Nicole Gardner

Scaling the Smart City engages with the smart city as a problem of scale. It disentangles the smart city from its corporate and technocratic stronghold by presenting an accessible design framework that productively aligns philosophical thinking on technology with foundational technical understandings of urban technology and smart system design. The knowledge and know-how to design and create urban technologies and smart cities are steadily moving from a niche field to a core industry competency. This book outlines a cross-scalar design framework, developed to teach smart city design to designers and engineers. It unpacks smart city initiatives and demystifies physical computing system design concepts, while complementing and mediating between critical social theory perspectives of the smart city and technically comprehensive case studies. The book’s analysis of real-world case examples and design prototypes demonstrates how design thinking and practice can better engage with the ethical implications of creating urban technologies and smart systems for society. It uses a clear, accessible, and instructive style of writing that synthesizes relevant scholarship and concepts to develop the reader’s foundational understanding of the contemporary smart city paradigm. This book is an invaluable resource for readers in the established fields and professions of design, architecture, urban design, and city planning, as well as the emerging fields of urban technology and urban interaction design.

A cutting edge discourse on the theory and practice of a groundbreaking and emerging technology. Includes case studies by leading researchers in the fields of BIM modelling, digital fabrication, smart cities, responsive enviroments, and gaming. Computational design is an evolving discipline that operates at the intersection of computer science, engineering, and design. It helps designers leverage technology to develop new strategies, tools, methods, and workflows for thinking about and creating the built environment. While computational design thinking and methods are considered transformative in the architecture, engineering and construction industries, the shift from promise to practice remains a challenge.This book documents the nexus of research and practical collaborations that form the basis of the Computational Design Education and Research program at the University of New South Wales, Australia. The diversity of projects outlined in this publication contributes to advancing an understanding of computational design as an interdisciplinary field that is capable of innovatively addressing real-world built environment challenges.