Adam Greenfield is an American writer and urbanist, based in London.
Greenfield was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1968. He attended New York University, graduating with a degree in cultural studies in 1989. Between 1995 and 2000, he served as a psychological operations specialist (later sergeant) in the United States Army’s Special Operations Command. [1] [2] [3] [4]
After leaving the Army, Greenfield began working in the then-nascent field of information architecture for the World Wide Web, holding a succession of positions culminating in employment at the Tokyo office of Razorfish, where he was head of information architecture.
In the 2006 and 2007 academic years, with Kevin Slavin, he co-taught a class at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program called Urban Computing. In the following academic year the class was renamed Urban Experience in the Network Age, and Greenfield taught it alone. From 2008 to 2010 he was Nokia's head of design direction for user interface and services, residing in Helsinki throughout the assignment. In 2010 he returned to New York City and founded an urban-systems design practice called Urbanscale, which described their work as "design for networked cities and citizens." [5]
In September 2013, Greenfield was awarded the inaugural Senior Urban Fellowship at the LSE Cities centre of the London School of Economics, [6] relocated to London, and taught in the MArch Urban Design programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture of University College London.
He has written a number of articles for The Guardian , beginning in 2014. [7]
Ubiquitous computing is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear seamlessly anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing implies use on any device, in any location, and in any format. A user interacts with the computer, which can exist in many different forms, including laptop computers, tablets, smart phones and terminals in everyday objects such as a refrigerator or a pair of glasses. The underlying technologies to support ubiquitous computing include the Internet, advanced middleware, kernels, operating systems, mobile codes, sensors, microprocessors, new I/Os and user interfaces, computer networks, mobile protocols, global navigational systems, and new materials.
David Andrew Patterson is an American computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at Google. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley.
Mark D. Weiser was an American computer scientist and chief technology officer (CTO) at Xerox PARC. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988. Within Silicon Valley, Weiser was broadly viewed as a visionary and computer pioneer, and his ideas have influenced many of the world's leading computer scientists.
Sim Van der Ryn is an American architect, researcher and educator. Van der Ryn's professional interest has been applying principles of physical and social ecology to architecture and environmental design.
Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Sennett has studied social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world.
Michael David Sorkin was an American architectural and urban critic, designer, and educator. He was considered to be "one of architecture's most outspoken public intellectuals", a polemical voice in contemporary culture and the design of urban places at the turn of the twenty-first century. Sorkin first rose to prominence as an architectural critic for the Village Voice in New York City, a post which he held for a decade throughout the 1980s. In the ensuing years, he taught at prominent universities around the world, practiced through his eponymous firm, established a nonprofit book press, and directed the urban design program at the City College of New York. He died at age 71 from complications brought on by COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Melvin M. Webber was an urban designer and theorist associated for most of his career with the University of California at Berkeley but whose work was internationally important. He was a director of the university's Transportation Center, an author of classic theoretical papers and of major consulting reports, and an active contributor to debates on transportation policy, regional development and planning theory.
Kent Larson is an architect and Professor of the Practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Larson is currently director of the City Science research group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-director with Lord Norman Foster of the Norman Foster Institute on Sustainable Cities based in Madrid. His research is focused on urban design, modeling and simulation, compact transformable housing, and ultralight autonomous mobility on demand. He has established an international consortium of City Science Network labs, and is a founder of multiple MIT Media Lab spin-off companies, including Ori Living and L3cities.
A pervasive game is one where the gaming experience is extended out into the real world, or where the fictional world in which the game takes place blends with the physical world. The "It's Alive" mobile games company described pervasive games as "games that surround you," while Montola, Stenros, and Waern's book Pervasive Games defines them as having "one or more salient features that expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially." The concept of a "magic circle" draws from the work of Johan Huizinga, who describes the boundaries of play.
Owen Hatherley is a British writer and journalist based in London who writes primarily on architecture, politics and culture.
Urban computing is an interdisciplinary field which pertains to the study and application of computing technology in urban areas. This involves the application of wireless networks, sensors, computational power, and data to improve the quality of densely populated areas. Urban computing is the technological framework for smart cities.
Open-source architecture is an emerging paradigm advocating new procedures in the imagination and formation of virtual and real spaces within a universal infrastructure. Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, modular design, avant-garde architectural, science fiction, language theory, and neuro-surgery, it adopts an inclusive approach as per spatial design towards a collaborative use of design and design tools by professionals and ordinary citizen users. The umbrella term citizen-centered design harnesses the notion of open-source architecture, which in itself involves the non-building architecture of computer networks, and goes beyond it to the movement that encompass the building design professions, as a whole.
Benjamin H. Bratton is an American Philosopher of Technology known for his work spanning social theory, computer science, design, artificial intelligence, and for his writing on the geopolitical implications of what he terms "planetary scale computation".
Bernd Johann Krämer is a German computer scientist and professor emeritus of the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics.
Urban informatics refers to the study of people creating, applying and using information and communication technology and data in the context of cities and urban environments. It sits at the conjunction of urban science, geomatics, and informatics, with an ultimate goal of creating more smart and sustainable cities. Various definitions are available, some provided in the Definitions section.
LSE Cities is a research centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Radical Technologies is a non-fiction book by the UK-based American author Adam Greenfield. Subtitled 'The design of everyday life' it looks at the technologies that are transforming the world at an ever increasing rate.
Responsive computer-aided design is an approach to computer-aided design (CAD) that utilizes real-world sensors and data to modify a three-dimensional (3D) computer model. The concept is related to cyber-physical systems through blurring of the virtual and physical worlds, however, applies specifically to the initial digital design of an object prior to production.
Jofish Kaye is an American and British scientist specializing in human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. He supports the Innovation Enablement team's research function as Principle Scientist at Wells Fargo, and is an editor of Personal & Ubiquitous Computing, and previously ran interaction design and user research teams at anthem.ai.
Usman Haque is an architect and artist who works with technology. He is known for designing large scale interactive installations and his contributions to Interactive architecture and the Internet of things.