update
On 16 October, Wijkcoop Afrikaanderwijk organised an open day. One highlight was a Wijkbot parade featuring four neighborhood robots made by schoolchildren. The Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative used the WijkbotKit to help primary school children build Wijkbots constructed entirely from wind-blown litter and leftover materials from the market. During the open day,
update
On 10 October we organised a workshop at the Society 5.0 Festival at The Social Hub Amsterdam, applying a new workshop format. At the festival, Smit hosted a workshop titled Transforming the Neighborhood Fabric with Hoodbots, exploring how technology can be designed to blend digital and physical realities in
update
On 26 June, four teams of industrial design students at TU Delft presented their prototypes for so-called Neighborhood Navigators as part of the course Interactive Technology Design. Cities of Things was a partner in the course, inviting students to think about what it would mean if robots became a permanent
update
On 6 & 7 June, the PublicSpaces conference took place in Amsterdam. Wijkbot was invited to run a workshop making the role of robots in the city tangible, with special attention to public values. We opened with a short presentation about the project background and offered scenarios showing ways the
reflections
On 4 June 2024, I gave a talk at an evening on “Designing Intelligent Cultures with Data and AI”, organized by design agency CLEVER°FRANKE from Utrecht (check also their recap). I decided to share my developing thoughts on the emergence of Generative Things, a new breed of things that
update
On 6 June Cities of Things will be hosting a Wijkbot workshop at the PublicSpaces conference. On 6 and 7 June, PublicSpaces and Waag Futurelab will organise the fourth edition of the PublicSpaces conference with the theme 'Taking Back the Internet'. The two-day programme will take place at
update
A team of IPO (Industrial Product Design) students from Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences created a modular version of the WijkbotKit in semester 23 of the 2023/2024 academic year. A combination of sheet materials and connectors makes it possible to quickly create a volume with great freedom. The modular
reflections
Following the method of last Month, I again asked the AI-intern (ChatGPT-4) to reflect on the different weekly thoughts at Target is New, through the lense of the Cities of Things Manifesto. I continued the conversation a bit with my own feelings about last Month, as an important moment with
update
Today -19 April 2024- four teams of students from the master program Industrial Design Engineering faculty of Delft University of Technology will present their first ideas and explorations of the relation of so-called neighborhood navigators for future citizenship as part of the Smart and Social Fest in Rotterdam. The teams
reflections
Every week, I post a newsletter via Target_is_New signaling notions from the news and elaborate on one topic triggered by a news item or event I visited. As my frame of view is the City of Things beliefs, it makes a lot of sense to create a monthly
update
Two teams from the IUXD (Interface & User Experience Design) course at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences designed concepts for the Wijkbot, with the Cool Zuid neighbourhood as their starting point. Both teams had already conducted field research in the neighbourhood. We gave students this brief: In this assignment, we
update
Two student teams from the Next Level Engineering master programme at The Hague University of Applied Sciences presented their final projects on 25 January 2024 at Delft Campus, as part of the Design and Technology course. We distinguished two goals: one group focused on collecting leftover raw materials for the