Adam Greenfield is a world-renowned urbanist, leading “smart cities” sceptic, and passionate advocate for the human-centered design of technological systems. He is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on urban environments.
Greenfield is founder and manager of Urbanscale, a New York City-based practice dedicated to “design for networked cities and citizens”, and co-founder of Do projects. In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities at LSE. As a Senior Urban Fellow at LSE Cities, based in London, Greenfield concentrated his research on the interaction of networked information technology with urban experience, and particularly on the implications of emergent technologies for the construction of public space and the right to the city.
In 2010 Greenfield founded Urbanscale, and since then as managing director he has applied the toolkit and mindset of user-centered interaction design to the specific problems of cities. Through the design of products, services, interfaces, and spatial interventions, he makes cities easier to understand, more pleasant to use and live in, and more responsive to the desires of their inhabitants.
Greenfield co-founded Do Projects in 2010, a platform for collaborative making, publishing books, pamphlets, and editions exploring space and experience. Prior to 2010, he lived and worked in Helsinki for two years, as Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user interface design. He taught ’Urban computing’ and ‘Urban experience’ classes at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Programme from 2006-2008.
Greenfield is the author of ‘Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing’ (2006), which offers a humanist take on the colonisation of everyday life by information technology. In 2007, he co-authored the pamphlet ‘Urban Computing and its Discontents’, which was an overview of informatics for urban environments. In 2013 he released his book ‘Against the smart city’, which argues that technology cannot be harnessed by municipal administrators to serve the interests of the people who live in cities.
