Humans Being Machines Learning

Context

The new Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology has a sequence of four design studios. The first studio in the program sequence needed to be designed and launched in three months from complete scratch. Twenty students would meet three [3] times a week for three [3] hours over the course of a semester.

I was the first program-specific professor hired.

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Client

University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology

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Users

The students come into the program interested in cities, technology, and design. In contrast to training them around a discipline such as mechanical engineering or computer science, which is more aligned to a role, we train them around the domain of urbanism and give them the tools needed to improve the urban environment.

Students are expected to graduate into 1) the technology sector, 2) design agencies, or 3) government / non-profits / institutions related to the urban environment.

Photo: Bryan Boyer

The design and urban inquiries studio was the first studio that was ever launched in the program. As a required course, it was a core component of the design curriculum. The studio was formally called "Design and Urban Inquiries." Students were to be introduced to design research methods for Urban Technology. What that meant was unclear, because the definition of "Urban Technology" is unclear.

Regardless, whether it is "Urban Technology", "Architecture", or "Data Platforms", research will be fundamental to all four studios for the role it plays in design decision-making. While the shape of those studios to come were rough sketches since this was the first cycle, the general desire was for each studio to build on the other by layering in complexity over time.

To bound the ambiguity, I researched and developed as much structural context and feedback as possible to translate them into requirements to be incorporated into the syllabus.

Requirement 1

The research methods the students learned in this studio should be extensible to the next three studios while also being able to conceptually stand on its own.

Requirement 2

Despite the inherent ambiguities of developing a new program, the studio had to be a strong and safe holding environment for the stress and uncertainty that inevitably comes with being asked to do open-ended problem-solving for the first time while being publicly evaluated in front of peers.

The studio within an architecture school forms the culture of the discipline. It come with its own rituals, stereotypes, and outdated expectations. The studio is a home, an environment and a community. It pushes students to grow and take risks in the present, and creates a network for them to push disciplinary boundaries in the future.

This studio would be the first studio our undergraduate students would take, and therefore it would make a strong first impression for the studio culture we expected to come. While the studio exists as part of institutional memory in architecture, no such thing exists for urban technology students.

Photo: Eric Bronson

Requirement 3

Along with the research curriculum, the first studio also had to onboard our students to studio norms and expectations. The course had to be challenging, creative, and collaborative enough for students to come into the space and spend time with their peers to do work communally.

What is a "camera"?

Requirement 4

Students have learned rapid (paper) prototyping skills in one of the prior courses, but do not go in depth to apply these skills to a long-term project using the design process. They also worked in groups, so not all the students were able to build equally on fundamental skills.

After discussion instructors about these drawbacks, I decided to create assignments that built upon each other throughout the semester. These assignments would culminate as a single project, broken into two parts.

Degree Learning Objectives

The degree learning objectives served to guide the first courses the students were required to take. These were reviewed and incorporated as appropriate.

Studio Design Sequence Matrix

The matrix provided a snapshot of how each studio would build upon each other. Terms were clarified with the faculty director, and edits to the matrix were made.

Studio Prerequisites

Although the studio was their first studio, students have taken several required courses in the program with other instructors. I talked to the instructors to understand the skills / methods that students were coming in with, and to get read on how things might be improved in the studio methodologically.

Although I was the first studio instructor, the program itself was well underway and students have completed their first semester. I reviewed all existing materials for requirements, clarification, and room for improvement.

Our students come in wanting to understand cities, design, and technology. They want to improve the built environment for the public. Rather than training them in specific skills related to a discipline, we needed to teach them the domain of urbanism while also training them on the design and technology skills needed to make change,

While the details of the program was still in the midst of being defined, the context that the students would graduate into was relatively clear, Students were expected to graduate into 1) the technology sector, 2) design agencies, or 3) non-profits and institutions related to improving the urban environment, These organizations had varying processes and cultures, but the design skills are relatively transferable.

At the same time, research is a broad activity. While we can recognize that specific roles are tied to specific responsibilities, all of them engage in research in some form as part of their job. With such a fluid definition of research, there needed to be mental anchors for what research means in a research-specific urban technology studio. To bound the design space, I suggested that we develop each studio around a particular primary role / protagonist.

Illustration: Jabbriel Najjar

Requirement 5

The studio shall not teach design research methods related to:
- interaction design,
- service design,
- foresight.

The faculty director also asked for ethnography to not be a method since it would be an elective.

What skills would urban technologists of the future need?

The Urban Technology program has a very clear mission. The idea is to build technology that improves people's lives by accounting for culture, context, complexity, participation, and ethics.

Two things motivated me to join the program as a faculty member: 1) Dean Jonathan Massey's article in The Architect's Newspaper and 2) how it aligned with my thesis on data ethics.

An Equitable Discipline

Massey outlines the relationship between the people who use our built environment and the people who can afford to build our built environment. The ratio should match, but they don't.

While Massey speaks of architecture, the goals in (urban) technology are the same.

A Diverse Tech Industry

In 2016, Helena Price featured diverse technologists as a counter-narrative to its predominantly white male engineering stereotypes, At the time, tech was reckoning with the impact of its employees gentrifying low-income neighborhoods in San Francisco due to flush venture capital funding drawing a myriad of tech workers to the city.

While the industry recognized the homogeneity of its white collar workers, diversity was valued as a driver of innovation. With varying life experiences, the prevailing ethos believed that creativity could be stoked through collaboration and conscious incubation of a psychologically safe environment where off-the-wall ideas could be explored without judgment. Such philosophies undergirded the design thinking methods espoused by design agencies such as IDEO who worked with technology powerhouses such as Apple.

Architecture, Disability, and Policy

Although the current state of architecture also skews white and male because these identifying properties generally leads to a privilege that allows one to afford architecture, the discipline also has a history of socio-technical pedagogical innovation.

One of the most successful through-lines can be found in the disability community. With its direct need for access to space and architecture, the disability community found a common voice through Raymond Lifchez's ground-breaking architecture studio at UC Berkeley. His studio created a community that was able to find a voice. In addition to advocating for one of the first curb cuts in America, the community developed in the studio fought for what would eventually be the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Similarities and Differences between Architecture & Urban Planning and Technology

The problems in architecture and technology are the same. The people who build our physical and digital world do not reflect the constituents at large. The barriers are systemic, and the root problem is the same. Education is a privilege, and these are expensive white collar professions.

At the same time, there are significant differences. The works of architecture and urban planning are singular, rooted in place, context, and community. This is not the case in technology, where deployment and its impact are distributed, global, and continuous. Ever-shifting, they reach into the most intimate moments of people's everyday lives, structuring their interactions in ways that go beyond structures and infrastructures.

Many of the unintended impacts of technology today can be traced back to their deployment in places that were unprepared to receive them. Technology is produced at the bleeding edge, and there will always be a social lag. We will always need to learn to use technology responsibly and build rules and best practices of engagement. Our economic, social, and political systems will evolve with, within, and without guardrails.

While education and pedagogy are well-situated for improvement given that we recruit for a well-balanced cohort and a plurality of life experiences that can check for possible insensitivities, we cannot expect our student's life experiences to carry them through, especially when these life experiences may be themselves disadvantaged. They need tools.

Requirement 6

Urban technologists should have the skills to design physical-digital systems with contextual and cultural awareness to mitigate the harms and risks in old ways of building. At the same time, they need to have methods to mitigate these risks in ways that account for how technology is deployed at scale, a way of building that can often be insensitive to context and culture. This is the core ethical-methodological tension.

Similarities and Differences with Data between Research-in-Academia and Research-in-Practice

Technology today is composed of 1) hardware, 2) software, and 3) data. Yet, depending on the context, data means different things to different people. While data is fundamental to research, how data is treated in academic research versus how it is treated in practice is fundamentally different.

Research as an activity has its roots in academia. Data collection in such an environment takes place with rigor and intention. This is not how data collection takes place in practice. Corporations will collect all the data and decide what they can learn with it later. Where the context of data collection is closed in academia such that variables can be controlled to answer a research question, data collection in practice is open. "Collection" also presumes a passive activity, whereas data in practice is generated through the technology itself. These are fundamentally two different types of research activities.

A comparison of data in academia versus practice frames the methodological area for pedagogical intervention. I made two moves: 1) extend the rigors of academic data collection to the innovation of practice, and 2) decouple capital production from outcomes.

What if students created a product that produced knowledge as an outcome of user interaction? What if the product helped answer a research question?

Requirement 7

Like academics, students should aim to produce knowledge that would help make the world a better place. Except, instead of writing papers, they should make product like practitioners. These products would passively collect the data they needed to produce the outcome they want to see in the world, outcomes that go beyond capital.

Requirement 8

To support their ethical goals, our students need to understand how data is created in product, which is how data is engineered. In addition to the critical thinking needed for proactive risk mitigation, for students to innovate ethically they should engage directly in the data collection and data definition stages of the data engineering process. This is data modeling,

After doing research to develop a direction, I gathered the requirements and pulled together a syllabus,

Requirement 1

The research methods the students learned in this studio should be extensible to the next three studios while also being able to conceptually stand on its own.

Requirement 2

Requirement 3

Requirement 4

Requirement 5

Requirement 6

Requirement 7

Requirement 8

What skills would urban technologists of the future need?

What if students created a product that produced knowledge as an outcome of user interaction? What if the product helped answer a research question?

Given the research, requirements, and design brief, the concept and structure of the studio as well as its assignments needed to be created from scratch. The assignment would introduce the common design research and design production goals while locking in and layering the methods for students to learn and practice within an overall design process.

Methodological Synthesis

Data is distributed across a organization, and the varying design methods developed to work with it has evolved over time and in discipline-specific ways. The course would teach them to both gather and model data as well as translate that data into information / knowledge. Students would pull from content modeling, model-based systems engineering, and data engineering. To handle context, they would also learn qualitative urban planning methods.

This is a broad surface area. To simplify, the studio would focus on creating abstractions.

Abstraction Process

An abstraction in this context is a modular software object that describes an object by encapsulating its properties in the form of data. In order to do this, students must learn decompose, or break apart, a complex system and then recompose it. The complex system in this case is an "urban object," a thing in the physical world that, as a rule of thumb, is no bigger than a car and no smaller than a cellphone. The urban object must reoccur in public space. Each instance of the object is evaluated and the set of them generalized into an abstraction. The form of the abstraction is a diagram / infographic as well as a table / spreadsheet. In this process, students take something physical in the world and break it down into something digital. Tables hold the data and its values, and the set of table schemas is its data model.

Decomposition

Through their assignments students break down an urban object through a series of lenses starting from the visible / local and gradually moving into the invisible / distributed world. In this process, they iteratively document properties of the object in their tables to bring legibility to the object and the complex system it sits in.

Since the studio and the structure of the assignments was novel, it was important to make learning as easy as possible by collating all material in a single custom portal. I designed a website to serve as a hub for the course, linking out to lectures, Canvas submittals, and supplementary materials.

View Course Website

Recomposition

Once they have their data model, effectively an API for an urban object, they can design an interface. The data model serves as the backend, while the interface serves as the frontend.

This turns the role of a design on its head by involving designers in the design of databases and their representations from the beginning instead of starting with wireframes and then discussing with engineers as to whether the data is available. It also fills a gap in practice where designers do not understand backends when the backend is where most of the costs of their design are created. It also empowers designers to resolve ethical problems at the point of designing technical systems, where representations are created, enabling them to have the vocabulary to directly engage in the process and mitigate the risks that their design education has prepared them to identify.

Sample Projects (W2023)

Shown end-to-end, a sample project for creating neighborhood street planters.

The work of the studio and students were disseminated at invited events:

- Harvard Graduate School of Design Landscape Architecture Pedagogy Symposium;
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- European Architecture Historian Third Ecology Conference Pedagogy Workshop;
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- Just Futures Lecture at Boston Architectural College