Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -45

Ethics + misusing telescopes

What we’re up to right now, in these last weeks of summer, is trying to get organized before the semester sets a different pace. A few clusters of thinking, reading, and sketching from the past few days….

📜 A “Michigan approach” to the Ethics of Urban Technology?

This question emerged a number of times during discussions and workshops in the Winter and Spring. As June Manning Thomas put it in one of those sessions, what’s the Hippocratic Oath for this work?” It is an important question in any place, but perhaps even more so in Michigan where experiences in Detroit and Flint have shown the dangers of poorly or hastily planed urban technologies of an older variety, like road networks and water systems.

Blob sketch drawn during a January workshop. Lots of questions emerged then about how to ensure history, ethics, and civics are foregrounded in the Urban Technology program.

To date at Taubman we have an emergent consensus that there should be a statement of ethics for the program (Hippocratic Oath or otherwise), but we have not yet aligned around a specific set of principles. In fairness, we have not yet tried to align! That’s on the list for this Autumn.

In the meantime, newly appointed colleague Anthony Vanky sent a blog post by Sarah Hendren this week, wherein Sarah shares thoughts about relating to technology that “repairs” some perceived deficit in the world as well as technology that “critiques” the status quo. Her remarks below were motivated by the implosion of the Media Lab at MIT—a very different context from our own—and are focused on the forward-looking possibility of how engineering education could be rethought around a balance of these critique and repair:

Critique and repair are ideas that really do mix the languages of artworks with engineering. Each could be quite robust at the lab, and getting clearer about them would assist the Lab’s community in articulating its commitments to socio-political concerns. How?

Let’s call “repair” mode, in the technical sense, the best-case version of new technologies (or technical research fields) that come into the world for the net benefit of humankind. This alone is a whole universe of debate, of course, but let’s say that that horizon is more or less the status quo of much engineering education—and that when it’s in fact the best-case scenario, the world gets important tech that it needs.

“Critique,” in the technical sense, has been a matter of concern at the Lab, but from where I stand, not nearly enough defined or robustly supported. Leah Buechley, Sputniko!, Ethan Zuckerman, and others ran groups doing technological repair work. They each also supported parallel lines of study in the mode of critique: They made political inequities plain and visible to the public. They utilized technologies to dignify marginalized modes of craft. They allowed questions to be posed in artifacts, and they let them live as questions, without resolve. This is critique! Technological critique is the articulation of urgent socio-political questions made real in things. Things-to-think-with, which is not just for the gallery viewer. They’re public technologies with high stakes attached. (Emphasis added)

I’m captivated by ideas of repair and maintenance as central questions of technology rather than the more common fixations of invention and ‘overcoming’ in the Promethean sense. What’s a definition of conscientious technology that considers maintenance to have equal weight as creation? What’s the role of design to help people imagine and think through the consequences of maintenance that may be required by a technological system?

The Green New Deal posters by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign (example above from Detroit) are loaded with good questions in this sense. A scene such as this is not just a city that has high speed trains that are accessible to all and powered by wind turbines (though that’s a nice start). From the cheery tone of the image we can also infer that it’s a city which has figured out how to share and celebrate the acts that keep these systems in good working order, affordable and dependable.

🛠 Making & Use

To extend that thought, repair is also a helpful lens because it implicates both the making of a thing and its use. How you make an energy grid will shape how you use it, and how you eventually maintain it. Conversely, how you want to use an energy grid can deeply inform how you make it, and open up new possibilities for how you maintain it. When it comes to interaction design, use and user experience are more central than is often the case in built environment discussions.

In casual conversation lately I’ve been testing out different ways to explain what how studies in Urban Technology differ from studies in Planning and Architecture, already present at Taubman. Via email with Rory Hyde, curator of contemporary architecture and urbanism at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and a sharp author on themes relevant to this program, I ventured that we may start from the use of cities rather than making of cities.

Rory replied, “it really feels like one of those moments where we need to look through the other end of the telescope, to realise how out of touch what we do is, and how much we need to do to connect with the lived reality of the world out there.” Agreed, Rory!

This is an area in which our students will benefit from the urban and regional planning department’s extensive work in Detroit and Michigan more broadly, and it is also an opportunity for us to bring additional resources in ethnography and other corners of social science into the program.

Links

Should we include a few links in this newsletter each week? Let’s try it out!

🌳 Parktech is a thing. Nesta, a non-profit in the UK, are experimenting with displays and sensors to help manage parks more effectively. Via Anthony Townsend.

🚖 Uber may halt operations in California in response to a court ruling that drivers should be qualified as full-time employees which, apparently, their business model doesn’t support. Yikes.

🛣 UM, Ford, and Sidewalk Labs Infrastructure Partners (part of Alphabet) will partner with the State of Michigan to build a 40-mile autonomous vehicle corridor between Detroit and Ann Arbor, says Gov. Whitmer. Here’s the proposal if you want to dig in.

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This week: Discussions with Jonathan about Detroit, Joe about faculty, Earl about budgeting, and lots of people about the Website.