Urban Technology at University of Michigan Week -35

Lots of links + forest interlude

Have been hiding out in the woods this week, more or less offline, which means today’s issue of the newsletter is all links (and a few photos).

🍁 Postcard from the Catskills

Is it even possible to be out of office? Not really. Not in 2020 anyways, when even the forest has wifi.

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Hello! I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan. This newsletter is about cities, technology, and design, all very broadly interpreted. Usually we write in more depth about things like fiber optic installations and the maintenance of networks, changes to the business model of architecture, why “smart cities” is not a useful term, and OFFICIAL SURVEILLANCE UNITS. Back to that kind of writing next week.

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Links

🏢 What does a city’s domestic architecture tell us about the culture and history of that place? This series of articles explores the question by looking at Reykjavik, Athens, Singapore, and others.

🧮 Delve is a generative design tool to help people working on large projects make decisions (a city block or larger). You start with a plot of land, identify criteria for the project, and let the software generate hundreds of potential basic designs for the buildings on that site. If a building is like a photograph, the output of Delve is at this level of detail: 😃. But that’s enough to make it useful because decisions about what we call the “massing” of a structure impact all sorts of things from number of apartments in the building, open space on the site, access to daylight, and more. Those outcomes are all connected, so sorting out a good balance between them came be quite challenging.

Recently I have seen a fair bit of blowback against Delve but I’m generally excited about any introduction of quantification to the design process in so far as it connects design intent to outcomes. Intent is not enough. Delve seems aimed at developers and others with deep pockets. What would the community version of this be? I would love to see community groups using tools like this (or whatever open source alternative emerges) to push back against mega developments like Amazon HQ2, or better yet, used to develop and propose alternatives that are even more compelling.

🧠 What happens when you train a neural net on Craigslist apartment listings? Walk-in dishwashers, bed with built in stairs, and other delights. Really lovely poetic/creepy use of a GAN just in time for Halloween. What’s the middle ground between this and Delve? h/t Ethical Futures Lab

🚇 There should be a word for little tiny software—software that does almost nothing. Plenty of joy to be found in those almost nothings though, like this subway sign word speller.

🍦 “I reverse engineered McDonald’s internal API” to find which ice cream machine are in working order. Here’s a test I would like to put in front of our students at some point: Can you use an API to make a joke?

📱 Tech product review as scathing cultural criticism? We’re here for it. “You can now spend literally every waking moment staring at your phone and only bother to recharge while you’re sleeping. Awful things are just going to keep happening forever, no matter how hard we try to stop them; you don’t want your phone to die in the middle of it all.”

🦟 Sure cars can drive themselves, but can they keep their electronic eyes free of bugs and mud? Prediction: we’re going to be seeing ever more elaborate sensor cleaning setups in the coming years. Water jets, complicated wipers, lasers, you name it.

🛰 DIY NASA Origami! Fold your own deployable origami shield. Not going to try to bend this into having some connection to urban technology but instead celebrate it because cutting and folding things is a nice break from all your video calls. On the other hand, more portable and deployable structures could help create temperate outdoor spaces beyond the usual warm seasons…

🕵️‍♀️ Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic by Deborah Lupton. Lots of ideas here for conducting qualitative research that will be useful beyond current uncertainties. h/t Sara Hendren

🤖 Robots live in cities too, but are they good neighbors? Developing new rituals and routines for cohabitation with robots is likely to be a continued theme for the 21st century.

🎺 Related to above, students at Taubman College created the 2019 Robot Survey to equip themselves (and you!) to speculate about and design the ways in which robots might be better urban citizens.

🏠 When will buildings move too? In 1997 Detroit moved a theatre building to make room for a stadium. Wish they would have left the Gem Theatre on all those wheels so it could have roamed around Detroit. See also: Network of Care by Taubman College alum Rinika Prince.

🏞 Zoomtowns are a thing now. Is this relevant to urban technology? One definition I’ve been fond of lately is that urban technology is software and hardware that impacts your neighbors whether they use it or not. That means it involves individual choices that have shared consequences, now mediated and very often accelerated thanks to being networked.

🏛 PLATFORM Austria at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Stay tuned for some writing from Dean Jonathan Massey. In the meantime, here’s the curatorial statement is relevant: “When not in use, nothing remains to remind us of the functionality of the infrastructures in the background. A smart phone might leave an unsightly bulge in one’s trouser pocket, but other than that these services quickly slip out of sight, and out of mind. Yet, the rapid expansion and ubiquity of platform-based services has triggered a cascade of effects that are leaving clearly noticeable marks on everyday urban life.”

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This week: So much scenario planning. A smidge of reading. Emails with Malcolm. Trey’s setting up an info session for highschool students in collaboration with an alum in India. Diana and Christopher are doing the same closer to home. Finalizing the illustration we showed a snapshot of a while ago and reviewing voice talent for an animation that’s now underway. Preparing for the next faculty working group meeting. 🏃‍♂️