2022 – 2024

Connecting the City

A design research studio for designing research machines.

University of Michigan Urban TechnologyProfessor of Practice, Instructor of Record

About

The new Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology has a sequence of four design studios. I was the first program-specific professor hired. The first studio in the program sequence needed to be designed and launched in three months from complete scratch.

Twenty students would meet three times a week for three hours over the course of a semester. They are 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.

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

Students stand in a row at a long wall of pinned-up drawings in the studio, their backs to the camera, behind a red bench with a laptop on it.

Photo: Bryan Boyer

Nested rounded shapes of scale, Inquiries inside Interactions inside Services inside Systems, mirrored below by Objects, Groups, Spaces and Policies, with Inquiries and Objects highlighted.

Design Studio Sequence

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.

Design Studio Culture

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.

A wide view of the studio: students work at long tables along both sides of a room with tall windows onto bare trees, around a blue sofa and a red bench in the middle.

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.

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.

A slide, Reviewed Design Sequence: a matrix of the four studios, Inquiries, Interactions, Services and Systems, by timeline, goal, starting point, example projects, research typology and learning objectives, with notes on the double diamond, data visualization and system mapping.

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.

A slide, Reviewed Toban's Syllabus and Notes: the prior course's Learning Goals and Grading and Evaluation Criteria, beside notes on its observational design methods and its mix of individual work and team self-evaluation.

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.

Learning Goals

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.

User Profile

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.

An illustration of four characters standing side by side, Research, Business, Design and Tech, each listed with its roles, such as policy analyst, entrepreneur, interaction designer and data scientist.

Illustration: Jabbriel Najjar

A timeline of the four studios, Inquiries, Interactions, Services and Systems, each with its role, researcher, designer, product manager and change-maker, in rings that grow with each studio.

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?

Transdisciplinary Vision & Mission

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.

The cover of Radical Pedagogies, edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister: three boys walking toward a modernist building.

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.

The cover of Raymond Lifchez's Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People: a student and a man in a wheelchair looking at an architectural model.

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.

A pyramid split in two by overlapping circles: architecture and urban planning above, contextual, waterfall and locally placed, and information and communication technology below, globally distributed, continuous and detached, meeting at impact on space.

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.

A comparison of data in academia and in practice, row by row: closed against open, observed and collected against collected and generated, knowledge production against capital production, and research question against user interaction as what drives data collection.

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,

Syllabus Design

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

Methodological Synthesis

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.

Four overlapping circles, content modeling, data modeling, urban planning and model-based system engineering, around abstraction at the center, on axes from physical to digital and from qualitative research question to quantitative user interaction.

Data Systems Design Methods

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.

Assignment Development

Four storm drains, numbered 001 to 004, gathered into a set.

A research question at the center, pointing out to four storm drains.

Storm drains feeding a data model at the center, with one more storm drain still to come.

A platform at the center, exchanging with the storm drains around it.

Platforming Research

Students collect a set of objects and develop a research question through the first half of the assignment. The research question scopes their representation of the object in their data abstractions. By the end of the assignment, the abstractions developed represent a data model. After designing their data model, they put a wrapper over the data to create a platform, shaping the model for user interactions.

Abstraction as decomposition of an urban object into information parts and their recomposition into data structures: the first half done individually as an anatomical drawing, the second half in assigned pairs as a decision support tool.

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.

Eight steps in a row, Object, Counts, Nouns, Spaces, Verbs, Adjectives, Times and Model, each feeding the next.

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.

An outer ring of seven steps, Counts, Nouns, Space, Verbs, Adjectives, Time and Model, around an inner ring of Story, Signals, Rules, Patterns and Views, with Agency at the center.

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.

Methods Map

Designing real-time technology requires working at multiple temporal scales. The current double design process commonly used in design education -- evangelized by consultants with no in-house experience iterating, testing, and improving product -- fail to structure these scales appropriately.

Using the semester as a sprint towards a release, data modeling methods were mapped to the assignment structure while students used hypothesis testing to execute each assignment. Students were then introduced to the most common design methods for each phase to limit the number of methods they had to learn so that they could deepen their skills to the point where they could critically think and reflect on what they were doing.

A cycle of four steps, hypothesis, research, prototype and evaluation, with evaluation looping back to hypothesis.

Design as Hypothesis Testing; Design Science

For each assignment, students would practice design as hypothesis testing (design science). This would allow them to hone their intuition to navigate ambiguity and complexity in relation to their goals, Desk critiques were situated around them explaining to me their interests and goals (research) as reflected in the assignments they produced (prototype). These sessions allowed instructor-to-peer and peer-to-peer evaluation. Outcomes from critiques would create further questions and design opportunities that would serve as inputs to their continually developed hypothesis about the urban object and project.

Experience Design

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.

Student Results

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

A student's tree pit study in two halves: nouns, space and time, a cutaway of a tree pit with the history of urban trees around it, and verbs, adjectives and counts, the forces acting on it over a map of downtown Ann Arbor.

The SAFERS poster, Students Advocating For Emergency Response Systems: the case for replacing the University of Michigan's Emergency Blue Light Phones, a map of them, sample results, and screens from a data-collection app.

Three taxonomy tables from the Blue Light project: Macro, the evolution of emergency blue light phones; Mezzo, their user groups; Micro, the accessibility of a single tower.

Dissemination

The Boston Architectural College event page for the 2024 Fall Lecture Series: Elisa Ngan, Data: Between Fact and Fiction, on October 2, 2024, with her photo and bio.

Data DesignData EthicsOntology