Urban Technology at University of Michigan week -05
Link roundup
We’re ramping up three small research projects right now, which means the week was mandolined into meeting, thinking, reading. Themes: accessibility, drones, algorithmic interpretation, privacy, and infrastructure. Back soon with more writing but, for now, some links.
Hello! I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan that will welcome its first students soon. 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.
Links
📕 “At the intersection of anthropology, STS and design, this book is an investigation of smartphone repair places (shops mostly, some hackerspaces and repair cafés) in Switzerland” - Dr. Smartphone looks to be a beautiful and thoughtful ethnography, and we would expect nothing less from Nicolas Nova.
📗 Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City is a new book by Aaron Shapiro examining fragments of “smart cities” through direct experience and ethnographic research.
🗣 John Maeda distinguishes between Maker-maker, talker-talker, and maker-talker. We’re interested in the latter, btw.
👓 Touching Holograms is a design exploration of Microsoft Hololens that is quite fascinating.
🏎 Do you know how an internal combustion engine works? Like how it really works? Neither did we, but this essay filled with visual and interactive bits does a great job of explaining it. If you recognize this didactic approach, that’s because we previously linked to a similar explainer for camera lenses. h/t Linda Liukas
🇫🇮📸 The City of Helsinki has released 65,000 photos from 1840s to today under Creative Commons license. Here’s Vallila, a neighborhood of wooden houses and here’s the market hall. With a focused archive like this, each search is a slice through time. h/t Dan Hill
🏢 Speaking of Finland, broadband is a human right there. NYC is taking steps in the same direction by mandating that affordable housing must come with internet.
📦 Route is “reinventing post-purchase experience” which seems to mean they’re providing software for customers and businesses to track shipping and deal with ‘exceptions’ like stolen packages, returns, delays, etc. more smoothly. This feels like a business that was inevitable due to the rise in online commerce and accelerated by COVID. h/t Anthony Townsend
🔋 “The Michigan Mobility Funding Platform provides grants to mobility and electrification companies looking to deploy their technology solutions in the state of Michigan.” The focus is on encouraging electric vehicle adoption, building charging infrastructure, removing mobility barriers, increasing access to affordable and reliable transportation, and multimodal transportation. All good stuff but would have been even cooler if Michigan was willing to call out electrification and automation specifically for public transit at scale (not just vans and shuttles).
🪑 Furniture company Knoll (started by a Michigander) will merge with rival Herman Miller (Michigan-based), forming a massive high-design Kaiju that shoots projectiles made of high quality textiles, bent plywood, and well-crafted metal. If those names are not familiar, they’re responsible for some of the most iconic furniture of the last century.
💡 Soulardarity is a community group that has crowdfunded seven street lights in Highland Park, a city inside Detroit (like the Vatican inside Rome). This is to replace the lights that were removed by the energy company DTE. This podcast with Soulardarity Outreach and Organizing Coordinator illuminates the situation.
♻️ Enterprising crypto-grifters found a way to take advantage of a free continuous integration service to mine Bitcoin. If your response to that is “huh?!” here’s a metaphor: It’s like if someone figured out how to extract tiny amounts of gasoline from the free window washer liquid available at gas stations and then drained all the liquid from every gas station for thousands of miles. File under: life always gets weirder. h/t Rebecca Williams
🔵🦷 Do you know the etymology of “Bluetooth” ? Now you do. While we’re at it, “Wifi” is also made up.
🛴 Here’s a battery-powered scooter from 1974. Did it come with a free blast of hairspray so that your good looks stay intact while you whiz around the mall? h/t David King
🙆 Ways of Working is a resource from Public.Digital describing the basics of working together as a healthy team.
🐍 “Medusa Chart” a term coined by Tracy Alloway to describe a chart that shows historical data and multiple future projections. Here are a bunch of examples. h/t Tom Critchlow
📉 RAW Graphs takes in spreadsheet data and outputs data visualizations in editable formats like SVG. Useful. h/t Marco Ferrari
👀 Adversarial.io makes images machine-unreadable by injecting faint noise that confuses computer vision algorithms (for now).
🛠 Speaking of helpful tools: Tinytools.directory is a list of hundreds of “tools and toys” that may be helpful for games / websites / interactive projects. Looks like fun. I could lose a day to Paint of Persia (filed under: Colors).
🏠 Speaking of tiny: tiny houses are not the answer to affordable housing, but this house just 20 micrometers is cool nonetheless. Pretty nice proportions too. h/t George Valdez
🪵 Speaking of building housing, the Construction Physics newsletter is an awesome, focused look at how macro forces push and shape the construction industry. Start with the Lumber FAQ if you need a place to dive in.
🖼 Postcard from Ann Arbor
This week: A long walk with Malcolm and a meeting over lunch with Larissa, the incoming Chair of Urban Planning. Caught up with Rob. Meeting with Anthony to see if we can rope others into our exploration of computer vision. Getting squared away for a focused summer. 🏃♂️