April in cities of (agentic) things: design for collectives in human-agent societies
Annotating a future agentic thing from April reflections
The weekly reflections on the news in human-AI co-performances are brought to life via a story from the future of living with agentic things in the city.1
The Keysmith
Maya's fingers danced across the haptic interface, each gesture adding a new line to the collective key she was crafting. As the neighborhood's designated keysmith, she specialized in translating collective decisions into the cryptopoetic haikus that governed daily life. Keys that express the beliefs of the collectives, as tattoos used to do in the beginning of the century.
"Almost there," she murmured to herself. The holographic projection showed the nested structure of permissions and relationships that would be encoded in this key – allowing the Urban Greening Collective to access water resources from the Watershed Management Collective during specific morning hours.
The final verse took shape:
Roots seek water's pathDawn light shares fluid treasureGardens breathe as one
The words glimmered, then solidified into a complex geometric pattern – beautiful enough to be art, functional enough to serve as executable code. This wasn't just a permission token; it was a cultural artifact expressing the philosophical agreement between collectives.
Her assistant AI, Juniper, analyzed the completed key. "The verse achieves 98% alignment with both collectives' belief systems. There's a minor tension in the water allocation timing that might need resolution in the next collective assembly."
"Flag it, but let's proceed," Maya decided. "The gardens need water tomorrow."
She pressed her palm against the interface, transferring the key to her personal token – a small crystalline object that served as her interface to the collective systems. As it absorbed the new key, the crystal briefly displayed all the interconnected collectives she belonged to: her neighborhood hub, the city's education collective, the regional art exchange, and a dozen others. Each connection represented not just membership but a relationship defined by mutual obligations and rights.
Maya headed toward the neighborhood square where representatives from both collectives would ceremonially exchange the key. These in-person validations weren't technically necessary – the systems could handle everything digitally – but they had become important rituals, reminding everyone that behind the elegant architecture of nested collectives were actual humans making decisions together.
As she walked, Maya noticed a group of children playing with training tokens, learning how to navigate collective decision-making through simplified games. One child was clearly struggling with the concept of nested voting rights.
"Remember," their teacher was saying, "you vote directly in your learning collective, but your learning collective votes as a unit in the education assembly. Your voice travels upward, but transformed by consensus."
Maya smiled. She'd struggled with the same concepts as a child. The old democracies of her grandparents' era seemed so primitive now – binary yes/no voting on issues too complex for simple answers, conducted by isolated individuals rather than through thoughtful collective deliberation.
The morning sun caught her token as she arrived at the square, sending rainbow patterns dancing across the gathering space. Representatives from both collectives were already waiting, ready to add another connection to the living tapestry of their interdependent world.
April reflections: Design for collectives in human-agent societies
The speculative thing aims to embody the key themes I've been exploring this April via my newsletter Target is New. Claude explains the links between the story and the weekly columns.
Part 1: The Rise of Fluid Collectives
Weekly theme: Work with AI: The Rise of Fluid Collectives
“The story illustrates fluid collectives through Maya's role as a keysmith, where she works symbiotically with her AI assistant Juniper. Their relationship exemplifies the shift from hierarchical structures to contextual, adaptive partnerships. Neither is managing the other; rather, they collaborate toward a shared goal. Maya contributes human empathy and ethical reasoning when she decides to proceed despite the minor tension in water allocation, demonstrating the uniquely human contribution to collaborative intelligence. The story shows how roles have become fluid and purpose-driven, with Maya serving as both technical executor and cultural interpreter of collective decisions.”
Part 2: Agency in Agentic to Agentic Realities
Weekly theme: Negotiating mutual agency in agentic to agentic realities
“The keys in the story represent the negotiation between autonomous systems, similar to the A2A protocol you discussed. When Juniper analyzes the key for "98% alignment with both collectives' belief systems," we see autonomous systems negotiating outcomes based on human preferences. The crystalline token functioning as Maya's interface to collective systems illustrates the delegated management systems that oversee agent networks. Like your concept of "hoodbots," the collectives in the story have evolved beyond individually controlled tools to become interconnected communities with their own form of "citizenship," creating a new relationship between humans and systems.”
Part 3: AI Fragmentation for Collectivity
Weekly theme: Reconciling AI Fragmentation and Design for Collectivity
“The cryptopoetic haikus beautifully exemplify the AI fragmentation-to-coherence process. The key takes fragments of meaning (individual words and concepts) and reconstructs them into coherent expressions that represent collective agreements. This mirrors how AI language models create cohesion from fragmentation. The ceremonial exchange of keys in the neighborhood square represents Indy Johar's concept of "restoring relational care" - creating physical spaces for human connection that counterbalance technological atomization. The story shows the productive tension between digital systems (the keys) and social reconnection (the ceremony).”
Part 4: Intelligence as Components
Weekly theme: Understanding intelligence as collaborating components
“The entire nested collective structure portrayed in the story exemplifies intelligence as collaborating components rather than monolithic entities. The teacher's explanation to children about how "your voice travels upward, but transformed by consensus" shows how individual intelligence contributes to collective intelligence. The comparison to "old democracies" with their binary voting highlights the evolution toward more nuanced, component-based decision-making systems. The keys themselves represent the Analogy, Abstraction, and Reasoning (AAR) framework you discussed - they're not just processing information but creating meaningful abstractions that can generalize across different contexts and collectives.
The story serves as an integrative example of how all four concepts might manifest in a coherent future society, where fluid collaboration, negotiated agency, fragmentation-to-coherence processes, and component-based intelligence all work together to create a more interconnected and thoughtful world.”
Research through Design Fiction
With Cities of Things, we aim to envision the impact of living together with things with agency, with agentic things, with autonomous things, in the near future cities. We explored concepts such as the Collect|Connect hub as an engaging “AI”-neighbor to orchestrate and support community life in neighborhoods. With Wijkbot we created a kit for civic prototyping possible futures and impacts of living with intelligent and autonomous objects in our cities. Read more on our activities.
Combining capturing knowledge and creating inspirational artifacts is typical of what Cities of Things like to engage. By ourselves or as commissioned projects for students or workshops. Check out citiesofthings.org and hoodbot.net for examples, and reach out if you like to know more.
This example is just a quickly made impression that opens up more questions than it provide answers. Something that is always the right start.
Thanks to a helpful writing co-author (Lex.page with Claude 3.7), this speculative thing got a storyline. I inspired the thing with a combination of four (randomly taken) cards from the Near Future Laboratory's Design Fiction Work Kit, that I translated into this prompt for a speculative thing.
I pulled these four cards: key thing (object), dossier (archetype), tattoo (action), anthropomorphic (attribute), and this was the prompt I created for Claude:
In the near future we are organized to support collective goals. Systems are designed to focus on the benefit of the collective, not on the individual. These are fluid collectives, depending on the need for the moment. We live in types of collectives, the associations of homeowners entail more than maintenance and more than joint resources such as energy or mobility, it is also a way to live, a belief system. Collective can differ, but there is awareness that it is the way to organize societal life. In a way, we replace democracies with layered forms where you have voting rights for your collective behavior and delegate the collective with voting rights in the higher level collectives, which can differ based on the topic. The energy layer is organized in different collectives than the mobility layer, or the urban development layer. etc.
Keys are the tokens for executing your collective rights. As every piece of content is data, the way to store decisions is as creating tattoos, not on humans but on the collections of rules captured in the dossiers. The tattoos are concepts for an in-between state of being definite, hard to remove, and expressing emotional level beliefs. The ‘tattoos’ are keys to a new type of super short stories, like haikus, that capture in an anthropomorphic way understandable collective decisions and set of rules. The system cards of the collectives, are the main ‘code’ for operating societies.