Sensors, smartphones, and smart-home devices are already collecting vast amounts of data about how people move through and use their surroundings. The Future Places Centre aims to turn that raw information into a practical tool for designing healthier, more sustainable towns and cities. Today, pervasive computing and the Internet of Things are mostly used in offices and factories. This centre will push them into everyday public spaces—parks, high streets, housing estates—to understand how the physical layout of a place shapes human behaviour, and vice versa. The core problem is that we have the technology to measure spaces in detail, but we lack the methods to translate that data into better design. If the centre succeeds, local governments and planners could use real-time sensor data and AI to test how a new pedestrian crossing, a redesigned square, or a green corridor might affect air quality, physical activity, or social interaction before building anything. The North West of England will become a test-bed for this approach, linking university researchers with councils and industry. This is applied, not fundamental, research: the goal is a practical toolkit for shaping places that make people healthier.
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The Future Places Centre will explore how ubiquitous and pervasive technologies, the IoT, and new data science tools can let people reimagine what their future spaces might be. Today, the footprint of such systems extends well beyond the work environments where they first showed themselves and are now, quite literally, ubiquitous. Combined with advances in data science, particularly in the general area of AI, these are enabling entirely new forms of applications and expanding our understanding of how we can shape our physical spaces. The result of these trends is that the potential impact of these systems is no longer confined to work settings or the scientific imagination; it points towards all contexts in which the relationship between space and human practice might be altered through digitally-enabled comprehension of the worlds we inhabit. Such change necessitates enriching the public imagination about what future places might be and how they might be understood. In particular, it points towards new ways of using pervasive technologies (such as the IoT), to shape healthy, sustainable living through the creation of appropriate places. To paraphrase Churchill: if he said we make our buildings, and our buildings come to shape us, the Future Places centre starts from the premise that new understanding of places (enabled by pervasive computing, data science and AI tools), can be combined with a public concern for sustainability and the environment to help shape healthier places and thus make healthier people. It is thus the goal of the centre to reimagine and develop further Mark Weiser's original vision of ubiquitous computing. As it does this so it will cohere Lancaster's pioneering DE projects and create a world-class interdisciplinary research endeavour that binds Lancaster to the local community, to industry and government, making the North West a test-bed for what might be.
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