Enabling Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging network superstructure that will connect physical resources and actual users. It will support an ecosystem of smart applications and services bringing hyper-connectivity to our society by using augmented and rich interfaces. Whereas in the beginning IoT referred to the advent of barcodes and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which helped to automate inventory, tracking and basic identification, today IoT is characterized by a dynamic trend toward connecting smart sensors, objects, devices, data and applications. The next step will be “cognitive IoT,” facilitating object and data re-use across application domains and leveraging hyper-connectivity, interoperability solutions and semantically enriched information distribution.

As more and more devices become interconnected through the Internet of Things (IoT), there is an even greater need for this book, which explains the technology, the internetworking, and applications that are making IoT an everyday reality.

This book represents one of the key milestones of DESIGNSCAPES, an H2020 CSA (Coordination and Support Action) research project funded by the European Commission under the Call “User-driven innovation: value creation through design-enabled innovation”. The book demonstrates that adopting design allows us to embed innovation within the city so as to arrive at feasible answers to complex global challenges. In this way, innovation can become disruptive, while also sparking a dynamic of gradual change in the “urbanscape” it acts within.