Keynote Talk DIS 2016, June 4–8, 2016, Brisbane, Australia



Carlo Ratti
Senseable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA, United States
ratti@mit.edu





Cities are, by definition, plural, public, and productive.
They are created by society itself (barring exceptional cases
like master-planned Brasilia or Chandigarh) and they
function as culture’s petri dish for progress. Living in space
and creating space can go hand in hand. We propose to
employ design in a systematic exploration and germination
of possible futures, exploring how ubiquitous computing –
i.e. the increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held
electronics in recent years, what we call Senseable City – is
opening up a new approach to the study of the built
environment. Design can investigate and intervene at the
interface between people, technologies and the city –
developing research and applications that empower citizens
to make choices that result in a more livable urban
condition.
The aim is not to portray what is to come. We call it
futurecraft: we pose future scenarios (typically phrased as
What if? questions), entertain their consequences and
exigencies, and we share the resulting ideas widely, to
enable public conversation and debate. It is important to
extrapolate from the present condition and to place
ourselves, as designers, in a fictive but possible future
context with the intent of realizing or precluding that future
through public discourse. Designer’s work is meaningless
unless it ignites imaginations and provokes debate: design
by mutation is intrinsically collective. Designers produce
mutations, some of which will grow, evolve, and develop
into tangible artifacts that cause global change – driven to
realization by the energy of the crowd.



Smart cities; real-time data; urban design; urban interaction
design; sensor data; future scenarios; city making




H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation: Misc.
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DIS 2016, June 04-08, 2016, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
ACM 978-1-4503-4031-1/16/06.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2915253


An architect and engineer by training, Carlo Ratti practices
in Italy and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he directs the Senseable City Lab. He
graduated from the Politecnico di Torino and the École
Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, and later earned
his MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Carlo holds several patents and has co-authored over 250
publications. As well as being a regular contributor to
Project Syndicate, he has written for the Le Monde, El Pais,
La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, Scientific American and
The New York Times. His work has been exhibited
worldwide at venues such as the Venice Biennale, the
Design Museum Barcelona, the Science Museum in
London, MAXXI in Rome, and MoMA The Museum of
Modern Art in in New York City.
Carlo has been featured in Esquire Magazine’s ‘Best &
Brightest’ list and in Thames & Hudson’s selection of ‘60
innovators’ shaping our creative future. Blueprint Magazine
included him as one of the ‘25 People Who Will Change
the World of Design’, Forbes listed him as one of the
‘Names You Need To Know’ and Fast Company named
him as one of the ’50 Most Influential Designers in
America’. He was also featured in Wired Magazine’s
‘Smart List: 50 people who will change the world’. Carlo
was awarded the Renzo Piano Foundation prize for ‘New
Talents in Architecture’. Two of his projects – the Digital
Water Pavilion and the Copenhagen Wheel – have been
included by TIME Magazine in the list of the ‘Best
Inventions of the Year’.
Carlo has been a presenter at TED (in 2011 and 2015),
program director at the Strelka Institute for Media,
Architecture and Design in Moscow, curator of the ‘BMW
Guggenheim Pavilion’ in Berlin, and was named ‘Inaugural
Innovator in Residence’ by the Queensland Government.
He was the curator of the ‘Future Food District’ pavilion for
the 2015 World Expo in Milan. He is currently serving as
Chair of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda
Council on Future Cities, and he has been selected as
Special Adviser to the President and Commissioners of the
European Commission, to advise on urban innovation.
senseable.mit.edu
carloratti.com