Target_is_New - Issue #175

Welcome to the new week! Now 2022 has started for real. Still, some prediction blogs are dropping but most have been published and we can start monitoring the expectations for web3 and other big stories. And we can say that Wordle has officially become hype overnight with a media frenzy about monetizing on other ideas. Nothing new but it was very quick.

These are not the typical topics I like to focus on in this newsletter though. I try to keep the focus on the phygital (I don’t know about this term), intelligence, post-human societies, and robotics.

One of the signature domains is mobility. We are looking into new concepts for nicer neighborhoods and cities in the field labs related to last-mile mobility including logistics. A lot of aspects come together. There is noticeably an uptake for the concept of a hub as a guiding principle; it is taken on all levels of decision-making as a framing solution. The specific Cities of Things Hub uses specific aspects of self-organizing and orchestrating tech as inspiration. Things as citizens, neighborhood hubs as a trusted partner, or even as a kind of parent, as Jelmer conceptualized in his graduation research in 2020.

Last week the Micromobility online conference was one of the things I planned to visit. I missed it, but I will try to see some of the panels online. Curious if the hub was a topic; Bird is addressing parking as important as riding micromobility.

So far from the updates from last week.

As mentioned last week, you might check Sensemakers AMS session on Web3, however, it is already fully booked I think. It is a sign of the times that soo many are interested in attending!

On the same day a bit earlier, Digital Society School has its showcases. I know from the time I was connected as an ambassador that it can deliver some inspiring work by the students.

If you are into digital art, good old v2 is having a nice evening on Thursday. Part of celebrating 40 years of history of that institute.

Is Web3 really the next big thing we should strive for? Or do we introduce some face decentralization/democratization?

Before diving into a paper for this week, let me share a lovely little tool: tl;dr papers. Based on the GPT-3 engine it promises “science abstracts for second graders. written by AI.” The tool delivers nice insides in your own or some else’s work. Fun to see, but also as ‘mirror’ on what remains of a paper.

This one was extracted from the paper Products as agents: Metaphors for designing the products of the IoT age (Cila et al, 2017).

The tool is rather popular apparently as it is under maintenance now, so I cannot use it for this week’s highlighted paper: a classic one in the design for intelligent objects: Taylor, A. S. (2009, April). Machine intelligence.

Already some years old, still relevant. “As such, intelligence does not just belong to the province of the human mind, but can emerge in quite different, unexpected forms in things.”