Sensors "Visceralization"
Urban responses to environmental issues are split between advocates of a return to/of nature and those who promote the technological solutions of the smart city, based on sensors and data. Joseph Paradiso, Director of the Responsive Environments Group at MIT, studies the interactions between individuals and computing technology. He explains how portable electronic sensors known as wearables allow access to a set of data that modify our experience of space and profoundly impacts the built environment. Electronic interfaces autonomously determine our needs, permitting the optimization of comfort and energy consumption. He sees a world of information becoming established in the real world, articulating wearables in real time with the general digital infrastructure. Carrying this virtual bubble along with us will even cause the notion itself of the individual to be modified. The roles of the virtual and the real also seem destined to change in his opinion, accompanying a “visceralization” of sensors and the digital, source of an increase in power of our sensorial capacities.
