Moscow FuturoDesign Laboratory Workshop: Co-create Urban Intelligence. Designing Smart Interfaces Between People and City

Rob van Kranenburg of Council is participating in this Design Challenge How can we make our urban journeys better? organized by Ekatarina Khramkova from Lumiknows. He will be making a report and publish that here.

Gerald Santucci,  Head of Unit "Enterprise Networking and RFID" at European Commission, wrote a Foreword to the workshop: "After the PC and the Internet, a third wave of communication 
technologies is rapidly emerging with person-to-object (and vice versa) 
and object-to-object communications. The so-called 'Internet of Things' enabled by wireless and contactless technologies is pointing out a new era 
where everyday objects will become readable, recognisable, locatable, 
addressable and/or controllable via the Internet.

By 2020, there will be 
on Earth some 7 billion humans, 70 billion connected devices (including
 100 million robots), and 70,000 billion 'things' potentially indexable and
 interconnectable. This new "proletariat" of objects capable of 
transmitting information about their status, performance and usage will
 interact with people and social networks.

The Internet of Things will
 become an inherent part of our economic environment such as electricity
 distribution, utilities management, water resources management, oil/gas
distribution, transportation, healthcare. It will also contribute to solve
 two of today's most challenging issues: energy and health care.

Therefore, 
the Internet of Things is heralding not only a new technological paradigm
 but also the dawn of a new societal paradigm as new forms of collaboration
 among people and things will profoundly change the way the economy and the
 society operate. For the economy, the Internet of Things will bring a
 disruption - only companies that are able to exploit this new potential
 will survive. For the society, it will impose a new "social contract", not
 only among humans but also among people and objects. The current policy
 challenges - notably security and privacy - will not wear off, far from 
it, but will require radically new approaches summoning up both technology 
and regulation. And new challenges will surely emerge, in particular
 ethics - what is the place of humans in a 'new society' where 'thinking
 objects' dominate and gradually conquer their autonomy?

The EU and Russia
 have much in common to analyse and address the Internet of Things 
challenges and opportunities. We can learn from our common cultural
 heritage - for example Cervantes, Rousseau or Voltaire and Gogol, Tolstoy
or Tourgueniev - to better understand how the 'new society' will emerge 
from the reshuffling and redefinition of the human and social values that 
the Internet of Things will generate. We can also bring together our
 exceptional scientific heritage, especially in mathematics and economic
 sciences, to invent the new business models on which our future economies 
will thrive.

A dialogue is necessary to anticipate the changes looming on
 the horizon and, through it, make that our shared legacy takes also the 
form of a common destiny for the well being of our citizens."