Viral Voices VI | Virtual Displacement

As the digital revolution continues to affect our everyday lives, counterintuitively, many new processes born in the digital realm are now finding the need to become physical and geofixed. Once ephemeral, only existing online, new media companies have begun to invest in the design and production of physical retail environments, vehicles, kiosks, and other public interfaces, adding new variables to the built environment and forcing an evolution in long-standing conceptions of urban placemaking. What had once been described as the accelerating process by which “all that was solid will melt into air” may also set into motion countervailing effects by which what “was air now turns back into solid” – as digital practices and firms that once existed bring their data, media, and products back into the physical world.

Speakers:
Anand Babu, Chief Operating Officer, Google Sidewalk Labs
Allie Kelly, Executive Director, The Ray
Jeff Maki, Senior Director of Innovation and Strategy, Intersection
Brian Lakamp, Founder and CEO, Totem Power
Luc Wilson, Founder, KPF – Urban Interface 

Moderator: Jessica Leigh Hester, Senior Associate Editor, CityLab