Conscientious Urban Technology

the question of transdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary connects back to earlier in the conversation, the urbanist and technologist perspectives. I don’t want either one of those to “win the future of the city,” we have to find a way to operate in a space between them.

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

Applying the notion of urban scale to technology reminds me of the current online trend of people looking for smaller communities, private groups, chat platforms and taking a step back from the well-known social networks.That’s what a neighbourhood is, right? You have a relationship with people within your neighbourhood, which is different from you... See more

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.

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.

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.

I think there’s a prevalence of generalists, people who have moved between different careers, and it’s a reflection of our macro-historical moment. Don’t get me wrong, the silos of the industrial society are still here, but they have melted to some extent. So you have people trying to understand how to exist in that murkiness where society’s tradit... See more

there’s vital work needed to develop new approaches to conceptualising, discussing, debating, and mitigating risk in urban prototypes. For the same reason, our students need to be able to swim in a transdisciplinary pond that mixes design, law, and policy.

Design is a conversation with the future, but you choose which version you’re trying to design toward, by being intentional about a preferred destination.

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.