Abstract

The more shared and digitally interconnected our environment becomes, the more complex its collective use, behaviour and design get from people’s conflicting decisions, in ways that technology alone cannot resolve. The Urban Synergetics Lab at UNC Charlotte, designs, studies, and develops enabling systems that connect humans, objects and places cooperatively across scales, physically or virtually. We envision a future in which ambient intelligence emerges naturally from how humans interact with data with and through their physical environment. Towards this end, we design physical or virtual interfaces for remote awareness; we design social mechanisms to incentivize cooperative behavior; and we develop data-driven models to understand dynamics, performance, and limits of shared systems of collective action. In this talk, drawing on examples from research on telepresence interfaces for public awareness and on vehicle sharing systems for personal mobility, I discuss experiences and insights from the design, planning, and analysis of enabling systems of collective purpose.