As we move towards the future, we embrace evolution, knowing that everything we interact with in our everyday lives will improve, be enhanced in its performance and potentially customised by its users. Features shift, defaults disappear, menus change. In this constant motion, it is fundamental to recognize transitions, but also to anticipate mutations, and shape alternative solutions. As Kevin Kelly says, the Future we are moving towards is the product of a process – a becoming – that we can see right now.
More than half of the world’s population has already chosen to live in cities, a phenomena that is expected to rise to 70% by 2050. High impact consumption patterns, environmental degradation, and persistent inequity are only a few of the issues that affect contemporary cities. However, cities also offer, per capita and in a limited space, high access to infrastructure and services, including water, energy and mobility, making them fertile terrain to provide realistic answers to some of the global challenges we are to face in the near future.
The IaaC Global Summer School 2019 will question some of these impending challenges, envisioning how we can reconfigure infrastructure, manage resources, establishing new paradigms for cities, buildings, matter and citizens. Through its distributed and multidisciplinar network of Nodes, a global team of researchers, students, and institutions will define and prototype actions for the application of Advanced Digital Design Strategies as essentials means for this change.