Abstract
Within the paradigm of the smart and playable city, the urban landscape and street furniture have provided a fertile platform for pragmatic and hedonic goals of urban liveability through technology augmentation. Smart street furniture has grown from being a novelty to become a common sight in metropolitan cities, co-opted for improving the efficiency of services. However, as we consider technologies that are increasingly smarter, with human-like intelligence, we navigate towards uncharted waters when discussing the consequences of their integration with the urban landscape. The implications of a new genre of street furniture embedded with artificial intelligence, where the machine has autonomy and is an active player itself, are yet to be fully understood. In this article, we analyse the evolving design of public benches along the axes of smartness and disruption to understand their qualities as playful, urban machines in public spaces. We present a concept-driven speculative design case study, as an exploration of a smart, sensing, and disruptive urban machine for playful placemaking. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we expand on the potential of urban machines to partake an increasingly active role as co-creators of play and playful placemaking in the cities of tomorrow.
Highlights
Against the smart city backdrop (Nam and Pardo, 2011), the advent of playable cities has brought a creative imperative to urban liveability
We identified an under-researched category of public bench as smart, sensing, and disruptive, especially in regards to emerging technologies of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic features
We focus on playful placemaking (Innocent, 2016; Stokes et al, 2017; Luostarinen, 2019; Chew, 2020)—a variant of placemaking adapted from traditional and contemporary methods outlined by Jacobs (Jacobs, 2016), Whyte (Whyte, 1980), and other influential urbanism organisations such as Gehl2 and the Project for Public Spaces3
Summary
Against the smart city backdrop (Nam and Pardo, 2011), the advent of playable cities has brought a creative imperative to urban liveability. We focus on playful placemaking (Innocent, 2016; Stokes et al, 2017; Luostarinen, 2019; Chew, 2020)—a variant of placemaking adapted from traditional and contemporary methods outlined by Jacobs (Jacobs, 2016), Whyte (Whyte, 1980), and other influential urbanism organisations such as Gehl and the Project for Public Spaces3 Supporting urban liveability, it is a placemaking process involving the public as co-creators of city life by means of playful interactions designed for the built environment. In this context, the relationship between smart and playful street furniture can be described as contrasting but interconnected—the former focusing on efficient productivity, the latter on vibrancy, and enjoyment. This conversion of street furniture into urban machines follows the common understanding of the efficiency and intelligence portrayed by smart cities and includes the ingenuity and novelty of creative technological applications
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