Medialab Prado

"As cities become programmable, sentient, so the interface between physical and digital systems becomes increasingly significant. Deployed infrastructure needs to be tested, reliable, generic; so how does infrastructure become more innovative and open?

The traditional way of doing 'big infrastructure' is linear, create the technology and a business case, and roll it out. There is increasing awareness of the importance of engaging wider ecosystems and communities. A technology only comes to life once it is in use, and many applications are not foreseen. One way to stimulate innovation is to make infrastructure more open ended, open source - in a managed way, you cannot simply give an open API to critical infrastructure. Another is to stimulate a mashup culture so that people can build new services. Only the large technology companies can build infrastructure as a single, monolithic entity, but an alternative is confederated projects with many small contributors, and a supporting infrastructure to track contributions, split rewards. There are challenges in synchronising big, physical infrastructure with a lifecycle of 15 years, and soft, digital infrastructure with one of only 40 weeks.

Co-design, open innovation and "creative misuse" need to be a part of infrastructure development. Deploy prototypes in living labs, let users shape it, give access to artists, be open to unexpected, surprising outcomes.

FutureEverything's work in digital innovation applies creative approaches from art and design to explore themes such as open data, social sensing, new mobilities and distant collaboration involving original research, development, practice and publication.

Open Data Cities is an innovation lab by FutureEverything which led to the creation of new infrastructure in the form of DataGM, the Greater Manchester Datastore, in partnership with a Greater Manchester local authority. FutureEverything operated in a disruptive way from a neutral position outside local government, whereas Open Data development has been led in most cities by the Mayor's office. DataGM is an example of an infrastructure designed to enable innovation, it will succeed when people innovate." By Drew Hemment