Interaction design + urban planning.

The semester is humming nicely along. I have an incredible group of about nine grad students in my Visualizing Information design class at MICA. In my research for the class, I came across Trulia Hindsight. It couldn't be more timely given my current bedside reading, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 

Anyway, talking with an architect friend of ours here in Baltimore, I relayed to him how increasingly fascinated I am with the intersection of urban planning and interaction design. Take this interactive, for example, showing building trends in American cities across the years. And then there are the new augmented reality iPhone apps that enhance urban navigation. 

How will technology and interaction design change the way cities are planned? How will interface innovations change the way we interact with urban centers? What does/will it mean to evaluate cities as interfaces? What are the heuristics applied to these hybrid operating systems, these UIs that meld physical affordances with the ethereal? What new revelations emerge when cities are cloaked in the context of product design?

I need to go back to school.