Guest Post: Adam Greenfield of Nokia on Urban Systems Design

Howard Greenstein | October 24th, 2009 | Strategic Change

My name is Adam Greenfield, and I currently work for Nokia in Helsinki, Finland, as head of design direction for service and user interface design. For the past ten years, I’ve worked in the field of user experience – which is to say, at the intersection between ordinary, everyday people, their perceptions, expectations and desires, and the information-technological artifacts that increasingly populate their lives.

At first, this meant discrete things like Web sites and mobile devices, but as early as 2001 I began to develop an interest in ubiquitous computing: what happens when information-processing power begins to evaporate from these discrete boxes we think of as “computers,” and instead takes up residence in the myriad ordinary objects and surfaces around us. (If you’re interested in this question, you’ll find it and its implications explored in depth in my 2006 book Everyware.)

Of course, in the years since, Web use has utterly saturated everyday life in the developed world. Tens of millions of people use Internet-capable devices we call “smartphones” – and those devices are increasingly being considered as sensor platforms capable of registering everything from location and direction of movement to air quality. Some four billion real-world things, from running shoes and passports to bridges and entire transit systems, are instrumented with RFID tags, generating data that can be taken up to be reused, visualized or acted upon by any other system connected to the global network.

One of my abiding interests (and a main goal in taking my present position) has been exploring the ways we might make and use cities under such conditions. But with municipal governments around the world opening up access to their data, and companies like IBM starting to preach the networked-urbanism gospel, I’m beginning to feel we’re in a position to take the next step further out: to use the data all these devices, services and systems are generating to understand the fiendishly complex tangle of material, energetic, biological and informational flows that constitutes a city. And eventually, with sensitivity and tact, to design the kind of interventions that will improve quality of life for everyone who lives in or uses a given urban environment.

This is what the linked piece concerns itself with, and it’s what I’m going to be speaking about at Supernova. I look forward to meeting you there, and discussing the prospects and potentials with you.

Editor’s Note: Guest poster Adam Greenfield has done a great post that related to his talk at Supernova in December,  called “Toward Urban Systems Design” that is worth checking out. Watch this space for more Supernova Conference speaker guest posts.