The BMW Guggenheim Lab, a traveling think tank/community discussion space, released today their latest list of urban trends, gleaned from almost six months' worth of workshops held in Mumbai, Berlin, and New York City. From Container Architecture to Data Visualization, Crowdsourcing to Urban Data, many of these trends -- discussion points, really -- pop up frequently in Wired coverage as well.
The list for each city includes many topics we follow. Here are five of our favorite design-focused trends from the three locationss.
- Arduino
- Collaborative Urban Mapping
- Hackerspace
- Mixed-Use
- Rapid Prototyping
- Dynamic Cities
- Flash Mob
- Open-Source
- Retrofitting Infrastructure
- Urban Sensory Experience
- Container Architecture
- Design Barriers
- Evolutionary Infrastructure
- Participatory Urbanism
- Social Design
The list, an expansion of last year's Berlin-specific release, is a glossary of sorts, and each term is associated with a program or event, says Maria Nicanor, the project's curator. It's a record of the issues most important to each city. Over the course of the workshops, which averaged about six weeks, the lab put on daily events and discussions in pavilions built specially for the event. Nicanor, who is also curator for architecture at the Guggenheim, distilled the most important messages into these trends.
"They're not intended to forecast anything new," says Nicanor. "They're a list of the most talked-about terms in each of the cities."
Laid out in an interactive visual grid, the trends and their related terms light up when you hover your cursor over them. Some overlap between labs -- all three cities, for example, discussed Bottom-Up Urban Engagement -- but more of them are unique to the cities they came from, and the particular challenges each faces.
"In each of those cities, we basically design a space for events, and programs, and conferences, and screenings," says Nicanor. "It was a thought of taking architecture, design, and events around it outside of the museum walls."
On one level, that means forums and panels, but it also includes physical projects. When the New York lab closed down, the empty lot where it was located was rebuilt as a public park, and the lab in Mumbai prototyped a rainwater collecting and filtering bench that will provide clean water during monsoon season.
After the workshops started running, Nicanor came up with the glossary as a way to show what the project is all about. The first hundred trends from the Berlin workshop were released last November, and the whole set is scheduled for an exhibition this fall at the Guggenheim.
