Participating and Performing with Public Things
Laura Forlano
Institute of Design
Illinois Institute of Technology
Co-Director
Critical Futures Lab
Public spaces in cities are currently being embedded with a range of networked things – adaptive traffic
signals, urban screens, dynamic parking meters, smart lampposts and trashbins – that have the potential
to create new ways of participating and engaging with urban environments. However, as part of the ‘smart
city’ agenda, which is being widely adopted throughout the world, these projects are often primarily
focused on promoting the values of efficiency, innovation and security. For example, in Chicago, UI Labs,
a network that received a $300 million grant from the Obama Administration, is developing a citywide
sensor network that is being led primarily by technology companies with little consideration of the needs
or interests of citizens. On the other hand, the Array of Things1 project, which is primarily being led as an
academic project, has been prototyping “a network of interactive, modular sensor boxes around Chicago
collecting real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use,”
with the goal of being an open source platform for citizen science. My current design research is
engaging with these topics in order to understand the socio-political implications (Pinch & Bijker, 1984) of
existing technologies as well as creating participatory design (Spinuzzi, 2005) platforms for re-imagining
alternative future possibilities (Dunne & Raby, 2013) of these technologies.
Many of the technologies that are being deployed in public spaces are designed to surveil, regulate and
discipline (Latour, 1992) our actions. How might we in turn create modes of participation and performance
that discipline these disobedient devices around alternative norms and values? How might we reverse the
kinds of algorithmic injustices that are likely to emerge with increased reliance on these devices? Two
recent projects, the needy toaster 2 and the ethical fan3, demonstrate the ways in which the design of
these devices might allow for the emergence of a very different set of relationships in terms of the ways in
which public things might participate in the world. At a recent workshop on “Predicting the City,” at the
University of Amsterdam, we discussed the possibility of a public art project that would put smart
lampposts “on trial” for their infringement of mobile data and location information.
Over the past ten years, I have been researching and intervening in new forms of participation in public
infrastructures in a number of ways. First, as an academic and activist working on community wireless
projects (Forlano, 2008; Forlano & Dailey, 2008). Second, as a design researcher, I have created a series
of participatory design workshops and events through several projects -- Breakout!, Designing Policy and
Reimagining Work -- which experimented with urban technology and engaged multiple stakeholders in a
definition of the kinds of collaborative practices and values that might be supported by particular kinds of
urban infrastructures and technologies (Forlano & Halpern, 2015; Forlano & Mathew, 2014; Townsend,
Forlano, & Simeti, 2011). Finally, as an educator, in Spring 2015, for my Networked Objects course, a
graduate workshop at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, students created a game
called Critical Loop 4 in order to introduce designers and technologists to ethical and values in design
considerations related to the ‘internet of things’.
Bibliography
Dunne, Anthony, & Raby, Fiona. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Forlano, L., & Halpern, M. (2015). Reimagining Work: Entanglements and Frictions around Future of Work
Narratives. Fibreculture(25).
Forlano, Laura. (2008). Anytime? Anywhere?: Reframing Debates Around Community and Municipal Wireless
Networking. Journal of Community Informatics, 4(1).
Forlano, Laura, & Dailey, Dharma. (2008). Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy. New York, NY:
The Architecture League of New York.
Forlano, Laura, & Mathew, Anijo. (2014). From Design Fiction to Design Friction: Speculative and Participatory
Design of Values-Embedded Urban Technology. Journal of Urban Technology, 21(4), 7-24.
Latour, Bruno. (1992). Where are the Missing Masses? A Sociology of Few Mundane Objects. In W. E. Bijker & J.
Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change (pp. pp. 151-180).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pinch, Trevor J., & Bijker, Wiebe E. (1984). The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology
of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other. Social Studies of Science, 14(3),
399-441.
Spinuzzi, Clay. (2005). The methodology of participatory design. Technical Communication, 52(2), 163-174.
Townsend, Anthony, Forlano, Laura, & Simeti, Antonina. (2011). Breakout! Escape from the Office: Situating
Knowledge Work in Sentient Public Spaces. In M. Shepard (Ed.), Sentient City. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
1
See https://arrayofthings.github.io. Accessed on May 15, 2015.
See http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-03/18/addicted-toaster. Accessed on May 15, 2015.
3 See http://www.creativeapplications.net/objects/ethical-things-the-mundane-the-insignificant-and-thesmart-things/. Accessed on May 15, 2015.
4 See http://CriticalLoop.org. Accessed on May 15, 2015.
2