LKY CIC Brown Bag Lunchtime Talk: “Designing Thermal Delight in the Asian City”

Synopsis Rising humidity, pollution, and urban densities have made it increasingly difficult to be comfortable in the streets and parks of many Asian cities. Designers must work increasingly hard to ensure external urban spaces retain their commercial, cultural, and recreational importance. This talk will discuss two ways this can be addressed. First, to revisit Asian cultural practices which temper the effects of […]

LKY CIC Brown Bag Lunchtime Talk: “Digital Ecologic”

Synopsis How can ‘digital design’ – the use of data, algorithms and online platforms – help cities address the Climate Emergency by radically reducing global carbon? What skills will tomorrow’s designers require to practise ‘online’ as well as ‘on land’? What technologies will make the real difference needed? Is it sufficient to focus on self-parking cars and self-emptying bins that optimise existing urban systems […]

LKY CIC Brown Bag Lunchtime Talk: “Environmental challenges & citizen concern, a false dichotomy?”

Synopsis As Phnom Penh grows exponentially, its many environmental challenges are expected to magnify, placing the city on a course like major Southeast Asian cities like Jakarta. This talk establishes a comparative analysis between Phnom Penh and Jakarta on environmental perceptions of middle-class residents. Based on surveys, we find middle class residents report experiencing environmental challenges less frequently than they occur, problematizing […]

LKY CIC Brown Bag Lunchtime Talk: “Beneath the veil: Examining private chatter on WhatsApp during the COVID-19 pandemic”.

Synopsis How do we use WhatsApp, and can we categorise different types of usage patterns? With approximately 2 billion users worldwide, WhatsApp is the most widely-used messaging platform. During times of crises, it has also been implicated in the spread of falsehoods and in shaping crisis outcomes. Despite its influence, little is known about how content is received, generated, or disseminated. In this […]

LKY CIC Brown Bag Lunchtime Talk: “Post-COVID MaaS Platformin Chinese Mega-cities: Affordable, Fast, Green Mobility for the People”.

Synopsis Calling for more sustainable and equitable urban mobility solutions, mega-cities worldwide have been experimenting the concept of mobility as a service (MaaS), aiming to vastly transform the public transport to a service level that would be preferred by commuters over car travel. The Chinese Tier-1 mega-cities, the top cities with over 20-million population, are all determined to pursue the MaaS solutions […]