The design challenge for developing The Smart City Case of Aalter was to combine a ‘smart’ advanced media setup with the aesthetics of slick designed city furniture, which blends in the overall landscape architecture of the city or location. From our design research we found city screens often seem to be bulky steel objects which have little relation to their environment and poor aesthetics.

So, we decided to develop a clean design furniture item made of concrete. We then integrated a compact screen housing with numerous ‘smart’ components that companies, and pioneers can use to optimize the applications of the furniture.

The setup consists of 3 main elements. The concrete housing is custom made to perfectly fit the screen case, technology and computer unit. The vertical smart strip allows for the use of components like camera, card readers, eID readers, etc. The smart case in the top can hold optional components like solar panels or data collecting sensors such as a weather station.

All power supply and cabling are guided through the concrete design coming from bottom into the unit. The project we created for Aalter is our “standard” setup, in which we implemented a 55inch touchscreen in all of the 10 installations. Depending on the needs of the location you may or may not chose to use a touchscreen as a regular screen is also a possibility. If the location permits, information can be found on both sides of the furniture.

The same design principle can be applied to different screens. Smaller to extra-large screens, both used in portrait or landscape. The concrete case gets custom made for a specific screen type to make it a tight fit.

In doing so we can hide much of the technical aspects of the screens, showing only a clean screen surface and a smart case. Of course the visual content is interchangeable, and the setup allows for many more technical and digital solutions to be added.