2 December Usman Haque gave the closing keynote at ThingsCon Amsterdam 2016. Decision-making and design are central to the production of technologies in networked urban environments, but it’s important to understand how definitions of efficiency, optimisation, etc, that often underpin such processes, especially in so-called ‘smart cities’ help determine how and why things are implemented and with whom and where power concentrates. The questions of who designs and who decides (data, technologies, actions), as well as how we collectively make designs and decisions about the future are crucial. This talk will discuss these issues in the context of some of Usman’s work in the internet of things.