Design & Innovation

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The image above is one of the greatest of all time. Taken at the Solvay Conference of 1927, it captures the greatest physicists of the time (including Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, Schrodinger and Madame Curie). A friend refers to this as the photo with the maximum IQ per square inch.

As the Design Research Workshop on digitally transforming urban experiences in the future draws to a close, one has a similar feelings - a group of great minds with diverse interests coming together to transform the course of urban life in one of America’s greatest cities.

The conference ends here and now, but the process has just begun. The projects envisioned by the different teams, the book that the participants will jointly bring out, a movie that brings together the highlights of the conference are things we can look forward to.

Just like science, just like life, and just like the city of Philadelphia itself, digital transformation of urban experiences is a work in progress. To the participants, thank you very much for attending the conference! Wishing you a safe journey back home. Until the next time, good bye and good luck.

(Image courtesy: University of Frankfurt, Institute for Theoretical Physics. Click here for a high resolution image from Wikipedia.)

Towards the end of the panel discussion, Dr. Richard Boland presented the idea of how adding a new actor in an overlapping relationship leads to an exponential growth. He identified three actors who are engaged in innovation: interested participants, engaged actors and the act of experimenting with participation.

This relationship is linear, with each actor feeding into the other, but the outcome is also linear. However, we can add into this system an external actor, Rewards. The idea of “Reward”ing “Engaged Actors” for “Experimenting with Participation” makes idea of participation a lot more appealing to current as well as potential actors. This makes the relationship grow exponentially - a key concept behind the idea of YoPhilly!

A recording of the discussion led by the Plenary Panel.

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Richard Buchanan, John Carroll, Judith Tschirgi, Monica Zimmermann Treichel

Instead of taking a top-down approach by putting up one single network covering the city, the city’s universities and other institutions which have already put up an excellent cyber infrastructure for themselves should work towards interoperability.

YoPhilly! Yes, that is the name of the planned portal. So Philly-like, isn’t it?

YoPhilly will work with a network of aphiliates (basically youth from Philadelphia), who will aggregate information about anything and everything going on in the city, and will share this through the portal. YoPhily can also be used to create a new economy using the idea of smart mobs.

Watch out for this, yo!

Zoran Obradovic, Kalle Lyytinen, Antony Bryant and John Carroll

New spaces of Experience

- World of things
- Virtual world of representations
- Virtual world of imagined world of things

When designing a city for the future, it is important, crucial to search for identity. Understanding a city’s tradition and heritage will help enable historic movement in richly connected worlds that are changing and shifting.