Conscientious Urban Technology

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

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.

A multi-disciplinary community can be really powerful, but it doesn’t always create a genuine collaboration; often, you have a bunch of different perspectives, but you’re not creating something new together.

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.

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

Why transdisciplinary?

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.

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.

There is currently a quite monocultural digital life, especially compared to the digital world that we came up with in the late nineties and early two-thousands, when individuals created the web. We had our websites and our hodgepodge content management systems, which we’d built for ourselves. Because of that, the web felt more like a city with dif... See more