An American writer and world-renowned urbanist, leading "smart cities" sceptic, and passionate advocate for the human-centred design of technological systems, Adam is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on urban environments.
After stints as Lead Information Architect for Razorfish in Tokyo and Head of Design Direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia's headquarters just outside Helsinki, Adam founded Urbanscale, a New York City-based practice dedicated to “design for networked cities and citizens”. Urbanscale aimed to make cities easier to understand, more pleasant to use and live in, and more responsive to the desires of their inhabitants.
Adam continues his research on the interaction of networked information technology with urban experience, and particularly on the implications of emergent technologies for the construction of public space and the right to the city.
Author of the groundbreaking “Everywhere: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”, the first general-audience book on what is now called the Internet of Things, and “Against The Smart City”, which makes a strong case against the prevailing smart-city vision as fundamentally unsuitable to the nature and complexity of urban life. His most recent book was titled “Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life”.
