Featured personality Carlo Ratti,architect and engineer, leads CRA design and innovation practice (New York and Turin) and directs the MIT Senseable City Lab. He has recently collaborated with the rocagallery.com platform, in which he has reflected on how big data and technology can contribute to improve the health of people.He has also been a member of the jury of the 8th edition of jumpthegap , Roca’s international design® competition Your work focuses on the use of new technologies to improve life in cities. How can it be used to improve health and well-being? Health and well-being cannot solely be reduced to a numeric factor, but data sourced from digital technology can help us to become more aware of some issues. If I learn about my behavior, then I can improve it; it is a way to create healthy feedback loops, both at the individual and the social scale. I think the quantified self-approach is a positive example of how gathering data about ourselves can both encourage a more active lifestyle and encourage social dynamics. The smart city concept is often criticized for its elitist, top-down and de-humanizing approach. How can we avoid technology’s potentially negative effects on society and technology evolution. One of the biggest tasks for society in general, and thus human psychology, well-being What challenges will we have to also, most importantly, for designers and architects, is that of facing the challenge of environmental preservation. and on the health of society as a face in the next years? Architects have a particular responsibility, as the building whole? sector accounts for around 50% of all energy consumed I think that we face a great opportunity: exploring how in many countries around the world. Yes, there have been criticisms of this concept, and I oftento positively integrate digital technologies into physical agree with them. That is why I prefer the term senseable space. French 20th century architect Le Corbusier dreamt How do you imagine the bathroom city which I believe takes a more humanistic approach: of “realiz[ing], harmonically, the city that is an expressionspace of the future will be? it better encapsulates the possible social benefits of our machinist civilization.” Yet our civilization today has coming from embedding Internet-of-Things technologies transitioned from mechanization to computation. The I think that it will be more and more the space of “health” in into our urban spaces, as opposed to technology per digital revolution – the convergence of bits and atoms – the house. Thanks to ubiquitous sensing we will be able to se. Senseable implies both the ability to sense through is poised to be the most radically disruptive change that constantly monitor our vitals – and to perform different type digital technologies, and the more human quality of being has ever recast the design, construction and operation of analyses thanks to the development of “lab-on-a-chip” ‘sensible’, of keeping people and their desires at the center.of our built environment. Just as machines brought approaches. At MIT, as part of our project Underworlds, Ultimately it is an issue of approach — top-down versus standardization and high output, digital tools can bring we monitor the human microbiome by sampling sewage bottom-up. dynamism, variation and responsiveness. Le Corbusier’s water – I am convinced that in a near future the same question then becomes: “how to realize, harmonically, the could be performed at an individual level every time we At MIT Senseable City Lab, you city that is an expression of our digital civilization.” use our bathrooms. are working on various projects A key aspect will be responsiveness. Architecture – and,more broadly, urban design – has often been described Ithink jumpthegap brings the opportunity to think critically® related to healthcare analytics. and productively about a space that is essential to our daily as a kind of “third skin” – after our biological one and ourlives and yet often neglected. Can you tell us about a few of clothing; and yet we have to acknowledge that this skin them? has been the most rigid and uncompromising of the three, Do you think it is a necessary almost a corset. We see the disruptive, digital technologiesexercise for young students and of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) revolution as having the One of the most recent examples is: Weibo Smog. We potential to make this skin more flexible, allowing the builtprofessionals to think about how used data from the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Weibo, environment to start adapting to us and generating a living, to understand the sensitivity of different areas of China totailored architecture that is molded by the life inside it. the future of architecture and air pollution, according to their socioeconomic profiles. We design will be? Why? hope that by studying and reporting on the differing waysin which air pollution actually affects Chinese citizens andAre young designers and architects in part responsible of Yes – not in the sense of trying to predict the future, but their health, policy officials and others can then be in a in playing our part in creating it. As the great Karl Popper better position to address this concern. how the world of the near future said: “The future is open. It is not predetermined. No Design and architecture have will be? How can they contribute one can predict it, except by chance. We all contribute to determining it by what we do. We are all equally always walked together within to guarantee its environmental responsible for its success.” preservation? Roca Sanitario, S.A. Avda. Diagonal, 513 08029 Barcelona - Spain Telephone +34 93 366 1200 www.roca.com 8102 anolecraB .A.S ,oiratinaS acoR ©