MAK Future Lab for Citizen Science

Developing a Format for the Topics Smart City, Digital Modernity, and the Working Environment of the Future.

A Smart City is both an algorithmically optimized urban space and a publicly utilizable commons, thus it ought to be designed with humans and intelligent machines in close cooperation. This requires creativity, participation, and responsibility. Therefore, the design and architecture sectors are in particular demand—as is citizen involvement. Where does the potential of Citizen Science lie as concerns the urban future? And what vital role can design methods play in this process? These questions and many others were the focus of a workshop series with students and retirees that was conceived and implemented by the design team Vandasye, designer Kathrina Dankl, architect and architectural theorist Andreas Rumpfhuber, and the MAK.

The concepts and methods underpinning this project as well as the stations of the process that gave rise to the issues and parameters for three fictive future scenarios will be shown in the MAK FORUM in a presentation created by Vandasye. Each fictive scenario is based on the assumptions that robots can perform all “necessary” work and that a universal basic income is available. Which aspects of human labor do we nonetheless consider to be indispensable for our social well-being? What work do we still want to do ourselves; what could such forms of work look like and how could they organize themselves within our daily lives? The resultant scenarios will be visualized in collaboration with one designer each—artist Aldo Giannotti, photographer Stefanie Moshammer, and the design studio BreadedEscalope—and presented at the MAK FORUM.

Discussion of the results of the MAK FUTURE LAB for Citizen Science with

Kathrina Dankl, Designer
Marie Céline Loibl, Program Management Sparkling Science, Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy
Michael Nentwich, Director, Institute of Technology Assessment at the Austrian Academy of Sciences
Andreas Rumpfhuber, Architect and Architectural Theorist
Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, General Director, MAK
Manfred Tscheligi, Head of Center for Technology Experience, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
Peter Umgeher, Designer, Vandasye

in GERMAN