 So hi everyone, thanks for coming to the second lecture and the MS CDP conversations of practitioners lecture series for those of us joining for the first time Computational design practices an MS program in its second year They introduce the students to a range of possibilities for design work at the intersection of architecture urbanism and computation My name is Adam Vosberg. I am the assistant director of computational design practices along with Laura Kurgan Who is the director of the program? This lecture series is designed to introduce students to Practitioners who are working with computation on various media and subject matters at a wide variety of scales last week We welcomed on curry hack it who spoke about his work in place making and recent experiments of generative AI All of which was kind of oriented more or less the scale the individual today's speaker on the other hand It's typically worked in much larger scales those of cities and urban systems to find broadly Define it broadly It is in that context which I introduced Seeky zoo a new York City based urbanist technologist whose work leaders urban development strategic design and urban technologies Seeky's professional work underpins his critical interests how urban technologies and real-estate development shape and are in turn shaped by the political economic regime of the contemporary city legibility and governance of emerging cyber physical technology being deployed in urban space technology controversies and technology Counterfactuals and evolving demands on it on the design professions to respond to these issues effectively He was formerly director of planning and delivery for sidewalk labs Where his work imagined how technology transforms the design of implementation of urban streets and public realms Before sidewalk Seeky had a lot of product design and envelope a New York City based startup that visualizes development opportunities under New York City zoning I don't know fully what he's doing these days But as I understand it he is back working at Saki associates and he can tell us a little bit more about that in the lecture Seeky also teaches at Harvard semester of design engineering program where he works with students to design and prototype speculative technologies for societal good He holds a bachelor's degree in engineering science from the University of Toronto and a master's in urban planning from Harvard University GSD and has led research projects at MIT sensible city lab Both a brief Q&A afterwards so make sure to take the opportunity to ask some questions or share thoughts about Seeky's work Thanks again for coming everyone enjoy me and welcoming Seeky soon Thank you so much. Can folks hear me clearly great Yeah, thank you so much for having me I was here in this program last year for reviews And I think I overlapped with some of you and I was really impressed by the work and thought the conversations were really good So happy to be back here and continue some of the conversations. We're having so Like Adam said, I'm currently a partner and director of a nascent urban technologies Design practice within a firm called Sasaki, which is a global planning landscape architecture firm Based in Boston now with an office in New York. I can talk more about that but I think what I'd love to do today is to You know follow the spirit of this lecture series and talk a little bit about my practice my history of my practice more generally And also talk about like what motivates me and why it's interesting and why that might might be relevant to you I think it's really interesting, you know, just given my interest in Like many of you the intersection between urban urbanism the build environment and technology Given that I'm at GSAP and CDP in particular, which is, you know, really at the productive intersection between urbanism and technology I think the question that's really interesting to me and hopefully we can talk about later is just what exactly is the role of the designer in shaping the Directionality of technology and technology change in our cities, right? if you believe The discourse which is, you know, technology has dramatically shifted our cities and will continue to do so Which, you know, I believe for the most part What is our role within that and what is the opportunity space for us as designers and graduates of this program? So I think that's the underpinning of what I'll be talking about today To give a kind of brief Background of my history my professional history So I have to say I'm a bit of an imposter in the school because I'm actually not an architect I train as an urban planner With an engineering background, but weirdly in school over 10 years ago now at this point I became really interested in the use of visual information To communicate complex issues of urban design or urban policy and that maybe was my entryway drug into this intersection of urbanism and technology so Luckily one of the first projects I got coming out of grad school was working with the city of Boston to develop a set of guidelines for their Emerging complete streets program, which at the time was new for Boston certainly new for Boston and you know new for the North American context So my job was Developing a set of a visual system a set of visual material that Communicates all of the complex issues that underpin what makes a complete street who operates it who makes it possible? What does it look like and how does it function? So these are some examples of the work that came out of that that job And as you can see it really spans a huge range of scales from the level of the design of individual tree pits to the larger more zoomed out questions of you know, what makes for a Complete and smart intersection Urban streetscape and what are the design and operational and technology technological elements of that? so this is my you know my sort of the start of this whole story and then Luckily, you know with the same client a few years later. I undertook the City-wide transportation planning effort go Boston 2030 a huge part of which was actually data visualization data design specifically with the idea that Through data visualization and visual and design we can pinpoint and untangle Truly the most critical issues facing Boston's mobility in the years to come and that Unsurprisingly is the intersection between transportation planning and equity and how you know like most Actually deeply segregated North American Northeastern American cities Where and how you get to move around is to a great extent determined by your socio-economic and racial status in the city, so These are some of the work I did, you know with with a very enlightened public official actually, you know, they were very Where he I should say was very encouraging and open to me working with Data as a medium to really tell pretty complex stories about how people commute how they move around and How unequal that situation is actually across the city, so I looked at issues around How people commute I looked at walkability as a luxury asset in a city like New York So one of the things we looked at in particular was You know where how walkable you your neighborhood is And to what extent you walk to work to shop to leisure is largely a product of Your Economic standing socio-economic standing in the city. So these are some examples and then finally I also worked at MIT For a year working on some of their Emerging urban big data initiatives one of the longest running ones very prominent one was Working with the government of Singapore where the government of Singapore being the kind of government It is has a lot of data readily available about how people travel through the city How people use the telecommunication networks how these systems and dynamics intersect with natural phenomenon like weather patterns rain events and so on so forth and This is some of the outcome of that work and One of the things I worked on and this also influenced my later work is to think about how we can take these large urban data sets and make them perhaps a point of discussion and Nucleus of consensus among the many citizens of Singapore, you know these this is really the first time Most people in the city average people in the city have seen any of these data sets and how their city works So the design brief that I worked on was how do you turn this data set inside out? And how do you make it a? sort of a Thing in front of which people can discuss, you know, how does the city work and how might we change it? so this resulted in a number of design prototypes Including museum exhibits Interactive exhibitions so this thing you looked at was sort of a giant data interface that we designed and implemented and put in the museum in the National Museum of Singapore and You can sort of imagine people making composite data visualizations Using this interface and kind of curating their own stories and that was the aspiration anyway in reality, you know It was a little complicated, but we can talk about that So These kind of things I worked on on and off for seven to eight years You know, I would broadly call this what I in my mind I call it the sort of technology of urban social Epistemology and the idea here really is this is a set of technologies with which people Make sense of how their cities work They understand the key issues facing their cities and they can collectively construct and perhaps form Some sort of common understanding and perhaps even consensus about how the city should work So this is one broad bucket of my work And I should also point out that I I've never seen this kind of work this kind of technology work as being fundamentally separate from planning They're extremely intertwining my mind so for example the work I did in Boston around the mobility plan 2030 was to Make those visualizations, but put them in the context of a public forum so the whole purpose of creating those visualizations Helping people understand the relationship between walkability and socioeconomics is to put those questions in front of people and illicit reactions illicit reactions and Maybe even you know surface some disagreements about how the city should be right so I'll just say To me it's never been a kind of static beautiful object It's always been there to do something and have performed some kind of political effect and This is something that's quite important to me and I'd love to talk about that later Yeah, some other examples, you know these this sort of data Practice has always been a core part of many different kinds of planning projects I worked on so I work a lot with cities and municipalities and I still do and This kind of making sense of the city through data and design visualization has always been a core part of it And this is just another example of that Um Like many of you, I'm also interested in technologies of design process I've worked on a couple of these products some of which you might know One of those from actually this is now defunct I've worked on this five years ago. The product is called amalope. It's a digital product and the idea is for New York City in particular Every development site is subject to many many many Constraining factors that determines what in the end the development might look like so you probably know about F. A. R.'s you know about lock coverage maximum height and Through the complex interaction of these rules you get a building that's shaped a certain way so the contention of this software is that It's really hard to do this and it's there is a lot of professional gatekeepers that benefit from the zoning code being so hard to interpret and the the founder of the start of actually who used to be at G-Saps are Williams her idea was let's encode those zoning rules as algorithmic rules and Develop a software that parses all the rules and also visualizes the outcome So the idea eventually became a piece of software that you know, you can kind of imagine how it works You pick a site you click on You gen you provide a few small in number of inputs and the software essentially Through those zoning rules generates the final outcome for you Kind of complicated because You know one of the reasons it failed is because it was hard to imagine how to make money with the software and who is actually paying for it You know we thought about Architects buying this because this is a lot of what architects do they do this as a matter of fact they do this often times for free for their developer clients because this is a way of Getting in their good favors and be on the ground floor Literally a metaphorically of a potential new architecture and design project. So it was really hard to extract additional economic value from what is already a essentially Economically challenging situation, right? So if you are already doing this for free, would you pay additional money to this software to do it for you? Again, you know, we come back to this entanglement between technology and economics, which You know in some small way was very influential for me and in thinking about you know, just how we should work in this fear I want to quickly show. Oh, okay. Well, of course something doesn't work the the other The other product I worked on and this is something that violet Another faculty here in this program and I worked on together is a software called delve and this is maybe The idea of this is perhaps familiar to you it is a computational design software that generates automatically generates a large number of Urban design options based on some small number of inputs you provide your draw site you specify the high level parameters of what you want I want 50% Resi 25% commercial and I wanted to be you know, I Wanted to have this amount of open space and voila you put in these inputs and this goes in the machine essentially generates 50 options 100 options 200 options, which then allows you to pick You know, what is the best one? So I worked on this actually I only worked on this for one year This was a much longer ongoing pro project before I even started in it but You can I think I think for all of us It's easy to see both the promise and hopefully what the problem might be with the with a project like this, right? The product that one of the problems just to go back to what I was saying before is again the question of economics, right? Who is paying for this and who's really? Extracting value from the deployment of this technology where in the design and development process is this Solutioning fact valuable. So this is you know yet again Like there are certain questions that you can't escape from right when you're working on developing technologies and using technologies And lastly I want to talk about a third kind of technology work I've been doing where I have done a happy is doing right now, which is what I call the technology of digital physical governance Adam didn't mention this before Just a couple years ago. I was working at sidewalk labs, which was as some of you might know a The urban innovation Startup within alphabet funded by Google but separate from it that broadly was looking at how to Develop cities differently, right? so one of the projects I worked on and one of the key projects I worked on really is a ambitious Blackship demonstration project urban development project in Toronto So if you look up Keyside on Google, you can probably find a thousand hits of you know think pieces pro con a lot of con That talks about what this project is fundamentally, this is a Real estate development project, right? This is like anything you see walking down the streets of New York This is a project that is you know converting financial capital into physical capital is a design project. It's a It's a it's a experimental technology project in the sense that Within these buildings you have a lot of new systems that We were hoping to bring into the world. So one of those examples we're looking at is Revolutionizing urban logistics, you know instead of Amazon driving up to your door dropping things off at your doorstep and then getting packages stolen This is a different way of organizing and rationalizing urban logistics such that it takes up less space It's easier. It's more sustainable efficient, etc, etc, right? It's all of those things But I but I argue that This is also a sort of governance project a project of thinking about a different way of governing cities in which instead of the complex and Messy logic of individuals doing different things. We abstract all of that away Into data and algorithms, right? So if you look at a diagram like this, it's all extremely kind of smooth running everything moving silently governed by the underlying infrastructure of data and technology and sensors and I would say this is kind of the fundamental underpinning of this project and And my job actually interestingly was to think about how these systems Actually can come to life because as you can imagine to get all of these things to work It depends on the orchestration of many many different pieces both physical and digital Everything has to work together and as a matter of fact, none of these things have previously worked in the world so part of the work and part of the big risk is Proofing it right making sure that this thing actually have a Any kind of chance of working in the real world. So that was a big part of my work and You know, for example taking ideas of modular technology Embedding sensors into some version of a real-world prototype that was kind of the kind of work I did and you know what to me illustrates this logic of Data government data driven governance of cities is the idea of managing urban curbside spaces, right this idea that Instead of static parking signs and parking meters. We have a system that tells people this is exactly What you can use the curbside space for during what time and this is how much you pay for it So this was actually a project. I spent a lot of time working on Developing a system to experiment and test this idea of managing the curbside flexibly I think this is a maybe interesting test case to think about how a designer within this room might fit in to work like this Because it truly cuts across a whole spectrum of design capabilities from the digital to the physical, right? You first have to imagine Thinking like a UX designer a service designer what the experience of this space actually is What does it become throughout the time of the day? Whether it's for loading, you know, public realm trucks pick up drop-off You have to think about the experience of that You have to think about all of the different sort of technical affordances of the system, right? these are all the things that it can do and You'll have to think about how it all comes together as a physical object and a physical space, right? We come back to the space of architecture and then you also need to know what are the individual kinds of enabling technologies that makes all of these things possible and work together so you need to be a engineer a technologist someone who can Understand how these individual components work But then also put them together in the context of a system that talks to each other, you know Sensor a talking to sensor B actually reading, you know element C so and so forth And even a bit of software development So one of my jobs is actually thinking about what the back end of the system needs to look like who needs to monitor This and make what decisions and all of this comes together in the context of a pilot which I put together In Brooklyn ABR which only wrapped up last year So this all of this as simple as it looks took way longer than you think what then you think it did So I think this is a good example of again what I call the technology of digital physical governance But what was really interesting to me also is We think Technologies like this eliminate difficult questions about how to run cities But in fact what it actually does is it displaces one set of questions and raises other kinds of questions, right? To make it to put it most prosaically We built this prototype and we really had to think who the hell is gonna run this thing in the 12 month in which no one's gonna be around this this thing. What if something goes wrong? Who fixes it and I guess most importantly who's actually setting the rules in terms of who gets to use the curb during what time? For what purposes right so technologies like this actually again instead of eliminating and abstracting away a lot of the questions of urban governance simply produces new questions and these questions maybe in a way is a bit more hidden and and Let's talked about and for me that was maybe the biggest sort of central insight of my work in the last few years is who thinks about these questions and Where does one work if one wants to help think about those questions, right? So So yeah, so so that brings me to I guess, you know, just some maybe some observations about About the contemporary moment the inner the intersection between technology and urbanism and you know, what what we should what we should be thinking about today I think What something like the flexible curb tells us is Technologies like that. They have very explicit Functions and uses right. I'm building this thing to manage urban curbside spaces to make them more efficient More sustainable etc etc, but they also perform a more implicit set of political economic agendas, right and These agendas just to give an example of that, you know, when we go back to Everything I did around data visualization urban data. These technologies are not really just about Visualizing data and making them beautiful and understandable presentable, right? we create these technologies with an explicit purpose of Forming opinions forming consensus Making sure that people understand urban issues in a way that we want them to understand understand those issues and I would say These technologies is a way of creating a kind of common sense, right around how cities should be This kind of common sense can be Democratic in the case of you know us using data visualization to talk to the citizens of Boston Talk about the futures of city. It can obviously also be very Technocratic and even autopratic, right? I you know, I just I can't help it You know, I bring up an image of the the smart city Control center in Rio, which is the case that everybody shits on as what smart cities shouldn't be But I think it illustrates my point right you can use data to Illuminate how the city works, but that knowledge can serve very different purposes, right? I think this also illustrates the second important point, which I really want to hit home, which is the Political value valence of these technologies isn't fixed, right? You can take almost the same technology Put it in two different contexts and they can perform radically different political functions and economic functions, right? To give one example back to the curbs curbside spaces again, right? If you look at a technology that many people were looking at a few years ago, which is codifying every single inch of urban curbside spaces Having that information as a way to put a price on it You can argue that it is about making urban streets more efficient But you can also argue that it's about monetizing what is otherwise just the public asset, right? and these two outcomes are entirely possible and I argue that there is Space and in fact a sort of obligation for us to think about what what what is that future outcome that we want and want to shape I Want to just show some other examples and maybe get us all to think about kind of what an alternative arrangement of this technology might be, right? So from curbside spaces to using curbs as the loading zones for urban logistics companies networks You know We kind of walk by this every day. We kind of take it for granted now, but it's not sort of It's not a given, right? It's this is the way the the way that Delivery companies use urban curbside public assets as a way to unload as a place to unload their their goods is Not a natural state of affairs. This is highly contingent. This happened for a whole set of reasons and Things happening and things not happening, right? I talked to Laura about this briefly a few months ago this idea that we have a technology infrastructure to for gig work for getting food delivered getting laundry delivered and You know getting your knees taken care of getting someone to come and fix your door but it's the same technology infrastructure with which you can imagine a different way of organizing Municipal services and the municipal mutual aid and I don't think these two technology Infrastructures are that different, but I think it just illustrates the point that with the same technology In two different side a lot of economic context. They can do very different things. I Want to pose these oppositions in terms of what those different things might look like You know when we talk about urban spaces and Urban streets and curbside spaces are we creating common spaces are we creating commons? Or are we creating a market out of those spaces, right? What kind of relationship do we put people in relation to each other? You know, are we creating relationships of mutuality or relationships of exchange, right? And are we at the end of the day creating public value or private value? Kind of complicated, but actually it's really simple I think it's an argument that people have been making for a very long time Which is any kind of technology encodes a certain set of social relations and social assumptions and political assumptions And these technologies in turn affect those relations, right? So looking forward to some of the incoming Technological transformations of the city just to take eb charging for example, right? We take eb's as a Uncomplicated good, right? It's a good thing. We're turning fossil fuel burning cars into eb into electric cars but this technology infrastructure also embeds a lot of values in What it does and what it doesn't do and one of the things it does do right now is it excludes people it doesn't include a lot of people in this infrastructure deployment and When you look at how they're actually built in the street even at the level of Design minute design at the level of individual streetscapes. You also see choices between What is important and what isn't important and You know like for example, this is LA a couple years ago just eb charging cables across Across bike lanes. I mean I could I you know you can argue that this is there's maybe a just a much more innocent mistake here But in a way like no mistakes are innocent like, you know, like every every every Every innocent mistake has something better as assumptions behind it that I think is worth interrogating so these are the questions that really motivate me and You know if I pose it back to Designers in this room and designers like myself, you know broadly speaking what technologies get made and how right? Importantly, how are these technologies deployed operated and managed right who makes these decisions and then ultimately To what and and for whose benefit You know, and I think it's maybe worth making a small digression here about generative AI I think a lot of the conversations today Opposes You know artificial intelligence Against humanity which is sort of a very kind of romantic humanist way of looking at technology But there are much more mundane questions you can ask about generative AI Which is like who's making these things for what purposes and what kind of relationships do generative AI creates between people and is that a You know equitable good relationship that we want to perpetuate so anyway raising these questions But then you know the big question for us, which is you know What are our what are our vectors of influencing these questions because a lot of those questions are Frankly decided outside of this fear of technology and design per se, right? We don't really we're not really in the room Deciding on these things right Mentor capital does to a to a great extent, you know in terms of what technologies get made and how so So this brings me back to What I'm doing now. I actually started my job only three months ago, but there was a much longer incubation period behind that I thought it was very important for me to get back into planning, but Also still work on technology questions, but work on these technology questions in particular questions of You know How to deploy how to operate how to manage, you know, how to turn these into a sort of political conversation so So the practice I'm running right now is you know what I call this urban design urban technology design practice and broadly speaking, you know The mission statement is helping to shape purposeful value add technology applications in cities aligning technology applications with purpose with public value and really think about the questions of Deployment operation management, which is where a lot of those values actually get reflected and come in To give just a super short rundown of what I'm doing right now to kind of make those things reality I would say broadly speaking. It's kind of three buckets of work making shaping and critiquing I think it's important for all of us to still be making technologies, right to because we're interested in it because it's interesting It's fun and But I think what I've been trying to be very conscious about is Making technologies to what and and giving it giving that technology to whom and what do they do with it? And what kind of outcome is that producing so to give one example one of one of the projects I started since I joined is Working with the chief heat officer of LA So it's a new position that was created in the city that deals specifically with Climate change and extreme heat in the city So my work is working with her to develop a set of technology solutions that specifically helps her address the challenges of her work and Those challenges are actually really mundane it goes back to a lot of the things we talked about earlier, right? It is data geospatial analysis data visualization overlaying remote sensing of you know Urban heat island with socioeconomic indicators that Indicates extreme stress right so that's one vector of work and the other vector is honestly even simpler which is that she is one bureaucrat within the larger city and her influence on Other city departments to do what she needs them to do is Limited by her ability to communicate and coordinate and organize So we're really just looking at creating technologies for her where she can say well I need this done by the department of transportation, which I don't have formal influence over but this is a Technology that can help us coordinate efforts better. So one example In terms of shaping technologies I want to just give two examples of things that I've seen out there as potential examples I haven't I this is something I'm honestly going to think about what it looks like because if you're shaping technologies You have to think about you know what with what power you're shaping them, right? today the the most important power shaping technology development in this country anyway is a Private investment system of which venture capital is that at its very heart, right? Venture capital decides what we collectively as a society invest in technology development a versus B, right? What I'm interested in is is there is some kind of public power that allows us to shape the directionality of Those technologies if not how to make them then at least how they're being deployed and used in the real world So I think that work is beginning to happen one of the things I looked at in building the business case for my work is Work such as the one on the right of the alley lighting plant So this is a city department. That's literally working with communities to decide if Our city has a capital budget to buy new technologies by light poles that can do XYZ What exactly do we want to buy and for what purpose, right? so this is Not even so much in the realm of making like technology as we commonly think of it But it's firmly in the realm of planning and that's why I Think doing this working planning with in a planning context is really important I talk I want to talk a little bit about the fun stuff. I do which is the critiquing part of it I don't do this as a professional practice, but my partner who's an artist and I have been developing a set of Projects, I would say around technology counterfactuals, which is this idea that let's construct a Alternative history of how some technology might have developed and let's just play that out And let's just see what the outcome of that Counterfactual of that different history might have been and the purpose of it is not necessarily to Be known the present as much as it is to understand what is Malleable and contingent about our present moment and what can actually change right because the moment you start thinking about Alternative histories you realize nothing was supposed to have nothing was Predetermined about the way things developed and things can still change right so one of the ones we worked on was a Different history of the internet right so many people have written histories of internet And what we did was just you know just played out like what if what if The internet evolved in a different way What if it remained the sort of academic communication network that it was intended That it that it initially developed as and what are the sort of societal Economic and political outcomes of that so this is more just a fun exercise to kind of keep my brain engaged but Something that we're hoping to develop further So that's it for my presentation. I do want to just spend the last couple minutes zooming out About like thinking about our present moment and why it might be interesting for us to think about this kind of work I think You know a couple of things I'll observe Technologies have gotten much more sophisticated much more complicated, but also much simpler in a way right there are as you all of you Who play with chat GBT in the last few months? No There is a way in which those technologies are actually much very friendly to beginners novices right the barrier to entry of Testing new ideas and making new ideas actually in a weird way is lower lower now than it You know for a much longer time previously So so I think there might be more creativity coming in to this space and the other big driver is a Different larger political context in which you know the federal government is actually making industrial policy again It's doling out like billions and billions and billions of dollars in to local governments to combat climate change grow green economies and so on and so forth and what that translates into is greater public power and Greater public power through which we can affect many of the changes that you know I've been thinking about so, you know, I want to end on a sort of optimistic note I think like this work obviously is very challenging, but at the same time I think it's happening at a funny and interesting and kind of exciting moment and And so yeah, so that's what I want to leave you with and I know I talked about a lot of about a lot of things We can you know continue this conversation during the Q&A. So Thank you Thanks a mutsuki. That's great. And it's like in some ways your career We mentioned I thought we talked I talked with you about this before but it's some way your career is followed So many things going on in urban tech in a way that you are like uniquely kind of positioned as an interesting person to talk about this I'm sure all of y'all have questions Same as last time. I have a couple of mics that I can dole out So, please just raise a hand if you have a question, and I'll come over and give you one Thank you for this great lecture I'm not from the CDP program. I'm from AAD and it's actually pretty funny that I attend this lecture today Because we're I just read Bruno Latour before coming into this Bruno Latour. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I was just reading about exactly how Technologies are not political, but they do create social interactions or They organize social interactions based on who governs technologies in a way, and that's something you talked about a lot On this age where like we're all interconnected through Internet and all these kinds of things What do you say is our responsibility towards creating technology which can be Actively relocated globally on different places different contexts because the politics of the technology changes depending on which context it is So would you say our role is to make technology? infinitely abusable and perhaps open-source Oh, that's wow, that's a great question But kind of hard to answer but you might have to repeat the second part of your question a little bit because I don't think I'd like totally caught it Maybe just break it down a little bit for me. I mean, I guess I'm just saying Since technologies are abusable and changeable, right? Is it our role to make allow them to be abusable so that they're not politically streamlined to just well I guess I would Put the question back to you like what does it look like to make These technologies of communication abusable in your word Maybe just to clarify that a little bit and we can kind of riff riff on that. Yeah, what does that look like? to you Well, I would hope so something that your project did There was a technology I would say in New York City Laws to our technology that shape how buildings become and your project Was in a way anti-technology or technology against that technology, right? Yeah, like the zoning code is a sort of social technology like the 1961 zoning code is right and our technology is sort of a way of Taking the fangs out of that you're right, but indecipherable attacks. Yeah, if it is Employed by someone else it is still abusable, right? Hmm. So how do you liberate technology from being? Users of weapon for tinnary tyranny do. Oh, wow Great question I think there is a more I think there is a more pessimist school here, which is to say that in a way Like we get exactly the technologies we deserve like, you know a certain capitalist order produce is is destined to produce certain technologies of oppression and Those technologies like it's our redeemably going to be harmful and do all these terrible things that like the larger System conditions to do. I don't I'm not so sure from that. I'm not I'm not pessimistic actually because I don't think There's always I mean if you you know if you read more like a lot more of these The sort of like social construction this the side of technology The science technology studies they'll argue that like especially in early days of any technology the meaning the valence the value the use of that technology is very much open to shaping and debate and And I think that's true like I think you know you look at something like the Early Internet for example like it does it still does perform like what I would say is like a very Libertory function, right? So, I don't know. I I guess I'm trying to say that I'm not so like deterministic in terms of like Technologies going to do this because we live in a certain society and it's destined to do that Like I don't think I believe that I think there is a role to shape it And that's why even do what I do in the first place at all But I think you ask a more important question is how do we actually do that? How do we shape the valence and effect of Technologies as they're deployed in the real world and I think I don't know I mean, I can't give you a generic like blanket answer do this and everything will be great. I don't know I do think I do think Public power is an important ingredient. I think having like a certain FTC person in the federal government who regulates these technologies that's sympathetic that makes a huge difference I think I do think organizing makes it makes it makes a difference Depending on the context. I do think designers like us have a have a have a role But it's not so much us designing in the vacuum Like it's not just about us sitting in our bedrooms Speculating what a different technology future might look like we really have to be thoughtful about what kind of power we leverage to achieve that outcome whether that's some kind of public power or Organizing power or something else. I don't know hope that answer the question partly But it's kind of a it's a big question and hard to answer Yeah Hi, that was really really fascinating, so thank you I have a question for that's very specific to someone who's interested in kind of this Field whether you call it urban technology is strategic design so I'm from South Africa and This is something I've been really fascinated with for a long time And I work more like economic commons and that sort of thing But I've often found that Conversations around urban technology Seem to be very centered in places where there is some kind of tradition or culture around urban design That's the fact that you get to work with these partners and do some really really cool projects I'm sitting here thinking like how on earth do I do that in a place like Kili fee in Kenya where There's no chief of heat If you want to speak to anyone in a bureaucratic position, you probably have to bribe them So it's like what is your advice? for Practicing this in a way that is meaningful. Do you have examples perhaps of where you've seen this done really well at a grassroots level? Like how do you take this and you know apply it in other places? That's such a great question. I mean, I think my answer is going to disappoint you Which is I really feel like it's outside my realm of experience here. Maybe you know, maybe we can like Found some ideas off the podium. I almost feel irresponsible just to be like, oh, I think we can do this to I don't know. I'm trying to think like What's a good entry way to thinking about that? Yeah Yeah, yeah, please Yeah I'd walk. Yeah, I'm alone. Yeah, yeah, yeah I think the the platform the platform labor platform thing was what we talked about right like What what would it take to instantiate a municipal platform that is not, you know, Over eats, right? Yeah, I think it might have been the counterfactuals or yeah, or untangle it or something. Yeah But sorry the question was how do I? Yeah Um Well, I think I think Yeah, I'm trying to be specific in my answer, I guess why I remain optimistic about it I mean, I'm not sure if I'm like optimist. I don't know if often optimistic Like I think it's very interesting. I Don't I Have no illusions about a lot of this work being really hard, right? because Because we I would say we still live in a pretty I would say like political adversarial environment for like a collect like a truly collective Reimagining of what technologies can do like we're not in our world, right? This is still a world in which Basic research gets spun out of certain university labs get picked up as startups And then go through venture capital and becomes a thing that like makes a bajillion dollars And only those things get funded right and only those things that have a sort of like Let's scale potential are favored with the kinds of capital needs to grow into it into a real technology We look at the thing we're doing for the city of LA It's not fundable. It's by nature like not fundable by venture capital No one will touch that because who wants to invest in technology development that is by definition limited to like 2,000 users in the in the country and no more than that. So I think it's gonna be really hard but I think maybe one source of optimism to your question Laura is I do think there is a bit of a Context context shift in in terms of like the US thinking about industrial policy and thinking about like robust public investment in some of these things So I do think that context is important You know in addition to technology, I also just do planning planning work You know I work my partner Susanna Drake is a well-known landscape architect that does a lot of climate resilience work and we do work together and That work has really dramatically been accelerated in the last couple years just because of IRA like we see it We see it every day that like federal funding of You know Millions and millions dollars for planning projects around the country. So I you know that that's one source of optimism I think is this idea of this feeling that the context is changing beneath our feet a little bit And I also just think like I think Yeah, maybe it's not optimism is just like a conviction that like The full story of some of these technologies haven't been written yet, right? Like there is still a weighing which You know Maybe like the full potential benefits of some of these ideas that are being developed Like they just need to be on earth somehow and that just takes creativity and hard work and I don't know like all of the platitudes that That that that comes with that. Sorry. I'm not that's not a super clear answer, but That's an A answer I think you've largely answered my question, but I really appreciate the presentation and I really like how honest you are about the Back that currently does sort of technocracy and increasingly so autocracy is in the hands of the private Predominantly and you know and then you really highlight your aspirations towards certain values that the society should be heading towards this direction instead of this, but you know at the end of the day the private Has a very clear set of goals that is against whatever that aspiration is And I guess, you know, you talked a lot about like what could support that like that the fact that you know, perhaps DTO and the in the government that that you know supports a certain thing may help but I am curious from your personal experience as someone who's worked in You know Google and in or sidewalk labs and and other like private urban planning companies what like what are the sort of current like Temperature around these attitudes are people within these private firms. Are they pushing do people do they really do You know they really do like I would say You know when I was at delve within Google, we're in a partner. We're like a partner team to Google Earth engines, which is a It's not a it's not a profit-making team, right? It's like completely it's kind of like a residual Artifact of an earlier Google or something where this team literally is just making a sort of environmental data catalog of all the cities in the world and working with cities to make this available and Help them do carbon inventories plan for you know, do kind of trip planning All with the purpose of reducing carbon, right? So that that stuff exists And I think there are other pockets of that You know, you can't separate that from the fact that it's otherwise situated in a extremely profitable firm that derives its money from How computing and advertising like those two things are inseparable I Think you also just can't overlook the contradictions of a team like that because you know every time there is a Corporate restructuring those teams are always like really at risk, right and There is also in this particular moment some drive towards Making Google look good greenwashing right so like obviously those the presence of that those things within Google has valued now that doesn't exist before but you can't count on that as The permanent foundation for those kind of team to exist in Google So I think the situation is very complicated like those things do exist for sure But it's it co-exists with all of these other Stuff, you know, yeah, so would you say like aligning those valleys would not be possible that if we really do want the type of technology Well, I don't I mean, I you know, it's maybe maybe what I'm trying to say here is like Maybe we just all need to be operators, you know, we need to like yeah like actually Oh, Google wants to greenwash great Then let's just leverage Google resources do this thing and build this thing and Google might not support it forever But that's fine, you know, like we you know my metaphors like you're like the satellite that's trying to like Navigate the planets and try to get in various orbits and get a little boost, you know, I think another major source of Resources I haven't talked about is foundations, right? There are a lot of major foundations that are funding Civic technology work and and Climate resilience work and these two things are more and more overlapping. So that's really a huge Set of resources that I'm very interested in looking at tapping into but it's not uncomplicated, right? I mean these foundations Oftentimes have very ambiguous roles in many places in context, but but again, it's finding the kind of Impermanent temporary Alignments of interest between you and these powerful actors and find a way to like make the thing happen to the best extent you can if that makes sense Yeah Mm-hmm. Okay. This might be a little better And I think like data Like data is very kind of opaque and I think like, you know You're one of the people that like work on these teams to make it approachable to you know A venture capitalist in a sense or you know the head of heat for example in LA and You know, you were starting to like speak about how You know you work to make Data more accessible and less opaque, you know to people in Singapore With that data set and I guess like one question is like I'm curious like what are some successful methods that you You know used to you know create not just like an open sandbox that people can get lost in with data Which we see kind of happening a lot with With machine learning and all this kind of stuff of like just this the sandbox of exploration that like we don't know We can get out of it and it's unclear of how people, you know People are sort of figuring out how to interpret it like how can you what are some successful like successful methods that you have? Encountered in projects like that that people have understood it in a way that like they can almost action on to influence That's a really good question You know the the dirty secret of like the data visualization practice field is It's Pretty hermetic like people do beautiful cool things and it's not really It's not it's not clear how applications effective. They are in Doing what it purports to do. So it's true like I think your point is completely right Trying to think like what are some really really amazing examples of like this kind of thing being extremely useful and producing real What effects I Don't know. I'm actually I'm drawing a blank at the moment. I You know, this is not a perfect example I've I've always really liked just locally like the work that Center for Urban Pedagogy does it's called making policy public. I've always really loved it. It's not a data project. It's more using information design to untangle complex issues for the audience that These complex urban policies questions are really affecting. So I think that's a good as a good example. It has a very clear purpose around public teaching public pedagogy So I think that's a good example Trying to think I mean I were like less Sleep deprived I can probably tell you but but I can you know, I can I can we can hang around a little bit I can you know, I can I have some some other ideas. I can I can show you so and I think like another piece to that is when sort of collecting more data to You know to help make these issues like more accessible and stuff like You know, I saw you had an example about You know creating sort of additional sensors in the environment, you know, like within the sidewalk or whatever but I think like like data synonymous with like surveillance in a sense, you know, how like how have you sort of Navigated that like public conversation of like or maybe maybe it's just like it's an unknown thing like, you know We're we're being surveilled. Yeah, I know I wouldn't say like I wouldn't say that pavement example was like such a great example of like how to deal with this issue in the public realm, right like like 70% of the air around sidewalk Toronto was sucked up by Questions of surveillance and privacy, which I would argue is like to the detriment of other Worthball things to discuss around that project, but it doesn't anyway. That's not a cure in there I mean one thing I didn't show I worked on was set of public Data public technology transparency standards So essentially like a bunch of like standardized Information stickers that you put on things to explain to people. Oh, like this sensors collecting this data to use it for XYZ purpose And that's also like a super limited response, right Because it Assumes that the only thing that people can do in a situation like that is to consent We're not consent, right when in fact there are other ways of people getting involved in We're not involved in data collection and surveillance I mean, there are just so many things we can talk about here. One thing I also didn't talk about is Along with the heat project in LA. We're also trying to develop a low-cost solution that are that community groups can use to do Kind of crowdsource measurement that their quality and heat issues in their communities, so it's sort of Not saying no to the idea of measurement and surveillance, but really to like give The surveilled the historically surveilled the ability to measure what matters in their particular environment So that might be a different way of responding to it and that's Not again, that's not really new work That's happened a lot in various settings in here in New York But what we're trying to do is to like systematize that knowledge and make that knowledge open source and like as Easy as possible to deploy and use so that Any community group that gets a three thousand dollar grant to do this can deploy Ten sensors and measure the presence of extreme heat spots in a particular neighborhood So that's that's another example Do I have time for one more? Okay, sorry, and then the like the last in that is How do you How do you account for sort of Like Not like bad actors, but I guess like sort of darker like user experience Issues like at like a governmental like municipal level with you know, particularly like your like the parking project where you know Parking is Yeah, you know Like how do you navigate that conversation to get you know For something like that to be beneficial at like a city level where that's a big money maker for a city and there's you know Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's an issue of it being a big money maker for the city I think you know a few years ago. It would have been the case that cities would just buy it because You know Siemens knock on their doors like you should really get this because every other city has gunshot sensors on their On their life post and it's gonna do XYZ. I do think a lot of cities are becoming much much much much more sophisticated about these things and Part of my hope is to work directly with city governments that make procurement and operational decisions around these things to Help them set the parameters for what they actually need and what is good. I do think community engagement slash organization is a key part of this like Developing some kind of public voice around What technologies people in a given city actually wants and needs and how What the parameters are for using those like that is again like a question of planning and community engagement so it's sort of no surprising answers here, but It's yeah, it's it's it's helping cities and communities develop a point of view about What they need and don't need and what is harmful and what is not? I guess to sorry to refine though It was I think the question is more about when a city benefits from ambiguity in like Practices and like systems and stuff and how do you oh like when? Yeah, I Actually, I don't know if I've actually come across many world like real-world examples of the city's Benefiting from that ambiguity like I think we really have to talk about specifics here and like what what kind of technologies? we're talking about and What the cities are that deploys these to do what like Like the only example I can think of is like policing technologies that police departments Cure certain sensors that disproportionately target certain communities But you might be thinking of something else. I'm not parking in this instance parking in this instance parking. Yeah, I mean the cities by parking solutions mostly out of a Technocratic sense of like this is gonna help us manage parking spaces better. I don't know if there is like a lot of Like Necessarily a lot of batting tensions in there from day one. It can be kind of naive, but it's not to me. It's not like Batting tensions if that makes sense. So Yeah, I don't know. Sorry. This is not not a not a super clear answer, but maybe I can understand the questions a bit better too. Yeah Yeah Thank you again for such a Fascinating presentation. I think my question is quite busy because I might not be around to you know talk after the exercise I was just curious. Where can we learn more about you your background and some of the work? You know you do beyond your email address. Oh, okay, so I have a website My name is pretty Googleable. So that's where Adam found my file because I didn't send him one and And the work I'll be doing I mean I'm getting things set up on the Suzuki website right now. So that's you know that's coming and Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm in New York and you know, I'm around the program I'll probably be coming for reviews in the future. There. There are more conversations to be had Yeah The intro to architecture program would you see it for summer? Yeah Interest architecture. Oh, there is one last question. Do we see you do time for one? Yeah, that's fine That's fine. Yeah, we can we can talk as long as folks are okay with it. Yeah. Hi. Thank you That was actually really interesting because just yesterday in Violet's class We had a guest lecture by Dan B Lee who's part of Google Yeah, but nevertheless, I think it was super interesting how you really highlighted Dan B Lee No, yeah, okay. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Okay. Yeah, she was also really yeah She was just also very interested like Honestly critical about the new tools that Google Street Raps now allows to actually have all like 3d Visualizations and how many data is now accessible and the responsibilities of Google as well, but I didn't want to talk about this I'm sorry. I was just thinking especially in terms of governance of digital and Physical infrastructures that I think it's interesting. Maybe now to look I think that's also what you suggested with the LA project It's kind of drawing ideas from decentralization on how governance can actually be more realizable and really also more focus on particular I guess groups and their needs and desires Yeah, and I think it's maybe also a parallel transfer from issues and web 2 to web 3 Realizing how we have to decentralize also governance models and I was just thinking if you if you have maybe also other examples in mind Maybe then referring to digital Ministries for example in Taiwan or like there are the examples. I think that could be applied to the yes ideally as well I've Try to stay away from web 3 mostly because I don't I don't find myself all that knowledgeable about it. Frankly. I think you know Like I wouldn't say I wouldn't say decentralization is like Like for me, it's not a Political program or like a set of an end in itself, right? Like I don't I don't think that decentralization is intrinsically better or good. I Think in a particular context for a particular problem. It can make a lot of sense i.e. in the case of a community coming together to identify what the particular areas of climate vulnerabilities might be in a given Geographical area for a given population. I think that makes a lot of sense I think there is a limit to How much you can understand what's happening on the ground by using top-down analytical methods. I think that's just true So that that is where you know where I agree with you in terms of the value decentralization I look at Yeah, I don't know. I'm almost afraid to say too much about why three because I'm like I don't know what you know, it's so big and I'm not that knowledgeable. What do I even get into? I Think for Yeah, I mean, you know as a both the technologies and the technologies and the planner planner who works on larger City-scale problems of climate adaptation and looking at some of the infrastructure that's actually needed to Address these issues coastal infrastructure, for example It's hard to imagine how decentralization plays into that because that literally is like the state deploying billions of dollars and legal powers and financial powers and technical powers to like make all those things come together and build a Levy system right like it's hard to imagine how decentralization plays into that and I don't know if that's a good thing We're patting but that's just the fact right Anyway, I just I'm rambling all a little bit now, but yeah Okay, sweet. I think that's all we have time for but thanks everyone for coming. Thanks for the conversation and thanks for the lecture