Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 136
Avery's Journey + Interview with Randy Plemel
Have you ever had the experience of looking at an image and feeling as though your eyes almost slide right off of the picture, unable to grasp its contents? That’s the best way I can describe how my brain processed images from Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, and the other GAN-based text-to-image generators the first times I saw them.
After repeat exposure experiencing GAN-based imagery, what once felt unsettling then started to feel boisterous and entertaining, and now feels more like... boring, but in a very good way. As artists get better at “prompt engineering,” some really careful explorations are being created. One of my favorites is an Instagram series called Blacktopia, by Detroit-based artist Tylonn J. Sawyer whose images are completely fantastic and completely Detroit. Look at the visuals (Examples one, two, three) and you can already see the movie, even hear the music.
Randy Plemel’s work is in a similar vein: a careful exploration of a specific imagined universe, though in this case a very different context—that of municipal workers and urban objects. One of the things I enjoy about both series is how the use of generated beauty leads to generating inquiry. The images are so bluntly attractive that they spark questions of “what if?”, “why not?”, and “how would?”
Below we are syndicating a series of Plemel’s GAN images exploring the life of a fictional municipal worker from the future, in no small part because I hope that someday an Urban Technology student is the one who transmogrifies these vignettes into non-fiction. The vignettes are followed by an interview with Randy about the project and his work. Enjoy!
💬 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.
👷 Avery at Work
Randy Plemel has worked as a designer and architect with a variety of organizations, including IDEO and the Knight Foundation. After making the leap to form his own design consultancy, Expedition Works, he has been taking on client work with civic-oriented organizations as well as indulging in the occasional self-initiated project. One such example, “Avery's Journey,” is a series of Instagram posts that floated across my screen for the first time like glimpses of a world I didn’t recognize. Each vignette pairs an image generated via MidJourney or similar GAN and text drafted by Randy to situate the imagery. Sometimes oblique, occasionally esoteric, always fascinating, Avery’s Journey drops us into the perspective and toil of an imagined municipal worker as a way of forcing the reader to speculate about what is or could be plausible. Will Avery’s journey be your journey? Your neighbor’s? Your child’s?
The Hydrant
“Avery looked over the Jobs to Be Done board for the new district and saw a new requirement was added late last night: redesign the fire hydrant for both water and Halon. It took a few moments, but then they realized what was happening: the new district had a mixture of induction and plug-in chargers, and the prototype in the neighboring District did not go well. The local fire brigade had trouble putting out fires caused by the new system, and this new District needed to provide additional, and different firefighting capabilities for all the possible new EV’s.”
The Cross Walk
“Another day, another piece of street furniture to make sure robots don’t kill people. This time Avery was tasked with submitting initial massing schematics for a new walk sign indicator for a historic district; you know, the one with the regular hand/walking person, and a new suite of sensors to help all the proposed autonomous vehicles not roam into the street. This struck Avery as silly on so many levels: why are we going through the trouble of massing studies for the historic district committee, when what we are proposing isn’t historical at all!? As if there were historical robots. Well, there *were* historical robots, but certainly not on this street. Even if there were historical robots, the suite of sensors the RFP requires was a bit silly: LiDAR, GPS/GLONASS beacon, Bluetooth beacon, WiFi, 6g, sonic rangefinder, ultrasonic beacon, etc, etc – the list went on. It was a complete belt and suspenders operation, and the resulting form showed that. Avery thought that all of these sensors could be combined into one sleek monolith, but no matter the configuration the resulting form was just a bunch of barnacles. Avery hoped this would be denied, allowing additional design time.m to get this one right.”
The Street Light
“Avery’s next assignment was for a new traffic light. Now that the EV induction chargers were installed in the new District and the water/halon hydrants were in production, the bureau needed to think through how to safely manage traffic flow. The design documents did not confirm if the new District’s streets were going to be mixed traffic, or if it was going to be autonomous vehicle-only. As usual, the design department was forced to move faster than the policymakers. Avery was sure this was going to end back on the Jobs to Be Done board in a month. Avery decided on submitting two designs which satisfies the design requirements list as-is but allows for policymakers some room to choose. Avery knew that these prompts forced policymakers to choose, and wasn’t sure the District was ready for such a change in traffic light design. But for now the designs were submitted to the planning department for prototyping and testing.”
The Charger
This vignette was is dropping for the first time in the UT newsletter - thank you, Randy!
“In today’s mail drop Avery received the newest advertisement from The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, this time it was for their updated AV charging station. This ad was something else – Avery thought that maybe SCC was high on their own supply, with all these cheery examples of robot charging stations with cheery names such as “The Deliver Perch XL” or “JuiceBox Thrive: Efficient and speedy robot recharge” or “GridGuardian.” It was like looking at paint swatch samples and seeing what names the paint company came up with for vibrant orange which, in the company's description is, “a lively, enthusiastic color, which conveys a sense of energy and vitality.” All Avery really needed was the model and specs – if it was on-chain then their lives would be so much easier. But SCC had to rollback their chain to a savepoint before The Merge because someone installed a corrupted Genuine People Personality rendering the whole chain morose with the attitude of a 17 year old. The promise of decentralized trustless chains hasn’t really come true for the building industry, and now they are trying to layer on helpful agent-based intelligence? Oh, McMaster and the Green Catalog tried to move everything on-chain, but that didn’t really work out either. So just like the library of E&O’s sitting at the workstation, Avery received these pamphlets, dutifully logged the competency check into the MCP, and recycled the pamphlet.”
If you like these, follow Expedition Works on Instagram where Avery’s Journey continues to unfold. For extra credit, cross compare with the student work we showed last issue, also focused on urban objects at a similar scale through explored with very different tools and perspectives.
👷 Interview with Randy Plemel
BRYAN BOYER: What are these vignettes? What are they doing? What future do they give us a glimpse of?
RANDY PLEMEL: I'm not quite sure what this is all about to be honest. Like many others, I've been messing with OpenAI/ChatGPT and MidJourney for some time, but to be honest I've been a bit listless with these tools. But then two things locked together: I saw Julian Bleecker, one part of the Near Future Laboratory, who was publishing these interesting trucks on Instagram. They seemed to be for-sale adverts from some uncertain future. I thought that was neat.
I've been loosely playing around with Design Fiction for a bit but never really had a project where I could practice it to learn the boundaries and skills. It is an interesting and evolving toolset for imagining a future much like our own present, in order to create an artifact from that future to explore what possible future might entail.
For my process, I need to be grounded a bit, since a lot of futurist or speculative futures feels like they are just awash in lens flair and clear screens. Without a grounding in needs, story, or person when I'm trying to solve a problem, it's hard for me to create criteria to make design choices that don't feel arbitrary.
So when I squint into the near future, it's less J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek and a little more like Star Wars: Andor — lots of wear and tear on everything, patina, and Gibson's uneven future fully undistributed. Hopefully less galactic empire, but in this possible world I'm loosely building, one piece at a time, it does feel like there is more central control, with the same levels of entropy and disorder we see today. I'm not sure I'm all in on Solarpunk, but I'm also not depressed into thinking this will all be Black Mirror or the Matrix.
By using street furniture I can sidestep big and easily falsifiable future conjectures by using bite-sized chunks of our city.
BRYAN: How did you choose the objects that have been reimagined?
RANDY: I have a slight obsession with street furniture: it's often the interface between zoning, politics, land use, and our bodies. I've been capturing street furniture and typologies for some time – a more nerdy version of Pokémon GO for sure – and these archetypes quickly became initial prompts into squinting into the near future. So I did what anyone might do: rip off some ideas, be inspired by someone's work and make it my own. ChatGPT gave me a list of English-language non-gendered names, so Avery was born. I imagined what a new designer in public service might be asked to design, iterate, and deal with in the not-too-distant future. This gave me the grounding and perspective to walk around a bit in this future.
I have a huge list of different street furniture typologies, tools, affordances, etc. That list is impenetrable, but I often get inspired walking around New York with my kids while they interact with a piece of the city in ways no designer would ever think of as appropriate. When that happens, I quickly try to write it down to save for later. Kids are great user testers.
Or I might go into a tangent because of some real-life event: the NYC Department of Transportation is piloting curbside EV charging, and I wanted to think about what the implications of this future might be. I personally don't think we should be locking-in limited curbside space for personal vehicles, so I wanted to think about what this might do to fire hydrants when there's a wider range of exotic energy storage that doesn't react well to water, or to traffic lights when the vehicle might be augmented by robots, or when the robots need more sensors to not run over people in crosswalks, or when eBikes needed a charge.
BRYAN: Does the look of street furniture and urban objects have a civic role to play? Is there a look of “civicness”?
RANDY: This is where dancing with the robot has been interesting. I tried many variations based on what I thought was interesting, and settled on a slightly generic, off-white prompt which I think acts as a bit of a Rorschach test. Part of the Midjourney prompt includes "style dieter rams, in style of the artstation, digital art," which does give a certain Mid Century functionalist vibe where you can read into what's happening a variety of ways. When I'm feeling really saucy I add "dystopian, retrofuturism, the most clearest details, defined features" to the prompt, which adds all sorts of greebles and Goes Nowhere Does Nothing (GNDN) to the image.
The look of civicness is certainly a question I'm trying to explore here. Street furniture is often a funhouse mirror reflecting what residents (and politicians) feel is valuable and valued in public. So when we become more afraid of kids and the unhoused, we begin to armor our street furniture to dissuade skateboards and overnight sleeping. Tokyo is full of these amazing tiny vending machines, New York's newspaper stands are being converted to comfort stations for Deliveristas, and San Francisco is paying millions of dollars for public restrooms. Because street furniture is often deployed as multiples at scale, generally as part of a larger system, the entropy of the city kicks in to add that patina — whether designers want it to happen or not.
I haven't worked my way up to a police or fire station or city hall, because these typologies are so well known. The closest I've come is a subway station entrance, which is almost Rococo in detail. I find it easier to explore this future through these tiny affordances which need a mixture of durability, repairability, the ability for a municipality to procure and install them, and is interesting enough that an elected official would want to stand next to one for a ribbon cutting.
BRYAN: Aren’t you are architect? Why did you stop designing buildings and start doing this other stuff?
RANDY: Depending on how I feel, I introduce myself as an environments designer or a service or experience designer. I've been able to take everything I've learned from architecture school and from practicing architecture to find and create a niche where I'm not building buildings (which take 1 to 10 years), but I'm still composing environments in service of people, so they can solve their problems in elegant ways. The time to implement is shorter, the duration of the thing I'm creating is less than an average building, and I'm trading permanence for near-term impact.
My work continues to be situated in physical spaces, and in my practice I'm often designing physical goods but as a response to a service or product. Sometimes this is an ongoing physical pamphlet where I explore our journey with purpose. Sometimes they are tent-sized installations like I did for the NYCLU to host conversations around policing. Sometimes they are store-sized buildings like when I designed a new business for State Farm. Sometimes they are sticker sized participatory art happenings when I designed a resident engagement art project. Sometimes they are strategy-sized google docs for advocacy groups around livable communities, or prototypes for more equitable ingress to sporting events for a worldwide sports league.
I feel lucky that my training has let me play in a variety of scales, media, and formats.
BRYAN: What’s your favorite city and why?
RANDY: Wherever my kids and wife are: they help me see the city in new ways and remind me that the city is here for us to use. If forced to choose, then I will say New York City, a city of systems and change, where you really want to put up with all the pain to live and stay here.
These weeks: midterms, faculty hiring, Protogrant application reviews (!), admissions application reviews for cohort 3 (!!), and welcoming our first cross-campus transfer students. And stickers. Don’t forget the stickers. 🏃