Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield Speaker Biography

Adam Greenfield is a world-renowned urbanist, leading “smart cities” skeptic, and passionate advocate for the human-centered design of technological systems. He is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on urban environments.

With over a decade and a half in the technology industry, Adam Greenfield brings a detailed understanding of the way networked information technologies are designed, developed, and brought to market to his consideration of the challenges facing today’s cities.

In 2010, after stints as a 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, Greenfield founded Urbanscale, a New York City-based practice dedicated to “design for networked cities and citizens.” Through the design of products, services, interfaces, and spatial interventions, his work at Urbanscale aimed to make cities easier to understand, more pleasant to use and live in, and more responsive to the desires of their inhabitants.

In 2013, Adam Greenfield was awarded the inaugural Senior Urban Fellowship at the LSE Cities center of the London School of Economics, put Urbanscale on hold, and relocated to the United Kingdom. Greenfield 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.

Adam Greenfield is the author of the groundbreaking Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing, the first general-audience book on what is now called the Internet of Things, and 2013 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 Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, a field manual to the blockchain, 3D printing, machine learning, AI, and the other technologies that are transforming our lives, which came out in 2017.