The electronic high associated with concepts for new technologies was on display in the “Energies of Data“ Workshop“ at the Audi Urban Future Summit. And so were equally intense emotions about privacy and information overload.

Workshop moderator Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, began the session with questions about how his children may perceive cars when they come of age. Will the idea of needing to drive seem archaic to them? Will the notion of going somewhere to work make no sense? Will the idea of driving to work “seem as silly to them as a CD does to us today?“



The vision presented by the workshop’s first panelist, Jürgen Mayer H. of Berlin-based J. Mayer H. Architects, suggests that the future Anderson imagines for his children could be quite real. The architect presented “A. WAY,“ the data-driven vision for urban mobility that won the Audi Urban Future Award 2010. Mayer H.’s self-described “fairytale“ calls for a “digital tsumani“ in which cars will not need drivers to tell them know where they are going, thanks to a free-flowing stream of electronic information. The car, he suggested, will be transformed from a from a driving machine into an experience machine.


Chris Andersen

In a similar take on data flow in cities, Dr. Steffen P. Walz, Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, believes that the automobile will become a computing device that will bring forth a city-scale operating system. The car becomes part of a social network of sorts. Ricky Hudi, who serves as head of Electrical and Electronic Development for Audi AG, described several technologies that are in various stages of development. Amogn them are augmented visualization of information such as gatehred through crowd sourcing as well as intelligent traffic management and pilot driving, which turn over many driver responsibilties to the car.


Jürgen Mayer H.

Such rethinking of the roles of car and driver are exciting, but where does the data come from, asked Anderson? As panelist Carlo Ratti of MIT’s Senseable City Lab noted, digital data has two consequences: “It doesn’t decay, so you can search for it,“ but it also poses questions of privacy and safety.“

Of equal concern was the issue of being too connected. Mayer H.  noted that, despite the no-turning-back aspect of our technological future, there is currently a backlash against the inexhaustible sharing of data. „“We call [A .WAY] a fairytale because we’re not sure this is what will happen.“