Simone Mora

PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)



Senseable Cities

The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed, as are the tools we use to design them. The mission of the Senseable City Laboratory, a research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is to anticipate these changes and study them from a critical point of view. The Lab’s work is characterized by an omni-disciplinary, highly-collaborative approach: it speaks the language of designers, planners, engineers, physicists, biologists and social scientists. Through design and science, the Lab develops and deploys tools to learn about cities—so that cities can learn about us. The talk will feature recent Lab’s projects in the field of environmental monitoring and open-source sensing such as Flatburn and Dust Tracker - discussing how blending the physical and digital worlds can open for new possibilities for the design of future sustainable cities.



Semblance

Simone Mora is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He does research on novel sensing technologies and their applications for future cities. He develops methods and tools for rapid design and rapid prototyping of internet-connected sensors and human-computer interfaces. He lectures in the field of design thinking, internet of things and environmental sensing. Since 2018 he leads MIT's City Scanner Research Initiative, which has developed a low-cost environmental sensing platform that is currently used by cities and research institutes worldwide to give data-driven answers society-critical research questions in the fields of environmental science, environmental justice and city planning. He has contributed to more than fifty scientific papers, he has been a visiting scholar at City London University, and he co-founded a company that developed an ideation toolkit to tackle the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.