Urban Technology at University of Michigan week -19
Taxonomies for urban technology + being frenemies with the AEC sector
Planning to admit our first cohort of students has us thinking about how they will mix in with all the other students and everything else happening at the College. Not too dissimilar from the larger question of how tech relates to AEC sector at large—architecture, engineering, construction (and real estate).
Our urban technology students will be designing the apps, services, and organizations that someday will power the buildings designed by our architects, set within the districts laid out by our planners. As a whole, the College will be enriched by this broader discussion. If we do our jobs right, the students in Taubman’s various programs will all be friends but they’ll treat the AEC sector as a frenemy. Here’s why…
Hello! I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan that will welcome its first students in the 2021-2022 academic year. If you’re new here, try this 90 second video introduction. While we launch the program, we’re using this venue to explore themes and ideas related to our studies. Thanks for reading. Have questions about any of this? Hit reply and let us know.
🧰 Let’s be Frenemies with AEC
To help make sense of what’s happening in the outside world, we keep a running list of examples of urban technology here at Taubman College squirreled away on Google docs and from time to time I open the file and move line items from one category to another.
Do you focus on industry or sector (built environment, energy, transportation, etc), like the VC fund Urban.us does? This makes a lot of sense if you’re investing in companies or building one of your own. In those setting it helps you to know who the peers and competitors are.
Do you organize around core technologies? For instance, we could group together Bushwick Blockchain Alliance with all the others that use blockchain, or the hotly contested ClearviewAI with all the others that rely on computer vision, AirBnb would get lumped in with all the other marketplaces, Next Door would be categorized as hyperlocal media, and Juno would be filed under vertical integration—just like Apple is not-so-secretly a supply chain logistics behemoth who happens to make attractive rounded-corner rectangles of glass and metal.
We pick the taxonomy that’s most appropriate to the work at hand, and for us the most helpful so far has been to group urban technologies by those which help us see, shape, and inhabit cities in new ways. Here’s how that shakes out:
See - Technologies that help us understand cities in new ways and make better decisions. This includes digital mapping like Sensible Cities Treepedia that is automatically calculated from streetview photos, as well as more traditional efforts like Amsterdam’s GIS map of trees. It doesn’t have to be limited to literal sight, either. Biobot is also a way of seeing cities from the waste up.
Shape - Technologies that shape are those that help us imagine and and build cites in new ways. This includes digital fabrication and new materials, computational geometry, and all the software that helps architects and planners do their traditional work more effectively, like Hypar and Monograph (founded by Taubman alum Robert Yuen). This category also includes speculative policy work that implies new ways to govern cities, since governance is so critical to long term shaping of urban places. To stick with trees as the theme, Dark Matter Labs’ recent investigation into Trees as Infrastructure is a proposal for how action might be taken to shape cities based on an alternative understanding of trees.
Inhabit - Technologies of inhabitation are those that help us occupy and live in cities in new ways. This group is the flagship category of urban technology as it has been written about in the press. Things like ride-hail or coworking reconfigure existing urban elements elements (cars, drivers, passengers, workers, real estate, etc) with new efficiencies and tradeoffs. They can feel magical to some, like the people who can more easily catch a cheap ride, but can be punishing to others, like the drivers who sleep in their cars to make ends meet.
One of the reasons I like this breakdown is because it gives us a way to understand what’s already happening at Taubman College. In our Urban Informatics certificate and related coursework there’s already interest in how we see cities through Data. Cyrus Peñarroyo has been mapping Detroit’s digital divide and newcomers Anthony Vanky and Catherine Griffiths are using computer vision to understand cities anew. “Seeing” technologies have a long lineage at Taubman.
Likewise with “shaping” technologies. Our ground floor FABLab is—forgive the technical term here—for real. If you want to explore new ways of building buildings, talk to Tsz Yan Ng about her experimental concrete forming, Wes McGee about his work generating complex geometries in felt, Arash Adel about robotic construction, or Kathy Velikov about her work leading the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture.
On inhabitation, how can architecture and planning not be about this? So much of the discussions we have at Taubman are about how we could or should inhabit buildings and urban spaces more sustainably and equitably. Indeed, many of the student thesis projects in architecture that I’ve guided recently were not just plans for buildings or urban areas, but expanded to include speculative user interfaces and sometimes even org charts or mocked up websites for completely new organizations that the students brought in as icing on the cake 🍰. While they are not the core of architectural or planning education, it’s clear that in 2021 digital interfaces, business models, supply chains, markets, and governance schemes are critical to how cities are experienced.
The question is, do we educate architects and planners who can expand their practice to engage in these parallel questions, or do we educate students who are focused on digital and organizational questions as the primary focus of their design efforts? We should do both, of course. Existing programs at Taubman like our BS in Architecture degree are doing the former; the new Urban Technology degree is our take on the latter.
Before Urban Technology, Taubman College’s programs focused on the AEC sector—architecture & planning, engineering, construction (and real estate), and we have a track record of inventive new ways of seeing, shaping, and inhabiting cities from the point of view of the AEC sector. It’s primarily a business to business sector, which means that architects, engineers, and construction folks offer specialized services and spend tons of time interfacing with each other, arguably more so than they do interacting with their customers.
As links in the cumbersome supply chain of the built environment, many (if not most) companies within the AEC sector suffer from being disconnected from endusers of their spaces in ways that would be unthinkable for today’s digital companies. Distant from customers means missing out on essential feedback loops. Working within a complicated supply chain means innovation is challenging (but possible!) because the whole (sector) overwhelms the parts (individual companies).
Remember Pace Layers? AEC’s high level of regulation is one of the reasons it changes more slowly than other sectors. That’s not a criticism of government but rather a call to action. It means that if you care about AEC (translation: if you care about buildings and cities) you have to be as inventive at the layer of governance and business as you are at design and fabrication. It’s worth noting that Dark Matter Labs, who are thinking through trees as infrastructure and related governance questions, are the same people who about a decade ago designed the fabrication wonder of Wikihouse.
If being disconnected from users and constrained by the function of the AEC sector as a complex whole are among the challenges, then urban technology gives us an alternative to traditional AEC roles. What if we worked more directly with customers/users/citizens/residents? What if we focused more explicitly on business models, sourcing, as well as management and organizational practices? What if we made all of those the cake rather than the icing? How would we see, shape, and inhabit cities then? What if we understood the AEC sector without being part of it?
🎏 Postcard from Japan
Links
See:
📮 “Cities, villages, urban and suburban areas are full of small bits of urban fabric which we almost never foreground: street furniture.” Randy Plemel is building a taxonomy of them all.
Shape:
👷♂️ Robots on construction sites can install beautiful drywall, but they cannot yet do it cheaper than humans. Can this reverse the longterm decrease in productivity in American construction? Can that be done without vaporizing zillions of jobs?
🦾 Construction technologist Brian Ringley takes down the myth of “file-to-field” automated construction using robots and outlines a set of more plausible opportunities, including using construction site robotics to increase feedback loops that improve the process of building things. We’re obsessed with feedback loops.
👵 “I am an architect… or a guide,” is what the MetaHuman says in this introductory video. Unreal Engine, which powers tons of video games, is releasing a hyper realistic digital human “creator” app and this is A) a technical feat B) complicated moral terrain. h/t George Valdes
Inhabit:
🧮 Automatically pay for parking with a bitcoin wallet tied to your license plate? Unclear how exactly blockchain is beneficial here but will be following. h/t Rebecca Williams
🦿 Robot dogs from Unitree delivered food packaging backstage at China Media Group’s spring gala. Apparently greens were on the menu because there’s no way to describe 5G+4K/8K+AI other than acronym salad. Should have put little ox horns on that robot!
This week: Snow on the ground here in Detroit and Ann Arbor makes it easier to spot the cardinals fluttering about. Nice to have a flash of color in the depths of winter. Admissions gears a-turning. Happy Lunar New Year! 🧧 🏃♂️