Carlo Ratti

You are currently browsing articles tagged Carlo Ratti.

“The Funny Thing Is, It Is Already Here”

August 23, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The_Conversation-1

A common theme in Christoper Mims’ smart WSJ column about the soft launch of sorts of the Internet of Things and Maarten Rikkens’ interesting Research Gate Q&A with The City of Tomorrow author Carlo Ratti is that the future is arriving with a whimper, not a bang. A world enabled by the IoT will be very different even if it doesn’t look any different. You’ll hardly notice it at first blush. You might even forget about it once you do. That’s great for practical matters and less so for issues of privacy. To my mind, that’s always been the promise and peril of such a ubiquitous, essentially invisible network.

From Mims:

Everyone is waiting for the Internet of Things. The funny thing is, it is already here. Contrary to expectation, though, it isn’t just a bunch of devices that have a chip and an internet connection.

The killer app of the Internet of Things isn’t a thing at all—it is services. And they are being delivered by an unlikely cast of characters: Uber Technologies Inc., SolarCity Corp., ADT Corp., andComcast Corp., to name a few. One recent entrant: the Brita unit ofClorox Corp., which just introduced a Wi-Fi-enabled “smart” pitcher that can re-order its own water filters.

Uber and SolarCity are interesting examples. Both rely on making their assets smart and connected. In Uber’s case, that is a smartphone in the hands of a driver for hire. For SolarCity, the company’s original business model was selling electricity directly to homeowners rather than solar panels, which requires knowing how much electricity a home’s solar panels are producing.

Here is another example: On June 23, Comcast said it would acquire a unit of Icontrol Networks Inc., which helps set up smart homes for clients. The company, founded in 2004, prides itself on being “do it for you” instead of “do it yourself,” as are most home-automation systems, says Chief Marketing Officer Letha McLaren.

Understanding that most people want to solve problems without worrying about the underlying technology was crucial, she says.•

From Rikkens:

Question:

Your book mentions that it is increasingly difficult to divorce the physical space from the digital. Does this mean that all aspects of city design should factor in IoT? Or are some aspects of city design divorced from its influence?

Carlo Ratti:

From an architectural point of view, I do not think that the city of tomorrow will look dramatically different from the city of today — much in the same way that the Roman ‘urbs’ is not all that different from the city as we know it today. We will always need horizontal floors for living, vertical walls in order to separate spaces and exterior enclosures to protect us from the outside. The key elements of architecture will still be there, and our models of urban planning will be quite similar to what we know today. What will change dramatically is the way we live in the city, at the convergence of the digital and physical world. IoT will have its biggest impact on the experience of the city, not necessarily its physical form.•

Tags: , ,

“The City Will Talk To Us More”

May 31, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

life_booth_1

Cities are pretty much cities throughout history, and tomorrow’s urban centers won’t differ so greatly physically from today’s in the more obvious ways. There will probably be some new infrastructure to try to deal with rising sea levels and occasionally something like phone booths will come and go, but the buildings will still look like buildings. 

The real changes will be more subtle, so quiet you won’t even hear a hum. In the same way driverless cars will carry on “conversations” with one another and all types of gadgets in the cloud, the Internet of Things will allow a city’s skyscrapers and furniture to communicate with its inhabitants and collect endless information about them. Much of that new reality will be beneficial, helping to ease traffic and lower crime, but it will also place all of us inside of a machine with no opt-out button. 

In a Curbed interview conducted by Patrick Sissons, MIT’s Carlo Ratti, author of The City of Tomorrow, discusses smart buildings, among other topics. An excerpt:

Question:

One of the topics you discuss in your book is this idea of buildings being more reactive and smart. How interactive will architecture get, and how will it change the look of our cities?

Carlo Ratti:

I think it’ll be very interactive. But overall, the interaction will happen through people;  our lives will change a lot, but public space won’t. A city from Roman times doesn’t look terribly different from a city today. The shift is more about how our human life and interactions in the city will change, not the shapes of buildings. That’s where we’ll see a lot of transformation.

Question:

It’s not really as much about infrastructure changes, but how we interact with the infrastructure.

Carlo Ratti:

Yes. The city will talk to us more. We’ll have new buildings, new materials, and more interactive facades, but overall, the key components will remain the same. Buildings are about horizontal floors for living, vertical walls for partitions, facades that protect us from the outside, and windows that give us a view of the outside. They were like that a hundred years ago, and they’ll be there tomorrow and in the future.

Question:

What are some great examples of these new types of buildings and architecture?

Carlo Ratti:

The project we did at the World Expo in Zaragoza, Spain, the Digital Water Pavilion, offered a vision of digital, fluid architecture. Think about a park; there are so many things you can do, between interactive lights and more responsive technology. This coming technological change is like the internet. That transformed so many parts of our lives, and the upcoming Internet of Things will do the same to our environment and cities. For instance, the city of Melbourne successfully developed an “internet of trees,” which allows residents to visualize and map urban forests.. It’s a platform, like an open street map for trees, that will help them grow, monitor, and measure, and help people take care of their parks, and compare them against those of other cities.•

Tags: ,

“The Goal Isn’t To Do Away With Bartenders”

April 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Whenever I read that new robots will “work alongside humans, not replace them,” I think two things:

  1. Some humans will be immediately replaced.
  2. The rest (or almost all of them) will eventually be replaced.

It’s great if we have AI that can do the drudgery for us, delivering products and waxing floors and stocking warehouse shelves, but unless this new machine age somehow creates a corresponding number of jobs to replace those lost, we’re headed for some difficult challenges. And, no, not even bartenders are safe.

From Timothy Aeppel at WSJ:

Robots aren’t about to elbow bartenders out of a job.

But versions of them could start showing up at your favorite watering holes. Indeed, some are already out there.

The Makr Shakr is the creation of an Italian company and consists of robotic arms that mix cocktails, and then place them on a conveyor belt to be carried across the bar to the waiting customer or a server. The first two installations are on Royal Caribbean cruise ships, where they’re the centerpieces of “Bionic Bars.”

The goal isn’t to do away with bartenders, who are still needed to tend the machines and, when necessary, deliver the drinks. Carlo Ratti, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and cofounder of Makr Shakr, says the project began when he was asked to design a machine that would allow people to interact with robots in an unexpected setting. “It started as something to shock people in a tangible way,” he says, to show them “what the third industrial revolution is all about.”

Another example is the “Bartendro,” a box with hoses and flashing lights that can mix an array of drinks—but it too needs to be tended by a human, who among other things puts the glass into position under the pour spout and then delivers the drink to the customer.

Machines like these are designed to work alongside humans, not replace them.•

Tags: ,