Draft version.
Leveraging data-driven innovations for sustainable cities – Rizal Sebastian
Across the globe, cities are under pressure from housing shortages, energy poverty, climate change, and resource scarcity. Digital innovations are taken up rapidly, but they come with negative impacts, such as excessive energy demands, societal divisions, and security risks. How can research and education on digitalisation in the built environment develop the body-of-knowledge-skills-and-attitudes for professionals, citizens, and municipal governments to leverage data-driven innovations for sustainable cities?
In this keynote lecture that marks the inauguration of Dr Rizal Sebastian as a visiting professor at LSBU, current projects of his research chair Future Urban Systems at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS) will be discussed as input for collaborative research with LSBU. The highlighted research focuses on data-driven innovations that enable local communities to take up energy transitions in their neighbourhoods, as well as digital urban mining, material and renovation passports for circular resources and decarbonisation of buildings and urban areas.
Subsequently, a vision for future collaborative research will be presented in relation to European and international innovation programmes. The committed effort will be directed towards novel solutions for student and social housing around university urban campuses, regenerative maintenance of social real estate, and responsible AI in urban digital twin – CitiVerse for future-proof urban (re)development through participatory approaches.
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Inhabiting Digital Twins as Infrastructural Imagery – Ofri Cnaani, Annet Dekker, Noa Roei
In this presentation we examine the concept of the Digital Twin (DT), defined as a real-time virtual entity of physical systems used for prefiguration, optimisation, and preservation. Mediating between human perception and, often invisual, machine processes, a DT translates data and simulations into interfaces promising realism, legibility, and control. Using Digital Twin Dubai as a case study, we trace how DTs shift from simulations to infrastructural images. Drawing on theories of operational and networked images, we define infrastructural imagery not as a mimetic representation but as a dynamic, processual entity emerging from real-time feedback loops between physical objects, data streams, and computational models. This infrastructural image also produces ‘infrastructural time’, privileging calculable futurity and continuous optimisation over lived experience. Ultimately, infrastructural imagery facilitates new forms of recursive governance, involving accelerating cycles of decision-making and value extraction through data-driven, real-time intervention.
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Does justice need space? – Ozan Kamiloglu
The justice system is undergoing a profound transformation, from an analog world of folders, reports, and physical courtrooms to a digital one of virtual platforms, cameras, and advanced recording technologies. This presentation traces that transformation through the lens of digital twins. My argument is as follows: the changes the justice system is currently experiencing are not incidental but directional. They point towards legal singularity, a horizon at which life becomes seamlessly convertible into legal questions, and those questions become automatically resolvable. In this emerging model of justice, the same input reliably produces the same output, independent of courtroom performance, judicial temperament, or other social contingencies. The legal question, in other words, becomes a data question and as such, infinitely reproducible. This is not merely a technological shift. It is, I argue, the proposition of a new aesthetics of justice.
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Compost Computer: A Minimal Energy Webserver Powered by Soil-based Microbial Bio-batteries – Mariana Marangoni & Shinji Toya
This talk presents a retrospective overview of Compost Computer, a collaborative project led by University of the Arts London’s Critical Climate Computing (CCC) group in partnership with Future Everything. Installed at Manchester Urban Diggers’ (MUD) Platt Fields community garden, the project questions the extractive relationship between computation and the environment. By harnessing compost-based microbial fuel cell technology, the server draws power from the biochemical processes occurring in decomposing organic matter, creating a tangible connection between contemporary digital practices and sustainable DIY energy generation.
As the project’s lead artists and researchers, Marangoni and Toya will detail the technical challenges and ecological ethos of building the compost-powered micro webserver that embraces the slow, rhythmic nature of minimal and situated permacomputing that were the basis for this research. This ‘situated laboratory’ demonstrates a move away from ‘always-on’ server infrastructure toward a model that respects the temporal and material constraints of the environment, diverting from the technocapitalist reliance on more processing and ever-present electricity power.
This session offers a comprehensive view of the hardware setup and the creative solutions born from extreme power constraints, decisions that shaped everything from the material and device selection to the web design and server architecture. Ultimately, the project serves as a functional prototype for off-grid, minimal computing alternatives in a climate-conscious future.
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How Computational Methods Contribute to the Study of Human Perception and Cognition? – Daniel Wing Hang Tang
This presentation examines how computational methods can extend the study of human perception and cognition within architectural contexts. It reflects on two empirical projects that combine qualitative human responses with quantitative spatial and visual analysis.
Project 1: Global and Local Visual Complexity and Cognitive Load (2024): 36 participants were invited to evaluate a series of architectural images. Subjective responses were collected through structured questionnaires. These perceptual evaluations were analysed alongside computational measures of visual complexity, including entropy measure, fractal dimension, and image segmentation. The study explores how variations in global visual complexity relate to participants’ perception of time duration and cognitive load.
Project 2: 100 Minds in Motion (2025): 100 participants navigated a controlled indoor labyrinth environment at UCL’s PEARL laboratory. Positional tracking data were collected to examine movement patterns within a shared spatial configuration. Space Syntax analysis was applied to investigate how environmental structure influences behavioural dynamics under crowd conditions.
Together, these projects demonstrate how computational approaches—ranging from computer vision to agent-based analysis—can bridge subjective experience and measurable environmental variables. The presentation reflects on methodological challenges and opportunities in translating qualitative perceptual data into computationally tractable models, and discusses how such integrations may contribute to a deeper understanding of cognitive processes in architectural environments.
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