Conscientious Urban Technology

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

One way to consider it is to ask ourselves, who are the people who should be working at that intersection? Who are the best-prepared people to accomplish that work?