Urban Technology at University of Michigan week -17
We're hiring + doodles + 3 questions for Philip D'Anieri
Feeling some regret here for including an animated gif in the last post because now there’s pressure to have something similarly exciting every time we write. While it’s not an animated gif, this might be the kind of thing that matters if you’ve been following along. We’re hiring!
Hello! I’m Bryan Boyer, Director of the Urban Technology degree at University of Michigan that will welcome its first students in the 2021-2022 academic year. 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.
🧑🔧 Work with us! We’re Hiring!
We are seeking a proactive future team member to help build the most caring and well-crafted degree program at the intersection of technology and the built environment.
You’ll work side by side with director Bryan Boyer (👋) and gain experience in every aspect of launching a new academic program, creating a new culture among our cohort of students, and effectively building a startup within the teeming coral reef that is the University of Michigan 🐠. One need not have any experience in academia; rather we seek an individual who has domain expertise in one or more of coding/hacking, DIY everything, interaction design, service design, cities, circular economy…
There’s a lot for you to do—a lot for all of us to do—and if we do it well we will have created a great degree program as well as a new way of thinking about and working on the built environment. Translation: it will be hard but rewarding.
Here’s a secret: creating something new like this is actually a strategic design project, so working with us is a great opportunity for a person at the start of their career who is curious about strategic design. Doubly so if you’re interested into cities or the built environment.
Curious but have questions? Hit reply to this email and we’ll talk. Otherwise, here’s a button you can click to learn more about the position:
✍️ Doodles
Caution: things are getting wonky and esoteric around here from time to time. 🚧
If urban technology is about stuff that lives on cellphones and laptops, it’s smaller than architecture and urban planning, right? Well… how “big” is WhatsApp?
Is it small because you access it via your phone, or is it large because it empowers masses of people to connect and coordinate in activities like the student protests in Hong Kong? When digital technology has consequences in the built environment, scale gets all sorts of complicated and becomes less useful as a primary organizing principle. Why does it matter? Because at some point our students rightfully want to know what they will be designing. I like to be more simplistic about it: what are the nouns we will fixate on?
Will urban technology students design buildings? No, that’s what architects do. Will they design district plans? Nope, that’s what planners and urban designers do. But they very well could design fixtures and fittings, like digital displays or wayfinding that help people navigate districts. And the same goes for the apps that enrich the inhabitation of a place. Urban technology students will design the digital layers that orchestrate life in cities. Those systems will be larger than any one individual, but accessed often through individual phones and computers, which is part of what makes it such a challenge. Individual choices and actions, tethered to collective consequences. Malcolm and I have been noodling on this to find a taxonomy to describe a spectrum of fixations that’s suitably broad while being precise.
Still chipping away at this one, but here are some diagrams he put together. The first one uses scale, again more familiar to the world of architects and planners. This is good but still we can ask, where does WhatsApp go on this spectrum? Is it a digital “object” or citywide—even global—”infrastructure” of sorts? If used in a protest, isn’t it also partially about “identity?” E) All of the Above.
One of the things that makes digital so hard is that we use apps and other digital interfaces through time, so we have to understand them as things that have scale and duration both, and often the duration is more defining than scale or size. Below, “artefact” is something brief and ephemeral. One looks at the digital clock and the interaction, as such, is complete. The time has been read. But WhatApp, by contrast, is a product that occurs as a series of interactions over time. So then what do all of those interactions add up to? Is there a strategy? Might it be to get you hooked on using a free messaging app so that you might start using it to send money back and forth, thus creating a viable revenue stream for the makers of the app?
3 Questions for Philip D'Anieri
Next Spring our students will be taking an introductory course with Phil D’Anieri, who teaches undergraduates about urban planning and urban systems at Taubman College. At one time Phil was a reporter for NPR so it should not be a surprise that he’s great at dissecting really complex stuff like cities–zomg!!! and the urban planning process so they’re digestible.
Q. What’s your favorite city and why?
Queens, which is not a city, I know. But in my mind it is New York at its New York-iest—the whole gamut of people and places, from skyscrapers to suburbia and everything in between. Cities to me are about mixing, not sorting, and Queens captures that for me.
Q. What is urban planning good for?
Urban planning is where we collectively, politically, decide what our built environment is going to look like, what it's going to be good at. I encourage my students to view cities from way overhead, as blobs of light on a satellite image. Planning is where we set the rules for the physical form of those urban blobs, from the micro-level of individual streets and neighborhoods all the way up to the shape and size of the city-region as a whole. Depending on what rules we come up with, we get places that are more or less sustainable, more or less open and equitable, more or less dynamic and interesting. So planning is good for making the world a better place, when you get right down to it. But unfortunately planning can be just as good at making the world a worse place—less equitable, less sustainable. In the end, planning can be good for lots of things. The question is: what goals—whose needs—are driving the process?
Q. Can you give us an idea of who urban planners collaborate with most closely?
It depends on the planner. Some are collaborating most closely with grassroots neighborhood groups, some with senior elected officials, some with real estate developers, some with environmental scientists. The cool thing about planning is that we collaborate with everybody, because the built environment is such a complex place.
Links
🧫 Bloomberg CityLab is an annual conference that always brings together a good mix of perspectives, this year including Vice President Harris. Usually invite only but this year March 1-3 and online streaming, so get in there!
🌻 Audrey Tang is a hero and they’re speaking on March 9th about “Taiwan’s digital democracy, collaborative civic technologies, and beneficial information flows.”
🌳 There are numerous APIs that let you automate carbon offsets. Cloverly is one of them. File under: who knew?! h/t Robin Sloan
🛵 When data is wrong and it rules your life, how do you fight back? By making your own data. Gig workers are tracking their miles and time to make sure they get paid fairly. Open source and coop based.
🏛 Which Annalee Newitz book should be required reading? Maybe Four Lost Cities?
🤖 They had me at “What do robots, starfish and toasters think about?” h/t Linda Liukas
📫🦆🚛 Never would I have guessed that the next US postal service vehicle would have duck lips but wow is this a funky looking new vehicle. But what I really care about are the sensors it will carry… if any? See also: the designs that weren’t selected.
This week: Chats with Phil, Malcolm, D Scott TenBrink. Got to meet Michael Mogensen and learn about D-Ford. Drew some charts, projected growth, estimated resources, art directed stickers (because: stickers) and all of that with a steady background hum of admissions. 🏃♂️