Iskander Smit

Iskander is the founder and chair of the Cities of Things Foundation, a research program that originated at TU Delft and is now a foundation to provide a knowledge platform and field lab coordinator in partnership with both academic partners and industry. A special project is Wijkbot / Hoodbot, a prototype toolkit for urban robotics, developed in close partnership with Creating010 of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Since he was a visiting professor at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University in 2017, Iskander has been diving deep into the new relations of human and machine intelligence from a design perspective. Living together with intelligent things and their impact on society are core interests and research endeavours. Since 2024 Iskander founded Target is New as an independent future research studio, as a spin-off from the weekly newsletter with the same name. He is also the initiator and chair of the Dutch chapter of ThingsCon, which has been organising community events since 2014, reflecting responsible technology and the Internet of Things. Before Iskander was a strategy and innovation director and lab manager at INFO digital agency, initiator at the Behavior Design Amsterdam meetup, and co-organiser of the Tech Solidarity initiative.