5: The litany of an urbanizing world: Manu's questions for Tobias and Han

Manu Fernandez:

1. Tobias's contribution points out, among other things, a crucial issue on urban challenges related to equality. The litany of an urbanizing world has been spectacularized and designing project in the urban context may be fooled into a critical approaches that do not consider conflicts and clashes. We can even consciously include these concerns when designing new projects in the urban realm, but fail to make it a transformative goal of them. Projects, interventions, installations... may have a well-established rhetoric, but only scratch the surface of what is at stake in urban fields. 

Can you think of projects or initiatives that hit the nail on the head on this? Can you think of some sort of criteria to discern the spectacular and the transformative?

2. Han's post can be read as an invitation for urban interaction designers to get their hands dirty. It is also a warning not to understand urban interaction design as a coherent, comprehensive, neat and totalizing construct, but as a standpoint to intervene in the messiness of cities. 

Can you give us some examples of everyday life situations in which urban interaction design can be more meaningful for all those pirates?

This post is part of the online conversation about urban interaction design: June 2014