“Technology is defined in the Oxford dictionary as the science of industrial art.” Cedric Price affirmed in 1966 at the beginning of his lecture entitled Technology is the answer, but what was the question?. The lecture speaks about the Fun Palace, the transdisciplinary cultural centre that Price designed in 1960 for Joan Littlewood.
- it fosters a more communal experience, largely free to operate outside its material limits, and ventures into other realms of human experience. In Price’s own words, “a 21st century museum will utilize calculated uncertainty and conscious incompleteness to produce a catalyst for invigorating change whilst always producing the harvest of the quiet eye”.
- Now we ask what characterises digital urban futures.
- ‘Smartness’ proliferated as a purely commercialized concept cannot be the answer. In this age of the Internet of Things, as we lean ever more on the seductive support of digital infrastructure, the big question is, can we evolve a critical understanding of how to evolve digital-physical thresholds in their social implications?
- Because in the 3rd Industrial Revolution of Internet technology and renewable energy, there are tools and processes, high tech and low tech, that can be unlocked, which in aggregation, can avoid a Silicon Valley-style, dotcom-driven urban evolution, bringing yet another enclave divorced from the wider realities of the downtown.