Most people pass a bus shelter on a Sydney street without giving it much thought. It’s worn from years of performing a single task, functional, and a little boring. However, that bus shelter is seen by researchers and designers who work at the nexus of urban technology and human behavior as something completely different—a lost chance, an operating system that needs to be updated, a subtle suggestion that was never fulfilled.
Steven Bai, a Sydney-trained designer who co-founded Sencity after graduating from the University of Sydney, is partially responsible for this framing. Growing up, Bai followed the sound and light of firecrackers as he ran through Chinese streets with his father. It may seem like a minor childhood recollection, but he attributes everything to that encounter—his intuition that public spaces should inspire people and that cities should feel alive. The work itself is difficult to discount, regardless of whether a firecracker story truly explains a career.
Sencity creates what Bai refers to as persuasive technologies, which are tangible installations that subtly promote better behavior in the real world rather than the kind that keep you scrolling through a feed at two in the morning. A trash can that played Tetris was his first proof of concept, and it was unveiled at Sydney’s Vivid festival in 2014. A new game piece was triggered by an LED display that reacted each time someone dropped something in. There was a line of hundreds of kids waiting to use it. This begs the obvious question: does that genuinely alter people’s perceptions of waste or just their feelings about that specific bin on that specific night? Bai seems to think that the distinction between those two things is less clear than most people think.
The larger goal is to completely rethink public infrastructure, both through Sencity and through research facilities like the University of Sydney’s Smart Urbanism Lab and UNSW’s City Futures. The claim is that city infrastructure, such as lighting poles, benches, pedestrian crossings, and public restrooms, was primarily created decades ago for a different type of urban life. More or less, it works. However, it doesn’t react, doesn’t pick things up, and doesn’t prod. This was discovered years ago by smart homes. Most of the city has not.
There are already some minor experiments that are worth considering. Jaywalking rates are said to have significantly decreased in one city after an interactive game was incorporated into a pedestrian crossing button. Whether that effect scaled or persisted is still unknown. Due in large part to users accessing content the city had not anticipated, a New York kiosk project that offered free internet access on the street failed. These things are sideways. For a very long time, urban technology has sounded better in a pitch deck than on a soggy Tuesday afternoon.
This entire endeavor revolves around that tension. Millions of people behave in ways that no designer, no matter how careful, can fully predict because cities are uncontrolled environments. The cultural shift that this type of work signals—that infrastructure should be expected to do more and that public space deserves the same creative investment that goes into apps and devices that people actually choose to use—may be more valuable than any one installation.
It’s fascinating to watch this movement emerge from Sydney, in part because Australian cities have frequently been overlooked in discussions about urban innovation around the world. Slowly and quietly, that appears to be shifting. Tetris was played by the trash can. The bus shelter’s appearance hasn’t changed. However, something is being figured out somewhere in between those two things.
