Institute without Boundaries’ #PlayroomTO wins Award

Ethical Smart City Exhibit wins DesignTO Award

As reported in last month’s newsletter, students at George Brown College’s Institute without Boundaries (IwB) launched a new exhibit called #PlayroomTO – an interactive exhibit that invited people to expand their thinking about values, ethics and the future in a smart city such as Toronto.  It was recently awarded DesignTO’s Juror’s Choice for Community Wellbeing.  See: https://designto.org/awards/ and https://designto.org/event/toward-an-ethical-smart-city/ for more information on the award.

This multi sensorial and interactive exhibition explores the benefits and risks associated with Smart City interventions to promote a shared understanding of how the integration of technology in the fabric of cities might transform human experiences and values.

‘Toward an Ethical Smart City’ poses the question: “How might we create Ethical Smart Cities while preserving our human values?”

For the 2020 DesignTO Festival, the Interdisciplinary Design Strategy (IDS) students at the Institute without Boundaries (IwB) showcased their research insights and scenarios on Ethical Smart Cities through an interactive, multimedia exhibition. The exhibition proposes the stance that cities need ethics to conquer their challenges and evolve into Ethical Smart Cities. Accordingly, PlayroomTO explores the possibilities of how cities can move from a smart city to an Ethical Smart City.

Congratulations to students at IwB who worked hard to make this a success: Andrea Facenda Fraino, Céline Genest, Tanya Goyal, Hardeep Kaur, Eirene Keh, Maddy Lawrence, Samira Matan, Amanda Nobile, Adunni Rufai, Nitesh Salwan, Rosanne Sauz, Max Thomson, Jordan Yee. Thanks to the faculty at the School of Design, George Brown College, including ICF Canada’s John Jung, who is their Smart City Expert in Residence.