Background and Motivation

This project began from a personal experience. When I first moved to Melbourne, my landlord told me, “You should adapt to the city, not expect the city to adapt to you.” That sentence stayed with me, because it reflects a common assumption in urban life: that individuals are expected to absorb discomfort quietly, even when they are new, overwhelmed, isolated, or vulnerable.

Living in cities made me increasingly aware that emotional struggle is not an exception, but a recurring condition embedded in everyday urban routines. Experiences such as feeling lost after relocating, walking alone while frustrated, seasonal depression during winter, or even extreme cases like people committing suicide on their way to work, are all signals of emotional states that remain largely unnoticed or unsupported. These moments are not invisible because they are rare, but because cities are not designed to perceive them.

Core Question

This project asks what might happen if cities could sense emotional distress instead of ignoring it. Rather than treating mental and emotional well-being as purely individual responsibilities, Perceptive City questions whether urban environments could become more responsive, acknowledging collective emotional patterns and reacting before harm occurs.

Concept Overview: Perceptive City

Perceptive City proposes a model of the city as a sensing and evolving system. Environmental conditions and human emotional signals are continuously interpreted, not as isolated data points, but as part of a collective urban pattern. Instead of offering direct control or optimisation, the city responds subtly through adjustments in atmosphere such as lighting, sound, and temperature. These responses are not fixed rules, but adaptive behaviours shaped over time by how people move, feel, and choose to interact with their surroundings.

Crucially, the city does not change solely through automated systems. It evolves through human presence, behaviour, and shared experience.

LENSI as an Interface

LENSI functions as the interface between individuals and the perceptive city. Designed as augmented reality glasses, it reveals otherwise invisible layers of urban stress and environmental pressure. Rather than overwhelming users with data, LENSI presents minimal visual cues that translate how the city is sensing and responding in real time.

While current smart glasses remain technically limited, the project is grounded in the assumption that future wearable perception will replace the need for constant phone-based interaction. Beyond personal customisation, LENSI enables experiences to be shared. Through aggregated and anonymised data, individual perceptions contribute to a collective understanding of urban conditions.

Collective Feedback and Urban Change

A central idea of the project is that personal experience does not end at individual perception. When people choose to share how they feel and how they interact with the city, these signals can accumulate into meaningful feedback. Over time, this collective data allows the city not only to adjust atmospheres in real time, but also to inform future urban planning decisions.

In this vision, the city gradually changes through its inhabitants. Emotional patterns influence environmental responses, which in turn shape physical spaces. The responsibility of adaptation shifts away from the individual and becomes a shared process between people and the city itself.

Film Narrative and Atmosphere

Conclusion

Perceptive City explores a transition from universal design towards inclusive design. Instead of expecting all individuals to adapt to a fixed environment, the project proposes environments that adapt to diverse emotional and sensory needs. It does not aim to present a ready-to-build solution, but to question the values embedded in current urban systems and to imagine cities that evolve through empathy, shared perception, and collective responsibility.

Perceptive City imagines a future where cities do not merely observe human behaviour, but evolve through human experience.