AG is in Europe for the coming week, in Berlin and Helsinki, and I’ve been handed the keys to the weeknotes. Adam is in Berlin to give the opening keynote at the Cognitive Cities conference, where he will give a talk about public objects. I’m sure he’ll write up some thoughts on his return. He’ll also be in Helsinki early next week, working with Nordkapp on urban screens, among other things.

We’ve been pushing towards bringing project PERRY to life, starting to create a video (“telly-lies” in the wonderful words of BERG‘s Schulze) that fleshes out how we imagine it working and dissolving into behaviour and everyday life. After stumbling upon the wonderfully named Boston Mayor’s office for New Urban Mechanics, we had a brief but hugely gratifying and positive call with them, discussing how we might get involved with some of the exciting work they are doing; ‘think big’ was the main message we heard back, and we don’t need to be told that twice. We’re also continuing to work on creating a series of elements of design fiction around a framework of an “urban operating system”, to both think-through-making and to better communicate how some of the different facets of the idea might fit together and translate from abstract concepts to something closer to real-world implementations.

This week: 24th – MN at NYC 2050 at Arup, NY / 26th and 27th – AG at Cognitive Cities, Berlin.

Next week: AG in Helsinki, MN in the studio.