Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -43
Sensing + feedback loops
With colleges and universities are starting up again, all eyes are on the public health implications. Schools that are continuing with in-person learning, like Michigan, are developing detailed plans to attempt to keep people safe. University of Arizona’s plans include periodic testing of wastewater on campus. Such a test “identified a breakout before it began” by picking up on presence of the virus in feces collected from the wastewater of a dormitory. Everyone in the dorm was tested and two asymptomatic students were identified and quarantined. Amazing!
➰ Feedback Loops
Biobot is a really cool company that builds technology for wastewater health screening. By monitoring the waste stream they’re able to analyze the chemistry of all that flows through municipal sewer systems, and in doing so they are able to convert waste into data. I would love to know more about Biobot’s position on the privacy implications of this approach to data collection. Since municipal sewer systems aggregate data by default—that’s a fancy way of saying that sewage flows into a common system where it cannot easily be re-attributed to the individuals that created it—the privacy concerns are presumably low. But what if you’re a person whose DNA sample is held by government, or a private company for that matter? Are there privacy concerns about wastewater monitoring? And if so, what’s the nature of those hesitations? Taubman College professor Anthony Vanky worked with Biobot in a previous role, so we’ll ask him and find out.
Waste is data. What we throw away, compost, recycle, and flush down the toilet are rich streams of material that are useful in their own right as fodder for the circular economy, but/and with the application of analysis that material takes on an additional life as data.
Whether the data is of any use or not depends on how well the it is connected back to human behavior via a feedback loop—and how wide that loop is. Who’s in the loop and who’s not? Are the people not in the loop left out by ignorance or excluded on purpose?
The possibility of using data in some way implicates the design of data visualizations and user interfaces that help make it legible and navigable. Are they these visual artifacts approachable? What if you’re a novice instead of an expert, are still accessible to you? How do they work for people with different sensory abilities, like the sightless? Do the visualizations and interfaces provide answers or help the user ask new questions?
And when it comes to using data to inform behavior—by, say, informing policy or larger structural changes such as closing down a dormitory due to contagion—the ethics of the organizations doing the work are also a critical aspect of consideration. Do you trust the people collecting, storing, analyzing, and representing the data? Do you trust all of them equally? Are they the right parties to be doing the work? Do you have the information and understanding that you need to make a fair assessment?
Companies like Sense, who make a device to help you monitor domestic energy usage (and therefore waste), create feedback loops at the scale of a home, while Biobot helps cities analyze waste at the municipal scale. These technologies are exciting in that they provide new lines of connection between human behavior and the consequences of our actions. They help us see ourselves in new ways and hopefully help us act more responsibly, where the “us” is not just individuals, families, neighborhoods, cities, and regions.
Since we’re in the practice of regularly testing out new ways to think about the Urban Technology program, here’s one for week -43: Urban Technology is about designing fairer, more empowering, more meaningful loops.
💌 Postcard from Detroit
How many free range scooters can you spot? What unexpected feedback loops resulted in them landing here of all places?
Links
🏢 Mobility innovation studios are coming to Michigan Central Train Station, currently under renovation by Ford, organized with the help of New Lab from NYC. Will be watching this.
🛴There are long reads, but this is an epic read by transit data expert Kevin Webb about e-scooters, redlining, privacy, and the ongoing debate about municipal data. via Benjie de la Pena who writes a great newsletter about cities and informal transit.
👀 Day 67 - a Zine about surveillance in the city by Digital Justice Lab for Future Says_, a network of which the author of this post is also part (👋)
This Week: Very nice discussion with Catherine Griffiths and Jose Sanchez, both new faculty at Taubman College, about Unity, board games, commons, simulations, Processing, APIs, and cows. Moo. Organizing discussions for September. Digging into curricular design and thinking about ways to diagram what we’re doing. Calling across Europe-North America-Asia with Tiny Factories, a distributed team of designers that graciously gave me their time to help think about design, systems. 🏃♂️
