Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 138
We made a Zine!
This week it’s a short note filled with eye candy, folks. We took the contents of this newsletter, teamed up with some very talented graphic designers, and jammed it all together to produce a printed zine to commemorate the first few years (!) of our own little academic marathon. Pics and process notes below.
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that technology can be harnessed to nurture and improve urban life. If you’re new here, try this short video of current students describing urban technology in their own words.
📰 Zine 01
Publishing is a hobby that we indulge every now and then here at the University. Messy ideas die on glossy websites, so the newsletter that you’re reading right now was one of the first things we created. We needed a place to put thoughts as they were being formed.
Last summer I sheepishly emailed Actual Source, a graphic design studio based in Utah that does work I’ve admired for years for film studios like A24 and little companies like Adidas. To my great surprise, they wrote back and we got to work. The result is a folded newspaper zine of 28 pages that looks like this:
As you may be able to tell from the table of contents above, the contents are pulled from posts like this and this, in some cases re-printed directly and in others edited and revised for the inky medium.
Like any good zine should be, this one is a rough around the edges and happily haphazard. Katrina Peterson, the designer at Actual Source who we worked with most closely, described the visual layout of the pages as inspired by a traffic jam. In the picture below you’ll see how the text of the essay scoots up in around the headline WE LIKE URBAN TECHNOLOGY, like bikes and pedestrians weaving between cars on a busy street.
The centerfold of the zine (pictured below) is a fold out that features interviews with faculty colleagues like Larissa Larsen and Scott Campbell as well as people doing work in the field, like Jackie Lu. The whole thing is made from large newspaper sheets folded down, so every page has a hidden poster within the signature. You’ll have to get your hands on a physical copy if you want to see those!
Over the years of publishing this newsletter, as we kept writing, interviewing, and experimenting, we’ve been pulling numerous threads together without having to worry too much about the vessel in which they land. I’m probably post-rationalizing, but the freedom to just stuff content into the ‘envelope’ of this newsletter and not worry too much about how it all hangs together has been important.
The zine extends this logic to meatspace and is enclosed within a literal envelope. With this edition, the contents are a zine and a sticker. Next time it may be completely different. Actually, I hope it’s completely different because it should be owned by the students!
Writing the copy for the envelope gave us a chance to revisit how we talk about this urban technology thing in the most direct terms. Here’s the text, since you can’t read it in the photo above.
Our degree program teaches students how to see cities through data, shape cities through code, and ultimately design positive changes for cities large and small. The reason is simple: Contemplate the order of magnitude of change that the twenty-first century promises to bring our way. Climate collapse! Frayed social fabric! Pandemics! Information overload! Wealth disparity! Right now, massive changes in the patterns of everyday life are needed to address any and all of those issues, and you better believe that when everyday life changes, so too will the form and function of cities. Will these reconfigurations be the result of happenstance or lack of preparedness, or will the clear and present need to live together differently become an opportunity to consciously rethink how we share a hot and crowded planet? We’re excited by the latter, of course, and hope that you are too. Consider: Who will design the way that neighborhood-scale microgrids work? Who will do the work of creating systems that help neighbors cooperate to make their corner of the world more resilient? What will happen to all of the corners currently occupied by gas stations? What possibilities exist in the redesign of how we move across town, across a region, to the other side of the continent? Why aren’t more things repairable? What is the etiquette for a sidewalk shared by humans, animals, and robots? How do we live with nature more consciously? In which ways do you want your city to be responsive? Each of these is a question of hardware, software, organization, and values to be designed, prototyped, and enacted together. This is the big work of urban technology.
So that’s the zine. If you want a copy, come to Ann Arbor and say “hi.”
These weeks: Admissions is done and letters are in the hopper. Talking about World building, organizing visitors, getting ready for Julian Bleecker. Curriculum stuff. Hiring (always hiring). Scoping out careers resources for students. How does March always get so busy? 🏃
Hi! So cool! Ann Arbor is out of reach for me- is it possible to purchase these for mail delivery?