Ambient intelligence and the digital umbrella
The Smart City must provide infrastructure for free living and interaction with physical space while reflecting users' digital lives. Visual and auditory displays should be open to individual digital services, respecting personal choice and data privacy. The citizen and digital collective share an equal bidirectional relationship, where the citizen controls personal data and determines its use and sharing.
In a Smart City, inhabitants have individual influence and collective control, supported by an open network connecting digital services and physical locations. The city becomes a place for citizens, driven by their needs and offering culturally neutral spaces. Citizens' combined intelligence forms a digital melting pot, revitalizing the city space for human-scale cultures.
The situated citizen
A successful city plan acknowledges that a city is formed by its inhabitants and users. The narrow winding streets of pre-industrial architecture were not planned per se, but rather formed by the flow of pedestrians and small carts; the flowing waters of daily life carved out the necessary urban pathways. These areas of cities still attract visitors from far away and are often among the most exclusive areas.
A Smart City is a city in which the inhabitants influence individually and control collectively their surroundings; the digital domain allows a city to support the life of its citizens, and this starts by providing a network open to the unruly services and interests of its citizens.
Interfacing ambient intelligence
Mobile computing and positioning technology merge physical and virtual reality. This hybrid space requires us to look beyond conventional interface designs in search of new forms of interaction that will work in open-ended systems.
In contrast to the safety of the virtual desktop, physical reality is open-ended. Challenges to the design of an interface that must function in a constantly changing world involve practical issues and defining new conceptual models of interaction. The practical, low resolution on visual displays with animation may be a viable solution to changing resolution, distortions, and scattered user attention.
The conceptual approach taken is to avoid unnecessary encodings in the interface and instead build on causal relations between the interface and the immediate environment whenever possible.
The chief contribution of this thesis is the articulation of a visual format that is sufficiently robust, sufficiently swift, and sufficiently flexible to survive in dynamic environments. This approach is contrasted to traditional visual representations of agents and system functions.
