What does it mean to design urban technology?
We’ve recently launched a new degree program in Urban Technology at University of Michigan that combines urbanism, technology, and design. But what does design mean in this context? Like many aspects of creating a new transdisciplinary degree program from scratch, a simple question has been somewhat less simple to answer. This post is a report-to-date of our thinking on the nature of design in urban technology. TLDR? We’re combining service, strategic design, and product management, all with a focus on urban needs.
I’m writing, in part, because we’re starting to recruit people to join the teaching team (first example) and I want prospective applicants to know what they’re getting into. We’re growing a teaching and research team to align the way that designers are educated in the 21st century with 21st century challenges. This is a rare opportunity to build a design curriculum from scratch. Want to help?
Graphic designers create books and other graphic media, game designers create games, architects work on buildings. What does a designer do in the context of urban technology?
We define urban technology as digitally-powered products and services that affect how cities are seen and made sense of, how they’re shaped and built, and how urban spaces are inhabited. If this sounds extremely broad, that’s because it is—on purpose. Technology is not about electrons and bits alone, but also about the funding, business models, policy positions, risk attitudes and much more. So when we use the term urban technology we’re not talking about another smart home device or some autonomous dog taxi, but rather the transition of urban life from a time where computation and network connectivity are an exception to one where they are the default.
You can call it the Fourth Industrial Revolution if you like, or the Anthropocene. There are lots of Black Mirror scenarios in which this goes really poorly, but it doesn’t have to. The work of this century is to build without fossil fuels, without systemic racism, without want. If we imagine a world that has weened itself from the convenient externalities of industrial society, then it seems fair to assume that industrial silos of expertise are not likely to survive. What’s the role for design in this world, and what work are designers called to do? How can new theory and practices in design help create transdisciplinary collaborations that borrow the best from the urbanist and technologist perspectives?
As the built environment is increasingly digitized and instrumented, new data streams and thus feedback loops emerge that make previously ignored waste, disparity, and discrimination difficult to ignore. When we see the world differently, we act differently—one hopes! While building urban technologies involves new hardware and software to be created, computer scientists alone cannot reimagine urban life any more than architects or urban planners can reimagine the digital. Creating urban technologies that truly enrich life for the many requires new collaboration across, between, through, and over the disciplines of industrial society.
1. But why does your Building Exist?
When Buckminster Fuller asked Norman Foster, now known as the architect of the Apple donut, “how much does your building weigh?” he was previewing a demand of the built environment that is just now coming into its own, many decades later. Sure, a building can be beautiful and sound, but what does it do, what does it produce, how does it affect the society around and inside of it?
What do you want from the house where you live, the building where you work, or the neighborhood where you roam?
Physical security, safety, and beauty are inherent characteristics of the thing that gets built—the building or, more generically, the noun as I often refer to it. Nouns have qualities and those qualities are important. But they’re not the whole story, as Buckminster Fuller implied with his question of Foster.
Buildings and cities around us are increasingly asked to also perform on desired “big picture” outcomes like achieving a lower carbon footprint, increased social mixing, or better affordability. Compared to beauty or soundness, these desires are different because they rely on the outcomes and impacts that the physical environment (including its maintenance and operations) yields or, more precisely, enables.
Buildings and urban spaces cost a ton of money to build and we are almost always inside of them, so it’s seems fair that people should demand that everyday structures and spaces perform well. Yet, it’s hard to tell one way or the other. Most families in America don’t have a clear idea of how much energy their home uses on a daily basis, let alone the ability to track the volume and weight of waste that the house emits without going to great lengths, or understand the impact that the home has on the physical and mental health the individuals that pass through it.
Compared to your phone and every app on it that are producing constant and proliferate streams of data about their own performance and your behaviors, most buildings and urban spaces are as chatty as a rock. Things are changing, though.
Waves of technological development including the quantified self, the internet of things, smart home devices, and smart cities technologies have begun to create new (incomplete, imperfect) data-based views of our urban lives. The picture Roomba makes of your house may not look familiar to you but, sure enough, Roomba is peeping your human domain with its digital eye. Waymo describes itself as “the world’s best driver” which just happens to be software-based. Digital thermostats connected indoor air temperatures to the cloud and now Google can tell you the average indoor temperature in neighborhoods across the country. Convenience is almost always one of the top selling points for these technologies—change the temperature from aNyWhErE, cries the “smart” thermostat—but a side effect of digitizing and connecting these aspects of daily life is that digital things create data streams, and data is the first half of a feedback loop.
Numina offers an example. The product uses computer vision to generate a data stream from the flow of passing people and cars. It’s easy enough to survey street activity using a clipboard, as Jahn Gehl and his associates have demonstrated for decades but the picture generated by these long-practiced data collection methods is sporadic and partial, and costly to collect. With a tool like Numina, the evidence collected to inform policy or business decisions can be more robust.
If you were City Hall, you could use Numina to build a data stream of how people use the curbs in a given neighborhood and use that information to adjust policy and programs accordingly over time. Discover that parking is the dominant use and maybe you have a body of evidence to then discuss the need for more public transit, with greater precision about where and when it needs to be accessible. Find a battle between delivery trucks and passenger vehicles and the feedback loop gets even more interesting. Do you eliminate the conflicts by favoring one use over the other, or find some other solution altogether? Perhaps you find that an unexpected number of people are using the curb as a makeshift bar seat at night: early warning system that the street fair is going to need more space next year?
2. Feedback Loops in the Built Environment
Zooming into the scale of the building for a moment will help clarify the opportunities presented by a greater demand for performance outcomes like carbon neutrality or better wellness for occupants. Such outcomes are the result of what happens in and through a building, but are not characteristics of the building itself. Outcomes have to play out over time, and with the involvement of humans. Outcomes are the result of use, participation, co-creation.
This means data is needed about the ongoing performance and use of the building and the organization(s) inside of it, beyond the static reality of the structure itself. Luckily, the volume of available urban and building data is increasing, and has always been increasing, for that matter.
When there’s a strong desire for better climate, social, and business outcomes from the built environment (e.g. now), cheaper and more proliferate data will create more feedback loops, which will lead to more frequent adjustments to physical environments, including the policies, rituals, and routines that operate within them.
The built environment is already becoming increasingly responsive. In countless places, bollards and barricades shift streets from right of way to market or plaza in a matter of minutes. COVID made the larger possibilities of this abundantly clear. On a longer horizon, but still “quick” in built environment terms there are groups like Reimagining the Civic Commons who are using a careful metrics-and-evidence based approaches to track the utilization and enjoyment of public spaces and then adapt the spaces and their management based on the findings.
When Frank Duffy and Stewart Brand wrote about the conceptual layers of buildings and their lifespan, the message was to design in such a way that allows the various parts of buildings to change and adapt at their own pace. This diagram above and the book How Buildings Learn have nearly cult status among digital designers, but are (ironically) more scarcely found in architecture schools. Perhaps that’s because the diagram works as a metaphor better than a way to understand the relationship between built spaces and behavior.
The diagram’s representation of occupation and use stops at the revelation that people use buildings and thus buildings tend to change over time, whether the architect is happy about that or not. Important, and a detail that many architects overlook, but this is still focusing on the specificities of the building itself.
What’s also true is that individuals and social groupings behave in their own special ways. The way your school uses its hallways is different than how Taubman College does it, and that’s as much about the physical design of those spaces as it is about the norms and culture of disparate organizations. To understand the outcomes of life inside buildings and built spaces, the physical layers of skin, structure, and building systems are relevant but not sufficient. Descriptions of generic nouns such as “classroom,” “hallway,” and “lecture hall” give some hint of what might be happening inside a college building, but room names don’t really shape behavior. A different language is needed to grapple with the feedback loop between physical space, human experience, within that space, and the outcomes that follow.
If an architecture of qualities requires obsession over the nouns, an architecture of outcomes requires the same rigor applied to verbs... and that’s not about just architecture anymore! Instead, it’s about how architecture and outdoor spaces enable and contribute to the operation of urban services and systems.
3. Why do so few People Working on the Built Environment know about Service Design?
A useful way to analyze and design the relationship between nouns and verbs is the concept of a service. Services are nouns (subway train, station, map, payment app) that support verbs (finding, boarding, paying, riding) resulting in outcomes (access, convenience, sustainability).
A well-functioning subway system requires good architects, industrial designers, programmers, operators, labor organizers, and more, but all of those parties have to contribute to the operation of a service that enables customers, users, or whatever you want to call them to realize their desired outcomes on a regular basis. How do you coordinate all of this, and work through the inevitable conflicts that arise?
The discipline of service design introduces the user journey as the basic element to be designed, involving roles of people involved, key events or stages (verbs!), and physical touchpoints at different scales or in various media (nouns). The work of the service designer is to orchestrate how these come together, which involves a hefty amount of participatory and collaborative efforts in the development of a new service, as well as stewardship and iteration of services that are in operation.
Hotels, airlines, stores and anyone trying to sell you an experience thinks a lot about service design, whether they know it or not (many of the best service designers don’t know that there’s a word for what they do). Government can too. Two promising recent public sector examples are the use of AI Chatbots to improve the experience of immigrating to Finland, and the application of Minecraft and deliberate stakeholder engagement to center the needs of youth and women in the design of safe park spaces in Kosovo. (For more on these, see the recently published book, Design for Social Innovation, which I co-edited).
As you can see from the two examples mentioned above, our students will not graduate as architects or urban designers. Urban outcomes are now as much defined by digital coordination of physical resources as it is by the design of places themselves. Architects and planners focus on the latter, our program in urban technology will focus on the former. Our students will leave as service and strategic designers who focus on urban needs. These are hard things to master, so our curriculum will need to help them step up to the challenge.
4. Between Craft & Consequences
Service designers need to be good at research, good-enough at creating visual artifacts and physical prototypes, and great at recognizing and looking after the multiple forms of value that are exchanged within a service. Accomplishing this means reassessing the Venn diagram of two things that are central to the work of designer: craft and consequences.
During the past 18 months I have returned to two words at the heart of design work: Craft and Consequence. As a student in architecture, I was taught to have a healthy respect for the work and lifestyles that an architect sets in motion. The lines we draw translate to labor, waste, carbon output, perceptions, convenience (or the opposite) and many other things.
The bulk of the time in my design education, however—and I think this still holds true for design education in many places—was focused on questions of craft. In architecture school we spent hours and hours drawing lines just so, creating imaginative and evocative models, and obsessing over (read: copying) the details of famous buildings around the world. All of this is important, even more so if you want to design really special buildings, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.
Whereas many design educations could be summarized as Consequence<Craft, this is not the right equation for the needs of this century. Though we care how things look and how they’re made, we care about these less than we are concerned with the plural impacts of what we design—how it affects the people who encounter it and the environment around it.
When I interviewed people in design leadership roles at Google, Facebook, and other big tech houses as well as smaller design studios, a consistent theme was “we do not need more pixel pushers.” Not surprising, given the loud and accelerating criticism of Silicon Valley recently, but important to underscore. For all but the most rarefied few, pixel pushing is no longer enough to be considered a great designer. This is a reflection of the extent to which outcomes (or consequences) are driving decision-making.
Though the craft of a pixel-perfect interface may be part of enticing users to join a platform or use a digital product, the sum total of that person’s experience of the platform is what matters, because it’s in the relationship between person and platform that consequences emerge. Does the hypothetical platform enrich the user’s life? Does it do so with fair and legible tradeoffs? These are very hard questions to answer and even harder to design, precisely because the answer is not in the pixels.
If the arrow is flipped and we imagine Consequences > Craft, then the focus becomes designing things of consequence (choosing the right problems to work on) and grappling with the consequences of what we design (meaningful response to the challenges we take on).
5. First Question: What Matters?
The top half of this diagram represents the role of designers in identifying and articulating relevant challenges. No good design presentation should ever be met with the response, “… so what?” but many are, because designers can be quick to find the problem they’re interested in, even if others do not see the importance of the chosen issue.
Our students should be capable of articulating challenges that are recognized as important to larger constituencies. To do this, they need to have a healthy respect for evidence to support the claims, propositions, and proposals that they work on, and to discover these things in deep collaboration with communities. I use the word “evidence” here exactly because it is akin to discussing a mystery. Evidence can be quantitative or qualitative, it is often imperfect or incomplete, and it always demands interpretation. Where does evidence come from? From micro-scale research with real people, and from macro-scale analysis of statistics and trends.
User research as it has grown in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community over decades, as well as the associated practices of design ethnography that have developed in design schools (but less often architecture schools) is now basic within the context of digital design. However, architecture often lacks such rigorous approaches to understanding the relationship between outputs (buildings) and behavior. Part of this is explained by the focus in the digital world on products that can be iterated relatively cheaply compared to physical architecture, which is always a prototype by virtue of the fact that buildings are (mostly) not created in factories or even duplicated very often. Buildings could be iterated, of course, but only at significant expense.
Human-centered design grew out of human-computer interaction and is now prevalent in design, business, education, and even law schools, but somewhat harder to find within architecture and planning departments or colleges! Partially, for good reason. Human-centered design methodologies were developed to facilitate the design of products, and products (or services for that matter) are rarely asked to deal with contested interests. HCD is a practice designed for a world of abundance, but urban space is fundamentally defined by scarcity. You and your spouse do not need to agree on which razor to buy, you can easy buy the one that suits you best. Try the same with a municipal recycling plant.
When human-centered approaches work well, they help ensure that products exhibit care for the humans that use them. Oxo Good Grips is a classic example, in that these kitchen implements were designed to be easy for people with arthritis to use, but they also happen to be easier for everyone to use! Thank you, HCD and universal design! But the flip side of human-centered design’s ability to make things useful for people is the potential to make them too easy to use, like the addiction caused by social media and extremely well-crafted interfaces, or to make harmful things easy, like Juul vaping devices that George Aye recently disassembled in a talk at Taubman College.
Still, aspects of HCD and digital design practices in general are very useful. Designers working in traditional built environment fields have a lot to learn from baseline practices in the digital design world, and I often recommend Erika Hall’s excellent and concise book Just Enough Research as an example of how focused you can be on design research, for instance.
Our students will not know that it’s possible to design without evidence, as we will push them to search for, build, and interpret qualitative and quantitative data in making sense of the world. This perspective has been informed by my own work at places like IDEO, Finnish Innovation Fund, and Sidewalk Labs, supercharged by watching Public Policy Lab develop its rigorous design process, and has been fully crystalized in conversation with Andrea Cooper OBE at an event in Seoul where she drew a disarmingly simple diagram:
We know how to educate designers to handle the left side of Cooper’s diagram, but the right end is less common. But it shouldn’t be, right?! We have a unique opportunity with the Urban Technology program in that our students will all take a sequence of Python courses, as well as a required course in statistics and data science. In other words, by the time our burgeoning young designers arrive at their first studio, they will have a deeper set of tools to deal with data than your average design student. We’re normalizing the idea that designers can code. It’s 2022!
6. Second Question: What Next?
The lower half of the Consequence > Craft diagram is important as well: If designers are to own the consequences of their work, then they must be in the habit of answering the question, “what comes next after this designed thing becomes part of everyday life?” What’s the world in which this is normal? What is different about that world compared to the status quo?
It’s a mouthful, but an important thing to reckon with when working in a context of technology, where design proposals have the potential to scale rapidly by definition. Designers cannot claim any special crystal ball that helps them see the future, but we can borrow from the adjacent fields of Foresight and Futures to adopt methods and perspectives that help follow design ideas to their plausible impacts, both direct and indirect.
As an example, consider the Starship delivery bot, seen above in a promotional shot from the company. A person and their dog confront a small robot on the sidewalk. The person seems amused, the dog curious: everything’s OK. That’s one possible outcome for this idea at an early stage or as a prototype, sure. But what happens when the timeline under consideration is stretched a little and this proposal for delivery-robots-on-sidewalk becomes the new normal?
Is the person in the image above as happy as when a single robot shared the sidewalk with them? When confronted with a sidewalk as congested as the highways, are you rosy about the technological possibilities? Do you have new questions about the design of the technical system in the scene above? Does the identity of the person or group who owns the robot matter more to you when there are lots of them around?
Whether you have these questions or others, when the presence of a specific technology multiplies in our current or near-future life, so too do questions about what happens next. The what that happens next is about economic, political, social, and cultural changes that are set in motion by technological development (and vice versa).
My professional work has been informed by conversations with designers and researchers like Superflux, Stuart Candy and the Situation Lab, Scott Smith at Changeist, Extrapolation Factory, Radha Mistry, and Anthony Townsend, who has been a frequent collaborator for almost a decade now. What we can borrow from the practices of these geniuses is a way to contend with the unintended consequences of the ideas that we bring into the world. To show love for your community is to follow ideas to their unintended potential outcomes and then use that experience to feed back into the original idea. Design with love.
As I’ve been writing these notes and sharing an early version of these ideas with colleagues, I met Cyd Harrell, whose work in civic technology I had followed for years (read her book btw). She in turn pointed me to Ron Bronson, who has been writing about… consequence design! It’s nice to know we’re not alone on this line of thought. Here’s a snippet from a recent interview:
“Consequence Design is the mat in front of the door,” Ron explains. “When you look underneath, insects who weren’t visible scurry in all directions. All designed interactions have consequences, whether it’s someone getting stuck buying a train ticket from a kiosk, or hidden menus inside of web applications. The consequences might be unintended but they cost time and money, and erode trust with our platforms. We need to uncover how a product can cause harm and fix it.”
What Ron describes here in terms of costing time and money or eroding trust is an order of magnitude more important when we’re focusing on urban technologies. If a music app erodes your trust, you can use a different app, but if robots on your sidewalk undermine your ability to use the sidewalk easily, then an entirely different order of harm has been done. The app store does not offer new sidewalks.
7. From Problems to Challenges
Technology firms like to talk about solving problems, but this description glosses over the reality of urban challenges. Uber may think it has “solved” mobility, but it’s only accessible to people who can afford it, and that solution comes at the cost of increased congestion for everyone.
Meaningful city challenges are fundamentally “wicked” in nature, as defined by Rittel & Webber and therefore design practice meant to do meaningful work on significant issues in cities should be prepared to grapple with “wickedness” regardless of the medium. As an iterative, multi-disciplinary, synthesizing, and action-oriented way of working, the design process is widely recognized as an alternative to linear working modalities favored during the era of industrialization when carbon awareness, gender equity, racial justice, and countless other outcomes that we now consider essential, were accepted as externalities or unimportant altogether.
Central to the reframing of design by Rittel & Webber is a shift from focusing on solutions to focusing on problems. When the invention of industrial production lines in the 18th century first differentiated design from art and craft, “designs” emerged as the pattern to be stamped on items coming off the production line. Design was seen as a discipline of creating solutions to problems. “Have plate, need decoration,” if you will. This same logic holds true today for the vast majority of designers who receive a brief from the client to do something straightforward like design a house and respond, eventually, with blueprints. Compared to the wicked problems described by Rittel & Webber, even the most complex plates and houses are polite indeed.
In contrast, what’s the “solution” to a food desert? To answer that question, one first has to develop a position on the nature of a food desert, factors contributing to its origin, and other aspects that perpetuate or exacerbate the issue. In the context of wicked problems, collecting input, making sense of diverse evidence and perspectives, and framing challenges in a way that makes them tractable is a task as important (if not more so) than searching for appropriate responses. If one brings designerly talents to the challenge of a food desert, what is the work to be done? Will they design a better grocery store that emphasizes fresh ingredients, or perhaps safer streets that facilitate walking further distances to make the grocery store more accessible? These tangible interventions, while potentially meaningful, are likely not the places where the highest level of transformation can be achieved for the most people. In the parlance of my grandfather, a walnut farmer, such ideas would be “putting lipstick on a pig” because the nature of the challenge is a market failure rather than an urban design issue. If we aspire for our students to have the ability to work on such challenges, we need a way to understand the nature of the design work they will be doing.
My mentor, Marco Steinberg, who I worked with at The Finnish Innovation Fund, uses the analogy of a funnel to describe the multiple roles of design (see diagram below). On the narrow end of the funnel is traditional design. Designers operating here are happy not to ask many questions. Instead, they receive requirements from someone upstream and develop a creative solution to those requirements. These are not the kind of designers we hope to educate in Urban Technology or any of Taubman’s other programs. On the wide end of the funnel is where needs and requirements are articulated. Designers here need to be conversant in economics, policy, and broader macro factors or risk being out of their depth. Decisions made on the narrow end of the funnel tend to be between differences of degree — how should this idea be executed? — whereas decisions made on the wider end of the funnel are typological — what is the right idea to pursue at this time?
8. Want to Change the World?
Until perhaps 20 years ago when design thinking, human centered design, and user experience all became more widely valued (and enshrined as business buzzwords), the most common way for design activity to be understood was on the narrow end of the Steinberg Funnel: providing solutions to relatively simple problems. Increasingly design is now valued at the wide end of the funnel for the ability of the iterative design process to provide a way to grapple with challenges that are dynamic, often due to their inherently social nature, like the issue of the food deserts described above.
On the narrow end of the Steinberg Funnel, designers need to have good craft skills such as visual representation and fabrication, almost always tied to a specific medium (architecture, graphic design, etc). On the wide end of the funnel, designers need to be stewards of decision-making processes (or we might say “codesign” processes) when many heads are involved in the making of a plan of action and many hands in the enacting. This more abstract definition of the work of designers has risen in prominence thanks to the viral expansion of “design thinking,” first as a value-creation and innovation method in business, then as a way for government to pursue human-centered policy formation and delivery through the combination of design, policy, and social innovation.
While numerous case studies exist that offer compelling arguments for the role of designers in these more strategic contexts and their wicked challenges, little consensus exists on the best way to educate a designer of this stripe. Much like multimedia and the web shook design education in the 1990s, design academia has yet to establish norms on how to respond to the rapid collision of technologies and urban life. Former colleagues Marco Steinberg, Justin W. Cook, Dan Hill, and I spent lots of time looking at this challenge while running Helsinki Design Lab, if for no other reason than the need to hire and train members of our team. Frankly, we didn’t crack it back then. Now with the benefit of more than a decade, the question of how to best educate designers to take on the challenges of the 21st century is coming into focus.
Numerous universities around the world have been ramping up efforts to address the shift of design education away from its attachment to mediums like architecture, product, and graphics. At the Rhode Island School of Design, the Center for Complexity is doing pioneering work on challenge framing and systems innovation under the leadership of Justin. With Dan’s help, UCL’s Institute for Public Policy is integrating design into their educational programs. Other relevant examples that offer some insights include Carnegie Mellon’s Transition Design program (outcome: sustainability), NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and MIT’s Media Lab (noun: emerging technologies), or Parsons Transdisciplinary Design and U-M’s Integrative Design program (verb: transgression) to name a few.
It is dangerous to make such broad generalizations, but these programs may be characterized as producing a very special “supply” of design talent. However, those talents do not always have an easy time finding the right role for themselves after graduation. There are few jobs that include the words “integrative design,” “transition design,” “or strategic design” in the titles, for instance, even if the numbers are growing.
Our curriculum was created with awareness that our students will follow a multitude of paths after college, so while everyone in the Urban Technology program will take a series of design courses, we do not expect them all to be self-proclaimed designers in their careers. Instead, we think of the design mindset—and particularly exposure to service and strategic design—to be some of the power moves that we will send our students into the world with.
I’m excited for the future politician who also has a good grasp on the history and theory of urban settlements and computation alike. Bring on the community advocate who organizes by design. Welcome, designer who knows economics and elegant form in equal measure. Hello, future computer scientist who knows cities not as metaphors for digital concepts, but as complex and contested real places. Want to change the world? Build the right feedback loops. Change behavior based on what you learn. Collaborate with people who know things you do not. Honor history. Embrace the possibility of change. Be human. Don’t lose sight of the mission that drives you.
If this resonates with you, subscribe to our newsletter where we have been writing about the development of the program for the past year and change and consider applying for the job we have open currently, or future opportunities.
Thanks to (alphabetical): Mariana Amatullo, George Aye, Matthew Claudel, Justin W. Cook, Ryan Freitas, Rob Goodspeed, Joe Grengs, Erika Hall, Cyd Harrell, Dan Hill, Charlie Keenan, Dan Klyn, Larissa Larsen, Chelsea Mauldin, Malcolm McCullough, Mike Monteiro, Abhi Nemani, Cassie Robinson, Michael Sippey, Molly Steenson, Marco Steinberg, Anthony Vanky and surely others who’ve entertained discussions on these topics over the past 18 months.
