Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 90
Checking in on our Prototype Grant teams
Last fall, we launched an experiment: the Urban Technology Prototype Grant. We wanted to see exciting work being done by practitioners outside the university, and to bring that work (and the people making it) into discussion with the Taubman community. It was an experiment, and still is, but only for a few more minutes. By the time you read this, the demo day will be nearing completion.
The grant was simple: three projects were selected from an open submission process. Each one was connected with a faculty mentor, university computing and other resources, and a bit of seed funding. Now, after four months, they are now joining us in Ann Arbor to showcase their projects. Though you will have missed the demo day (😭) we thought you might want to hear from the creators about what they’re up to, so we enlisted current U-M student Nicole Planken (whose name may sound familiar from a previous issue) to track down our intrepid protograntees.
💬 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 90 second video introduction to our degree program.
🚚 Air Quality and Truck Idling with Darren Riley
Darren Riley is the co-founder of JustAir, a Detroit-based company devoted to monitoring and improving air quality for residents. His Protogrant project uses computer vision to monitor truck idling, a ticketable offense not currently enforced by the city, in Southwest Detroit near the bridge to Canada.
“[Manually tracking air pollution] is extremely time consuming, so we want to take this load off of them so they can spend more time engaging with the community.”
NICOLE PLANKEN: Can you start off by explaining your project?
DARREN RILEY: Our project focuses on measuring the impact of diesel truck emissions. Users upload videos from street cameras to our computer vision algorithm, which tracks how many trucks were in the video and how many were idling. There's two parts to this: understanding the volume of truck traffic through neighborhoods, and air quality monitoring. Marrying those two data sets is how we pinpoint contributors to environmental inequities in communities near highways and industrial locations.
NICOLE: What does environmental inequity look like?
DARREN: For one, urban communities have higher rates of asthma hospitalization. I moved to Detroit from Houston four years ago and developed asthma about three years ago, so this is the first time I had to pay attention to my breath. Realizing that it is a privilege to be able to breathe motivates me in my work. This project is a step towards ultimately creating more equity in the breathing environment: it shows what’s causing disparities in air quality so that we can create a cleaner living space for everyone.
NICOLE: How do you collaborate with community members?
DARREN: It’s the core of our project. We work with environmental nonprofits in Detroit and Grand Rapids that currently track trucks manually by watching videos and keeping tallies. This is extremely time consuming, so we want to take this load off of them so they can spend more time engaging with the community.
NICOLE: What do you have planned for the future of this project?
DARREN: Community members can use this tool to be their own environmental and health advocates. I can do my part by creating technology that aligns with the work environmental justice leaders are already doing. We’re striving to create tools that move policy; this project aims to provide the data and technology to motivate industry and representatives to act on policy that is equitable for all.
NICOLE: What’s your favorite city, and why?
DARREN: Houston, Texas. It’s where I grew up and the place that molded me into who I am.
👾 Roleplaying with Kay Liang and Maria Gerdyman
Kay Liang and Maria Gerdyman are co-creators of Tiny Town, an online game that encourages children and adults to imagine and design new cities through roleplaying, participatory drawing, and digital craft.
“A good indicator of spatial justice is when people in a space are able to thrive and express themselves fully. Urban planning has so much negotiation with legality and zoning, but there’s none of that in Tiny Town.”
NICOLE: What is your project all about?
KAY LIANG: Tiny Town is an amalgamation of role playing, hosting events, bringing people into alternate spaces, and reconnecting them with their inner child. Initially, Tiny Town was designed during the pandemic for kids to connect with each other and share their imaginations through Zoom.
We thought the benefits of feeling like your imagination is valid and heard would still hold true for an older audience. By giving adults the space to express themselves in a digital city, we can learn about their desires, fears, and anxieties. So we ran a season for adults that was 10 “episodes” long. Each participant designed their character and established its desires, obstacles, and fears. Maria and I would narrate situations and prompts that the adults would respond to by roleplaying as their characters.
MARIA GERDYMAN: By asking the participants simple questions, we were able to understand their deeper desires for the city of Tiny Town while allowing them to exist in ways that are weird and expressive. A good indicator of spatial justice is when people in a space are able to thrive and express themselves fully. Urban planning has so much negotiation with legality and zoning, but there’s none of that in Tiny Town.
NICOLE: How did the adults perform compared to the kids?
KAY: The adults struggled more with being silly, because as you grow older you become more socially aware. It was also hard to get them to follow through with homework since adults already have so many commitments.
NICOLE: What do you have planned for the future of this project?
KAY: Potentially an intergenerational cohort, with both adults and kids, that may not normally interact in a non-digital environment. We also learned that when working with adults, we have to dial back and teach them how to roleplay from square 1, since it’s hard for them to be silly and let go of self-judgment.
NICOLE: What’s your favorite city and why?
KAY: From a “grass is greener on my side” mentality, my favorite city is Toronto, where I’m based. I moved here when Toronto was locked down from the pandemic, and as things are opening up it feels like I’m unlocking parts of the map in a video game.
MARIA: Tiny Town! And Providence. I went to college there, and the city is very walkable with a lot of public spaces. I feel very connected to the community there, and I love the food in Providence.
🧭 Location Data with Daan van der Zwaag
Daan van der Zwaag is developing Fides, a blockchain-based app that will allow individuals to control and sell their geolocation data to third parties with granularity and transparency.
“Marketing companies can track data’s entire path, but individuals cannot do this with their own data. This is very worrisome.”
NICOLE: From the top! What is Fides?
DAAN VAN DER ZWAAG: Fides, which translates to “trust” in Latin, makes location data equitable. It’s a marketplace where people have the choice to sell their data for profit, or not sell their data and just track who sees it, when, where, and why. Consent is the key component in this process. Fides is smarter than the companies who harvest data for free without consent because we connect the consumer with the seller. Once this relationship is established, people can consent to sell their other data, including answers to surveys. There is a $16 billion dollar industry of companies that harvest and sell people’s location data without consent; Fides can redistribute this wealth back to the public.
The technology behind Fides originated when someone in my close circle had administrative errors in their health data. I began to research distributed data and created a network to share and check health data. When I came to the U.S. from Europe, I found out that location data is also a huge issue.
NICOLE: What is one challenge you’ve had while creating this system?
DAAN: Tracking the tracking of data. Marketing companies can track data’s entire path, but individuals cannot do this with their own data. This is very worrisome because we are at a stage where we have to establish the relationship between ourselves, private companies, and the government. It is important to put more control in our own hands so that we are not relying on these institutions to make decisions for us.
NICOLE: What do you have planned for the future of this project?
DAAN: We plan to truly make an impact on the relationship between data and institutions. The underlying trend is to make our digital assets more equitable, which is not always a common trend in tech recently. I hope we can think of a digital infrastructure that can help urban technology move forward.
NICOLE: What’s your favorite city and why?
DAAN: At the moment, Tel Aviv. It has uncontrolled innovation, and you can count on other people there. I also love New York for the business, and Europe for the lifestyle.
👏 Thank you to Darren, Kay, Maria, and Daan for sharing your work; to Joe Grengs, Ana Paula Pimentel Walker, and Anthony Vanky for being faculty mentors during this process; and to College leadership including Larissa Larsen and Jonathan Massey for supporting the Protogrant experiment.
Links
🗑 Darren is using computer vision on trucks, while Rubicon is equipping trucks with computer vision to collect data that streamlines the dirty, dull, and dangerous work of urban maintenance.
⚓️ Detailed story of how the cyberworm NotPetya almost took down global shipping giant Maersk. Wait right here while we boot up a cybersecurity minor for all of the urban technology students… h/t The Prepared newsletter, which is awesome
🤔 Unicode is the underlying standard that tells computers how to identify the glyphs or characters of a font so that all computers display the letters and emoji in a more or less uniform manner. There are zillions of unicode characters, including this one: ⍼. The weird thing is, no one seems to know how this strange glyph became part of a global standard or really what it means.
🚌 On the topic of fonts, variable fonts make letter forms programmable and responsive, and some people are using them to create elaborate illustrations like this bus in a browser window.
🚏 Speaking of buses, Streetsblog is running a bus stop bracket to determine which American city has the best waiting infrastructure. Real (and also snarky) answer: none of them! America, get your bus in gear and build better bus infrastructure.
These weeks: One thing inward and one thing outward. In: I gave Charlie a wrench and asked him to dive deep into the depths of university machinery. He emerges every few days with a bit of carbon smudged across his brow or cheek, a knowing gleam in his eye, and a fist full of wires. Machines, you will be tamed! Out: we’ve hosted five admissions events recently for admitted students. It’s fun to learn about prospective students (and their families). Soon we will officially meet our class of 2026. Wild. 🏃