Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 168
How it might feel to spend 24 hours in and around the U-M Center for Innovation
Big news here in Detroit with a new U-M Center for Innovation officially now pressing forward as of yesterday, when it won approval from the Board of Regents. The project represents a $250M investment and a huge opportunity for U-M to amplify its role in the economic and cultural life of southeast Michigan.
We’re impatient people, so this week our main section is a fictional day in the life of UMCI as a place and a learning community. But before we get to that, an academic interlude.
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that data, connectivity, computation, and automation 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.
🐡 Writing a Degree Program Into Existence
Writing is the cheapest and often quickest way to inflate ideas. I’ve reached for fictions and scenarios as a design tool to describe potential futures since I was in grad school. Add to that working with folks like Dan Hill and Anthony Townsend, and writing as an act of design is still often where I start.
In January of 2021 I returned from a short parental leave after welcoming my son into the universe and felt like there was a lot of stuff to do, but not a lot of clarity on how to start. We knew that in another year from that point in time we would have students in the building, but how many and how best to prepare for them were indeterminate details at that moment. So I wrote, drafting a fifty-some page document that projected a path to the steady state for the urban technology degree program.
When I sat down to document a collection of neatly organized work streams, it became clear that something was missing. I had created an outline of how to deliver the program, but it said nothing about what it might feel like for all of us at the College, so that work of storytelling was done by vignettes. Each academic year between 2021 and 2026 was described in The Big Picture with a few hundred words. These short stories were not intended to be predictions, but looking back over the one for 2023-2024… it’s not too bad, really! Reproduced below is the description imagining what this current academic year would feel like, written almost three years ago. Notes in brackets added from today’s vantage.
2023-2024
The return to campus brings report from the first capable few urban technology students landing internships with great companies and organizations [Here's a sampling]. Career Services is taking close notes and we’re using that to build new relationships with companies that will hire our students on a regular basis [Check!]. One of the modules on offer is taught by a visiting professor who’s traveling in from San Francisco a handful of times and otherwise working remotely [Philadelphia, actually]. This brings fresh talent to the students, but puts an extra burden on the program’s staff to support the students between Zoom calls.
Collectively, the faculty and staff who touch Urban technology are starting to get our bearings. Urban technology’s evening lectures are well attended by our students and others from adjacent departments [no lecture series yet but we have done a few]. We have a handful of interactive installations around the building that provide touchpoints for curious members of the Taubman community, and are of particular interest during events that welcome the public [two 95% complete projects, sadly, does not deliver on this promise].
The snow comes again and with it another 50 students, pushing the urban tech population up to 95 [on track to push past 100], now larger than MURPs and URP PhDs combined, and feeling like a real presence in the building. One course, two studios, and four modules are on offer. For the first time the urban technology cohort will be reshaping existing courses by adding their ranks to the flagship Becoming Digital, causing it to grow and shift to accommodate the new headcount.
For the first time in Spring we have two offerings. One is the same first year spring intensive that we always offer, again improved with feedback from the second run through in May-June of 2023. The other is an advanced travel course open to all Taubman College students of both grad and undergrad level as a way to experiment with urban technology. A cohort of 20 decamps to Singapore for two weeks for a charrette on site with the Housing Development Board. They’ll be designing tools to aid decision making among neighbors [though we have toyed with the idea of international courses, we're not quite there yet. technologies of engagement are still a promising topic though].OK, let’s try this again but for something bigger…
🌱 24 Hours at the U-M Center for Innovation in Detroit
Yesterday the Board of Regents for the University of Michigan approved the U-M Center for Innovation in Detroit to move forward. It will be a $250M new building representing a major project for the university, Detroit, and for all of the parties involved. The details of the initiative are still emerging but it will house graduate-level studies with a tech (perhaps even urban tech!) focus, as well as a wide array of community programs aimed at high school students and lifetime learners. To celebrate the announcement of this project, let’s borrow a play from the section above and imagine what UMCI might feel like ten years from today. At that point it will have been open for six years.
Note: I have been involved in the project, including on the search committee for its director, so I must be very explicit that the text below is a personal fictional and is not a description of U-M plans, intentions, or commitments.
Thursday, October 20th, 2033 - 07:00am
A burst of steam echoes through the park behind UMCI as a barista turns knobs and fiddles with machinery. She prepares for the morning tide of graduate researchers, shuffling bleary-eyed out of the adjacent apartment building, and commuters who pass through the park on their way to the rapid transit corridor along Grand River. A trace of OLED glimmers at the edge of the coffee kiosk’s origami roof structure—a halo over the morning’s first coffee seekers indicating good air quality.
09:00am
Seagulls startle as large garage doors grind upwards, making a corner of the ground floor into an al fresco workshop and putting its activities on display to the last of the breakfast crowd lingering parkside. Before the glass wall is even fully retracted, a six-legged construction robot jitters out, pauses as if taking in the fresh air, and promptly face plants after stumbling on varied terrain. At the thought of rewriting the code yet another time, smiles slide off of the faces of a huddle of students. At least they didn’t have to lug machine far to reset.
11:00am
The wood is dancing, or at least that’s the best analogy Jaya could come up with. A soaring wall of wood paneling etched with sparklines depicted the University’s progress on KPIs related to the Community Commitments it made in 2025. These graphics slowly fade before the wooden pixels reassemble, this time in the shape of a dial pointing people to nearby mobility options in realtime. U-M ANN ARBOR NORTH CAMPUS EXPRESS - 2 MIN. SIXTEEN SCOOTERS AVAILABLE NOW IN GLB PARK. RTA BUS FROM NOVI EXPECTED AT 11:15. MAY POD AVAILABLE ON DEMAND. Parking is available too, of course, but usage is low enough that someone upstairs in an office too small with a monitor too large is studying the potential to accelerate Phase II for the parking deck: converting it to a combo of housing and public library, like everyone expected to happen eventually.
01:00pm
Across Grand River a group of students with pins on their jacket that say SUSTAINABILITY, GO BLUE!, and URBAN TECHNOLOGY in various permutations are coaxing pedestrians on the sidewalk to spend 5 minutes giving their thoughts about what could be built on a disused patch of land owned by DTE. They don’t know it yet, but after graduation three of the students will turn their group research project into a company and take up residency at Newlab, 12 minutes down the road by bike.
03:00pm
A group of four friends from Cass Tech High School climb to the top of the lobby’s grand curving staircase and collapse into bean bags, first of the MEZers to arrive for an after school program. Kings and Queens of the roost, but only for a hot second before a crush of peers in ArcPrep turn up. Someone once told them that the future director of UMCI was already attending high school programs there. Indeed, Kash thought to themselves.
05:00pm
Wayfinding panels around the building cycle a new header with crisp typography reading BLACK TECH WEEK. What started as a social gathering in Newlab has grown into a city-wide annual event celebrating Detroit’s role as the most diverse tech hub in the country. Leaders from the community bring the best of local innovations from across Detroit’s radial grid, eager to share with the 11,000 people expected to converge on the city to enjoy the SXSW of the north. From the event space on UMCI’s top floor, attendees gather for one of countless conference sessions and parties around town.
07:00pm
The building’s a sandwich. Top and ground floors abuzz with public events, middle occupied by learners. Filling UMCI’s classrooms are lectures, seminars, and workshops offered for workforce development and lifelong studies: Computer Vision on the Job Site. Embedded Sensor Maintenance. Space Utilization & Management for BIDs and Public Spaces. Carbon Accounting. Financing Regenerative Urban Ecologies. Outside a meeting room, PhD students running the SEAS+Ross clinic on net negative carbon development have taped up a sign saying BE RIGHT BACK. NET NEGATIVE ON DINNER RIGHT NOW.
09:00pm
Carousers stumble down the sidewalk, halting in front of a ground floor robotics labs. They look deep into the room trying to make sense of robotic arms and fabrication equipment lit in striking colors, casting theatrical shadows on the back wall of the space. “Not the clubbbbb,” Sam shouts, and the stumbling continues.
11:00pm
With evening classes done and quiet streets outside, the most hardcore scholars are… playing video games. But with purpose! Elbow deep into VisionOS and Blender’s SDK, a research team is working on the next version of the app they will take back out to the sidewalk across Grand River (and ten other places around town) as they continue to test a new type of mixed reality community engagement tool.
01:00am
The last of the UMCI to North Campus express busses has arrived safely in Ann Arbor, says the lobby display. Or at least it would have, but the building knows that its hospitable shell is nearly empty and has started shutting down non-essential systems to conserve power.
03:00am
Berry is what the building engineers call the AI that runs nightly spatial resource utilization scenarios to keep UMCI’s mix of programs and possibilities moving along with orchestral grace. Berry prefers to work while you’re asleep, just because Berry can. Leave Berry alone, human.
05:00am
An AV container creeps silently into the loading dock and releases the lock on its corrugated doors. Thirty three 80/20 segments in varying lengths, 8 sheets of plywood, a small buffet of breadboards and electronics, 4 racks of pastries, 1 large bag of coffee, 3 boxes of assorted produce, and 24 reams of paper are among the dispatch from the Detroit’s Downtown Consolidated Delivery Center. Later a bike courier will hustle to UMCI with a single box of Pentel Sign Pens that fell through the automated cracks, hand it to the person at the front desk, and leave with a wordless smile.
And so the clock spins again.
To reiterate: While I have been involved in the UMCI project, including on the search committee for its director, the text above is a personal fictional and is not a description of University plans, intentions, or commitments.
👨💻 Are you hiring for summer 2024? Reply to this email if you’re interested in having urban technology students join your team as interns. They have skills in UX design, service design, python, javascript and a zeal for urban challenges.
These weeks: RACI Matrix, employer visit, study abroad consults, study abroad machinery, studio fabrication coordination, and a big to-do with the World Economic Forum Urban Transformation Summit in Detroit. Congrats to Bedrock on launching the UTX-Urban Tech Exchange. 🏃
Sounds fun! And congratulations. Looking forward to visiting!