to engage with new urban information flows through the logic of dashboard interfaces. What datastreams are left off the dashboard of engaged urban experience? What design opportunities arise when dashboard visualizations are moved into the domain of mixed reality? In this two-day workshop, participants will construct prototype mixed reality interfaces for engaging the informational layer of the built urban environment. Using the Unity game engine and the Microsoft HoloLens, participants will focus on generative design in the space of data-driven interfaces, addressing issues of data access, civic agency, and privacy in the context of smart cities. Specific attention will be paid to interfaces that facilitate harmonious co-existence between humans and non-human systems (AI, IoT, etc.).