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The goal was to introduce our lab to the new Master’s students from all tracks by having them to investigate “What are interactions we will have with city-things?”, by doing this workshop the participants.

While we were expecting around twenty students to join the workshop, we were pleasantly surprised by three times that number, sixty students attended. So we changed the group work a bit to cater the larger groups. The session start with an introduction to the lab by Iskander Smit, Lab director of Cities of Things.

The workshop consisted of 3 steps

  1. The students worked in a group of 3 people, discussing possible interactions that will happen between city-human-things relationship. Each group worked with a given Thing Card as a starting point and were asked to illustrate their ideas on key interaction between the human and agentic thing through sketches and notes on the Key Interaction Boards.
  2. The students who worked with the same type of Thing Card got together then discussed about their findings. Later, each group chose their most 3-4 interesting findings to present in the final step.
  3. The day was concluded by the students enthusiastically presenting their results.

The workshop was short and the main goal was to get the students acquainted with the concept of Cities of Things. Nevertheless it is nice to share some of the thoughts.

  • A group that worked on the national angel drone addressed a concern regarding personal privacy drone services. The group suggested that people should not have their own drones, but it should be global service.
  • The other group who worked on the self sufficient robot cleaner, noticed how humans can support the robots to do their job properly.
  • The group that worked on the efficient public transport robot t was interested in priority of passengers. Who should the robots serve first? Should it be people with high social status or with high who have high morals?
  • The last group that worked on the friendly delivery robot raised a concern regarding hierarchy on the roads, should delivery robots wait for human to go first during a traffic?
Lab Director
Iskander Smit