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Bio of Iskander Smit

Profile
Opening ThingsCon 2019

There is also an extended CV here.

In brief

For 30 years, I have been at the core of new developments.

At the Dutch Consumers’ Association (Consumentenbond), I set up the first website in 1995 and developed the transformation to digital services.

At INFO, I did this for a diverse range of clients, serving as strategy director and innovation director. There, I established LABS – an R&D environment where we explored the boundaries of IoT and AI together with universities.

As a visiting professor at TU Delft, I translated practical experience into the Cities of Things Lab, where we research how AI systems function as ‘fellow citizens’ in the city.

After 5 years, we made it independent as the Cities of Things fieldlab where we make living together with autonomous technology in our neighborhood tangible through projects like WijkbotKit.

By bringing ThingsCon to the Netherlands in 2014, a steady platform emerged for passionate design professionals and academics in connected products and IoT, facilitating knowledge exchange and relationship building.

Since October 2023 I have been working as an independant “researcher through design” and creative strategist exploring the impact of new human-AI-physical lifeworld entanglements.

In the weekly newsletter, I share reflections on human-technology relations and the latest in robotics and augmented intelligence. I also track interesting events in this space and share an academic paper related weekly. You can subscribe to the newsletter via the newsletter service (Ghost).

My knowledge of human-AI partnerships is built upon my work on the Cities of Things research program, which started in 2017 at Delft University of Technology when I was appointed as a Design United Visiting Professor. Together with Professor Elisa Giaccardi, we started a Delft Design Lab with this theme in 2018. In 2021, it became an independent foundation to generate new knowledge through explorations and real-world experiments with both academic partners and industry.

You can find more on Cities of Things research via the dedicated website. One longer-running initiative that started in 2022 is the Cities of Things LAB010 project in partnership with Creating010 of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, which resulted in Wijkbot / Hoodbot, a prototype toolkit for urban robotics, developed.

Since 2013, I have been the initiator, curator, and organizer of several community events. Behavior Design AMS ran for about 6 years, and Tech Solidarity for 2 years. In 2024, ThingsCon will be running for 10 years, and we are organizing a new edition in December 2024 to celebrate. I have been the initiator and organizer since 2014 and became a foundation in 2016. We run a yearly conference and dedicated Salons throughout the year. Find out more via the website.

I am educated as an industrial design engineer and have always been working in digital media and services. I was a design, strategy, and innovation director.

I started my career at Consumentenbond, the Dutch consumer organization, developing new digital products. At the time, the internet was still a new thing, and it started as a side project next to making CD-ROMs and the like. I worked on the internet strategy, ran editorial teams, and was an internal advisor on the “new media.”

I switched to the agency side in 2001, starting at INFO as an interaction designer and becoming strategy director and innovation director. In the latest capacity, I ran the internal Innovation Lab for about 10 years, exploring and experimenting with new technologies and methodologies. We developed the concepts of Virtual Warmth (2004), Exploding Websites (2008), and Big Data for Tiny Services (2011) to support new service strategies. I was part of the management team.

In the innovation lab, we partnered with many universities to explore and experiment with new concepts and technologies. We were partners of the Digital Life Lab at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and worked closely with Creating010 for years. A special relation we had with Delft University of Technology faculty Industrial Design Engineering being a visiting professor and lab coordinator.

An advisory project for Structural, which is developing tooling for a new methodology for engineering and designing service architectures through a promise-based architecture, resulted in a role as design director. I explored the role of AI as a co-pilot for the platform, and we created an early prototype of the platform. As funding was not secured, Structural is in hibernation for now.

In October 2023, I officially started as an independent practice for future research and product discovery, and I am an advisor on the role of digital in our daily lives.

My latest activities:

  • Developing the WijkbotKit into a next-generation toolkit and educational program, among other funded by ESCall;
  • Contributing to the editorial team for the Agenda Power of Design (Agenda Ontwerpkracht), with a focus on the digital domain (completed);
  • Quartermaster (kwartiermaker) envisions a new program for fighting poverty and debt through proactive and intelligent services that leverage the power of design.
  • Masterclasses and speculative design workshops for Master Next Level Engineering of The Hague UAS, Mater Health by Design of Avans UAS, Catch a Fire agency.
  • Visiting researcher at Civic Interaction Design group of Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences shaping a new research program Civic Protocol Economies with Martijn de Waal.

See also my profile on LinkedIn. 

In the blog, I post on things I recognise as interesting new developments or important trends. Weekly, I post updates that you can also subscribe to via Ghost. 

In addition to this blog, you can follow me on Mastodon, X/Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and a bunch of other networks (Discord, Threads, Bluesky). I like to try new things 🙂 
Try iskandr if you want to find me.

Contact me via DM or good old e-mail.

Publications

(Academic) publications:

Cila, N., Smit, I., Giaccardi, E., & Kröse, B. (2017, May). Products as agents: Metaphors for designing the products of the IoT age. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 448-459) https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025797 

Lupetti, M. L., Smit, I., & Cila, N. (2018, September). Near future cities of things: addressing dilemmas through design fiction. In Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 787-800). https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3240273 

Valentine, D., Smit, I., & Kim, E. (2021). Designing for calibrated trust: exploring the challenges in calibrating trust between users and autonomous vehicles. Proceedings of the Design Society, 1, 1143-1152 https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2021.114

Smit, I. The Alienating Consequences of Things That Predict. The State of Responsible IoT 2019 — Small Escapes from Surveillance Capitalism

De Roeck, D., & Smit, I. Ludicrous IoT Dreams. The State of Responsible IoT 2020, 21. Ludicrious IoT Dreams 

Guo, P., & Smit, I. (2022, June). Towards an Active Predictive Relation by Reconceptualizing a Vacuum Robot: Research on the Transparency and Acceptance of the Predictive Behaviors. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 241-256). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17618-0_18

Jaśkiewicz, T., & Smit, I. Between Experiments Leveraging Prototypes to Trigger, Articulate, and Share Informal Knowledge: Case of the Cities of Things Living Lab. (2024) In Applied Design Research in Living Labs and Other Experimental Learning and Innovation Environments (pp. 210-233). CRC Press. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.1201/9781003491484-13/experiments-leveraging-prototypes-trigger-articulate-share-informal-knowledge-tomasz-ja%C5%9Bkiewicz-iskander-smit

Smit, I. (2025). Ubiquitous immersive relations with generative things. In RIOT 2025, State of Responsible Tech – Generative Things (pp. 31-35). Stichting ThingsCon Amsterdam
https://thingscon.org/publications/riot-2025/riot-2025-ubiquitous-immersive-relations-with-generative-things/

Public speaking (selection)

2008 Reboot 8 (Copenhagen), Emerce Eday (Rotterdam)

2009 Mobile Monday #10 (Amsterdam), Reboot 9 (Copenhagen), EuroIA (Copenhagen), Emerce Eday (Rotterdam)

2010 Marketing Pioneers (Amsterdam), The Next Web (Amsterdam), National Marketing Day (Bussum), The Web And Beyond (Amsterdam), Digital Recruitment (Utrecht), GX Connect (Amsterdam)

2011 Club of Amsterdam – Future of Services (Amsterdam), Liquid Internet – Web 3.0 (Utrecht), Annual Internet of Things Europe (Brussels), PICNIC (Amsterdam), Online Tuesday (Amsterdam)

2012 Seminar Short Range Wireless Communication (Tilburg), Club of Amsterdam – Future of Taxes (Amsterdam), Knowledge session Big Data (Amsterdam), Media Battle (Utrecht), CMO Dinner (Amsterdam), Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven), Inbo Architects (Woudenberg), UX Cocktailhour (Amsterdam)

2013 ProductTank (Amsterdam), IoT Week (Rotterdam), IoT Europe event (Eindhoven), Facebook Marketing Event (Utrecht), Shopping Today (Almere), Innovatie-estafette (Amsterdam), TU Delft Honors Program (Delft), Interactieve Professionals Associatie Netherlands (Amsterdam), Adobe User Group (Rotterdam)

2014 Rabobank innovation session (Utrecht), Webwinkel Vakdagen (Utrecht), Cross Media Cafe (Hilversum), Mens voor de Lens (Amsterdam), Young Equens, Shopping2020 (Utrecht), Data of the Crowds (Rotterdam), Ministry of General Affairs (The Hague), Google Glass Meetup (Amsterdam), Amsterdam Creative Industries Future of Retail (Amsterdam), Thingscon (Amsterdam), OPEN Wear (Amsterdam)

2015 Firestarters (Amsterdam), A-wearable (Rotterdam), Thingscon (Berlin), Are You Connected? (Rotterdam), Hack The Visual (London), IoT Shifts (Barcelona), ThingsCon Amsterdam

2016 IoT Eindhoven, IoT Olympics (Amsterdam), Behavioral Informatics Seminar (Amsterdam), Bosch Connected Experience (Berlin), SXSW (Austin), NRC Live (Amsterdam), Rockstart Smart Energy Summit (Amsterdam), ThingsCon Salon #1 (Amsterdam), CrossMediaCafé (Hilversum), DrupalJam (Utrecht), Campus Party (Utrecht), Darefest (Antwerpen), IoT and the City (Amsterdam), DDA in Paris, UX Cocktailhour (Amsterdam), ThingsCon Amsterdam

2017 Bitcoin Wednesday (Amsterdam), Cross Media Café (Hilversum), SXSW New Dutch Wave (Austin), Data and the Self hackathon (Rotterdam), Avans Hogeschool (Breda), ThingsCon Shenzhen (Shenzhen), Butterfly Works (Amsterdam), Dare (Amsterdam), ThingsCon (Amsterdam)

2018 Symposium Things As Citizens (Amsterdam), Rotary (Purmerend), IoT Rotterdam, AVANS (Breda), Brunel (Utrecht), The Next Web (Amsterdam), Border Sessions (Den Haag), HvA Festival (Amsterdam), DRIVE (Eindhoven)

2019 BTCM (Amsterdam), TU IDE (Delft), Media Perspectives (Hilversum), HU (Utrecht), MILE (Amsterdam), IoT Rotterdam (Rotterdam), AVANS (Breda), Digital Society School (Amsterdam), Sensemakers (Amsterdam), Behavior Design AMS (Amsterdam), ThingsCon (Rotterdam)

2020 TUD IDE (Delft), AVANS (online), Media Perspectives (online), VanMoof (online), NGI Summit (online), ThingsCon (online)

2021 TUD IDE (Delft), IoT Rotterdam (online), AVANS (online), DAAD Berlin (online), Media Architecture Biennale (online), Cities of Things (Munich)

2022 MILE lecture (Amsterdam), Mozfest (online), AVANS (Breda), ThingsCon (Rotterdam)

2023 AVANS Smart Systems (online), Smart & Social Fest (Rotterdam), Creative Coding (Hamburg), Dutch Design Week/DRIVE (Eindhoven), ThingsCon (Rotterdam)

2024 Pecha Kucha IPO (Rotterdam), Clever|Franke AI session (Utrecht), Public Spaces (Amsterdam), Society 5.0 Festival (Amsterdam), Avans (Breda), The Hague UAS (Delft), Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven), ThingsCon (Amsterdam)

2025 Smart & Social Festival (Rotterdam), ThingsCon Salon (Amsterdam), Food for Thought (Amsterdam), InChange (Amsterdam), Society 5.0 Festival (Amsterdam)