Transhumanism
Transurbanism: Smart Cities for Transhumans

Abstract

The current trends related to ‘smart cities’ are bringing the cityscapes of movies such as Blade Runner and games such as Cyberpunk 2077 closer to our immediate reality. The question of what will the cities of the future look like is at the heart of urban studies. In parallel, a similar question is posed by (trans)humanists about the future of humanity and its possible technological enhancements. However, (trans)humanity and future cities are defined in a bi-directional dependency. Therefore, we have to answer the questions of future humans and cities simultaneously. This paper maps several ways of interacting between transhuman communities and smart cities to understand their possible effects on governing, design and society at large resulting in a framework and a series of speculative pastiche scenarios that will work as a cautionary tale and an inspirational blueprint for imagining future urbanity.

Role: Main Co-Author, Design Researcher

Type: Full Paper

Conference: The 2020 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems [h5-index: 31] 

Date: 2020

Co-Authors: Mattia Thibault, Seda Suman Buruk, Juho Hamari

 

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Children in 2077: Designing Children’s Technologies in the Age of Transhumanism

Abstract

What for and how will we design children's technologies in the\textit{ transhumanism} age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children’s lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies can clearly be defined as transhumanist, such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children’s’ lives by using the power of design fiction.

 

 [Image credit: Darkart.cz]

 

Role: Curator, Design Researcher, Main Author

Type: alt.CHI Paper

Conference: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [h5-index: 85] 

Date: 2020

Co-Authors: Oğuzhan Özcan, Gökçe Elif Baykal, Tilbe Göksun, Selçuk Acar, Güler Akduman, Mehmet Aydın Baytaş, Ceylan Beşevli, Joe Best, Aykut Coşkun, Hüseyin Uğur Genç, A. Baki Kocaballı, Samuli Laato, Cassia Motta, Konstantinos Papangelis, Marigo Raftopoulos, Richard Ramchurn, Juan Sadaba, Mattia Thibault, Annika Wolff, Mert Yıldız     

 

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