Two years ago the proportion of the world's population living in cities eclipsed those living elsewhere for the first time in history. The trend has persisted, in fact it seems an unstoppable juggernaut with the ratio predicted to reach 3:1 by 2050. Of course, city-dwelling is nothing new, but cities that 20 million people may call home certainly are. As Justin McGuirk discusses in this article, the transformation presents some of the most profound design challenges of our era. The process of regeneration is relentless - you can't go far in New York or London without seeing immense construction work underway, or derelict buildings whose future is no doubt already a glint in the eye of some ambitious developer.

Some of us here at Cogapp were lucky enough to get tickets to Friday’s sold out dConstruct conference, just down the road from us in Brighton. It was an extremely inspiring day…

Adam Greenfield kick-started the morning with a detailed and compelling study of the role that ubiquitous computing is/can/will play(ing) in large cities (there’s no avoiding a capricious use of tenses when discussing the near-future). His talk was fuelled by the fact that, as of last year, most human beings on planet Earth live in cities. This comes at a time when we’re in the process of shifting from a state of having hundreds of people per computer to hundreds of computers per person, so it stands to reason that the laws and trends that have governed cities of the analogue past will not be relevant for modern/future times.

Information, argues Greenfield, is becoming ‘persistent’ - offered to us at every waking moment, whether it is desired or not. When surrounded by statistics on every object and person in our vicinity, people begin to cluster into groups of common identity, avoiding encounters that do not seem desirable in advance. Ubiquitous computing is likely to usher in mind-boggling efficiency and agency over our environment, but we are at risk of losing a textural, unplanned, helpless quality that has previously made cities such ‘centres for human vitality and creativity’.

Greenfield’s thorough account of possible urban conditions of the near future felt neither pessimistic nor naively utopian, but underlined our need to be fiercely conscientious and adaptable.

A couple of chaps from Stamen Design talked us through the creative process for some of their celebrated data visualisations, ranging from busy, data-rich apps like Historical Hurricane Maps and Oakland Crimespotting...

Rachael and myself are in Indianapolis at this year's Museums and the Web conference. Yesterday I went to a fascinating talk by Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr, who I remember gushing about before.