Conscientious Urban Technology

In our view of urban technology, we don’t care about technology for its own sake, but we recognise that technology has always been how we scale what we do as humans. In particular, it’s a way of scaling the care that we exhibit for each other.

In today’s world, we have computer scientists, some of whom care about cities and gravitate towards related work. We also have urban planners, architects, and other ‘traditional’ professions that physically shape the city, and some have started to think about how they can employ technology to do that. When two fields start intersecting like this, i... See more

In the end, lack of imagination is only a tiny part of why we don’t see more change; the more significant aspect is the friction between the status quo and those alternative futures. We need to understand those sources of friction in great detail and be articulate and convincing when discussing why they are causing friction and why they can be diff... See more

beyond the impossibility of ever truly ‘knowing’ a wicked challenge, there’s the fact that acting changes the situation, so our students have to be comfortable in a continuous cycle of understanding and acting, learning and doing.

Why transdisciplinary?

How do we learn to do things better if we’re so cautious about harm that we are afraid to try new things? It’s impossible to learn how to do things better without feedback loops connecting hypothesis and action to outcomes and, one hopes, insights about what has worked and what has not.

That ability of the designer to imagine an alternative is hugely important. A democratic society has to be about choosing between legitimate options, and designers should be in the role of manifesting, visualising and expressing those legitimate alternatives.

For me, that kind of middle space continues to be the next frontier, the next area where more focus is needed. It’s a way of being thoughtfully experimental while in real conversation around what an experiment would imagine differently.

Because of the nature of the ‘wicked’ challenges now faced by societies worldwide—and almost all urban challenges are wicked—there is no state of perfect understanding.