Towards Sensible Interfaces
I wrote this essay for the Artificial Intelligence in the City: Building Civic Engagement and Public Trust report (Ana Brandusescu and Jess Reia)
From sensors to surveillance cities
Our cities are home to more and more sensors. As they collect data from urban systems that can be analyzed and optimized, networks of sensors are often considered basic infrastructure of “smart cities”. Although such infrastructures aim to bring efficiency, their design also facilitates the emergence of surveillance cities. In this essay, I will explore how we can reverse this paradigm by urbanizing technology and transforming sensors into sensible interfaces.
Sensors are purposely designed to be seamless and invisible. It is interesting to note that this design results from a techno-economic imperative. Indeed, sensors’ reduction in size over the years has been guided by cost optimization and their average production price has reduced to one-third in less than a decade (Statista, 2021). Moreover, sensor invisibility expresses a technical ideal. As the computer scientist Mark Weiser says: “A good tool is an invisible tool” (Weiser, 1993).
But by seeing without being seen, sensors tend to be part of what Michel Foucault described as a Panopticon (Foucault, 1975). As such, the networks of sensors create distrust among citizens and discord among urban stakeholders. Initially open and owned by people, the city becomes a surveillance system characterized by opacity.
Materializing data through sensible interfaces
Instead of creating invisible sensors that enhance surveillance, we should design interfaces that materialize data (D’Ignazio et al., 2019). It is usual to imagine screens or smartphones when talking about interfaces. But one could argue that smartphones also isolate users from the urban environment. It creates “smombies” — a suitcase word formed from smartphone and zombie to refer to city dwellers who are constantly looking at their phones (Zhuang & Fang, 2019).
Though, smartphones represent only a certain way of interfacing bits. Information can be transmitted by other mediums than screens (e.g., wood, water, and light) and stimulate other senses than sight (e.g., touch, hearing and smell). We could talk about “sensible interfaces” to characterize these low-tech and multisensorial information supports. Unlike smartphones that concentrate the digital world in our hands, sensible interfaces materialize information and distribute it in the urban environment (Hartmann, 2005). By doing so, they create an augmented environment in which people can make enlightened decisions. Transparency not only brings trust but also efficiency.
On this subject, Urban AI recently collaborated with the French Institute of Design, The Nantes Metropolis, the Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis and three French design schools to imagine sensible interfaces. Below is one of the projects from this collaboration:
This team proposed to materialize data collected by Nantes Métropoles on the Loire River by using water bubbles on the water mirror. Each water bubble embodies different data of the Loire (water level, chemical pollution, temperature and organic pollution). Here, data are interfaced with a low-tech material (water) and distributed in the built environment. Unlike the smart city paradigm where data are collected for experts or innovators,sensible interfaces make them available and accessible to all. Last but not least, they amplify cities’ speech and (re)make public spaces a meeting point where urban dialogue flourishes.
Urbanizing technology
This effort to embody data highlights that sensors cannot remain only techno-economic products. They need to become a social object and a catalyst of urbanity. In this context, data becomes a raw material to shape the city. This process of designing and developing technologies that promote urbanity and cityness is what we call, drawing from Saskia Sassen’s work, “urbanizing technologies” (Sassen, 2021). Applied to sensors, this concept leads to the emergence of sensible interfaces. But the same logic can be used to reimagine many other technologies.20 It is about designing and using technologies as tools that help us dwell upon the earth and with each other
Reference List
D’Ignazio, C., Gordon, E., & Christoforetti, E. (2019). Seamful Interfaces for a Community-Centered Smart City. Urban Interfaces: Media, Art and Performance in Public Spaces, edited by Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 22(4). »
Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage. » Hartmann, M. (2005). Interfacing ambient intelligence. IT University of Copenhagen, Department of Innovation. »
Sassen, S. (2021). Urbanized technology. Urban AI.
Statista. (2021). Global average sensor sales price from 2010 to 2020. »
Urban AI — Ecole de Design de Nantes. (n.d.) [Digital images]. »
Weiser, M. (1994). The world is not a desktop. Interactions, 1(1), 7–8. »
Zhuang, Y., & Fang, Z. (2020). Smartphone zombie context awareness at crossroads: A multi-source information fusion approach. IEEE Access, 8, 101963–101977.
