Urban Technology at University of Michigan week -12
Change the measurements, change the world
47ºF outside in Detroit means that it’s time to crack the window, put on some Exit Planet Dust, and write you a note. Hello, folks. Since we’ve had a small surge of subscribers recently, let’s start with a restatement of purpose.
What we’re doing here is writing a new degree offering into existence. Specifically, a liberal arts degree designed for people working on the future of cities. The Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology at University of Michigan gives students the opportunity to make cities their domain, technology a fundamental skillset, and design their practice.
But in plain language? Well, since you asked…
Hello! I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction. Have questions about any of this? Hit reply and let us know.
🪶 The Three Trials
I had three parents—mom, dad, and Nintendo—so it’s nearly impossible for me to think of something involving more than a couple steps without construing it as a quest. That’s exactly the way our degree program comes to life when I let myself float out of the spreadsheets and documents. On the path to graduation, Urban Technology students will dodge Octoroks and Stalfos while gathering the wherewithal and the know-how to pass three metaphorical trials.
🎲 The Trial of Strange Places
If we teleport you to a random city on Planet Earth, can you walk around for a couple hours and then venture a plausible guess as to why the city is the way it is? If you can’t read a city, then you won’t see the challenges, let alone the opportunities. If you don’t see yourself and your unique circumstances, then you’ll be blind to how the experiences of others may be different. Our students have to develop conceptual x-ray vision to feel urban places, and to read them.
UT students take a sequence of courses designed to help them understand cities as complex systems that involve decisions and decision-making: Why does Chicago have an orthogonal grid and Boston a warren of cow paths? Why does a cablecar make more sense in Medellín than San Francisco? Who decided Oslo should banish cars from downtown and why? Do you have the tools to decipher the public spaces of the Nacirema’s greatest cities?
It’s important that this is not just about the stuff of the city but also the people and social constructs that control all the stuff. This means we care as much about the ‘hardware’—physical decisions like roads, zoning, infrastructure—as we do about the ‘software’—the mash of tribal, institutional, market, and network dynamics that drive decisions. Pop quiz! You’ve been teleported to Helsinki and you observe a curious rectangular patch of asphalt around a concrete bench. What gives?
🗄 The Trial of 1,000 Records
If we give you a json (aka machine readable) file of a huge number of lines, can you process it into an engaging visualization or create a tool to explore the data? During the pandemic lockdown I watched multiple friends take up wood carving as a pastime. It’s a charmingly meditative act that is repetitive and laborious, but rewarding too. Editing a spreadsheet of 1,000 records is also repetitive and laborious, but very rarely does one hear the terms “charming, meditative, or rewarding” in the same sentence as “spreadsheet.” Wrangling data is a skill that’s useful regardless of what you do professionally because decisions are made based on inputs, and that’s exactly what data is—not a definitive source of truth, but simply one of myriad tools to understand the options in front of you.
In his book The Institutional Revolution, Douglas W. Allen writes about the patronage system in Britain prior to the Industrial Revolution. Sounds pretty dry, but hang in there. It’s one of the most useful books I’ve ever read because he applies an economics perspective to something that seems strange otherwise: the patronage system used in the British Navy (and elsewhere) and, in doing so, Allen illustrates that when new things become easy to measure, the world changes.
Allen’s argument boils down to this: Is there a cheap way to monitor the performance of a worker? If yes, then you set standards and ask people to meet them. Those that do not are fired. Easy enough. But what if it’s really hard to know if a perceived failure is the fault of the individual or was caused by something beyond their control?
Imagine you’re the Queen or King of England in the early 18th century and your naval ship arrives to port two weeks late. Do you trust the Captain who tells you that poor winds are the cause of their tardiness, or do presume that they took a holiday in the middle of the journey and put them on trial for dereliction of duty? Without radio to contact them, GPS to locate the ship, weather predictions to analyze conditions, or even the ability to measure time in a reliable fashion while at sea, you are left with one choice: trust the Captain. In turn, this means you need someone trustworthy. Interesting coincidence that trust is the keyword here, because that’s back in the collective consciousness with all the froth about crypto being a ‘trustless’ system. (If you want to learn how patronage was actually a form of antique blockchain you can read the book.)
Allen’s thesis is that the emergence of cheap(er) marine chronometers enabled better oceanic navigation and more predictable voyages (thanks, Longitude Prize), which in turn dramatically changed how the Navy was managed. Change the measurements, change the world.
Guess what’s changing right now? Measurement! Cheap, profuse, and small digital sensors, like the cheap marine chronometers before them, change the accuracy, available frequency, and affordability of measurements that can be performed in the world around us. Data gets higher resolution… and maybe (but not always) more accurate. Layer on top of this the fact that computer vision and machine learning offer new tools to extract data from camera imagery and more fuel is added to the fire. Just one autonomous vehicle generates on the order of terabytes of data per day. Much of that will be discarded… or will it? What decisions will be made based on the data exhaust of the ride you take to the grocery store?
Not everyone needs to be a data scientist, but all graduates need to be literate in the subject and have some experience with code. All of our students will take a sequence of coding courses in Python at the School of Information. Some will come away as capable hackers. Others may just become “the one in the office who slays at excel functions” and that’s just fine, because the best tool for the job is the one you know well—so long as it can capably handle thousands of rows of data.
🧶 The Trial of the Red Thread
Climate change is your unfortunate and unavoidable inheritance so what, concretely, will you do about it? One of the things that differentiates our program from urban studies is that we have an applied focus. Our students will be good at analysis because that’s a requirement for any kind of serious work, but they should not be satisfied to stop at analysis because they are, after all, designers. It’s a tricky word though, “design,” because it conjures ideas of sharp graphics and black turtlenecks. On the contrary, we’re interested in design as a strategic capacity.
In Finland the expression “red thread” is used to describe the line of continuity that connects disparate ideas. Finding the red thread in a story is an act of integrating multiple different elements and distilling that chaos into something that can be easily followed. That’s not a bad description of service design and strategic design, which are the most important disciplines that you’ve probably never heard of.
Service design is the art of crafting value flows within a relationship. Whereas interaction design happens à la minute, service design is slow cooked. It plays out over hours, days, or months. But let’s put that into more useful terms for our purposes: in the 20th century, industrial design and engineering were essential aspects of the success of Ford Motor Company, but in the 21st century service design will be the thing that makes or breaks their business. As the world moves in the direction of shared rides and a sharing economy, ownership fades. When that happens, transactions—buy this car now plz!—are supplanted by relationships—isn’t thisshared, multi-modal mobility platform fulfilling? As discussed in a previous newsletter, the terms we use matter because identity is a basic building block of relationships, so this stuff gets wooly pretty fast. That’s one of the reasons that an ability to find red threads is so critical. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
It’s one thing to design a great mobility service given the status quo political, economic, social, and technological consequences of today, but if we’re serious about working in a mission driven way on topics like climate change, then we need our graduates to be able to look beyond business-as-usual, which means an ability to think strategically. Our studio sequence is designed to build this ability up from scratch.
Links
🎤 Why Sci-Fi Legend Ted Chiang Fears Capitalism, Not A.I. - enough said.
💻 “We are knitting together collections of state agencies based on common needs to help them cooperatively procure, develop, and maintain the software that they all depend on. This will prevent 50 states from buying 50 versions of near-identical, overpriced software.”
🧳 606 Days Without a Lease is a short film about relationships to people and places experienced in a world that is impossible without digital technology but not at all about digital technology
🧹 Tired: Technical Debt. Wired: Housekeeping. h/t Tim Maly
🦖 This rig is an alternative means of passing the Trial of 1,000 Records. Impressive! For those just discovering that Chrome’s “No Internet” page is a video game, you’re welcome!
This week: Hearing from admitted students is one of the best things, but did you know that if you email me you’re obligated to now attend the University of Michigan? Only joking… or am I? Anya, Jacob, Trey, Jonathan, Cynthia, Joe, Catherine, Charlie, Ann, Lucie, Edi and then again and again until all of the words have been spoken. In other words, busy week. 🏃♂️