1. Robots, immaterials
& control
How digital technology changes our social, cultural
and physical experience of the city
Canadian Centre for Architecture
14 February 2013
Neil Clavin Studio

2. Digital technology will evolve the experience of the city
as radically as the automobile

3. Tomorrow’s architects will design the future city with
both physical and digital materials

4. How will technology transform the experience of the
city socially, culturally and physically?

5. Express a future reality reflecting the technology
saturated, augmented and information rich city

6. Robots
Immaterials
Control

7. Robots
Immaterials
Control

8. New lifestyles emerge from living and working with
machines and between digital and physical space

9. Robots will live with us

10. Increasingly we will share our environment with robots

11. Robots are replacing many human jobs

12. New careers will be created

13. Our world will become increasingly designed to be
navigable by machines in addition to humans

14. Co-habiting with robots will change the structure and
appearance of our environments

15. Increasingly our environment is being translated for
machines to understand and navigate

16. Machines navigate in different ways than humans

17. We are living in public spaces traversing the physical
and digital

18. Occupying two spaces simultaneously requires
affordances for navigation...

20. ...and how we demarcate public and private space
around us

21. By 2045 some of us may live completely inside digital
space to later be installed in new physical bodies

22. What architectures might people living inside
machines require?

23. Robots
Immaterials
Control

24. The image of the city changes both physically and
immaterially via living with digital technology

25. The New Aesthetic is emerging driven by the functional
needs of machines not humans

26. Architecture for machines is reinforced, windowless
and highly ventilated

27. Buildings situated on high data speed sites are
premium real estate for machines

28. Parametric architecture creates unique buildings
modelled around data

29. The immaterial city is viewed in ways previously
invisible or non-existent

30. Mapping the networked city

31. Mapping physiological arousal

32. Mapping emotional cityness

33. What are the invisible smokestacks of the immaterial
city?

34. Energy smokestack

35. Pollution smokestack

36. Happiness smokestack

37. Robots
Immaterials
Control

38. Urban phenomena emerge around networked urbanism
of either collaboration or control

39. Personal digital technology and social networks
encourage collaborative bottom up urbanism

40. Crowdsourcing is driving collaborative design

41. Crowdfunding is driving production of architectural
‘minimum viable product’ funded by end users

42. Crowdsourcing & crowdfunding are emerging for
urban change on a local level. Can they scale?

43. Companies extol visions of the city as a system of
efficiency and control

44. IBM, Cisco, General Electric, etc, envision a city as
system of efficiency and control

45. Urbiotica proposes a gentler sensor laden ‘urban
operating system’

46. Explore how technology can be applied in a designful
way to enrich the experience of the city for citizens

47. Robots
Immaterials
Control

48. Digital technology will transform our experience of the
city socially, culturally and physically

49. Tomorrow’s city is shaped
by the lifestyles of us and
machines, physical and
immaterial forms,
the tension between
collaborative bottom up
urbanism and top down
centralised control

50. Thanks!
www.neilclavin.com
hello@neilclavin.com
Neil Clavin Studio