Under the collaboration with City Science Lab @ Shanghai , over two weeks, participants explored how our surroundings shape the way we move, and feel, and how technology can help us understand the living rhythms that connect people, cities, and ecosystems.
The workshop, co-led by Direct Tomorrow Lab and Leticia Izquierdo (MIT Media Lab), invited students to rethink urban design not as the control of infrastructure, but as the cultivation of shared vitality, studying how bodies, environments, and technologies interact in everyday urban life.
From “The City and I Today” to “The City and I Tomorrow”
Each group began by scanning and mapping their local environment using 3D tools such as Luma AI and Polycam, creating point clouds of parks, plazas, and streets. They paired these spatial scans with biometric and environmental dat, tracking heart rate, gaze, or stress, alongside noise, temperature, and air quality, to explore how space affects the body and collective well-being.
The result was a set of biometric stories: data-driven yet deeply personal narratives about how people experience and adapt to the city around them.
Technical Process
- Site Selection : Students chose public spaces that reveal tensions between ecology, density, and comfort.
- 3D Scanning : Local environments were reconstructed through point clouds and digital twins.
- Spatial Analysis : Using CloudCompare and Blender, teams extracted density maps and spatial behavior patterns.
- Sensing and Biometric Design : Participants proposed systems integrating EEG for emotional response, heart-rate sensors for stress, and air-quality and sound sensors for environmental feedback.
- Design Intervention : Using Stable Diffusion and VR prototyping, groups created speculative responsive environments : pavilions, pathways, and installations that react to collective signals and atmospheric change.
What Emerged
Instead of treating cities as data systems, the workshop invited participants to sense them as living ecologies; shaped by air, light, emotion, and movement.
Some students worked on transforming stress itself into design material, turning the city’s noise, heat, and pressure into opportunities for calm. One group created neuro-adaptive soundscapes, translating chaotic urban frequencies into meditative rhythms through real-time EEG feedback and generative visual patterns that “breathe” with the crowd. Others reimagined the subway commute, building soft, inflatable environments that read galvanic skin response and pulse, expanding and glowing as passengers relax—brief moments of recovery within the city’s most compressed spaces. Still others explored intersections and parks, where e-bikes, cars, and pedestrians collide or where shade and vegetation quietly regulate emotion, designing responsive crossings and restorative spaces that adapt to collective tension.
Projects explored:
– How collective biometric signals could inform adaptive lighting, acoustic, or thermal patterns in public spaces.
– How AI-generated narratives and imagery might visualize invisible aspects of urban life—calm, stress, joy, belonging.
– How cross-cultural biometric datasets could reveal differences in how people feel safety, beauty, or connection.
Teaching Team:
Leticia Izquierdo MIT Media Lab (Boston, USA). Architect and media designer exploring how technologies can help cities reflect emotional, sensory, and ecological experience.
Direct Tomorrow Lab Vienna, Austria. Research studio integrating cognitive technologies and new media into spatial design and urban sensing.
Under the collaboration with City Science Lab @ Shanghai