About the project

This thesis analysis how the vast deployment of network and computational technologies into our spatial environments is prompting us to reconsider what “products” are, what they are made of and how they are designed. Moreover, I argue that we through a material and communicative design practice can contribute to foster agency and understanding, for both designer and the wider public sphere, within this sociotechnical context.

Every day we interact with products and services that are made possible by this massive technological development of this network infrastructure. Even though the networked city is perceived as intangible, immaterial and invisible, we interact with it through highly physical and material objects and interfaces. It is through various forms of designed interfaces that the infrastructure of the networked city is made useable and understandable to us.

Accepting that interaction design is part of shaping the products of the networked city, also implies that we as designers are engaged in a new material reality. Products of the networked city are designed from new, unexplored and poorly understood materials, materials that are often literally invisible, intangible and obscure. How can we seek to understand these materials through practice-based design? What does this new material reality mean for the field of interaction design and our notions of what products are and what they are made out of? These are questions that I take up throughout this project.