Toward the Sentient City – Mark Shepard

1 – The idea of sentience not as intelligence but as an ability to sense is a very important point in this text. The idea that a city is sentient but not “intelligent” through the means of an A.I. seems to already be the case of the existing built environment. The large amounts of sensors, cameras, and lights in our everyday street environment can be helpful, but problematic when it starts to make decisions. How can this large amount of data be useful for the city, without causing all the problems described in the reading associated with false positives or negatives? Is there some human component necessary, or is an A.I. the direction a sentient city is heading?

2 – As the city becomes less about the materiality of the streetscape and the buildings which we inhabit, and more about the technology interfaces which people use and carry around, how does the architecture profession adapt? How do we incorporate the idea of personal participation through the technologies, as some apps attempted to do? (geocaching, as an example)

Ambient Commons – Malcolm McCullough

3 – There is a discussion on page 202 of how technology may be distorting our mental models of space, and allowing us to rely more on external sources for navigation rather than internal maps. How does increased externalization help us, or does it only hurt us? Does a city start to embed these technologies so that we don’t even need to look at a device at all?