Carlo Ratti presented The "real-time city"- the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT, at the Interfacing Innovation conference Brussels

34. GreenWheel
All components contained in the
back wheel. Easily retrofitted into
any standard bicycle
Regenerative Breaking
Intelligent Locking Mechanism
Electric motor turns on when extra
power is needed on hills
Sensors in back wheel monitor
• air quality,
• distances traveled
• journey’s made
Torque measured when pedaling to
give fitness readings
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37. 66

38. 67

40. Imagine we could use smart tags to reveal where our garbage
goes… we could follow the final journey of our everyday
objects and increase awareness of sustainable practices…

41. Waste and the city – does volume matter?
Are we aware how much waste we produce?
Why do we know so much about the supply chain and so little
about the ‘removal chain’?
What if waste collection suddendly stopped?
(Think about what happened recently in Naples, Italy, where the streets were
overwhelmed with garbage…)
Image a city entirely made of garbage
Wall-E’s post-human waste city of the future 2008’s waste emergency in Naples, Italy

42. the performance: from my house to the street… to where?
Disseminating tagged products into the city of New York
and following them in space and time

43. What we want to show…
We celebrate and document THE WASTE OBJECT
before throwing it away through portraits and in a
database. Afterwards, we follow it and visualize its
physical COORDINATES and its MOVEMENT
through space, tracing its PATH on the map and
displaying snapshots of the STREET VIEWS through
which the object travels. This takes the viewer along
the waste object’s end-of-life journey.
How far outside the city will the trash travel?

57. >MIT campus
Location: Boston, MA
Area: 168 acres
People: 10, 320 students and 9, 414 total employees
Buildings: over 190
Context / Test environment / Data / Preliminary data interpretation / Conclusion