So ..., long time between posts.  I've been attending seminars and conferences and finishing off my Masters in Architectural Science (Illumination Design).  The latest conference was Media Architecture Biennale 2016.  This will turn into a long blog post so the start is here:

Media Architecture Biennale 2016

So for the last four days I’ve been attending the Media Architecture Biennale 2016.  It’s been a self-indulgent immersion in the ideas around Smart Cities / Media Architecture / Lighting.  An assembelage of signiifcant players and personalities in these fields spoke on their topics over those four days.  In multiple streams it makes a difficult choice so I unfortunately missed a few items around the concept of Media Architecture.

The Media Architecture Biennale was held in Sydney 1st to 4th June 2016, looking for a Twitter hash tag use #mab2016.  This is the fourth conference of this type, the previous being held in London(2007), Denmark (2102, 2014), the next in 2018 to be held in Beijing.  a theme of ‘Digital Placemaking’ was chosen for this conference.

The program comprised of the SPARC Design exhibition, a day of workshops across urban environments and digital engagement through media architecture to smart cities and urban spaces, the city as a platform and the utilisation of data and creating public spaces at night.  It’s important to remember that the urban place/space exists in a diurnal world.

On the first day the workshops I attended was on “Smart Cities and Urban Innovation”, introduced by Scott Hawken and Hoon Han of University of New South Wales.  The speakers:

Greg Stone - Head of Digital Services - Australasia, ARUP.

Greg Stone - Head of Digital Services - Australasia, ARUP

Here Greg spoke on drivers of change these being: political, social, economic, technological and environmental.  He emphasised that the sontext of the system is mobile that artificial intelligence needs to be the intent of the system and the implementation needs to be over the internet protocol.  In the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning it is simple to conceptualise a scene  where the  daily aspects of a persons life would be centred around functions such as:  finding nourishment, arriving at the workplace, getting around, access to localities  being welcomed, access to business services  managing identity, unique and personalised retail.  Greg said a fundamental nature of a city is change and with that is  a changing technology landscape, have a look at his slide describing the changing technology landscape.  The clincher though is cost, how will it be funded and what the yield will be.  The take away was the intent and role of the street in the city and how open data will combine with ubiquitous sensors. 

Jeremy Gill - SCG Economics and Planning

Jeremy Gill - SCG Economics and Planning.  

The second speaker Jeremy Gill of SCG Economics  and Planning described the city as its people and that to define a city you need to start with data, he described data as a lens through which a city can be viewed.  That data is to be used to define the future of the city.